The Giveaway

16

Just as it’s nearly impossible these days to fake your death, there’s also no easy way to prepare for your likely actual death other than recognizing that it’s one of several possible outcomes. Normal people don’t usually possess this ability. It’s an existential conundrum and most people can’t even define “existential” or “conundrum” much less handle the philosophical questions of being. When you’re trained by the government to kill, you get a crash course in desensitization. From the first day of boot camp onward, you speak of death-both the death of your enemy and your own.

From the cadence chants of basic training to the man-shaped silhouettes you’re taught to fire at, to the new virtual-reality simulations that allow you to take on an entire city of people, you become inured to the common fear of death that a sane person might have. You’re willing to walk into enemy fire because you’ve already survived.

The result of this training is a series of skills that most humans really shouldn’t want, including the inability to feel fear when they really should.

Give this training to the wrong person and you just might give a platform for a burgeoning sociopath.

Give this training to the right person… and you end up with me and Sam riding howling hogs down a street in Miami, our saddlebags filled with paperwork and patches belonging to the Ghouls Motorcycle Club and one human hand, minus a severed pinkie.

We pulled up across the street from Purgatory and parked our bikes. It was barely 11:00 A.M. and traffic was light, but regular. Even a cop drove by once, but he didn’t bother to slow down. A block up the street was a 7-Eleven. A block down the street was a McDonald’s. There was a used-car lot within fifty feet of where we stood. And at 11:00 A.M. all had customers.

In front of Purgatory was the gold Lincoln and two bikes. Clete wasn’t holding up the front door, for obvious reasons, but his replacement looked to be cut from the same piece of cloth. Neck tats, arms the size of barrels, sunglasses, jeans, a bat.

He also had an iPhone, which he was playing with and therefore didn’t notice me and Sam staring directly at him. Not even the Ghouls can get a decent security detail, apparently.

“That guy is pretty scary-looking,” Sam said. “If a softball game breaks out, we’re done for.”

“Be careful,” I said. “He might also text you to death.”

“Kids,” Sam said, “they love the texting.” Another cop drove by. It wasn’t that odd, really. It wasn’t the best neighborhood in the city, or the worst, but it was also only about a mile from a substation where, a few months earlier, a delusional gangster had decided he’d go Terminator and try to shoot several police officers using a paintball gun. It didn’t go well, which told me that at least the cops were pretty good shots.

“Nice that there’s a legal presence here,” Sam said. “It would be a real shame if they just let a criminal organization roost here under their nose.”

“Alleged criminal organization,” I said.

If the Ghouls were really savvy, they’d call the cops as soon as we got anywhere near them. We were in possession of stolen property, after all, and they knew we’d be strapped.

Which gave me an idea.

I called 911.

“Yes, hello,” I said, “an eighteen-wheeler holding about ten cars on it? Toyotas? Maybe Hondas? Anyhoo, I think they are foreign cars? Well, I just saw one of those crash into one of those big apartment buildings on 142nd Avenue. Pardon me? Oh, the south part. Maybe south and to the west. There’s a huge fireball. Such pretty colors!”

Before I could continue with the show, the 911 operator told me authorities were on the way and disconnected me.

“Nice,” Sam said. Twenty seconds later, we heard the first sirens in the distance. An ambulance raced by us shortly thereafter, followed by two fire engines and two police cars.

“Good response time,” I said.

“Unless one of us needs an ambulance,” Sam said.

I tossed my cell phone into the street and watched as a second ambulance drove right over it, crushing it to pieces. Making a prank call to 911 isn’t advisable. They tend to track you down, arrest you, and put you in jail. It would be slightly more difficult to find out who I was with my burner crushed into the pavement. It was okay, though; I had another phone on me and another fifty or so at home.

After the authorities passed on by, traffic returned to normal. A city bus rolled by. A low-flying plane pulled an advertisement. A man pushing a taco cart walked in front of Purgatory but didn’t even look up from his feet.

Not a great time to open fire on a city street. Which was good. I didn’t want to get shot.

But sometimes, you need to let the neighbors know you’re home.

“Do you want to shout the hard-core thing or should I?” I asked Sam.

“I’ve got a couple of lines I’ve been working on,” he said.

“Please, no more John Wayne,” I said.

“You’ll have to wait and see.” We both pulled out our guns. He shouted, “Wagons forward, ho!”

