by Mike Lawson
DeMarco didn’t know what to say, but right now the fate of Roy and Ray McNulty was the last thing on his mind. He concluded the call by thanking Fitzgerald for his help—and saying that he hoped he never saw him again. Or maybe it was Fitzgerald who said he hoped he never saw DeMarco again.
DeMarco reached his room and was glad to see that the maid had made up his bed, meaning that the bedspread he’d slept on was hopefully being laundered. He’d started toward the bathroom when a voice said, “Hi, Joe.”
Christ! He whipped his head around to see who’d just spoken. It was a woman sitting in a chair by the window. The blinds were closed and she was sitting in a shadow, so he couldn’t really see her face but he knew who it was. He wondered if she was holding a gun.
“I told the maid I was your wife,” Maria Vasquez said, “and she let me into the room. People are way too trusting of a pretty woman.”
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Joe, why do you think you weren’t arrested last night for murdering Mr. Callahan?”
“Because you screwed up and I was able to get away before the cops got there.”
Maria smiled and shook her head. “Joe, Joe, come on. Do you think I would have made that kind of mistake? The reason you weren’t arrested was because Mr. Castro didn’t want you arrested last night. But who knows what the future might bring? Who knows what witnesses might come forward to say they saw you leaving the building? And the murder weapon. It’s no longer in the toilet tank of the pizza parlor. One of my people followed you and retrieved it. It would be a shame if the police were to execute a search warrant on your home in Washington and find that gun.”
DeMarco didn’t say anything for a moment because he couldn’t think of anything to say. “What do you want?” he asked again.
“I just want to make sure you got the message, Joe.”
“What message is that?”
“That you are never, ever again to interfere with Mr. Castro’s plans. If you do, you might be arrested for Mr. Callahan’s murder. Or maybe, Mr. Castro might conclude the simplest thing to do is to send me to deal with you the way I dealt with Mr. Callahan. The other thing you need to do is pass on a message to your employer.”
Maria stood up. Because she’d been sitting in a dark corner of the room, he hadn’t been able to see her face well. Now he could. She was one of the most beautiful women he’d ever met—and she was scaring the living shit out of him.
“You need to tell Mr. Mahoney that Mr. Castro would never be so foolhardy as to do something to a United States congressman, especially one as powerful as John Mahoney. But the problem is that there are other people invested in Delaney Square, and some of these people . . . Joe, I’m sure you’ve read about the way things are in Mexico, how the cartels murder politicians and judges and cops and whoever else gets in their way. Well, some of these people, after a while, they start to think they can do anything. These people are not so . . . analytical. They just might believe that they can take action against a man like Mahoney, no matter who he is, and Mr. Castro would not be able to stop them. Do you understand, Joe?”
“Yeah, I understand.”
“Good.” She walked over to DeMarco and gave him a soft kiss on the lips. “Take care, Joe.”
30
DeMarco was sitting in the departure area, waiting for his plane to board. He was exhausted as he hadn’t slept well, and he just wanted to get on the plane and close his eyes and fall asleep.
DeMarco had had assignments go bad before—nobody bats a thousand—but never as bad as this one had gone. He’d failed to protect Elinore Dobbs, and now, and maybe thanks to him, she would spend her remaining days staring at a wall. And although he’d made the McNultys and Sean Callahan pay for what they did to her, he’d never intended that Callahan be killed. Then, because he’d pushed Javier Castro into a corner, there was now an ex–cartel boss with a lethal female assassin who might frame him for Callahan’s murder at some time in the future. Could things have possibly gone any worse?
His phone rang, interrupting his depressing reverie; he didn’t recognize the number. All he could tell was that it wasn’t a Boston, New York, or D.C. area code. He wondered if it could be Adele Tomlin calling to curse him again from wherever she was hiding, terrified that Castro’s men were going to make her face look like a Halloween pumpkin. He almost didn’t answer the call, then changed his mind.
“Hello?” he said
“DeMarco, you son of a bitch! Why did you let her do it?”
“What? Who is this?”
“It’s Elinore.”
“Elinore! You sound like you’re all right. Thank God!”
“Of course I’m all right. I just got a little bump on my noggin.”
“It was more than a little bump, Elinore. I didn’t think you were ever going to be okay again.”
“Well, I’m fine. The swelling or whatever it was went down. Now answer my question. Why did you let my damn daughter take that deal from Callahan?”
“I couldn’t stop her, Elinore. You were incapacitated and she had power of attorney. And face it, you got a good deal. You got enough money from Callahan that you can go live wherever you want.”
“I didn’t want to move! I told you I was taking a stand against Callahan.”
“I know but . . . Anyway, there’re a couple things you should know. The McNultys are going to prison.”
“For what they did to me?”
“No, for trying to sell machine guns.”
“Machine guns?”
“Yeah, the cops found them with a bunch of guns and they’re going away for a long time. I guess someone must have ratted them out.”
“Good.”
“And Sean Callahan is dead.”
“Dead?”
“Yeah, somebody shot him. The police don’t know who.”
“Well, I’m actually sorry to hear that. I never wanted him to die, but it was probably somebody he screwed in one of his slimy business deals.”
