House Revenge

by Mike Lawson

  DeMarco certainly couldn’t blame them for not trusting him.

  “We’re going to do our time,” Ray said, “and when we get out, we’re going to hunt you down and kill you.”

  This was hopeless.

  DeMarco drove back to Boston, still unable to believe that the ­McNultys wouldn’t take the deal. They were stubborn, stupid fools but for God knows what reason loyal to Callahan. Or maybe it wasn’t loyalty. Maybe they just didn’t trust him like Roy had said, and thought he was playing them in some way. Whatever the case, he was now going to have to go to Mexico to meet with Javier Castro. He could call the guy, but he didn’t think a phone call would have the same impact as a face-to-face meeting. But going to Mexico . . .

  DeMarco’s impression of Mexico was that the country was lawless. The police were either corrupt or incompetent, and the drug cartels appeared to act with total impunity. He didn’t know how many articles he’d read about cartels slaughtering anyone who opposed them, no matter who they were. The last major atrocity he’d read about concerned forty-three college students who’d disappeared, and it took the Mexican cops months to figure out that their bodies had been incinerated by one of the cartels for reasons that never made any sense. How hard would it be to make one American disappear?

  DeMarco made a reservation on Delta that left Boston at six the next morning and would arrive in Mexico City about noon. To find a hotel, he looked up the address Adele Tomlin had given him for Castro on Google Maps, and made a reservation at a nearby Marriott. The helpful elves at Google also informed him that Castro lived in an upscale area of Mexico City called Polanco in the Miguel Hidalgo borough, and that some of the wealthiest families in the city lived there.

  Travel arrangements complete, he went to the lobby, copied down the number of one of the pay phones there, then called Mahoney. He was surprised when Mahoney answered his cell phone. He expected he’d need to leave a message and then have to wait around until Mahoney called him back.

  “You need to go find a pay phone,” DeMarco said, not knowing how long that would take. The disappearance of pay phones in the last few years made this sort of skullduggery more difficult. “I need to tell you something and I don’t want to do it over a cell phone. Call me at this number,” he said, and read him off the number of the hotel pay phone. He thought it pretty unlikely that anyone would be monitoring Mahoney’s phones, but he didn’t want to take the chance. Mahoney, with a minimal amount of complaining, agreed and fifteen minutes later called DeMarco back.

  “I’m planning to fly to Mexico tomorrow to meet with Javier Castro.”

  “Why would you do that?” Mahoney said.

  “I’m going to threaten him with the fearsome might of the U.S. government if he doesn’t help me screw Sean Callahan.” Then DeMarco explained what he had in mind and when he was finished, Mahoney said, “You think it’s a good idea, blackmailing a guy who used to run a drug cartel?”

  “No, I think it’s a really bad idea but you’re the one who said that forcing fifty grand out of Callahan to set up the McNultys wasn’t good enough. You said, and I quote, that it was like giving him a parking ticket. So if Castro does what I want, Callahan’s not getting a parking ticket. He’s going to go bankrupt.”

  “Yeah, but still,” Mahoney said. “You remember, just a year ago, some cartel kidnapped a DEA undercover down there? They flayed all the skin off him before they killed him. Those people are nuts.”

  That was just what he needed to hear. “So what do you want me to do?” DeMarco said. “Give Callahan a pass for what he did to Elinore and let him make however many millions he’s going to make off Delaney Square?”

  “No,” Mahoney said. “I’m just saying you better be careful down there.”

  Ya think?

  “I will, but I doubt Castro’s going to do anything to a guy who works for an American congressman,” DeMarco said, although he wasn’t really sure that was true. “But that’s one of the reasons I called you. If you don’t hear from me in a couple of days . . . Well, call somebody.”

  After talking to Mahoney, he decided to go have an expensive steak dinner in the hotel dining room. He couldn’t help but think of it as the last meal for a condemned man. Following dinner, which was excellent, he headed over to the bar to have a nightcap or two. Or three. He took a seat at the bar and looked around, and lo and behold, there was a woman there who looked like the actress Amy Adams.

