Tod Goldberg - The Bad Beat

When you’re a spy, repetition becomes second nature. Spend ten days in a cave in Afghanistan staring at the same tent waiting for something, anything, to happen and you either learn how to avoid the perils of boredom or you risk blowing your mission or, worse, getting yourself killed. So you learn how to play games with your mind. You catalog. You assess. You occasionally see if you can remember every song you learned at Silver Spur camp that one summer you and your brother were sent there for “accidentally” blowing up your neighbor’s Fiat. And then, when your shot comes, you take it, get out and move on to the next repetitive exercise in some other foreign land. Because when you’re a spy, you live for the five seconds of adrenaline that result from weeks of paper preparation and solitary scouting.

Which is why, against my better judgment, I agreed to go with my friend Sam Axe on an errand. It was the kind of errand that required me to bring a MAC-10 with me, which was fine. It’s always better to be overprepared than underprepared in these situations.

We pulled up across the street from an office park on Northeast Fifth Street, just a few miles from my loft. It was one of those 1970s-era one-story bungalow-style office parks where businesses could actually hang a sporty shingle advertising their notary services, just as Grayson Notary amp; Associates had done. It was quaint, in a way that was being eradicated from Miami one Coconut-Grove-mauve-colored-open-air-shopping-district at a time.

I’d agreed to go with Sam on his errand primarily because he’d shown up at my loft looking more vexed than usual, as if maybe he hadn’t had his proper number of mojitos yet, which, for a Saturday, was troubling. More troubling, however, was that he asked me if there was an extra MAC-10 around that he could borrow for the afternoon. And also that he was dressed in a navy blue suit.

“An extra?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I let Fiona borrow my favorite one a couple weeks ago when we shot it out with those bikers.”

“Which bikers?”

“You know, the murderous ones. Not the vengeful ones. Or the ones who kidnapped that kid. You remember. The bloodthirsty, evil, murderous bikers bent on killing.”

“Ah, yes,” I said.

“Anyway,” he said, “I’ve got a little thing I gotta do today that would be helped along with a MAC-10.”

“Why don’t I come with you?” I said, figuring, naturally, that if I came there was less of a chance that Sam would actually use the MAC-10.

“Oh, Mikey, this isn’t anything you need to be mixed up in. It’s just a favor for a buddy of mine. Some freelance intimidation of a bad guy.”

“You don’t need to pay me, Sam,” I said.

“That’s great news, Mikey,” Sam said, “because I’m actually a little short right now.”

“Really,” I said. I’d known Sam Axe for the better part of the last twenty years and during that time he’d almost always been a little short. But since I returned to Miami a few years ago (minus my cover, my spy credentials burned, my life thrown into regular tumult as I looked first for the people who burned me and then, later, for a way out of their net of deception), Sam has been in a slightly better financial situation. As a former Navy SEAL, he has skills, along with those of my ex-girlfriend (and occasional gunrunner) Fiona, that have allowed the three of us to earn a better-than-government salary helping people solve rather delicate problems. “I’m happy to help, Sam. Makes me feel needed.”

“Thing is, Mikey,” Sam said, “it’s just one of those jobs that really feels beneath your time. You’ve got bigger fish to fry. This fish, it’s like a rainbow trout, and I feel like you’re out there fighting a barracuda on the line. One of those boys with big old snapper teeth.”

“Sam,” I said, “whatever it is you’re attempting to avoid telling me? It’s not making me want to help you. And that means I don’t want to lend you my MAC-10, either.”

“See,” Sam said, “the point of that last bit? I was hoping you’d just give me the gun and then later on, when things got bad, I’d call you and ask for help and then you couldn’t ask me any more questions, because it would be too late. It’s how we do business, Mikey, and it works. This is messing up my whole plan.”

“Fine,” I said. I left Sam in my kitchen, went upstairs and then came back with a duffel bag filled with guns. “Here,” I said and handed the bag to Sam.

He opened it up and peeked in. “You old dog, you gave me the Steyr TMP, too.”

“I’d hate for you to be alone with only one fully automatic pistol at your fish fry,” I said.

“Well,” Sam said, “I mean, if you want to come with me, I wouldn’t say no. I’m a man who likes company. You just can’t ask me anything until we get to the spot.”

“That’s fine, Sam,” I said.

“Really?”

“What time were you going to pick up Fiona?” I asked.

“It really depended on how this went,” he said. “She said she was busy dusting her knives today, so I didn’t want to bother her.”

Fiona loved intimidating bad guys, so if she couldn’t be bothered with Sam’s errand, that was a good sign. Or what amounted to one in my life.

“Then pretty please, Sam,” I said, “can I come with you?”

“No questions until we get there.”

“Fine,” I said.

“And Mikey,” he said, “could you put on a conservative suit? Something that says low-level government operative and not gallivanting spy?”

I agreed, even to the suit, because now I had to know what Sam was embroiled in. To get Sam Axe to put on a shirt and tie, one normally needed to first promise him either untold riches or a single woman with untold riches, or at least one with a decent alimony settlement. We pulled up across the street from the office park and Sam cut the engine and for a good three minutes I kept my promise and stayed quiet. It was a Saturday, so the parking lot was nearly empty, save for a red Camaro.

“Sam,” I said, “why does that car look familiar?”

“I dunno, Mikey,” Sam said. “It’s a popular American automobile. And that counts as your one question.”

“We had no predetermined number of questions I could ask,” I said. “And just so I know what the operation is, should I be keeping an eye on that car? Because it both looks familiar and reminds me of several previous bad experiences.”

“That car could belong to anyone,” Sam said.

“Sam,” I said.

“The thing is,” Sam said, “people tend to remember cars emotionally. So my thought is that you probably had an experience with a red Camaro sometime in your childhood and now, well, now it’s just a harbinger of bad things.”

“That’s Sugar’s car,” I said.

“Sugar?”

“The drug dealer who used to live next door to me,” I said. “The drug dealer who took five bullets the last time he engaged us to help him. The drug dealer who let another drug dealer and his thugs smack you around. Sugar.”

“Oh,” Sam said. “Sugar. Right. That is his car. I’ll be.”

“You hate Sugar,” I said.

“I do hate Sugar,” Sam said.

“Tell me you’re not working for him.”

“We’re not,” Sam said.

“I never said ‘we.’ ”

“He called me up a couple of days ago and said a buddy of his, a notary, was getting hassled by some Russians who wanted him to pay a weekly tribute.”

“How much do the Russians think they’re going to get out of a notary?” I said.

“Well, seems they thought notaries worked for the government,” Sam said. “So, they probably thought he was their conduit into the deep, deep pockets of the U.S. government’s lucrative notarization coffers.”