Tod Goldberg - The Reformed

But sitting with this girl-whose name was Leticia, she’d learned-wasn’t so bad. Leticia was twenty-three and had a seven-year-old boy that she still called a baby. And, unfortunately, the father of the baby was a Latin Emperor whose nickname was Killa.

“Killa?” Fiona said.

“He got it on the street,” Leticia said, “and it just stuck. Now whenever someone gets killed anywhere near him, they bring his ass in. It’s stupid.”

“You call yourself Killa,” Fiona said, “it’s bound to cause suspicion.”

Leticia took a sip of coffee. They were sitting outside at Cafe Flordita, a Cuban coffee shop just a few blocks from the Orange Bowl. They’d been there twenty minutes, and in that time Fiona had learned everything she really needed to know to understand why Leticia was snooping for the LE: Either she did their bidding, or Killa told her he’d take their son and she’d never see him again. This wasn’t a custody battle, just the basics of street life, which Leticia understood even if Fiona couldn’t wrap her mind around it entirely. Different rules for different streets, she supposed.

“I wanna get away from him, from this whole life, you know? I did time. I got this shit all over my face and you know, for what? It’s stupid. I just want to take my baby and get out of Miami.”

“Then you should do that,” Fiona said.

“Father Eduardo? He’s got me training to be a dental assistant starting in the fall. Paying for it and everything. So I need to be here for that. I couldn’t pay for that out of my own pocket.” Leticia sighed, and Fiona saw that her eyes had welled up. “I just, you know, I got this thing to deal with first, and then I can do whatever I want. It’s not even illegal, and, you know, Father Eduardo is LE from back in the day, so I think that, you know, it’s all good.”

If anything was patently not all good, it was certainly this situation. Fiona wanted to tell Leticia that she was going to help her out of this situation, that there was a way out of it all that wouldn’t involve her working with the Latin Emperors. But Fiona also knew that the poor girl was unsteady on her feet right now, giving up all of this information to a perfect stranger, which meant she’d give up even more to people who really had hooks into her.

Women. Fiona just didn’t get most of them. She was, she had to admit, annoyed by many women. Leticia wasn’t weak-she had those scars, after all, and was out in public doing her thing, even if her thing was filled with regret, and that took a spine and a will and Fi respected that, God knows-but she compromised emotionally. She probably loved Killa, too, even if she said she didn’t. Or loved him enough not to run to the police and tell them she was being blackmailed by him. Though for a girl who’d done time, just being around… Killa… probably constituted a violation of some kind. The poor girl had made a series of bad choices in her life, or made a series of no choices whatsoever, and now here she was, about to be in the thick of a criminal conspiracy, too.

“If I were you, you know what I’d do?” Fiona said.

“Rob a bank?” Leticia actually smiled when she said that, which made Fiona happy. Somewhere was a person inside there.

“No, I’m not doing that anymore,” Fiona said. “I’d pick up your son from school tomorrow and I’d just keep driving. Don’t stop until you get to Atlanta or Charlotte or New York or Canada. And then when you get to wherever you are, you call Father Eduardo and tell him that Killa was making you do things you didn’t want to do and that he threatened to take your son and that you’re not coming back until he’s gone.”

Leticia nodded and then welled up again. “That’s my dream. But that takes money, and I don’t have enough to even get gas in my car to make it to Sarasota.”

“If I could get you money,” Fiona said, “would you go?”

“Why would you do that? You don’t even know me.”

“I was you,” Fiona said. That wasn’t strictly true, but it was for the role she was playing, and it was also what life could have been like if she’d been the type of woman who let other people rule her.

“Anyway, I got a parole officer,” she said. “I can’t just relocate like that. It would take a lot of paperwork. And you know Killa? He’s got visitation rights. It would be kidnapping, wouldn’t it?”

That someone named Killa had any rights made Fiona sick. But the reality of the situation made Fiona sicker. She needed to do something for the girl. She’d just have to tell Michael that she’d picked up another client for him.

“Let me talk to some friends I have,” Fiona told the girl.

“Why are you being so nice to me?”

“Someone has to be.” Fi reached into her purse and pulled out a pen and a scrap of paper and scrawled out one of her safe numbers. “This is my cell,” she said. “You find yourself in a bad position, you feel like you need help before I can get you the help you need, I want you to call me.”

“This is crazy,” Leticia said. “You don’t even know me.”

“We tough girls have to stick together,” Fiona said.

Leticia smiled faintly, and for the first time she looked to Fiona like the young girl she absolutely was. She took the piece of paper with Fiona’s number on it and slipped it into her own purse. “I better go or I’ll be late to get back to the phones,” Leticia said. “I don’t like to disappoint Father Eduardo if I can avoid it.”

When plotting a counterinsurgency, it’s important to recognize that not all of your decisions can be based on what would be considered, in everyday life, acceptable ethics. Breaking the law for the good of the country is practically a right of passage for American presidents, so imagine how often it happens with spies.

But if you’re leading a counterinsurgency operation, you must gauge the moral well-being of your subordinates after these activities and be prepared to act as a sounding board for them or, if needed, remove them from duty. What this means is that in a war zone, you may need to order a Black Hawk in to medevac a soldier to an appropriate mental facility. But if you’re fighting in close quarters, with a small fighting unit, a good leader may have to serve as the mental health provider.

Which is why when I called Barry-a man with exceptionally questionable ethics and usually very little guilt about it-I could tell that he needed the equivalent of two Xanax and a good nap, but that he was pondering something more along the lines of a guy with two guns showing up at his door and offering him a dirt nap. So I did the one thing I could think of: I invited him to my mother’s house for lunch. Sometimes a guy just needs a sandwich with crusts cut off to feel better about himself.

Plus, my mother’s house was a safe place. If anyone from the Latin Emperors happened down the street, the neighborhood watch commander would scuttle an F-16.

I’d been at my mother’s for only a few minutes when Barry knocked on the door. My mother opened it, saw him looking pitiful there on the front porch and did the one motherly thing she could do in this instance: She gave him hell.

“Did someone kill your dog?” she asked by way of greeting.

“No, Mrs. Westen,” Barry said. “I’ve just had a hard week. Busy time in my line of work.”

“You think you have it any harder than anyone else?”

Barry looked over my mother’s shoulder at me-she hadn’t let him in yet-and I gave him the universal sign of surrender. “No, Mrs. Westen,” Barry said. “I guess I don’t.”

“Well, then wipe off your feet, take off those ludicrous sunglasses and come inside. Michael’s been waiting for you for hours.”