House Reckoning (34 page)

“Who? Who made the announcement?”

“The president’s press secretary.”

“So what did he say?”

“He said the president has withdrawn your name for the FBI job.”

“But did he say why?”

“Not really. All he said was . . . I was watching at the Four Seasons, having a drink with the real estate agent when the news came on. My God, Brian, it was humiliating. I didn’t know what to say to the woman.”

“Barbara, calm down. What reason was given for the president dropping me?”

“All he said, all the press secretary said, was something like ‘Certain information has come to the president’s attention, information that is currently being evaluated that has caused the president, for the time being, to reconsider Commissioner Quinn’s appointment.’ A bunch of gibberish like that. Brian, what’s this all about?”

“Sit down, Barbara. I need to tell you something, something that happened when I was young.” He took her hands into his and looked deeply into her eyes. “I need you, Barbara, more than I’ve ever needed you before.”

42

DeMarco had told Mike and Dave it would be too much of a hassle to get them passes to come into the Dirksen Building and that even if they could get in, they wouldn’t be able to carry weapons. So what use would they be? He’d told them to wait for him on the steps on the north side of the building and, to his disappointment, they were still there when he finished with Quinn.

“I’m not going to be needing you guys anymore,” he said. “You can take off.”

DeMarco figured that no way in hell was Quinn going to make a run at him after Stephanie Hernandez showed the FBI the photos. If DeMarco was killed, Brian Quinn would be the prime suspect—and Quinn didn’t need to be a suspect for more than one crime at a time.

“Yeah, well,” Mike said, “we’re not exactly working for you. We’re working for Emma. So she needs to tell us if it’s okay for us to take off.”

DeMarco was in too good a mood to argue with him and tell him that it was
his
decision and not Emma’s regarding whether or not he needed their continued protection—which consisted of them primarily sitting around his house, eating his food, and playing cribbage. All he said was “Then I’ll give Emma a call in a while, but right now I’m heading over to the Monocle for a drink. I feel like celebrating. You can tag along if you want.”

“What are you celebrating?” Mike asked.

“Karma,” DeMarco answered.

Yep, Brian Quinn might still be alive, but he’d eventually pay for what he did. Or at least DeMarco was pretty sure he would pay. It would probably take two or three years with a legal system that moved slower than slugs could travel, but in the end, Quinn would go down. He was concerned, of course, because Quinn was bright and slippery and well connected—and because his wife was so goddamn rich—that Quinn might be acquitted. But DeMarco didn’t think so.

The Monocle restaurant—a well-known watering hole for the denizens of Capitol Hill—was only a few blocks from the Dirksen Building and it was too nice a day to take a cab, so they walked. As they were walking, Dave suddenly tensed up and said, “Hey, Mike! That guy over there, across the street, the guy in the tan jacket? Is he the one we saw this morning near DeMarco’s place, getting into his car?”

DeMarco looked over at the man they were talking about. He was pretty sure it wasn’t the same guy; although he was tall and balding and wearing the same color jacket as the man they’d seen near his house, this man was younger. Mike apparently thought the same thing because he said, “Nah, I don’t think it’s him.”

At the next corner the man in the tan jacket turned and headed west and Dave said, “Yeah, it probably wasn’t him.”

DeMarco almost said,
Probably?
He was going to tell
Emma that in the future, if she thought he needed bodyguards, to hire people with twenty-twenty vision.

In the Monocle, DeMarco ordered a vodka martini. Mike and Dave ordered draft beer; apparently drinking beer on duty—as opposed to the hard stuff—didn’t violate whatever sacred oath they took as bodyguards.

DeMarco looked up at the television over the bar as he waited for his drink; CNN was on, the sound muted, and captions were running across the screen too fast to read, but DeMarco saw enough to understand that the maniac who ran Iran was up to something screwy again.

His martini arrived, and as he was sipping it, it occurred to him that he needed to call his mother. He didn’t want her to be surprised when the news broke that Quinn had been arrested for killing Gino DeMarco. Dealing with her husband’s death had been hard enough the first time; he wished there was some way he could spare her from having to go through it all over again. Maybe the best thing would be to call his Aunt Connie first, give her the news, and ask her to stay with his mom for a couple of days. Yeah, that sounded like a plan.

“How long we gonna sit here?” Mike asked.

“Until I’m through celebrating. Just relax and drink your beer.”

At that moment, he looked up at the television and saw the CNN guy’s lips moving and on the caption were the words
Brian Quinn
and
FBI director
. “Hey,” DeMarco said to the bartender, “would you mind turning on the sound for just a minute?”

The bartender’s expression made it clear that it would be a major inconvenience for him to pick up the remote and hit a single button, but he did, and at that moment the president’s wimpy press secretary appeared behind a podium and told the nation that the president had decided to drop Brian Quinn.

DeMarco raised his martini and made a toast: “Here’s to John Fitzpatrick Mahoney.”

“What?” Mike said.

DeMarco sat there a moment longer, noodling things over as he finished his drink.
What the hell?
he thought to himself.
What do I have to lose?
He took out his cell phone and made a call. “Is he available?” he asked.

“Yes,” Mavis said. “For exactly twenty-two minutes.”

“I’ll be right over.”

It was time for DeMarco to go beg for his job back.

“I’m heading over to the Capitol. You guys can come along if you want.”

“Can we go inside the building this time?” Dave asked.

“Sure,” DeMarco said. “You just go over to the visitor’s center and get in line with all the rest of the tourists.”

Mahoney was on the phone when DeMarco walked into his office. He glared at DeMarco briefly, then said into the phone, “All right, Stephanie, and thanks. I’ll talk to Barlow in the next couple of weeks—I gotta figure out what to do with him—then after I talk to him I’m going to send you a guy who’ll help with your campaign.”

