House Blood - JD 7

by Mike Lawson

  Kelly kept gear in his car he might need when he was following a subject; Nelson did the same thing. In Kelly’s trunk was a knapsack containing a Colt 9mm and two extra magazines, a folding knife with a four-inch serrated blade, lock picks, an LED flashlight, a ski mask, a couple hats, a lightweight jacket, duct tape, and a few other odds and ends. He also had his passports with him in case he might have to leave the country quickly. He dumped everything out of his knapsack except for his passports, the flashlight, the hats, and the jacket, and followed Emma to the terminal.

  As DeMarco drove from Tysons Corner to his home in Georgetown, he grappled with a dilemma: Should he or should he not tell Mahoney that Emma was going to Peru for him?

  DeMarco had involved Emma in some of his assignments in the past because she had connections in places where he had none, places like the Pentagon and the CIA. Or, as in this case, she knew people in the State Department like Clive Standish. And Mahoney understood why DeMarco involved her—but he didn’t like it when he did. He didn’t like it because Emma had a rigid moral code and a conscience, and if Mahoney told her to do something and she didn’t want to do it, she’d tell Mahoney to go to hell. The fact was, no one told Emma what to do. The other reason DeMarco was reluctant to tell Mahoney that Emma was going to Peru for him was that Mahoney, just to prove that he was the guy in charge, might make DeMarco go to Peru anyway—and DeMarco didn’t want to do that.

  The more he thought about it, the more he realized there wasn’t any dilemma. He wouldn’t tell Mahoney, at least not right away. If Emma found something significant in Peru, then he might tell him that Emma had gone to Peru for him. Maybe. He’d grapple with that dilemma later. For the next couple days, he’d spend his time trying to find some nefarious connection between the Warwick Foundation and Congressman Talbot. He’d do most of the work from home, using the Internet and calling people who could help him, and stay away from Capitol Hill, where he might accidentally run into ­Mahoney —assuming Mahoney was even at the Capitol, actually doing his job, and not out playing golf.

  All dilemmas having been grappled with and overcome, DeMarco’s thoughts turned to his stomach. On his way home, he’d be passing close to a place in Arlington that made great ribs, so he’d stop there and pick up some ribs and corn bread for dinner. He was almost to the ribs place when he saw a liquor store and remembered he was low on vodka. Vodka was a staple—like butter and sugar and toilet paper. He pulled into the small parking lot in front of the liquor store.

  Nelson watched DeMarco enter the liquor store—and an idea occurred to him. He pulled into a parking space near DeMarco’s car, put on a baseball cap, and walked past the store, making sure to keep his head down so the bill of the cap obscured his face; there were almost certainly security cameras inside the liquor store. After glancing into the store, he walked back to his car and called Kelly.

  “DeMarco just went into a liquor store. There’re only two other people inside, the clerk and some kid. I’m gonna take out DeMarco right now—him and everybody else in the store. It’ll look like a robbery gone bad and nobody will know DeMarco was the primary target.”

  “I don’t know,” Kelly said. “I’m at Dulles. That woman from McLean is taking a trip. I’m wondering if she’s planning to meet DeMarco in Peru.”

  “Well, if I take care of him, she won’t be meeting him.”

  “I don’t know,” Kelly said again. “I don’t like doing things on the spur of the moment like this.”

  “I don’t either,” Nelson said, “but we may not get another chance.”

  “They got cameras in those stores.”

  “I’ve got a ski mask in my kit.”

  Kelly hesitated; he didn’t have a good feeling about this. Nelson could take out three unarmed guys without even breaking a sweat, but something could always go wrong. A cop could drive by at the wrong moment. The liquor store might have some sort of alarm system to alert the cops. Kelly liked to do things the way they did when they took care of Phil Downing—lots of surveillance, research, and dry runs. But Nelson was right, too. Another opportunity like this might not come along again anytime soon, and Fiona had made it clear she wanted DeMarco taken care of as soon as possible.

  “Okay,” Kelly finally said. “I may have to follow this woman to wherever she’s going, so I may be out of touch for a while.”

