The fix

6

Most people don't want to get hit in the face. Who can blame them? Getting hit in the face hurts, but it's also expensive, especially if you don't have insurance. A severely broken nose? The kind you'd get if someone who knew how to hit you just right managed to hit you just right, thus collapsing your nasal cavity into your face but not actually killing you by shoving upward and into your brain? That's four to seven thousand dollars in plastic surgery just to get you looking human again. A blown-out orbital bone? That's another eight grand, plus there's always the chance you'll lose some sight. Broken jaw? That's a bad time: months drinking your meals out of a straw and then a bill for ten grand at the back end, along with maybe a few permanent metal plates in your face, just to keep things together.

If you're doing the hitting, you also don't want to hit someone in the face, unless you are certain you can find a soft spot, like the eyes or the bridge of the nose. Hit someone in the mouth, there's an excellent chance you'll end up with teeth lodged in your knuckles, which is hard to explain when you're at the hospital. Hit someone in the forehead, you're likely to pop the joint at the base of your pinkie, by far the weakest joint in your entire hand, or, if you're really unlucky and the person you're hitting is particularly hardheaded, crush all of your knuckles at one time.

You really want to incapacitate someone? You go for the throat. Or, barring that, you go for the ears. Mike Tyson was no dummy. Well, he was, but he knew how to spot vulnerability in an opponent and legalities never seemed to bother him.

I thought about this very issue as Fiona and I pulled up in the Charger at the front gate of Longstreet's offices. The security detail was standing in front of the gate with his back to us, talking on a walkie-talkie, so when he heard the car roll up, he turned and gave us an absent halt sign with his palm. Ahead of him I could see three beefy-looking fellows huddled around Sam's Caddie in the parking lot. All three were wearing workout gear-shorts, tank tops, New Balances-and I could see the sun gleaming off of their skin even from one hundred yards away.

Still, this didn't look good. If they were looking in the car, that meant they knew it didn't belong. And if they were outside in their workout gear, it was probably because someone had yanked them away from their free weights somewhere inside. I put the Charger in park and turned to Fiona. "Watch me," I said.

"Just run him over," Fiona said.

"If it looks like that's a viable option, go ahead." I jumped out of the car and started walking toward the guard. When Fiona slid behind the wheel, I said, " 'Scuse me. My lady and me, we can't find the airport. I see all these planes buzzing around, but for the life of me, can't find nothing."

The guard turned his head toward me. "What?"

I was about a yard away from him now. "The airport? Place with all the planes and people? I can't find it."

"Get back in your car," the guard said. "This is a secure facility." Not for much longer, I thought. He put his hand on the butt of his gun to prove his point nonetheless and probably because I was about a foot away from him now.

"No problem," I said. I raised my arms wide to show him I meant no harm and took a step backward.

When he turned his back to me again, he pulled out his radio and said, "I think he's under one of the…," but before he finished, I clapped him simultaneously on both ears.

You do this hard enough, two things happen:

• The person passes out.

• The person vomits and then passes out, because you've turned their semicircular canals into a centrifuge.

I hit him really hard.

The guard grunted and then vomit splashed out of his mouth in a rushed torrent. At the same moment his knees went completely slack. Though I had to jump back to get away from the puke, I did manage to grab the guy by the waist to give him a soft landing. Bad day to be a security guard, but I figured there was no need for him to wake up with a broken neck. Still, I didn't want him causing too much more trouble, so I yanked his cuffs off of him-a nice pair of heavy-duty hinged cuffs, the ones you'd use if you wanted someone to be as uncomfortable as possible while being detained-hooked him to his guard shack and took his. 357.

Fiona pulled the Charger up beside me and I slid into the passenger seat. I didn't really like the idea of Fiona driving my car. She didn't have a great respect for things like black-flecked paint on recently restored muscle cars from the 1970s.

"Sam just texted," she said. "He's hiding under one of the Hummers next to his Cadillac."

