Terminal (17 page)

I
was just coming back from visiting a guy tall enough to dunk on Wilt and skinny enough to do it through the eye of a needle. That is, if his legs worked. He needed one of those two-handed walkers to get around, but his hands were as good as any surgeon’s.

I pulled into the chain-link cage behind the two-pump gas station that never seemed to have any fuel to sell. The Plymouth was now a resplendent shade of Mopar’s infamous Plum Crazy, instead of its usual urban camouflage, a mottled pattern of dull black and gray primer.

That’s what the guy I had visited wanted to show me. He had a way to apply a full-body decal to any car. Looked exactly like paint, even up close. It took him a while to put one on—the less chrome to remove the better, and my Roadrunner was a perfect candidate—but only a few minutes to peel it right off. Especially if you had help.

“Think of it as a getaway driver’s condom,” he said, smiling with teeth so perfect they had to be replacements.

My plan was to test it for a couple of days, including running it through a car wash. If it worked, it was worth every dime the man was asking.

The new color didn’t faze the three pit bulls ambling out of their own two-story condo. I don’t know if dogs can see color, but I know they never rely on it. If they hadn’t recognized me in whatever way dogs do, even the plastic tub of pulled-pork BBQ I brought with me wouldn’t have distracted them from their job.

As usual, the old male got the first deep snarf of the goods. His humongous head plunged viciously, shook once, and then turned the concrete into a dinner plate. The two females went right for the booty, but one of them, an orca-spotted beauty I’d been courting for a long time, gave me a look over her shoulder first. I made a “come here” gesture with one hand. She immediately trotted around me, deftly snatching the solid cube of steak I held out behind my back, without breaking stride.

After I slammed the three-pound padlock closed, I walked back to the flophouse. Darkness was down, and I wrapped it around me the way a rich man’s mistress does her mink. It was mine, and I’d paid what it cost to make it so.

“The kid’s upstairs, boss,” Gateman greeted me.

“Alone?”

“Yeah,” he said reluctantly. To Gateman, both Terry and Clarence were kids, but he only called Terry by that title, because Clarence was a fellow gunman. The naked unhappiness in his voice was because Terry had come without his mother—Gateman’s unrequited adoration of Michelle had never been expressed once he found out she was the Mole’s woman. Never expressed to her, that is.

“Bad?” I asked. Meaning: was Terry on the run? If he’d been down here and got caught in a bad spot, this is where he’d come. Getting past Gateman would be a hard job for a couple of pros, impossible for amateurs.

“Nah,” Gateman dismissed my worries. “He had a message for you, said he had to deliver it in person.”

Something happened to the Mole!
flashed in my mind, but I let it go just as quick. That was the case, Terry would have been with Michelle, for sure.

“Why didn’t he wait down here with you, Gate?”

“Oh, he did, boss. Got here
hours
ago. We sent out for sandwiches and everything. But I had a little business to do, and I didn’t think you’d want…”

“You’d make a good father, Gateman.”

“Probably would have made a good sprinter, too,” the man in the wheelchair said.

I tapped fists with him, acknowledging his recital of the truth we all learn: you play what you’re dealt.

Then I hit the stairs.

“H
ey, son,” I greeted Terry as he looked up from his laptop.

“Burke.”

“Gateman said you had a—”

“Dad needs to see you.”

“So why not just—?”

“Now, okay?”

“Do I need—?”

“Nothing.” Meaning: No weapons. And come alone.

“N
ice ride,” I told the kid. I’m not a rice-burner man, but I could feel the Scion tC we were riding in had been major-league reworked, even if the boost gauge on the A-pillar hadn’t tipped me off.

“I had a big fight with Mom about it,” he said, not quite smiling.

“The only thing Michelle knows about cars is how good the leather on the seats is.”

“Not that. She wanted to buy it for me, and I wanted to pay for it myself.”

“She should have been proud of you.”

“She
was.
But she said…Well, you know how she gets.”

“Amen.”

