House Reckoning (21 page)

DeMarco had a cab drop him off in Manhattan, then he spent two hours ducking in and out of buildings, taking short subway rides, ducking in and out of more buildings, trying to spot a tail. If they were tailing him, he couldn’t tell. Finally, he ended up at his cousin’s place of business, a mob-affiliated pawnshop in Queens.

The pawnshop was a shabby, dusty, dingy place with sheet metal screens that could be rolled down over the door and the windows at night. It was overflowing with an unimaginable collection of crap: musical instruments, tools, knives, fake antiques, rings, bicycles, and baby carriages—and one cigar-store wooden Indian that looked like it might actually be worth something. DeMarco knew the pawnshop was just a front for merchandise hijacked from trucks and pilfered from warehouses, then sold to shoppers who never questioned how it was that a pawnshop could beat the prices at Target.

Danny had been working in the pawnshop when he married DeMarco’s ex-wife—and he still worked there, although he now ran the place. He wondered if Marie was disappointed that her husband hadn’t climbed farther up the corporate ladder. DeMarco was, in fact, surprised that Marie was still married to Danny. One reason why, he supposed, was that his cousin was still a handsome man. He looked like DeMarco—nobody would be surprised to hear they were cousins—and they had the same thick, dark hair and almost identical noses and chins. That is,
almost
identical but not identical. For whatever reason, all Danny’s facial features seemed to be organized in a more appealing way than DeMarco’s and the end result was that where Joe was a good-looking man, Danny looked like a leading man.

The other reason that Marie might still be married to him was that Danny DeMarco was actually a lot of fun to be around—that is, he was a lot of fun when he wasn’t turning you into a cuckold. He was a charming, likable guy and DeMarco suspected Marie had fallen for him in the first place because she was bored in D.C. being Joe’s wife, and Danny was simply more entertaining.

There was a third possibility, DeMarco realized: maybe Danny was making a lot more money than DeMarco thought. All DeMarco knew was that his cousin had always been a small-time crook, but maybe over time he’d gotten into things that were more lucrative than fencing stolen goods. He could be connected to money laundering or drugs or God knows what. All DeMarco knew for sure was that his cousin couldn’t be involved in anything legitimate and that he most likely had to be making a decent income to keep Marie happy.

The one possibility DeMarco refused to consider was that his ex-wife just plain loved the damn guy regardless of what he did or how much money he made.

When DeMarco walked into the pawnshop, Danny was sitting behind the counter on a high stool, his feet up on the countertop, drinking a Pepsi, and watching a
Sopranos
rerun on a television set mounted high on one wall. DeMarco had the fleeting thought that maybe guys like Danny watched
The Sopranos
hoping to learn something—like the HBO series was some sort of mob training film. Danny was laughing at something one of Tony Soprano’s hoods had said, when he saw DeMarco. His eyes widened in surprise and delight, and he used the remote to turn off the television.

“Jesus, Joe. I can’t believe it.” He said this with a big smile on his face—and had the counter not been in the way, he probably would have tried to hug DeMarco. Oddly enough, his cousin wanted to be friends. He was grateful that DeMarco had gotten him free of the murder charge and he figured that by now DeMarco would have gotten over his wife’s unfaithfulness and his own treachery. DeMarco hadn’t.

“I need a loaded gun with a silencer,” DeMarco said without any preamble. “The gun can’t be a piece of shit and the silencer has to be good.”

“You’re kidding,” Danny said.

“Does it fuckin’ look like I’m kidding?”

“Hey, okay. Take it easy. You going to tell me what’s going on?”

“No.” Then he paused and tried to lighten his tone. “I need you to do this for me, Danny. It’s important. But I can’t tell you why. So can you get me a gun?”

“Yeah, sure. It’ll take me a couple of hours, but I can get one.”

“How much will it cost?

“Don’t worry about that. I owe you.”

DeMarco didn’t argue with him; he needed all the cash he had on him. In fact, he needed a lot more than he had on him. He didn’t know how long he’d be in New York and the cheapest hotel he’d been able to find in the area where he needed to be was two hundred bucks a night—tax not included. He thought about asking Danny for money but decided not to. He didn’t want to be any more beholden to the guy.