“I’m sure you’re right. And I’m sorry this turned out the way it did, but in the long run, you made out okay. You were going to have to move off Delaney Street in three years anyway, and now you can find a nice place to live, wherever you want. Hell, you can move into another building some developer like Callahan is trying to renovate.”
“You know, I just might do that.”
“Elinore, I was kidding.”
“I know you were. But I’m not.”
DeMarco walked into Mahoney’s office and told Mavis he needed to see the big man. He wanted to give Mahoney the good news that Elinore was okay, feeling feistier than ever, and ready to take on the world. He also wanted to let him know about his last encounter with pretty Maria—or whatever her name was.
Mavis said that he’d have to wait, as Mahoney was currently meeting with Congressman Sims. And DeMarco thought: Great. He could just imagine the mood Mahoney would be in after that meeting.
Ten minutes later, Sims left Mahoney’s office. He was a big lumbering man in his fifties, and probably weighed sixty pounds more than he had when he was a young marine in Lebanon. He looked shell-shocked; he didn’t appear to even see DeMarco and Mavis as he left.
DeMarco walked into Mahoney’s office to find Mahoney drinking bourbon, staring morosely out at the National Mall.
“How’d it go with Sims?” DeMarco asked.
Without looking at DeMarco, Mahoney said, “I asked him if he’d really been given a Purple Heart, and eventually he told me the truth. He said, just like Emma thought, that he figured he deserved one and during his first campaign, on the spur of the moment, he lied. Then after that, he was stuck with it. So I told him he had to set things straight, that you can’t lie about something like the Heart.
“But I told him that when he did, I was going to be there, standing beside him. And that guy whose life
he saved, he’d be there, too, and he’d tell how Sims had risked his life and got all cut up doing so. I’d say that Sims was a decent man and a brave one, too, but he just made a poor decision in the heat of a campaign.”
Mahoney polished off the drink in hand and swiveled his chair around to face DeMarco. “But none of that’s going to happen. Sims is going to resign. He said he’s not going to spend the next year watching his opponent’s campaign ads trash him. He said he wasn’t going to subject his wife and kids to that kind of humiliation.”
“Are you going to tell anyone about him not receiving the Purple Heart?” DeMarco asked.
“No. Not if he resigns. And I’m sure he’ll never bring it up again.” Mahoney paused. “Fucking politics in this country has become so nasty and cutthroat. There was a time when Sims could have owned up to what he did, and people might have forgiven him. But not these days.”
Mahoney refilled his glass with Wild Turkey. “So what good news have you got for me, now that I just lost the Democrats the only congressional district we had in Alabama?”
DeMarco looked at the bundle of contradictions sitting before him. He would never be able to understand Mahoney.
“Actually, I do have some good news,” DeMarco said, and told him about the phone call he’d received from Elinore.
“Thank God, she’s okay,” Mahoney said. “As for what happened to Callahan . . . Well, when you lie down with dogs you’re liable to wake up with fleas.”
And that, DeMarco thought, was going to be Sean Callahan’s epitaph.
Then DeMarco told Mahoney about the warning Castro’s lady gunslinger had given him, that if he ever went after Javier Castro again, DeMarco was likely to be framed for Callahan’s murder. Mahoney’s reaction to this statement was: “Aw, he won’t do shit.”
Easy for you to say.
“She also said that if you go after Castro, some of Castro’s cartel friends who are also invested in Delaney Square might come after you.”
“She said that, did she?” Mahoney said.
The way Mahoney said this, DeMarco thought: Oh, no. He knew immediately what Mahoney was going to do next.
Mahoney picked up his phone, punched a button, and said, “Mavis, I want a meeting tomorrow with the head of the DEA. There’s a bunch of Mexican drug dealers laundering money through a development in Boston and I want the bastards strung up by their balls.”
He put down the phone and said, “I’ll show them they can’t threaten a United States congressman.”
DeMarco closed his eyes and prayed: Dear Lord, please save me from this maniac. Didn’t Mahoney realize that screwing with Castro could get them both killed?
Epilogue
Javier Castro knew he was going to die. What he didn’t know was how agonizing his death would be. It was almost laughable that a man would actually pray to be shot in the head but that was what he prayed for now: a bullet in the head rather than being tortured for hours, his body mutilated, his heart finally bursting when it could no longer endure the waves of pain.
He was in a barn someplace in Mexico but he didn’t know exactly where. There were four empty horse stalls, saddles and bridles hanging from hooks, bales of hay stacked near one wall, straw covering a dirt floor. Leaning against one wall was a pitchfork and he hoped that’s where it stayed. He was bound to a chair with a rope, his hands handcuffed behind his back. His hands had been cuffed for the last six hours and he no longer had any feeling in his fingers. Standing near the barn’s double doors were two men—two of his former bodyguards, men who’d betrayed him. He’d been sitting in the barn for over an hour, waiting, he assumed, for his crazy cousin Paulo to arrive.
