by Mike Lawson
She directed him to drive one block and turn right at the next corner. He never even questioned her orders. He was high from the adrenaline rush of what they’d just done. As he drove he said, ‘Oh, man, that was cool, just fuckin’ cool! Did you see those windows blow?’
‘Stop at the next corner,’ she said. She could see the big red M for the Gallery Place metro station.
‘What?’ Jorge said.
‘Stop the car!’ she screamed
And he did – and she shot him in the back of the head.
She exited the car and closed the door and walked quickly but calmly toward the metro station. With the tinted windows in the Honda, no one could see Jorge’s body slumped over the steering wheel. As she descended the escalator to the subway platform, she heard the cars behind Jorge start to honk.
43
Emma had known Doug Chamberlain for twenty years. He’d been a Green Beret, and then he’d trained special ops guys before he retired from the army. He now worked for Prescott Security, the mercenary outfit that Edith Baxter had hired.
‘Why are you involved with these people, Doug?’ Emma said.
Chamberlain looked away, embarrassed. ‘Because of Maggie,’ he said. Maggie was his wife. ‘I got drunk one night, three years ago, and drove the car off the road. Naturally, I didn’t get a scratch. Maggie broke her jaw. The insurance paid for the first surgery, but the docs screwed something up. She was in pain for a year. And it affected her mentally too; she was so depressed I was afraid she was gonna kill herself. Anyway, the HMO wouldn’t pay for another surgery so I paid out of pocket to have her taken care of. She’s had two operations now and might have to have a third. I’ve got two mortgages on the house and I’ve wiped out our savings.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that Doug. But Prescott?’
Chamberlain shrugged. ‘They offered the most money. And all I do is train the people they hire.’
There was nothing to be gained by pointing out that the people he trained provided protection for dictators who butchered their own people. So instead, Emma said, ‘Did you find out why Edith Baxter hired Prescott?’
‘Yeah. You remember the deck-of-cards thing in Iraq? Saddam and the other fifty-one bad guys we were trying to capture over there? Well, Edith had her own deck made up, fifty-two radical Muslims. She’s offering a hundred thousand a head for the capture of these guys.’
‘Their capture or their deaths?’ Emma said.
‘The contract says capture, but well … you know. The thing is, Prescott’s just screwing her. Governments – ours, the Europeans, even the Saudis – have been after some of these guys for years. Prescott’s chance of catching them is practically nil, but he’s billing Baxter for the hours he’s spending looking for them.’
‘Is Prescott helping Edith do anything here in the States?’
‘In the States?’ Chamberlain said.
‘Yes, anything to do with Muslims here in the U.S.?’
‘Not that I know of. I can try to find out if you’d like.’
‘Well, if you could, I’d appreciate—’
Emma’s cell phone rang at that moment. The caller ID screen said it was Howard University Hospital calling.
44
The wound in DeMarco’s side was less serious than the one in his leg, but it hurt like hell. He supposed the reason the one in his leg didn’t hurt so much was because the doctor had given him a local anesthetic when they’d patched him up. He bet, after the drugs wore off, the hole in his leg was going to hurt too. But the doctor hadn’t seemed very worried; he told DeMarco to stick around for a couple of hours so they could watch him a bit and then he could go home. DeMarco thought they should have kept him longer, but the way hospitals operated these days it seemed you could get shot twice and be home in time for dinner. They probably wouldn’t have kept him overnight for anything less than a heart transplant.
Including DeMarco, four people were injured and three were killed at the DEA building. The couple he’d walked out the door with were among the dead. DeMarco found out that the woman had been a DEA agent, but her husband worked for the Department of Agriculture and had just stopped by to take his wife to lunch. A security guard had also been killed. The FedEx carrier that DeMarco had dodged to get to the door had been shot in the side. He was alive but was expected to lose a kidney.
