At any rate, the Ghouls would like the torture part. They were big on using welding material and power saws and, apparently, acid.
A normal person driving a Chrysler Sebring would be shot during the course of this action, which is why we were going to play the part. Bikes. Colors. A subservient Fiona to sit behind me. The whole deal. We’d make them an offer on Bruce’s head. Get a good sale price to deliver him to them.
“First thing, though,” I said, “we need to find Nick Balsalmo’s girlfriend. I’ve got a feeling that if she left him and that apartment just prior to his death, she had to know something was coming.”
“You got a name on her?”
“All Bruce knows is that her name is Maria.”
“So I need to find a Cuban woman named Maria. That shouldn’t be difficult. How many could there be in Miami? Fifty, sixty thousand?”
“I figure you’ve probably got a buddy who could pull her electric bill,” I said.
“Yeah, I could call in a favor or two,” he said.
“And I’m going to assume Nick Balsalmo will have a funeral shortly,” I said. “He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who had a lot of friends and family, so I’m going to say Maria turns up sooner than later. We get her to finger the Ghouls definitively in Nick’s death, we have something to bargain with.”
“And if she doesn’t do that?”
“Motorcycle gangs in Florida tend to have pretty defined turf and markets,” I said. “I’m sure once the Ghouls find out that the local chapter of the Banshees hired Bruce to knock them over, and us, that they’ll be ready to kill someone.”
Sam started to smile. “I see me wearing a leather vest at some point. You know, not to brag, but there was a time when a man could wear a leather vest and no shirt and make that work. You don’t see that too much anymore.”
Fiona hopped down from the roof then-literally, she came off the low lip of the roof above the porch and landed as gracefully as a gymnast. “This time you speak of,” she said to Sam, as if she’d been in the conversation with us the entire time, “this was when? Antiquity?”
Sam looked up at the roof. “What was that, a twelve-foot drop?”
“I’m very agile,” she said.
“You’re not wearing any shoes,” Sam said.
“And you’re talking about wearing a vest and no shirt and making it work. There are mysteries beyond what anyone can perceive, apparently.” She turned her gaze to me. “I heard a rumor about me being property. Is that accurate?”
“If you’d like,” I said, “I’d be happy to give you a copy of the Ghouls’ constitution and you can read it for yourself.”
“No need,” she said. “I rather like the idea of being subservient to you and then springing into the face of some man with a handlebar mustache and teaching him a thing or two about how to respect a woman.”
“That’s wonderful news, Fi,” I said. “But you know that when these bikers get into a fight, it’s never one-on-one. They’ll rat-pack you.”
“Which is why you and Sam will be there to defend my honor. And why I’ll have a very powerful gun- currently being used to help a rebel cause in Cuba-in my purse.”
“I don’t think Kate Spade will go with the leather pants and bikini-top ensemble I’m sort of picturing you in there, Fiona,” Sam said.
“Is that what I get to wear?” she asked me.
“That’s the general uniform,” I said.
“Lovely,” she said. “I’ll bring two guns and a knife. Maybe a blackjack, too, just for fun.”
Sam and I both looked at Fi and tried to do the math. It wasn’t working. But I’d seen her fight plenty of times, and if she said she was going to carry two guns, a knife, a blackjack and a SCUD missile, I figured she’d put it all somewhere.
“I gotta run, Mikey,” Sam said. “I’m meeting my guy with the bikes at the Carlito, and then in the morning I’ll see what I can find on Maria. You need anything else?”
I opened the door into the house and listened for screaming. All I heard was the TV. Wheel of Fortune was on and someone had just lost everything, which was evident by my mother’s loud proclamation “They rig the game, Zadie, that’s why,” which I could only imagine answered some very important question as to the strategy of spinning a wheel covered in money.
I closed the door. “We need to get Bruce and Zadie and my mother apart as soon as possible,” I said.
“Yeah,” Sam said, “I thought I saw your mom making eyes at Bruce. Frankly she could do a lot worse. Though I have to say that whole missing-finger business would be a serious distraction. But that’s just me.”
“Sam,” I said.
“Anyway,” Sam said, “the house is safe and this will all seem like a bad dream to everyone really soon. Eventually you’ll even start to miss old Bruce, at least until we’re all back together for the wedding in the final episode.”
“That will be sweet,” Fi said.
A series of bad decisions by Bruce had left me, once again, in the middle of something beyond my control. It was a great day to be Michael Westen. No doubt. “Let’s see if we can get this taken care of as quickly as possible,” I said to both Fi and Sam, “before we have to move everyone into one of your homes.”
Not surprisingly, this time they both agreed without question.
8
For Sam Axe, tracking down leads was a rather enjoyable process. He frequently got to do it from home, which meant pants were optional, or from the bar, which meant umbrella drinks were optional, or poolside, which meant other people’s shirts and pants were optional as well but umbrella drinks were prevalent. Occasionally he had to track someone down by foot, and that was okay in the larger scheme of things, too, since tracking someone through the streets of Miami was a far better option than through the dunes of Kabul.
Still, the one thing he was absolutely certain about was that if a person feared for their life, they were much more difficult to actually find. Oh, you could figure out who they were, but where they were was an entirely different set of circumstances.
The easiest way to figure out Maria’s full name and likely whereabouts would be to simply go back to the apartment where she had lived with Nick Balsalmo and poke around, maybe see if there was some mail with her name on it sitting about, talk to the neighbors. But since the news the previous night had been full of grisly reporting about Balsalmo’s death, it didn’t seem prudent. Homicide cops tend to ask a lot of questions that Sam really had no prepared set of answers for, beginning with the inevitable “What are you doing here?”
And then when Sam picked up the morning’s Miami Herald and flipped to the local news section and saw that the media had already been through the building and found the inhabitants strangely quiet-no one, it seemed, had heard anyone being brutally murdered, which was odd since Sam could hear his neighbors doing all sorts of things, none of which included dismemberment-he decided that pounding on doors and skulking around might lead to him getting into more trouble than was needed. How hard could it possibly be to find someone named Maria, especially someone with a previous address?
Hard, it turns out, which was why Sam was sitting in the driving test bay at the DMV waiting for his buddy Rod Lott to come out. Of all the people Sam could call on, he really preferred staying away from people in the DMV. They just weren’t like normal human beings. Sam chalked it up to dealing with the lowest common denominator of society each and every moment of each and every day.
It’s not as if fighting wars for a living was a great way to make new supersmart friends, nor, really, was this current way of life he was leading, where he spent most of his time helping other people out of their problems by, well, fighting miniature wars. But at least the people he worked for had interesting problems, even if they weren’t active members of Mensa. Sam had no idea just how many mobsters, drug dealers, crazy gun-toting boyfriends and assassination plots he’d foiled in the last year or so, but his life was different each day, and there was value in that. The night before, after putting tactical razor wire around Madeline’s house, he’d met up with an ex-undercover DEA agent who gave him the address of the Ghouls’ hangout and hooked him up with two very nice choppers. Not everyone got to do that every day, right?