For the last six months, he’d been living in a home in Belize. He’d purchased it in a manner he thought was untraceable from the estate of a Russian oil baron who’d fallen out of favor with Putin. And he bought it because it was a virtual fortress with high walls and a sophisticated security system that included motion detectors, cameras, and a safe room—an impregnable vault that only an expert with explosives would be able to crack open. He figured the only way anyone would be able to breach the home’s security system and get past four men armed with Uzis was if there was a traitor in his ranks—and he turned out to be right about this.
Last night, while he was sleeping, la Leona, Maria Vasquez, had entered his bedroom accompanied by two of his bodyguards, men who had been loyal to him for years. She prodded him gently awake with a slim finger, and with his bodyguards pointing pistols at him, ordered him to get dressed. Maria had been dressed in black—a short black jacket, a black turtleneck sweater, tight black jeans, and black Reeboks. She looked like a cat burglar—or maybe the way a beautiful actress playing a cat burglar would look. He suspected Maria had met with his bodyguards when they were sent out for supplies, and she either bribed them to help her or threatened family members who still resided in Mexico.
How brilliant Maria had found him in Belize he didn’t know. The only good news was that his wife wasn’t with him because when the American investigation started to damage the cartel, he insisted his wife and daughter go live in a small place he owned in Switzerland—a place the Americans couldn’t confiscate—and had been paying a security firm thousands of dollars a day to protect them.
As he was dressing, he said to Maria, “Whatever Paulo’s paying you, I’ll triple it.”
“Please, Javier,” she said. “Don’t embarrass yourself.”
As they left the house, he saw the bodies of his other two bodyguards lying on the floor. Both men had been shot in the back, he assumed with silenced weapons, as he hadn’t heard shots. He also assumed that the two bodyguards helping Maria had killed them and then let her into the house.
He was handcuffed, placed in a large black SUV, then driven to an airstrip on private land where a small jet was waiting. On board the plane, Maria showed him a list of banks where he kept cash; the only way she could have gotten the list was from his lawyer or his personal accountant, and God knows what she did to them to make them cooperate. When she asked him to provide the passwords and security information needed to transfer money out of the accounts, he did so without hesitation. If he hadn’t given her the information voluntarily, he knew he’d be tortured until he did.
The money in the accounts amounted to about 120 million; all the rest of his assets were in real estate or tied up in businesses or stock held in various companies, and Maria knew this. Those assets would be harder for his cousin to appropriate and maybe he wouldn’t bother. Also not on Maria’s list was 25 million he kept in gold bullion buried beneath the courtyard in his Mexico City home, for no one but he and his wife knew about the gold. There was at least some consolation in knowing his wife and daughter wouldn’t be left penniless. After he gave her the bank account information, Maria spent a little time on a computer, most likely verifying information he gave her or transferring the money out of his accounts, then she slept like a baby until the plane landed, not a worry in the world, nothing troubling her conscience at all.
The plane landed at a private airport in Sinaloa that the cartel used. A hood was placed over his head before he left the plane, and then he was placed in another SUV that was waiting on the runway. From there they drove to the barn where he was now sitting, bound to a chair, waiting for his cousin to come and kill him. While he sat there, his unfaithful bodyguards watched him, looking regretful. He thought about railing at them for being the treasonous, ungrateful dogs they were, but didn’t bother. He didn’t know where Maria had gone, most likely to pick up his cousin.
Javier Castro’s troubles began seven months earlier, almost immediately after he thought he had dealt successfully with the Callahan problem. A federal task force led by the DEA, with help provided by the U.S. Treasury and Justice Departments, started looking at money coming into and going out of the Cayman firm he’d used for investing in Delaney Square. Thanks to the help of one
of the Cayman executives who cooperated to avoid a jail sentence, the U.S. government was able to identify a number of properties and bank accounts in the United States where the cartel had placed considerable sums.
To date, the U.S. government had seized over three hundred million in cartel-owned real estate in the United States, including his daughter’s condo in New York. Also seized were three jets, each worth approximately twenty-five million, and a number of U.S. bank accounts holding approximately four hundred million dollars. These accounts belonged not only to members of his cousin’s cartel but judges, cops, and politicians who had helped the cartel over the years. A final problem caused by the investigation was that the cartel now had cash stacking up in warehouses on both sides of the border, moldering, because it was afraid to move the money.
The U.S. government also got an injunction to stop work on Delaney Square until the investigation was completed, and when the U.S. bank that had loaned money to Callahan for Delaney Square learned he had partially financed the project with money coming from a Mexican drug cartel, the U.S. bank, at least temporarily, had refused to make the additional loans needed to complete the project. Now in the place where Elinore Dobbs’s old apartment building had once stood there was nothing more than a large hole in the ground. No new structure would be rising from the hole anytime soon.
When the DEA money-laundering investigation began, Javier talked to a source he’d been paying in the DEA for years, and his source told him that Congressman John Mahoney was the one who’d initiated the investigation, and he did so because he’d been threatened by Javier Castro. It was outrageous! He’d done exactly what Mahoney had wanted when it came to Callahan, and he’d never threatened Mahoney—or at least, that’s the way he saw it. All he did was have Maria Vasquez tell DeMarco that if Mahoney didn’t leave the cartel alone, people like his insane cousin might come after Mahoney—but he never said that he would retaliate against Mahoney.
