arguing with my mother over whether or not tile floors or hardwood were the better flooring for the couple on the television, particularly since neither had the hall-marks of something he kept calling “divine design.”
“It’s not about whether or not he can rob banks still,” Sam said. “They’d probe him. Find out what made him rob banks. Find out his psychology.”
“I wonder what they’d make of me?” Fiona said.
“You might create a whole new field of study,” I said.
“Mikey, how many guys have the forethought to let someone whack off their finger in prison for insurance money?” Sam said. “He might seem like an old man in an ugly sweater, but that guy, he’s a treasure trove for some headshrinker.”
“And you, Michael,” Fiona said. “What would they do with you?”
“I think they’re already doing it,” I said.
All of what Sam said was certainly true, but when mixed with the issues at hand, there was some massaging that was going to need to be done. If Bruce refused custody, or if the FBI didn’t care to relocate him, and if the Ghouls came up with the $500,000, which would be enough to take care of Zadie no matter where Bruce might have to run to, it wasn’t as if Bruce would have zero problems toting $500,000 in loose bills. If they actually paid up, we’d need Barry to facilitate a few banking issues, none of which were legal, which might then put Bruce in a perilous situation yet again.
There was also a pretty good chance the Ghouls might not find the story about the Banshees setting this into motion all that believable. Oh, certainly the Gluck brothers believed it, but they weren’t running the show. Someone like Lyle Connors, a guy with a gold Lincoln, he might see the flaws in it. If we really wanted to pit these two groups against each other, we’d have to rob the Banshees, too, and make it look like the Ghouls did it.
Depending upon how this afternoon turned out, all options were open, which is what I told Fiona and Sam. I didn’t really say it to Nate, because he wasn’t listening. He was busy staring inside the bag at the hand.
“Let me know when we get to do that robbing of the Banshees bit,” Fiona said. “I have a few new moves I’d like to try out. And a few things I’d like to buy, too, so perhaps you’ll let me blow their secret vault.”
“I’m not so sure these guys have a secret vault,” I said.
“Everyone’s got a secret vault,” Sam said. “Right? I know I do. Working on getting that undersea lair together, just in case the North Koreans send a bunch of nukes our way.”
I didn’t answer Sam for fear that he might honestly be building an undersea lair. Instead, I focused on Nate, who was oblivious to everything going on around him, save for whatever he saw in the brown bag.
“Nate,” I said, “you’re either a part of this or you’re not.”
“You know, it doesn’t really smell,” Nate said. “At least not from here.”
Great.
I checked the clock on my mother’s 150-year-old microwave. It was ten thirty. Nate was due to take Zadie to radiation in about forty- five minutes. We had to get moving in all areas.
Which included the task at hand, so to speak.
“All right,” I said, “who wants to cut off the finger?”
No one jumped at the chance.
“One of us has to do it,” I said.
Still nothing.
“It’s not as if it’s even a hand anymore. It’s completely disassociated from the body. And it belonged to a bad guy, right, Sam?”
“Right,” he said, “but candidly, Mike, it’s hard for me to disassociate the hand from the person if you keep reminding me it used to be on a person.”
“Would it be easier if he said it was on a goat?” Fiona said.
“Was that you volunteering?” Sam said. “Ladies and gentlemen, Fiona Glenanne will be performing her magical finger-removal trick now. Fiona?”
Fiona, for the first time in her life, didn’t have a quick missile to launch in Sam’s direction.
“What about you, Nate?” I said.
“I’m not the globe-trotting assassin,” Nate said.
“I’m not an assassin, Nate,” I said. “I’m a spy.”
“Right,” he said. “Sorry. My mistake. I’m not the globe-trotting spy who occasionally killed people for the government. Is that better?”
“It’s just a hand,” I said, a truth I was in the process of reminding myself when my mother walked into the kitchen.
“What are all of you fighting about? I can hear you all the way in the living room.”
“Which is ten feet away,” I said.
“What’s in that bag?” she said. She reached for it but I pulled it toward me.
“Nothing, Ma,” I said. “Go back to your television show. They’re just about to reveal the new countertop.”
“Michael, I have thirty strangers and a dog in my home right now, all as a favor to you. The least you can do is tell me what else you’ve brought into my house. What could be worse than what is already here?”
Since I’d been back in Miami, my mother had been shot at, ambushed and pulled in several directions by forces foreign and domestic. She’s aware that I work somewhere between the law and disorder. She owns a shotgun. She married my father, which was like sanctioning an emotional Cuban Missile Crisis for the whole of the 1970s and most of the 1980s.
So she can handle herself.
“It’s a dismembered hand,” I said.
“And why is it in a brown bag on my counter?”
“We need to chop off one of the fingers, so that it matches up to Bruce’s hand,” I said. “And then we’re going to use it to fake his death.”
“And what’s the problem?”
I looked from Fiona, to Sam, to Nate-three people who knew their way around a crime scene, generally-and landed back on my mother. “No one really wants to chop the finger off.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” she said. “Didn’t any of you ever work on a farm? Fiona? Didn’t any of your relatives have a farm in Scotland?”
“Ireland,” she said. “And no. Most of my family worked with their hands to steal things from other people.”
Ma regarded Sam. “Madeline,” he said, “you have to understand my rich regard for the sanctity of human life. And that I had chicken fingers for dinner last night.”
She didn’t bother reproaching me or Nate. She just shook her head and said, “Nate, reach into the drawer beside the sink and hand me that electric carving knife your father used to like to use on Christmas.”
When Nate didn’t budge-and when I didn’t let even a breath escape me-she sighed, went into the drawer under the sink, a place where the past evidently stood still, and came out with the GE Electric Carving Knife I remembered from every major holiday between my birth and leaving Miami directly after high school. My father and mother used it to cut any meat thicker than a slice of Italian salami and, occasionally, my dad used it for minor home repairs-it worked great for cutting into drywall-and anytime something in the Charger needed to be severed, which accounted for the odd saw marks I found on various hoses, tubes and fabrics when I refurbished the car not long ago.
Because it was made in the 1970s, the knife needed to be plugged in. Fortunately, it was still attached to the mud brown ten- foot extension cord Dad had put on it sometime before the first Star Wars movie. The dual blades looked dull, but that might have just been a mirage from the caked-on grease, animal blood and remnants of duct tape, since when Ma plugged it in, the 120-volt motor roared to life and the blades looked positively deadly.
The noise got Bruce off of the sofa. He examined the knife, examined his own gnarled stump and said, “That should do the trick.”
“Bruce,” I said, “why don’t you have a seat before you get hurt?”
“What’s the worse that could happen? I lose a finger?”
He waited for the laugh to come and when it didn’t, he seemed honestly disappointed. I had a feeling it wasn’t the first time he’d used that line.
