Tod Goldberg - The Giveaway

The twitch was coming back.

“You can change an environment overnight, but you can’t change the people inside of the environment immediately,” he said, his voice careful, measured. “Lessons have been learned.” He talked like someone who’d been reading manuals on corporate leadership.

“Expensive lessons,” I said.

“You think you’ll be able to do whatever you want to do for the rest of your life?” he asked. “Me? I’m fifty years old. My brothers are all doing time. You think I want to spend the next thirty years doing fed time? So I’m changing the way the Ghouls handle their business. Keep us protected and keep us in business. I’m clean. I intend to stay that way. Maybe I’ve got some dirty friends. Even Obama has a few of those, right?”

It was nice talk, but they’d killed Nick Balsalmo. They’d killed the men working the stash house. And they would have killed Bruce. But now I understood why, even though we’d threatened Clifford and Norman, we weren’t met by a dozen men with guns when we approached the bar.

“So, what,” Sam said, “you want some kind of corporate alliance with us? That what we’re talking here?”

Lyle laughed. “No. No, I do not. What I want is for you to stop embarrassing my people. Your arrival in town is a good object lesson. The ranks are bloated with idiots and cowards. Ten years ago? You’d already be dead. But you move fast. You’re nimble. I like that. You probably have my whole operation rigged, right? Know where all my weak points are. That’s how the Ghouls should operate, but no one here has any idea how to run a business. None of these guys ever worked in the military, so they’ve got no sense of structured command. All of them were raised on The Godfather but didn’t have sense enough to get mobbed up. So here they are with the Ghouls, happy to rally, happy to run meth. Living and dying over their colors. Me? I’m thinking internationally. I’m thinking about the brand. You understand?”

If I had to make an informed guess, it would be that Lyle Connors had not only read a few books on management structure but was also taking classes in the University of Miami’s continuing education program.

Maybe it was a condition of his parole.

Maybe he really wanted to change the way the Ghouls did business.

Maybe he just had nothing to do on Wednesday nights.

“You talking about action figures and lunch boxes?” I asked. “A Ghoul under every Christmas tree?”

“I’m talking about a binary approach to business,” he said and then I was sure he was taking night classes. “We do the drug game and then we have a legit side that isn’t just to keep the RICO off our asses. Not just kids’ charities once a year or bumper stickers like the Angels do. I’m talking about fantasy camps, video games, reality television shows. Taking this game to the next level.”

“You realize you’ll need to stop killing people,” I said. “No one wants to go to fantasy murder camp.”

“You’d be surprised,” Lyle said.

“I’m never surprised,” I said.

“Point is, men,” Lyle said, “there’s a role in this for you if you want it.”

“For us?” Sam said. “I thought you said you weren’t looking for alliances.”

“I’m not. I’m looking for someone to teach my people how to ride right. You two-and that woman-you got your roll down. I don’t know how many people you got backing you every time you go out, but the three of you come out like an army, like the army. You want this territory? You buy in. No war. No bloodshed. We make a deal, we make the Redeemers legit again, no one thinking you’re FBI. Everybody wins. Or you give up that Redeemer shit and those colors you’ve been holding, they become yours.”

Lyle Connors was smart. I had to give him credit for that. He recognized a situation that was undermining his ability to govern and he acted. Did he mean anything he said? It was hard to tell. There was nothing stopping him from letting us buy in and then killing us five seconds later. There was nothing stopping us from buying in and killing him five seconds later. But by making this offer, he forced our hand. What he wanted to know was if we were opportunists or if we were just in it for the quick score.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“No, thanks?” Lyle said. He sounded pretty sincere. I hated to let him down.

“We don’t go into business with Ghouls. Never have. Never will. I’d sooner mount up with bin Laden. And anyone coward enough to invite us in is no one I want to be associated with.” I stood up, which got Sam to stand up, too, though somewhat reluctantly. He was still working on his Quarter Pounder. “You got until midnight tonight,” I said. “Five hundred thousand, cash, or it’s a war you can’t win.”

“Show up at midnight,” he said, “you’ll have your answer.”

Real cool.

No pressure.

A man who has spilled blood on the street before acting like: What’s another couple bodies?

Before we walked out, Sam grabbed up his burger and a handful of fries. “Thanks for lunch,” he said. “Good luck with that video game. Let me know when you book the Ghoul-themed cruise, too, okay?”

When you’re out for revenge, you tend to lose the ability to think beyond the act of retribution, the fleeting emotion of righting a real or perceived wrong. While I didn’t care for the existence of the Ghouls Motorcycle Club, the fact was they hadn’t actually tried to come at me. They’d only come at Bruce Grossman because he made the error of robbing the wrong damn stash house. That he wanted to give back what he couldn’t use, while admirable, didn’t make him any less guilty of a crime, nor did the fact that he robbed them in order to provide medical care to his dying mother.

When you live in a civil society, you must adhere to the rules. Without rules, only the toughest, most aggressive of the pack will survive.

Bruce Grossman wasn’t tough.

Bruce Grossman wasn’t particularly aggressive.

Bruce Grossman wasn’t even a great bank robber. He was just a lucky one, whose adventures had become romanticized lore, such that even Fiona had heard of him and the FBI wanted to employ him.

And now I had to protect him, which meant two things.

I needed to dispose of the Ghouls and everything of theirs that Bruce possessed. If I could sell it all to the Ghouls, that would make for a perfect order of life, but I knew well enough that come midnight, there would be war.

Bruce Grossman had to stay dead. If he managed to get arrested again, the Ghouls would know, and then he would be dead again, but with a headstone and appropriate services.

I sat in my mother’s living room and explained both of these things to Bruce. He nodded his head once but then didn’t say anything at first. Sam and Fi were in the kitchen working on a laptop to get some pertinent information and pretending not to listen to our conversation, though every few seconds I heard Fiona sigh or mutter something like, “Oh, just put him on the rack, for God’s sake!” Luckily, Bruce’s hearing wasn’t so swift.

Zadie, my mother and Maria kept themselves busy at the kitchen table trading People magazines back and forth. I could tell my mother was getting jittery from the lack of tar in her body but she was somehow managing to not smoke inside her own home. My bout of childhood bronchitis cursed her.

“So,” Bruce said, as though he’d downloaded my thoughts, “you grew up in this house?”

“I did,” I said. “Nate, too.”

“And your dad, where’s he?”

“Dead,” I said. “But he haunts the linoleum in the laundry room.”

“And you liked it here?”

“Can’t say that I did.”

“Your brother? Did he?”