House Reckoning (25 page)

“Well, sir, he’s standing outside an apartment building,” and Heller gave him the address.

Quinn didn’t say anything. He recognized the address, of course. DeMarco was right in front of Pam’s building. The bastard was obviously waiting for him.

“Sir,” Captain Heller said, “what would you like me to do?”

“I don’t want you to do anything, Captain. Is somebody watching the man right now?”

“Yes, sir. A rookie named Martinez. He’s the one who saw him.”

“Captain, call Martinez and tell him he’s to leave the area immediately. He’s to make no contact with that man or do anything that might scare him off. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And tell Martinez his vigilance in this matter will be recognized, as will your promptness in reporting this situation to me.”

“Uh, yes, sir,” Heller said, and Quinn disconnected the call.

“Honey,” Quinn said to Pam, “I’m going to have to leave soon. It’s, well . . .”

“I understand,” Pam said. He knew she was disappointed but he also knew she understood that with his job emergencies happened, and she wouldn’t whine about him having to leave abruptly. This was another difference between her and Barbara, and another reason why he loved her.

“Excuse me for a moment,” Quinn said, “I need to make a call.” He walked into Pam’s bedroom and shut the door, grateful that Pam also understood there were some things that he couldn’t discuss even with her.

Hanley was sitting on the floor playing cars with his son. The game was pretty simple: Hanley and his son each had a little toy car and they’d “drive” the cars at each other and smash them together, and then Hanley’s son would shriek and laugh like that was the funniest thing in the world. To Hanley, the game could become tiresome after a short while, but his boy could play it forever. Hanley looked at his laughing little boy, now flat on his back, tennis shoes up in the air, and couldn’t help but smile; not that long ago, he thought he’d lost his son. He’d play the game with him as long as the little guy wanted to play.

Hanley’s cell phone rang. He pulled it off his belt and looked at the caller ID. He stood up and his son said, “Daddy, where are you going?”

“I’m sorry, buddy,” Hanley said, “but I have to talk to this man.” Answering the phone, Hanley said, “Yes, sir.”

“I’m in the East Village,” Quinn said, and gave Hanley the address.

Hanley didn’t need to write down the address; he knew where Quinn was. He was visiting his girlfriend, his mistress, whatever the hell she was. Half the damn force knew he was sleeping with a Manhattan ADA, but Quinn, as smart as he was, thought his affair was a secret. Hanley, of course, had never let on to Quinn that he knew Quinn was seeing the woman. That wasn’t the sort of thing a guy his rank could talk to his boss about.

“DeMarco’s standing in front of the building,” Quinn said. “He’s waiting for me to leave and when I do, he’s going to try to kill me.”

“What do you want me to do, boss?” Hanley said. Hanley knew Quinn wanted him to do something. If Quinn had just wanted DeMarco taken off the street, he could have had a couple of squad cars pick the guy up. Hell, he could have had a whole damn SWAT team there in five minutes if that’s what he wanted. There was no reason for him to call Hanley if Quinn just wanted DeMarco arrested or detained.

“I want you to get down here,” Quinn said. “How long will it take you?”

“About thirty minutes,” Hanley said.

“Okay,” Quinn said. “Now DeMarco’s seen you, so you can’t stand near him or approach him immediately. When you get here, wait down at the corner, where he can’t see you, then call me. I figure it will take you thirty seconds, walking quickly, to reach the front of the building where he’s standing. When you call me and tell me you’re on the corner, I’ll go downstairs and wait by the front door of the apartment building. Then I’ll call you back, and exactly thirty seconds after I call you, I’m going to step outside, and when I do, and if DeMarco approaches me, I want you to kill him. Do you understand?”

Hanley didn’t respond. He didn’t know what to say.

“Hanley, I need to make something clear. DeMarco obviously followed me to this building. There’s no other way he could have known I’d be here. This means that if all he wanted to do was talk to me, he could have stopped me before I went inside the building. But he doesn’t want to talk. The reason he’s waiting outside is that he plans to assassinate me. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, boss, but—”

“Hanley, I don’t want this guy arrested. If he goes to jail for attempting to kill me or for carrying a weapon, he’ll be out in a few years and he’ll come after me again. He isn’t going to go away. He’s obsessed with killing me; he said as much the other day in Battery Park. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder for him.”

