House Justice (39 page)

She asked about his family, meaning his dad. He told her he really didn’t know what his dad did until he was in his teens and another kid in the neighborhood asked him if his dad kept a bunch of guns in the house. When he asked the kid what the hell he was talking about, the kid said, “Well, he’s Carmine Taliaferro’s button man, ain’t he? He must have a buncha guns.” He hit the kid, then went home and asked his mother if what the kid had said was true, and when she wouldn’t answer him or look him in the eye, he knew.

“But I never really believed it, not in my heart,” he said. “I’m not saying that he wasn’t who the papers said he was, but to me he was just my dad. He took me to ball games, he came to
my
ball games, he harped at me about getting an education—just like any other dad on the block. He cooked pancakes every Sunday morning after Mass. I still can’t picture him putting a bullet into the back of some guy’s head. It broke my heart the day he died.”

DeMarco knew by now that he was attracted to a certain type of woman. Physically, he preferred women who looked like his ex-wife, which Angela did: dark hair, dark laughing eyes, trim hips, good legs. His wife had been bustier but Angela’s breasts were, as he found out later, perfect. But beyond the physical he was attracted to the kind of bright, aggressive, smart-mouthed Italian Catholic girls he’d grown up with in Queens. The ones that fought with all their brothers when they were young and usually beat them. The ones that went to church every Sunday but swore like sailors when they were pissed. Angela DeCapria was one of those girls.

She wasn’t perfect—love wasn’t that blind. She had to discuss every item on the menu with the waiter before she ordered and was ridiculously picky about what she ate. She was an annoying, nonstop, backseat driver. She wouldn’t admit when she was wrong and had to get the last word in an argument. But he could accept the minor flaws; it was the two major flaws that worried him.

One of those was that when it came to her career she was blindly, dangerously ambitious. For whatever reason, she felt like she had something to prove in the male-dominated world of cops and spies, and she was determined to succeed, no matter what the cost, as evidenced by her current assignment. He knew if she was offered an overseas post in some godforsaken place like the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that was ruled by Taliban gunmen and opium warlords, she’d take the posting without hesitation and DeMarco would just have to live with her decision. And he wasn’t sure he could.

The other major flaw was that she was married.

It was most likely a second phone call from her husband, however, that resulted in them going to bed together. The call came when they were eating lunch at Jim Croce’s place in the Gaslamp district. DeMarco didn’t know what her husband said to her, but all she said was, “Is that right?” and a cold, “Yeah, I’ll talk to you later.” DeMarco got the impression that ol’ Brad had called to let her know he was busy at work but really thinking about her, and it looked like Angela was just weary of all his bullshit. After she hung up, she sat there for a moment, then raised her eyes to DeMarco. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not going to chug a martini because the jackass called.” And then she shook her head, casting out all thoughts of her husband, and said, “So, where are we going next?”

After the phone call she seemed to soften toward him. She became less guarded, looked at him longer, touched him more. He didn’t seduce her; she seduced herself. But did she go to bed with him to get back at her husband or did she go to bed with him because she was just glad to be with a man who obviously wanted to be with no one but her? He didn’t know—and he didn’t care.

It happened on the third day of their mini-vacation, when they were having dinner at a famous, tourist-infested outdoor Mexican restaurant in Old Town San Diego. The place was best known for its gigantic margaritas, and they’d just been served two drinks in glasses the size of goldfish bowls. She reached for her drink then stopped and looked directly into DeMarco’s eyes and said, “The other night you wouldn’t go to bed with me because I was drunk, and I appreciated that. But I’m not drunk now, although I may be after I finish this drink, so I’m gonna say this before I even take a sip. I’ve had a great time the last two days, and I’ve really enjoyed being with you, and when we get back to the hotel you’re going to come to my room. Is that okay with you?”

DeMarco had wanted to raise his hand and yell, “Check!” but he knew that wouldn’t be cool. So instead he just said, “Yeah, that’s okay with me.” And when they were in bed, he had that same feeling he’d had the first time they kissed: that she was a perfect fit, designed by an all-knowing God to mold precisely to his body. She was the one made for him.

