“No, she doesn’t,” I said.
“You don’t give her enough credit. Maybe she’s a psychic.”
“If she were psychic, she’d know when her car was going to run out of oil, and I wouldn’t need to pick her up from the Lube and Tune tomorrow morning.” Sometimes my mother can be a little frustrating. But, then, whose parents aren’t frustrating? “The mayor certainly didn’t have a problem with him. He’s doing all the right things, and then something like this shows up. I just can’t let him fail now.”
“So what’s the plan?” Fi asked.
Sun-tzu may have said, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer” more than fifteen hundred years ago, but that notion still applies when forming a strong counterinsurgency plan. If you really want to defeat a terrorist organization, which a gang certainly is, you need to understand their methodology, their aims and just how far they are willing to go to get what they want.
The best way to deal with a terrorist is to dictate the terms of the fight. If there are rules of engagement, it’s not all that terrifying to face an adversary. You know what kind of guns they have, you know what parcel of land they are after and you know just how much they are willing to lose. So to fight someone who leans on your fear, you need to bring him to a place where you have no fear at all.
“We give Junior what he wants,” I said. “We give him every single thing he demands. And then we make him wish he’d never stepped foot back in Miami again.”
“Oh, Michael,” Fiona said, her glee barely contained. “That sounds like a potentially violent and dangerous thing to do. Would you like me to get some armor-piercing rounds out of storage?”
Before I could answer, my cell rang. It was Sam.
“What do you have?” I asked.
“A hangover,” Sam said. “Or what do you call that feeling before a hangover when you’re not happy anymore?”
I put my hand over the mouthpiece and said to Fiona, “Brew some coffee. And do you have any bread?”
“I think I have some English muffins,” she said.
“Maybe run over to the store and get a loaf of something. Oh, and some Mylanta. Get some Mylanta for sure.”
“Will we be entertaining later, darling?”
“Sam’s been drinking pruno,” I said. “He sounds… off.”
That’s all Fiona needed to hear. “Say no more,” she said, and disappeared back into her house.
“Where are you?” I asked Sam.
There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Oh, hell, Mike, I think the cab left me at the wrong place. I told him to take me to your mom’s place, thinking maybe I’d get a bowl of oatmeal inside me, maybe some soup, maybe something made of lard, and then I sort of thought about that sofa in the living room, which always is very soft in the small of my back, and…”
“Sam,” I said. “Focus. Where are you?”
“In front of that strip club Mom’s Place. Over by the airport. Some very nice ladies seem to work here. Have you ever noticed how loud airplanes are, Mikey? It’s like they are filled with jet fuel or something. Just one big roaring noise.” Sam stopped speaking for a moment, which concerned me, until I heard him say, “Hello to you, sweetheart. What’s that say on your back? Oh? Oh, I’m a bad boy? You’re a bad girl…”
“Sam!” I shouted.
“Oh, sorry, Mike. You know what I like? Those tattoos women get on the small of their back. Never stops being sexy.”
“Sam,” I said, “I want you to step away from the strip club. Is there a gas station nearby? Something with a mini-mart?”
“Let me tell you something, Mikey. Those mini-marts are ruining the mom-and-pop stores. I won’t go into them anymore.”
“Sam,” I said, “you go into them every single day.”
“I’m having epiphanies tonight, Mikey. Things are changing, for sure.”
“How much did you drink, Sam?”
“It’s not about how much. It’s about how long. And I don’t know that answer, either.”
The reason people in prison drink pruno is so they can forget-for just a little while-why they are in prison. The downside, however, is that alcohol in pruno is so abusive, it can make you forget the day after you drank it, too, and maybe the next week or two if you’re not careful. And, of course, if it’s made incorrectly, it can just shut down your kidneys and then forever isn’t a very long time. Fortunately, K-Dog sounded like the kind of guy who had good recipes, and Sam didn’t sound like he was in renal failure, just regular failure.
“I want you to stand at least ten feet from the road,” I said. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. While you’re waiting for me, don’t go inside the strip club and don’t give anyone any money. And, Sam, please don’t drink any more.”
“Nothing to worry about, Mikey, because I’m never drinking again,” Sam said, which made me think this was much more serious than I ever could have imagined.
6
A properly trained operative understands that immediate tactical questioning of a detainee is the best way to get desired information. Wait until a person has been imprisoned for a few days, and you’re more than likely going to get useless patter. The reason is simple: If you’ve been taken into custody by U.S. officials, there’s good reason to believe that they aren’t going to kill you. It’s all about having the moral high ground, and enemy combatants have a pretty good idea what Americans will and will not do. However, if you detain someone on a roadside, put a gun to their head and demand information, fear tends to override rationality.
Unless, of course, the person you’re questioning is drunk on pruno. After I picked up Sam from the strip club, I brought him back to Fiona’s, stood him up in her front yard and hosed him down. This wasn’t in order to sober him up. Rather, Sam demanded he be hosed down because he was covered in dog hair and smelled of ethanol and peppers. Sam just wanted the hair off of him, but once Fi caught a whiff of him, she thought it best to give him a thorough cleaning outdoors versus inside her home.
Wash-down complete, I tossed Sam a towel, and Fi came out with a cup of coffee and an entire baguette.
“You have a nice evening?” I asked him once he was sufficiently dried and was happily chomping on the bread.
“Let me tell you something, Mikey: There’s nothing right about a drink you can make in your toilet, even if you’re not making it in a toilet anymore.”
“Good to know,” I said.
Sam riffled through his pockets and came out with his recorder. “I wired myself,” he said, and handed me the device. It was a digital device, which meant it could hold up to twelve hours of conversation. I checked the remaining time-there were only a few hours left.
“I thought you said K-Dog was your friend?”
“Mikey, I don’t remember my own name right now. I taped the conversation as a precaution. It was a good thing, wouldn’t you say?”
I hit PLAY on the recorder and spent about three minutes listening to Sam and K-Dog talking about how great it would be if they were a team on The Amazing Race. “You remember that?” I said.
“Mikey, you ever seen that show? We could win a million dollars.”
“Looks like you already have a partner,” I said. “You have an idea at what point you and K-Dog talked about Junior?”
“It was early,” Sam said. “And then it was late. I’m sorry, Mikey. I just didn’t want him to be offended, so I kept drinking with him.”
“When in Attica,” I said.
We went inside, and while Fiona tended to Sam-which is to say, while Fiona made Sam eat Tums and bread and forced him to drink a gallon of Gatorade-I tried making my way through Sam’s tape of himself. It turns out there’s nothing less entertaining than listening to drunks, particularly drunks who think they are being insightful. Eventually, I caught the thread of the conversation about Junior and even managed to make out the address Sam slurred into the recorder.