I fired two shots into the gold Lincoln, taking out two of its tires. Sam fired two more shots, taking out the other tires. The guy guarding his iPhone surprised us both by throwing down his iPhone and ducking for cover, which was the smart move.

“Hondo?” I said.

“It was on television.”

I stepped out into the middle of the street, my gun on the crouching Ghoul. I could see that he was trying to get something out of his pants; his gun, most likely, which proved yet again how stupid it is to keep your gun in your belt, since it’s not very easy to retrieve it when you’re crouched down hoping to save your life. I walked a few more steps and then said, “Don’t do that.”

The Ghoul looked up at me. “Don’t do what?”

“Your gun. Don’t take it out and don’t try to shoot me with it. If I wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead. And if you’re not careful, you’re liable to blow your right testicle off. So stand up and pull your gun out slowly and then toss it into the gutter.”

Sam had followed me but was still about ten yards behind me. Cars swerved around him on the street, but no one seemed to be the least bit surprised that two guys with guns were stalking around. The man with the taco cart was about a block away, but hadn’t bothered to turn and look at the commotion. McDonald’s was still serving up Quarter Pounders. Gas was still being pumped. For some reason, the rest of the Ghouls hadn’t stormed out of Purgatory yet, which led me to believe they were expecting a show, which probably meant that the Ghoul on the street was not their most treasured asset.

“Man,” the un-treasured asset said, “you’re in the wrong place,” but he tossed his gun into the gutter anyway.

“People keep telling me that,” I said. “And yet, here I am. I wonder why that is?”

“Do you know who you’re shooting at?” he asked. He sounded incredulous. It was the default sound of tough guys who can’t believe other people don’t think they are tough.

“If you have to ask that question,” I said, “then the answer is yes. Now, run inside and tell your boss that there are some bad men outside who’d like to talk to him.”

The Ghoul didn’t move.

“He gonna shoot me in the back?” he asked. He indicated Sam with a lift of his chin.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Duke, you gonna shoot him in the back?”

“Out here, due process is a bullet,” Sam said, which only confused the Ghoul.

“That means no,” I said, though that wasn’t true. It just meant Sam had also seen The Green Berets recently. “But walk backwards if it makes you feel more comfortable.”

The Ghoul did just that, but before he made it up the steps to the door, it opened and Lyle Connors stood in the doorway. He wore a linen summer suit with no tie. His hair was parted conservatively to one side and his face was freshly shaved.

He walked down the steps, shoved the doorman aside and stepped past both Sam and me to look at his car. He walked around it twice, checking for damage. There wasn’t any, apart from the tires. He seemed content with that.

“Feds don’t knock anymore?” Lyle said to me.

Not what I was expecting.

“Wouldn’t know,” I said. “But I figured trying to get past your man at the door would be difficult.”

Lyle laughed. “You send a woman to do your work yesterday and you’re scared of one guy? The FBI isn’t what it used to be.”

“I don’t know who you think is FBI,” I said, “but it ain’t us.”

“No?” Lyle said. “Since when are the Redeemers back in business in Florida?”

“Since Oregon stopped being profitable,” I said. “And since we got tired of having the FBI wearing our colors and riding our bikes.”

Lyle regarded me for a few seconds. I couldn’t tell if he was looking for cracks in the veneer or if he was just trying to apply some silent pressure, see if I or Sam started babbling or backtracking.

“That so?” he said. “How come we haven’t seen any soldiers? You two and your crazy woman, that’s the whole unit?”

“You don’t believe me, that’s your business. Doesn’t change the fact I got this.” I reached inside my vest and pulled out the Ziploc bag now holding Bruce Grossman’s hand-or, well, the hand portraying Bruce Grossman’s hand-and dropped it at Lyle’s feet. I’d shoved a couple of the Ghouls’ patches into the bag, too, just for effect. “I also got a bunch of maps in my saddlebag that list all the safe houses you got between Tallahassee and here. That’s gotta be worth something to someone, right, Duke?”

“You got that right,” Sam said. “Put it on eBay. Get the Banshees and the feds to bid against each other.”

Lyle’s right eye twitched. He didn’t look horribly mad, but that twitch wasn’t because he was over-caffeinated.

“What’s your name?” he asked me.

“You can call me Jasper.”

“Okay,” he said. “Tell me something, Jasper, what makes you think I’ll do business with you?”

“It doesn’t matter. Either you do business with me or you don’t, I’ll still get what I want. Professional courtesy, I came to you first, seeing as the Banshees tried to screw both of us. You don’t pay up, we take over this territory. I make my money either way.”