  “Hooah,” Nelson said.

  “Yeah, hooah,” Kelly said. “You just watch your ass.”

  DeMarco reached for a bottle of Stoli, then noticed that Absolut was having some kind of promotion: attached to the 750-ml bottles of Absolut were little airline-sized bottles of vodka mixed with something, and you got the little bottle for free. He looked at the little bottle: raspberry vodka. That sounded awful, but what hell. The little bottle was free and the Absolut was about the same price as the Stoli.

  Rich Bennallack stood in front of all the wine bottles, overwhelmed. He was a beer drinker and didn’t know one wine from another—and there had to be two hundred bottles in the damn store to choose from. But a girl he’d met last week had invited him over to her place for dinner and he knew he should bring some wine, but what should he get? White, red? What the hell was Shiraz?

  His mom had introduced him to the girl. She was dying to see him married so she could have grandkids, and she was always trying to hook him up with some girl. Most of the girls she introduced him to, although they weren’t complete dogs, just weren’t his type. But this one … Well, ol’ mom picked a winner this time, and he wanted to make a good impression.

  But what kind of wine should he buy? He thought you were supposed to get red for meat and white for fish, but he didn’t know what she was cooking for dinner. And no way was he buying two bottles of wine. Maybe the clerk could help him.

  Jesus Salvador was thinking this day was never gonna end. Some days were like that. You stood behind the counter and watched the clock creep by, like it took an hour for the minute hand to move a minute. And he had an exam tomorrow—a calculus test—that was going to be harder than shit. He’d been trying to study in between customers, but enough of them kept dribbling into the store that he wasn’t able to focus. As soon as he got out of here, he was gonna go to some all-night café and drink a gallon of coffee to stay awake and study his ass off. It was a bitch trying to get an engineering degree while holding down a job.

  Nelson took a 9mm semiauto and a ski mask from the gym bag in the trunk of his car, and slipped the mask over his head. He needed to move quickly, before DeMarco left the store. He’d go in, say gimme the money to the Hispanic guy behind the counter, grab whatever bills were in the register, and then shoot the clerk. He wanted the cameras to see that; he didn’t want it to look like DeMarco had been singled out as a target. So one in the chest for the clerk, two for DeMarco to make sure he was dead, and then one for the kid lingering by the wine bottles.

  Rich Bennallack saw the guy come into the store, a big son of a bitch wearing a ski mask. And he had a gun in his hand. Oh, shit.

  Jesus Salvador stood there unable to move as the man in the ski mask walked up to the counter and pointed the gun at his face. “Give me the money,” the guy said. “You hesitate one fucking second, I’ll kill you.”

  Jesus didn’t hesitate. He opened the drawer to the cash register, yanked out all the bills as fast as he could, and placed the money on the counter in front of the guy. But the guy didn’t pick up the money. He just stood there—his eyes all cold—looking at Jesus, pointing the gun at his head. Aw, Jesus, Jesus thought. Please don’t let this happen.

  Then Jesus heard a voice say, “Police! Drop the gun!”

  It was the young guy who couldn’t figure out what kind of wine to buy.

  What the fuck? Nelson thought. He slowly turned his head—he didn’t want to move too quickly in case the kid was jittery—and saw he was holding a .40-caliber Glock. The young guy had to be an off-duty cop, a gung ho rookie
most likely. Talk about rotten luck. But he hadn’t heard him chamber a round, and it seemed unlikely that he would have a round chambered when he was off-duty. So the kid could be bluffing. His gun was pointed at Nelson, but for all practical purposes it was empty. On the other hand, he might carry the weapon with a round in the chamber, and since the weapon was a Glock, the safety was right on the trigger. But would he shoot right away? Probably not. And in a way, this was good. The cameras in the store would show him shooting the kid because the kid was pointing a gun at him, and then he’d have a motive for killing everybody else in the store because they were witnesses, including DeMarco.

  “I said, ‘Police! Drop the fucking gun!’”

