There was another fence, about a hundred feet away, to hold the crowds back. The media had descended and the riot gates bristled with camera lenses. The evacuees were penned in another area. I could see them getting questioned by police and then walking out through a single gap in the fence. That was the only way in or out.
And there was William Marcus, chatting away with one of the cops as he scrutinized every person leaving the scene. A plainclothes gave him a nod and pulled the fence back for him. He started walking toward the ambulances, toward me.
My ATF ruse may have been enough to get me past the cops but not past Marcus. I was hoping some turn for the worse—shock, cardiac arrest, anything—would have them throw me in the ambulance and get me out of there, but I couldn’t will a medical catastrophe or fake my vitals.
Marcus looked into the faces of the police, of the other victims, as he approached. I tried to sit up, to get off the gurney, and the EMT—a guy with a ponytail and hands like vises—clamped me back down.
Marcus was walking directly to me. I stared straight up, and prayed he’d pass. But he never even arrived.
When I looked back he was gone. I turned and saw him walking toward the fence. Henry Davies was beckoning him away. They talked for a moment, then started across Pennsylvania, to a man standing beside a black sedan.
He stepped into the car with them, then the car drove away. It was my father.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE MEDIC BROUGHT me to George Washington University Hospital. The triage area for the ER was overcrowded and chaotic, and I was able to slip away while waiting for the EKG tech to show up. After returning to the scene of the crime (apparently my new specialty) I picked up my car near the DOJ and set out to determine what the hell my father had gotten himself into.
He and I had made a deal before I set out that morning: I would do all the heavy lifting, and he would stay back.
But I guess I should have known: never trust a grifter’s word. Granted, he’d saved my ass, but now I wasn’t sure if I could save his.
I drove to the Davies Group mansion, and cruised past, peering up at Henry’s windows. When he’d had me tied up in there, the blinds had been drawn. Now they were wide open. The office was empty.
So what exactly is the plan here, Mike? Raid the castle, take Henry’s head, and rescue Dad like some shining knight? Not likely. I was doing a number on my fingernails, chewing away, running through the angles when my phone rang.
“Mike,” the voice said.
It was my dad.
“Where are you?” I asked. “You okay?”
“The Bel-Air Motel on New York Avenue. Been better, but at least I got away. Got a car?”
“I’m on my way. Any heat?”
“Not that I can see,” he said. “Sooner the better.”
I knew the guy was a stoic, so the distress in his voice, the uneasy strain, had me worried.
I hauled ass over to New York Ave. I knew that area. The front door to DC along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, it was about as nasty as it comes, all druggie hotels and empty industrial buildings
The Bel-Air was a world-class dive: whores working out in the open, sheets across the windows, crackheads begging or selling stolen shit—it always seemed to be packs of socks—to the cars stuck in traffic.
But, hey, free HBO. Some drug dealers mean-mugged me as I walked across the parking lot to the room where my dad had said he was holing up. The door was open, the lock forced.
I found him inside, aiming a gun at me. He dropped it as soon as my face showed. He lay on the bed on his left side. A wad of napkins, soaked red, stuck to his right shoulder.
The smell of coffee filled the room. Like father, like son. “Want some?” he asked. “Made a pot while I waited. Fixed me right up.”
I helped him sit up. A drop of blood ran from his ear.
“Henry did this?”
He nodded.
“Is he around?”
“Maybe. They had me in one of the warehouses. I got away.”
“Can you walk?”
“I ran when I needed to, but I’m feeling a little shaky now. Maybe you want to help me down the stairs.”
I draped his arm over my shoulders and we walked along the back of the motel to my car. His shirt lifted up. I saw red welts along his back, over his kidneys.
“I’ll get you to a hospital.”
“I think I’m good, Mike,” he said between short breaths. “Cartwright has this doctor, well, more of a veterinarian—good surgeon, bad gambler—who owes him. He’ll take care of me.”
I eased him into the front seat of my car. There was no sign of Henry or Marcus. We pulled off New York Ave. onto the surface streets, heading to the reservoir and Washington Hospital Center.
“You’ll get picked up if you go into a hospital, Mike. There’s always cops. I’m doing better than I look. Don’t worry about it.”
I kept driving to the hospital. I wasn’t going to argue with him.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I saw they were going for you, so I stepped in. I told them you already had the evidence.”
“I lost it, Dad,” I said, shaking my head with shame. “Marcus burned it.”
“That’s fine,” he said. He didn’t seem fazed at all. “I just said that to get him clear of the scene, to get you a little breathing room. Henry has the same weakness we all do. He’ll believe what he wants to believe: that everyone has a price, everyone wants to make a deal. We can use that against him. So I told him we wanted to bargain.”
“What deal?”
“Nothing. Once we were clear of DOJ, I shut him down. He was”—my dad made a flapping lips gesture with his hand—“about sending me to prison, lethal injection, going down for the Perry murder.
“I didn’t bite. I wasn’t going to let him use me to lever you. So they brought me over to some old shipping warehouse, and Marcus went to work.”
He grimaced, twisting in his seat. “He’s a real artist, that guy.”
“What were they going to do?”
