Tod Goldberg - The fix

In order to get to the registration desk, you have to walk through the middle of these two bars, which might be why so few people ever end up checking in. It's not a family environment, unless you're practicing to make one, which is why I should have been curious from the get-go that my mother wanted to dine there this afternoon, but sometimes, with my mother, it's better to just nod your head and agree than to actually listen and interpret.

The registration desk isn't actually a desk. It's a twelve-foot-long S-shaped aquarium filled with goldfish, though no actual goldfish, and the people standing behind it all look fashionably bored tapping away at computers or talking on their Bluetooths. I walked up to the one fashionably bored person who wasn't otherwise engaged. She was about twenty-five, looked about sixteen, and probably thought I looked a hundred.

"I'm Michael Westen," I said.

The girl nodded once, tapped a few keys on her keyboard and handed me a room key without looking back up. "Ms. Copeland is expecting you in room one fifty-three," she said. "She also asks that if you have a gun, to leave it in our safe."

I smiled, because, sometimes, when you're faced with the absurd, it's good to do just that sort of thing. "That's not going to happen," I said. I slid the room key back across the aquarium. "What's option two?"

The girl started tapping on the keyboard again, still not looking up, which was too bad because I was still smiling. "Yes, Mr. Westen, I see," she said. "Ms. Copeland is expecting you in cabana six"

I turned around in time to see two security guards yank three writhing bodies from a cabana. "Will the sheets be changed?" I asked.

"Of course, Mr. Westen," she said. She tapped something on her keyboard again.

"What are you typing?"

The girl stopped typing, but still didn't look up. "Nothing, Mr. Westen," she said.

"Then why are you typing?"

"Just following Ms. Copeland's directions," she said.

I leaned over the aquarium and turned the computer monitor so I could see it. Under Special Instruc tions it said: Keep typing until Mr. Westen leaves the counter. Do not make eye contact. I spun the monitor back so that it faced the girl.

"What's your name?" I said.

"Star," she said. She was already typing again.

You never meet a woman in Miami named Sue anymore. An entire generation of women has decided that adopting stripper names sounds somehow more interesting. "What's your real name?" I said.

The typing paused. "Joanne," she said quietly.

"Joanne," I said, "look at me."

The girl tilted her eyes up but her head remained firmly downcast. "I'm just trying to do my job," she said.

"I understand that," I said, "but your job sucks. Now lift your head up and look at my face." Joanne did as I asked. "My name is Michael Westen. I have a gun-that's true-but in my case it's okay. I have a license. Or, well, I did. It's confusing. My point is this, Joanne: you need to quit your job the next time you're asked to tell someone to stow their gun in the company safe. You understand that that request is not normal, don't you, Joanne? You understand that if you ask the wrong person to do that, it's likely they'll shoot you in the face, don't you, Joanne?"

"I guess," she said.

"There's no guessing here. You either understand or you don't."

"Okay, yeah, I understand."

"Good," I said. "Now, Joanne, tell me something. Have you ever met Ms. Copeland?"

"Of course," she said. "She's the general manager. I see her every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. I'm trying to get on Wednesdays, too, but things have been so hectic with my modeling and stuff, but it's, like, a toss-up, you know, because I can go on an audition or I can just be here and hope that someone notices me…"

In addition to having the names of strippers, every woman in Miami is trying to be a model, which I've always thought was like aspiring to be a mannequin. Who would be interested in someone who posed their entire life? If there's one thing that has always returned me to Fiona, eventually, it's that the only photos of her in print have been where she's in the background of some burning wreckage. "Joanne," I said, "stop speaking." She did. "How long have you worked here?"

"Forever."

"How long is forever these days?"

"Almost a month."

"And has Ms. Copeland been here the whole time?"

Joanne, who, really, should have rechristened herself Black Hole if she wanted to be more personally accurate, tapped a finger against her chin. I waited while she thought things through, though I had a pretty good sense already of what I was walking into. The Hotel Oro had all the hallmarks of the perfect cover job for an operative-a transient population of employees, most of whom were just waiting for that big break (which likely meant that they were hoping The Real World put out a casting call), guests who didn't stay long enough to notice anything peculiar and a job that generally required no work whatsoever.

"I think she got here two weeks ago," Joanne finally decided, though it sounded absolutely possible that Joanne could be wrong, possible that Ms. Copeland's first day started about five hours previous.

"Thank you, Joanne," I said. "Why don't you check your computer and see if Ms. Copeland has given you the okay to let me walk over to the cabana?"

Joanne clicked away. "Yes, Mr. Westen, your cabana is ready."

"Excellent," I said. "You may now resume staring idly at your keypad and typing, if you don't think it's too late to keep your job."

Joanne shrugged. "Whatever," she said. "I've got an audition for an Abercrombie shoot after work today, anyway."

I would have wished Joanne good luck, but my sense was that if I were to wish her anything, it would have less to do with luck and more to do with common sense, but I've found wishing people good common sense is rarely a nice way to depart. So, instead, I just gave her a little nod meant to connote a larger, deeper understanding between the two of us.

Besides, my larger concern at that point was trying to figure out who this Ms. Copeland really was. The name "Copeland" made me think she was British, but British agents rarely have anything against their American counterparts, apart from armory envy. When you're working undercover, it's important to keep your backstory as close to your own as possible so that you don't trip yourself up being more convoluted than you need to be. If you like pepper steak in real life, so does your cover. If you went to high school in Miami in the 1980s, so did your cover. And if your last name is Copeland in cover, then your real last name probably is something very close to that as well, at least something that sounds like it, even better if your cursive scrawl might normally approximate the same letters, too. You spend your entire life signing your name one way and then suddenly have to sign an entirely different name, and it's likely you'll screw up at least once, and one time is all it will take to get you killed. In addition, even a halfway decent handwriting specialist would be able to point out the pregnant pauses in your penmanship, the deliberation over a letter that you'd normally move fluidly through, and could thus point you out as a fraud.

I ran the name through my head, chopped off letters, thought about different iterations and decided that, in about thirty seconds, I was going to either have a chat with an old friend or I was going to be strangled to death with a bedsheet. If the person was who I thought it was going to be, there wouldn't be much wiggle room between the two, but I did think it was unlikely that any employee of the hotel-be it just a cover or not-would want to try to explain the bloodstains all over so much fine white fabric.

Standing in front of my assigned cabana was one of those guys who think lifting weights will make him a good fighter. Lifting weights will make you strong. Lifting weights will make you lose fat and gain muscle. Lifting weights will not give you a strong chin or teach you how to defend yourself when someone who weighs a hundred pounds less than you is punching you in the throat. To be a good fighter, flexibility is an asset, whereas muscle mass will help you if someone tries to stab you, but won't change anything if they poke you in the eye. Guys like this, your average bouncer, might know how to get someone drunk and stupid to submit, of they might have the strength to pick you up and throw you through a window, but they're probably no use to anyone if you happen to kick them in the knee. Bulky muscle is slow. Lean, manicured muscle is fast. You want lean and manicured.