“No one,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “Keep it that way. If my plan is to work, we need every move to be a surprise, even to you.”
“I trust you,” he said.
“You have to,” I said. “No matter what happens tomorrow, understand that you should react in the only way you can, which is to say, don’t fight me, and don’t fight Junior. Let me do the work.”
“Have you ever read The Art of War?”
Fiona let out a little snort. “Boys,” she said, but Father Eduardo ignored her.
“Yes,” I said.
“‘He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious,’” Father Eduardo said. “I have lived by that for a long time now. I have won all my battles, including my freedom, with that in mind.”
“Good,” I said.
Father Eduardo thanked us and said he’d see us in the morning, and began to make his way out of the loft. He paused after he opened the front door and then stepped back inside. “Your father,” he said to me, and then pointed, but concentrated on some point in his mind and didn’t finish his sentence.
“What about him?” I said.
“That car you drive. It was his?”
“Yeah, for a while,” I said.
“Junior and I tried to steal it once from in front of the high school.”
“What stopped you?”
“Your father was sitting in the front seat,” Father Eduardo said, “and when we told him to get out, he just laughed at us and told us to keep on moving down the road. Those were his exact words. ‘Keep on moving down the road,’ just as cool as can be. It… unnerved me. That’s the word. He wasn’t afraid.”
“He was probably drunk,” I said.
“No,” Father Eduardo said, “no, I don’t think that’s true. And neither do you.”
“No,” I said, “I guess I don’t.”
Eduardo Santiago, who used to rob little kids, who ran the Latin Emperors, who did federal time, snitched out his gang, found God and came out a changed man, came out a priest, smiled at me in a way I found unnerving, too. “Maybe he was a spy, too?”
“Not a chance,” I said. “Get some rest. Tomorrow we go to war.”
Eduardo still had that unnerving smile going. “I didn’t think this was going to happen to me again. I thought this period of my life was done.”
“It will be,” I said. One way or the other, that was true.
Father Eduardo left for good then, so I opened up the fridge and pulled out three beers and one blueberry yogurt.
“You gonna get a beer for yourself?” Sam said.
“I thought you weren’t drinking anymore,” I said.
“That was this morning,” he said, and cracked open one of the bottles. “It’s a new day in Australia, mate.”
I slid one of the bottles to Fiona, but she pushed it away. “What?” I said.
“This Leticia business,” she said. “I’m all wrapped up in it.”
“We’re all wrapped up in it,” I said. “Even your boyfriend, Barry.”
“No,” she said. “That Killa is Father Eduardo’s brother makes this all the more complicated for her. How does she know who to trust? I mean, really, Michael-how will she ever know who to trust?”
“She won’t,” I said, “just like the rest of us.”
“And that poor child has a great genetic makeup. Both of his parents are criminals, for God’s sake.”
I couldn’t remember a time when I’d seen Fiona this worked up over one of our clients. “We’ll get her out of this,” I said.
“Sam, can you get her into Witness Protection or something?”
Sam took a sip of his beer and then made a smacking sound with his lips. “Ah, to be in love… No luck, sister,” Sam said, “not when Father Eduardo won’t even admit there’s something criminal going on. I could talk to my guys in the FBI, but Father Eduardo would have to cop to this blackmail, and he won’t do that. Hell, he won’t even let us have squirt guns.”
Barry made a snorting noise in his sleep that echoed down from upstairs, which got Fiona’s attention. She raised her eyebrows in a silent question to me.
“Maybe,” I said. “Let’s see if Barry makes it out of this alive before we have him getting your best girlfriend Leticia smuggled out of the country.”
“Okay,” she said.
“In the meantime,” I said, “we need to get some guns that aren’t guns. I don’t suppose you know anyone, Fi, with a gross of paintball guns for sale?”
“I could get us 50 Vektor CR-21 assault rifles, if you’d like,” she said, and suddenly was full of perk again. Nothing like a little gun talk to get Fiona out of a funk. “But no, nothing with paint. My clients rarely want to make an Impressionist work of art. A body is far more preferable.”
“Sam?”
“I got a guy I went to basic with about a million years ago who now runs one of those paramilitary camps where accountants spend an entire weekend shooting each other for kicks. I could ask him.”
“He know how to keep a secret?”
“He’s ex-military,” Sam said.
“Right,” I said.
“Right,” Sam said. “Well, I’ll tell him I’m helping a bunch of at-risk kids. Which wouldn’t be a lie, right?”
“If he’s running a camp for rich people,” I said, “he’s probably been tinkering with the guns already. Tell him you want the ones he keeps for the whales in the group.”
Paintball guns aren’t really guns. They’re markers. Get hit with a paintball and really what you’re getting hit with is a paint-filled gelatin capsule traveling at three hundred feet per second, which is fast enough to bruise you or put out your eye or break your nose, all of which are good reasons to wear a helmet and goggles when people are shooting at you. If you really want to hurt someone with a paintball gun, you need to amp up the velocity to six hundred feet per second, which will generate enough force to break a bone. But breaking bones isn’t usually enough if you’re fighting people with guns. People with guns can still shoot you with a broken foot or clavicle. So instead of a gelatin cap filled with paint, you want to get a gelatin cap filled with pepper spray. Get hit at six hundred feet per second by a paintball filled with pepper spray and you’ll have a broken bone and you’ll think you’re about to die. And if pepper spray isn’t available, mix together bleach and ammonia and you’ll find that they make a rather debilitating and disabling combination, too.
Sam drained the rest of his beer and then stepped outside to call his guy, which left Fiona and me alone with Barry’s snoring. She was still upset but had on her bravest face, which only meant she was thinking of ways to do this all her way.
“Fi,” I said, “tomorrow, when we face Junior again, I need you to follow my lead.”
“Don’t I always, Michael?”
“No,” I said.
“Don’t I usually?”
“It’s about seventy-thirty,” I said. “My plan is to attack all the angles, but systematically. I’m going to start with Leticia. I want you to know that. She’s going to be at the door, and I’m going to put her into enough fear that she might run out right then.”
“I don’t know why this is getting to me so much,” she said. “Maybe because Leticia is so young. Maybe because she has a child. I don’t know, Michael.”
I took her into my arms for a moment and she held on. It wasn’t one of those desperate moments we’ve had before, where it feels like the world is about to explode. Instead, it just felt like a time when Fiona might need to be treated like someone who needed a hug.
A sound from upstairs halted the moment. Or, really, the end of a sound, as Barry’s snoring came to an abrupt halt. I heard him rummaging around for a moment, and then he appeared on top of the stairs, shirtless,
