Tod Goldberg - The Bad Beat

Fiona stomped across the front lawn and into the street, saw where I was looking and then mumbled something under her breath and began rummaging in her purse. She mumbled something again, this time with a bit more vehemence, so I said, “What was that?”

Fiona looked up and her expression was… well, she seemed a touch on the angry side. Her face was a handsome shade of red. “I said, ‘We should just shoot them.’ Maybe you’ve heard me say that before?”

“We’re in the middle of a residential street, Fiona.”

“Maybe you haven’t noticed, Michael, but I have an open wound on my head.”

“I noticed.”

“And I turned my ankle-did you see that?”

I looked down. She was wearing, as usual, a nice pair of heels. “It does look a bit swollen.”

“While you and Sam were having beers with an evil scientist, I was in a fight for my life. So you’ll excuse me for not having much patience,” she said.

“Fi,” Sam said, “maybe you should just wait in the house. Let the physically fit handle this.”

“Where are you going to be, then, Sam?” Fi said and she headed off down the street.

“Uh, Fi,” I said.

“I’m in no mood for this,” Fiona shouted. She reached into her purse and pulled out a gun, not her Sig, I noticed, and then remembered what she’d told me. Nice that she already had a replacement. I didn’t anticipate her pulling another gun from her purse, too. She had both of her arms outstretched as she walked, which made for a rather striking image.

“You want me to run after her?” Sam asked.

“No,” I said. “She might kill you.”

“Is everything all right?” Brent asked. He’d moved to the middle of his lawn but couldn’t see the action.

“It sure is,” I said. “Just stay where you are.”

Fiona stood directly in between both SUVs, but was far enough away that I couldn’t hear her voice. By the way she waved her guns, however, I had the impression that she was stating her points emphatically. After another thirty seconds of this, both SUVs pulled away at a normal rate of speed. Even used their blinkers at the corner.

Fiona stuffed both of her guns back into her purse and walked back toward the house.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Some gentlemen who believe Henry Grayson owes them money,” she said.

“Bookies?”

“Loan sharks,” she said.

Not good. “What did you tell them?” I said.

“To get in line.”

“How much is he on the hook for?” Sam asked.

“They didn’t say,” Fiona said, “but enough that the kind gentlemen apparently have spotters somewhere on the street to let them know when someone shows up unannounced.”

“Great,” I said.

“But I convinced them to leave the house alone,” she said.

“Permanently?” Sam asked.

“I told them I worked for Yuri Drubich,” she said,

“and that if they valued their lives and the lives of their children they’d consider the debt a loss on this year’s earnings. Now, can we get on this? I have a lateevening appointment at a day spa to get rid of the ugly gash I have in my head. I’d like not to miss it.”

Fi brushed past us then, grabbed the house keys from Brent’s hands as he stood patiently on the porch and calmly let herself into the house.

“She seem a little agitated?” Sam asked.

If you want to get to know someone, look at their bookshelves. If they have row after row of self-help books, you can assume with absolute clarity that they are insane, since clearly if self-help worked, they wouldn’t need dozens of books on the topic. If they have books primarily suggested by Glenn Beck, you can be fairly certain that if they’re not home it’s because they’re busy looking for the black helicopters or checking on the birth records of every elected government official and thus won’t be back to bother you anytime soon. If they don’t have bookshelves, that’s a sign, too. Never trust someone who doesn’t read.

In Henry Grayson’s case, the bookshelves in his home office were filled with two kinds of books: ones on betting strategy-this included a fascinating work called Killing the Book, which, the cover blurb said, was written by “an ex-Mafia bookie” who “knew where the numbers and bodies were buried”-and then books on how to disappear.

The first books were easy enough to understand-he was a compulsive gambler who must have always been looking to end the losses. The second books, of course, spoke to his current predicament and they weren’t the kinds of books one generally found on the shelves at Barnes amp; Noble: Hiding from the Government: A Guide to Living Off the Grid; Faking Your Death for Profit; The Minutemen Survival Handbook and about fifty others of a similar ilk. None of these books were actual bound books; rather, they were bulky photocopied messes held together with paper clips or velo binding or gold brads.

Henry Grayson had spent a good deal of time scouring the dark corners of the Internet for source materials, which I admired-at least he wanted to get educated before he flew off-but the majority of books like these were written by crazy people for crazier people. The keys to disappearing were (1) don’t leave evidence sitting around and (2) stop creating new evidence-two things Henry Grayson had notably not done.

His office was decorated in modern-day-man-cavemeets-aging-geek: built-in bookshelves, two flat-screen plasma televisions (which went well with the plasmas in the living room, kitchen, master bedroom, guest room and the one in the garage, which seemed an odd place to keep an expensive television), a small desk decorated with old Star Wars action figures (including at least half a dozen different Boba Fetts), framed comic books and photos of Henry’s deceased wife and of Brent.

It was also surprisingly clean compared to the rest of the house, which was bachelor-dirty: old sports magazines on every available surface, dust bunnies under all of the furniture (which Brent assured me were there long before his father disappeared) and DVDs scattered throughout.

The desk itself, with its carefully laid-out calendar in the center, the action figures along the rim, and the phone placed at a perfect diagonal to everything else, made me think of a catalog. There was a stack of papers inside a wicker mail organizer that by themselves weren’t noteworthy-a flyer for a notary conference next January in Palm Desert, California, the receipt for a small donation to hurricane relief in Haiti and a Post-it reminding him to pay Brent’s tuition and housing bills-but together they painted an odd picture. Why keep those things?

There was something off about the office but I couldn’t exactly place what it was. The books might have given me an initial clue as to who he was, but the rest of the office told me something different. A Star Wars -obsessed notary who kept only one room in his entire home clean? And who needs two plasma TVs in one small room?

I went back to the bookcase and examined his reading again, my eyes landing on a book called Building Bunkers, Safe Houses and Underground Domestic Dwellings by a writer calling himself “John Q. Keep Me Out of the Public.” Cute. I pulled it out and flipped through the pages once, stopping to ponder the entirely inaccurate information about planting trip wires before I headed to the living room.

Fiona and Brent sat on the sofa going through stacks of old bills and bank statements. Sam was in the kitchen tinkering with a desktop computer that looked to be at least fifteen years old, which made it the perfect age for Sam’s computer skills.

“Would you like some light reading?” I said to Fiona. I handed her the book but she just set it on the coffee table. She’d calmed down some. Or at least enough to patiently go through stacks of unopened mail Brent had found in his father’s bedroom, in the trash can and overflowing out of the mailbox.