The 500: A Novel (34 page)

I could smell my hair burning as I jammed my pinkie into the mechanism to feel for the notches in the wheels. It was awkward, painful work as I gasped and wrenched my finger.

I set the forward wheel, then the second. The air was hot enough to burn my skin. The safe, first a buffer against the fire, was now an oven. I twisted wheel three into place, then four, then prayed the fire had gone down enough so that I wouldn’t get torched as soon as I opened the door.

The room was black as I opened the safe. Flames danced past. I crawled along the floor, pulled my shirt over my mouth, and moistened it with what spit I had left.

The fire singed my skin, and the heat burned my lungs with every half breath, but I made it to the exit door, slammed it behind me, and stumbled up the steps.

Through the glass pane I could see the room was solid with black smoke and fire. The papers burned. Henry’s secret burned with them. As I mounted the stairs, the pressure built, the glass windows blew, and the greedy flames gulped all the air they needed to reduce everything to ash. The evidence, the only leverage against Henry, his only mistake and my only chance, was gone.

I crawled up the stairs, away from the heat, finally managing a few breaths. The dull red smear of an exit sign appeared in the smoke overhead and sharpened as I moved closer. I pressed the bar of a heavy door and stumbled out a rear exit, raising my face up toward a sun that a minute ago I’d thought I’d never see again.

Freedom. At least until I looked down and saw the legion of police, firefighters, EMS, SWAT, and FBI swarming toward me. Everyone in the national capital region with a pair of cargo pants, a crew cut, a bad mustache, or a flashing light had laid siege to this one block of Pennsylvania Avenue, and now they were all storming at me.

If I had a recurring nightmare, this would be it: a flatfoot zombie army. The first guy took me by the arm. It was all over. I was a wanted man and I’d been caught by cops who I was sure Henry could buy off if he hadn’t already. I’d just watched my only bargaining chip burn. I put my hands in the air, surrendering.

“Are you okay, buddy?” he asked, then shouted, “Give me some room here! Get the EMTs. We found him, everybody. We found him!”

Apparently there had been some concern about the missing ATF agent, aka me. They helped me walk outside the riot fence they had up around the DOJ as a blast barrier.

Having this many law enforcement types staring at me made me slightly more uncomfortable than my scalded skin. Putting my hand over my mouth, I gestured for air. They brought an oxygen tank and laid me out on a gurney. I hoped the mask, and the burned hair and soot covering my face, would buy me some time before I was recognized. I felt for it, but the bump on my nose had fallen off or melted.

The EMTs threw ice packs on me. A half a dozen other victims were receiving medical attention, some sitting on the curb, some laid out.

There was another fence, about a hundred feet away, to hold the crowds back. The media had descended and the riot gates bristled with camera lenses. The evacuees were penned in another area. I could see them getting questioned by police and then walking out through a single gap in the fence. That was the only way in or out.

And there was William Marcus, chatting away with one of the cops as he scrutinized every person leaving the scene. A plainclothes gave him a nod and pulled the fence back for him. He started walking toward the ambulances, toward me.

My ATF ruse may have been enough to get me past the cops but not past Marcus. I was hoping some turn for the worse—shock, cardiac arrest, anything—would have them throw me in the ambulance and get me out of there, but I couldn’t will a medical catastrophe or fake my vitals.

Marcus looked into the faces of the police, of the other victims, as he approached. I tried to sit up, to get off the gurney, and the EMT—a guy with a ponytail and hands like vises—clamped me back down.

Marcus was walking directly to me. I stared straight up, and prayed he’d pass. But he never even arrived.

When I looked back he was gone. I turned and saw him walking toward the fence. Henry Davies was beckoning him away. They talked for a moment, then started across Pennsylvania, to a man standing beside a black sedan.

He stepped into the car with them, then the car drove away. It was my father.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

THE MEDIC BROUGHT
me to George Washington University Hospital. The triage area for the ER was overcrowded and chaotic, and I was able to slip away while waiting for the EKG tech to show up. After returning to the scene of the crime (apparently my new specialty) I picked up my car near the DOJ and set out to determine what the hell my father had gotten himself into.