“When you get the gun,” DeMarco said, “stick it in a box and wrap up the box. Then I want you to drop it off before four
P.M
. tomorrow at the front desk of the St. Marks Hotel in the East Village. I haven’t checked in yet and won’t until tomorrow, but tell the guy at the front desk it’s for me and I’ll pick it up when I check in later.”

“I can get you the gun today, Joe.”

“No. Deliver it to the hotel before four tomorrow.” He didn’t bother to tell Danny why.

“Okay,” Danny said. “You want to give me a phone number so I can reach you if I have to?”

“No. After you drop off the gun, you forget I was ever here. I’m serious, Danny. You don’t want to be involved in what I’m doing and you have to make sure the gun can’t be traced back to you.”

“The gun will be clean. But I’m telling you, Joe, you don’t want to get caught with an unregistered weapon with a silencer on it. Not in this town.”

“Is there a back way out of here?” He knew his cousin had to have some kind of bolt hole, through an adjacent building or the one that butted up against the back of his shop. Rats like Danny always had an escape hatch.

“Sure,” he said. “Come around behind the counter.”

As DeMarco was leaving, Danny said, “It’s really good to see you again, Joe.”

And the damn guy was actually being sincere.

DeMarco left Danny’s shop, and as he walked, he looked back frequently, checking for a tail. He didn’t think anyone was following him. He slipped into a Chinese restaurant that had a pay phone and called Neil.

“I need you to send me five grand in cash. I can’t use my credit cards or my debit card.”

“Jesus, Joe, what the hell are you doing? Does this involve Quinn?”

“Will you send me the money? I’ll repay you when I get back to D.C.”

He didn’t bother to add:
If I get back to D.C.

Neil hesitated. DeMarco didn’t know if the money bothered Neil—he was a tightwad—or if Neil just didn’t want to be involved in any way with what DeMarco was doing. “Neil,” DeMarco said, “I’ve sent a lot of business your way over the years. Don’t be an asshole.”

“Yeah, all right,” Neil said. “Where do you want me to send the money?”

DeMarco told him the same thing he’d told Danny: FedEx the money to the St. Marks Hotel and make sure it gets there before 4 
P.M
. tomorrow. Then something occurred to DeMarco. “Also send me a cell phone, a smartphone, one that’s not traceable to you.” DeMarco didn’t have time to go phone shopping and didn’t want to spend his cash on a phone.

“Okay,” Neil said. Then he added, “Joe, I’m telling you, you don’t want to screw around with Quinn. Whatever you have in mind, whatever you’re doing, you need to drop it.”

DeMarco hung up.

He didn’t want to check into a hotel, mainly because a hotel would want a credit card. So for the next twenty-four hours—the time it would take Neil to FedEx the cash—he was just going to move around New York, maybe catch a couple of movies so he could get some sleep. He also needed to buy some clothes: a few changes of underwear, a couple of shirts, a pair of pants, and a duffle bag to put everything in. Also a few items that could be considered a disguise: a couple of hats, a sweatshirt with a hood, sunglasses.

He hadn’t thought about it before, but there were a lot of details involved in killing a man and he didn’t have his father’s experience. He wondered what he was overlooking.

26

Quinn’s cell phone vibrated on the nightstand next to the bed.

“Damn it,” Pam muttered. “I hope you don’t have to go tearing out of here.”

Quinn reached for his phone and checked the caller ID. “Sorry, I need to take this.” He answered the phone, saying, “Quinn.”

“It’s Hanley, boss. I’m sorry to bother you, but we lost DeMarco.”

“How the hell could you lose him?” Before Hanley could answer he said, “Hang on a minute.” He turned to Pam and said, “I need to talk to this guy,” and he left the bed and walked naked into the living room of Pam’s apartment. Pamela didn’t know about the DeMarco problem and he was hoping he wouldn’t have to discuss the issue with her.

