“I’m not the globe-trotting assassin,” Nate said.
“I’m not an assassin, Nate,” I said. “I’m a spy.”
“Right,” he said. “Sorry. My mistake. I’m not the globe-trotting spy who occasionally killed people for the government. Is that better?”
“It’s just a hand,” I said, a truth I was in the process of reminding myself when my mother walked into the kitchen.
“What are all of you fighting about? I can hear you all the way in the living room.”
“Which is ten feet away,” I said.
“What’s in that bag?” she said. She reached for it but I pulled it toward me.
“Nothing, Ma,” I said. “Go back to your television show. They’re just about to reveal the new countertop.”
“Michael, I have thirty strangers and a dog in my home right now, all as a favor to you. The least you can do is tell me what else you’ve brought into my house. What could be worse than what is already here?”
Since I’d been back in Miami, my mother had been shot at, ambushed and pulled in several directions by forces foreign and domestic. She’s aware that I work somewhere between the law and disorder. She owns a shotgun. She married my father, which was like sanctioning an emotional Cuban Missile Crisis for the whole of the 1970s and most of the 1980s.
So she can handle herself.
“It’s a dismembered hand,” I said.
“And why is it in a brown bag on my counter?”
“We need to chop off one of the fingers, so that it matches up to Bruce’s hand,” I said. “And then we’re going to use it to fake his death.”
“And what’s the problem?”
I looked from Fiona, to Sam, to Nate—three people who knew their way around a crime scene, generally—and landed back on my mother. “No one really wants to chop the finger off.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” she said. “Didn’t any of you ever work on a farm? Fiona? Didn’t any of your relatives have a farm in Scotland?”
“Ireland,” she said. “And no. Most of my family worked with their hands to steal things from other people.”
Ma regarded Sam. “Madeline,” he said, “you have to understand my rich regard for the sanctity of human life. And that I had chicken fingers for dinner last night.”
She didn’t bother reproaching me or Nate. She just shook her head and said, “Nate, reach into the drawer beside the sink and hand me that electric carving knife your father used to like to use on Christmas.”
When Nate didn’t budge—and when I didn’t let even a breath escape me—she sighed, went into the drawer under the sink, a place where the past evidently stood still, and came out with the GE Electric Carving Knife I remembered from every major holiday between my birth and leaving Miami directly after high school. My father and mother used it to cut any meat thicker than a slice of Italian salami and, occasionally, my dad used it for minor home repairs—it worked great for cutting into drywall—and anytime something in the Charger needed to be severed, which accounted for the odd saw marks I found on various hoses, tubes and fabrics when I refurbished the car not long ago.
Because it was made in the 1970s, the knife needed to be plugged in. Fortunately, it was still attached to the mud brown ten- foot extension cord Dad had put on it sometime before the first
Star Wars
movie. The dual blades looked dull, but that might have just been a mirage from the caked-on grease, animal blood and remnants of duct tape, since when Ma plugged it in, the 120-volt motor roared to life and the blades looked positively deadly.
The noise got Bruce off of the sofa. He examined the knife, examined his own gnarled stump and said, “That should do the trick.”
“Bruce,” I said, “why don’t you have a seat before you get hurt?”
“What’s the worse that could happen? I lose a finger?”
He waited for the laugh to come and when it didn’t, he seemed honestly disappointed. I had a feeling it wasn’t the first time he’d used that line.
“Uh, Ma,” I said, “let’s think about this.”
“Oh, Michael,” she said, which was her code for: Shut up. She took a look at Bruce’s hand, noted the approximate spot where his pinkie stopped—he had only a nub above the knuckle—and then sliced right through the finger of a dead pimp.
She calmly turned off the electric knife, unplugged it from the wall and set it in the sink while all of us stood by.
“Michael, you’ll wash the knife?” she said.
“Sure,” I said eventually.
“And maybe spray some Lysol on the countertop?”
“Will do,” I said. “Anything else?”
She thought for a moment. “Nate, when you go out to take Zadie to her appointment, will you stop by the grocery store and pick up a gallon of milk and one of those nice rotisserie chickens?”
Nate waited for me to say something, as if I could provide any kind of insight into this person who apparently had abducted our mother. I was just hoping she didn’t get wise and turn the electric knife on me. “Sure,” I said. “Nate can do that. Can’t you, Nate?”
“Sure, Ma,” Nate said. “Whatever you need.”
Ma and Bruce went back into the living room. Their show was over, so they switched to Food TV and settled in for thirty minutes of heart-pounding excitement via a show about a guy who only eats absurd quantities of weird food.
“So,” Sam said.
“We’re not going to speak of this,” I said.
“What just happened?” Nate said.
“Fi?” I said.
She looked at the hand there on the counter for a few seconds and then said, “Doesn’t it look too fresh?”
“We’ll put it in some dirt,” I said. “So it looks like we just dug it back up.”
“Best-case scenario,” Sam said, “you just tell them we cut even more off while torturing Bruce for information. The Ghouls will appreciate that.”
