House Reckoning: A Joe DeMarco Thriller

by Mike Lawson

  “I can get you the gun today, Joe.”

  “No. Deliver it to the hotel before four tomorrow.” He didn’t bother to tell Danny why.

  “Okay,” Danny said. “You want to give me a phone number so I can reach you if I have to?”

  “No. After you drop off the gun, you forget I was ever here. I’m serious, Danny. You don’t want to be involved in what I’m doing and you have to make sure the gun can’t be traced back to you.”

  “The gun will be clean. But I’m telling you, Joe, you don’t want to get caught with an unregistered weapon with a silencer on it. Not in this town.”

  “Is there a back way out of here?” He knew his cousin had to have some kind of bolt hole, through an adjacent building or the one that butted up against the back of his shop. Rats like Danny always had an escape hatch.

  “Sure,” he said. “Come around behind the counter.”

  As DeMarco was leaving, Danny said, “It’s really good to see you again, Joe.”

  And the damn guy was actually being sincere.

  DeMarco left Danny’s shop, and as he walked, he looked back frequently, checking for a tail. He didn’t think anyone was following him. He slipped into a Chinese restaurant that had a pay phone and called Neil.

  “I need you to send me five grand in cash. I can’t use my credit cards or my debit card.”

  “Jesus, Joe, what the hell are you doing? Does this involve Quinn?”

  “Will you send me the money? I’ll repay you when I get back to D.C.”

  He didn’t bother to add: If I get back to D.C.

  Neil hesitated. DeMarco didn’t know if the money bothered Neil—he was a tightwad—or if Neil just didn’t want to be involved in any way with what DeMarco was doing. “Neil,” DeMarco said, “I’ve sent a lot of business your way over the years. Don’t be an asshole.”

  “Yeah, all right,” Neil said. “Where do you want me to send the money?”

  DeMarco told him the same thing he’d told Danny: FedEx the money to the St. Marks Hotel and make sure it gets there before 4 P.M. tomorrow. Then something occurred to DeMarco. “Also send me a cell phone, a smartphone, one that’s not traceable to you.” DeMarco didn’t have time to go phone shopping and didn’t want to spend his cash on a phone.

  “Okay,” Neil said. Then he added, “Joe, I’m telling you, you don’t want to screw around with Quinn. Whatever you have in mind, whatever you’re doing, you need to drop it.”

  DeMarco hung up.

  He didn’t want to check into a hotel, mainly because a hotel would want a credit card. So for the next twenty-four hours—the time it would take Neil to FedEx the cash—he was just going to move around New York, maybe catch a couple of movies so he could get some sleep. He also needed to buy some clothes: a few changes of underwear, a couple of shirts, a pair of pants, and a duffle bag to put everything in. Also a few items that could be considered a disguise: a couple of hats, a sweatshirt with a hood, sunglasses.

  He hadn’t thought about it before, but there were a lot of details involved in killing a man and he didn’t have his father’s experience. He wondered what he was overlooking.

  26

  Quinn’s cell phone vibrated on the nightstand next to the bed.

  “Damn it,” Pam muttered. “I hope you don’t have to go tearing out of here.”

  Quinn reached for his phone and checked the caller ID. “Sorry, I need to take this.” He answered the phone, saying, “Quinn.”

  “It’s Hanley, boss. I’m sorry to bother you, but we lost DeMarco.”

  “How the hell could you lose him?” Before Hanley could answer he said, “Hang on a minute.” He turned to Pam and said, “I need to talk to this guy,” and he left the bed and walked naked into the living room of Pam’s apartment. Pamela didn’t know about the DeMarco problem and he was hoping he wouldn’t have to discuss the issue with her.

  He took a seat in the living room and said to Hanley, “What happened?”

  “He took his rental car back to LaGuardia and we figured he was catching the shuttle back to D.C. But he didn’t. After he dumped the rental car, he caught a cab into the city and then he shook Grimes. I mean, he deliberately shook him. He started ducking into buildings, going in one entrance and out the other, taking subway rides, hopping on and off the trains, and he eventually shook him.”

  “So use his cell phone to find him.”

