House Reckoning (29 page)

“I don’t know,” DeMarco said. He was already beholden enough to Emma.

Thinking that he was objecting to her plan, Emma said, “Well, do you have a better idea?”

“Only one. Get Neil to dig harder into Stephanie Hernandez’s past to see if there’s something there we can use to pressure her.”

“I think that’s probably a waste of time, but I’ll do that. Neil’s more inclined to follow orders when they come from me.”

“Or what we could do,” DeMarco said, “is kidnap Taliaferro’s daughter and some of your DIA friends can waterboard her and force her to tell what she knows about Quinn.”

“I assume you’re joking,” Emma said.

“Yeah. Sort of.”

“And for your information, the DIA did not engage in waterboarding, at least not while I was there.”

“Good for you. But if Quinn doesn’t act in the next couple of days, I’ll have to come up with a plan B. I can’t play bait forever and even as rich as you are, you can’t afford to pay people to protect me forever.”

“Well, we’ll worry about that later.”

They were passing over the Delaware Memorial Bridge and DeMarco saw a boat approaching the bridge, fishing rods stuck in holders at the stern of the boat. He remembered one time when he was sixteen and he and his dad had gone fishing with one of his uncles in a boat about the same size. They caught a few fish that day but the thing that had made the day memorable was his dad let him have a beer, saying, “Don’t tell your mother.” It was funny how his tough-guy father had been afraid of his wife.

“I saw a movie one time,” DeMarco said to Emma. “I don’t remember the name of it, but I remember a guy in the movie was being used as bait so the cops could catch this bad guy. You know what the guy in the movie said?”

“No,” Emma said.

“He said,
The bait always dies
.”

The morning after he returned from New York, DeMarco went out to breakfast in Georgetown—counter to Emma’s order to remain in his house until his bodyguards arrived. When he returned to his house, he found two thugs waiting for him, sitting on the top step of his front porch. Well,
thugs
may have been a bit harsh.

Their names were Mike and Dave and they were both in their fifties, stocky guys about his size, and they looked tougher than horseshoe nails. They had big .45s in shoulder holsters.

After the introductions were made, the one named Mike, the apparent thug in charge, told DeMarco the plan as devised by Emma, the plan being pretty simple: DeMarco was to hang around his house, every once in a while poking his head outside the door so folks would know he was home, and if anybody tried to break in and harm him, Mike and Dave would shoot them.

DeMarco chose to occupy his time by filling out an online resume form, not sure how he could possibly spin being Mahoney’s fixer into something appealing to a future employer. Under the section on
Special Skills
he wondered if he should put down
red fire axe.
Mike and Dave spent the time playing cribbage, periodically glancing out the windows to see who might be lurking about. Mike also informed DeMarco that as neither he nor Dave cooked, DeMarco was the designated chef.

Being the bait sucked.

34

The day after meeting with Tony Benedetto, Quinn was in his Manhattan apartment, packing for the trip to D.C. He needed to be in Washington several days before the hearing started because there were a number of people the White House wanted him to meet with, including half a dozen senators on the Judiciary Committee. He would have a long lunch tomorrow with the acting director of the FBI to receive an informal briefing on current issues facing the Bureau, followed by a meeting with the attorney general. Dinner was planned for one evening with the secretary of Homeland Security, a woman he expected to be working with closely. He wouldn’t be meeting with the president again until after the hearing.

Unfortunately, his wife would be accompanying him. He wished he could have taken Pam with him but that obviously wouldn’t do. And, he had to admit, Barbara was good in social settings with the politically powerful. She also seemed excited about the idea of living in D.C. and had already been in contact with a real estate agent there. She clearly had no clue about his affair with Pam. Well, maybe that wasn’t true. She knew things weren’t right with their marriage, and she might even suspect that he was having an affair, but maybe she was thinking that he would be faithful to her since he was being appointed to such a highly visible position.

