House Reckoning: A Joe DeMarco Thriller

by Mike Lawson

  “Well, poop, DeMarco,” Sherman said after he gave his report. “It looks like Brian Quinn is going to become the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There’s no point calling Dombroski to testify without the teacher. She was the one who actually saw Quinn do something.”

  “Maybe we can track her down,” DeMarco said. “Check with TSA and see if she caught a flight to somewhere. I don’t have the clout to do that, but you do. Check cruise ships leaving New York, too.”

  “I’ll do that,” Amelia said, “but I doubt her name will be on a passenger list. Quinn’s too smart for that.”

  “What about Quinn’s girlfriend?”

  “I don’t see that helping much. For one thing, a rumor of marital infidelity without any proof isn’t going to be enough to keep him from getting confirmed. The other thing is, my boss isn’t in any position to raise the issue. He’s too old to run around on his wife anymore, but I’m afraid that Senator Beecham has a long, very well documented history of straying from the marital bed.”

  “Shit,” DeMarco said.

  “Indeed,” Sherman said.

  They waited until he passed through the Holland Tunnel and was in New York City before they pulled him over.

  DeMarco had no idea how they knew where he was. Cameras in the tunnel? He didn’t think they’d followed him to Brick and he hadn’t see any sign of them while he was in Brick or driving back from New Jersey to Manhattan. He wondered if they’d used a helicopter to monitor him. Whatever the case, a few blocks after he emerged from the tunnel, a black SUV appeared behind him, blue and red lights flashing in the windshield.

  He pulled over and two guys in suits, one guy black, one white, exited the SUV. It was the same guys DeMarco had seen with Quinn at the Carlyle hotel. He wondered if it was the same guys who had Dombroski pissing blood. He rolled down the window and the white guy showed him a badge and said, “NYPD. Get out of the car. You’re coming with us.”

  “Fuck you,” DeMarco said.

  “Fuck me?” the guy said, and he looked over at his partner and smiled. “Sir, you can either get out of the car and come with us peacefully or me and my partner will drag you out, beat the shit out of you for resisting arrest, and you’ll come with us in handcuffs. Which would you prefer?”

  The mood he was in, DeMarco was thinking he would actually enjoy trading punches with these two cops, even though he knew he’d lose. But what he didn’t want was to waste his time sitting in a jail cell. He stepped out of the car and the white cop frisked him. “I’m not armed,” DeMarco said as the cop patted him down.

  “Well, I gotta make sure. We’d look like dumb shits if you ended up shooting our boss.” As they were leading him back to their SUV, DeMarco said, “What about my car? It’s a rental. I can’t just leave it sitting there.”

  “Not my problem,” the cop said. “But I imagine before long someone will come by and steal it or it’ll get towed.” He seemed to think this was funny.

  Inside the SUV, the black guy sat in the back with DeMarco while the white guy drove.

  DeMarco didn’t ask where they were taking him because they’d already given him the answer to that question: they were taking him to see Quinn. And other than the fact that he was going to have a major hassle getting his car back, what was happening was actually fine with him. He was going to come face-to-face with his father’s killer.

  They drove silently for twenty minutes, using lights and the siren periodically to move traffic out of the way. DeMarco thought they would take him to 1PP, where Quinn’s office was, but they didn’t. Maybe Quinn didn’t want anybody to see DeMarco near his office. They took him instead to Battery Park, where Quinn was waiting at an outdoor table, talking on his cell phone. Two men, who looked like Quinn’s security detail, stood near him, scanning the crowd.

  When they reached the table where Quinn was sitting, he nodded at the two cops who had brought DeMarco to him and they walked over to join the other two security guys.

  “Sit down, DeMarco,” Quinn said.

  The night he’d seen Quinn at the Carlyle, DeMarco had been sitting some distance away. All he’d noticed was Quinn’s prematurely gray hair, his patrician looks, his lean build, and how Quinn had struck him as being confident and in command even when talking to the president’s chief of staff. Up close, he noticed that Quinn was at least three inches taller than him, had gray eyes, and was carrying a weapon in a shoulder holster, a black automatic. His arrogance was palpable—which infuriated DeMarco.

