by Mike Faricy
“Mmm-mmm, this is really good. Where did you learn to cook like this?”
“I’ve slept with a lot of women who worked in restaurants.”
“No, seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Do you think it’s really necessary to wear that gun? You know when you’re cooking or just hanging around the house.”
“Let’s hope not. But I’ve been shot, blown up, chased, and assaulted in the past couple of weeks and I’d just as soon hedge my bets. Besides, I’d never forgive myself if something happened to you.”
“Really?”
“No, not really, I was just kidding on that one. I’m just worried about me.”
She poured herself another glass of wine, leaned over, gave me a kiss on the forehead then dashed out of the kitchen saying, “Thanks for doing the dishes and cleaning up.”
Chapter 57
It was perhaps indicative of my physical state that I slept in Heidi’s guest room. Secure with extra pillows propping my butt into the air in my new favorite position. Heidi didn’t wake me whenever it was she left for her office. I dressed in loose-fitting jeans and a T-shirt. I left the shirt untucked covering the.45 on my right hip. I was cleaning up the kitchen after breakfast, doing everything I could to avoid the series of stretching exercises that were floating out there in my not-too-distant future when the doorbell rang.
I thought about not answering it. Then decided it would be best to at least see who it was. If it was a neighbor I could ignore them. If it was Braco Alekseeva, I’d just shoot the bastard.
It was I.C.E. agent Billy Hale.
I opened the door, Hale smiled.
“Agent Hale.”
“Hey, heard about your big bang. How you doing?”
“Getting better, come on in,” I said.
He carried a waxy white paper bag, the kind from a bakery. I could only hope.
“Picked up a couple of rolls for you, hope that’s okay.”
It was. There were four of them, with more cinnamon caramel than roll.
“You got time for coffee?”
“I was hoping you’d ask,” he said.
“So, tell me what happened,” he said, a cinnamon caramel roll crammed in his mouth, and I did.
“What I can’t seem to figure out is why.” I said finishing up my story.
“Well, I’d say you touched a nerve somewhere. Question is where? What? Maybe even who? Your buddy LaZelle filled me in a little. Right, wrong, or indifferent you’ve bumbled into more action than we’ve been able to generate on that snail paced Task Force over the past eighteen months.”
“I don’t know, was your intent to generate car bombs? If it was, yeah, I’m way ahead of you, but otherwise, I don’t know. Despite whatever friction I seem to generate between Peters and myself, from what I saw you got a hell of a list of bad actors up here and down in Chicago.”
“Yeah, great. We had that list twelve months ago. You hear any talk about actually doing anything? Arresting or charging anyone?”
“Well, no not really.”
“Exactly. We just continue to gather more and more information. Whoever took out that moron Sergie, they should get a medal. These guys, the rest of them, Braco, ‘The Butcher,’ God, we arrest any of them they’ll be lawyered up so fast, it’ll be a decade just to get the legal right to charge the bastards, let alone prosecute.”
“Well, yeah, about that butcher comment I made at your Task Force meeting, I…”
“Relax, LaZelle, told me about it. The fact is, I think that’s the guy, your buddy Tibor Crvek. He runs under the radar but we’ve been aware of him for quite some time. ‘By the Book’ Peters won’t believe it but I think he’s our boy. Might just be dumb luck but you stumbled onto him. You had any close up dealing with that psycho, you’re lucky you’re in one piece.”
I felt myself beginning to sweat noticeably.
“But the thing is I’m still an innocent, essentially. If Karina Vucavitch, Kerri, hadn’t contacted me, and paid me, I wouldn’t be involved in any of this. I was just trying to find one missing person, not too successfully, I might add. Why me?”
“You wanna know what I think?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, no offense but you’re a bit of a known fuckup. Look, I like you, but I think she probably got you involved because she, well, they, figured you wouldn’t ask too many questions. You’d do the grunt work, take some money, and go away. You had a better chance of finding this Mathias woman?”
“Nikki,” I interjected.
“Yeah Nikki, you had a better chance of finding her than they did because, well, she’s hiding from them. If you did find her it’s probably a fair comment you would have told them where she was, taken the money, gone off, and pissed it all away in about a week. Right?”
“So,” I sounded a little more defensive then I meant to.
“Not a criticism, just a probable fact, okay. Look, you got lucky, if that’s the right word. Either way, you’ve stumbled into something and until you see it through, you are gonna have to hide.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. That car bomb, Peters didn’t set that. You got something, whether we know what it is or not is another question, but you got something and they’re gonna come looking for you.”
“But I don’t know shit.”
“But they think you do, and that’s all that counts. I’d say the key for you is Nikki Mathias. You find her, your answer, whatever it is, is probably nearby.”
“Well, I’m lying low here for the time being.”
“Hey, look, with all due respect, I found you, with one phone call. I didn’t even have to get out of bed.”
“Yeah, but Aaron wouldn’t tell…”
“I don’t know, where was he when he told me? Can they tap his cell? Didn’t you say Peters had two guys out there in the street just the other day?”
