And she’s right. Most of the time.
“Fine,” I said. I’d already spent the previous three hours with my mother, running a gauntlet of errands—the podiatrist, Target, the hair salon, back to Target, back again to Target—and now, finally we were heading back home, so I wasn’t in a mood to argue much. Sometimes it’s just easier to say “Fine” and chalk the day up as a total loss.
I reached across my mother, flipped open the glove box and pulled out the SIG SAUER I kept there and the bag of blasting caps I meant to give back to Fiona. There were also about fifteen cell phones in various stages of disrepair littered on the floor in the back, but I figured those could stay in one place since I didn’t see any vacuums around, anyway. I handed the gun and the blasting caps to my mother. “Could you put all of that in your purse?”
“What are these sticks?”
“They’re like fireworks,” I said.
“Are they legal?”
“Just as legal as the AK-47 is,” I said.
“If I wasn’t here, where would you put all of this stuff?”
“If you weren’t here,” I said, “I wouldn’t be stopping.”
“Oh, fine,” she said, and stuffed it all in her bag.
The light turned green, and I made my way through the intersection and then pulled into the church lot. There were about fifteen kids lingering, but only two cars getting washed. I pulled behind a yellow station wagon—the kind that was last sold in America when Carter was president—and then both my mother and I got out. My mother immediately lit up a cigarette, which clarified why she’d wanted to stop the car so desperately.
A teenage boy walked up to the car with a bucket and a towel and his hand out. “It’s five dollars,” he said. He had all the urgency of molasses.
“What does the money go toward?” I asked.
“We’re trying to earn enough money to go to Disney World.”
“Why?”
The kid shrugged. “We go every year,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “But why?”
“I dunno. It’s fun.”
“Is it?” I asked.
“Do you want a car wash or what?”
I reached into my wallet and pulled out a twenty. The kid reached for it and I yanked it back, ripping it in two. “Here’s the deal,” I said. “I’m going to be standing right here. If you go anywhere near the trunk of the car, I’m going to keep the other half of this bill. If you manage to stay away from the trunk, I’ll give you the other half, plus five bucks. Deal?”
“Why don’t you just wash your own car?”
“My mom won’t let me,” I said.
The kid seemed to understand this universal truth and started to get to work on the Charger without another word. I stood back and watched him work for a few minutes and tried to recall the last time I’d stood in this exact spot. It was only a few miles from my mother’s house, but wasn’t in a part of Miami I tended to visit all that often, since it also happened to be just a few streets from my old high school. It was bad enough when my mother bumped into my ex-classmates—or the families of my ex-classmates—and told them I was back in town.
She’d invariably tell them I was free to do odd jobs for them, or she’d just give them my number and encourage them to ask me for help. This sort of help typically involved me saving them from human traffickers, drug kingpins and particularly violent gangster rappers. Frankly, it was easier dealing with the various rogue governments and jilted assassins sent to kill me than it was with people who knew me when I was fifteen.
The kids working the car wash all looked liked kids in Florida always have—which is to say that they were all wearing flip-flops, shorts and T-shirts and had a slight sunburn on their cheeks. Their hair was slightly shaggy and they had the air of nonchalance people possess before they start paying taxes or taking palpable risk.
I can’t imagine I had ever looked anything like them.
“Why didn’t I ever take part in any charity car washes as a kid?” I asked my mother.
“I always wanted you to,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“Well, you and your brother, Nate, were always so industrious. I just thought it would be wonderful if you were engaged in some of the philanthropic events I was interested in.”
“What were you interested in?”
“Well, Michael, that doesn’t matter,” she said.
“No. Now I’m curious.”
“Well, I always
wanted
to be involved with that thing where you went to another country and did things.”
“The Peace Corps? You were interested in joining the Peace Corps?”
“Yes,” she said. She exhaled a huge plume of smoke and stared at me. “Don’t give me that look, Michael. I was a very active person when you were a child. You don’t remember, obviously. You didn’t just develop your sense of wanderlust on your own.”
“I didn’t have wanderlust, Ma. I had a desire to escape.”
“And look where that got you,” she said. “Right back where you started from.”
“Ironic,” I said. For a moment we both watched the kid working on the Charger. He kept trying to buff a spot out of the hood that, if memory served, was from a bullet deflection. The week previous I’d been involved in a small shooting incident involving an ex- KGB agent who’d come to town to settle a few scores, which, as it happened, had ended up involving me. “You can let that spot go,” I told him.
“You sure?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll touch that up myself.”
The kid nodded and moved around to the passenger’s door and stopped. “You’ve got a couple of similar-looking spots over here,” he said.
“You can leave those, too,” I said. I turned to my mother. “This was an
excellent
idea.”
“It wouldn’t kill you to reach out to some at-risk kids like these,” she said.
“These aren’t at-risk kids,” I said. “They’re going to Disney World.”
“Michael, do you remember how nice it was when adults took a special interest in you?”
“Ma, the only adults who took a special interest in me were in the Special Forces.”
The kid moved toward the rear of the Charger and then paused. The problem with telling a teenager to avoid something is that it only makes him more interested in doing precisely what you’ve advised him against. It probably would have been wiser of me to tell the kid that I wanted the trunk area to be pristine.
I held up my half of the twenty-dollar bill and waved it. “You remember this?”
“It’s just that you’ve got a lot of, uh, dirt, I think, on this part of your car.”
The kid pointed at the bumper and also indicated a spatter pattern on the back window. The car was indeed dirty, but it wasn’t covered in
dirt
, so I thought it best not to have the kid investigate the matter any further.
