Read Turtle Baby for Free Online Page B

involvement. The feeling was not unfamiliar.
    You will have dinner with Dr. Broussard tonight, Bo. You will talk to her about this medication, which seems to be working, but is leaving a few wrinkles. Now, just get the address of this place and then leave.
    Nodding at the sensible advice, Bo jotted down the address and then stood looking at the bar's curtained doorway. The black canvas tarp hanging from a wire across the door revealed nothing. Beneath it Bo could see broken maroon asphalt tile, some cigarette butts, a chair leg. An odor of tequila, shots of which were called "shooters" when forced down your throat by costumed waiters, drifted from the tarp. So this was where Acito's mom worked.
    Bo remembered promising the baby she'd try to find his mother. How could she just walk away? This Chac might be in the bar right now, unaware that her little son had come close to death. Inside Bo heard voices. A few English words.
    "Oh, why not?" She grinned at a burro on the corner, painted in black stripes to approximate a zebra. The burro shook long ears through holes in its flowered sombrero as Bo pulled the black curtain aside and went in.
    A passageway running diagonally toward the center of the block between two adjacent storefronts was hung with colored plastic doilies and strands of Christmas tree lights. Eight feet in, a sawhorse over a plastic-draped pile of construction rubble held a sign that said Peligro. Bo had seen the word on Tijuana's streets. It meant "danger."
    "I can't believe you don't know where she is," a male voice spoke in a British accent with overtones Bo couldn't quite identify.
    The voice came from just inside a large room at the end of the passageway. The room was half filled with small tables beyond which a bare expanse of soaped concrete served as a dance floor. Into this a wooden ramp supported by oil drums extended about fifteen feet. The oil drums had been painted gold. Along the left wall a long bar rested on forklift pallets, backed by more plastic doilies and yards of hanging metallic strips that looked like limp slices of mirror. Where the two walls would have met was a gaping hole revealing bent concrete reinforcers and more rubble.
    "A margarita, señorita?" asked the bartender in a white shirt and red satin cummerbund. He seemed genuinely happy to see Bo. Delighted, actually.
    "Um, no, just a Coke, please," she answered. For some reason it seemed wise to say nothing, just sit and wonder why a Mexican bartender was radiating joy at her presence. At the end of the bar a man of about thirty with long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail under a leather gaucho hat was working on the wiring of a sound board and bass amplifier.
    "The show tomorrow night's critical," he said thoughtfully. "She knows what's at stake."
    "Señorita Chac, she never miss a performance," the bartender said to Bo, as though she had asked. In his hands a perfectly dry bar glass was being dried ferociously with a red paper napkin.
    Bo stabbed at the lime wedge in her Coke and let it happen. That wide intensity of awareness that, even when dutifully medicated, she possessed as the dubious gift of an illness that could also destroy her. The bartender, she assessed, was defending Chac, and knew perfectly well where she was. He was afraid of the man in the ponytail, glad to have a customer as a buffer between them.
    "I'm a buyer for a little import shop in Idyllwild," she said, noticing an exquisite silver bracelet with a geometric pattern of stone inlay on the wrist of the man with the ponytail. "I'm looking for some quality silver jewelry. Could you recommend a few dealers?"
    The question was directed to the bartender as she pulled a pen from her purse and grabbed a paper napkin.
    "Si, silver," he answered with enthusiasm. "Lots of good places for silver."
    As he named a number of dealers, Bo wrote on the paper napkin. "Acito in peligro. Donde esta Chac?" Acito in danger. Where is Chac? The Spanish was pathetic, but the message