He and I had made a deal before I set out that morning: I would do all the heavy lifting, and he would stay back.

But I guess I should have known: never trust a grifter’s word. Granted, he’d saved my ass, but now I wasn’t sure if I could save his.

I drove to the Davies Group mansion, and cruised past, peering up at Henry’s windows. When he’d had me tied up in there, the blinds had been drawn. Now they were wide open. The office was empty.

So what exactly is the plan here, Mike? Raid the castle, take Henry’s head, and rescue Dad like some shining knight?
Not likely. I was doing a number on my fingernails, chewing away, running through the angles when my phone rang.

“Mike,” the voice said.

It was my dad.

“Where are you?” I asked. “You okay?”

“The Bel-Air Motel on New York Avenue. Been better, but at least I got away. Got a car?”

“I’m on my way. Any heat?”

“Not that I can see,” he said. “Sooner the better.”

I knew the guy was a stoic, so the distress in his voice, the uneasy strain, had me worried.

I hauled ass over to New York Ave. I knew that area. The front door to DC along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, it was about as nasty as it comes, all druggie hotels and empty industrial buildings

The Bel-Air was a world-class dive: whores working out in the open, sheets across the windows, crackheads begging or selling stolen shit—it always seemed to be packs of socks—to the cars stuck in traffic.

But, hey, free HBO. Some drug dealers mean-mugged me as I walked across the parking lot to the room where my dad had said he was holing up. The door was open, the lock forced.

I found him inside, aiming a gun at me. He dropped it as soon as my face showed. He lay on the bed on his left side. A wad of napkins, soaked red, stuck to his right shoulder.

The smell of coffee filled the room. Like father, like son. “Want some?” he asked. “Made a pot while I waited. Fixed me right up.”

I helped him sit up. A drop of blood ran from his ear.

“Henry did this?”

He nodded.

“Is he around?”

“Maybe. They had me in one of the warehouses. I got away.”

“Can you walk?”

“I ran when I needed to, but I’m feeling a little shaky now. Maybe you want to help me down the stairs.”

I draped his arm over my shoulders and we walked along the back of the motel to my car. His shirt lifted up. I saw red welts along his back, over his kidneys.

“I’ll get you to a hospital.”

“I think I’m good, Mike,” he said between short breaths. “Cartwright has this doctor, well, more of a veterinarian—good surgeon, bad gambler—who owes him. He’ll take care of me.”

I eased him into the front seat of my car. There was no sign of Henry or Marcus. We pulled off New York Ave. onto the surface streets, heading to the reservoir and Washington Hospital Center.

“You’ll get picked up if you go into a hospital, Mike. There’s always cops. I’m doing better than I look. Don’t worry about it.”

I kept driving to the hospital. I wasn’t going to argue with him.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I saw they were going for you, so I stepped in. I told them you already had the evidence.”

“I lost it, Dad,” I said, shaking my head with shame. “Marcus burned it.”

“That’s fine,” he said. He didn’t seem fazed at all. “I just said that to get him clear of the scene, to get you a little breathing room. Henry has the same weakness we all do. He’ll believe what he wants to believe: that everyone has a price, everyone wants to make a deal. We can use that against him. So I told him we wanted to bargain.”

“What deal?”

“Nothing. Once we were clear of DOJ, I shut him down. He was”—my dad made a flapping lips gesture with his hand—“about sending me to prison, lethal injection, going down for the Perry murder.

“I didn’t bite. I wasn’t going to let him use me to lever you. So they brought me over to some old shipping warehouse, and Marcus went to work.”

He grimaced, twisting in his seat. “He’s a real artist, that guy.”

“What were they going to do?”

“They said they’d kill me if I didn’t bring you back to them, to strike a deal for the evidence. I said they could go right ahead. That pissed him off something proper. Thin skin.”

“I don’t think Henry is used to hearing no.”

“I could tell Marcus wanted to take it easy, but Henry just kept barking at him. ‘More! More!’ I was half blacked out, so…” He shrugged. “Not so bad. I think Henry stepped in himself at the end.”

He groaned. “Oh, fuck.”

“What is it?”