  DeMarco would never have admitted it to anyone, but he had a thing for Amy Adams. She had one of those sweet, virginal faces and early in her career she’d played the enchanted princess and the plucky but pure girl next door. But as Amy grew older—she was about forty now—she started taking parts that showed off her edgy sexy side, which DeMarco liked.

  There was a romance writers’ convention taking place at the hotel. He’d seen a sign in the lobby when he got back from visiting the ­McNultys, and on the sign were photos of a couple of authors he’d never heard of. DeMarco had never read a romance novel in his life, but he’d seen the ripped-bodice book jackets and figured a romance writer’s head would be filled with sexual fantasies. Or maybe better than fantasies, actual hands-on experience the writer could draw upon.

  The woman he was looking at had long red hair, like Amy’s hair in that movie where she played a con man’s hot mistress. She was sitting at a table with three other women and DeMarco assumed they were all romance writers. The other women were frumpy-looking, overweight, and in their fifties or sixties, and DeMarco was fairly sure they all relied on strong imaginations when it came to their books rather than recent sexual experience. But the Amy look-alike . . . She was cute—short and curvy. She’d noticed DeMarco looking at her, made eye contact with him, and flashed him a smile—which made DeMarco think here was this writer, far from home, in a setting where she could go a little wild, and maybe do some hands-on research on him.

  As DeMarco was trying to devise a way to separate Amy from her friends, she again looked over at him, then nudged the woman sitting next to her, a hefty lady in her fifties with long gray hair and no makeup. The other woman looked at DeMarco, said something to Amy, then both women rose from the table where they were sitting and walked toward him.

  “Hi, my name is Madeline Cummings,” Amy said. “And this is my writing partner, Janice Brooks. We wondered if you’d allow us to take your picture.”

  “My picture?” DeMarco said.

  “Yes. I know this is going to sound odd, but there’s this villain in the book we’re currently writing and when I saw your face, I said to myself: That’s Bruno! Our villain! You see, it really helps us capture the characters in our books, particularly the main ones, if we have an actual person in mind. So would you mind, terribly, if I took your picture?”

  “I’ve got the face of your villain?” DeMarco said.

  “Well, yes. I mean, you’re sort of hard-looking,” Madeline said.

  “Sort of gangster-looking,” Janice said.

  “Sort of menacing,” Madeline said.

  “Sort of brutal,” Janice said.

  “Brutal?” DeMarco said.

  “No offense intended,” Madeline said. “I’m sure you’re a very nice man but you have this face that . . . Well, you’re our Bruno.”

  Come to think of it, up close, she didn’t look so much like Amy Adams. In fact, she didn’t look at all like Amy Adams. Her eyes were too close together and her nose was kind of fat.

  “Uh, sure, snap away,” DeMarco said.

  Madeline—definitely not Amy—framed DeMarco’s face in her smart phone, took a picture. Then she said, “Just one more,” and took another.

  “Thank you so, so much,” Madeline said.

  “No problem,” DeMarco said.

  They went back to their table and DeMarco looked at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. What a bunch of bullshit. He didn’t look “menacing,” whatever the h
ell that meant, and he sure as hell didn’t look brutal. He decided to go find another bar to drink in, someplace not filled with a bunch of screwball writers. Then tomorrow he’d fly to Mexico and threaten a guy who used to run a drug cartel.

  24

  As the plane descended for landing at Benito Juárez International Airport, DeMarco could see the sprawl of the great city. Mexico City proper was home to about nine million people but the population of the entire metropolitan area was closer to twenty million. It seemed to go forever.

  DeMarco had only been to Mexico once and it had been years ago, before the drug violence got so bad that he had no desire to visit again. But the one trip he’d taken had been marvelous and memorable. He and a woman he was dating at the time—the lady worked for the State Department and was proud of her high school Spanish—had stayed at a resort in Puerto Vallarta on the Pacific Coast. There were two things DeMarco remembered most about the place.