  DeMarco sat there with his jaw clenched, his hands formed into fists, and it was taking all the willpower he possessed to keep from attacking Quinn. He may not have had it in him, as Emma had said, to shoot Quinn in cold blood, but he wouldn’t have any problem at all with beating the man to a bloody pulp. He figured the best he’d be able to do, however, was throw one punch—and then four good-sized guys would wrestle him to the ground and handcuff him.

  “This has to stop,” Quinn said. “Whatever you think you know, whatever you’ve been told, you have no proof. You can’t hurt me, DeMarco. Thanks to me, the rate of violent crime in New York has never been lower and I’ve been given awards by almost every civic organization in the city. And the media loves me. Did you see the profile they did on me last month in the New Yorker? I’m a personal friend to the mayor, the governor, and both of New York’s senators, and the president practically begged me to take over the Bureau. He said there’s no one else in the country that can match me in terms of my experience and accomplishments. So you can’t hurt me, DeMarco, and you can’t stop me. All you can do is annoy me. The question is: What should I do about you?”

  “You killed my father,” DeMarco said.

  As if DeMarco hadn’t spoken, Quinn said, “For the last twenty-four hours I’ve had an NYPD intelligence team pulling your life apart. I know about your connection to John Mahoney and I know you and Mahoney have pulled a lot of crap over the years. As director of the FBI, if I decide to do so, I’ll find something I can use to put you in a federal prison. Given your history with Mahoney, that shouldn’t be hard, but if I have to, I’ll frame you. I will also do everything I can to make sure you never hold a decent job for the rest of your life, and by the time I’m finished with you, you’ll either be in jail or living out of the back of your car. So you have a choice to make, DeMarco: you can either crawl back into your hole and hope that you never come to my attention again or you can continue to pursue a pointless vendetta against me, in which case I will destroy you.”

  Quinn gave DeMarco the full force of his eyes one last time, then put on sunglasses and walked over to join his security detail. With Quinn leading the way, he and his four men left Battery Park, reminding DeMarco of a pack of wolves, Quinn, of course, being the alpha male.

  And that was the moment that everything changed. That was the moment when DeMarco decided he was going to kill Brian Quinn.

  25

  After Quinn left, DeMarco continued to sit at the table in Battery Park, gazing out at the Statue of Liberty, thinking about his decision to kill Brian Quinn and trying to figure out exactly how he was going to do it.

  The way Quinn had spoken to him—acting as if killing Gino DeMarco had never really happened—was one reason why he’d decided to kill the man. Another was Quinn’s insufferable arrogance, bragging about his accomplishments, so confident that with his power and connections, someone like DeMarco wouldn’t stand a chance against him. But the final reason was that DeMarco knew that if he didn’t find the courage to kill Quinn, Quinn would not only get away with what’d he done, but with his record and his abilities, he could very well end up in the Senate or even the White House.

  DeMarco was still afraid that if he attempted—or succeeded—in killing Quinn, he would end up either dead or in jail. But now he didn’t care. He was not going to allow Quinn to get away with what he’d done and become even more powerful than he already was.

  The only question now was, How was he going to do it? Fifteen
minutes later he had a plan.

  DeMarco caught a cab back to the last place he’d seen his rental car. To his surprise and delight, the car was still there.

  The first thing DeMarco needed to do was shake any cops who were tailing him. He had no doubt they were following him even if he couldn’t see them, and he suspected they would continue to follow him until Quinn was confirmed. Or maybe they weren’t physically following him. He could be tracked via his cell phone and his rental car almost certainly had some sort of anti-theft GPS device.

  He dropped off the rental car back at LaGuardia, then found a cash machine and took the maximum he could get from his checking account: five hundred bucks. Money was going to be a problem. Every time he used a credit card or hit a cash machine, Quinn’s people would be able to get a fix on the location where he used the cards. While he was waiting for a cab, he dismantled his cell phone and dropped the pieces into two separate trash cans. That decision not only cost him two hundred bucks, but like most people he’d become used to the convenience of a cell phone and knew that life without one was going to be painful. Pay phones were going the way of the dodo.