The other thing DeMarco thought about as he lay there in bed was the way he’d acted when the shooting started. All he’d wanted to do was get away from all the screams and breaking glass and flying bullets. He didn’t think about anything other than saving himself, and he was embarrassed by that. He wondered how soldiers did it. He assumed that when soldiers were in a firefight, bullets zipping past their heads, they somehow managed to return fire. But DeMarco knew, even if he’d had a gun, the last thing he would have thought about was shooting back. He’d just wanted to get out of that doorway; that had been his only thought. If he’d been able to, he would have dug a hole right in the floor and climbed into it.
And when they pulled the bodies off him, his only thought had been, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive. He could still hear the bullets hitting the body of the DEA woman who’d been lying on top of him.
Emma came into his hospital room. She didn’t have the worried, terrified expression on her face of a woman rushing to the bedside of a dying man, or at least one who’d just missed death by inches.
‘Thank God you were just nicked,’ she said.
‘Nicked?’ DeMarco said. ‘I’d call the hole in my leg more than a nick.’
‘I’ve already talked to the doctor,’ she said. ‘The one shot barely grazed your side, didn’t even hit a rib. And the one in your leg was a through-and-through and just hit meat, nothing vital. Anyway, he said you can leave in an hour or so. They just want to make sure they didn’t miss anything.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ DeMarco said. ‘I can’t believe they’re kicking me out of here so fast. I mean, I haven’t even tried to walk yet.’
‘So get up,’ Emma said, ‘and see if you—’
‘How is he?’ Mahoney said, blowing into the room, topcoat flying behind him. He spoke to Emma, ignoring DeMarco as if he was comatose.
‘He was just scratched,’ Emma said.
‘Well,’ DeMarco said, ‘I don’t know if I’d exactly call the hole in my leg a—’
‘He’s fine,’ Emma said. ‘One shot grazed his side and the other just went through the meaty part of his leg, no big deal.’
‘You know,’ DeMarco said, ‘that one shot, if it had been a little higher, it could have—’
‘Shit, is that all?’ Mahoney said to Emma. ‘Hell, when you called and told me three people had been killed, I figured he’d been all shot up. I mean, you wanna see a wound …’ and he started to tug up his pant leg.
‘Nah, that’s okay,’ DeMarco said. He didn’t feel like watching Mahoney and Emma, both combat veterans, re-create that scene in Jaws where Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss compare their scars.
‘So what the hell happened?’ Mahoney said. ‘The radio said it was some kind of drug drive-by thing, a couple of idiots who decided to shoot up the building.’
‘Maybe,’ Emma said. ‘One of the people killed was a female DEA agent with an impressive arrest record. I talked to someone I know, and he thinks they may have been after her specifically. But he said the shooters could have been retaliating against the DEA in general for some friend getting busted or killed.’
‘So you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ Mahoney said to DeMarco. ‘What the hell were you doing in the DEA building anyway?’
Before DeMarco could answer Mahoney, Emma said, ‘I’m not so sure I’d conclude that. The DEA agent or the building may have been the target, but it’s also possible they were trying to get Joe.’
‘Why do you think that?’ Mahoney said.
‘A witness got the license plate on the car as it was pulling away and the cops found the car less than two blocks from the scene, near
a metro entrance. The driver had a bullet in the back of his head, and that’s what bothers me. If a couple of gangbangers had decided to shoot up the DEA building, why would one kill the other? It’s more like the driver was executed so he wouldn’t talk. That’s something a pro would do.’
‘So maybe some drug lord hired a pro to kill the DEA agent,’ Mahoney said.
‘Maybe,’ Emma said again, ‘but I don’t like the timing of this either. I mean, here we are, looking into these terrorist attacks, and Joe is coincidentally a victim in this supposed drive-by.’
‘Huh,’ Mahoney said. ‘What have you guys found out that’s worth killing you for?’
‘I don’t know,’ DeMarco said, and he quickly filled Mahoney in on everything they’d learned, the biggest news being that Edith Baxter and Ken Dobbler were giving lots of money to Broderick.