"What is he doing?" From our vantage point, we could see the Hummers but not Sam. I trusted that he was where he said he was.

"He apparently had to escape from the building but didn't want to leave his car behind," Fiona said. "He indicated there was an aggressively violent woman involved who he would prefer I not kill."

A woman who looked aggressively violent burst out the front door of the facility. She had a lightning bolt running the length of her neck. She also had a shotgun and two aggressively violent-looking men trailing behind her. There was a barbed-wire fence between them and us still, but not for long.

"I guess that would be her," I said. Sam popped out from under one of the Hummers and started running toward the gate. The men surrounding his Caddie hadn't noticed him yet, but I had a good feeling that would change momentarily when the woman with the shotgun rounded the bend, spotted us and spotted Sam running toward us. "Shit," I said. "Go."

"Where?" Fiona said.

"Get Sam," I said. "Go." Fiona beamed. "And try to avoid destroying my car."

Fiona punched the gas and the Charger shot through the gate, splintering the plywood arm across the bumper. Which hurt me. Not physically. But it hurt me.

The three men surrounding Sam's Cadillac whipped around at the sound of the Charger growling toward them, but seemed unsure what to do. This wasn't Fal-lujah, after all. And they didn't look armed.

And this was Miami. A 'seventy-four Charger pounding over the pavement could justifiably be driven by an octogenarian with a poor sense of direction.

Regardless, I rolled down my window and started shooting at the Hummers to give Sam some protection. Not surprisingly, my bullets pinged right off of them. Armor-plated. Nice. These guys were pros. Which also meant that at the first sound of gunfire, they did the right thing: They got down flat.

Behind us, the woman with the lightning bolt had no such compunction.

"You lying son of a bitch!" she shouted and then she fired a shot at Sam, who was now about ten yards from my car. She then screamed a few more things that were hard to accurately parse over the cocking and firing. Oddly, the woman didn't seem to want to hit Sam. She was firing way over everyone's heads.

And Sam wasn't shooting back.

Something weird was going on here.

Still. There were bullets.

And the guys by the Caddie had snapped alert and were now chasing after Sam.

"Cover me," I said to Fiona. I jumped out of the Charger and fired three times at the woman with the shotgun. And since she didn't seem to be actually shooting at Sam, I didn't actually shoot at her, either. Instead I destroyed the rack of cameras I saw lining Longstreet's fencing-cameras that were literally swiveling to capture all of the action.

At the same time, Fiona took care of the men chasing after Sam, except her method was to shoot at Sam's Cadillac, taking out all the windows, all the tires, and both mirrors. All in the course of about fifteen seconds.

She's a very good shot.

It was enough to get everyone on the ground, at least for a moment, and for Sam to dive into the backseat of my car.

When the woman started to rise, I put the gun on her again. "I'm not trying to kill you," I said. I swung around and made sure the men behind the Charger saw me, and heard me, too. "But I will."

"That asshole stole something from my office," the woman said. That didn't seem to be the thing that was bothering her, though. She honestly looked heartbroken.

"I'm sorry about that," I said. "But it's no reason to come out here with a shotgun." I motioned for Fiona to get into the car. In the distance, I could hear sirens. Did these people actually call the police? Who calls the police anymore? What kind of paramilitary unit were they? "Whatever he took, he'll return it when we're done with it. As a token of trust, we're going to leave his car here." I pointed at the Cadillac, which wasn't exactly in driveable condition now anyway. "I'm going to get into my car. You'll have about three to five seconds where it will be possible for you to stand up and shoot me. That's a choice you can make. But understand that my friend behind the wheel will run you over and then she'll come back and kill everyone you know. That's just how she is."

This seemed to get everyone's attention.

"Do you know who we are?" the woman asked. "We will hunt you down through every corner of the universe."

I opted not to point out that the universe was unlikely to have actual corners, that it was likely more of a fluid concern. "I am well aware of who you are," I said. "You have a very comprehensive Web site." I started back toward the car. "But, honestly, your security? It's terrible. You might consider outsourcing." I slid into the Charger then, figuring, you know, they probably didn't have a witty rejoinder to bounce back off of me.