“They said they’d kill me if I didn’t bring you back to them, to strike a deal for the evidence. I said they could go right ahead. That pissed him off something proper. Thin skin.”
“I don’t think Henry is used to hearing no.”
“I could tell Marcus wanted to take it easy, but Henry just kept barking at him. ‘More! More!’ I was half blacked out, so…” He shrugged. “Not so bad. I think Henry stepped in himself at the end.”
He groaned. “Oh, fuck.”
“What is it?”
“Back here and here.” He pointed just above his butt and down toward his groin. “Kills. Just drop me at the hospital and go. Give Cartwright a call. Tell him we don’t need the vet and you just leave me out in front of the ER.”
His face was white. He couldn’t stop shivering.
“We’re almost there, Dad. Hang on.”
“I beat it out of there,” he said, his eyes shut now. “The way I figured it, I was the only leverage he had on you, so with me off the table, you could take him down, no deal. I ran. Either I would get away or I would die trying. Same difference in the big picture.”
“Not to me. How’d you get out?”
He reached into his pocket and handed me a tooth, a canine flecked with red. I looked at his mouth. It wasn’t his.
“Still got a few tricks left,” he said. “The good news is, Mike, he’s scared of that envelope. I guess there are plenty of people out there looking to get back at him, but no one has the goods.”
“Neither do I, Dad. It burned. I fucked it all up. I’ve got nothing.”
He waved that away. “That doesn’t matter. Henry thinks you got it.” The beating he took to keep quiet assured him of that.
I pulled the car up to the hospital, then shouted to the nurses by the emergency room doors. One look at my father and they rushed him in on a stretcher. I followed alongside.
“Dad. You shouldn’t have done it.
” He’d put himself in Henry’s hands to get me out.
“Fiddle game,” he said and smiled: swap something worthless for something prized.
“No, Dad. Not at all. You shouldn’t have given yourself up. This is too much.”
“It’s what you do for your family,” he said.
He kept his hand on mine as they admitted him. His words and the ringing telephones inside the ER reminded me, but I think I’d already known it. He sacrificed himself for me, the same way he’d sacrificed himself for my mother.
The night he was arrested for breaking into that house in the Palisades was so clear in my memory. I’d relived every detail a thousand times, trying to make sense of it. And I knew that there hadn’t been a phone call taking my dad away. I remember from the trial there wasn’t even a phone in the house he broke into. My mother had come back at least an hour before my dad left, “for a baseball game,” he’d told me.
No. Perry was dead before he got there. My mother was a fighter, and when Perry had tried to force her, she’d knocked him onto that hearth. She’d killed him. Everything my father had done—never saying a word in his defense during that long trial, leaving his family for sixteen years, surviving in that hell—he’d done for her, taken the fall to protect her, the same way he’d sacrificed himself to Henry Davies for me.
I could never sneak anything past my father when I was kid; you try putting one over on a con man. And as he looked up at me and saw that holy-shit look of comprehension on my face, I knew he knew.
“Thank you, Dad. I love you.”
“You too,” he said. “But don’t get all sappy. I’ll be back out of here in an hour, good as new.”
His hand was cold. A doctor picked up a phone and ordered a crash something and eight units of O positive.
“I lost the evidence. I let you down, Dad. I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter, Mike. We’ve got him scared. Pig in a poke. Play the man, not what’s in your hand.”
I probably said a couple more sappy things. He humored me. Then they wheeled him up to surgery.
One of the cops working the waiting area would not stop strolling by and checking me out. He walked over to a colleague for a little parley. I wasn’t going anywhere, though, until I knew what was happening with my dad.
Cartwright showed up a half an hour later. “How is he?” he asked.
“In surgery. I don’t know.”
“This place is crawling with police,” he said. He nodded toward the far doors at the end of the corridor. I took the long way around and checked that hallway. Sure enough, there was my friend Detective Rivera, the cop who had betrayed me. God knows how many other goons Henry and Marcus had descending on this place.
I circled back to find Cartwright. “You need to get out of here,” he said.
“I’m not leaving him.”
“There’s no point in you handing yourself over to the police, Mike.”
“I won’t go.”
“I’ll take care of him,” he said. “Your father and I go way back. I’ll get him through this.”
I heard the door open at the far end of the hall, and Rivera led a pack of what looked like plainclothes cops toward us. We ducked around the corner.
Cartwright grabbed my shoulder. “Get the hell out of here. I’ll take care of your dad. You get whoever did this to him.”
I’d lost my only means of taking Henry down, but that didn’t matter. I had to find another way to stop him.
The police moved closer. I held on, refusing to run. Cartwright grabbed my shoulder again. “Go!”
I started off and just missed the cops by darting through a service door. They’d swarmed over the hospital. It took a half an hour of sneaking around corners and hiding in empty rooms to end-run around them as they swept the surgery wing.
But I couldn’t leave yet. I had to see my father again, to know he would make it. I found a call room, cracked the door, and stole some sleeping resident’s coat and stethoscope off the hook inside. I headed back to my father’s wing, my face down, buried in some papers I’d pulled from the coat pocket.
