House Reckoning (26 page)

They reached the corner at the end of the block when Emma suddenly darted out into the street and raised her hand to stop a passing cab. The driver had to slam on his brakes to keep from hitting her. She yanked open the back door of the cab and turned to DeMarco and said, “Get in!”

DeMarco got into the cab and Emma slid in after him. To the cabbie, she said, “Move it!”

The cabbie started driving. He was a tiny Asian man barely tall enough to see over the steering wheel. He looked frightened. “Where are we going?” he asked.

“Just drive,” Emma said.

DeMarco looked behind him and could see Quinn’s bodyguard, the man Emma had hit, standing in the middle of the street, looking at the cab. He was holding a gun in his hand, but he wasn’t aiming at the cab. He was probably trying to get the license plate number. DeMarco also wondered why Quinn hadn’t shot him and figured the reason was because DeMarco hadn’t shown a weapon and Quinn was afraid to shoot an unarmed man with witnesses nearby. He’d already made that mistake once before with Connors.

Emma and DeMarco were both breathing heavily—more from the surge of adrenaline than from the distance they’d run. A few blocks later, Emma told the cabbie to pull over. Emma quickly paid the fare, they got out of the cab, and Emma immediately flagged down another cab. “Take us to Brooklyn,” she told the driver.

A few minutes after they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, Emma told the cabbie to pull over. She and DeMarco exited the cab, and as soon as the cab pulled away and they were alone, DeMarco said, “Goddamnit! What the hell are you doing here?”

“Give me the gun,” Emma said.

“What gun?” DeMarco said.

“The gun in your jacket. Give it to me. Now.”

“No.”

“Joe, I just hit a man on the head and assaulted the commissioner of the New York Police Department. I can be arrested for what I did. I could also be considered an accomplice to the stupid thing you were about to do. And if you get caught with that gun, that’s going to make things worse for both of us.”

“I didn’t ask you to help me.”

“Give me the damn gun.”

DeMarco looked around to make sure no one was watching, and pulled out the gun.

“Christ! A silencer!” Emma said. She jacked the shell out of the chamber, ejected the magazine from the gun, and unscrewed the silencer. She walked a few paces over to a gutter drain, tossed the gun down the drain, then dropped the magazine and silencer into a waste container.

DeMarco started to say something, but she held up her hand, silencing him, and pulled her cell phone off her belt.

“Susan,” she said, “it’s Emma. I need a favor.”

DeMarco had no idea who Susan was, but whoever she was, she had a small beach house near the town of Islip on Long Island. It took him and Emma more than two hours to get there from Brooklyn because they changed cabs two more times on the way.

DeMarco followed Emma around to the beach side of the house—he could hear the surf but couldn’t see the ocean in the dark—and waited as she groped into a planter box for a key. Once inside, she shrugged off her jacket and walked directly to a cabinet in the small living room—she’d obviously been to the place before—and pulled out a bottle of vodka.

“Martini?” she said.

As Emma made the martinis, DeMarco paced the living room. His emotions were in turmoil. He was angry at Emma for stopping him from killing Quinn, and at the same time, if he was honest with himself, he was relieved that he hadn’t actually killed the man—and yet he still wanted to kill him. He also thought that because of what Emma had done, he’d never get another shot at Quinn.

Emma handed him his drink, flipped a switch near the fireplace, and a gas fire came to life. She took a seat in a rocking chair near the fireplace and took a sip of her drink. “Um, that’s good,” she said. “Sit down,” she ordered DeMarco, and he sat on a small couch across from her, still agitated.

“How did you find me?” DeMarco said.

“Neil,” Emma said. “He called me this afternoon and told me about everything you asked him to do. I don’t know why he didn’t call earlier. Anyway, he said he was worried about you, so I caught a shuttle up here and had Neil track you down using the phone he sent you.