“I’d like to see you try,” Lyle said.

“You would,” I said. “Because we’d be wearing your colors. We’d go door-to-door looking for old ladies to smack up. We’d set up shop outside elementary schools to move meth. We’d pimp out thirteen-year-old girls. And when the police got close? We’d take them to your safe houses. We’d leave a trail out to your processing plant in the Glades. We’ll go out to Sturgis, Oklahoma City, Houston and we will shoot at people. And when we get tired of that? We’ll come back here to Miami and maybe we’ll kill some Cuban Mafia don and then a cop and a rabbi and a priest and maybe we’ll kidnap Dwyane Wade. All in your colors.”

That twitch? A full-blown blink.

Lyle scratched absently at his neck until a thick red line rose up from the skin just above his Adam’s apple. “Maybe you’re not feds,” he said. Lyle looked down the street, his eyes squinted into narrow slits, like he was trying to make out something very important in the distance that he knew should be there but wasn’t. “You hungry?” he asked. “I can’t negotiate on an empty stomach.”

I looked at Sam. He gave a quick shrug. “We could eat,” I said.

Lyle reached down and picked up the bag with Bruce Grossman’s hand in it. He unzipped it, pulled out the Ghouls’ patch, and then took a moment to examine the evidence before dropping it back onto the pavement with a dull thwack. “Buster,” he said to the doorman, “get rid of this. Put it in the incinerator. Chop it up. Feed it to your pit bull. Just get rid of it.”

“Got it,” Buster said.

“And tell the boys inside that I’m going down the street to McDonald’s for a business meeting,” Lyle said, “and that if I don’t come back in an hour, they should go kill everyone named Grossman in Miami. Got that?”

The McDonald’s down the street from Purgatory didn’t have a Playland. It was one of those recently renovated McDonald’s that looks like a Starbucks slathered in trans fats and encourages people to come in with their laptops and spend the day eating French fries and Oreo McFlurrys while sucking down the new McDonald’s espresso drinks.

So even though there was no area dedicated to screaming children, there were plenty of postcollegiate men with messenger bags and wire-rim glasses working on their novels or resumes or letters to Parade magazine about the state of Jennifer Aniston’s romantic relationships.

Lyle insisted on buying us lunch, so Sam and I found a circular table with a good view of the door and of Lyle. Sam watched the door. I watched Lyle. Not that we didn’t trust him, aside from him being a murderous biker gang leader, but it just made good sense to watch the hard target and pay mind to any soft ones coming through the door.

It probably made sense to Lyle, too. We’d already proved that we weren’t afraid of taking him on in what would otherwise be the sacred ground of Purgatory, and that we could predict his moves enough so that we were waiting on his men at Zadie’s. Going to McDonald’s? That wasn’t something I could have honestly assumed.

He walked back to the table and set down a tray loaded with food and for a couple of minutes the three of us ate in silence, Lyle protecting his meal prison-style, with one arm wrapped around the entire tray. He was a Big-Mac-large-fries-and-an-orange-drink kind of guy.

No apple pie.

No McFlurry.

No salad.

He was Old School.

Time for recess.

“Since when do Ghouls wear suits?” I said.

“It’s about diversification,” Lyle said. “New business models. I can’t walk into a business meeting dressed like you two. You’ll find that out soon enough, Jasper. You wear a suit, you’re untouchable.”

“And yet you leave all of your most important stuff in a stash house somewhere?” I said. “You ever hear of a computer? You ever see Bruce Grossman? Man was almost seventy. You got jobbed by a guy collecting Social Security.”

“He got you, too,” Lyle said.

“Correction,” I said. “He tried to get us. You know what he stole from me? Shoe boxes. You know what was in those shoe boxes? Shoes. He stole my shoes. Little bit of money. Little bit of drugs. Not like how he took you down. He bullied you. Treated you like his stepson. Us? He got what we left out. Plain and simple. And he paid for it. Boy, did he pay for it. Oh, it took us some time to find him, but we didn’t have to go torture and kill someone else to get to him. Didn’t have to put no bounty out in Little Havana. We handled our business. While you were busy making house calls in Little Havana, Bruce Grossman was already in the dirt. We had to sit and wait on your asses. So you got taken by an old-ass man and by us and by the Banshees. You’re 0-for-3, hoss.”

