Tod Goldberg - The End Game

“Sure, Walt.”

Walt smiled, which made Sam recoil. Man, those teeth looked strange. They were just too white, and his gums were too pink and his tongue, well, his tongue was too gray. Sam made a mental note that when he retired he was going to brush his teeth three times a day, just to make up for whatever karmic tarnishing was going on this day. “You think you could take out my neighbor’s parakeet? It chirps all night long and keeps me up like you wouldn’t believe.”

“I’m not in the assassination business,” Sam said, and Walt seemed disappointed.

“Well, next time,” he said.

Next time, Sam thought, he’d ring up a different buddy.

Sam’s original plan was to make some phone calls about the list of names, but it was too damn early. It wasn’t even seven thirty a.m. by the time he got out of Roasters ’n’ Toasters, which just wasn’t right. Who retires so they can wake up at the ass-crack of dawn? He’d go to the Carlito, but he still had another three and half hours before the doors opened and the scenery picked up.

Besides, he had a niggling sense that something just wasn’t adding up about the names on the list, even before calling on them. If Christopher Bonaventura were in town, wouldn’t he be staying at a place like the Setai? Sam didn’t think a guy like Bonaventura would have the moxie to set up a Web site as first-rate as the one he’d just viewed, nor did he really think Bonaventura was behind the kidnapping in the first place, but he figured that getting a jump on the other side of the problem with Gennaro would solve some issues later on, so he called the one buddy he knew who might be up at this early hour and who might know where to find visiting mafia dignitaries.

Darleen worked organized crime in New York when Sam first met her, and he was pretty sure they had a night of passion right around the turn of the millennium, back when everyone- especially everyone who was privy to inside information about what they feared was likely to be the total destruction of the American infrastructure-thought they could write checks that would never be cashed. Fact was, he just wasn’t 100 percent certain about it. It was a long night. There were several bottles of champagne involved, and all of it happened in an unmarked building in Newark that housed an alphabet soup of secret agencies. Nothing good ever happened in Newark, though technically, neither of them were even there. Anyway, she’d never mentioned it and he’d never mentioned it, and that was okay. Sam didn’t think that if his performance had been notable there would be this silence, so he thought not poking a stick into the issue was likely to keep the specter of disappointment away from both of them.

At any rate, Darleen was now working in Miami, proctoring the old-school five families, the new-school Russians and Cubans, the executive branches of the Bloods, Crips and Mexican Mafia, and whoever else came along through the Port of Miami wanting to organize and do crime. It meant she had a lot of late nights that looked like early mornings, so he wasn’t too worried about calling her before eight. Though as he dialed her number, he tried to figure out what she looked like at eight a.m. from his previous recollection, but just kept coming up with the sensation of pain in the back of his skull, which was likely a champagne hangover flashback and not anything exciting or acrobatic being conjured.

“Sam Axe,” Darleen said, “I must say I wasn’t expecting a call from you this fine morning. You locked in a cell in Kabul or something?”

“No, no,” Sam said, “I’m just picking up a protein shake and then heading off for my morning ocean swim.”

“I’d like to see that,” Darleen said.

Sam wanted to believe she was being flirtatious, but he got the sense that she was being facetious. Maybe he was wrong about that night. That whole “partying like it was 1999” business did tend to dull the old cerebrum. “Listen, Darleen, small favor.”

“Small?”

Hmmm. Now he really wasn’t sure. There was a lot of subtext to this woman. A lot of levels. A lot of ramps. He started thinking of her like a parking garage and realized it was really far more than he could reasonably be asked to deal with before noon. Tough to be really smooth when Regis and Kelly are still on in most houses. Never mind he’d already spent far too long talking to Walt, which was like intellectual antifreeze.

“Yeah,” he said. “Tiny.” Be humble, he thought, just go with it. “I’m trying to track down Christopher Bonaventura. You got any idea where I might be able to find him this week?”

There was a pause on the other end of the line, a change in the energy of the phone call, and Sam recognized that dropping Bonaventura’s name into the middle of a nice chat that may or may not have been reflective of a brief sexual liaison about a decade ago might have been a surprise. “You’ve got no reason to be looking for Christopher Bonaventura.”

Normally, Sam liked that kind of direct talk. Simple orders. Do this. Do that. Put it there. Nice thing about being a SEAL was that you pretty much always knew how your boss felt about you and what was expected of you; there was not a lot of emotional negotiation. But this was more like a personnel directive from human resources, both for today and tomorrow and probably the foreseeable future.

“I don’t even need to talk to him,” Sam said. “I just need to know where he’s staying while he’s in town.”

“Why would you think he’s in town?”

The problem about digging a hole is that if you’re not careful, someone is liable to push you into it.

“I saw that explosion yesterday and figured it had to do with him,” Sam said. It was worth a shot, he figured, since Gennaro had mentioned it the night previous. And if Gennaro knew, well, then the FBI knew. And if the FBI knew, then everyone with a security clearance above a janitor at the field office over on Northwest 2nd Avenue probably already had a peek at the incident report. It was a nice office, really, with strong, soundproof walls and a good location. There was a bar across the street called the Dorsal Fin where, for the price of a shot, and on a particularly slow news day, you could probably get a few mundane state secrets.

Darleen stayed silent. When she finally did speak, all she said was, “And?”

“And, well, I’m sort of working with a friend who has business interests affected by this terrible calamity,” Sam said. When Darleen didn’t reply immediately, he added, and kept adding and adding and adding, “And as you know, I’m concerned about the intercoastal byways and that was a significant environmental accident out there, which, when you take into consideration the migration patterns of the seagull, and the swallows of Capis trano which, as you know, are endangered, could be considered a problem. Internationally. As you know.”

Sam was of the opinion that if you added the words “as you know” to anything, people tended to pretend as if they did know, if only to not seem comparatively ill informed. It was a skill he’d gleaned working with intelligence people. No one wants to seem like a moron, even if admitting they don’t know something would likely make them seem all the more reliable.

“Sam,” she said, “he got away with killing his own father. You don’t just walk up and talk to him unless you have a good reason to have the mafia on your ass. These guys are true blood killers, not a bunch of Newark posers.”

Newark.

Sam was pretty sure that was a signal.

Really, it didn’t matter. He’d recently had a brush with unwanted marriage, and then there was the fact that he was technically still married to an ex-hippie, but it was useless to dwell on the past. Well, maybe not useless, but not advisable, anyway. Faced with dealing with history or dealing with the moment, Sam always advocated the moment. It was controllable. Besides, what was nice about his current position in life was that he got to spend a long time at the old romantic buffet, but even still you never knew when your favorite place might get shut down with an E. coli break-out. Or, in the case of Veronica, whom he didn’t hate, certainly, just didn’t want to, uh, spend forever with, another marriage proposal. Though he sure missed his Cadillac.