During the confirmation hearing, he and Barbara would be staying at a friend’s house in Georgetown. The friend and his wife were currently on an extended African tour—some sort of world hunger thing—and Quinn preferred to stay in a private home rather than a hotel. Grimes and Hanley would accompany him for security purposes and they’d live in the house where he and Barbara would be staying. Barbara wasn’t happy about that, but with DeMarco on the loose, Quinn wanted his security people nearby.

He was trying to decide how many suits he needed to pack—two or three?—when Hanley called.

“DeMarco’s back in D.C.,” Hanley said.

“How do you know?” Quinn asked.

“He used a credit card this morning to buy breakfast at a place in Georgetown.”

“I need to find out where he’s staying, Hanley.”

“I think he’s staying at his own home. After I heard about the credit card charge, I called his home phone and he answered.”

What the hell was DeMarco doing? Had he given up? Or had he just returned to D.C. to regroup? Whatever the case, it wasn’t going to change Quinn’s plan.

“What do you want me to do, boss?” Hanley asked.

“Nothing,” Quinn said. “I think the guy’s given up after what happened the other night. We’re taking the shuttle to D.C. as planned this afternoon and if DeMarco tries something, you and Grimes will deal with him, but I doubt he’ll try anything.”

“Okay, boss,” Hanley said.

Quinn finished packing, then walked into the living room, where his wife was on her cell phone with somebody. She was always on the phone. “Have you finished packing?” he asked. “We’re leaving in two hours.”

She cupped her hand over the phone and said, “Yes. I packed last night while you were doing whatever you were doing.”

He wondered if that was a zinger. Last night, he’d told her he had to deal with a few urgent issues before they flew to D.C., but he’d actually been with Pam. “Good,” he said. “I have to go out for just a moment, but I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?”

He ignored the question and left the apartment, and ten minutes later was using a public phone. He called Tony Benedetto’s hospital room and when the old man answered he said, “He’s at his home in D.C. You know who I’m talking about. Get this finished, Tony.”

Tony started to call Oskar Pankov after he finished talking to Quinn, to tell Oskar what Quinn had told him: that DeMarco was at his home in Georgetown. Then something occurred to him. He’d already called Oskar once and a second call might not be smart, and it also wouldn’t be smart to mention DeMarco’s name or address on the phone.

He remembered the big stink a while ago about the NSA monitoring everybody’s calls and emails, and although he thought the likelihood of somebody eavesdropping on a call he made was almost zero, why take the chance? One thing that Carmine had drilled into his head when he was young was that telephones were dangerous.

He thought for a couple of seconds, then called a guy he used to work with, a guy named Shorty for obvious reasons. Shorty had been able to pick any lock in existence before he got all crippled up with arthritis. He told Shorty to come to his hospital room, and because he owed Tony and because Tony said he’d pay him a C note to run an errand for him, Shorty showed up half an hour later. After Shorty stopped pretending that he gave a shit that Tony was dying, Tony handed him a sealed envelope containing a note that said DeMarco was at his home in Georgetown, and told Shorty to deliver it to Oskar’s restaurant in Brighton Beach.

“My wallet’s in that closet over there,” Tony said. “Take out a hundred and get going.” After Shorty left, he thought about checking his wallet to see how much Shorty had really taken from it, but no way did he have the strength to get out bed.

He closed his eyes and debated whether he should take more morphine—he had a little button he could push that would drip the dope into his veins—but he wanted to delay that as long as possible. The dope put him in some weird half-awake state where his brain didn’t work and where he had memories of events he was sure had never really happened. The doctor also told him that he could push the morphine button as many times as he wanted—that the only thing that mattered at this point was minimizing his pain. And when the doc said this, Tony had thought:
Bullshit.
The doc was really telling him to push that fuckin’ button until he overdosed because there wasn’t anything else that could be done for him. Well, he wasn’t ready to commit suicide yet.

