Tod Goldberg - The Bad Beat

“It was off the chain,” he said. “So, yeah, I can pay you with whatever is left.”

“You’re not going to pay me,” I said. “Don’t lose any sleep over it. What I need from you is every single piece of information that went back and forth between you and the Russians. Do you have that?”

“It’s all on my computers,” he said.

“Good,” I said. “All right. Why don’t you try to take another nap while Fiona and I step outside. Okay?”

There was a sweetness in my voice that I found nauseating. I made a note to myself never to have children. Or at least not helpless children.

“I’m not tired.”

“Then just sit here quietly,” I said.

Fiona and I got up to walk outside but Brent stopped us. “Look, out of all of this? I just want to find my dad and know he’s okay. He’s made a lot of mistakes in his life, but he’s still my father and I love him. I did this all for him.”

“I know,” I said. “And I’ll find him. I promise.”

We left Brent and walked down the stairs and out onto the street in front of my building. It was almost five o’clock and I was still alive. Not bad.

“What do you make of it, Michael?” Fiona asked.

“I don’t see Yuri Drubich coming after him that big for $150K,” I said. “That’s a lot of money, but not enough to send ten guys with explosives to Miami.”

“You think he’s lying?”

“No,” I said. “I think Drubich probably resold the information he had and now he’s in a serious pinch. I wouldn’t be surprised if he tried to kidnap Brent so that Brent could stand in front of some very angry men to explain his deception.”

“And then what?” Fiona said.

“And then they’d kill him.”

“Do you believe his father is still alive?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a classic shakedown the bookies are doing on him. If they got access to the bank accounts to make Brent think his father is still alive, well, that’s pretty smart. But I just don’t see these guys going after a kid. Most bookies, they’ve got a code. A terrible, stupid, dangerous code, but a code no less. Brent’s not in the game, so I can’t see them doing this to him if his dad was dead.”

“Maybe they’ll tire of him,” Fi said.

“Maybe when the money runs out.”

“Or when he runs out of blood,” she said. It was just a matter-of-fact statement, which made it all the more chilling. “Personally, Michael, I find these Russians far more dangerous. They blew up a building in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. What’s stopping them from blowing up your loft tomorrow if they find out Brent is here?”

“You,” I said.

“I was hoping you’d say that,” she said. “Please tell me I get to play dress-up.”

“You get to play dress-up.”

“And do I get to indiscriminately shoot people and devastate entire city blocks?”

“Probably not,” I said.

I took out my cell and called Sam. “You get rid of Sugar?” I asked after he answered.

“Yeah. Boy, Mikey, he’s pretty torn up. He said his best quality was his car.”

“He was right,” I said.

“What did you get from the kid?”

I told Sam what I knew and what I didn’t.

“So what’s our first move?” he asked.

“Well, your first move is to find out all you can about Brent’s father, Henry Grayson, and then tomorrow, why don’t you join me to meet with Big Lumpy. I have a feeling that might be a challenging conversation.”

Tracking down someone who has disappeared of their own accord is never an easy process. In fact, if it was up to him, Sam Axe would prefer to look for someone who’d been abducted. Abductors tend to leave evidence, because if you’re in the business of abductions, you’re probably not very bright, or you’re acting on impulse, or you’re acting on someone else’s impulse, which means you’re strictly doing work for hire and people doing work for hire don’t always pay really close attention to detail.

Which is maybe why, Sam realized, he hadn’t exactly prepared with his usual monastic dedication when Sugar initially called him for help. He was blinded by those Dolphins tickets. Well, he wouldn’t dwell on that. Or, well, he couldn’t if he wanted to, since Sugar had admitted he didn’t really have the tickets and was hoping Sam wouldn’t really ask for payment after all.

But anyway: Someone grabs you, there’s likely going to be some spilled blood, some broken glass, maybe even a witness. You disappear yourself, you’ve got time to clean up, to plan, to leave false trails. Maybe you even kiss your kid good-bye.

Not that Sam thought Henry Grayson was smart enough to do all of that, exactly, but that he left his son to deal with these bookies just made Sam angry. What kind of father does that to a son? Thing was, if Henry was really lucky-which he clearly wasn’t in light of his predicament-he might look upon leaving his son to deal with all of this as the ultimate good luck: The firebomb that destroyed his office had, as Michael had told him, insurance windfall written all over it. Plus, the guy was a notary and notaries were responsible people, right? Sam thought if you couldn’t depend on a notary, the very people put on this earth by God to make sure things got… notarized… well, who could you depend on? Not just everyone gets to use a fancy seal every day.

So Sam drove back over to Henry’s burnt-out husk of a business to do some poking around. When he’d been there earlier in the afternoon, all he saw was fire trucks and hoses and gawking neighborhood onlookers, all of which was to be expected. It wasn’t every day that an entire side of an office park was bombed. A little slice of Fallujah right in the middle of lovely Miami.

Now, however, the street was packed with late-model American sedans: Chryslers. Oldsmobiles. Mercurys. Sam even spied a couple Chevrolets, not an occurrence one usually witnessed in nature. This meant one of two things: insurance companies or federal employees. Homeland Security usually rolled up in SUVs, but lower-level CIA and FBI operatives typically got assigned Impalas and the like. If they were lucky, maybe they got a Chrysler Sebring with a moon roof. Not even spies got Aston Martins.

Judging by the clusters of men drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups, Sam decided that most of the assembled were insurance adjustors. In Sam’s experience, if something big was destroyed in some dramatic fashion, it was only a matter of time before the insurance companies showed up and began to set up their own coffee station. It was good public relations, Sam supposed, and made for good photo opportunities: “The Men of State Farm Pause with a Warm Cup of State Farm Coffee While Inspecting the Total Destruction of Hurricane Katrina. ” Plus, insurance guys preferred short-sleeved shirts with ties, whereas government types tended toward blue suits and Sam counted at least a dozen men with excessively pale forearms poking out of lightly starched white shirts. It was as if they all shopped at the same Marshalls.

Sam pulled up to one of the clusters and rolled down his window.

“Pardon me, boys,” he said, “but I’m looking for the agent in charge.”

The cluster looked at one another in confusion. It was very strange. It was as if once they all got together they couldn’t manage a single thought or action on their own. Maybe that’s what being in the caution business did to you. Finally, one of the men-the only one wearing a Windbreaker, Sam noted-stepped forward. “I guess that would be me,” he said.

“No,” Sam said. “Federal agent.”

“Oh, I don’t think anyone like that is here,” Windbreaker said. “We’ve been working the scene here for the last couple of hours and it’s just been fire and police.”