Mahoney rolled all this around in his brain and said, ‘Well, hell. You don’t have shit.’
Mahoney, always the complimentary employer.
‘But if they tried to kill Joe,’ Emma said, ‘maybe we’re close to something and don’t know it.’
‘But what?’ Mahoney said.
Emma just shook her head.
Mahoney shrugged back into his topcoat. ‘I gotta get back to work,’ he said. ‘And you,’ he said to DeMarco, ‘since you only got winged, you need to get back to work too.’
Jesus, what did he have to do, get a leg blown off to impress these two? But then he thought, I’m alive.
45
‘The guy’s going to be out of the hospital in a day. A day!’
The client was furious, and Oliver Lincoln could understand why. He had been paid very well to execute a simple assignment, and he’d failed.
‘Do you want me to try again?’ Lincoln asked. ‘No charge, of course.’
The client was silent for a minute, apparently thinking. ‘No. If you try again it’ll be obvious that he was the target of the DEA shooting. Just forget about DeMarco. It’s time to execute the last part of the plan.’
‘Are you sure?’ Lincoln said.
‘Yes. The bill’s stuck in the House. That goddamn Mahoney.’
Lincoln had hoped it wouldn’t come to this. He was very good and very careful, but if he executed the last phase of the client’s plan … well, every cop in the country would be looking for the people involved, and they’d be looking for years. But, he thought, the only way they could get to him was if the client talked, and that wasn’t ever going to happen.
‘You blew it,’ Oliver Lincoln said to the Cuban. ‘You were supposed to incapacitate the man. He was barely wounded.’
The Cuban was embarrassed; she’d failed only one other time during her career and that had been nine years ago. But she’d be damned if she’d apologize to Lincoln.
‘You still need to pay my expenses,’ she said.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ Lincoln said.
‘You will pay my expenses. Now, do you want me to try again or return the money you gave me? Minus my expenses, that is.’
‘No, to both questions.’
‘What?’
‘No, I don’t want you to try again, and no, I don’t want you to return the money. It’s time to take care of the target that you prepared for last month. The client wants that target eliminated now.’
‘Is the plan still the same?’ the Cuban asked.
‘Yes. Nothing’s changed.’
‘If you’re thinking that I’m going to accept the payment you gave me for DeMarco for this subject, you’re a fool. We already negotiated the price for that assignment.’
She was correct. Her fee for her next assignment was much larger than the amount she’d been paid to kill DeMarco, which was only appropriate considering the risk.
Lincoln said, ‘Of course I’ll pay the price we agreed upon.’ Then he smiled. ‘And I’ll let you keep the money from the last assignment as well, even though you failed.’
‘Why?’ the Cuban said, immediately suspicious. ‘Why would you do that?’
‘So you’ll sleep with me,’ Lincoln said.
The Cuban didn’t say anything; she couldn’t tell if Lincoln was serious or not.
Lincoln struggled not to smile. He knew the last thing she wanted to do was have sex with him, but would she for seventy-five thousand dollars? Exactly how greedy was this woman?
The Cuban still didn’t respond. She stared at Lincoln’s face, her eyes blazing, yet at the same time he could tell she was considering his offer.
‘No,’ she said at last, but he could tell it just killed her to say that.
‘A hundred thousand,’ he said. ‘For one night.’
She cursed in Spanish. She looked at Lincoln, then looked away, then back at Lincoln. He could tell she couldn’t make up her mind. But enough of this; he had to get going. He had a date in an hour. ‘I’m just teasing you,’ he said. ‘I’m letting you keep the money because the next assignment is so critical and because I’ve moved up the date. And because I like you.’ What he didn’t add was: and because it’s not my money.
The Cuban’s face was flushed, embarrassed that she’d actually considered his offer – and that Lincoln knew it. Finally she said, ‘Well, I don’t like you. And maybe I’ll kill you one day for nothing.’