As he lay next to her he wondered what was going to happen next. Was she going to leave Brad and take up with him? Maybe. Or would she stay married to Brad and see DeMarco on the side? No, that would never happen. She wasn’t the sneak-around type—and he was glad she wasn’t. Or would she tell DeMarco it had been a wonderful weekend fling but it would never happen again, and it was time to make things work with her husband because she “still loved the asshole.” Yeah, that was a very likely possibility—and the worst one of all. So he didn’t know what would happen next. All he knew was what he wanted to happen.

He leaned over, kissed her softly between the shoulder blades, and slipped out of bed to take a shower. He forced his mind to dwell only on the present, and not the future.

DeMarco walked out of the shower, a towel wrapped around his waist. Angela was awake, sitting up in bed, the sheets covering her lap but
nothing else. She reminded him of the Venus de Milo statue, except with arms. He felt the beast stirring beneath the towel but before he could do anything, she said, “Rulon Tully’s been kidnapped.”

“What?”

Angela turned down the television and, figuring correctly that DeMarco couldn’t listen while he was looking at a naked woman, got out of bed and put on a robe. Then she told him what the TV reporters had said.

Last night, at approximately ten p.m., about the time DeMarco was making love to her for the first time, Rulon Tully, accompanied by his driver and his head of security, had left Tully’s estate near Ventura. Tully didn’t return home that night. The following morning, while on his way to work, Tully’s chef found Tully’s Mercedes abandoned on the access road leading to the estate with its front tires shredded, and lying near the Mercedes was the body of a man the chef didn’t recognize. The police were immediately called to the scene and they found the bodies of Tully’s driver and security chief in the trunk of the Mercedes. It was assumed Tully had been kidnapped and the unidentified man at the scene had been killed by Tully’s security people, although no ballistic tests had been conducted to confirm this. Tully’s chief counsel would appear on television later in the day to make an appeal to the kidnappers.

“I thought Yuri was supposed to rob the guy’s house,” DeMarco said. He didn’t bother to add,
and kill Tully
.

“He was supposed to,” Angela said.

Neither of them said anything for a moment. He didn’t know what she was thinking but he was wondering how she felt about the fact that two of Tully’s people had been killed. He wasn’t going to remind her that he’d told her something like this could happen. Now she—and he—would have to live with that. Whatever she was feeling, the only thing she said was, “I need to call Langley and see if they know anything more than what’s on the news.”

It looked like their vacation was over.

Yuri stood next to the doctor, looking down at Mikhail. He was unconscious, his chest was heavily bandaged, and his breathing was labored —and Yuri wanted to take a pillow and suffocate the life out of him.

The doctor’s house was located in a run-down neighborhood in National City, California. It was isolated from its neighbors by a towering laurel hedge that didn’t appear to have ever been trimmed, and the front windows were obscured by other overgrown, untamed shrubs. The bedroom where Mikhail lay contained a standard hospital bed with side rails and there was an IV stand next to the bed, dripping some sort of clear fluid into Mikhail’s veins.

The doctor was an alcoholic and a gambling addict who had lost his license to practice medicine when he was convicted for Medicaid fraud. He now provided his services to gangs in the San Diego area whose members preferred not to go to a hospital when they were injured on the job. Yuri had heard of the man through the criminal grapevine and had used him once before when one of his men had been shot in an argument over a woman.

“Will he live?” Yuri asked.

“Only if you take him to a hospital,” the doctor said. “The bullet’s in his right lung, and the lung has collapsed. He needs blood and the bullet needs to be removed before infection sets in.”

“So remove the bullet.”

“I can’t do that here; I don’t have the proper equipment. He needs to be in a hospital.”

“He’s not going to a hospital,” Yuri said. “But I need to talk to him before he dies.”

The doctor shrugged. “If he regains consciousness, I’ll let you know.”

Yuri went into the doctor’s kitchen. He opened the refrigerator hoping to find a bottle of water, but the refrigerator contained nothing but condiments, a greasy carton of Chinese food, and a wedge of cheese that was green with mold. He slammed the door in disgust and then stood at the kitchen sink, looking out at the doctor’s un-tended backyard as he reflected on his misfortune.

