The Giveaway by Tod Goldberg Page B

there was a time when a man could wear a leather vest and no shirt and make that work. You don’t see that too much anymore.”
    Fiona hopped down from the roof then—literally, she came off the low lip of the roof above the porch and landed as gracefully as a gymnast. “This time you speak of,” she said to Sam, as if she’d been in the conversation with us the entire time, “this was when? Antiquity?”
    Sam looked up at the roof. “What was that, a twelve-foot drop?”
    “I’m very agile,” she said.
    “You’re not wearing any shoes,” Sam said.
    “And you’re talking about wearing a vest and no shirt and making it work. There are mysteries beyond what anyone can perceive, apparently.” She turned her gaze to me. “I heard a rumor about me being property. Is that accurate?”
    “If you’d like,” I said, “I’d be happy to give you a copy of the Ghouls’ constitution and you can read it for yourself.”
    “No need,” she said. “I rather like the idea of being subservient to you and then springing into the face of some man with a handlebar mustache and teaching him a thing or two about how to respect a woman.”
    “That’s wonderful news, Fi,” I said. “But you know that when these bikers get into a fight, it’s never one-on-one. They’ll rat-pack you.”
    “Which is why you and Sam will be there to defend my honor. And why I’ll have a very powerful gun— currently being used to help a rebel cause in Cuba—in my purse.”
    “I don’t think Kate Spade will go with the leather pants and bikini-top ensemble I’m sort of picturing you in there, Fiona,” Sam said.
    “Is that what I get to wear?” she asked me.
    “That’s the general uniform,” I said.
    “Lovely,” she said. “I’ll bring two guns and a knife. Maybe a blackjack, too, just for fun.”
    Sam and I both looked at Fi and tried to do the math. It wasn’t working. But I’d seen her fight plenty of times, and if she said she was going to carry two guns, a knife, a blackjack and a SCUD missile, I figured she’d put it all somewhere.
    “I gotta run, Mikey,” Sam said. “I’m meeting my guy with the bikes at the Carlito, and then in the morning I’ll see what I can find on Maria. You need anything else?”
    I opened the door into the house and listened for screaming. All I heard was the TV. Wheel of Fortune was on and someone had just lost everything, which was evident by my mother’s loud proclamation “They rig the game, Zadie, that’s why,” which I could only imagine answered some very important question as to the strategy of spinning a wheel covered in money.
    I closed the door. “We need to get Bruce and Zadie and my mother apart as soon as possible,” I said.
    “Yeah,” Sam said, “I thought I saw your mom making eyes at Bruce. Frankly she could do a lot worse. Though I have to say that whole missing-finger business would be a serious distraction. But that’s just me.”
    “Sam,” I said.
    “Anyway,” Sam said, “the house is safe and this will all seem like a bad dream to everyone really soon. Eventually you’ll even start to miss old Bruce, at least until we’re all back together for the wedding in the final episode.”
    “That will be sweet,” Fi said.
    A series of bad decisions by Bruce had left me, once again, in the middle of something beyond my control. It was a great day to be Michael Westen. No doubt. “Let’s see if we can get this taken care of as quickly as possible,” I said to both Fi and Sam, “before we have to move everyone into one of your homes.”
    Not surprisingly, this time they both agreed without question.

8
    For Sam Axe, tracking down leads was a rather enjoyable process. He frequently got to do it from home, which meant pants were optional, or from the bar, which meant umbrella drinks were optional, or poolside, which meant other people’s shirts and pants were optional as well but umbrella drinks were prevalent. Occasionally he had to track someone down by