House Rivals (14 page)

“Sorry, Agent,” DeMarco said, not sounding sorry at all. “By the way, are you ever going to tell me your first name so I don't have to keep calling you Agent? With all this clout you seem to think I have, I can probably find out on my own if you won't tell me.”

“My name is Bertha. Okay? Are you satisfied? And if you ever call me Bertha, I'll shoot you.”

“So what do your friends call you?”

“You're not my friend, DeMarco.”

19

Mark Jenkins and Roy Patterson.

Westerberg had finally given him something he could use. And in this case, Denzel was wrong: DeMarco didn't need proof, he just needed to know he was right.

The question was: Was he willing to accept the consequences if he failed? It took him about two seconds to decide that yes, he was. Twenty-two-year-old Sarah Johnson, a woman with her whole life ahead of her, had been willing to risk her life to get Leonard Curtis—and DeMarco was willing to risk the possibility of going to jail.

So he didn't spend much time agonizing over whether he would do it. He spent the time instead thinking about how to do it, and concluded he needed some help and some equipment he didn't have. If he'd been near New York, he could have called up a couple of mafia-connected lowlifes—guys who used to work with his father—and paid them to do the job for him—but he was sixteen hundred miles from New York.

He thought about logistics for another minute, then called Doug Thorpe.

“Mr. Thorpe, it's Joe DeMarco.”

“What do you want, DeMarco?”

“Do you have any guns?”

“What? Yeah, of course.”

“I don't mean rifles or shotguns. Handguns.”

“Yeah, I got a couple. Why are you asking?”

DeMarco told him, and then told him what he planned to do. He concluded by saying, “You understand you could end up in jail if you help me.”

“I couldn't care less about jail,” Thorpe said.

“Okay, as long as you understand.” Then he hesitated and asked, “When's Sarah's funeral?”

“Friday,” Thorpe said.

After speaking to Thorpe, DeMarco called Mahoney and told him that he needed Roy Patterson's address. He said that Patterson was a tattooed thug who might have a criminal record and that he lived in a double-wide, but that's all he knew. DeMarco might have been able find Patterson's address using the Internet and without Mahoney's help, but he didn't feel like spending hours on a computer. And Mahoney had the sort of connections in D.C. that could find the guy if he lived in a cave.

After speaking to his boss, DeMarco got into his rental car and drove slowly through the streets of downtown Bismarck, checking his rearview mirror to see if he could spot whoever was following him.

When DeMarco met Dawkins and Logan in their office yesterday, it became apparent to him then that they'd been having him followed. If they hadn't had someone tailing him how else would Dawkins have known that he'd been following Logan? He didn't buy that you're-playing-in-our-ballpark crap that Dawkins tried to feed him.

The more startling conclusion he came to was that maybe Logan and Dawkins had someone start following him the day he arrived in Bismarck or, more likely, they'd been following Sarah, and when Sarah met with him he was identified. This also meant that maybe they knew he and Sarah were seeing people like Janet Tyler, trying to get evidence to use against Curtis. DeMarco also remembered Doug Thorpe telling him that Sarah had been concerned that her phone calls were being monitored, something Thorpe had chalked up to paranoia—and a possibility DeMarco had completely ignored. So it was even possible that Dawkins and Logan, in addition to having him followed, had listened in on calls Sarah and DeMarco had made to each other. And what all this meant was that DeMarco felt more convinced—and more guilty than ever—that he could have been the catalyst for Sarah getting killed.

After driving for about fifteen minutes, DeMarco was pretty sure he was being followed by a man in a gray Honda sedan. He got on the I-94 interstate, in the middle lane, and the Honda got in the same lane, staying two cars behind him. At the next exit he came to, DeMarco waited until he was almost past the exit, then turned the wheel hard to the right, cutting in front of a sixteen-wheeler, almost clipping the semi's front bumper, and took the exit. Whoever was driving the gray Honda was blocked by the semi and didn't stand a chance of following him off the highway.

Satisfied that he'd lost the guy, DeMarco consulted his phone for directions to the nearest Walmart. He'd picked the Walmart for one reason: he was sure it would have self-checkout and, therefore, no one would witness his purchases. He found two black ski masks in the sporting goods section, paid in cash at the self-checkout machine, dumped the ski masks into a plastic bag, and never had contact with another human being.