He put down the phone and said to DeMarco—or maybe he was talking to himself—“She’s going to be a real pain in the ass. I know I’m going to regret getting her a seat in the House.” Then he said to DeMarco, “What do you want?”

“I, uh, just wanted to thank you for what you did.”

Mahoney just stared at him, his small blue eyes boring into DeMarco’s. DeMarco was about to open his mouth and go into the spiel he’d prepared, telling Mahoney how he was sorry that he’d lost his temper and threatened him, how he shouldn’t have done that even though he’d been understandably upset, and how if Mahoney . . .

Mahoney opened the center drawer in his desk and pulled out a key and tossed it to DeMarco. It was the key to DeMarco’s office—the office of the
Counsel Pro Tem for Liaison Affairs
. The office where the red fire axe resided.

“Get the fuck out of here,” Mahoney said. “But if you ever pull something like that again . . . Go on, beat it.”

As DeMarco walked past Mavis’s desk, a smile on his face, he remembered what Jake had told him the first time he met Mahoney:
“I thought that went pretty good.”

Now DeMarco really felt like celebrating and he also realized that he hadn’t eaten lunch and he was starving. He called Emma so he could shed himself of Mike and Dave but Emma didn’t answer her phone, which didn’t really surprise him. Emma viewed her cell phone primarily as a one-way communication device.

DeMarco decided to treat himself—and Mike and Dave—to an early dinner at a sports bar in Georgetown. Once they arrived, Mike and Dave proceeded to drink more beer, and DeMarco got the impression that they weren’t pacing themselves. DeMarco, not being a big beer guy since beer usually gave him a headache, decided to stick with vodka martinis.

At one point, while waiting for his next drink to arrive, he called Emma and this time she answered. He gave her a recap of all that had transpired with Mahoney and Brian Quinn. She’d already seen the news conference announcing that Brian Quinn would not be occupying the big chair in the Hoover Building.

“I appreciate you hiring Mike and Dave to watch over me,” he said, “but I don’t need them anymore. Quinn’s not going to do anything now.”

“Probably not,” Emma said, “but I want them to escort you home and make sure there’s no one lurking around your house. Plus it sounds like you’re in some bar and about three sheets to the wind.”

“Hey, I’m celebrating.” He didn’t bother to say that Mike and Dave were probably as drunk as he was.

“Whatever. Put Mike on the phone and I’ll tell him what I want him and Dave to do.”

“Thanks, Emma. For everything.” Then he added, “You saved my life.”

By the time DeMarco got home, it was dark outside. Dave made a tour around the exterior of the house, looking, DeMarco assumed, for evidence that somebody had broken into his home. Mike stood next to him while Dave was searching, glancing casually about the neighborhood. DeMarco wasn’t too sure about Mike’s powers of observation since he knew how many beers the damn guy had had; he’d paid for the beers.

Dave returned from his walk around the house and Mike took DeMarco’s house key, pulled out his .45, and opened the front door. DeMarco rolled his eyes—and prayed that Mike wouldn’t shoot something in his house, like his TV set, when Mike saw his own reflection in the screen. Mike punched in the code to DeMarco’s alarm, flipped on a light, then proceeded to walk through the house, flipping on more lights, while Dave and DeMarco waited by the front door; DeMarco just wished this charade would end as he desperately needed to take a piss.

“All clear,” Mike called out.

DeMarco fast-walked toward the bathroom—to discover the door closed and Mike inside the room.

43

Oskar Pankov looked outside his hotel room window. It was almost dark and it would be completely dark by the time he arrived at the vacant house in Georgetown. He hoped he could finish the job tonight and wouldn’t have to hang around any longer. He hated to sleep in any bed other than his own.

He dressed all in black—black baseball cap, black shirt, black Windbreaker, black jeans, black Reeboks. Even his socks were black. Lastly, he put on black leather shooting gloves; to keep from leaving fingerprints on his weapons or in his rental car, he wouldn’t take them off until the job was finished. That afternoon, he’d wiped down the rental car and both his weapons—the rifle and the pistol—as well as all the ammunition. He knew he was going to have leave the rifle after he made the shot and he might have to leave the rental car as well if something went wrong. He’d used a fake ID and credit card to rent the car, so he wasn’t worried about anyone tracing him through the car.

He took one last look around the hotel room to see if he’d forgotten anything, then took a piss. Experience had shown, particularly as he’d grown older, that it was always prudent to take a piss before a job.

Oskar parked his car in front of the house that abutted the back of the for-sale house. From the backseat of his car, he took a canvas shopping bag that contained his short stepladder and a rectangular case that looked like it might contain a musical instrument such as a saxophone. He walked around the block until he reached the front of the for-sale house and looked casually around. There was no one on the street that he could see.

Moving swiftly—not like someone sneaking around—he walked directly up to the gate on the west side of the house, opened the gate, and passed through it. He acted like a man who belonged. He walked to the backyard fence, placed the stepladder at the base of the fence, then walked to the east side of the house. Going down on his belly, he crawled into the space between the house and the rhododendron bushes on that side of the house.

He opened the case, took out the rifle parts, attached the barrel to the stock, and attached the scope. Now, if someone had seen him and called the police, he might be arrested for trespassing and for having a rifle and an unregistered pistol. Of course, if the cops arrived, he would leave the weapons in the bushes and stand up to greet them, hands in the air, and hopefully they wouldn’t find the weapons. If they did, they’d still have to prove they belonged to him. What he would not do was shoot the policemen.

Lights were on in the house across the street but Oskar didn’t see anybody in the house. Fifteen minutes passed; the cops had not arrived and he still hadn’t seen anyone in the house. Thirty minutes later, a man walked into a room and picked up the phone. The man was perfectly framed by the window and clearly visible through the scope on the rifle.