“Or short him some cash to get the problem taken care of without alerting the missus,” Sam said. “It’s not as if he can go to someone legit to help him on this, because in ten minutes it would be on some blog. Bonaventura is probably the only person he knows who is in Miami who could help him and not have it ping back to wifey.”
“She finds out he’s making time with a sixteen-year-old girl, he loses everything,” I said. “That’s the catalyst here.” Which meant Fiona was right: It all boiled down to a girl being involved. I just wasn’t expecting it to be an actual girl.
It also meant something a bit more distressing.
“If Dinino told Bonaventura even half of the truth,” I said, “if he really wanted to convince him to help, then he told him about Maria and Liz on the boat. Didn’t tell him he was behind it, of course, but he must have dangled that out there.”
“Oh, Mikey,” Sam said. “That’s not good.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s occurring to me.” My play this afternoon to get Bonaventura off Gennaro had probably worked. But now it’s likely he thought Tommy the Ice Pick and his outfit were behind the blackmailing of Dinino, too. Or were at least affiliated with whoever was pulling the strings. It was, disturbingly, a perfect mess.
We knew Dinino was the one pressing Gennaro.
We knew why Dinino was pressing Gennaro, but not who was pressing Dinino.
We knew that if we released the photos to make Dinino fold, there was a good chance Maria and Liz would be dead and, in short order, Gennaro would be killed for ratting Bonaventura out, too.
“We need to get Maria and Liz off that boat,” Sam said.
“Or we need to make sure that Bonaventura does it for us,” I said.
Christopher Bonaventura’s easiest move, provided he thought unemotionally, provided he had someone with a little tactical training in his stable, was to remove the chance Maria and Liz might get killed himself.
Which meant I needed to speak with my new friend Alex Kyle again sooner rather than later. Convince him that even if I wasn’t Tommy the Ice Pick, I was still the person making this all happen.
“You know where Virgil is?” I asked.
“I’m sure I could find him,” he said. “Spray a bit of your mother’s perfume into the wind and he’ll poke his head from his shell.”
“Tell him we need a boat,” I said, ignoring Sam.
“What are we looking at? Forty-footer? Cigar lounge with a stripper pole?”
“Something fast,” I said. “It would be helpful if we didn’t need to return it.”
“I’ll put out the word,” he said.
Still, there was an unseen aspect to this all that was troubling me. Alex Kyle’s admission that he knew me wasn’t a move he needed to make.
Which meant it was a move he had to make.
The essence of developing warnings intelligence is the ability to understand that you can’t concentrate solely on the evidence you have in front of you. You have to have the facility to look beyond what’s happening now and decide what’s going to happen next. A good spy makes reasoned predictions based on experience and then reacts accordingly.
This means occasionally you have to go into a small country and assassinate the president before anything outwardly untoward has happened.
It also means that occasionally you need to be aware that the gun is pointed at you.
Which was precisely what I was feeling when my cell rang. It was Fi.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Meeting with Timothy Sherman’s illegal driver,” she said. “Or at least what’s left of him.”
“Fi,” I said.
“He looks to have been a brainy individual.”
“Tell me you didn’t shoot him.”
“I didn’t shoot him.”
“Good. Who did?”
“Judging from the spatter pattern, I’d say someone shooting from about a half mile away with a sniper rifle. Fascinating, really. I wish you were here to see it with me, Michael.”
“Yeah,” I said. Fi is one of those people who isn’t fazed by violence and gore. It’s the sort of thing she finds alluring, which is not the least of her mysteries. “I had my own spatter pattern today, so I’m good.”
“Shame,” she said.
“Fi, do you want to tell me where you are, or are you going to make me guess?”
“That’s the funny thing, Michael,” she said. “I’m standing on the sidewalk in front of your loft.”
11
Fiona Glenanne has a unique worldview: it’s her world and you would be wise not to get in the way. What this means in a practical sense is that she’s pretty good at getting what she wants.
Shoes.
Purses.
The contents of a bank vault.
In the process of acquiring said items, she has no problem punching you in the throat, setting fire to your home or giving you the impression that you are mere moments away from a level of physical pleasure you’ve only read about in the Kama Sutra.
All of which makes her the perfect person to extract information from those who might be unwilling under normal circumstances to give it up.
Male.
Female.
It doesn’t really matter.
So when she walked into the offices of the Star Class Association looking for Timothy Sherman and encountered an armed female security guard at the front desk, she wasn’t concerned in the least.
Women with guns were her comfort zone. Though, Fi couldn’t abide the fact that she looked to be one of those women who clearly took part in weight-lifting competitions. It was the shock of white blond hair, the rub on tan that made her glow orange (and smell a bit like wet cardboard) and the forearms that looked like a freeway interchange with all the raised intersecting veins. Fiona thought that you could be dangerous without sacrificing style and grace and sex appeal. Never mind the horror of a rub on tan, just generally.
“Can I help you?” the guard asked. Her voice was a little on the thick side, too.
“Yes,” Fi said. “I’m from Allied Car Rental and I’m afraid we have a very substantial problem. I need to see Mr. Sherman.”
“Okay,” she said. She looked down at the phone system, which struck Fiona as being a might too confusing for simple use. Didn’t anyone have an intercom anymore? She guessed that people with impressive looking phone exchanges at their front desks wanted to give off the impression that they fielded many, many calls. Odd, really. Power through the impression of vast communication and heavily veined women with guns at the front desk.
The office itself was fairly standard: a rounded off desk up front covered in trade magazines, including one, Fiona noted, that featured a photo of Gennaro Stefania on the cover. He was cute, but from what she’d learned, not much on the manly side of things. Oh, he could pilot a boat, but she doubted he could take a punch.
Men.
The shame of their sex was that so few lived up to billing.
Beyond the desk was a locked glass door-nothing special security-wise, Fiona saw, just a keyed lock. Nothing exciting happened in these offices, she imagined, and very little of value could possibly be inside apart from computers and phones and maybe a little petty cash. She could be in and out of the place in five minutes with everything of worth and no one would probably raise an eye, least of all the woman in front of her, who was now punching buttons almost at random.
Fi saw that a rather pained look was beginning to cast over the poor woman’s face. Maybe she was having
