“You’re enthralling me with your tale of woe,” Fiona said. “And most of it even seems plausible, except for the part about smart girls thinking you were cute, but what happened with the stash house?”
It was stupid, Bruce had to admit. After getting released from jail, minus a finger, minus the $500 he had to pay to lose the finger, but plus the $750,000 his insurance paid out that he was able to give to his mom for her bills while he was inside, he moved in with his mom, determined to just be a good son, which he felt he was. Good citizen, which meant he wouldn’t help his friend Barry do anything cash-based, just give him some occasional advice, maybe even get a job working at the Starbucks across the street, or the one next door, or even the one half a block away.
And for two months it worked. Well, apart from the Starbucks thing. He got a job instead working at Kinko’s, just to pass the time. But then his mom got sick again-this time the cancer was in her liver-and he started thinking about giving her some comfort. She was eighty-eight now and even if it all worked out with the cancer, how much longer did she have?
The thing was, he couldn’t go back to prison. And the last time he’d robbed a bank he found out the hard way that banks in Miami in the late nineties weren’t like crap-ass savings and loans in small towns in Oregon: You could break into the safe-deposit boxes, you just couldn’t get your ass back out, at least not with a broken leg. And that was twelve years ago. So Bruce went looking for a stash house, something run by drug dealers, so they’d be working from straight cash, and preferably crystal meth or coke dealers, since they frequently got high off of their own supply and couldn’t stand to be locked up at home.
It only took him a couple of weeks of scouting, first by going to the colleges at night and watching the dealers pull up to the fraternity houses to make drops, and then later tinkering around the hot spots in South Beach, looking for actors and actresses and models with runny noses and then seeing where they went. A couple of times he thought he’d found a good spot to rob, as they were in nice neighborhoods lined with expensive homes, but then he got to looking and realized that those nice places had security systems and Neighborhood Watch and talkative kids on bicycles who might notice something.
So when he finally found the ideal spot-a piece-of-crap house on the edge of the Everglades-and an ideal pair of marks-two stupid longhairs with modified motorcycles that roared like injured lions, which made them about as inconspicuous as Siegfried and Roy used to be, and who just let people walk in all day and buy drugs-he went to work. If he’d been younger, that would have meant getting city plans of the house, taking pictures of all the angles, maybe even enlisting a getaway car, but at sixty- five, and with these morons, it seemed easier to wait for them to leave for the night, break in through the ceiling-his go-to route, since these guys weren’t gonna call the cops anyway, and because there’s less absorbent surface to leave fingerprints and such-and rob the place.
Which is exactly what he did.
Two in the morning on a Saturday-your basic come-down time-both morons hopped on their bikes and headed out, messenger bags over their shoulders to make their drops in Miami, and Bruce headed in. Popped through roof tiles into the attic, out through the attic door with a rope ladder and into a bedroom closet, which was good because it was right where he needed to be. File cabinets of paperwork, boxes, bags-actual bags! — of cash. And drugs. Ziplocs filled with crystal meth, crack, pills. It was pitch-dark in the closet and the door was locked from the outside and, smartly, made of steel. On that measure, these boys were wise. Everything else, not so much.
Bruce took all the money, of course. Filled his car up. And then thought, you know, what drug dealer keeps paperwork? And so he broke back in and took the files, too, thinking he’d have a few more arrows in his quiver. Maybe some car information, house deed… who knew? He didn’t try to read anything in the dark, just took everything he could and got the hell out, thinking that if his mom got really sick, whatever he found would be worth something to someone. Plus, he really couldn’t lose another finger.
“How much money?” Fiona asked.
He hated to tell her, since he had the sense that maybe she’d robbed a few places in the past, too. “Three hundred,” he said.
“All of that for three hundred dollars?”
“Thousand,” he said. “Three hundred thousand.”
“Oh, my,” she said. Weird. Maybe she liked him, since her voice took on a much huskier tone. “And when did you find out it was a Ghouls’ house?”
“That night when I started going through the paperwork. I didn’t even think twice about it then, though,” Bruce said, though actually he’d been quite happy. “But then word got back to me that they were looking to find out who would be stupid enough to do the crime, lots of money being thrown around to find out, which meant that soon enough they’d find me. That’s why I just want to give what I have back, before they put it all together.”
Fiona reached into her bag and pulled out her cell phone. “Anything else you care to add?” she asked.
“Are you single?” he asked. Worth a try.
“I’m free any night for the right price,” she said, smiling, “and my price right now includes men with all of their fingers, so you just missed out.”
She dialed a number on her phone, still smiling, still giving off one vibe, but clearly not meaning it. She must have robbed banks, Bruce thought.
“Michael,” Fiona said, “he’s an idiot and he’s in trouble, but he’s not a liar.”
5
Every successful organization, pedestrian or criminal, has a hierarchy. The United States, apart from the occasional hijacked election, is the perfect example of this. Every four years, without violent civil unrest, leadership is allowed to change and, with it, ideology. Countries with dictators also have a hierarchy and within it change also frequently occurs. That change might not include the murderous head of state, but on a local level ministers and department heads move around, different mullahs are favored more than others, and the occasional bureaucrat makes a leap because of a well-timed snitch operation. But belief systems rarely change in dictatorships because no one wants to die for beliefs anymore. Well, unless there’s a coup, and then those beliefs are probably the ones people like me have, at some point, put into motion.
Even then there are rules. Break them and people will die, or at least lose their job, or die and lose their job, depending upon just how serious the violation.
You’d think the Ghouls Motorcycle Club wouldn’t have an extensive operating constitution; its members would understand that their jobs were to sell drugs, commit crimes and terrorize people on Honda motorcycles.
You’d be wrong.
Spread across a lovely wicker coffee table that hadn’t been dusted since Clinton was in office, there were pages and pages of the Ghouls’ rules and regulations, a manual as thick and thorough as the actual constitution. Sam and I sat in the living room of Grossman’s house going through the papers, each one stolen in the dark of night from the stash house, while Fiona sat outside with Zadie, apparently having a long conversation concerning US Magazine. From my view in the living room, it looked like they were getting along like sisters. That was Fiona’s unique ability: She could scare you or charm you, all within a few moments.
“So, just so we’re clear,” Sam said to Bruce, “you don’t want to move to Canada, right?”
I’d called Sam after Fiona told me about Bruce’s plight, and now the two of us were trying to figure out how best to keep Bruce alive. Sam’s ideas heretofore had also included face- transplant surgery and literally moving underground, like in an old bomb shelter, because trying to elude the grasp of the Ghouls was like trying to catch water in a strainer.