Lyle took a long drink from his orange soda. Here was a man not used to being talked back to, getting talked back to.

The twitch was coming back.

“You can change an environment overnight, but you can’t change the people inside of the environment immediately,” he said, his voice careful, measured. “Lessons have been learned.” He talked like someone who’d been reading manuals on corporate leadership.

“Expensive lessons,” I said.

“You think you’ll be able to do whatever you want to do for the rest of your life?” he asked. “Me? I’m fifty years old. My brothers are all doing time. You think I want to spend the next thirty years doing fed time? So I’m changing the way the Ghouls handle their business. Keep us protected and keep us in business. I’m clean. I intend to stay that way. Maybe I’ve got some dirty friends. Even Obama has a few of those, right?”

It was nice talk, but they’d killed Nick Balsalmo. They’d killed the men working the stash house. And they would have killed Bruce. But now I understood why, even though we’d threatened Clifford and Norman, we weren’t met by a dozen men with guns when we approached the bar.

“So, what,” Sam said, “you want some kind of corporate alliance with us? That what we’re talking here?”

Lyle laughed. “No. No, I do not. What I want is for you to stop embarrassing my people. Your arrival in town is a good object lesson. The ranks are bloated with idiots and cowards. Ten years ago? You’d already be dead. But you move fast. You’re nimble. I like that. You probably have my whole operation rigged, right? Know where all my weak points are. That’s how the Ghouls should operate, but no one here has any idea how to run a business. None of these guys ever worked in the military, so they’ve got no sense of structured command. All of them were raised on The Godfather but didn’t have sense enough to get mobbed up. So here they are with the Ghouls, happy to rally, happy to run meth. Living and dying over their colors. Me? I’m thinking internationally. I’m thinking about the brand. You understand?”

If I had to make an informed guess, it would be that Lyle Connors had not only read a few books on management structure but was also taking classes in the University of Miami’s continuing education program.

Maybe it was a condition of his parole.

Maybe he really wanted to change the way the Ghouls did business.

Maybe he just had nothing to do on Wednesday nights.

“You talking about action figures and lunch boxes?” I asked. “A Ghoul under every Christmas tree?”

“I’m talking about a binary approach to business,” he said and then I was sure he was taking night classes. “We do the drug game and then we have a legit side that isn’t just to keep the RICO off our asses. Not just kids’ charities once a year or bumper stickers like the Angels do. I’m talking about fantasy camps, video games, reality television shows. Taking this game to the next level.”

“You realize you’ll need to stop killing people,” I said. “No one wants to go to fantasy murder camp.”

“You’d be surprised,” Lyle said.

“I’m never surprised,” I said.

“Point is, men,” Lyle said, “there’s a role in this for you if you want it.”

“For us?” Sam said. “I thought you said you weren’t looking for alliances.”

“I’m not. I’m looking for someone to teach my people how to ride right. You two-and that woman-you got your roll down. I don’t know how many people you got backing you every time you go out, but the three of you come out like an army, like the army. You want this territory? You buy in. No war. No bloodshed. We make a deal, we make the Redeemers legit again, no one thinking you’re FBI. Everybody wins. Or you give up that Redeemer shit and those colors you’ve been holding, they become yours.”

Lyle Connors was smart. I had to give him credit for that. He recognized a situation that was undermining his ability to govern and he acted. Did he mean anything he said? It was hard to tell. There was nothing stopping him from letting us buy in and then killing us five seconds later. There was nothing stopping us from buying in and killing him five seconds later. But by making this offer, he forced our hand. What he wanted to know was if we were opportunists or if we were just in it for the quick score.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“No, thanks?” Lyle said. He sounded pretty sincere. I hated to let him down.

“We don’t go into business with Ghouls. Never have. Never will. I’d sooner mount up with bin Laden. And anyone coward enough to invite us in is no one I want to be associated with.” I stood up, which got Sam to stand up, too, though somewhat reluctantly. He was still working on his Quarter Pounder. “You got until midnight tonight,” I said. “Five hundred thousand, cash, or it’s a war you can’t win.”

“Show up at midnight,” he said, “you’ll have your answer.”

Real cool.

No pressure.

A man who has spilled blood on the street before acting like: What’s another couple bodies?

Before we walked out, Sam grabbed up his burger and a handful of fries. “Thanks for lunch,” he said. “Good luck with that video game. Let me know when you book the Ghoul-themed cruise, too, okay?”