Tod Goldberg - The Reformed

“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.

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.

“How’s he doing?” I asked Fiona.

“I’d say he’s about fifty-fifty,” she said.

“Of what?”

“Alcohol and animal fats. There’s nothing human about him yet. Might not be for another ten hours or so.”

“Is he safe to leave?”

“Only if you don’t mind him choking to death on his own vomit.”

“There’s a field trip I’d like to take tonight,” I said. I handed her the address I scrawled down from Sam’s slurred words. “This is where Junior Gonzalez has paperwork dropped off. I’d like to take a look at what he’s planning.”

“Shall we just drop Sam off back at that strip club? Pay a nice girl named Star twenty dollars to babysit him?”

“A good idea. But, no.” I picked up my cell phone and made a call. “Ma,” I said when my mother answered (on the first half ring), “I need a favor.”

The address K-Dog gave Sam wasn’t in the projects where the Latin Emperors have operated for years with impunity, or even in Miami proper, but in a new development of family-style houses in Homestead, about forty minutes south of downtown Miami and only a few miles north of the southern Everglades, and a few miles west of the air force base. And only a few miles away from the women’s prison my new friend the scarred receptionist spent her idle time in before getting a job with Eduardo.

“Are you sure we’re in the right place?” I asked Fiona. We were parked on the side of a road that headed into a planned community called Cheyenne Lakes. The blacktop we’d been driving on previously had turned into cobblestone pavers, and there was a not-very-discreet up-lit sign that proclaimed THE KIND OF LIFE YOU DESERVE IS RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER perched on a low berm of green grass that rolled… right around the corner.

“These are the directions you printed out,” Fi said. “It would help if you had GPS in this car instead of an eight-track deck.”

“GPS didn’t come standard in Chargers until 1975,” I said. “Let me see the directions.” Fiona handed me the paper. Everything was correct. This didn’t smell right. “What is a Latin Emperor doing living out here?”

“Golfing?” Fiona said.

I checked my watch. It was near 10:00 P.M. I rolled down my window and listened for a moment. You could almost hear people snoring already. A golf cart came from around the corner, where my better life presumably lived, and I could make out the form of a security guard, even in the dark, behind the wheel. Security guards tend to sit with a supererect posture, as if they’ve been taught at rent-a-cop school that good posture equals authority.

“Company,” I said.

“Do you want me to shoot him?”

“Let’s talk to him first,” I said.

The cart pulled up next to my driver’s-side window so the guard would be face-to-face with me. This is something they probably also teach at rent-a-cop school: Park your golf cart like cops park their cars when they’re talking in the Denny’s parking lot. “Lost?” the guard said. He didn’t even bother to say hello, which I found rude.

“Sure am,” I said. “I was stationed at the base out here, oh, gosh, ten years ago? Eighty-second Airborne. And I wanted to show my girlfriend the old lover’s lane. We’re down from Atlanta for the week. Guess it’s been paved over?”

The guard nodded gravely. He had a short haircut and the square jaw of a military man, but also possessed the unmistakable body of a civilian: a perfectly round gut, arms that showed the care and confidence of a man who spent his time at the gym doing only curls and a watch too gaudy to be real. He also had a name tag that said his name was Lieutenant Frank, which I took to mean his first name was Frank, because he certainly wasn’t an actual lieutenant in any real service. Being a lieutenant for a rent-a-cop firm is like being a chef at McDonald’s.