“When I saw you standing outside that apartment building, I didn’t approach you right away because I wanted to see if you were being watched. I was also trying to figure out what you were doing in that part of town, because I was pretty sure that Quinn didn’t live in the East Village. And that’s when I spotted the man I hit. I saw him watching you and then I saw him take a gun out of an ankle holster and start walking toward you, and I crossed the street and fell in behind him. He was so focused on you, he didn’t notice me. I hit him when he raised his hand to shoot you.” She paused then said, “Joe, if I hadn’t been there he would have killed you.”

“What did you hit him with?”

Emma laughed. “A sugar container; you know, one of those heavy ones made out of glass. I picked it up off an outdoor table at that coffee shop just up the street from where you were standing. And that’s what I threw at Quinn when he reached for his gun. Did you recognize the man I hit?”

“Yeah. He’s one of Quinn’s goons. One of his security guys.”

“Well, he wasn’t planning to arrest you. He didn’t bother to identify himself as a cop before he raised his gun. Somehow Quinn knew you were waiting for him outside the building and he told that man to kill you. And because you were dumb enough to be carrying a weapon—one with a silencer, no less—it would have been a free killing. Quinn would have claimed you were trying to assassinate him—and he would have been right—and you would have been dead. What in God’s name did you think you were doing, Joe?”

“He killed my father.”

“So what?”

“What do you mean,
so what
?”

“Just because he killed your father—and keep in mind it was some mafia lowlife who told you he did—that doesn’t give you the right to assassinate the man.”

“There was no other way to get him. I tried to screw up his confirmation hearing but I couldn’t pull it off.

“What are you talking about?” Emma said.

DeMarco told her how he’d gone to Senator Beecham’s chief of staff and how he’d videotaped Tony Benedetto telling all the things that Quinn had done—and then how Tony had betrayed him.

“Beecham was going to have Tony testify at Quinn’s nomination hearing. He was going to get him to talk about Quinn killing my father and Jerry Kennedy and covering up the shooting of Connors. The video I made of Tony’s testimony was in case Tony croaked before the hearing. But then Tony sold me out to Quinn to keep his son from going to jail, and Quinn disappeared the teacher. The only thing I could think to do was kill Quinn.”

“Yeah, except if I hadn’t been there,” Emma said, “Quinn’s guy would have killed you. And if you had killed Quinn, you would have almost certainly been caught and spent the rest of your life in prison. Now I have a problem because I assaulted a cop and the police commissioner.”

“Hey, the guy you hit pulled a gun and you didn’t know he was a cop.”

“I’ll be sure to mention that to my lawyer. Fortunately, you never showed the gun you were carrying and there were a lot of people around who saw the cop’s gun. I don’t know if any of those witnesses will come forward, but there were witnesses.”

Before DeMarco could say anything, she said, “I’m going to have another drink. Do you want one?”

“Yeah,” DeMarco said. “I might as well get hammered since I can’t think of anything else to do.”

Emma went into the kitchen, made two more martinis, and when she returned to the rocking chair near the fireplace, she said, “Quinn could have us arrested, but I don’t think he’ll do that. I don’t think he wants us—particularly you—blabbing to the press right before his confirmation hearing. On the other hand, I don’t think Brian Quinn is going to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder for you or waiting for you to come up with something that could screw up his life.”

“So what do you think he’ll do?” DeMarco said.

“I don’t know. But if Benedetto’s telling the truth, Quinn killed two people in cold blood to save his career when he was a young man. And now he’s a different person than he was back then—meaning he has a lot more power—so maybe he’ll decide he doesn’t have to kill you. Maybe he’ll frame you for a crime and get you tossed in jail. Or maybe, considering some of things you’ve done for John Mahoney, he won’t have to frame you. When Quinn is in charge of the Bureau, he just might give his agents a new prime directive: Get DeMarco. At that point, you can say all you want about him killing your dad but since you have no evidence, you’ll sound like a maniac. Quinn on the other hand will have evidence. So I don’t know, Joe. Maybe Quinn will try to kill you or maybe he’ll try to put you in a cage—but he’s going to do something.”