46
The materials finally arrived. Praise be to God.
A man, a Muslim, someone he didn’t know, knocked on his motel room door at two in the morning. He’d been sleeping and he woke up, terrified that it was the police. He looked through the peephole in the door, and when he saw the man’s face, his dark skin, his features, he was instantly relieved. He opened the door and the man, who never said a word, handed him a box and left.
The next day, a Thursday, he and the boy connected the C-4 to the radio receivers and the blasting caps. There was enough material to construct one more device than he needed, and he was trying to decide what to do with the additional material. He could keep it for the next operation or have the boy plant it somewhere in the refinery, but keeping the material would be dangerous, particularly when he was traveling, and he didn’t want the boy to spend any longer inside the refinery than they had already planned. The longer the boy was inside the facility, the higher the likelihood that he’d be discovered.
And then he thought of a better use for the extra device – a humane use.
When the devices were ready, he told the boy that he would place the bombs in the plant the following Monday night, and detonate them Tuesday morning. He wanted to breech the tanks on a weekday, and he preferred Tuesday to Monday because so many of these people tended to take three-day weekends.
The boy simply nodded his head.
Oh, he would miss this boy.
And then the boy finally asked him the question he’d been expecting for some time. ‘What will happen to my mother?’ he said.
‘She’ll be fine. They’ll question her for a while, but she won’t be arrested. And we’ll send her money, and with you gone she’ll be able to live off what she gets from the government. And, of course, she’ll have God’s blessing for eternity because she will be the mother of a martyr.’
47
To get Jubal Pugh arrested, DeMarco needed the cooperation of four people. The first was Patsy Hall of the DEA. Since Hall wanted Pugh more than anything else on the planet, she’d been easy to convince. The second and third persons whose help he needed lived in Queens, New York. One was the district attorney of the county; the other was a gangster. He decided to visit the gangster first.
Tony Benedetto’s home was a medium-sized two-story brick structure in Ozone Park. Most of his neighbors were working stiffs, but more than a few were mobsters. One of Tony’s goons met DeMarco at the front door and frisked him. He told the guy to watch his side and leg because he’d just been shot but this information, instead of impressing the man, only caused the sadistic bastard to pat him down harder. When he felt the bandage on DeMarco’s thigh, he made DeMarco drop his pants to make sure he didn’t
have a transmitter taped to his leg. The bodyguard finally finished and DeMarco pulled up his pants and limped toward the kitchen, the wound in his leg throbbing from the guy whacking it.
Tony was seated at his kitchen table, wearing a jogging outfit: a maroon sweatshirt that zipped up the front and maroon pants with white piping on the sides. He was sixty-eight years old and had big ears, a big nose, and dyed-black hair that didn’t make him look younger, just silly. When a man is almost seventy, his hair shouldn’t be the same color it was when he was twenty.
He was reading The Wall Street Journal and drinking Slim-Fast from the can. He saw DeMarco glance down at the diet drink and said, ‘Hey, it works. I tried Atkins, but who can live without bread and pasta? So I have one of these for breakfast, one for lunch, and for dinner I eat like a normal person.’ He studied DeMarco for a moment. ‘You know, you look just like your old man,’ he said.
DeMarco’s father had worked for another gangster in Queens, a man named Carmine Taliaferro. Taliaferro and DeMarco’s father were now both dead, Taliaferro of natural causes, Gino DeMarco from three bullets in the chest. Benedetto had worked with DeMarco’s father and had replaced Taliaferro as the head hood in Queens after Taliaferro died.
‘I’m also Danny DeMarco’s cousin,’ DeMarco said.
Now Benedetto smirked, making DeMarco want to smack the reading glasses right off his big nose. Benedetto obviously knew about the connection between DeMarco’s ex-wife and his currently incarcerated cousin.
‘Is that why you’re here, because of Danny? Whatta you gonna do, bug me like Marie to get him outta jail?’