“Yeah, but I figure they just saw my car and…”
“Jesus, they might be Feds but do you think they got the resources to cruise up and down city streets just so they can locate your vehicle? Even the Feds can’t waste money like that, too often.”
“You got any ideas?”
“Matter of fact I do. May not come with some of the fringe benefits your little friend can offer you around here but no one will find you and she might be a bit safer, too with you gone. We could pool our resources.”
“What resources you got?”
“The best,” Hale laughed. “Me!”
I packed my gear, such as it was, couple of shirts, underwear, two boxes of.45 rounds, and my donut hole, cushion. I wrote Heidi a note and left with Hale.
Chapter 58
On the way over he told me a little bit more about his role in the task force.
“Our hot button is illegal aliens. What do you think of when you hear that term?”
I was on my donut-hole cushion, sitting at an angle against the back of the passenger seat.
“I guess I think of people crossing the border in the dark of night down in Arizona. Hot, dusty. If they get picked up they’re sent back down to Mexico, and they maybe try it again a couple of nights later.”
“Yeah, well, that’s part of it. I mean that’s the one that makes the news. The stuff I’m involved with is young women coming here, usually under the guise of schooling or a job waiting for them. Instead of sneaking across the border they arrive perfectly legal in an airport. Someone meets them, picks them up, gets a hold of their passport then gets them drunk, drugged. A team breaks them in, rapes them for maybe a week or two straight. Then they’re working the Internet brothel scene, hookers on call, delivered right to your door, like your little girlfriend running that escort service. That’s one of about half a dozen connected with old Braco by the way,” he glanced over at me.
“The girls complain or screw up, they’re out on the streets, strung out, hooking for a couple of bucks. They g
o to the authorities they’ve been told their families back in Russia or wherever will be murdered. That part may or may not happen, but after what these girls have been through, they’d be stupid not to take it as gospel. They’ve got no passport, they’re in an illegal industry, not to be too unpleasant, but they are literally fucked.”
“That’s the scenario Kerri laid out for me the other night, in my car.”
“Yeah, well take whatever that broad says with a grain of salt. She’s management. She likes to play the part of the victim but she’s Braco’s front person in a lot of deals.”
“Were the Lee-Dee guys part of this?”
“Not in so many ways. Yeah, they had an escort service. Braco put your gal Karina in there, then he just took the whole thing over. Pretty safe guess he murdered Leo Tate and Dennis Dundee, made some adjustment, and built off the Lee-Dee model. Essentially what they’ve got is a cyber-brothel. They take credit cards, advertise a full GFE.”
“GFE?”
“Girl Friend Experience. Nice way of saying a hooker. You read anything about the economies in Eastern Europe and you know Braco’s got a constant supply of new eye candy available. One of the girls burns out here and he can have two more flown over within the week. They show up thinking they scored some dream job or school course, it’s a dream all right, a real nightmare.”
Hale’s narrative didn’t get any more cheerful as we drove. Eventually we pulled into a large garage attached to an industrial building, took a freight elevator to the fourth floor and then went down a short hallway to a metal fire door. Hale took out a key and unlocked the door. We stepped into a fairly large room, a kitchen area to one side, about a dozen computers going, three guys looked up, nodded, and went back to what they were doing.
Along the far wall stood five bunk beds. A couple of couches were arranged next to the beds. A flat-screen TV sat on a card table. There were red, black, blue, and white cables bundled together and strung across the open ceiling. Behind the fire door we had just come through was an overflowing trashcan and standing next to that, a three-foot stack of pizza-delivery boxes. The place needed some airing out.
“Home sweet home,” Hale said.
“Charming.”
“I’ll give you the formal introduction at lunch time. Gang, meet Devlin Haskell, guy I told you about.” That elicited two slight nods and a grunt.
“Look, why don’t you throw your stuff on an open bunk? Top and bottom on the far right are reasonably clean, I think. You want anything, a Coke or root beer? I don’t have any hard stuff or beer cause we’re operational. Help yourself and let me check in with these guys for a bit. Then we’ll all sit down and get to know one another over lunch. Bathroom is behind the kitchen area. You on any meds or anything?”
“They gave me some pain killers after my surgery but I’ve been off them for close to twenty-four hours and I’d like to keep it that way. Damn things gave me horrible nightmares.”
Hale nodded but didn’t say anything.
I hung my shirts on the corner post of a bunk-bed, dropped my overnight bag on the floor, then put my donut cushion on a couch, settled in and watched for a little more than an hour.
Chapter 59
Lunch consisted of hot dogs and nacho cheese Doritos from a bag that was constantly passed around the table. No one bothered to just take a handful and pile them on the “Happy Birthday” paper plates in front of us. I was famished and had three hot dogs. I met Gary, Mike, and Mike.
“So, you’re the guy got his ass blown off the street,” one of them chuckled. I’d already forgotten who was who.
“Yeah, not my best day.”
“Man, I don’t know sounds pretty lucky to me,” another one of them added.
“What we do here,” Hale said, cramming half a hot dog into the right side of his mouth, “is monitor traffic on a little over a dozen websites. We’re building documentation, coupled with sworn statements from customers after the fact.”