“I understand, boss,” Hanley said, and he did.

The best-case scenario, Hanley was thinking, was if DeMarco actually pulled a gun, then Hanley, as one of the commissioner’s security people, would be perfectly justified in killing him. Or if not exactly
justified
, no one would really blame Hanley for killing the man. If DeMarco didn’t pull a gun—or worse yet, if DeMarco didn’t even have a gun on him—and Hanley killed him . . . well, that could be a problem, but he knew Quinn would protect him. Hanley would say:
I thought he was going for a gun and I shot him
—and Quinn would make the whole thing go away. He hoped. Whatever the case, he wasn’t going to let Quinn down. He owed Quinn too much.

Quinn left the bedroom and walked back to the living room, where Pam was sitting. He took a seat on the couch next to her and picked up his wineglass.

“I have half an hour or so before I have to go. So tell me again what the judge said.”

Before he’d been called and told that DeMarco was lurking outside, Pam had been telling him about her day and a bizarre ruling a judge had made. The judge’s ruling was in fact so bizarre that Pam seriously believed the judge might have been bribed, as the case involved an enormously rich Wall Street crook. This was the sort of corruption that Quinn couldn’t tolerate and wanted to obliterate, but he really didn’t want to talk about the judge or the case.

Quinn wanted to take Pam to the bedroom and make love to her before he left, but he knew she wouldn’t appreciate him having a quickie, then departing five minutes later. Plus, they weren’t a couple of teenagers and neither one of them liked to have sex that way. They liked to take their time. So Quinn suppressed the urge but he really wanted her. Maybe it was knowing that DeMarco was waiting outside to kill him that was making his desire for her so strong.

Hanley called thirty-five minutes later, and once again Quinn walked into the bedroom to talk to him. Hanley said he was waiting at the corner and he could see DeMarco standing outside the building; DeMarco would be on Quinn’s right-hand side as Quinn came down the steps.

“Hanley,” Quinn said, “I’m not going to look at him when I leave the building. Do you understand? I’m counting totally on you not to let him kill me. I’m putting my life in your hands.”

“He’s not going to kill you, boss,” Hanley said.

Quinn left the bedroom and walked over to Pam and kissed her softly on the lips. “I’m sorry, but I have to leave now.”

“Okay,” she said, “but if you have a chance, call me later.”

“I will,” he said.

He left the apartment and immediately stopped thinking about Pam as he walked toward the stairwell. He needed to figure out how he was going to handle the media after DeMarco was killed; an attempt on his life would be a very big deal, and there were going to be a lot of questions from the press. To complicate matters, he’d asked Braddock to use the Ring of Steel surveillance cameras, as well as beat cops to look for DeMarco. That would probably be leaked to the media, who could then very well ask him why he was hunting for DeMarco before the man was killed. The other problem was that DeMarco had most likely talked to other people about his insane idea that Quinn had killed his father, and whomever he’d talked to might leak that information. So what would he tell the media?

It looked as if he was going to have to tell them the truth: that DeMarco, who was certainly mentally unstable, had gotten into his head that Quinn was somehow responsible for the death of his mobster father, Gino DeMarco. Joe DeMarco had, in fact, accosted him in Battery Park a few days ago and had accused him directly of murdering his father, even though Quinn had never met Gino DeMarco. Then a confidential source in D.C. had told Quinn that DeMarco appeared to have gone over the edge, was headed to New York, and might be intending to assassinate him—and that’s when he’d told his cops to see if they could locate the nut. It was tragic that they’d been unable to capture DeMarco, and that one of his security people had been forced to kill him.