DeMarco just shook his head. He wasn’t denying what Emma was saying—she’d just said almost the exactly the same thing Quinn had said to him in Battery Park, about what he might do if DeMarco continued to “annoy” him. He shook his head because he couldn’t believe that his life had come to this.

“By the way,” Emma said, “I noticed you haven’t thanked me yet for saving your life.”

“I’m still trying to decide if I’m grateful,” he said, which made Emma laugh—and him smile. Slightly.

31

The next morning, DeMarco could hear Emma showering in the only bathroom in the small beach house, so he made a pot of coffee and walked out onto a rocky beach. He noticed a battered-looking rowboat with flaking blue paint lying on the beach and a long rope attaching the boat to the house so the boat wouldn’t be swept away by a high tide. He didn’t think the boat looked particularly seaworthy, not that he had any intention of using it. He’d always thought: Rowboat versus the Atlantic Ocean—bet on the ocean. He walked up the beach about half a mile, and the whole time he was walking, seagulls flew over his head, screeching at him, as if they thought he was going to steal their eggs.

He had to figure out what he was going to do next. He thought Emma was probably right that Quinn wouldn’t have him arrested for trying to kill him yesterday and that he’d wait until after the confirmation hearing before he did anything. In the meantime, he’d beef up his security so DeMarco wouldn’t have a chance of getting near him again.

Emma was also right about Quinn having the power and the ability to ruin him. As she and Quinn had both said, Quinn might frame him for a crime but he wouldn’t even have to go to that extreme to destroy DeMarco. He was already unemployed, with few prospects for finding another job anytime soon, and by the time Quinn was finished with him, no one would hire him. He could just see Quinn keeping tabs on him—and as most job applications these days were submitted via the Internet, that wouldn’t be hard. Then he could imagine FBI agents visiting potential employers, asking questions about DeMarco without ever saying why they were asking the questions while at the same time revealing DeMarco’s past: his hit-man father, his connections to mobsters like Tony Benedetto, and how he’d been fired from his congressional job for reasons they couldn’t disclose, but which were serious issues related to integrity and politically skullduggery. So he was going to lose his house and blow through what little savings he had in a matter of months as he futilely searched for work. He could just see himself moving back in with his mother and becoming the night shift cook at a Mickey D’s in Queens.

If he was going to prevent all this from happening he needed some sort of plan to neutralize Quinn. And half an hour later, when both his shoes were filled with sand—he had one. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. He didn’t have a plan—but he had a question and the answer to the question might lead to a plan.

He returned to the beach house and found Emma sitting on the steps, drinking a cup of coffee and looking out at the surf.

“What a lovely morning,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind spending a couple more days here, but I think we should head back to Washington. There’s no point staying in Quinn’s backyard.”

“Yeah, maybe,” DeMarco said. “Let me get a cup of coffee. I want to bounce something off you.”

DeMarco took a seat on the steps next to Emma. He could see a guy with a black Labrador down the beach a ways, flinging a stick into the surf, and the dog would plunge into the waves and dutifully retrieve it. DeMarco thought the dog’s willingness to fetch a stick from freezing water was sufficient proof that it wasn’t a particularly intelligent critter.

“When Quinn was young,” DeMarco said, “he killed an unarmed man and got the department to cover it up, but Carmine Taliaferro found out and got his hooks into Quinn. To get out from under Carmine, Quinn killed Jerry Kennedy and my dad. And I can buy all that because at the time Quinn was young, didn’t have a power base, and he was worried that Carmine might kill his career. The cover-up was also bad because high-ranking guys in the NYPD had to have been involved and they could have been hurt, too, which would have made things even worse for Quinn.

“But time passes, years go by, and Carmine can’t use the killings against Quinn. There’s no evidence that Quinn killed Jerry Kennedy or my dad, and Carmine can’t say that he knows Quinn killed them without admitting that he ordered the killings. Carmine wasn’t going to admit that he was an accomplice to murder.”