“They’re usually the roles that are the last we thought we would play.”
Alvin could egg her on. Keep her going but she really needed someone to hear her out. A vaguely positive and agreeable, “Yeah,” was all that was required to let Coco continue to speak her heart.
“I try to disarm to get me, to get us on fighting ground. We try swinging our arms so much as we get tackled and our legs get pinned. But Al, I need you to provide the arena for us to attack way before we need to defend. I don’t need you to impress some executive in my organization. I need you to blow away the whole company.”
That was a lot to ask. So much for Alvin thinking he was tracking with what his boss was speaking of. It felt like some impromptu motivational speech shift managers occasionally felt obligated to impart to their team. But Coco took an entirely different freeway exit.
What was she getting at?
No doubt, the thing Matts and the FBI wanted to catch her mucking about in.
Alvin nodded his assent and understanding, hoping Coco would release him to get to his food. He also needed to process what he was getting into.
“Very good. We’ll keep in touch on this. I’m sure you won’t let me down.”
Back in the Day…
Alvin, six years old, stood in the longest hallway of his family’s two-bedroom home. He kept peering down the hall, anticipating something. And after a moment more, the beast emerged.
The boy would never usually refer to his only known family member as a beast. Not even in his mind. But something changed when he would not eat the food set before him by his grandmother.
She got it in her head once she came to America, from Jamaica, to assimilate the heck out of what to eat. Maintaining a presence of culture was fine in any other form, but do not ever be caught on the wrong side of the new, American life – eating something strange and smelly that you could not find on a dinner menu at Denny’s or IHOP.
But Grandma was teeming with too much power. Maybe it was a lucid food coma. Either way, Alvin did not care for ketchup and eggs – though his grandmother insisted the all-American condiment be a part of every meal; just about every single plate of food. The boy was sure it would have been in his morning cereal, if the pairing was advertised on the boxes.
Ketchup and eggs were the worst offense, as far as Alvin was concerned. Not because the eggs touched the ketchup on his plate, if another side went with the red dip. Hash browns. Corned beef hash, sure. The kid was quite alright with the accidental convergence of food to the center of his plate, as it beamed up to his mouth for a much closer look and feel. But Grandma squirted the ketchup into the pan while the eggs were cooking – and from Alvin’s point of view, there were several problems with ketchup as an ingredient:
Hot ketchup was awful. Tasted like it expired. The tang that made ketchup fun, soured into something gross. Cold or room temperature at the warmest.
Ketchup in cooking eggs was also easy to abuse. Maybe if Grandma added a smidgen, it might have made the plate a tad more interesting, but several tablespoons was more than excessive.
Ketchup eggs looked horrid. Utterly gory. Fresh, bloody innards violently wrenched from a poor soul that never had a chance.
Grandma did not care much for critics. And whenever it was ketchup-egg day, Alvin tried to
avoid it and would hang out somewhere else. That was when the hunt would begin. And eventually, Grandma would catch Alvin meandering in the all, trudge up to him and drag him by ear into the bathroom for a timeout. She always got freakishly strong, shedding her usual, gentle exterior for an indignant, raging giant.
When he emerged from his momentary confinement, Alvin would find the bloody eggs dry and in the trash, which he was always relieved to see. But he often thought it strange to throw something away and not eat what his grandmother claimed to like so much.
Perhaps it was medicine.
The more American the food Grandma could shove down his throat, maybe the more successful in the country he would be.
Unlike Alvin’s mother.
She worked hard to provide for her son – only to get knocked into oblivion by a bus, whose driver did not see a little, old car trying to get to a preschool for an evening pickup.
Chapter 2
Meeting with Agent Matts was always an experience. Mostly because Alvin was not sure how to be a good confidential informant.
Tell him the truth.
Yes.
The cook was for sure the neutral party in the operation.
Lord, yes.
Though Alvin was never sure he was off the hook when he reported. This was not something he could just let slip to Coco or her goons and officers, that he was meeting with a government agent.
He would also be in a bad place if he suddenly stopped giving Matts the crime business.
“I’m telling it to you as she told it to me.”
The investigator paused the way he always did. It was obvious he was thinking about a way to answer back. What someone else might take a little care to do to look more subtle, it was too apparent agents or detectives did not need to operate under that same pretense. They figured things out. Why play at hiding it?
“This is good. Great work.”
“I just cook for her and tell you what we talk about.”
“We could actually nab her in a couple of months. And it’ll all be thanks to you, Mr. Gates.”
That did not come across as saucy and as irresistible as Matts made it sound.
“Seems like