Hmm. He’d have to give that some more thought, but he figured that would work. The good news was that after Hanley had dealt with DeMarco, he’d have the rest of the night to come up with an approach for dealing with the media. He wouldn’t hold a press conference until the following day, saying that he delayed until his people could gather the necessary facts. Then something else occurred to him: an assassination attempt could be a real bonus in terms of his confirmation hearing. Politicians’ approval ratings always rose after an assassination attempt.

Quinn walked down the stairs but didn’t step into the foyer. He called Hanley from the stairwell. “I’ll be stepping outside in exactly thirty seconds. Don’t fail me, Hanley.”

Hanley knelt down and pretended to tie his shoe. As he did so, he took out the backup piece he carried in an ankle holster. The little .32 automatic could hardly be seen when he held it in his big right hand, a hand big enough to palm a basketball. He stood up, the gun held down at the side of his right leg, and began walking toward DeMarco.

DeMarco was looking to his left, toward the entrance to the apartment building. He’d been looking in that direction the whole time Hanley had been watching him, so he didn’t see Hanley coming toward him. Hanley was an excellent shot with the .40-caliber Glock he carried in his shoulder holster but not so good with the stubby-barreled .32. He wanted to be no more than ten feet from DeMarco when he fired.

30

DeMarco was surprised when the front door opened and Quinn stepped outside the apartment building. DeMarco had not expected him to leave for at least another hour. His heart began to hammer in his chest as he thought about what he was about to do. He took in a deep breath to calm himself, then reached inside his jacket pocket and placed his finger on the trigger of the P30.

Quinn came down the steps without looking in DeMarco’s direction, and as DeMarco had expected, walked over to the curb and looked up the street as if he was searching for a cab.

DeMarco glanced up and down the street quickly. There was an old lady walking toward him on his left-hand side and behind her, a young couple. Coming from the other direction, from his right, were two single women, a single man, followed by another single woman. DeMarco figured that when he fired at Quinn, most of these people, with the exception of the old lady, were going to be very close to him. Some might be standing right next to him; some might even hear the shot being fired even though the gun was silenced. And if any of them happened to be looking in the right direction, they would see his face clearly—but there was nothing he could do about any of those things.

DeMarco took a stride toward Quinn—he wanted to be just a couple of feet away when he fired—and aimed the gun in his pocket at Quinn’s back. Then he stopped, unable to move. He froze. Was he really going to do this? Was he really going to kill a man and probably ruin his own life in the process?

“Joe! Stop!”

At the same time he heard the woman’s voice, he heard something metallic clatter on the ground behind him. He turned and saw Emma. A black man was lying on the ground near her, and a few feet from the man’s hand, there was a small gun on the sidewalk. Emma was holding something in her hand, but DeMarco couldn’t see what it was. What the hell was she doing here?

An instant later, Emma was standing next to him, tugging on his arm, hissing, “Come with me, you idiot.” Quinn had turned to face him when Emma yelled. Emma tugged again on DeMarco’s arm, then stopped and pointed at Quinn. “Gun!” she yelled. “That man has a gun.” And DeMarco could see Quinn pulling his weapon from his shoulder holster. Emma threw something at Quinn—whatever it was that she’d been holding in her hand—and it bounced off Quinn’s chest, making him stagger backward. “Gun!” Emma yelled again, and a woman started running, another began screaming, and a man yelled something DeMarco didn’t understand.

Emma tugged hard on his arm again, but DeMarco didn’t move, and for just an instant DeMarco and Quinn looked directly into each other’s eyes—Quinn’s gun was now in his hand but he wasn’t pointing it at DeMarco—and then DeMarco broke eye contact, cursed, and turned in Emma’s direction and they both started running. As they ran, they stepped over the man lying on the sidewalk and DeMarco realized he was one of Quinn’s security people, one of the guys who had taken him to see Quinn in Battery Park.

He and Emma were running hard now, weaving their way through pedestrians on the sidewalk and the whole time DeMarco was expecting Quinn to shoot him in the back. He glanced back once and saw Quinn holding his left hand up in the air—his right hand, the one holding the gun, was down at his side. DeMarco realized later that Quinn was probably holding up his badge to calm the people on the street.