  The next item on his agenda was acquiring a gun, one that was untraceable. He didn’t want to fill out whatever paperwork it was that allowed nuts to buy weapons and shoot school kids and theaters full of people; he didn’t want there to be any record of him purchasing a firearm. He could probably wander around flea markets and yard sales and gun shows, but that was all too slow and required too much work. The easiest way for him to obtain a gun was to get one from a man who used to work for Tony Benedetto: his cousin, the asshole.

  DeMarco had married Marie the year he went to work for Mahoney, about eight months after his father’s funeral. He was making a decent salary; in fact, he was making a salary that was even better than he’d been expecting to make at that phase of his life. The wedding wasn’t exactly a joyous occasion, however. His mother had never liked Marie—she thought Marie was a self-centered airhead—and thought her son was mistaking lust for love. Marie’s parents weren’t happy that their precious daughter was marrying the son of a mafia hit man, didn’t like that Marie would be living in D.C., and considered DeMarco’s employer—a politician—not much better than the mobster who’d employed DeMarco’s father. The only ones who had a good time at their wedding were Marie’s bridesmaids, who all got roaring drunk.

  He didn’t tell Marie a lot about what he did for Mahoney—and Marie didn’t seem to care—nor did he tell her what his Aunt Connie had told him about the possibility of being indicted if he continued to work for Mahoney. No, he didn’t tell her those things. He chose to be optimistic and they bought a house in Georgetown on P Street; it was a narrow, boxy, two-story structure made of white painted brick. Although it wasn’t a big house, because it was located in Georgetown it was horrendously expensive. Marie thought of the place as her “starter” house. DeMarco soon found out that his wife excelled at spending more money than he made, and it wasn’t long before the house was well furnished.

  Looking back on what happened, DeMarco figured the root cause of the problem with his marriage was most likely boredom. Marie didn’t have anything to do all day because she made no effort to get a job and she didn’t have any hobbies—other than shopping and adultery. At some point, she started making trips up to New York. To see her mom, she said. To see her old girlfriends, she said. He found out later the trips were to see his cousin, Danny DeMarco, the handsomest guy in Queens.

  When she divorced him to marry Danny, DeMarco managed to keep his house and his federal pension—assuming he’d be in the job long enough to collect a pension. Marie took everything else—their savings (which didn’t amount to much), his car, and all the furniture in the house. It was really the furniture she wanted most, since she was planning to use all the expensive things she’d bought in D.C. to decorate her new place in New York. DeMarco ended up with no car, no cash, the bills for all the furniture she’d bought, and the exorbitant mortgage on a barren house. At the time his marriage ended, he wasn’t sure whom he hated more: his ex-wife or his cousin.

  Oddly enough, Marie had called him a few years ago when his cousin landed in jail, accused of murdering a man he actually hadn’t murdered. Danny was a small-time thief, a fence, a con man, and as crooked as a mountain road, but he wasn’t a killer. When Marie asked for his help getting Danny out of jail, he’d laughed and said a) he couldn’t help him and b) he wouldn’t help him. He told Marie that her husband could rot in prison for all he cared—and then it turned out he needed his cousin’s help on a case he was working on at the time, so DeMarco made an under-the-table deal with the Queens DA to get Danny out of jail. He hadn’t seen Danny since then and he hadn’t seen Marie since she divorced him.

  DeMarco had a cab drop him off in Manhattan, then he spent two hours ducking in and out of buildings, taking short subway rides, ducking in and out of more buildings, trying to spot a tail. If they were tailing him, he couldn’t tell. Finally, he ended up at his cousin’s place of business, a mob-affiliated pawnshop in Queens.

