“Buses,” she said.
“Buses?” Sam said. Now he was engaged.
“Buses?” I said.
“Those muni buses, back before everyone had a pass, carried a lot of cash on them.”
“A lot of coins,” Sam said.
“Coins are money, too.”
“What about you, Zadie?” I said. “Ever turn over a liquor store?”
“My husband and my son,” she said, a derisive tone rising in her voice. “No sense between them. Me, I understood a hard day’s work.” She explained that after her husband died in 1965 from a heart attack, she worked first as a teller at a bank, moved all the way up to assistant manager, but had to quit when her son was accused of walking out with some property.
“Property?” I said. “So that would be money?”
“Someone said he took a roll of quarters,” she said.
“Never proved. Who’s to say he didn’t have ten dollars in quarters in his pocket to start with?”
“Who is to say?” Sam agreed. “She’s got a point there, Mikey.”
Mothers want to think the best of their sons. This isn’t spycraft. It’s just common sense. No one who’s had another human living inside of them for nine months hopes to believe that human is a detestable waste of carbon.
Not Zadie.
Not my mother.
Not Fiona’s or Sam’s or anyone’s.
“Your son did what any good child would do, Mrs. Grossman,” I said. “He just tried to take care of his mother. He ran into a little problem in the process of it all, but it’s going to work out. In the meantime, you’ll stay here for a few days, my mother will order takeout, we’ll drive you to your doctor’s appointments and everyone will sleep easier when it’s over.”
“And that’s why you’re running razor wire around this house?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
She reached up and squeezed my cheek. “You’re a smart boychik,” she said. And then she squeezed a little harder. “Don’t get me killed. I’m already dying, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
She released me, patted me once on the chest, took a deep breath of the evening air and then smiled. “I do love Miami,” she said. “I’ll always appreciate Brucey bringing me here to retire.” She patted me again. “You be good to your mother when she retires,” she said.
“She’s never worked,” I said. “So retiring is more of a state of mind with her.”
“She raised you,” she said, “and I don’t see you out robbing banks. Someone did something right.” She went back inside then, apparently content that she’d learned what she needed to know and taught me something, too.
“Spunky lady,” Sam said.
I rubbed at my cheeks. “Her fingers were like talons,” I said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised to find out she did some Bonnie and Clyde business back in the day,” Sam said. “Maybe she was Bonnie. We don’t know.”
“Cops killed Bonnie and Clyde,” I said. “We do know.”
“A lot of that was covered up,” Sam said. “Top secret stuff, Mikey-one day I’ll explain it all to you.”
There’s a line I try not to cross with Sam. Breaking into his delusions was top on the list. So I just moved forward and asked, “How much time does Zadie have left?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “I got what medical reports I could get. They never have the expiration date on them. But not long, Mikey, not long.”
“Then we need to make sure she’s comfortable,” I said.
“And what’s the plan to make that happen?”
“I think we need to kill Bruce,” I said.
“Novel,” he said.
“Actually, first, we use him as bait,” I said, “then we kill him.”
“And then what, raise him from the dead?”
“Yes,” I said.
Sam contemplated my answer. “I don’t see how this could fail.”
I explained to Sam the framework of the plan. We’d first drive out to one of the Ghouls’ clubhouses-the wonderful aspect of dealing with biker gangs is that they actually have clubhouses, which is quaint unless you stumble in looking for a bathroom and end up with a pool cue upside your head-hand them a stack of the documents Bruce took, maybe even some of the vaunted patches, and tell them we have the guy responsible and we’re ready to deal. Tell them we caught him breaking into our “business” and that we tortured him and made him talk. And when he talked, he fingered the Banshees, another national gang with a big presence in the lucrative Florida drug trade. They also had a boutique business in prostitution and loan sharking, which made them an all-around great group of guys.
At any rate, the Ghouls would like the torture part. They were big on using welding material and power saws and, apparently, acid.
A normal person driving a Chrysler Sebring would be shot during the course of this action, which is why we were going to play the part. Bikes. Colors. A subservient Fiona to sit behind me. The whole deal. We’d make them an offer on Bruce’s head. Get a good sale price to deliver him to them.
“First thing, though,” I said, “we need to find Nick Balsalmo’s girlfriend. I’ve got a feeling that if she left him and that apartment just prior to his death, she had to know something was coming.”
“You got a name on her?”
“All Bruce knows is that her name is Maria.”
“So I need to find a Cuban woman named Maria. That shouldn’t be difficult. How many could there be in Miami? Fifty, sixty thousand?”
“I figure you’ve probably got a buddy who could pull her electric bill,” I said.
“Yeah, I could call in a favor or two,” he said.
“And I’m going to assume Nick Balsalmo will have a funeral shortly,” I said. “He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who had a lot of friends and family, so I’m going to say Maria turns up sooner than later. We get her to finger the Ghouls definitively in Nick’s death, we have something to bargain with.”
“And if she doesn’t do that?”
“Motorcycle gangs in Florida tend to have pretty defined turf and markets,” I said. “I’m sure once the Ghouls find out that the local chapter of the Banshees hired Bruce to knock them over, and us, that they’ll be ready to kill someone.”
Sam started to smile. “I see me wearing a leather vest at some point. You know, not to brag, but there was a time when a man could wear a leather vest and no shirt and make that work. You don’t see that too much anymore.”
Fiona hopped down from the roof then-literally, she came off the low lip of the roof above the porch and landed as gracefully as a gymnast. “This time you speak of,” she said to Sam, as if she’d been in the conversation with us the entire time, “this was when? Antiquity?”
Sam looked up at the roof. “What was that, a twelve-foot drop?”
“I’m very agile,” she said.
“You’re not wearing any shoes,” Sam said.
“And you’re talking about wearing a vest and no shirt and making it work. There are mysteries beyond what anyone can perceive, apparently.” She turned her gaze to me. “I heard a rumor about me being property. Is that accurate?”
“If you’d like,” I said, “I’d be happy to give you a copy of the Ghouls’ constitution and you can read it for yourself.”
“No need,” she said. “I rather like the idea of being subservient to you and then springing into the face of some man with a handlebar mustache and teaching him a thing or two about how to respect a woman.”