As he was driving out of the Walmart parking lot, a man called, didn't give his name, but gave DeMarco Roy Patterson's address. DeMarco's last stop was a RadioShack, after which he returned to his motel to wait for Doug Thorpe. He didn't see the gray Honda.

Thorpe knocked on DeMarco's motel room door just before sunset. The expression on Thorpe's gaunt face was grim and determined.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” DeMarco asked him again.

“If I wasn't sure, I wouldn't be here,” Thorpe said.

“Okay. We'll take my rental car. I don't want to take the risk of someone getting your license plate number.”

Thorpe just shrugged.

“You got the guns?” DeMarco asked.

“Yeah. They're in a sack in my truck. A .45 auto and an old .38 revolver. I haven't fired the .38 in thirty years. The last time I fired the .45 was five years ago when I had to put down a deer that got hit by a car.”

“Well, get the guns. But take the bullets out. Leave the bullets in your truck.”

“What?” Thorpe said.

“I'm not going to take the chance of accidentally killing someone. For that matter, I'm not going to take the chance that you might intentionally kill someone.”

Thorpe just looked at DeMarco for a moment than said, “Okay.” It was impossible to read the guy. He was obviously angry. Angry at whoever had killed his granddaughter. Angry with DeMarco, who he probably blamed for Sarah's death. Angry at the whole damn world. But aside from anger, DeMarco couldn't detect any other emotion. Thorpe certainly wasn't nervous about what DeMarco was planning.

“The first thing we have to do is see if we're being followed,” DeMarco said. “Look for a gray Honda.”

“Followed?” Thorpe said.

“Yeah. I think someone's been following me from the day I met with Sarah.”

He then told Thorpe what he knew about Logan and Dawkins, and how he'd come to the conclusion that they'd been having him followed. “So start looking behind me to see if you can spot a tail. I'm going to start making a bunch of random turns.”

Four random turns later, Thorpe said, “The blue Camry. The guy must have changed cars.”

“Yeah, I see him,” DeMarco said. He'd spotted the Camry also.

DeMarco stomped on the gas, committed a few minor traffic infractions, made a couple of high-speed turns, and five minutes later said, “I think I lost him,” feeling proud of himself.

Thorpe said, “I'm not so sure you lost him, as he just gave up. He figured out that you knew you were being followed, and he didn't see much point in trying to stick with you.”

“Hmpf,” DeMarco said. He liked his version better.

They arrived at the trailer park where Roy Patterson lived and DeMarco found Patterson's trailer. The once-white siding was covered with grime and mildew, there was a blue tarp on the roof to keep the rain out, and one of the windows was patched with plywood. There was a trash can in front of the trailer—a rusty fifty-five-gallon drum—that appeared to serve no purpose as the ground around the trailer was littered with beer cans. A battered blue Ford pickup squatted in front of Patterson's trailer.

As they were sitting there, the sun went down and the lights came on in Patterson's trailer, as did the lights in the trailers adjacent to his. The mobile homes in the park were less than ten yards apart, and DeMarco could see an overweight woman in the trailer on the right side of Patterson's. She was sitting at a table, shoveling food into her mouth, as she watched television.

“We need to wait for him to leave or for his neighbors to go to bed,” DeMarco said.

Thorpe just nodded.

About nine p.m., Patterson—or at least DeMarco thought it was Patterson—emerged from his trailer. According to the information DeMarco had been given Patterson didn't have a wife, but DeMarco didn't know if he lived alone or not. The man he assumed was Patterson was wearing a dark-colored baseball cap and a green letterman's jacket with white sleeves. He got into the blue pickup.

DeMarco followed the pickup to a bar that had a silhouette of a big-busted, long-maned woman on a sign over the door. The bar featured exotic dancers, who turned out to be not so exotic. After Patterson went into the place, DeMarco said, “I'm going to go in for a quick beer to make sure we're following the right guy.”

Thorpe grunted. A man of few words—or no words.

The bar was dimly lit and very warm, both conditions necessary to accommodate the dancers: the high temperature kept them from getting chilly as they were almost nude and the dim lighting made it less easy to see what they looked like nude. There was a short, six-stool bar along one wall and behind the bar was a bald-headed behemoth who was probably the establishment's bouncer as well as its bartender. In the center of the room was a small stage with a pole in the middle and a U-shaped bar that ran along the perimeter of the stage, close enough that the most nearsighted customer could get an eyeful. On the stage was a woman in her forties wearing nothing but a G-string and high heels, and her movements seemed to have no connection whatsoever to the music playing. There were seven men seated near the stage, one of them wearing a blue ball cap and a letterman's jacket. The guy was also wearing cowboy boots and the boots had silver toe caps.