  “He dumped the phone in a trash can at the airport.”

  “Goddamnit,” Quinn muttered. “So what are you doing now?”

  “He’s got relatives here. His mother, a couple of cousins, uncles. I’ve pulled together a list of all the ones I could identify and I’ve got guys watching their houses and apartment buildings in case he shows up at one of them.”

  “What did you tell the people you have looking for him?”

  “Nothing. I just gave them his DMV photo and told them you wanted him located.”

  “Good. You got somebody looking to see if he’s using his credit cards?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me think a minute,” Quinn said.

  What the hell could DeMarco be doing? Quinn couldn’t imagine him being able to come up with something else to use against him at the confirmation hearing. The only thing he could have used that might have been effective was Tony Benedetto’s testimony or his videotaped statement. But the video was gone—Quinn had personally destroyed it—and Benedetto wasn’t going to cooperate with DeMarco, not if he wanted to keep his son out of jail. In fact, Benedetto had already gotten himself admitted to a hospital so if he was called to testify, he could claim he was too ill to travel. The schoolteacher was at an upscale resort in the Adirondacks under a phony name; a female cop drove her there in an unmarked car so there wouldn’t be any transportation records. Quinn doubted anyone would be able to find the teacher before the confirmation hearing, and without Benedetto and the teacher, DeMarco had nothing.

  So what could DeMarco be doing? Was he in New York to see if he could squeeze Benedetto and force him to testify? If he was, that would be a waste of time. Tony, the old bastard, even as sick as he was, wouldn’t cave in. He’d also been to see Dombroski, but Quinn figured there was no way they’d subpoena Dombroski to testify at the hearing, not without the teacher backing up Dombroski’s statement. At least he didn’t think so—but maybe he should get Dombroski out of town, too. Whatever the case, he wanted to find DeMarco. He didn’t want the damn guy running around town without knowing what he was up to.

  It occurred to him that DeMarco might be planning to kill him. That seemed pretty unlikely, however. DeMarco, as near as he’d been able to tell from the research his people had done, was a lawyer who’d never practiced law and did John Mahoney’s dirty work. The guy was basically Mahoney’s bagman; he wasn’t a gunslinger. On the other hand, since DeMarco thought that he had killed his father and because vengeance was a hell of a motivator, he shouldn’t underestimate the potential danger DeMarco posed.

  “I want you to assign somebody to watch my place,” Quinn said.

  “You think he might try to do something to you, boss?”

  “I doubt it, but you can never tell with a nut like him. I’m also going to get his picture out to the guys in patrol and transit. I want the whole department looking for him. So I want you to email DeMarco’s DMV photo to John Braddock, then I’ll talk to Braddock. Don’t give Braddock DeMarco’s name, just his picture.”

  “Okay, but what if somebody finds him? What do you want them to do?”

  “I want them to call me. I need to make sure everybody understands that, Hanley. I don’t want anyone approaching him. I just want them to call me when he’s been located and then I’ll call you. You understand?”

  “Yeah, boss.”

  Quinn hung up and sat there, thinking. So far he’d limited knowledge of the DeMarco problem to Hanley and Grimes because he knew he could trust them completely, and he essentially told them the truth without giving them any details. He said he’d ma
de a dumb rookie mistake and DeMarco was trying to exploit the situation and derail his chance of being confirmed as director of the FBI. He said he needed their help to get DeMarco off his back, knowing that Grimes and Hanley would do anything for him. He’d also told them that when he went to Washington, and if they wanted to go with him and continue to be his personal security guys, he’d get them temporarily detailed to D.C., where they’d not only collect their current salaries but also collect per diem the whole time they were down there.