“I told her she and Dad were already paying for college, and—”

“She reminded you that you’re on a full scholarship, and you’re not too big to forget you were raised to respect your—”

“Exactly.” He sighed. “She got kind of upset, Burke. I asked Dad. You know what he said, right?”

I shrugged.

The kid burst into laughter. “Yeah. That
is
what he said. I mean, he’s not exactly
afraid
of Mom or anything, but…”

“I know.”

The kid handled the car expertly. I wondered who’d taught him, maybe feeling a little hurt that he hadn’t asked me. I knew it hadn’t been the Mole; he drives like Ray Charles on Valium.

“Burke?”

“What?”

“You know Mom. You maybe know her better than anyone.”

“Sure. She’s my kid sister.”

“Yes,” he said, quiet and serious. “Why did she get so worked up about the car? If it’s none of my business, okay. But don’t tell me you don’t know, okay?”

If I still smoked—I only do it now when I have to play a role—that would have been one of those times when I’d have reached for one. I took in a long, shallow breath. Let it out.

“You’re pulling away, T.”

“From
Mom
?! Are you—?”

“No. Not from your mother. Or your father. From The Life, understand?”

He turned and gave me a quick look.

“Terry, you know where we all live,” I said, treading softly. “None of us are citizens. None of us are ever going to be. It’s not that we picked our own paths; it’s that those paths crossed. Each one was our way out, and we can’t go back. The Mole and Michelle, you know they don’t want that for you.”

“But I’d never—”

“Yeah, you will,” I told him, straight to the heart, the way he deserved, from the uncle who loved him. “You have to. We don’t
want
another generation coming up with us. We live underground; we want you to live in the light. Whatever we teach you, it’s for ‘just in case,’ okay? Not to earn a living.”

“They always said…something like that.”

“Not ‘always,’ son. When they thought you were old enough to understand.”
Understand that the freaks who sold you are our blood-enemies; you’re one of us now. And we never give up our own.
But I didn’t say that out loud, just: “It’s not so much about what they
want
from you; it’s about what they
expect
from you, see?”

“No,” he said. But he wasn’t telling the truth. Or just refusing to face it.

“You don’t change the world from underground, Terry. You don’t cure cancer, or isolate the enzyme in mosquitoes that kills the malaria inside them, or figure out how to locate trauma paths in brain-wave patterns or—”

“People are already working on all that.”

“Cut it, kid. You know what I mean. Exactly what I mean. Can you even
imagine
what your father could have discovered if…if things had been different for him, earlier?”

“And if Mom—”

“Yeah.”

“You, too, Burke.”

“Me? Look, I was talking about—”

“You know what Dad once told me about you? He said you know more about people than any man he ever met. And that, if you’d been a cop, no freak on earth would ever be safe.”

“Okay,” I said quickly, trying for a nerve block.

“But if Mom
wants
me to go—”

“She knows you
have
to go, Terry. She knows it’s right. It’s hard for her to…deal with sometimes, that’s all.”

“Me, too,” he said, setting his jaw.

As far as he knew, I never saw the teardrop track his cheek.

T
erry slipped the metallic-ruby coupe inside the junkyard without a trace of drama. Walked through the dog pack like it was a fur-and-fangs turnstile, just like his father always does.

We walked the rest of the way. Found Simba sitting next to the Mole’s empty chair.

“I’ll wait here,” Terry said.

I entered the Mole’s underground bunker, moved through the dark with the confidence of a blind man in his own house, turned the corner—and there he was.

“Sit,” he said, as he turned from a table covered with tiny bottles and glass tubing.

I took the special chair Michelle had bought him for Father’s Day a few years ago. None of us ever celebrate our birthdays. We don’t even acknowledge them. Except for the kids: Terry’s, sure. Flower’s, not an option. Max might let it slide; Immaculata might understand; even Flower would let it go. But Mama would…well, none of us were brave enough to find out.

The Mole dragged over the four-legged wooden stool he sat on whenever Michelle wasn’t around.

“My people, they want something.”

“They’ve got it,” I said, knowing there was no other answer.

“This was not expected,” he said, almost apologetically. “But those I know, they have the younger ones coming. To those, I am not so much a…”

“I get it.”

