“We can work around that,” I said.
“We?” Sam said.
“Fiona can,” I said.
I heard rustling behind me and turned to see Fiona in the middle of the living room with a bottle of rum in her hand. “Cocktails, anyone?” she asked.
14
As a rule, Sam Axe didn’t really care for the sight of dead bodies. Spend enough time in the military, particularly if you happen to be one of those people who gets called to do the jobs no one else wants to do, and the chances are you’re going to see a few bodies. There’s no good way to depersonalize the experience. A human being is a pretty unique animal and even if you don’t see a part of yourself in every person that passes you on the street, subconsciously you make that connection. It’s what keeps most people from killing: simple human empathy.
And of course Sam had killed people in the course of doing his job. He hadn’t enjoyed it. He didn’t actively seek out the experience. But he had orders and he had to trust in the chain of command. If he was to kill someone it was because someone deserved to die. That’s what makes a good soldier.
Still, being around dead bodies creeped Sam out. Yet there he was at eight thirty in the morning, just a few hours after dispensing with the Ghouls, in the parking lot in front of the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner’s Office. It was a bizarre place to be at any time of the day, but even more so in the morning, since from his car Sam could see the traffic along Northwest 10th Avenue streaming by, no one even really bothering to look frightened. Didn’t they know they were driving by a slew of dead bodies? True, they were driving through an area that was densely populated with medical buildings-Jackson Memorial, Highland Park and Cedars were all over there-but still. Just a few yards away, people were toying with dead bodies!
The other weird thing was that the ME’s office was located on a side street off of Northwest 10th called Bob Hope Road. Somewhere, Bing Crosby was laughing his ass off.
Sam was to meet his buddy Brenna Fender in fifteen minutes. She worked in the ME’s office as a nurse, but that was just a ruse: She’d been in the office for the last six months doing an undercover operation involving black-market organ sales.
Normally, Sam would steer clear of someone like Brenna, but they’d gone out for drinks on a couple of occasions and Sam honestly liked her-she knew the value of Sam Time and wasn’t all clingy about things. Truth be known, Sam was of the opinion that maybe Brenna wasn’t clingy about anything-she just liked to have a good time and then go on back to sniffing out the dark underworld of spleen sales.
Anyway, she was the one person Sam knew who could give him a hand, literally. And maybe, if things went well, they’d hook up later in the week. See about catching a movie or getting a beer or six. Provided he lived through the week. Or maybe that would be the payoff from tangling with a bunch of murderous bikers: an evening on the town (or on the sofa) with Brenna Fender.
Sam’s cell rang, breaking his reverie.
“Is this the person who came looking for me?” a woman’s voice said after Sam answered.
What an incredibly stupid question, Sam thought. This was not a person who knew much about staying alive. “That depends,” Sam said. “Is this the person I’m looking for?”
There was silence while the woman-who Sam presumed was Maria; hell, he prayed it was Maria, since the idea of more than one person making a phone call like this gave Sam vertigo-pondered her answer.
“I guess,” she said after another couple of beats. “You know Nick? Is that what this is about? Because I haven’t seen him in, like, a week. I don’t even know where he is.”
The problem with most people is that they feel like the best way to get through an interrogation is to give way too much information, as if being forthright will somehow absolve them of any guilt, even if what they are saying is an absolute lie. Hadn’t she spoken to her stepfather? Didn’t she know what Sam already knew? Was she this stupid?
“No,” Sam said, “but I know a friend of his. Bruce Grossman. That name mean anything to you?”
There was a silence again as Maria tried to work through the equation. Bruce Grossman probably wasn’t the most important name for her to remember, especially if Nick kept his business and personal life separate, but they had dined together. That meant something, didn’t it? Didn’t breaking bread count for anything anymore?
“Yeah,” she said. “They did time together, right?”
“Right.” He decided to stay consistent and said, “Bruce’s dead now, is the thing. Bikers got him. Did him ugly. Any idea why?”
Another long pause, which didn’t engender a lot of faith in the answer when it came. “No,” she said.
Something Sam learned in the military is that if you’re not happy with an answer, give it back to the person in the form of a question. The weak- minded were incapable of dealing with this technique and invariably ended up giving you the very information they were attempting to conceal.
So Sam said, “No?”
“Not really,” Maria said.
“Not really?”
“Who are you again?” Maria said.
“Chuck Finley.”
“And how did you get my name?”
“Nick was one of the last people Bruce called before he got done in,” Sam said, figuring the girl had seen enough of those cold case and forensics programs to put the rest of it together. She was scared, clearly, and had some story she’d practiced, since nothing was coming from her in any sort of natural way.
“Nick said they were doing some business together,” Maria said.
“They were doing some business together?”
“Bruce sold him some drugs.”
“Bruce sold him some drugs?”
“Okay, fine,” she said. “Bruce just gave them to him. Okay? Is that what you were looking for?”
Maria made Sam worry about the future of America. If everyone was as easy to pull information from as Maria was, what chance did the country have of beating back terrorism? Didn’t anyone lie convincingly anymore? Didn’t anyone just hang up the damn phone? It’s not that he was upset with Maria, only that he recognized in her a failure: People just didn’t know how to shut the hell up. Which maybe would create jobs in the future, actually, Sam came to reason. People like himself wouldn’t become obsolete because people like Maria would need to be protected.
“Where’s Nick? I need to talk to him,” Sam said, deciding to just keep moving forward, irrespective of what he thought Maria should know already, since if she was going to play stupid, he was going to play stupid, too. Just to even the playing field.
“He’s dead, too, okay? For like a few days. You talked to my stepdad, you know this, right?”
“Oh,” Sam said, “right. I just wanted to hear you say it.”
“You sound like my stepdad,” she said, which made Sam kind of proud.
He liked Jose, especially since it turned out he was true to his word, even if Maria’s call was a few hours overdue. He wasn’t sure Maria was the same type of person, so he said, “What made you tell the Ghouls Nick had their stuff?”
There was another of those grating pauses, but this time Sam thought he heard sniffling. “Nick, you know,” Maria said quietly, “he wasn’t a good person.”
“He wasn’t a good person?” Sam was annoying himself with the repeated phrases, but it was a system that seemed to work with Maria, so he just kept tossing the lines out there, figuring when she stopped biting, he’d change the bait.
“He liked to hit me,” she said. “Broke my collarbone. Messed up my shoulder. One time, I told him I was pregnant, just to get him to leave, right? Instead, he tried to kick me in the back. So when I heard there were people looking for a big haul of drugs, you know, stuff that wasn’t normal in our neighborhood, and that they were offering a reward, I might have said something.”
