He walked down the steps, shoved the doorman aside and stepped past both Sam and me to look at his car. He walked around it twice, checking for damage. There wasn’t any, apart from the tires. He seemed content with that.
“Feds don’t knock anymore?” Lyle said to me.
Not what I was expecting.
“Wouldn’t know,” I said. “But I figured trying to get past your man at the door would be difficult.”
Lyle laughed. “You send a woman to do your work yesterday and you’re scared of one guy? The FBI isn’t what it used to be.”
“I don’t know who you think is FBI,” I said, “but it ain’t us.”
“No?” Lyle said. “Since when are the Redeemers back in business in Florida?”
“Since Oregon stopped being profitable,” I said. “And since we got tired of having the FBI wearing our colors and riding our bikes.”
Lyle regarded me for a few seconds. I couldn’t tell if he was looking for cracks in the veneer or if he was just trying to apply some silent pressure, see if I or Sam started babbling or backtracking.
“That so?” he said. “How come we haven’t seen any soldiers? You two and your crazy woman, that’s the whole unit?”
“You don’t believe me, that’s your business. Doesn’t change the fact I got this.” I reached inside my vest and pulled out the Ziploc bag now holding Bruce Grossman’s hand-or, well, the hand portraying Bruce Grossman’s hand-and dropped it at Lyle’s feet. I’d shoved a couple of the Ghouls’ patches into the bag, too, just for effect. “I also got a bunch of maps in my saddlebag that list all the safe houses you got between Tallahassee and here. That’s gotta be worth something to someone, right, Duke?”
“You got that right,” Sam said. “Put it on eBay. Get the Banshees and the feds to bid against each other.”
Lyle’s right eye twitched. He didn’t look horribly mad, but that twitch wasn’t because he was over- caffeinated.
“What’s your name?” he asked me.
“You can call me Jasper.”
“Okay,” he said. “Tell me something, Jasper, what makes you think I’ll do business with you?”
“It doesn’t matter. Either you do business with me or you don’t, I’ll still get what I want. Professional courtesy, I came to you first, seeing as the Banshees tried to screw both of us. You don’t pay up, we take over this territory. I make my money either way.”
“I’d like to see you try,” Lyle said.
“You would,” I said. “Because we’d be wearing your colors. We’d go door-to-door looking for old ladies to smack up. We’d set up shop outside elementary schools to move meth. We’d pimp out thirteen-year-old girls. And when the police got close? We’d take them to your safe houses. We’d leave a trail out to your processing plant in the Glades. We’ll go out to Sturgis, Oklahoma City, Houston and we will shoot at people. And when we get tired of that? We’ll come back here to Miami and maybe we’ll kill some Cuban Mafia don and then a cop and a rabbi and a priest and maybe we’ll kidnap Dwyane Wade. All in your colors.”
That twitch? A full-blown blink.
Lyle scratched absently at his neck until a thick red line rose up from the skin just above his Adam’s apple. “Maybe you’re not feds,” he said. Lyle looked down the street, his eyes squinted into narrow slits, like he was trying to make out something very important in the distance that he knew should be there but wasn’t. “You hungry?” he asked. “I can’t negotiate on an empty stomach.”
I looked at Sam. He gave a quick shrug. “We could eat,” I said.
Lyle reached down and picked up the bag with Bruce Grossman’s hand in it. He unzipped it, pulled out the Ghouls’ patch, and then took a moment to examine the evidence before dropping it back onto the pavement with a dull thwack. “Buster,” he said to the doorman, “get rid of this. Put it in the incinerator. Chop it up. Feed it to your pit bull. Just get rid of it.”
“Got it,” Buster said.
“And tell the boys inside that I’m going down the street to McDonald’s for a business meeting,” Lyle said, “and that if I don’t come back in an hour, they should go kill everyone named Grossman in Miami. Got that?”
The McDonald’s down the street from Purgatory didn’t have a Playland. It was one of those recently renovated McDonald’s that looks like a Starbucks slathered in trans fats and encourages people to come in with their laptops and spend the day eating French fries and Oreo McFlurrys while sucking down the new McDonald’s espresso drinks.
So even though there was no area dedicated to screaming children, there were plenty of postcollegiate men with messenger bags and wire-rim glasses working on their novels or resumes or letters to Parade magazine about the state of Jennifer Aniston’s romantic relationships.
Lyle insisted on buying us lunch, so Sam and I found a circular table with a good view of the door and of Lyle. Sam watched the door. I watched Lyle. Not that we didn’t trust him, aside from him being a murderous biker gang leader, but it just made good sense to watch the hard target and pay mind to any soft ones coming through the door.
It probably made sense to Lyle, too. We’d already proved that we weren’t afraid of taking him on in what would otherwise be the sacred ground of Purgatory, and that we could predict his moves enough so that we were waiting on his men at Zadie’s. Going to McDonald’s? That wasn’t something I could have honestly assumed.
He walked back to the table and set down a tray loaded with food and for a couple of minutes the three of us ate in silence, Lyle protecting his meal prison-style, with one arm wrapped around the entire tray. He was a Big- Mac-large-fries-and-an-orange-drink kind of guy.
No apple pie.
No McFlurry.
No salad.
He was Old School.
Time for recess.
“Since when do Ghouls wear suits?” I said.
“It’s about diversification,” Lyle said. “New business models. I can’t walk into a business meeting dressed like you two. You’ll find that out soon enough, Jasper. You wear a suit, you’re untouchable.”
“And yet you leave all of your most important stuff in a stash house somewhere?” I said. “You ever hear of a computer? You ever see Bruce Grossman? Man was almost seventy. You got jobbed by a guy collecting Social Security.”
“He got you, too,” Lyle said.
“Correction,” I said. “He tried to get us. You know what he stole from me? Shoe boxes. You know what was in those shoe boxes? Shoes. He stole my shoes. Little bit of money. Little bit of drugs. Not like how he took you down. He bullied you. Treated you like his stepson. Us? He got what we left out. Plain and simple. And he paid for it. Boy, did he pay for it. Oh, it took us some time to find him, but we didn’t have to go torture and kill someone else to get to him. Didn’t have to put no bounty out in Little Havana. We handled our business. While you were busy making house calls in Little Havana, Bruce Grossman was already in the dirt. We had to sit and wait on your asses. So you got taken by an old-ass man and by us and by the Banshees. You’re 0-for-3, hoss.”
Lyle took a long drink from his orange soda. Here was a man not used to being talked back to, getting talked back to.
The twitch was coming back.
“You can change an environment overnight, but you can’t change the people inside of the environment immediately,” he said, his voice careful, measured. “Lessons have been learned.” He talked like someone who’d been reading manuals on corporate leadership.
“Expensive lessons,” I said.
“You think you’ll be able to do whatever you want to do for the rest of your life?” he asked. “Me? I’m fifty years old. My brothers are all doing time. You think I want to spend the next thirty years doing fed time? So I’m changing the way the Ghouls handle their business. Keep us protected and keep us in business. I’m clean. I intend to stay that way. Maybe I’ve got some dirty friends. Even Obama has a few of those, right?”
It was nice talk, but they’d killed Nick Balsalmo. They’d killed the men working the stash house. And they
