Tod Goldberg - The fix

"If you like this sort of thing," Sam said.

"I could get on a boat from here," I said. "Sail all the way up the Eastern Seaboard. Park in New York. Hop on a train, be in Washington D.C. in no time. Start pounding on doors. Who'd ever know?"

"I would," Sam said.

"Or I could just go due south. Find a sandbar and call it home. Forget this burn notice and everything else."

"Ah, Mikey, that's not your life," Sam said.

And the truth, the sad truth, was that he was right.

There's nothing easy about having a lot of actual cash money, particularly if your job description is something other than armored-car driver. If you sell drugs, extort cash from socialites or happen to be running an international cartel funded by Colombians and protected by Russians, or just happen to be a grifter with a way with women, you still need to find a place to keep your money other than the bank, because a million actual dollars weigh a ton. Literally. You get a million dollar bills, they will weigh a ton. You get your million dollars broken down into hundreds, it's only twenty pounds.

You still need to find a way to pay your bills. So you have to clean that money, get it into the system so that you can live.

Because even if you're a malicious crime lord or evil genius, you probably still have cable, water, power and HOA fees to take care of at your secret hideout, which, usually, is just a very large home in a master-planned community since underground lairs, hollowed-out volcanoes and bases on the dark side of the moon have become harder and harder to come by. But beyond that, if someone hands you a check for a million dollars, you can't just deposit it and you can't just cash it.

Fortunately, Miami is only a puddle jumper away from the Caribbean, where illegal banking is practically a spectator sport. Or, if you're really industrious, you can go on a run from the Caribbean down to Guyana, where money laundering and the drug trade make up a sum close to fifty percent of the country's economy. So if you're a drug dealer, have a few million dollars in American cash and the ability to set up a nice shelter corporation-say, a timber company, which in Guyana is the favored business of drug dealers looking to get legit return on their dollars-and have a fast boat, or a decent plane, or enough contacts, you can do just about anything to get your money back into the U.S. in a way that it comes back smelling like Tide.

I had a pretty good idea that the money being moved around the perimeter of Cricket O'Connor's life was being cleaned by someone, somewhere. First rule of dealing with assholes: Follow the money.

"When I was robbing banks for the IRA, it wasn't so difficult to move money," Fiona said. I'd gone to her condo in the marina after meeting with Cricket, and Sam went off to do a little snooping. I filled Fiona in on the details, plus some of my suspicions, and then sat at her kitchen table and thumbed through a stack of society magazines that Cricket O'Connor had given me earlier in the day, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man she called Dixon Woods in the background of someone else's photo spread, since she told me the two of them had "made the scene" whenever he was in town. The "scene" looked to be something like the senior prom, but with elaborate ice sculptures instead of balloon art and no one under fifty-five to be found, but in pretty much the same gaudy outfits.

While Fiona cooked a Persian dish that had a lot of onions, peppers and lamb in it, and that smelled vaguely like the month I spent living above a cafe in Iran a few years back, I also tried to figure out how to approach the whole Natalya issue. I hadn't told Fiona about Natalya yet, knowing that it would be the sort of thing that would probably cause her to purchase guns for her own personal use, and I wanted to control that situation for as long as I could.

"You walked in," Fiona continued, her voice downright wistful, "shot a few people in the knees, locked a few others in the vault and then took what you needed. You drove down the street, ran up the stairs of the flat, dumped the money out on the bed, rolled around a bit and then went out for a pint."

"A simpler time," I said. The magazine I was reading-and by reading, I mean flipping through with a growing unease-was something called Palm Life, a magazine dedicated to, according to the slug line on its masthead, "the good life and golden years beneath the palms." There weren't any actual stories in the magazine, just elaborate photo spreads with a descriptive paragraph about who was in the picture and why those people were, I guess, living the good life beneath the palms. "Tell me something, Fi. What is the allure of being seventy and wearing a tiger-print miniskirt?"

"Being trashy isn't just for young women anymore, Michael," she said. Fiona set a plate of sizzling vegetables and meat in front of me and took the magazine from my hands. "You could do quite well in this world. Find yourself a refurbished wife and just stand by her side while she gets her picture taken. You'd need a better tan, though. And a pair of yellow pants wouldn't hurt, apparently."

"If that's the good life, I'll stick with whatever this is."

"It's funny how none of these women have any wrinkles," she said, flipping the pages.

"None that you can see." I ate a few bites of the dish. It was surprisingly tasty. "When did you become such a good cook?"

"Your mother and I are taking an online cooking class together," she said. She'd stopped on a double-page spread of a pool party at some mansion. There were men in Speedos who would have been better off in girdles.

"When I was a kid," I said, "if it wasn't made from a box of macaroni and cheese or wasn't served in a tin foil dish courtesy of Swanson's, it wasn't homemade."

"You're a little old to be blaming your bad childhood for anything," she said. "At least not anything you've done since you met me."

Fiona was probably right. But I'd learned plenty about being a spy by being a kid. First improvised-explosive device I ever made was in the backyard of a neighbor's house after Nate and I were kicked out one evening for complaining about the culinary options. You want to blow something up but are afraid you just don't have the skill set? Go into your garage, grab some disinfectant. Better: If you live in a place like Miami, you probably have a high-grade pool cleaner, but even if you don't, your local home-improvement store does. Buy a gallon. Grab some liquid soap.

Mix them together.

Stand back.

You're done.

Potassium permanganate and glycerin: best friends for young arsonists and prospective spies alike. You have children and want to get their attention away from their iPods, video games and the Internet? Teach them to blow things up.

We saw our dad create that particular explosive concoction in the garage one afternoon by accident. It's one of my few good memories of him. Anyway, it taught me how to make things go bang during a bad situation.

Which got me thinking about Dixon Woods again. I had to figure out a way to draw him out, get close enough to him to figure out where the money was, or where it had gone, and why he needed it in the first place. I figured if he just wanted a quick score, he could have had one. Coming back for more, getting married, all that-it screamed of intricacy. Greed was one thing. But this kind of personal involvement was something different.

"You say you're doing something online with my mother?" I said.

"Online. Offline. We are getting very close." Fiona was already working through another issue of Palm Life, this one with a picture of Priscilla Presley gracing the cover. She sat on the hood of a Bentley beneath a headline trumpeting a charity called "Hound Dogs for Humanity." Fiona flipped a page and I saw her eyebrows rise in actual surprise, rare coming from Fiona. She slid the magazine over to me. "How do you dance when you're hooked to an oxygen tank?"