directly into a great room combination of kitchen and living room. There was a beige sofa covered in multicolored throw pillows, a chocolate brown coffee table that was scattered with magazines and newspapers, and a leather occasional chair with a chenille blanket slung over one arm.
“Your wife has a beautiful eye for detail,” Fiona said. She wandered about the living room, touching things and, I assumed, pocketing whatever she could. That was her skill set. Unfortunately, her jeans weren’t exactly baggy. She’d find a way to make do, I was sure.
“I don’t have a wife,” Junior said. He walked into the kitchen and picked up a cordless phone and handed it to me. “Make your call.”
I dialed Sam’s cell phone.
“If this is Yvonne,” Sam said, “I’m not in a position to take your call.”
“It’s us,” I said. “We’re lost. But a very nice man let us into his home to use the phone.”
“Mikey,” Sam said. “How did I get to your house? And why is your mother with me?”
“I’ll have to explain that later,” I said. “In the meantime, if you can just give me your address, we’ll get right back over there.”
“Did you go to Junior’s place without me?”
“I did,” I said.
“And this is his phone?”
“It is,” I said.
“Came up blocked on my cell,” Sam said. “Only person who calls me from a blocked number is Yvonne, usually. I don’t think you’ve met her. Great lady. Phone is her thing, if you know what I mean.”
“Great, great,” I said. “Well, let me get this nice gentleman’s phone number in case we get lost again, maybe you can call him and retrace our steps.” I pulled the phone from my ear. “Excuse me, sir, can I get your phone number to give to my friend? He’s worried we’re never going to get back to his place. Apparently, not too long ago there was a gator attack in these parts, so you can imagine his fear.”
Junior stood in the middle of his living room, watching Fiona weave drunkenly about his house. He wasn’t paying the least bit of attention to me, and I couldn’t tell if he thought Fiona was suspicious or if he was worried she’d break something. I also couldn’t believe that the man I’d seen in the photos Father Eduardo showed us was living in this house and that he seemed, oddly, just as professional and put together in only a robe as Father Eduardo had been in his office. Either they’d learned quite a bit from each other, or Junior had realized that in order to make it big, he’d need to clean up. I could still see that he had tattoos on his hands, and though his hair was thick and wavy, every time he ran his hand over his scalp in exasperation as Fi came close to toppling one thing or another, a flash of ink showed on his head. You can only cover so much of your past.
“Excuse me,” I said again, this time a bit louder, and Junior turned around. “Can I get your phone number? My friends are worried we might get lost again and they’ll never be able to find us.” Just then, Fiona did a nice pirouette into the leather chair and tumbled into it, her legs kicking up into the air and then wrapping around the long, flowing white drapes that hung across the living room windows. She tugged with her feet and down they came.
Fiona has very strong feet.
“555-9819,” he said.
I gave the number to Sam.
“You want me to run incoming and outgoing?” he asked.
“That would be good, if you could,” I said, “and hopefully we’ll find our way back to you in a moment.”
I clicked off the phone at the same time Junior walked over to Fiona, picked her up with one arm and dragged her out of the chair. “Your girlfriend pulled down my drapes,” he said.
“Let me pay for that,” I said. “As soon as I get back to Atlanta, I’ll send you a check. You just let me know the cost.”
“Price is irrelevant,” he said. “I just want you out of my home before she breaks anything else.”
Junior shoved Fiona in my direction-his first action that actually betrayed his true personality-and when I caught her, I had to hold her back from, well, doing what Fiona does.
“Thank you for your hospitality,” I said, but he didn’t respond. He just walked back to his front door, opened it wide and waited for us to walk through.
It wasn’t until we were sitting inside the Charger again that Fiona felt it prudent to speak. “If he ever touches me again,” she said, “I’m going to break all of his fingers. And then-then I’m going to really hurt him.”
“No problem,” I said, since it’s usually better just to agree with Fiona in these situations.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a silver BlackBerry. “Plus, he won’t be so upset about missing this when he doesn’t have workable digits. I understand it’s hard to text with your toes.”
“I knew I could count on you,” I said.
She reached into her other pocket and came out with an envelope with a bank logo on the return address. “I thought this might be helpful, too,” she said.
“That’s my bank robber,” I said.
And from the small of her back she pulled out a set of car keys. “This I just did to be mean.”
7
When dealing with an adaptive enemy, making contingency plans can be a fruitless endeavor. An adaptive enemy is one who can morph his defenses on the fly, can change his goals to meet the situation and is willing, above all else, to make extreme sacrifices in pursuit of victory. In order to have a Plan B against this kind of enemy, you’d need to imagine every possible scenario while also acknowledging none of the things you’ve imagined might actually be the right answer.
In the case of Junior Gonzalez, everything I’d expected to learn about him was wrong. That he was living well in a planned community, that his home looked to have been decorated out of Pottery Barn (albeit a Pottery Barn that offered handsome metal doors covered in a wood veneer) and that he was initially polite (until he wasn’t polite) and uniformly well-spoken… All of it ran counter to my expectations. I shouldn’t have been surprised in light of who (and what) Eddie Santiago had become, and yet it all had come as a surprise to me that a career criminal could change his outward persona.
Spend enough time locked away in prison, and it’s only natural that you’ll begin fantasizing about the life you’ll lead once you’re free and the lengths needed to fulfill that fantasy. Maybe it will be a life of revenge. Maybe it will be a life of peace. Maybe it will be a life lived out of a catalog. Or, just maybe, it will be a life lived out of a catalog and that is filled with a desire for revenge.
Pottery Barn and revenge seemed like strange bed-fellows, even to Fiona. It was the next day, and we were sitting poolside at the Ace Hotel, waiting for Sam. He’d asked us to meet him at the hotel, which was odd, but he said it would all make sense once he arrived. I had a suspicion that it would only make sense to Sam, but there we sat, Fiona in a bikini that contained roughly the same amount of fabric that goes into a cotton ball, and me wearing an Armani suit, because I assumed we’d be sitting inside. And because I look good in it.
“For a brute,” Fiona said, “he did have a lovely set of chenille throw pillows. How can you want to hurt people when you can put your head down on chenille throw pillows?”
“It’s a great mystery,” I said. I had Junior’s BlackBerry in my hand and was busy going through all of his e- mail and phone contacts. Fiona was busy absorbing UV rays.
“Would you mind getting my back?” Fiona asked. She flipped over and undid her bikini top.
I’d spent the better part of the last hour putting suntan lotion on different parts of Fiona’s body, enough so that I was pretty sure she could walk on the sun without getting a burn, but then Fiona was always partial to putting on a show for the tourists, and there was a new batch of young men sitting across the pool, ogling her. The Ace was one of those hotels designed to look like it had been built in the 1970s, except that all of the things that were deemed dreadful in the seventies were now covered in glitter and made to look exceptional. Even the drinks had names from the seventies, like the DY-NO-MITE! Mudslide and the Jim Jones, which was basically a Long Island Iced Tea. Most of the pool denizens were born in the 1980s, so the significance (or insignificance) of it all was likely lost on them. But Fiona’s near-naked form certainly wasn’t.
