Chapter 89
I WAS IN my office on a conference call with Jorge Suarez and Andrew Boone, operations heads of Private’s Lisbon and London offices, respectively, when the GPS tracking device I’d stuck under Tommy’s car alerted my phone. I checked his car’s route on my screen and saw that Tommy’s car had stopped in Inglewood, a very rough part of town and far from my brother’s usual haunts.
When I signed off from the meeting, Tom’s car was still in Inglewood and I had no plans for the evening.
Emilio Cruz was in the underground lot unlocking his car when I got there.
I said to him, “Tom’s up to something, ’Milio. He’s been parked on West Boulevard near Fifty-Eighth for an hour and that’s not his beat, you know? You busy? Want to take a ride?”
“Are you buying dinner too?”
I grinned at him. “Of course.”
Cruz had no love for Tommy and had come to hate him even more since Tom had begun dogging Rick’s trial for no good reason.
Cruz said, “I’m never too busy to watch your psycho brother, Jack. Give me the keys.”
We took a fleet car, a five-year-old Chevy Impala I’d picked up at a repo sale because it can blend in anywhere. Twenty minutes later, we were parked on West Boulevard, in front of a shabby row of one-story houses and across the street from a low-budget strip mall. A spaghetti war of tangled wires hung overhead.
Tommy’s red Ferrari was thirty yards up ahead, our side of the street. His ride was conspicuous by design, but in this scraping-the-bottom, have-not neighborhood, it was like waving a red freaking flag.
I didn’t get it.
A clump of hooded kids were standing around the Ferrari, not jacking it, which told me that Tommy had hired them to stand guard.
Cruz got out of the car without saying why. He’s an imposing guy. Muscular, and the bulge under his jacket made it clear that he was packing.
I wasn’t looking for trouble. Not this kind, and as Cruz headed toward the group of kids, I yelled, “Emilio. Come back.”
He waved to me as he kept going, signaling, Don’t worry. It’s okay.
By then, the kids had seen Cruz coming toward them, and they shouted catcalls and showed a lot of junior-punk attitude. Cruz yelled out something in Spanish, and the kids stopped shouting. But they stood their ground.
The situation looked like it could break bad in an instant.
I opened the car door and was ready to join the party, but by the time my foot touched pavement, the body language had changed and the tension had died. Cruz handed something over to the biggest kid, then came back to our car.
We both got in, closed the doors, and Cruz said, “Well, that was twenty bucks well spent. Tommy’s in there.”
He hooked a thumb behind us, indicating the Lutheran church down the block. It was an adobe-style building with sand-colored stucco walls, a red-brick roof, and security gates on the front doors.
“Tommy’s at church? That would be a first,” I said.
Cruz said, “They got a Gamblers Anonymous meeting on Sunday nights.”
I turned in my seat, saw that the church was emptying out, people leaving in ones and twos. I saw my brother walking with another man, and they were absorbed in intense conversation, maybe arguing.
Tommy’s companion seemed familiar to me, but he was out of context and I struggled to put a name to the face. The two of them walked under a streetlight, then into the shadows, then they crossed the street and moved farther away.
Soon, I was looking at the streetlight shining on the back of the guy’s balding head as he called good night to my brother and unlocked his car.
Who was he?
I couldn’t quite grab the guy’s name, but I knew that I had to do it, that something big was at stake. As his car door slammed and his engine caught, it came to me. I remembered him and had a good idea how he was linked to Tommy.
I had to make a move.
I had to do it right now.