  He sounded scared. He’d probably never pulled his gun before. “Okay, okay,” Nelson said, like he was intimidated. He knew how good he was and he knew how fast he was, and he knew the kid would hesitate for just a second before pulling the trigger—and he knew he wouldn’t. He reached out, like he was about to put his gun on the counter in front of the cash register—then spun toward the kid and fired.

  The first bullet hit him in the chest. So did the second one.

  22

  Kelly watched as Emma approached the United Airlines counter. Fortunately, there was a long line of people waiting to check in, which would give him some time to figure out what to do. But then, goddamnit, she bypassed the long line with all the poor slobs flying coach and went to the first-class line, where there was only one person ahead of her.

  Kelly was fairly sure she was going to Peru, but he wasn’t positive. He’d get a ticket for an international flight—it didn’t matter where—and follow her to her departure gate. Then, once he was certain where she was going, he’d get a ticket on the same plane. She’d never seen him before. He glanced over at the Delta first-class counter and saw no one waiting there, and according to the departure board, Delta had a flight leaving for Nassau in an hour. That would do.

  Kelly followed Emma through security and, just as he’d feared, saw she was flying to Lima—and that the flight was leaving in forty-five minutes. Making a point of not looking at her, he walked up to the United counter and asked for a coach ticket to Lima—and the lady told him the flight was full.

  “What about first class?” he asked.

  “Sorry,” the lady said. “All seats are taken. We sold the last ticket just a few minutes ago. I can put you on standby, if you’d like.”

  Son of a bitch!

  “Look,” he said, “I need to get to Lima right away. It’s a family emergency. Check all the other airlines and see when the next flight leaves for Lima.”

  It turned out the next flight from Dulles to Lima was another United flight leaving two hours after Emma’s, and Kelly bought a first-class ticket. Since he was about 99 percent positive that Emma was headed for the Warwick Care Center near Pinchollo, the two-hour lead she had didn’t really matter. He’d catch up with her in Pinchollo—and deal with her when he did.

  He wondered how Nelson was doing.

  DeMarco couldn’t believe it: he was alive.

  When the robber spun toward the young cop to shoot him, the cop shot the robber twice, but the robber got off a shot, too, and the bullet shattered a bottle of Stoli about six inches from DeMarco’s head. Jesus! If he hadn’t decided to look at the Absolut promotion, he would have been standing right in front of that bottle when the robber fired.

  He was going to buy Absolut for the rest of his life.

  His ears still ringing from the gunshots, DeMarco brushed glass and vodka off his shoulders and walked over to look at the robber, who was bleeding from the chest and not moving. As he approached, the cop pointed a finger at him and said, “Just stand still, and don’t even think about leaving. We’ll need to get a statement from you.”

  The kid kicked the robber’s gun a few feet away from his outstretched hand, then knelt down next to him. “Call 911,” he yelled at the clerk. “This man’s still alive.” Then he pulled his cell phone off his belt and speed-dialed a number. “Lieutenant, it’s Bennallack. I just shot a guy trying to rob a liquor store, the one on Harrison Street. The guy’s still alive but I don’t think he’s going to make it. Yeah, an ambulance is on the way.” The kid listened a moment, said, “Yes sir,” and closed his phone.

  DeMarco watched as the cop pulled the ski mask off the robber, who turned out to be a white guy in his thirties with short dark hair. Little bubbles of blood were escaping from his lips.

  There are a lot of places in the world where it’s easy to obtain firearms, the United States arguably being one of the easiest of those places. In Peru, however, obtaining a gun was a real chore. Normally, Kelly would have called Hobson and told Hobson to obtain the weapons he needed and ship them to Peru, but there wasn’t time for that. Kelly wanted the guns waiting for him when he arrived in Peru—and there was a man in Lima who could make that happen.