  He then told Hanley and Grimes that DeMarco had in his possession a video of an old mafia guy named Tony Benedetto and Quinn needed to get the video. Benedetto was a sick old man and DeMarco had forced him to tell a pack of lies that DeMarco could use to build a trumped-up case against him. And that’s all it took. Hanley and Grimes got three other guys, two of them retired cops and one of them a technical guy who could deal with alarm systems and computers, and they broke into DeMarco’s house and recovered the video. Hanley didn’t tell the people who accompanied him to D.C. anything other than that he was looking for a video of an old guy talking. When they found the video camera in DeMarco’s basement lockbox, the only one who looked at it was Hanley and he told Quinn he only looked at it long enough to confirm that Benedetto was on it—and Quinn believed Hanley. Fortunately, it didn’t appear as if DeMarco had copied the video; at least Quinn hoped so. They hadn’t found any evidence on DeMarco’s computer that a copy had been made or emailed, nor had they found Benedetto’s statement on any CDs or flash drives in DeMarco’s house.

  The teacher had been easy. Quinn and his wife were big supporters of the New York public school system, donating money and helping out on a variety of projects with at-risk kids. Quinn called up the school superintendent and told her he needed to get Janet Costello out of town for her own safety but he didn’t want Janet to know she was in danger. The superintendent told Janet that a big donor—a man who wished to remain anonymous—wanted to reward Janet in a small way for her years of service. The donor claimed that she had made a lifelong impression on him, and because he was now a rich man in a position to pay her back, he was treating her to two weeks at a resort in the Adirondacks. The school system was giving her the time off without making her use her vacation time. Janet obviously didn’t have a clue who this person could be; she wasn’t aware she’d ever made an impression on any of the idiots she’d taught, but she gladly accepted her reward.

  Quinn didn’t have to tell Hanley and Grimes much of anything regarding Dombroski. He just told them that Dombroski was cooperating with DeMarco and he wanted Hanley and Grimes to let Dombroski know that he’d better stop cooperating.

  Quinn had a problem, however. Hanley and Grimes may have been willing to do anything for him, but it wasn’t going to be so simple to get the entire police department looking for DeMarco. Quinn knew that if he ordered a full-scale manhunt, his cops would find the damn guy in a couple of days, maybe in a couple of hours, but a manhunt meant getting people looking at both public and private surveillance camera feeds, checking to see if he was registered in hotels, and plastering his picture in the papers and on television. The problem with doing that was that at some point he’d have to tell the media why he was looking for DeMarco, and he didn’t want to go down that path. He finally decided to search for DeMarco in a more low-key way, knowing in advance that the chances of finding the bastard were smaller.

  He called John Braddock. Braddock was the deputy commissioner in charge of NYPD’s antiterrorism division. He told Braddock that Hanley was emailing him a picture of a man and he wanted every beat cop and transit cop in the city to get a copy of the picture. He also told Braddock he wanted him to employ the so-called Ring of Steel.

  The Ring of Steel, named after a similar surveillance system in London, uses more than three thousand surveillance cameras to watch for terrorists and common criminals. In New York most of the cameras are located in midtown and lower Manhattan, and the majority of those were focused on high-value terrorists targets: the New York Stock Exchange, the World Trade Center memorial, federal buildings, bridges, and tunnels. The system uses artificial intelligence software in addition to human eyeballs, and the software contains algorithms that direct the cameras to search for specific shapes and sizes—like suspicious packages that might contain bombs—and specific human faces. The cameras would now be hunting DeMarco.

  Quinn told Braddock the same thing he’d told Hanley: that when DeMarco was found no one was to approach him; they were to call Quinn. When Braddock asked why Quinn was hunting for this unnamed man, Quinn said, “I can’t tell you, John. It’s just something the guys in D.C. asked me to do.”

  Although a man of Braddock’s rank was normally in the loop, he wasn’t totally surprised that Quinn didn’t tell him more about the person they were hunting for. This sort of thing had happened before, and almost always for something related to terrorism. The CIA or FBI or NSA—or one of the dozen other alphabet agencies in D.C. involved in counterterrorism—would get a whisper about some Muslim fanatic being in the United States. They might not have a name, only a grainy picture taken by a satellite or a predator drone, and they’d ask police departments around the country to be on the lookout for the person of interest. Because the information was classified or came from classified sources, the feds didn’t share a lot of details with the local cops. And that’s basically what Quinn was telling John Braddock, and because Braddock owed his job to Quinn and was hoping that Quinn might endorse him to be the next police commissioner, he would do as Quinn asked.

