Sometimes, it's just easier to pay off the bad guys. Fewer bodies. Less psychic turmoil. But mostly, fewer bodies.
Everything was going swimmingly. We had a charming room in the lovely Warri Grand Hotel, where every low-level thug is treated like a higher-level thug. I didn't trust the gangster. He didn't trust me. But there was money from the American government in between us, and we both trusted that. The problem was that at some point between me stepping off a plane in Nigeria with the authorization to wire money into the Russian's account, and the exact moment I made the call to start the transfer, I lost my job.
If I worked at Kinko's, that wouldn't be much of a problem. I'd just strip off my name tag and walk out the door, because even on your worst day, it's unlikely a gangster will kill you if you lose your job at Kinko's. But when your job is to deliver $750,000 to a gangster and you have to try to explain to him that, unfortunately, you've just been informed that there's a burn notice on your file and therefore all pending deals you're a part of are now canceled, well, there're going to be hard feelings.
There were.
Thing is, you can't just tell a gangster that you've lost all of your security clearances, that your cover is gone, that your bank accounts have been frozen and that, for all intents and purposes, Michael Westen is pretty much just a regular guy now and he'll have to find someone else to deal with if he hopes to get his money. Even if it's the truth. Which it was. But when you get a burn notice it's not just your job you lose, it's all the fringe benefits, too.
Like assault teams.
Exit strategies.
Someone who might claim your desecrated corpse.
Thus, if you happen to get your burn notice in a place where you're likely to catch fire, too, you're obliged to figure out a more serviceable truth if continuing to breathe is a priority in your life.
Or, failing that, you fight your way out and hope to survive.
I did a combination of both, the result being that 1 got out of the hotel alive, barely, boarded a plane with half a rack of broken ribs, a concussion, a few chips, a few dings, passed out and woke up in Miami.
My childhood home.
The very place I ran from when I joined the military out of high school.
The place I've avoided returning to every year since.
The place where my mother, Madeline, lives in a periodic state of hypochondrial distress; where my brother, Nate, gambles and grifts; where my father is buried, but where his ghost still wanders around.
The place where I now live in a vacant loft above a nightclub. From the two windows in my loft I can see a sign store and the Little River, which winds from the coast back into the heart of the Everglades. There are exactly nine palm trees on my street. At night, after the nightclub closes, it's always exciting to watch drunks alternately piss on the palm trees or attempt to have sex against them. No one ever comes to clean them up, either way. A drug dealer named Sugar used to live beneath me until I shot him. It's the kind of neighborhood where anyone with a gun would feel right at home, but it's not anyplace I want to live.
Since finding myself in Miami, I've tried to unravel the truth behind my burn notice. What I know: If the government truly wanted me dead, I'd be dead. They might be willing to let someone else kill me if it should happen during the daily course of life, but they aren't sending assassins to my house. That my dossier is filled with flagrant inaccuracies is of no matter, apparently. The message they've sent through various means is clear: If I want to live, I am to stay in Miami, which is why I knew the SIB and ATF agents weren't looking for me at the Hotel Oro.
Fiona, on the other hand…
'I had a meeting planned with a lovely new client,' Fiona said. We were standing in my kitchen, and since I'd missed lunch entirely, I was trying to eat enough yogurt to raise my blood sugar to a level where I could hold a conversation with Fi without having the veins in my neck break through the skin. Plus, Fiona was wearing a yellow sundress, and when she moved, different parts of her body seemed to glow beneath the fabric, and she smelled vaguely of vanilla and strawberries. Difficult circumstances, all. 'I thought I'd drop off my small package for her and then join you two poolside.'
'What did you have in that package?'
'Three QBZ87s,' she said.
'Three?'
'Well, more like ten,' she said.
'Ten Chinese assault rifles,' I said. 'You just had those in your closet?'
'I stumbled on a few,' she said.
When I first met Fiona, she was mostly robbing banks and dealing arms for the IRA, but then other organizations heard about her particular abilities, and so she opted to hang a freelance shingle out in the world. When I woke up in Miami, she was sitting beside me in a hotel room, which is what happens when you forget to change your emergency contact information. I hadn't seen her since a rather hasty departure from Dublin. Interpersonal relationships have never been my strong suit.
'That's hardly enough to bring out the cavalry,' I said.
'I also had a few Spear hollow points that I was providing as a service.'
And this is where it always gets interesting with Fiona. 'A few?'
'A case. A very small case.'
'Fi.'
'It was an excellent deal, Michael,' she said.
'So ten Chinese assault rifles and a very small case of hollow points. That was it.'
'Closer to a gross of hollow point clips, if you're going to split hairs about things.'
It's never as simple as black-and-white with Fiona. While I'm virtually imprisoned in Miami, Fiona is here by choice, the only thing holding her to this place being whatever it is we have, which at the moment is strictly business… though, not always pla-tonic. Like I said before: It get's complicated. That she was sitting in my loft flipping through a magazine when I returned from our aborted lunch didn't surprise me in the least. I was frankly surprised she wasn't in the backseat of my Charger when we stepped out of the hotel.
'You didn't think to maybe pick up the phone and warn me when you realized the deal was off?'
'And let you grow complacent in your job?'
In order to make money, in order to survive long enough to find out who had burned me and why, I've been forced to take a few odd jobs helping people, and Fi has been kind enough to provide tactical support. On her off days, she's got her own business interests, the less that possibly involve me and my mother in the firing line of crooked fingered agents the better.
'I was there with my mother.'
'Who you should call more often,' she said.
'You're changing the subject,' I said.
Fiona stepped around me and opened up my refrigerator and stared inside. 'Do you have anything with protein?'
'The point here is that you were set up, Fiona,' I said.
'There's no devaluing your ability to notice the obvious,' she said absently. She was pulling out old food from my refrigerator and systematically smelling items and then immediately throwing them away.
'What do you intend to do?'
Fiona finally found an apple that met her approval, bit into it and then chewed thoughtfully. 'Well,' she said, swallowing, 'I could blow up the hotel.'
'Do you even know who the buyer was?' I asked.
Fiona waved me off. 'No one who'll be missed,' she said. 'And the hotel has terrible parking, anyway.'
'Did you get a name, Fiona? A room number?'
'Michael, I can handle this myself,' she said.
'That's my concern.' My actual concern was that Fiona hadn't been set up innocently-or as innocently as anyone is set up to be shot by government agents-since it's not as if Fiona has kept a low profile since she arrived in Miami. If the ATF was interested in grabbing her, they could have gone to her condo, or they could have parked a detail of agents inside of my loft. None of it felt right. 'Before you bang and burn the Hotel Oro,' I said, 'let's talk to Sam, see if he can find out anything.'