He took a seat in the living room and said to Hanley, “What happened?”

“He took his rental car back to LaGuardia and we figured he was catching the shuttle back to D.C. But he didn’t. After he dumped the rental car, he caught a cab into the city and then he shook Grimes. I mean, he deliberately shook him. He started ducking into buildings, going in one entrance and out the other, taking subway rides, hopping on and off the trains, and he eventually shook him.”

“So use his cell phone to find him.”

“He dumped the phone in a trash can at the airport.”

“Goddamnit,” Quinn muttered. “So what are you doing now?”

“He’s got relatives here. His mother, a couple of cousins, uncles. I’ve pulled together a list of all the ones I could identify and I’ve got guys watching their houses and apartment buildings in case he shows up at one of them.”

“What did you tell the people you have looking for him?”

“Nothing. I just gave them his DMV photo and told them you wanted him located.”

“Good. You got somebody looking to see if he’s using his credit cards?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me think a minute,” Quinn said.

What the hell could DeMarco be doing? Quinn couldn’t imagine him being able to come up with something else to use against him at the confirmation hearing. The only thing he could have used that might have been effective was Tony Benedetto’s testimony or his videotaped statement. But the video was gone—Quinn had personally destroyed it—and Benedetto wasn’t going to cooperate with DeMarco, not if he wanted to keep his son out of jail. In fact, Benedetto had already gotten himself admitted to a hospital so if he was called to testify, he could claim he was too ill to travel. The schoolteacher was at an upscale resort in the Adirondacks under a phony name; a female cop drove her there in an unmarked car so there wouldn’t be any transportation records. Quinn doubted anyone would be able to find the teacher before the confirmation hearing, and without Benedetto and the teacher, DeMarco had nothing.

So what could DeMarco be doing? Was he in New York to see if he could squeeze Benedetto and force him to testify? If he was, that would be a waste of time. Tony, the old bastard, even as sick as he was, wouldn’t cave in. He’d also been to see Dombroski, but Quinn figured there was no way they’d subpoena Dombroski to testify at the hearing, not without the teacher backing up Dombroski’s statement. At least he didn’t think so—but maybe he should get Dombroski out of town, too. Whatever the case, he wanted to find DeMarco. He didn’t want the damn guy running around town without knowing what he was up to.

It occurred to him that DeMarco might be planning to kill him. That seemed pretty unlikely, however. DeMarco, as near as he’d been able to tell from the research his people had done, was a lawyer who’d never practiced law and did John Mahoney’s dirty work. The guy was basically Mahoney’s bagman; he wasn’t a gunslinger. On the other hand, since DeMarco thought that he had killed his father and because vengeance was a hell of a motivator, he shouldn’t underestimate the potential danger DeMarco posed.

“I want you to assign somebody to watch my place,” Quinn said.

“You think he might try to do something to you, boss?”

“I doubt it, but you can never tell with a nut like him. I’m also going to get his picture out to the guys in patrol and transit. I want the whole department looking for him. So I want you to email DeMarco’s DMV photo to John Braddock, then I’ll talk to Braddock. Don’t give Braddock DeMarco’s name, just his picture.”

“Okay, but what if somebody finds him? What do you want them to do?”

“I want them to call me. I need to make sure everybody understands that, Hanley. I don’t want anyone approaching him. I just want them to call me when he’s been located and then I’ll call you. You understand?”

“Yeah, boss.”

Quinn hung up and sat there, thinking. So far he’d limited knowledge of the DeMarco problem to Hanley and Grimes because he knew he could trust them completely, and he essentially told them the truth without giving them any details. He said he’d made a dumb rookie mistake and DeMarco was trying to exploit the situation and derail his chance of being confirmed as director of the FBI. He said he needed their help to get DeMarco off his back, knowing that Grimes and Hanley would do anything for him. He’d also told them that when he went to Washington, and if they wanted to go with him and continue to be his personal security guys, he’d get them temporarily detailed to D.C., where they’d not only collect their current salaries but also collect per diem the whole time they were down there.