  The first time Kelly and Nelson went to Peru on behalf of Mulray Pharma—and knowing that at some point in the future they might need items that couldn’t be purchased in a typical department store—they spent some time in a few of Lima’s low-class drinking establishments, until they finally made contact with a German piece of flotsam named Gustav Freytag. Gustav was wanted for various and sundry crimes in Europe, and had lived in Lima for twenty years. He was primarily a middleman and, for a price, he could direct you to people who provided any number of goods and services. If your predilections ran toward eleven-year-old girls or boys, Gustav knew the appropriate pimp. Drugs? Not a problem. A liver for a rich man dying of cirrhosis? Well, a liver was harder to obtain than cocaine, heroin, or boys, but one could be found for a price. Obtaining what Kelly wanted—a semiautomatic pistol, a hunting rifle with a good scope, and a sat phone—wouldn’t be difficult at all.

  Kelly called Gustav from Dulles and told him what he needed.

  “I want the guns, along with a four-wheel-drive vehicle, waiting for me at the airport in Arequipa,” Kelly said. “And the vehicle and the guns had better be in excellent condition or I’ll come looking for you.”

  “You need not threaten me, Mr. Shaw.”

  As far as Freytag knew, Kelly’s name was Shaw.

  “And I need one other thing,” Kelly told the German. “I want you to send a man to the airport to meet United Flight 7599 from Dulles. There’s an American woman on the flight. She’s tall and slim, has short blonde hair, and she’s wearing a blue sweater and jeans and carrying a tan-colored knapsack. The knapsack has a Sierra Club patch on it. Did you get all that? I want your man to confirm this woman is catching a flight to Arequipa.”

  “Do you want my man to follow her to Arequipa?” Gustav asked.

  “No. This woman would spot the idiots you employ. I just want your guy waiting at the Lima arrival gate and to see if she catches a connecting flight to Arequipa. If she doesn’t, call me. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  Kelly called Fiona next and told her what was going on—that Nelson was taking care of DeMarco at a liquor store and he was following Emma to Peru. Fiona wasn’t too happy to hear that Emma was going to land two hours before him.

  “Yeah, well there’s nothing I can do about that, but since I’m pretty sure I know where she’s headed, it’s not a problem. What do you want me to do when I catch up with her?”

  “What do you think?” Fiona said.

  Kelly went to a restaurant in the terminal to get something to eat before his flight departed. While he ate, he wondered how Nelson was doing. He should have taken care of DeMarco by now. After he finished his meal, when he still hadn’t heard from Nelson, he called him and the call went straight to voice mail. Kelly figured Nelson had probably turned off his phone before he went into the liquor store, but he should have turned it back on by now. And Nelson wasn’t the type to forget to charge the battery.

  Just before he boarded the
flight to Lima, he called Nelson again, and again got his voice mail.

  Something was wrong.

  23

  The city of Arequipa, Peru, has a population of almost a million. It lies in a valley in the western Andes at seven thousand, eight hundred feet above sea level, and nearby mountains, some still active volcanoes, rise as high as twenty thousand feet. Spanish conquistadors founded Arequipa in the sixteenth century, and within the modern city there’s an old colonial district with cobblestone streets, splendid plazas, and magnificent white stone fountains. There’s also a cathedral—Catedral de Arequipa—which was constructed in 1544 but which has been repeatedly damaged by earthquakes and fires and rebuilt several times. It was almost as if God didn’t like the house of worship the Spaniards erected in His honor.

  As much as Emma wanted to explore the city, it had been a long flight from Washington to Lima that had included a layover in Miami, then another two-hour flight from Lima to Arequipa. Consequently, the only thing she really wanted to see by the time she arrived was a bed. If she didn’t learn anything alarming in Pinchollo, she might spend a day or two sightseeing in Arequipa before returning home.

  The next morning she rented a four-wheel-drive Land Rover. It had forty thousand miles on it and reeked of cigarette smoke, but the tires were almost new and the engine sounded fine. She had the rental car company strap two five-gallon containers of gasoline to the back of the vehicle. She figured it would take six to eight hours to drive from Arequipa to her destination—which was fine by her. She’d come to Peru to see towering mountains, condors, and those magnificent canyons, and she was looking forward to the journey.