over a batch of chips.
I also remembered that two weeks later, on Halloween night, Nate and I ambushed Justin Pluck and his friends with water balloons filled with Nair as they waited in the darkened parking lot at the evangelical church a few blocks from our house hoping to steal younger kids' candy. We spent all night searching, missing an entire night of candy gathering, just for the chance to get Justin.
It was worth it.
'That's the problem with education today,' Sam was saying. 'When I was a kid, we toured the armory. Generations of kids never get to see an armory anymore.'
'I weep for them,' Fiona said from the backseat. I couldn't tell if she was being sarcastic or if she was being serious.
After the children disappeared into the factory and the buses pulled away, I turned to Fiona, who had her laptop opened beside her. 'Any word?' I asked.
'Nothing yet,' she said. 'At least not from anyone you're interested in. But I've heard from several men who sound very enticing.'
I'd anticipated that, by now, Eddie Champagne would be trolling for a new woman on one of the widow sites, as Cricket called them, where Fiona now had her very own profile. I thought that my threat to Stan the day previous and the realization that Cricket's faucet had been turned off would get him scrambling. I figured that Fiona was bait he wouldn't be able to resist.
It wasn't for lack of trying on Fiona's part. She had posted several photos, including one that was just of her stomach, another that was just the curve of her right breast another still that was just her lips, which, admittedly, were hard to resist. Half of the e-mails were from other women telling her she wasn't being tasteful. The other half were from men who didn't seem to have a problem and were offering airfare to pretty much every major American city.
'Jealous?' Fiona asked.
'Gratified,' I said.
The fact was, everything was otherwise working well. I had Cricket's house set up for battle. I just had to get all the participants there, and things would take care of themselves. All that was broken would be fixed.
All I needed was for nothing to fall out of place, but already I was getting a bit of a moral tug. The money Stan was likely to get back to me was covered in the blood of others who'd been duped, too. The difference, I suppose, boiled down to choice. The investors who tunneled their money to White Rose were guilty for being stupid, for being greedy, for not recognizing that what they were buying into couldn't be legit. Money can blind. It had, thus far, turned the investors mute, too. And soon it would all be moot. Maybe if it all closed down now, people would get some of their money back.
Maybe it was like Barry said. No one made a billion dollars by doing everything straight.
The money-or, rather, the appearance of it- would also help me out of my problem with Natalya. But Dixon Woods would have to cooperate to make that happen.
It was after ten o'clock before I realized that wasn't going to happen.
We were still parked across the street, watching the movements outside Longstreet. We saw Brenda Holcomb pull in for her day at work in a black Suburban. We saw another two dozen or so men drive onto the plant in their own Explorers and Expeditions, hop out in workout clothes and ten, fifteen minutes later come out dressed for work, which meant the same khaki pants the employees of the potato chip factory were wearing, except the Longstreet employees dressed the khaki up with navy blue sport coats and bulging necks. Office casual versus paramilitary couture. The men jumped into the company Hummers and sped off without even bothering to wave at the security guard, who, I noticed, was not the same man I'd dropped days before. Too bad. He was one of the only guys I'd gotten to do the vomiting trick.
After three Hummers left the lot, we could see that Sam's Caddie was right where it had been left. At least Bolts thought I was good for my word, even if she hadn't called me back. Before Sam could even comment, or begin complaining, five men came out of Longstreet in what looked to be black Armani suits accented by tight black T- shirts.
'Give me your binoculars,' I said to Sam. He handed them to me, and I watched the five men stride across the lot. I only recognized one of them, but that was enough. Particularly since I also recognized that they were toting Hecklers to work, which seemed just slightly unusual.
I handed the binoculars to Fiona. 'I wonder who their seller is,' she said.
'Remind me and I'll ask,' I said.
'Where do you suppose they're off to?' Fiona said.
'Salvation Army,' Sam said. 'The center cannot hold. They're our last defense against the forces of evil.'
'Let me see your phone, Sam,' I said. I showed Fiona the photo of the tacks on South Beach Sam took when he was in Bolts' office. 'See the big guy in the middle?'
'They're all big,' Fiona said.
'He was guarding Natalya when I met her at the hotel,' I said.
'The Michael I first met wouldn't have let him keep walking,' she said.
'It wasn't like we were in a bombed-out building in Beirut,' I said. 'I couldn't exactly shoot him in the knees while he stood in the lobby of the hotel.'
'You should have shot him for wearing that shirt with an otherwise fine suit,' she said. 'I don't suppose this is all a coincidence.'
'Bad people find bad people,' I said.
'I can agree with that,' Sam said.
'You don't actually believe Longstreet is an evil organization,' Fiona said. 'That's absurd.'
'No,' I said, 'I don't think they are evil. I think they are in the business of making money. They don't have an institutional moral code or some kind of religious fanaticism to work against, so they just do what they do. I think they probably hire the kind of people who don't care how that money is made, provided they get their own cut.'
'Say what you will about Bolts,' Sam said, 'but she was going to hook me up with a decent workers' comp package.'
'All we know about Dixon Woods is rumor and innuendo,' Fiona said.
'When did that ever bother you?' I asked.
'It doesn't,' she said. 'But I thought at least Sam would require a burden of proof.'
'What I've been told is enough,' Sam said. 'Besides, a schmuck like Eddie Champagne knows you're a bad enough guy to use your name, that's like getting a notarized document from J. Edgar Hoover. Let's stick the fucker in Camp X-Ray and be done with it.'
'We closed X-Ray in 2002,' I said.
'Then let's bury him under it,' Sam said, 'whatever gets me my car back sooner.'
Fiona's point about coincidence was well taken. But I knew I wasn't just seeing things.
With money came the need for security-that much I understood about Miami. In the case of Cricket O'Connor, her position in society, her affiliation with the war, and her ability to be manipulated by a person like Eddie Champagne opened the door to exploitation. That Eddie had taken on Dixon Woods' name was no coincidence-he held a grudge against a guy who'd beaten him, caught him at his game, and he harbored it enough to be creative with it, if for nefarious purposes.
That Longstreet was protecting Natalya was a coincidence in the barest sense: The Oro was owned by Russians with a pedigree for the drug trade. It was only natural that they'd hire private security for their staff, particularly those ex-KGB agents who probably would be wise not to find themselves in dangerous situations stateside, lest someone spike their sushi with polonium 210 when they got back home. And Longstreet, with their affiliations with the drug trade in Afghanistan, were probably happy to just take the check and not ask questions.
Dixon Woods was a fulcrum, even if he wasn't aware of it. My plan was to use that against him.
Then my phone rang. The number was blocked. At least I knew it wasn't my mother.
'Talk,' I said. I'd spent some time thinking about shortening my sentences to sound more menacing when the moment called for it. I figured it would make people mind the gaps in my speech; thought they'd think I was of so few words because my time was better spent planning on ways to kill them versus ruminating on tours of potato