DeMarco took a seat to the left of the man he assumed was Patterson so he wouldn't be directly in the guy's line of sight. A moment later, the man stripped off his jacket and placed it on the stool beside him. A sleeveless T-shirt displayed two thick arms—more fat than muscle—covered with red, green, and blue ink. DeMarco took a sip of his beer, used the restroom, and left the bar. When one is on a stakeout, it's always smart to use a restroom when one is available.

“It's him,” he said to Thorpe as he got back into the car. “And I'll bet you he sits in that place until it closes or he runs out of money.”

For the next three hours, DeMarco and Thorpe sat in DeMarco's car, mostly in silence. In an attempt to make conversation, DeMarco asked Thorpe what John Mahoney had been like as a young man in Vietnam.

“Like most everybody else. He was scared when we were out in the boondocks, but he did his job. He wasn't a coward. He looked out for his buddies. He was a city boy so he didn't really know how to shoot or move through the jungle, but he learned fast. If he hadn't, he would have died right after he got there. When we were back at the base, he drank a lot, smoked dope, and chased what few women there were to chase. He probably got the clap half-a-dozen times. Thank God this was before all the AIDS shit. Anyway, he was a good guy. We got along.”

An hour later, DeMarco asked, “What was Sarah like when she was little. Was she always so driven?”

Thorpe smiled slightly. “Sarah was hell on wheels when she was a kid. Hardheaded, mouthy, thought she had all the answers by the time she was twelve. She didn't do all that well in school but it wasn't because she didn't have the brains. If she liked a subject or a teacher, she'd get straight As. But if she didn't like it, she just didn't bother.

“I'll tell you one thing, though: Sarah could cast a fly. I started taking her fishing with me when she was about five, and by the time she was sixteen, she was better than me—and I'm pretty darn good. I remember once—” Then his voice broke and he looked away from DeMarco and out the car window so DeMarco couldn't see the tears welling up in his eyes. “I don't want to talk about Sarah,” he said.

DeMarco had a sudden image of Sarah as a little girl of five—­butterscotch curls, skinny legs, jabbering nonstop as she stood beside her tall grandfather fishing—and he could almost understand how miserable Doug Thorpe felt.

Patterson left the bar a little after midnight. DeMarco had parked his car next to Patterson's pickup and he was hoping they'd be able to take Patterson before he got into his vehicle. But Patterson was followed out of the bar by another guy, and they bullshitted with each other as Patterson walked over to his truck and got inside. Patterson didn't notice—or was too drunk to notice—the two men sitting in the car next to his.

“Shit,” DeMarco said.

They followed Patterson back to the trailer park and DeMarco was glad that a cop wasn't nearby. Patterson drove like a man who would blow two thousand on the Breathalyzer. Patterson pulled into the trailer park and DeMarco was relieved to see that the lights were out in all the trailers except for one at the far end of the park.

“Let's do this,” DeMarco said. As Patterson was trying to extract himself from his vehicle, DeMarco pulled the ski mask down over his face and Thorpe did the same, then DeMarco gunned the engine and pulled his car in right behind Patterson's truck. DeMarco and Thorpe got out of DeMarco's car quickly and ran toward Patterson: two masked men pointing guns.

Patterson said, “Whoa, whoa,” backing up rapidly as DeMarco and Thorpe came at him, then he stumbled and landed on his back. “Don't hurt me,” he said. “Tell Monty I'll get him the money next week.”

“Shut the fuck up,” DeMarco said. “Now get up. We're going inside your trailer.”

“Yeah, but—”

“You don't move in the next two seconds, I'm going to shoot you in the head,” DeMarco said.

Patterson got to his feet, pulled keys from his jacket, and struggled to unlock the trailer door. As drunk as he was, he took an inordinate amount of time to get the key into the lock. “Hurry up,” DeMarco said. If one of Patterson's neighbors happened to look out a window at one in the morning, the Bismarck cops would be there in the next ten minutes.