  After Quinn finished talking to Braddock he rejoined Pamela in bed.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked. She was sitting up, the sheets down around her waist.

  “Yeah. I just needed to talk to a couple of people to get something moving.”

  “I’ll be so glad when you’re out of that job. The stress you’re under is unimaginable.” They both thought that being in charge of the Bureau was going to be less stressful than being the New York City police commissioner.

  Pamela Weinman looked good sitting there, the sheets down around her waist. She had long dark hair, but the only time she let it down was when they were in bed together. When she was working, she always wore it tied in some kind of bun or piled on top of her head in a fancy braid. She thought she looked more professional if she wore her hair that way. He loved to watch her pull the pins from her hair and let it fall to her shoulders as they undressed for bed.

  She had a narrow face and luminous dark eyes, eyes he thought of as Gypsy eyes, although as far as he knew her family didn’t have any Romani blood in them. She was slim like him because she jogged almost every day like he did. Her breasts were works of art. As far as he was concerned—although he’d never said it out loud—she could have posed for the Venus de Milo.

  But it wasn’t just her looks and it wasn’t all about sex. He loved being with her. He loved the way her mind worked. He loved her quiet, sophisticated sense of humor. He loved that she understood the politics of the city and what it took to get things done in New York, New York. She was a realist, not an idealist.

  He’d met her on a case she was trying two years ago and they both swore that the moment they saw each other was one of those events that happens only once in your life: an instant connection that was lust but more than lust. His marriage had been over years ago, not so much sexually but intellectually. He’d found Barbara interesting at first, mostly because she came from a higher social class than him. She knew the people who made things happen in New York—people in politics and business and the media. Just listening to her talk about those people had impressed him then. Barbara had also traveled all over the world, and at that time he met her, he’d never left the United States, not even a trip to Canada.

  Later, after they’d been married not all that long, he realized that his wife may have been sophisticated and cultured, but she wasn’t really all that bright. In fact, she was extraordinarily shallow. Her primary interest in lif
e was looking good and making her homes look good. Their apartment was perpetually being remodeled.

  But he had needed her in the beginning. He had needed her family’s influence. And when her mother died and left Barbara all her money, he had to admit that he liked that, too. Now he didn’t need her connections and he didn’t really need her money, either. These days she simply bored him to tears. After he started seeing Pam he couldn’t stand to be around Barbara.

  He would miss the money after they divorced, although his highest priority had never been money. It had always been his career. He also now had money of his own from books he’d written and investments he’d made, and when he finished his term as director of the FBI, he could write his own ticket with a dozen different companies. But he wasn’t thinking that far ahead yet. He’d spend the next two years running the Bureau, make his mark on the job, and when the president left office, he’d decide what he wanted to do. Most likely, it would be something in politics, as opposed to a lucrative private sector job. Governor of New York, senator from New York, and then, maybe, who knows, a run at the Oval Office. And Pam understood all this. She, too, believed that public service and the challenges that came with it were more important than money. They were the ideal couple.

  He was going to divorce Barbara within the year. Thank God, they’d never had children. He and Pam had talked the plan over and she agreed it would be best to wait until after he was confirmed and had been in the job for a couple of months. That way, they decided, the divorce wouldn’t generate much of a political ripple. He didn’t think Barbara would fight the divorce unless he went after her money and he didn’t have any intention of doing that. Then he and Pam would get married and . . . Once again, he didn’t see the point in looking farther ahead, but he knew she would be the last wife he would ever have.

  Right now the only thorn in his side was this fool, DeMarco. Quinn had made only one big mistake when he was young—accidentally shooting Connors—but after he’d killed Jerry Kennedy and Gino DeMarco, he’d been able to put that mistake behind him. He felt bad about what Carmine had forced him to do but it was water under the bridge, and since that time he’d done a lot of good, more than enough good to compensate for the deaths of a couple of mafia hoodlums. There was no one who would disagree that he had been a champion of law and order and he’d done as much as anyone to keep terrorists from attacking his great city again. He also believed, sincerely, all false modesty aside, that the country would be safer if he was in charge of the FBI.