He heard the door open and he opened his eyes to see who it was. He was expecting it would be one of the nurses just coming in to check on him—the nurses, he had to admit, had been really nice—but it wasn’t a nurse. It was his damn kid.

“Hey, Pop. How ya doing?”

“How am I doing? I’m dying, you fuckin’ numbskull. Where the hell you been? And how come this is the first time you’ve come to see me?”

Anthony Benedetto Jr. was a small man in his forties, his face prematurely wrinkled from booze and dope and because he liked to sit in the sun. Tony thought his kid’s face looked like a white raisin, and the raisin got smaller every time he saw him. Also, every time he saw him, he couldn’t help but think that it was his fault his son had turned into the loser-cokehead he was. If he’d spent more time with him, been more patient with him, maybe . . . The problem was, although he loved his son, he didn’t really
like
him. He felt bad that he’d had to screw over a decent guy like DeMarco to save Junior’s useless hide again.

Answering Tony’s question, Anthony Jr. said, “I checked myself into rehab after they let me out of the can; I figured I’d better do that before I got into any more trouble.” Before Tony could respond, he went on. “I still can’t believe they’re dropping the charges against me. Anyway, when I got out of rehab, I went by the house to see you and found out you were here. Mrs. Giacoma next door told me.”

Tony hadn’t told Junior about the deal he’d cut with Quinn to get the charges dismissed, only because he hadn’t seen the kid since he’d gotten out of jail. And bullshit, he went into rehab. They don’t let you out of rehab in just a couple of days, not unless you walk out. What Junior had most likely done—just based on the way he looked—was go out to celebrate after he got out of the can; he’d hooked up with some of his doper friends and had been on some kind of bender, snortin’ shit up his nose.

“Anyway, I’m here now and I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner, Pop. Can I get you anything? Magazines, a book, something?”

Tony almost said:
A book! When the fuck have you ever seen me read a book?
But he didn’t say that. Instead he said, “Just sit with me awhile. Okay, Anthony? Just sit here with your old man until he falls asleep.”

Tony knew that after he died, Anthony Jr. would inherit quite a bit of money and all the property he owned, and then he’d lose everything gambling, or he’d blow it on dope, or the money would get taken from him by guys smarter and harder than him—and there wasn’t anything he could do about that. All he could do was protect him from Quinn—and hold his hand for a while before he died.

“You remember the time,” Tony said, “when me and you and your mom went down to Jersey and rented them horses?”

Anthony Jr. brayed a laugh. “You on a horse! That had to be the funniest thing I ever saw in my life. I thought you were gonna shoot that fuckin’ horse.”

35

Emma had no intention of asking Neil to dig into Stephanie Hernandez’s past, and her plan to use DeMarco as bait was a ruse.

Emma thought it unlikely that Quinn would try to do anything to DeMarco before the confirmation hearing. After he’d been confirmed and was running the Bureau, then he might do something, but she figured DeMarco was safe until then. What she was really doing was making sure DeMarco didn’t do something crazy, like go after Quinn again on his own. Boxing him up in his own house with Mike and Dave watching him would keep him pinned down until she could execute the only plan she could think of to get Quinn and to keep DeMarco out of trouble.

Emma had never met Mary Pat Mahoney before. She’d heard about Mahoney’s wife from DeMarco, and based on everything DeMarco had said, she sounded like a decent woman. Why on earth she’d married Mahoney, Emma couldn’t imagine. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. She could imagine how a man with Mahoney’s charm could have seduced her when she was young, but she couldn’t imagine why Mary Pat had remained married to the reprobate for forty years.

When she arrived at the Watergate and told the doorman she was there to see Mrs. Mahoney, the doorman said, “And may I ask who you are, ma’am?”

Emma gave the doorman her name and added, “Tell Mrs. Mahoney this concerns a man named Joe DeMarco and that Mr. DeMarco is in trouble and needs her help.”