  The first thing—and similar to what Adele Tomlin had said about the Los Cabos resort where she and Sean Callahan met the Castros—was that the service had been incredible. He remembered one dinner at the resort’s main restaurant where four waiters hovered over them while they ate.

  But the other thing he remembered, and this stuck in his mind more than the magnificence of the resort, was the poverty. DeMarco and his lady friend had spent most of the week in Mexico inside the gated compound of the resort, near the beach and the bars and the swimming pool, but one day they decided to rent a car and tour the area. And that’s when DeMarco saw how the poor in Mexico lived. The most vivid memory he had was driving through a village where a brown stream that looked like an open sewer ran down the middle of a road between small shacks with tin roofs—hovels appropriate for a third world country—and a naked little girl of about three was playing in the stream. It was as if the resort was a feudal castle and if you stayed inside its walls, you were spared the reality of the way the serfs lived. Maybe the country had changed for the better in the years since he’d visited; he hoped so.

  There was no sign of abject poverty, however, in the part of Mexico City where the Marriott was located and where Javier Castro lived. It looked no different than the prosperous sections of American cities, and the twenty-two-story Marriott was about ten steps up from the Park Plaza in Boston where he’d been staying. The lobby was breathtaking, with marble floors and flowers in tall vases and modern artwork. There was a dark paneled library off the lobby if a guest desired a quiet space, a restaurant that specialized in French cuisine, and a bistro for more casual dining on a terrace looking out at Chapultepec Park. Nearby was the Museum of Anthropology, showcasing Aztec and Mayan artifacts, as well as Masaryk Avenue, Mexico City’s version of Rodeo Drive in L.A., with high-priced shops, nightclubs, and trendy restaurants—none of which DeMarco was likely to see as he planned to be in town for as little time as possible.

  He didn’t have Javier Castro’s phone number. He could have asked Adele Tomlin for it, but had decided not to, and since he had Castro’s address, he didn’t really need the phone number. He took a shower, and put on a suit, a white shirt, and a tie. It wasn’t as hot in Mexico City as it had been in Boston and he imagined that was due to the city’s elevation, but it was still a warm afternoon, in the eighties. Nonetheless, he figured he needed to dress appropriately for a man representing a United States congressman.

  He took a cab to Javier Castro’s house. The cabdriver—like everyone he’d met so far since arriving in Mexico City—spoke English. Javier lived on a street named Retorno de Julieta, in a neighborhood of large, luxurious homes. As for Castro’s home, all DeMarco could see from the cab was a white stucco wall that was about ten feet high with red and purple bougainvillea growing along the top, a twelve-foot-wide wrought iron gate, and a winding tree-lined driveway.

  He told the cabbie to wait for him and walked up to an intercom panel near the gate. He punched the button and while waiting for someone to answer, he noticed a security camera looking down at him. Then he noticed a couple of other cameras almost hidden in the bougainvillea. A moment later a voice said something in Spanish.

  “I’m here to see Mr. Castro,” DeMarco said.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is DeMarco. I’m here on behalf of United States congressman John Mahoney.”

  There was a long pause, then whoever was speaking said, “Mr. Castro isn’t here right now.”

  DeMarco had expected that this might happen. He reached into a pocket and held up a small white envelope. “I have a note for Mr. Castro. Could you please see that he gets it?”

  Again a long pause, followed by: “Wait where you are.”

  A moment later, a dark-haired guy wearing a floral-patterned shirt and jeans came down the driveway. He was about forty, appeared to be in excellent shape, and tucked into the front of his jeans, plainly visible, was an automatic pistol.

  DeMarco handed the envelope through the bars of the gate, saying, “My phone number is on the note.”

  The guy—a security guard, DeMarco assumed—didn’t say anything. He just took the envelope and walked back up the driveway.