“Okay,” I said. “Fi, you’re going to stay here and watch over Bruce and Maria and make sure my mother doesn’t cut anything else, okay?”
“Lovely,” she said. “Say hello to my friends at Purgatory.”
“I’m not going to do that,” I said. “But stay near the phone. We end up in a situation that needs your special attention to detail and explosives, I’ll call you.”
“Goody,” she said. “Am I excused now, professor? Because I must learn how to eat a giant pizza and it appears there’s a show all about that on the television at this very moment.”
“Dismissed,” I said.
I watched her walk back into the living room. She plopped herself into a chair and immediately fell into the program on the television. For a woman who weighed ninety-five pounds on a day when she wasn’t armed, she sure did like those cooking programs.
She’d have her hands full with Bruce and Maria, but I didn’t think for a moment that she’d be unable to take care of it. Especially since there was no sense in dragging a dead man out in public, lest he do something stupid, so keeping Bruce at the house was of the utmost importance. And since I knew he’d happily stay wherever Fiona was, I was confident that at least that avenue would be clear.
This was particularly important, since if the Ghouls knew
where
Bruce’s mother’s house was, they might have known
who
his mother was as well. With Nate taking Zadie to the doctor by himself, there was less of a chance that something beyond my control might happen. The Ghouls would be unlikely to make a move on an old woman since even bikers had a modicum of ethics.
Sam and I were going to handle the Ghouls and that meant Nate would handle Zadie.
“Nate,” I said, “you need to get Zadie into and out of that radiation appointment unscathed. Don’t let her talk to anyone. Don’t let her mention her son. We have no idea who might be on the Ghouls’ payroll by now, so you take her in, you watch her, and you take her right back out. You feel like anyone is on your tail, head for the police station. Just like last time. Okay?”
“How about if I notice anyone,” Nate said, “I’ll just bring them here and Ma can handle them. I mean, Michael, we need to talk about what just happened. Right? We avoid it, isn’t it like all that crap we avoided as kids that now has you all screwed up? Isn’t that right?”
“No, that’s not right,” I said. “We just pretend it didn’t happen.”
“If I end up with post-traumatic stress,” Nate said, “it’s on you.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll make sure I have a trauma nurse waiting for you here when you get back.”
“You don’t find what just happened odd, Sam?” Nate said.
“Nate, my boy, I have seen things that would make you question your own sanity. Papua New Guinea, fall of 1988, I saw a band of pygmies fell an elephant with spears and then climb into the elephant through its mouth and then out its backside,” Sam said.
“What?” Nate said. “What?”
“That’s my point,” Sam said. “I didn’t sleep for three days after that. So your mother? Just a quirk. She’ll probably think she dreamt it herself. People under stress, Nate, they do crazy things. I ever tell you about the time I saw a toddler lift a car off of his father? Side of the road. Kid knee- high to a grasshopper just picked a car right up. Damnedest thing. Right, Mike?”
“Uh, right,” I said. “Nate, look, just do this job for me. Keep her safe. You can do that. I know you can.”
Nate huffed and puffed a bit, but it was clear to me he was just happy to be part of the group. Even if it’s hard to depend on him to always do the right thing, it’s easy to depend on him emotionally. He is, after all, my brother and if there’s one thing I know about Nate, it’s that he wants to perform well. It’s not his fault that he doesn’t always have the natural ability.
Well, he might have the natural ability, actually. It’s not his fault he’s cultivated it toward stupidity on occasion. Not everyone is cut out to be a spy.
Besides, people tended to like him. Like Zadie, who put her arm through Nate’s and let him guide her outside to his car, which left me and Sam alone in the kitchen.
“
Superman
,” I said.
“No, no,” Sam said. “I’m just a regular guy like you, Mike.”
“No, that story. About the kid. That’s from the first
Superman
movie.”
“You saw that?”
“Everyone saw it,” I said.
“Not Nate, apparently,” Sam said. “Anyway, what do you think? We get out of this alive?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t read my tea leaves this morning.” I pointed down at the hand. “Maybe we get a palm reader over here and find out what his palm says and go from there.”
“Good idea,” Sam said. “Maybe get a Ouija board, too?”
I laughed. It felt pretty good. “This won’t be the hardest thing we’ve ever done,” I said. “All we need to do is walk into a hornet’s nest and not get stung.”
“It’ll be like that time in the Sudan,” Sam said. “Remember that?”
“Which time?”
“1993?”
“Were we there then?”
“Oh,” Sam said, “I can’t remember anymore. But what I remember is that we ended up as the last two people alive and we fought our way out using nothing but our good looks and sharp wit. And then we had mojitos afterward. Ring any bells?”
“That was in Venezuela,” I said. “2002.”
Sam closed his eyes. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I do remember. Lotta water under our bridge, Mikey.”
I pulled out a drawer and found a big Ziploc freezer bag and slid the hand into it. “Well,” I said, “then let’s go make some waves.”
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.