“Yeah,” I said and handed the kid the rest of the twenty and then handed him another twenty. “Let’s just call it even, okay?”
“I haven’t done the driver’s side yet,” he said.
“Your lucky day,” I said.
I tried to remember what might have happened recently for the back of the Charger to have blood on it, and then recalled that Fiona and the ex-KGB agent had tussled a bit over the trunk. It had been that type of week. I patted the kid on the shoulder and then pushed him away from the trunk, lest he notice anything he might need therapy for later.
“Ma,” I said, “let’s go. This was a terrible idea.”
My mother reached into her purse, managed not to fumble my SIG and the blasting caps out onto the pavement in front of the church, and came out with another five bucks, which she handed the boy. “I’m sorry,” she said. “My son isn’t very good with people.”
The kid nodded—again, something he could readily understand. “Do you want a receipt? This is all tax deductible, I guess.”
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” my mother said.
“Let me get the father over here, then,” he said, and off he went into the church, leaving my mother and me to stand there beside my bloodstained car.
“You’re really going to take five dollars off your taxes, Ma?”
“No,” she said, “I’m going to take forty-five dollars off my taxes.”
I sighed. I rolled my eyes. Then I did both things again. I checked my cell phone. It wasn’t ringing. For as often as Sam called to let me know he had a buddy who needed help dodging the mob’s bullets, or who’d ill-advisedly entered into an agreement with Hamas, he never seemed to do so when I really needed him to. I was certain that it was only a matter of time before lightning would begin to crack down around me or perhaps a good, biblical hailstorm would start pelting me from above. A torrential flood also seemed like a possibility.
Instead, it was the past that came rushing toward me. Or, to be precise, it came lumbering out the double doors of the Church of the Gleaming Spire in the form of Eduardo Santiago. All six foot five and 320 pounds of him. The last time I had seen Eduardo had been at least fifteen years ago, when I was asked to help out with an “urban renewal” project that involved the capture and extinction of certain members of the Latin Emperors prison gang, who’d begun a robust drugs and extortion business in El Salvador. And even then, I’d only seen a photo of him since he was still locked up. From his prison cell, he had been purportedly calling shots that had bodies showing up on the streets of foreign countries. And now he was fifty yards away and gangster-limping his way across the blacktop toward me, which made me consider that, in light of the current order of things, my previous thoughts on churches were misguided. Who believed in anything anymore?
“Ma,” I said, trying to stay as calm as possible, “I need you to hand me your purse, and then I need you to get into the car, lock the doors and, whatever happens, don’t get out.”
“I’m not giving you my purse, Michael,” she said. “My cigarettes are in there.”
“Ma,” I said, “do you see that man walking across the parking lot toward us? The one with neck tattoos?”
“Yes.”
“He’s not a friendly person.”
“Little Eddie Santiago? You went to school with him for ten years, Michael.”
“What?” I took off my sunglasses and squinted at the mass of man. He didn’t look like Little Eddie Santiago, but then I hadn’t seen Little Eddie Santiago since the ninth or tenth grade.
“That’s Eddie Santiago. He’s a priest now. Don’t you know that?”
“You’re thinking of someone else. That man is a gangster,” I said, but now I wasn’t so sure, since it wasn’t as if my mother was generally up on the business of churches and such. She was up on neighborhood gossip, however, and that sounded like something people would gossip about. Nevertheless, since my mother wouldn’t hand me her purse, I positioned myself next to the trunk in case I needed to pop it open and grab the AK. Not that I wanted to unload an AK-47 in front of a church on a lovely summer day, but I also didn’t think the alternative of being shot in the face by Eduardo Santiago sounded very appealing, either.
“Same person,” my mother said. “He’s very big in the community now, Michael. Don’t you read the newspaper?”
“No.”
“Do you ever watch the local news?”
“No.”
“He’s turned his life around, Michael. You should ask him for some pointers.”
I’d get the chance, since Eduardo Santiago, or Little Eddie Santiago, or the man who’d shoot me in front of my mother, was ten feet away from us and about to pull something from his pocket.
“This is for you,” he began to say, but then I reached out and grabbed his arm—the one connected to the hand that was shoved in his pocket and that was pulling out a gun, a knife or, well, a receipt—but I couldn’t be too careful—and pressed into the pressure points on either side of his elbow, bringing the big man to his knees slowly.
“Whoa, easy there. It’s slippery,” I said, and bent down to his eye level, which wasn’t difficult, since even on his knees Eduardo Santiago came to about my chest. “Do you know me?” I whispered.
Eduardo Santiago glared at me. Presuming he had a gun in his hand, the best he’d be able to accomplish from this angle would be to shoot himself in the foot and hope I was made squeamish by the sight of blood. He wouldn’t get that chance, however, because if I even felt a muscle twitch, I’d break his arm.
“Yes,” he said. “You’re Michael Westen. And I’ve been looking for you.”
I tightened my grip and Eduardo winced. “Who do you work for?”
A thin smile crossed Eduardo’s face. “God,” he said.
2
If you find yourself in a threatening situation, it’s best to take people’s actions at face value. If someone pulls a gun on you, more than likely he intends to shoot you. If someone is strapped with C-4, it’s probable she’s about to blow herself—and you—up. So if someone is facing serious injury—like, say, Eduardo Santiago—and is asked a serious question, it’s unlikely he’d tell a joke to lighten the situation. That only happens on television.