“You know how many Grossmans there are in Miami?” Sandpaper said.
“Not too many who’ve done time,” the other said. “Nicky was with him at Glades. He gave us a bunch of different first names, but none of them worked. And now he’s not talking.”
A laugh erupted and the man with the sandpaper voice said, “Everyone shut up. You think this is funny? This bastard has our shit. All of it. All of you gonna be laughing in prison? You know how hard I’ve worked to keep your asses on the street? You screw up, you go like those two last night. You want that? Keep laughing. Find this fucker’s first name. Find his family. Find everything about him and get me our shit back!”
Fiona decided right then that staying around any longer would be fruitless and dangerous. She’d been gone only a few minutes, so Skinny would be ready for action and probably wouldn’t notice her leaving. She reached into her purse and pulled out a cell phone, dialed an eVoice Mail box number she had that delivered a digital voice file directly to an e- mail address, and then wedged the phone between the toilet and the Swiss cheese wall.
The recording wouldn’t be admissible in a court of law, but Fiona didn’t mind that. If they needed to give it to the police, she was sure they’d figure out a use for it. How she could have used this simple bit of technology when she was a teenager…
Fiona stepped out of the bathroom at the same time a squat man with a major- league-and, like everything else in the bar, brown and greasy-mullet came out of the meeting. She thought he looked like a hobbit with a handlebar mustache, really. Sadly, he wasn’t looking in Fiona’s direction, which was really too bad for him, since Fiona was able to grab the back of his hair and slam his head into the wall, dropping him to the floor in a heap.
Generally, Fiona wasn’t big on saying menacing things to passed-out people-what was the use? — but as she stepped over the hobbit and made her way to the front door, she said, “That was for the peepholes.”
She paused once to check on Skinny. He’d left the door to the kitchen open, so she could see his shirtless form sweeping up the floor. His class knew no bounds. He’d left his shotgun on the bar, so Fiona picked that up, too. Along with Clete’s. 380, she’d made a nice profit from this endeavor and also got to beat the crap out of two members of that fine underclass known as biker scum.
A good day.
11
If you get a job working for the CIA directly out of college, you’ll most likely spend the duration of your career sitting behind a government-issued metal desk reading mundane government-issued reports on agricultural concerns in Yemen. You’ll work from nine to five. You’ll have excellent health benefits.
You’ll earn slightly less than people in the private sector. You won’t get a gun.
You might travel overseas, but most likely you won’t.
You won’t be asked to kill anyone.
You won’t be asked to impersonate anyone.
You won’t be asked to do anything, usually. Most of the time, you’ll just show up to your office and there will be a stack of papers waiting for you that you certainly didn’t ask to receive.
This will be your life.
If you want to travel the world covertly gathering information for the government, the best thing to do is go to college and then join the military, show your superiors a certain aptitude with intelligence and then, one day, you might just get a phone call from an agency that doesn’t exist in any formal government books asking you to leave behind the camouflage for a nice suit and a pair of sunglasses.
And even then you probably won’t get a gun.
You’ll be an analyst or an interrogator or you’ll be in charge of analysts and interrogators.
If you want the gun and the charge to use it (or any other weapon, including your own hands) regardless of the Geneva Conventions, it’s important to have a slippery moral center that the government views as potentially beneficial. Spreading democracy is the end goal, of course, but it’s nice if you’re willing to achieve that goal by using any means necessary.
When you’re no longer a spy-or waiting to become one again, presuming at some point the axis that tilts your world finally rights itself and the people who’ve burned you are willing to rescind the lies they’ve told about you-that slippery moral center (and understanding that you could be doing paperwork in a basement, too, if not for something as random as luck, or chance, or unique dexterity with a firearm) really only comes in handy if you spend your free time with someone like Fiona Glenanne, helping bank robbers with their problems.
“So,” I said, “just so we’re clear. You kneecapped Clete, cracked his coccyx and broke his wrist all in under ten seconds?”
“It’s about being graceful,” Fiona said.
“You didn’t think that was excessive?”
“Excessive? No. He called me a skank, Michael,” she said. “He’s lucky to be respirating.”
We were parked in front of a medical center in Coconut Grove waiting for Nate to come out with Bruce and Zadie. After hearing the general thrust of the conversation the Ghouls were having-that they were only one step behind Bruce Grossman and it was a short one-I figured providing security on top of Nate’s certainly excellent, totally coherent bodyguarding was wise counsel.
“And how long to dispose of the man in the hall? What did you call him?”
“The Hobbit was less than five seconds. One motion and then to the ground he went.”
“Less than five seconds, really?”
“It happened so quickly it couldn’t even really be measured in time,” Fiona said.
The medical plaza teemed with activity, but thus far no one who looked like they manufactured crystal meth for fun and profit. Most likely, those people were trying to figure out how one tiny woman was able to get by three different men without a peep being made. There was a good chance that at least Clete would claim there was more than one person involved, as his pride was likely so high that admitting the truth was worse than the pain of the truth itself.
That is, if they didn’t kill him for letting someone in. The phone recorded fifteen minutes of conversation, ending with the sounds of a person picking up the phone and slamming it into something, most likely the toilet. Maybe the wall, but certainly something solid enough to destroy it.
If they were smart, they would have checked to see the last number dialed by the phone and then maybe they’d try to get that traced and then maybe they’d show up at a server somewhere in Lawrence, Kansas, or wherever eVoice was based. And maybe, if they were really smart, smarter than I or anyone might justifiably give them credit for, they’d muscle out the e-mail address where the recorded messages were sent, which would be good investigative work indeed, except that e-mail address doesn’t exist anymore.
Plus, judging from the recording, the phone was destroyed.
There’s a reason some people are in biker gangs and some people are spies.
“How long do you think it will take them to find Bruce’s name?” Fiona asked.
“Not long,” I said. The truth was that all they had to do was go to the Florida Department of Corrections Web site and type in the last name “Grossman” and work their way through the list of released inmates, something I did about five minutes after Fiona delivered her news.
It was a short list.
Only twelve men with the last name Grossman had been released from Florida prisons in the previous ten years. There were only five men named Grossman actually doing time.
If the Ghouls tended toward the alphabetically inclined, they’d hit Bruce Grossman second on the list of released inmates, right after Abe Grossman. Abe was seventy-seven at the time of his release nine years ago, he’d been incarcerated for twenty- five years and would now be eighty-six.
If they were methodical, maybe they’d look at each person’s sentence and crime and decide who would be the likely candidate to rob their stash house. Abe and Bruce seemed least likely, since at sixty- five Bruce probably seemed just as dangerous as old Abe. So maybe they’d try out Kelly Grossman, a twenty- eight-year-old who did time for assault. Or Pierce Grossman, aka Thomas Pierce, aka Pat Gross, forty-three, and released after six years on a fraud charge.