The Giveaway Read Online Free

returning to Miami, my mother, Madeline, has inserted herself into all of my deepest—and most mundane—relationships. It’s as if all the attention she didn’t give me or Nate as kids she’s trying to make up for now, which is a nice sentiment, if not a completely exciting thing to actually live with. “Attention” for my mother often means me coming to her house and repairing the toaster oven or the top-loading VCR.
    Anyway, my mother’s call reminded me of something important. “Anything on his sick mother?”
    Sam reached into his pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper that had his scribbles on it. “Bruce’s release address is registered to Zadie Grossman, age eighty-eight. I’m going to guess that’s not his hot young wife.”
    He handed me the paper. It was an address in Aventura, a section of North Miami known for its extensive Jewish community, notably a large senior citizen population. Not exactly the kind of locale one wants to find themselves in after doing more than a decade of hard time, but then maybe he missed his mother’s cooking.
    Still, there was something interesting about this. I owed Barry a favor or two hundred, but I had to think that a sixty-five-year-old man, ex-felon or not, living with his mother meant something.
    If you really want to know about somebody, meet them when they are around their parents. When you’re a spy, this isn’t something that happens very often. You walk into the Libyan Embassy in Qatar and ask for Salim and Salim’s mommy, the odds are you’re not going to get either of them. But follow Salim for a few weeks and you’ll see how often he eats at his mother’s house, how often he complains to his wife that she doesn’t make Sharba Libiya as well as his mother does, how often he calls his mother to just check in, make sure everything is okay, and how little regard he gives to his wife’s welfare, you know you’ve got someone you can manipulate.
    Or at least someone who isn’t going to stray too far, lest his mommy needs him.
    I needed to get out of Miami.
    I flipped through the file and came up with several photos of a house. The address matched the one Sam gave me.
    “Why is the FBI still watching him?” I asked.
    “The FBI doesn’t watch people, Michael, you know that.” Sam reached across the table and took the file from me and fished around for a few moments and then pulled out a photo of an older gentleman wearing a red V-neck sweater, tan pants and red loafers. He carried a black satchel in his hands. “This is what Mr. Grossman looks like now.”
    “Looks like time did him,” I said. There were lines around his eyes that brought to mind the inside of trees. The weird thing was that he was missing most of the pinkie on his right hand. “What happened to his hand?”
    “Belt-sanding accident inside,” Sam said.
    “What kind of accident?”
    “Someone tried to take off his face with a belt sander, got his finger instead.”
    “They keep him separate from the population after that?”
    “Doesn’t seem like it. Records show he was in general population the whole time,” Sam said. “So, doesn’t look like he snitched.”
    “There goes your rehabilitation angle,” I said, though the truth is that if you’re in prison, it’s probably better for your long-term mortality to not snitch.
    “Hey, maybe he had a revelation upon release,” Sam said. He had a point, though not much of one. “Any guesses on what’s in that satchel?”
    “Girl Scout cookies,” I said.
    “Guess again.”
    “A chisel and hammer.”
    “One more,” he said.
    “Why don’t you just tell me?”
    “You’re not fun to play games with,” Sam said. “Anyway”—he was excited now, which was obvious since he stopped drinking the multiple beers he’d been nursing since we sat down and was now just toying with a knife—“that satchel contains the current membership list of the Ghouls Motorcycle Club. Your friend Mr. Grossman is in the process of