  The pawnshop was a shabby, dusty, dingy place with sheet metal screens that could be rolled down over the door and the windows at night. It was overflowing with an unimaginable collection of crap: musical instruments, tools, knives, fake antiques, rings, bicycles, and baby carriages—and one cigar-store wooden Indian that looked like it might actually be worth something. DeMarco knew the pawnshop was just a front for merchandise hijacked from trucks and pilfered from warehouses, then sold to shoppers who never questioned how it was that a pawnshop could beat the prices at Target.

  Danny had been working in the pawnshop when he married DeMarco’s ex-wife—and he still worked there, although he now ran the place. He wondered if Marie was disappointed that her husband hadn’t climbed farther up the corporate ladder. DeMarco was, in fact, surprised that Marie was still married to Danny. One reason why, he supposed, was that his cousin was still a handsome man. He looked like DeMarco—nobody would be surprised to hear they were cousins—and they had the same thick, dark hair and almost identical noses and chins. That is, almost identical but not identical. For whatever reason, all Danny’s facial features seemed to be organized in a more appealing way than DeMarco’s and the end result was that where Joe was a good-looking man, Danny looked like a leading man.

  The other reason that Marie might still be married to him was that Danny DeMarco was actually a lot of fun to be around—that is, he was a lot of fun when he wasn’t turning you into a cuckold. He was a charming, likable guy and DeMarco suspected Marie had fallen for him in the first place because she was bored in D.C. being Joe’s wife, and Danny was simply more entertaining.

  There was a third possibility, DeMarco realized: maybe Danny was making a lot more money than DeMarco thought. All DeMarco knew was that his cousin had always been a small-time crook, but maybe over time he’d gotten into things that were more lucrative than fencing stolen goods. He could be connected to money laundering or drugs or God knows what. All DeMarco knew for sure was that his cousin couldn’t be involved in anything legitimate and that he most likely had to be making a decent income to keep Marie happy.

  The one possibility DeMarco refused to consider was that his ex-wife just plain loved the damn guy regardless of what he did or how much money he made.

  When DeMarco walked into the pawnshop, Danny was sitting behind the counter on a high stool, his feet up on the countertop, drinking a Pepsi, and watching a Sopranos rerun on a television set mounted high on one wall. DeMarco had the fleeting thought that maybe guys like Danny watched The Sopranos hoping to learn something—like the HBO series was some sort of mob training film. Danny was laughing at something one of Tony Soprano’s hoods had said, when he saw DeMarco. His eyes widened in surprise and delight, and he used the remote to turn off the television.

  “Jesus, Joe. I can’t believe it.” He said this with a big smile on his face—and had the counter not been in the way, he probably would h
ave tried to hug DeMarco. Oddly enough, his cousin wanted to be friends. He was grateful that DeMarco had gotten him free of the murder charge and he figured that by now DeMarco would have gotten over his wife’s unfaithfulness and his own treachery. DeMarco hadn’t.

  “I need a loaded gun with a silencer,” DeMarco said without any preamble. “The gun can’t be a piece of shit and the silencer has to be good.”

  “You’re kidding,” Danny said.

  “Does it fuckin’ look like I’m kidding?”

  “Hey, okay. Take it easy. You going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “No.” Then he paused and tried to lighten his tone. “I need you to do this for me, Danny. It’s important. But I can’t tell you why. So can you get me a gun?”

  “Yeah, sure. It’ll take me a couple of hours, but I can get one.”

  “How much will it cost?

  “Don’t worry about that. I owe you.”

  DeMarco didn’t argue with him; he needed all the cash he had on him. In fact, he needed a lot more than he had on him. He didn’t know how long he’d be in New York and the cheapest hotel he’d been able to find in the area where he needed to be was two hundred bucks a night—tax not included. He thought about asking Danny for money but decided not to. He didn’t want to be any more beholden to the guy.

  “When you get the gun,” DeMarco said, “stick it in a box and wrap up the box. Then I want you to drop it off before four P.M. tomorrow at the front desk of the St. Marks Hotel in the East Village. I haven’t checked in yet and won’t until tomorrow, but tell the guy at the front desk it’s for me and I’ll pick it up when I check in later.”