“Back here and here.” He pointed just above his butt and down toward his groin. “Kills. Just drop me at the hospital and go. Give Cartwright a call. Tell him we don’t need the vet and you just leave me out in front of the ER.”

His face was white. He couldn’t stop shivering.

“We’re almost there, Dad. Hang on.”

“I beat it out of there,” he said, his eyes shut now. “The way I figured it, I was the only leverage he had on you, so with me off the table, you could take him down, no deal. I ran. Either I would get away or I would die trying. Same difference in the big picture.”

“Not to me. How’d you get out?”

He reached into his pocket and handed me a tooth, a canine flecked with red. I looked at his mouth. It wasn’t his.

“Still got a few tricks left,” he said. “The good news is, Mike, he’s scared of that envelope. I guess there are plenty of people out there looking to get back at him, but no one has the goods.”

“Neither do I, Dad. It burned. I fucked it all up. I’ve got nothing.”

He waved that away. “That doesn’t matter. Henry thinks you got it.” The beating he took to keep quiet assured him of that.

I pulled the car up to the hospital, then shouted to the nurses by the emergency room doors. One look at my father and they rushed him in on a stretcher. I followed alongside.

“Dad. You shouldn’t have done it.” He’d put himself in Henry’s hands to get me out.

“Fiddle game,” he said and smiled: swap something worthless for something prized.

“No, Dad. Not at all. You shouldn’t have given yourself up. This is too much.”

“It’s what you do for your family,” he said.

He kept his hand on mine as they admitted him. His words and the ringing telephones inside the ER reminded me, but I think I’d already known it. He sacrificed himself for me, the same way he’d sacrificed himself for my mother.

The night he was arrested for breaking into that house in the Palisades was so clear in my memory. I’d relived every detail a thousand times, trying to make sense of it. And I knew that there hadn’t been a phone call taking my dad away. I remember from the trial there wasn’t even a phone in the house he broke into. My mother had come back at least an hour before my dad left, “for a baseball game,” he’d told me.

No. Perry was dead before he got there. My mother was a fighter, and when Perry had tried to force her, she’d knocked him onto that hearth. She’d killed him. Everything my father had done—never saying a word in his defense during that long trial, leaving his family for sixteen years, surviving in that hell—he’d done for her, taken the fall to protect her, the same way he’d sacrificed himself to Henry Davies for me.

I could never sneak anything past my father when I was kid; you try putting one over on a con man. And as he looked up at me and saw that holy-shit look of comprehension on my face, I knew he knew.

“Thank you, Dad. I love you.”

“You too,” he said. “But don’t get all sappy. I’ll be back out of here in an hour, good as new.”

His hand was cold. A doctor picked up a phone and ordered a crash something and eight units of O positive.

“I lost the evidence. I let you down, Dad. I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter, Mike. We’ve got him scared. Pig in a poke. Play the man, not what’s in your hand.”

I probably said a couple more sappy things. He humored me. Then they wheeled him up to surgery.

One of the cops working the waiting area would not stop strolling by and checking me out. He walked over to a colleague for a little parley. I wasn’t going anywhere, though, until I knew what was happening with my dad.

Cartwright showed up a half an hour later. “How is he?” he asked.

“In surgery. I don’t know.”

“This place is crawling with police,” he said. He nodded toward the far doors at the end of the corridor. I took the long way around and checked that hallway. Sure enough, there was my friend Detective Rivera, the cop who had betrayed me. God knows how many other goons Henry and Marcus had descending on this place.

I circled back to find Cartwright. “You need to get out of here,” he said.

“I’m not leaving him.”

“There’s no point in you handing yourself over to the police, Mike.”

“I won’t go.”

“I’ll take care of him,” he said. “Your father and I go way back. I’ll get him through this.”

I heard the door open at the far end of the hall, and Rivera led a pack of what looked like plainclothes cops toward us. We ducked around the corner.

Cartwright grabbed my shoulder. “Get the hell out of here. I’ll take care of your dad. You get whoever did this to him.”

I’d lost my only means of taking Henry down, but that didn’t matter. I had to find another way to stop him.

The police moved closer. I held on, refusing to run. Cartwright grabbed my shoulder again. “Go!”