Sometimes Sam wondered how much longer he could do this running- around blowing-stuff-up business and then he saw people like Rod Lott and knew that he would keep doing it until, well, until the beer was free and paid for entirely by his pension, because when Rod stepped out of the office and into the bright sun of the Miami morning, Sam had to stifle a laugh. Sam had first met Rod back in 1993 at the Navy base on Diego Garcia. Sam was there preparing for a mission that would eventually take him to Bosnia, and Rod was assigned to the base to push paper from one side of his desk to the other. Guys like that, Sam knew, were always up for a little covert activity with the locals. Problem was, Rod turned out to be a good Catholic, didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t care to go to Sri Lanka to check out the local talent.
But he didn’t mind driving. Or looking. So for two months, Sam corrupted the poor fellow as much as he could, though Rod never did break.
That happened a day after Sam left.
Sam tried not to beat himself up about it, figuring, you know, eventually a boy will be a boy. Now, here Rod was, wearing pressed khaki pants, a short-sleeved white dress shirt and a plain red tie. But it was the black horn-rimmed glasses matched up with his ever-present Navy-issue high-and-tight haircut that got Sam thinking Rod must be back on the Book. You’d need to be on something to work at the DMV and look like Ward Cleaver and Buddy Holly’s love child.
Rod looked carefully in both directions before entering Sam’s car, as if maybe he thought he was being filmed. And then Sam looked up and saw the cameras above the doors to the DMV and realized that, in fact, he was.
“Sam,” Rod said. His voice was monotone, but then the guy never was much on octave change, but the sad thing was that he also stared straight ahead, unblinking. The DMV had turned the poor kid into a robot.
“How you doing, Big Rod?” Sam said.
Nothing.
Oh, hell, Sam thought, and turned straight forward, too. Whatever game he had to play to protect this job of Rod’s, he’d play. “Rod,” Sam said.
“Drive,” Rod said.
It was going to be difficult to get the information he needed if Rod spoke only one word at a time, but Sam was under the impression that maybe once they got out of the direct range of the DMV Rod would loosen up.
“You got a direction for me?” Sam asked.
“East,” Rod said.
“That left or right here at the street?”
Rod reached into his pocket and pulled out a compass. He was still Navy, that was for sure. You gotta trust a person who carries a compass around. “Right and then your first left,” he said.
Ah, finally, more than one word. Progress.
Sam drove and Rod kept giving him directions and Sam kept following them. He noticed that on Rod’s lap was an envelope filled with documents. A good sign.
After twenty minutes of meandering around the streets of Miami, Sam was starting to get both frustrated and bored, so when they got to a stoplight he said, “You got a destination in mind, Big Rod?”
“We need to find a vector not commonly used by DMVstaff,” he said.
Christ. Anyone who used the word “vector” on a regular basis and wasn’t still behind a gun needed help.
Sam looked around the area, tried to reconnect himself with the city a bit, see if he could find a place nearby that might suffice before he strangled the life out of Rod. Kitty-corner to them was a nice-looking bar called the Blue Yonder, which is to say it looked like the kind of place you went right before you skipped town on a warrant.
“You hear about a lot of DMV guys drinking at the Blue Yonder?” Sam asked.
Rod shifted in his seat. Maybe he didn’t drink anymore. Sam couldn’t imagine how that might be, considering how buttoned-up the guy was. If it was Sam, he’d need a drink just to put that damn tie on. “Fine,” Rod said when the light turned green. “But you won’t mind if I don’t imbibe.”
“Roger that,” Sam said, just trying to make Rod feel comfortable, and as an experiment, maybe if he simulated the sounds of radio talk, he’d get Rod to respond like a carbon-based life-form. Sam was actually feeling worried. He wasn’t sure if Rod was still in this body or if he’d been sucked out by the alien queen.
The parking lot of the Blue Yonder was filled with late-model American cars, always a good sign that the clientele was only in town long enough to cash the check they’d kited, and even still Rod looked cautious getting out. They made their way into the bar and took a seat in a dark booth. Sam made out five guys drinking alone, one woman who might have been a man in drag and, curiously, a civet cat hooked to a chain leash sitting placidly next to the bar. A TV over the bar was tuned to highlights on ESPN, but no one seemed to be watching, except for the bartender, who kept a running conversation with the anchors and, Sam decided, the cat. The other patrons didn’t seem to pay any mind to the cat, but whenever something interesting showed up on the television, the bartender would turn to the cat and say a sentence or two.
“That A-Rod is a bum, right, Scooter?” the bartender said. The cat turned at the sound of his name, but didn’t have a ready response.
“You know they eat those in China,” Rod said, referring to the cat.
“Really?” Sam said. He was just happy Rod was finally communicating.
“They’re a delicacy. But after the SARS outbreak, people stopped eating them as much.”
“Why is that?” Sam asked.
Rod looked at the cat kind of sideways, which reminded Sam of the way Rod used to look at the women on the streets of the Maldives. “They carried the disease,” Rod said.
This really was a dive bar, Sam thought.
“Good to know,” Sam said. “One less food I need to worry about being forced to eat.”
“They also make coffee out of their fecal matter,” Rod said.
“Who are ‘they’?”
Rod didn’t respond. He was still looking at the cat, though he actually seemed to be trying to do some sort of mind-meld with it. It wasn’t unusual for people to leave the military and then join either the post office or the DMV, as both required a slavish, military degree of subservience. Both also required people to find joy in repetition, which was just a precursor to madness as far as Sam was concerned. Doing the same thing every day and expecting to go home happy wasn’t the definition of madness, but damned if Sam could figure out why it wasn’t, since Rod seemed positively loopy.
“So, Big Rod, the little errand I asked you to do,” Sam said, “what do you have for me?”
Rod handed Sam the envelope, but kept his eye on the cat. Whatever was happening there was between Rod and the cat. Sam pulled out the documents and started going over them. According to what Rod had pulled from the computer, the woman living at the address where Nick Balsalmo had met his demise was a seventy-five-year-old woman named Maria Cortes. The DMV had her going five-two and weighing in at 283 pounds. That didn’t seem right. Sam had seen stuff on the Internet, of course, but Nick Balsalmo was a thirty-five-year-old guy running drugs out of Little Havana. He didn’t seem like a granny chaser.
“Rod, you sure about this?” Sam said.
Rod finally turned his attention from the cat and regarded Sam with something like disappointment. “Of course,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe he was being questioned.