Fiona showed great restraint by only spinning the tires once before shooting back through the gate.

A 1974 Dodge Charger seats two comfortably, three if the person sitting in the rear seat happens to be an Olympic gymnast with tremendous flexibility or was unfortunately born without knees. If you want comfort, buy yourself a 1974 four-door Dodge Coronet. It has the same body type and plenty of police departments across the land found them to be excellent for ferrying passengers to prison.

If you intend to have a whining and complaining Sam Axe in your backseat, the Coronet also came with an optional eight-track tape stereo system that one could use to drown out Sam's voice. Three Dog Night or Mac Davis would be great choices. Mott the Hoople would work. Foghat. Anything to dampen the din.

"You did not need to do that to my car," Sam kept saying. At first, he just said it under his breath, I presume because he didn't want to sound like he was complaining, since we'd just saved his ass. And judging from his split upper lip and the way the tip of his nose was turned just slightly to the right, there was some validity to that presumption.

"What happened to your face?" I asked. We were already back on River Drive, crossing behind the airport and back toward my place. We could still hear the sirens in the distance.

"That woman with the shotgun," Sam said. Then: "Fiona, you didn't have to do that to my car."

"I know," Fiona said, "but I was happy to."

"No," Sam said, "I mean…"

"I know what you mean, Sam," Fiona said. "Your utmost gratitude is appreciated and duly noted."

"You didn't have to do that to my car," Sam said again. "Maybe you'd like to tell Veronica? Maybe just drop me off at a bar and you go back to Veronica's and explain that while she was kindly watching Cricket, you were blowing up my car."

Sam was shouting now.

He kept sputtering about loyalty and the durability of American cars and how he'd always wanted a car like that and now, now, where was he?

"Sam," I said. "About your face."

"I should have ducked," Sam said. He explained the particulars that led to his eventual holing up in the ladies' room.

"Bolts?" I said.

"It's got a certain allure, doesn't it?" Sam said. "I mean, even after she hit me with her phone, I still felt, in a different situation, maybe five, ten years down the line… who knows?"

"She has a real pate de fois gras," Fiona said.

"You don't find a woman who can take a knife to the carotid every day," Sam said. There was wist-fulness in his voice that I chalked up to the high likelihood he had a concussion. He explained then that after he called us, he tried to sneak out of the bathroom and out the emergency exit, but that Bolts met him in the hallway. He decided that the best option then would be to confess his blooming attraction for her, which she admitted to having as well, and just when he thought he'd able to woo her enough to get the hell out of her office alive..

… her phone rang. And then it was all over but the gunplay.

"All for a piece of paper," Sam said. He pulled Dixon Woods' crumpled job application out of his pants and handed it to me. "Fiona, do you realize that Cadillac is one of the few cars that have traditionally gone up in value?"

"I didn't know that," Fiona said. "I'll steal you an old one, then, if it would make you shut up."

I took a few moments and looked over the form. "Where did you say there was a police report on Dixon from last year?"

"Jupiter," Sam said.

"How far away is that? A hundred miles?"

"Something like that," Sam said.

"You think your guy at the FBI could get you an idea when Dixon was last in the country? Just a round number even."

"Probably," Sam said. He was still distracted by his Cadillac being blown apart and left for scrap at Longstreet. "Do you know what a hundred miles feels like in a Cadillac, Fiona? It feels like silk. Like you're driving on a highway made of silk."

"I can turn around," Fiona said. "Let Bolts have her way with you. Shall I? Let her beat on your face some more. Maybe if she hit you just right, she could get your eyes to finally line up straight."

"I'll have you know that I didn't even attempt to hit her back," Sam said. "That's the kind of gentleman I am. But I did shoot up her office, which was probably a mistake. Did you know that you can get an armor-plated laptop now?"

I did. It made shooting them out of frustration a real option, particularly the Dells.