“There is a traitor. An old man now. My people cannot touch him.”

I can’t speak Hebrew, but I can translate Mole. Some fools think the Rosenbergs were Communists. Or did whatever they tried to do for money. I guess you’re not supposed to spy on your allies. I asked the Mole about that once. “Ally?” he said. “You mean, like Saudi Arabia?” So, when he said “traitor,” I knew he meant a man who had sold one of Israel’s citizen-spies to the
federales.

“He is a wealthy man,” the Mole said.

Meaning: he could afford security. Nothing the Mossad murder-magicians couldn’t penetrate, but they couldn’t be connected. Or even suspected. This was a job for thugs, not spooks. Maybe a burglary gone bad…?

“He sold his daughter,” the Mole said, controlling his voice with effort. “If she is convicted, she will be sentenced to life in prison.”

I looked a question over at him.

The Mole’s faded-denim eyes glistened behind his thick lenses. Something…something I couldn’t read.

“If he’s gone in the Grand Jury already, they can still use his testimony if he’s ‘unavailable’ at the time of trial,” I told him.

The Mole nodded. Meaning: We know. And it’s not a problem.

“You know I can’t involve my own—”

“There is a budget,” my demented genius brother said, softly.

“They expect me to just go out and—”

“Do you remember—a long time ago?—you were looking for something you needed very badly? I took you to a house. We met a man. The agreement was that he would talk with you. Talk
freely.
But you could not hurt him.”

I said nothing.

“You
wanted
to hurt him. This was known. You gave your word this would not happen. But the…people who made him…available, they insisted I come with you.”

“I remember,” I finally said.

“You did nothing to him. But something
happened
to him. Later.”

“Scumbag like that, just a matter of time.”

“He was a very valuable asset. Some of my people, they have not forgotten.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because what they want from you this time—and this I swear—is the opposite of what they required from you that last time.”

“I see.”

“No. No, you don’t, Burke. I am saying to you—what they want, it is something
you
want, too.”

“For real?”

“For everything,” the Mole said, holding out his hand. “Yes?”

“Yes,” I answered, closing my hand over his.

He turned, grasped the handle of a metal file box, held it out to me.

I took it, and turned to leave.

“Sei gesund,”
my brother said.

“F
ifty K?” Gigi said. “That’s—”

“The front money,” I finished for him. “Half.”

“For that kind of cash, you’re looking to buy—”

“You may not have to do anything. Depends on what this guy’s got in place around him. Could be you just sit there and watch. Could be you have to take someone off the count.”

“Same pay either way?”

“Either way. What I’m buying is what you can’t get anymore.”

“Good help?” the Godzilla said, chuckling.

“Time-tested,” I told him, speaking in the language only men like us understand—by then, Gigi knew the whole story of my new face.

“I
’m no good with guns anyway,” Claw said.

I hadn’t used any of the Mole’s “budget” to buy him in. Whether he believed me when I told him that I was trading the job we were going to do for the second half of what we needed to move on our targets, I don’t know. But he believed me when I told him that, if I didn’t get this one done, I couldn’t do the one he needed.

Or wouldn’t. From where he was sitting, same thing.

I
t took me three days and nights just to work through the stuff the Mole’s people supplied. I’d never seen surveillance work like it. They had draftsman’s-quality blueprints of everything, right down to the wiring of the apnea monitor; terrain maps; wiretap tapes; camera work—telephoto to macro. Plus, CAD/CAM 3-Ds; the combination to the floor-mounted safe; and even a list of weapons the bodyguards carried. There were two of those, and they never left the place. Slept in shifts sometimes, but they were both always on the job when it got deep-dark.

“You get the shooter,” I told Claw. “The karate guy’s yours,” I said to Gigi.

“I already got the car,” the humongoid assured me. “Motherfucker’s put together like a jigsaw puzzle. We can leave it anywhere and walk. But we can’t get stopped.”

I nodded. We each had our own reasons, but none of us were going back Inside. If some trooper lit us up on our way back from this job, court was in session.