“Where’d you find that?” I asked.
“Guest bathroom,” Sam said, “along with five hundred rolls of toilet paper and a tube of Bengay.”
“I’d check the expiration date,” Fiona said. “I found sour cream in the refrigerator that went bad in 2002.”
Sam smelled his hands. “Fresh and clean doesn’t have an expiration date, my friend. Good is still good. Still real good.”
Fiona picked up one of the cat heads and poked Sam in the gut with the pointed end. “Why don’t you apply some of that lotion to those fatty acids?”
I could watch Sam and Fiona fight all day, except that eventually Fiona would stop playing around and Sam would get hurt, so I put a stop to it by asking Sam who was on the phone.
“That was my guy Philly in the FBI,” Sam said. “I decided to step over the DMV and just go straight for the crime database, you know? Besides, Bruce dropped off their roll. I thought maybe they’d have worked through it by now and could just deliver all the information we could ever need.”
“Your guy at the DMV is that bad?”
“You have no idea,” Sam said. “Anyway, Philly says the Lincoln is registered to Cindy Connors.”
“None of the three guys in the Lincoln looked like a Cindy.”
“Yeah, that didn’t sound right to me, either,” Sam said. “So I had Philly run Cindy’s name. Turns out she’s the sister of one Lyle Connors. Also one Jeb Connors, one Kirk Connors and one Victor Connors, all of whom have resided in federal custody at least once.”
“Lovely family,” Fiona said. “It’s like you and Nate, Michael.”
“Funny,” I said.
“Anyway, Lyle seems to be the big guy,” Sam said.
“How do you figure?” I asked.
“He’s the only one not in prison currently.”
“Your deductive powers are amazing,” I said.
“That’s Uncle Sam’s intelligence training right there,” he said.
“Can you get a sheet on him?”
“My guy is gonna e-mail it to me as soon as he can sidestep all of his superiors and the electronic filters,” Sam said. “So, probably first thing tomorrow.”
“And people wonder how terrorists slip into the country,” Fiona said. She gathered up all of her cat heads and went inside.
“Any word on Maria?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Sam said. “I had my guy run her, her mother, her stepfather, gave him everything I had from the DMV, but you might be surprised to learn that the number of Maria Corteses in the world prevents a thorough accounting. But look, Jose said she’d call. I believe him.”
“Why?”
“He’s lived in the same house for fifty years. If you can’t trust someone who has lived in the same place for fifty years,” Sam said, “who can you trust?”
That sounded reasonable and I said so. If she didn’t call, there was still a good chance she’d show up at Nick Balsalmo’s funeral and we could talk to her then, whenever that might be. The Ghouls were smart enough not to say anything directly about Balsalmo’s death even when they thought they were safe at their clubhouse, but I still felt like Maria knew something. Enough, anyway, that between her and the information we were compiling, plus what we intended to do that night, we might be able to keep the Ghouls away from Bruce Grossman.
I had to hope, at least.
The key to a successful operation is patience. If you’re going to work in intelligence, you must be willing to survive boredom. You must become the king of the mundane.
As a kid, if I got bored I’d go into the garage and find something to blow up. I was particularly fond of using Aqua Net as an accelerant, particularly while using Nate’s bicycle to reenact Evel Knievel’s failed jump over the Snake River Canyon. The best way to defeat boredom, I learned, was to create conflict. Even if I got in trouble, at least it was better than having nothing to do at all.
That course of action wasn’t available to the three of us while we waited for the Ghouls to arrive at the Grossman house. Sam and Fiona took turns providing a lookout, which involved crouching in the juniper bushes along the side of the house for twenty minutes at a time, which, after nine hours, caused the two of them to start bickering.
For a while, their bickering was actually entertaining. And then the fifth hour slipped by. And then the sixth. And the eighth. At 2:30 A.M., Sam started actively complaining.
“You know what would be good right now?” he asked.
“A muzzle,” I said.
“Steak ’n Shake,” he said. “I’m starving.”
“If you’re still hungry in the morning,” I said, remembering one of my mother’s favorite sayings, “you can have breakfast.”
“What time is morning, technically?”
“After we deal with the Ghouls,” I said.
“And why are you so sure they’ll get here before I die from hunger?”
“These guys aren’t dumb,” I said. “They’ll pull Bruce’s name off of the Web site and if they have to hit every Grossman in Miami, they will.”
This quieted Sam for a moment.
That moment came to an end.
“What I don’t get,” he said, “is how these guys can wear these outfits every day.”
We were both dressed in jeans, black T-shirts and denim vests that had our colors on the back. We were part of a gang called the Redeemers. Sam told me they were big in Oregon. That they used to be part of a Bikers for Christ pack but they splintered off and decided to be Bikers for Meth instead, but kept their name because it sounded badass. They’d tried to colonize in Florida and the FBI had quashed them and then took over their identity for undercover use. They were now Bikers for J. Edgar Hoover.
“I’m comfortable,” I said. And I was. We were both sitting on chaise lounges beside the choppers in the backyard, so that when the Ghouls came, we’d be able to kick-start them and barrel into the living room on cue.
“How many vests do they have? Don’t they begin to stink? I mean, hypothetically, how old are these guys? Forties, right? They’re gonna get that smell, Mikey, that’s all I’m saying. I just don’t see these guys doing a lot of laundry.”
Just as I was about to tell Sam that everyone eventually had to do their laundry, that that was the one thing that made us all equal, I heard the growl of a muscle car on the street. Drive a Charger long enough, you begin to know how every decent American muscle car sounds from about fifty yards away. My guess was Camaro. 1976.
Fiona texted a confirmation: Bad men in a bad car. She scurried into the yard seconds later.
“They’re here,” she said. “They just rode once around the block.”
“How many?” I asked.
“Two,” she said. “In an old Camaro. Quite lovely, actually.”
“How are you sure it’s them?” Sam asked.
“It was fairly easy,” she said. “They were the only people on the street in a yellow and black Camaro with racing stripes on the hood casing out the old woman’s house.”
“For now,” Sam said. “They figure out this is the right place, they’ll call in reinforcements.”
“Then we’ll just have to be effective in our job,” I said. “Let’s mount up.”
Fiona selected her weapons. She was determined to use Skinny’s shotgun, if only for ironic purposes, so she had that as her primary and one of those nice guns she sold the Cubans on her leg.
“Fi,” I said, “let’s try not to light up the entire neighborhood.”
“You have no faith in me,” she said.
“Untrue. I have absolute faith in you. Which is why we don’t need to send hollow-points into the Chabad house down the street.”