"Bolts would have gouged your eyes out and eaten them," Fiona said. I knew where this was all headed, but I was trying to pay attention to Dixon's application, and it's fun sometimes to remember the good old days when Sam and Fiona hated each other. "You do recall that event in New York, don't you, Sam? You recall how you folded like a hand puppet in the face of-"

"Okay, children," I said.

We drove in silence for about two minutes. And by silence, I mean that I could hear Sam breathing. He was also mumbling things. Fiona was drumming her fingers on the steering wheel.

A hundred miles.

I hadn't been that far out of the city of Miami since, well, since getting to Miami. "How fast do you think I'd heat up if I had to drive to Jupiter?"

"You wouldn't get out of Fort Lauderdale," Sam said.

About what I thought. "According to Dixon's job application, his mother lives in Jupiter. Linda Woods. He lists that as his permanent address. I'm going to guess she found herself missing some part of her savings recently." I gave Sam back the application so he could see for himself. "You say you've got a driver's license picture coming in?"

"Yeah," Sam said. "But it's twenty years old. Probably looks like the keyboard player from the Cure in it."

"Cricket will be able to tell the difference," I said.

"You really think so, Mikey? She can hardly tell the time right now."

"She'll know," I said. "You sleep with someone a few times, you know them well enough to spot a baby picture."

"That true, Fiona?" Sam asked. An olive branch. A bit of pleasant banter.

"I wouldn't know," she said. "Michael never was much for showing off mementos from his childhood," Fiona said. Everyone was chippy. "Just all the terrible, terrible mental scars. Isn't that right, Michael?"

"Anyway," I said, because what I didn't need was Fiona's wrath acknowledged again. Let Sam deal with that. "I'm going to guess Linda Woods' son wasn't real happy about her losing whatever she lost. We get back to my place, call your guy. Get a copy of that police report. Whoever made the complaint, that's our Dixon."

"Nice bit of revenge, taking his name," Fiona said. "Maybe I'll start going by Natalya Choplyn."

"That's funny," I said.

"Isn't it?" Fiona said.

No, not really, I thought. Instead, I said: "Do you really think that guy in the photo tried to buy guns from you?"

"Yes," she said.

"When was that?"

"Six months ago. Maybe less."

"I don't recall you selling any guns six months ago."

"That's because I didn't tell you."

"Keeping secrets is wrong," Sam said.

"So is back hair," Fiona said. "We pick our battles, don't we?"

"How many did he buy?" I asked, ignoring them both. The sooner we were out of this car and back in a place where I was fairly certain they wouldn't start hitting each other and somehow place me in peril as a result, the better. Until such time, I was Switzerland.

"None," she said. "We were to meet in the lobby of the Mandarin Oriental to discuss prices. But when I got there and saw him, I had a sense that perhaps he was not the kind of person to keep their mouth closed about illegal arms."

"Why was that?" I asked.

"He was wearing a shirt that said Co-Ed Naked Vol leyball on it," Fiona said

"Classy," I said.

"And the hotel was filled with real estate agents attending a conference. I watched him for a time and he seemed to know many of them, or at least he said hello to them all. My impression was that he'd look lovely in one of those yellow coats, or with his head on top of a sticky calendar. The amount of perfume and large hair in that hotel was enough to turn me off."

"How did he contact you initially?" I asked.

"Through channels," she said.

"Fi."

"We all have secrets, Michael," Fiona said, "that are better left unknown to certain third parties who deem secret keeping wrong."

"Wrong is blowing up someone's car," Sam muttered.

"Fi."

"Fine, Michael," she said, and then went on to explain that she received a call from someone named Etienne, who'd received a call from Mario, who'd received a call from Gwyneth, who'd met a man named Holton, who knew a person who was looking for three AK-47s, of which Fiona was known to have easy access to.

Which is the definition of channels. None of those people were likely to know anything, less likely to, even if they did know anything, say a damn word.

"How long will it take you to put together that online profile?" I asked.

