“This didn’t come from me, right?” Lemke said, without looking up.
“Course not,” Tommy assured him.
After a couple of minutes, Lemke examined the paper and seemed satisfied. He handed it to Tommy with shaky fingers. “It’s everything I know,” he said.
“I believe you,” Tommy said.
The pinkie was beginning to leak enough blood to soak through the bar rag. Lemke’s eyes locked on the pinkie like it was a rare gem.
“Could you please let her go?” he asked politely.
Tommy inspected the pad and was impressed with how detailed the directions were. He ripped off the top sheet, then dropped the pad back on the table.
“Give me your cell phone,” Tommy said.
Lemke quickly slid his phone over to him.
Tommy handed the phone to Dino and said, “You know what to do.”
Dino nodded, then folded his arms across his chest.
Tommy got up and tossed the rubber pinkie at Lemke. The big guy scrambled for it once it bounced off his chest. It took a couple of moments of playing with it in his fingers before he’d realized the dupe.
“It’s fake,” Lemke looked astonished and confused. “Where’s Chelsea?”
“We took her out for some ice cream,” Tommy said. “The only thing we may have hurt is her appetite.”
Lemke seemed relieved and pissed all at once. “You mean. .”
Tommy became disgusted. “Unlike some of your friends, I don’t mess with kids.”
Lemke stared at the piece of paper in Tommy’s hand as if he’d just given him the password to his online bank account. It convinced Tommy he had the real deal.
“Listen,” Tommy said, zoning in on Lemke’s large torso, “mix in a salad every now and then, huh?” He headed for the door, pausing only to point at Ben Westfall and mouth, “Thank you.”
Once outside, Tommy slid into the back seat of the SUV. Matt was behind the wheel, Nick in the passenger seat. Stevie was back there with a lapful of rubber fingers and a bottle of red nail polish. Tommy handed Nick the piece of paper, who gave him a fist bump.
“Let’s go,” Nick said, putting an address into his GPS.
“He cause a scene?” Matt asked through the rearview mirror.
“Naw,” Tommy said, looking out at the passing desert landscape. “How tough can you be living in a town without sidewalks?”
Chapter 14
Matt parked the SUV a hundred yards from the house. They were in a rundown residential neighborhood in west Tucson. Most of the front yards blended into each other, just one long stretch of overgrown mesquite trees and dry dirt between patches of dead grass. There were scooters and tricycles resting on their side in random yards, but no kids.
Tommy thought if they built a police station on this street, it wouldn’t stop the flow of crime. Nothing would. You could smell it in the air.
“The Hostage Rescue Team is on the way,” Nick said to Tommy. “We’re going to sit tight until they get here.”
“Place looks like a bomb hit it,” Tommy said.
They sat silent for a minute until Stevie said, “What was Nairobi like?”
“Sad,” Tommy said. “Very sad.”
“You were at some orphanage?”
“Yeah, a buddy of mine has a daughter who runs the place, Susan Walker. She’s a real gem. Most of them are AIDS babies. She treats them like they’re her own children.”
“So what did you do exactly?” Stevie asked.
“Mostly scrounged for food or boiled water. I’d go to the local churches and ask for supplies. But the most important thing I did was hug these little creatures. They need human contact so badly. Did you know if you took a child at birth and kept them in complete darkness for the first four months of childhood, they’d be blind for the rest of their lives?”
“Get out,” Nick said. “Is that true?”
“I’m not shitting you,” Tommy said. “Something about the optic nerve needing to connect with the brain and it only happens in the first four months. After that, it won’t connect anymore. That’s why baby toys are all primary colors. They need to calibrate their eyesight.”
“Geez,” Stevie said. “Where’d you learn all this, in Africa?”
“Yeah, apparently some of these orphanages over there are basically babysitting kids whose parents already died of AIDS, so they just sit there in some kind of a pen, like a baby corral, and they get fed three times a day and that’s it. No one touches them and they don’t receive human affection, so just like the optic nerve, their ability to give and receive love never quite attaches. They grow up like zombies. They don’t smile, they don’t cry, it’s useless, because they’ve been conditioned to be ignored. So we go around and hug these babies all day long.”
“Wow,” Matt said. “Tommy Bracco, baby hugger. Who knew?”
“Yeah,” Tommy said with a smile. “I just wish the pay was better.”
They waited another minute before a slow-moving gray panel truck came up and parked behind them. Nick hopped out of the car and met with an HRT soldier, who seemed to be wrapped in Kevlar. The guy’s entire body was covered with black material all the way up to his black gloves. He pulled off his full-faced helmet to talk with Nick.
Tommy’s phone chirped and when he looked at the caller’s name he immediately became suspicious. Hector Gomez. Someone Tommy had known a long time, but wouldn’t exactly call a friend. The guy was unreliable, shifty, drug-addicted and had wild mood swings. The part which concerned Tommy was the fact that Hector resided in Mexico. Tommy tried to digest the coincidence.
“I’ve got to get this,” Tommy said, jumping out of the SUV and walking briskly away from Nick and the commander of the Hostage Rescue Team.
Tommy pushed the talk button and put the phone to his ear. “Hector, how the heck are you?” he said casually, not raising any red flags.
“Good, my friend. How are you?” Hector said in his thick Mexican accent.
“Great,” Tommy said, walking down the desolate street away from the action behind him. “How are things below the border?”
“Loco,” Hector said. “Too much violence down here. Makes your skin crawl.”
“Hector, you sound sober. What happened, too early to get your buzz on?”
Hector offered a fake laugh. He was trying too hard to seem normal and Tommy had never had a normal conversation with the guy. He was a paranoid, coke-sniffing, wild-eyed maniac with little tolerance for subtlety. Hector didn’t know how to have a normal conversation, so this was obviously difficult to pull off.
Tommy glanced over his shoulder to see the HRT work their way out of the back of their truck and stealthily spread out. They moved like athletes, on their toes, knees bent with their helmets on and laser-guided assault rifles at the ready. Nick and Matt were right there with them, pistols at their side.
“So, Hector, to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Huh?”
“Why’d you call?”
“Oh, well, just seeing how things are going. We haven’t spoken for a while.”
Tommy stopped. Something was very wrong and he couldn’t finger it just yet.
“I just got back from Nairobi,” Tommy said.
“Where’s that? Africa?”
“Yeah, in Kenya.”
“I see,” Hector said. Then, casually, with way too much effort trying to be nonchalant, he said, “So where are