“Sworn statements?”
“Yeah, we pay them a visit, gently confront them, and suggest they can either go to jail or sign a statement that basically says they responded to a particular Internet ad that led them to engage in sex for payment.”
“You get guys to sign?”
Hale looked around the table, they were all smiling.
“We got something like an 85 percent close rate. What would you do? Sign and we promise to keep it quiet, not prosecute them, or they can go to jail and sort it out.”
“You arrest them?”
“Nah, we just tell them we will. I doubt it would hold up in court anyway. Besides, I don’t want to screw with the paperwork. But, these guys are so freaked, they gladly sign, promise never to do it again, and then thank their lucky stars once we leave.”
“We can nail the ground troops, the working girls, anytime, today if we want. But what’s the point? They’ll be replaced with fresh meat within the week. The guy we want is Braco. Since his kid Sergie bought it, there’s been an increase in activity, lots of phone traffic. Problem is we don’t have a translator. So we have no idea what they’re saying. By the time we find out, it’s after the fact and too far down the road to do anything.”
I looked around at the computers, the four guys, the room, all the wiring, the three-foot stack of pizza boxes.
“You got all this and no translator, that doesn’t make sense.”
“You’re right it doesn’t, but those are the facts. I asked Peters if we could borrow that gal, what’s her name?”
“Dziedzic?” I said.
“Yeah, that’s the one. You can imagine how eager he is to share resources. You read all that shit in the paper about budget constraints, well,” he spread his hands palms open.
“You must be able to get someone, somewhere?”
“That’s where you come in, my friend.”
“Me? Sorry to disappoint, I got enough trouble communicating in English. I sure as hell can’t speak Russian.”
“Yeah, but Nikki Mathias can.”
“Nikki Mi… it might as well be the Easter bunny. Don’t you listen? I never found her.”
“Yeah, I know, she found you.”
“Me?”
“When old Sergie lost his head. Her name keeps coming up in the translations we received. They think she was the shooter.”
“Nikki, I don’t think she would…”
“What, since you couldn’t find her, that makes you an expert on her? Or is it because she’s a great-looking redhead who likes to stand around naked on the beach with three people who’ve been murdered? I’ve seen the photo, remember. Listen, her old man was some kind of master hunter or some damn thing. It’s not a long stretch to think his kid could…”
“I was there, or well, I saw it, sort of, in my rearview mirror.”
“So?”
“I just don’t think she’s your shooter.”
“Well, Braco and everyone else seems to think she is. I do too. You find her and we’re a long way toward putting this whole thing to bed.”
“How am I supposed to find her? I wouldn’t know where to even begin to look. I just spent the better part of a week chasing dead ends.”
Hale gave me a big warm smile.
“Funny thing, we got a plan.”
“Why do I think I’m not going to like this?”
“What’s not to like?” Hale asked sounding sincere. “It’s simple, we just use you as bait.”
“As bait, me! Are you crazy!”
“There’s been some discussion on that point.”
“As bait?”
“Look, I think she has a source, pretty close to Braco, real close as a matter of fact. If we can get you to lead her somewhere, we grab her, get her to translate for us. Then we take Braco down.”
“That’s, that’s so insane it can’t possibly work. For starters what makes you think she’ll show up somewhere. How will she know, I mean, are you kidding?”
“No, look, the hit on Braco’s kid, Sergie. She
didn’t follow you, she had to be waiting there. Think about it. How long did you talk to Karina, Kerri, a minute, two tops?”
I nodded.
“That’s not enough time to follow, unobserved, then get to a shooting station, take up a position, and fire. In a residential neighborhood? It just doesn’t work.”
He had a point.
“Think about it. She was in position before you arrived, knew Sergie and his pals were going to show up. It was a setup but not for you, for old Sergie. I’m just thinking we do the same thing, again. Only this time we grab her. I’m willing to bet she wants Braco out of business a lot more than we do.”
“If that’s the case, why doesn’t she just get in touch with the police?”
“Gee, go figure, a known prostitute, here illegally, no documentation. Some tight-ass like Peters will just lock her up the first chance he gets, charge her with Sergie’s murder. Then real or imagined she’ll figure Braco is going to kill her family. Too risky for her, we have to find her and convince her.”
“Okay, so let me guess, meanwhile while you’re trying to find her, I’m out there twisting in the wind?”
“I haven’t quite worked that tiny detail out yet.”
Chapter 60
A couple of days of doing stretching exercises, eating hot dogs, take out pizza and staring at three guys watching computer monitors put me in a slightly different frame of mind.
“So, how about this?” I said to Hale. “You set me up outside Braco’s, just like I did before. I follow Kerri or Braco, whichever leaves, with any luck they’ll lead me to a prearranged spot. If Nikki knows about it she’ll be waiting there, and you grab her. But, you grab me first, get me out of there. After that you can grab her. If she’s hiding, you find her. If she’s as good as you say she won’t jump up and run away, you’ll have to stumble over her. But you gotta get me out of there first. And then one other thing,” I said, “What’s that?” Hale asked.