CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
When they entered the safe house and saw Barry “Barbell” Sedaka against the backwall tied to a chair and guarded by two capos, Sal was astonished.
He looked like a shell of the man he used to know.
His eyes were so badly beaten that they were bulging.
His lip was swollen three times its size.
There were small cuts all over his face and arms. He’d been tortured. There was no doubt about it.
Sal frowned. “Damn,” he said. “What did they do to you?”
“Who gives a shit?” said Tommy. “He snatched my son. He got what he deserved.”
It was unusual for Dapper Tom to be so animated. But it wasn’t unusual at all for Backdoor Tommy. And Tommy, ever since his children were threatened, had become Backdoor all the way.
Tommy went up to Barbell, grabbed him by the top of his hair, and then angrily lifted his face up until they were eyeball to eyeball. “Remember me?”
Barbell began shaking his head. His mouth was so swollen he could barely speak. “I ain’t got no beef with you, Tommy.”
“You don’t think so?”
He was shaking his head. “I don’t!”
“Then why did you snatch my son and take him to that diner?”
“But I left him there. I didn’t do nothing to him.
I paid a couple cops to stop him, then me and some other guy I never worked with before took him to that diner.
That was all we was supposed to do. Then we left.
The cops took him back home, or wherever they dropped him off at. But that’s all I did.”
As if that wasn’t enough, Tommy thought. “Who paid your ass to do that?” asked Sal.
“They never gave a name,” said Barbell.
Tommy grabbed him by the hair even tighter. “I’m not lying, Tommy! I never seen no face, and I never heard no voice. I got nothing to tell you.”
But Mick had something to ask him. “Why didn’t you conceal your own face?”
“Yeah,” said Sal. “You didn’t show your face, then we wouldn’t be here. Why did you show it?”
“Because I figured it wouldn’t matter.”
“Why would you figure that?” asked Sal.
Barbell hesitated. Tommy grabbed his hair even tighter. And Barbell blurted it out. “Because he wasn’t supposed to live.”
Tommy’s jaw tightened. “What do you mean?”
“The other guy riding muscle with me said they were going to take him out before that day was through.”
Tommy’s heart dropped.
“I didn’t know who, what, or where,” said Barbell. “I did my job and got out of there. I just wanted to get out of there.”
Tommy didn’t know what to say. He and Hammer glanced at each other.
They both knew that had Hammer not been able to disable that implantation device, TJ would have been killed.
The fact that Hammer just so happened to be there and to be able to disable it, changed the course of TJ’s existence.
Had he not been there? Just the thought of it was almost too much for Tommy to bear.
For a second, he didn’t know what to say or even do.
It was too much for Sal too. He and his brother’s son were close. He didn’t know what to say either.
That was why Mick spoke up for both of his nephews. “You claim you saw nothing,” Mick said to Barbell. “How did they pay you? And don’t fucking tell me about no bank deposit. People who pull this shit don’t deposit in banks.”
“It wasn’t a bank,” said Barbell.
“Then what was it?”
“A cash drop.”
“Where?”
“Inside Pacific Place Mall.”
“Where inside idiot?”
“The Celtic restaurant.”
Tommy looked at him. “The Celtic?”
Barbell nodded. “They have a locked box on the door. I used the key they left in my own mailbox to unlock it. And I pulled out the envelope inside. That’s how I got paid.”
But Mick noticed more than that. “You know something about that restaurant?” he asked Tommy.
Tommy looked concerned. “I once knew the owner,” he said.
They all looked at Tommy. What he just said felt like something more tangible for them to work with. “Who’s the owner?” Hammer asked him.
“A lady I used to know.”
“You mean a lady you used to fuck?” asked Mick.
Tommy tried for years to rid himself of his past lifestyle, but there was no getting away from it. “Yes.”
“Who is she?” asked Sal. “What’s her name?”
But before Sal could finish that question, they heard the sound of gunshots ricocheting off metal outside.
As soon as they all turned to the sound, their weapons drawn, they saw a massive, fast-moving armored tank-like truck drive through and take out the entire front wall of the safe house.
But then they also saw a high-capacity machine gun drawn from that truck, and aimed at them.
“Get down!” Sal yelled as they all dived for cover. But Barbell Barry, who was tied up, couldn’t move. He screamed out as he was shot up like mincemeat.
Then the machine gun began firing at everybody else. Since they knew firing that back at a fortified tank like the one in front of them was fruitless, they all ran down the hall and out of the backdoor.
“Keep running!” Mick yelled once they got outside.
Hammer, Tommy, and Sal, and those two capos too, knew what that meant. They kept running toward the woods behind the house.
Mick pulled an IED with an explosively-formed penetrator out of his tricked-out long white coat, and tossed it through the open door. Then he tried to run for it, but was blown off his feet as he dived. The entire house, and that tank of a truck, exploded.
Tommy and Sal ran back and grabbed Mick. Then they dragged him to safety in the woods. To their shock, he was woozy but okay. He even slapped their hands away when they tried to assist him to his feet. Though the pain from that hard fall was searing him, he got up on his own.
The capos that had been stationed out front at the safe house, and whose bullets couldn’t penetrate that truck, ran around back too when they saw the explosion.
Robby Yale, who had driven Mick’s Escalade to the backroad behind the woods after dropping them off at the safe house, waited to pick them up.
They hurried through the woods, with a limping Mick still easily keeping up, and got into that SUV relieved to still be alive.
They could hear the cops arriving as they were leaving.
“Where to?” Robby asked once they were out of danger.
“Drop Uncle Mick off at the house,” said Tommy, “and then take us to the mall.”
Mick, who was up front on the passenger seat, turned around and looked at Tommy as if he’d lost his mind. Then he looked at Robby. “Take your ass to the mall,” he said.
And everybody, although still shook up from what happened at the safe house, couldn’t help but laugh.