The raid on Tully had been a disaster. One of Mikhail’s men—a tattooed idiot named Rudy—had been killed, Mikhail had been shot, and Rulon Tully was missing. All Ivan could tell him was that a man had come out of the darkness, fired half a dozen shots, and then took off in the Range Rover containing the billionaire. But everything happened so fast that Ivan didn’t see who had attacked them and didn’t know if more than one person had been involved. Since Mikhail was still alive, they took him with them when they fled Tully’s estate, but they didn’t have the good sense to take Rudy’s body as well.

Rudy’s body was a problem, as it could eventually lead the police to him. Rudy had never been arrested or fingerprinted in America but he had a criminal record in Russia and the tattoos on his arms, and some of his dental work, were distinctly Russian. And because the victim was Rulon Tully, the cops would do everything they could to identify the body, and they would eventually contact Interpol and the Russian police. The only good news was that it would take some time for the Russian authorities, with their notoriously outdated record-keeping systems, to respond to the FBI, but when they did, they would tell the Bureau that Rudy had worked for Yuri and Uncle Lev in Moscow. Then the FBI would come after him for kidnapping Tully—which was ironic, because that was the one crime he hadn’t committed.

What a god-awful mess, and all because Mikhail had failed. Now he needed to move even faster to turn Marty Taylor’s assets into cash and flee the country. And he would have to hide somewhere with Taylor until all the sales were complete. He felt like smothering Mikhail.

But there was one thing he wanted to do before he fled: he wanted to find Pamela Walker.
Somebody
had interfered with his raid on Tully’s estate and the only person he could think of was her. She had given him the original idea, and no one else knew what he was planning regarding Tully except the people in his own organization. She must have decided to wait for him to attack Tully and then, with the aid of at least one male accomplice, she took Tully from him. Walker had not struck him as the sort of person who would get involved in such a violent, high-profile crime, but who else could have taken Tully? She and her accomplice must be planning to ransom Tully or, like he’d been thinking, force Tully to transfer money out of his bank accounts.

At this point, however, he had no intention of taking Tully from Pamela if she had him. Kidnapping a person was relatively easy—but to get the cash in exchange for the kidnapped person was always fraught with danger. And in Tully’s case, the exchange would be particularly dangerous because the FBI would be involved. And as for forcing Tully to transfer money out of his account to his kidnappers, by now the FBI was most likely watching those bank accounts and would trace the transfer back to the guilty. No, Tully at this point was of no real use to him—but he still wanted to talk to Walker. He wanted to know why she had taken Tully from him. Maybe she had managed to get Tully to transfer money out of his accounts, and if she had he could take the money from her.

Yes, he wanted to talk to pretty Pamela—finding her, though, might be impossible. If she had Tully, she would certainly be doing everything she could to avoid being found.

Then he realized that he had a way to find her.

“Sir?”

Yuri turned. It was the doctor.

“He’s awake. I don’t know how long he’ll remain that way but you can talk to him now.”

Mikhail, in a weak, barely audible voice, told Yuri all he knew: a big man with short hair and a heavy mustache shot him and Rudy, and then took Rulon Tully. He had never seen the man before.

“Just one man?” Yuri said, and Mikhail nodded.

Yuri began to rant, screaming how he couldn’t understand how a single man had been able to overcome five armed men—so Mikhail groaned in pain and pretended to pass out. Half an hour later, he called out and the doctor came to him. He asked the doctor if Yuri was still in the house. The doctor said no. He then asked about his condition and was informed that the bullet was still inside him, lodged in his right lung, but it didn’t appear that the bullet had hit a major artery. If it had, the doctor said, he would have bled to death by now.

“What are you going to do next?” Mikhail asked.

“Well, there’s really nothing I can do other than make you comfortable. I don’t have the equipment here to operate on you. You need to be in a hospital, but, uh, Yuri said…”

“I can imagine what Yuri said.”