I came through an inner hallway into the surgery wing, striding past two cops who were scrutinizing all civilians but seemed blind to anyone in white. I walked to an empty nurses’ station. An older nurse with a grim look approached and asked, “Can I help you?”
“I need the chart on Robert Ford.”
Apparently the stethoscope did the trick. She didn’t question me, just rifled through the hanging files on the counter. “It’s probably with the body over in pathology by now,” she said.
Impossible.
“Could you double-check?” I asked, and nodded toward the computer. She typed his name in. I stepped beside her and read over her shoulder. The screen flickered, the text black on green. I couldn’t believe the words as I scanned his record. The last line read: Transferred—morgue—cold storage.
“Oh,” she said. “He’s down in the fridge.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
BECAUSE OF MY MISTAKES, my father was dead, and I had three hours until Rado would come after Annie and get to work on third-world-inspired violations I refused to imagine. My only weapon, the evidence against Henry, was ash.
I had to make a choice. Lose my soul to Henry or lose what I love to Rado. Even if Annie and I managed to duck the Balkan psycho, sooner or later Henry would find out that Annie was still on my side and would use her as leverage against me. There were no secrets from Henry Davies.
Two men wanted me dead, or suffering so badly I’d wish I were. My father had the luxury of not choosing, of taking the honorable death, a martyr to the end. But if I tried that, not only would I suffer, so would Annie, and she was all I had left.
It was an impossible choice. I saw one way out, and I would pursue it with a cold, unfeeling resolve. If the honest men were all criminals, then maybe only the criminals were honest. I had to make a deal. My father may have been gone, but he’d left me the answer. I would deliver myself to my killers and hope I could con my way back out.
After I escaped the hospital, my first stop was the White Eagle, the club where Aleksandar and Miroslav regularly held court.
Black Mercedes sedans lined the two blocks around the building, a beautiful former embassy. I walked up the curving steps to the front door. Thick men in slim suits stopped me cold.
“Tell Miroslav and Aleksandar that Michael Ford is here. Tell Radomir too, if he’s around. He’ll want to know.”
One goon pressed on his earpiece. A wire trailed from it into his suit. Pretty heavy security for a “fraternal society.” They frisked me, thoroughly, then dragged me through the salons—the place was full of Euro trash and beautiful whores—to a cozy little room in the basement with a fireplace, a chandelier, and two banquette couches.
Miro and Alex appeared and bound my hands behind my back, then knocked me onto the floor, my face on the carpet. Miro stepped on my bound wrists, pinning me to the ground. He held me like that while they talked about something—I got the sense it was soccer—in a language I didn’t understand. They were extremely casual about the whole thing.
Rado arrived a half an hour later, suggesting a freedom of movement pretty bold for someone hiding from a war-crimes tribunal. After some snapping of fingers and barking in what I took to be Serbian, Alex lifted me up to my feet.
“It’s very brave what you’ve done,” Rado said. “To come here and take your punishment like a man. I’m almost sad to not be able to enjoy the little black-haired one, but this is honorable what you’re doing.”
“You want revenge?” I asked.
“This is clear, isn’t it?” He smirked, raised his palms, and looked to his accomplices. They nodded.
“I’ll help you get it,” I said.
“I have been to this dance before,” Rado said, and smiled, pleased with the Americanism. “Allow me to hazard a guess. I’ve”—he put on a sort of cop-movie tone—“got the wrong guy.”
“That’s th
e only reason I’d walk in here defenseless. Think about it.”
He stepped very close to me, almost kissing distance, and put his hand gently on the side of my head. He looked into my eyes, and then, with an alarming, sudden strength, snapped my head sideways into what I can only guess was the mantelpiece because I was instantly unconscious.
I wish I had stayed that way. When I came to my wrists were still bound behind my back, but now the ropes around them ran up to a hook on the ceiling behind me. The blow to my head gave everything a swimmy, underwater quality. That made it especially hard to balance. I was standing on a small crate, on the tips of my toes. Any lower, and the ropes tightened, yanking back my shoulders. One was already pretty bad off from my run-in with Marcus at the museum. Whenever I lost my balance, the ropes jerked my arms back, wrenching the sockets.
Alex held the other end of the rope and would periodically, even when I managed to keep my balance, give it a yank.
“A Palestinian hanging,” Rado informed me, ever helpful. “Known as the strappado to Machiavelli, when he received it for conspiring against the Medicis, and the ropes at the Hanoi Hilton. I believe it is how the North Vietnamese deprived Senator McCain of the full use of his arms.”
The only thing worse than torture is torture at the hands of a bore. Whenever I managed to slip into half-consciousness or retreat to my happy place—sleeping in on a cool Sunday with Annie’s warm bottom beside me—Rado would break in yammering with another fun fact. Fortunately, they had given me some high-octane painkillers at the hospital for my burns. I’d swiped some more on my way out. Without them, I probably would have just fessed up to the murders I didn’t commit and let Rado kill me. Instead, the pain was merely excruciating as I felt the tendons and muscles in my shoulders tear, the bones grind out of place.
“Done well, it leaves no marks,” Rado said. “And yet it can quite easily paralyze, permanently destroy the feeling in both arms.”
I was almost relieved when he stopped talking and walked behind me.
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