"A few minutes. All I'll really need is a photo and some interesting hobbies to punch it up. Maybe something about loving sex with overweight men and giving money away by the bushel."

"How long to get that head shot together of Dixon, or whoever he is?"

"No time at all," she said.

"Good," I said. "We get that picture. We get that license photo. We get the name off the police report, and we're in business." Just when I was about to suggest that Fiona and Sam could get over their differences concerning her shooting up his Caddie by riding to Jupiter together tomorrow to talk to Linda Woods, my cell phone rang.

It was my mother. I decided to let it go to voice mail, but the problem was that having it go to voice mail meant my mother would leave a thirty-minute-long message that would be more painful to listen to than the actual five-minute conversation I could reasonably have with her prior to losing service. So, even after deciding I'd let it go to voice mail, I answered it.

"I'm in a meeting, Ma," I said.

"Who are you meeting with?"

"Very important world figures. We're discussing how often they call their mothers. What do you need?"

"Some people came by the house looking for you," she said.

"When?"

"About two hours ago."

"What kind of people?"

"They talked like Communists."

"Ma, you need to be a bit more specific."

"They dropped off a package for you. They said you'd know what it was about."

"Is it ticking?"

"Michael, I'm not stupid."

That was true. But she was frustrating. "Does it smell like cordite?"

"It smells like a manila envelope, Michael."

"They leave any instructions?" These days, it was hard to tell who might drop by, good guys or bad guys.

"Yes," she said. "They said that they were bringing something to Nate's house, too, but that they'd wait to hear from you first."

"Nate?"

"They seemed to know him," she said. "Are you two working together again? It's always so nice when you include him. You know, he told me last week that he really feels close to you now. Isn't that nice?"

Fiona pulled up in front of my place. There was already a line of people waiting to get into the club and it wasn't even dark out yet.

"Where is the package now, Ma?"

"I put it in the bathtub… just like you taught me last time."

My mother, full of surprises. "I'll be there," I said. "Don't touch it."

If you ever happen to become a spy and then happen to get burned and are forced to live in one town under threat of death, try not to make it the same one your mother lives in. In the event that is unavoidable, at some point ask your mother to unlist her phone number and cancel, finally, the subscription to Highlights that still comes to her home in your name. See about getting her to move permanently into an assisted-living facility that doesn't allow smoking or outside phone calls. See about getting your brother to leave town, too, particularly if he happens to be named Nate. See about asking the people who are burning you if, respectfully, they could drop you in Walla Walla, Washington.

"I'll make dinner," Mom said. "Why don't you ask Fiona if she'd like to come?"

"I don't know where she is," I said.

"I'll call her," Mom said and hung up.

I closed my phone and got out of the car. Stood on the sidewalk. Stared up at the sun. Surveyed the people lined up under my window. I could hear rap music coming from inside the club, a song about never being caught riding dirty. I tried to think pleasant thoughts.

Sam unwound himself from the backseat and stood beside me on the sidewalk. Fiona? She was still sitting in the front seat of the Charger. Seems she'd received a call.

"That was my mother," I said to no one in particular.

"Nothing says you have to answer," Sam said. "A little self-control, Mikey, it will save you heartache."

"She was visited by Communists today," I said.

"They're like cockroaches. You see one, there's another hundred meeting somewhere."

"I don't think that's true anymore," I said.

"The Red Menace would surprise you, Mikey."

"This Natalya thing," I said. "I've gotta get around that, it seems."

"I saw something interesting today," Sam said. He flipped open his phone and scrolled through the photos until he found the one of Longstreet's map of operatives. South Beach looked like a conflict zone.

"Well," I said, "that is interesting." Particularly, I noted, the cluster surrounding the Hotel Oro. I thought about the meat guarding Natalya. I thought about the morons parking cars. I thought about maybe seeing just how much they'd like seeing their pictures in Palm Life.

Fiona popped out of my car then. She was still talking on the phone. "Pot roast it is," she said. "I'll bring some potatoes."