  DeMarco told the cabdriver to take him back to the Marriott. All he could do now was wait to hear from Castro. On the note to Castro he’d written: “Mr. Castro, I represent United States congressman John Mahoney and wish to discuss Sean Callahan’s Delaney Square development in Boston. Congressman Mahoney has no desire to cause you any sort of legal or financial problem, but there is an issue with regard to Mr. Callahan that needs to be resolved. It would be in your best interest not to speak to Mr. Callahan until you’ve spoken to me. Please call me at your earliest convenience, although this is a matter of some urgency.” He signed the note “Joseph DeMarco” and wrote his cell phone number below his name.

  By the time DeMarco got back to the Marriott, it was almost five. He didn’t know if he’d hear back from Castro that night—he didn’t know if he’d hear back from Castro period—but he decided to stick close to the hotel so he could catch a cab if he needed to. The other reason he decided to stay inside the hotel was that he’d be safe. He hadn’t told Castro’s guy where he was staying, but he didn’t feel like taking chances.

  As he’d told Mahoney, he didn’t think Castro would be foolish enough to harm a man representing a United States congressman, but he could envision himself walking down some street, a vehicle pulling up, and a guy pointing a gun at his face and telling him to get in the car. The next morning the body of an American missing his wallet would be found in some neighborhood where people getting mugged wasn’t all that unusual, and the American Embassy would conclude that DeMarco had been foolish enough to venture into the wrong part of Mexico City. Or maybe a body would never be found. He figured he was being paranoid—but sometimes it’s not a bad thing to be paranoid.

  He went to the bar off the main lobby and ordered a margarita instead of his usual vodka martini. When in Rome. The bar was practically empty. Nearby were two very tall, shapely blondes who were speaking German and a silver-haired older couple who sounded like they might be from the American South. He checked his cell phone to make sure he was getting a signal; yep, he had four bars. As he was sipping his drink and wondering what he’d do if Castro decided not to meet with him, two guys—both blond, both tall, both handsome—walked up to the table where the two blond German women were sitting. They all left the bar together, a striking group that made him think of the Hitler Youth, an organization only perfect Aryans were allowed to join. A moment later, the older American couple left, too, leaving DeMarco sitting alone in the bar except for a bartender who was as silent as stone.

  DeMarco thought: This is dumb, hiding inside the hotel. It was a beautiful evening, and it wouldn’t be dark for another couple of hours. He was going to go for a walk and eat at some swanky place on Masaryk Avenue. He wasn’t concerned about the money he was spending on a five-star hotel and what he planned to spend
for dinner; he figured a portion of the extra fifteen grand that Mahoney had made off Sean Callahan could finance his Mexico adventure. He asked the concierge to recommend a restaurant and got directions to a place called Biko. According to the concierge, Biko was one of the best restaurants in all of Latin America, not just Mexico City, and specialized in Basque cuisine. And DeMarco thought: Why not? He hadn’t been planning to have tacos.

  He strolled over to the restaurant, was greeted effusively by a lovely young hostess, and was seated at a table holding what seemed like an excessive number of wine glasses. His waiter, a dignified Mexican gentleman in his sixties, patiently discussed the menu with him, and DeMarco decided to go for the priciest options. He ordered foie gras with mustard seeds and green onions for an appetizer, to be followed by duck breast simmered in amontillado sherry and Manzanilla olives; a different wine would accompany each course. Fifteen minutes later, his first glass of wine half consumed, the waiter placed the foie gras in front of him, the plate looking like a work of art. He took a moment to appreciate what he was about to eat, raised a fork to begin—and that’s when two men walked up to his table.

  “Mr. DeMarco,” one of them said, “we’d like you to come with us. Mr. Castro wishes to speak with you.”

  And DeMarco thought: Whoa!

  Both men were Hispanic, in their early thirties, and wearing suits, white shirts, and ties. They were tall, lean, and muscular; they reminded DeMarco of greyhounds. He was willing to bet that their suit jackets concealed weapons.

  Castro was sending him a message—and DeMarco was impressed. The only way these guys could have found him so fast was by using his cell phone to locate him. Which meant that in the two hours since he’d asked the guy at Castro’s gate to deliver his note to Castro, Castro had contacted someone and told that person to locate DeMarco using his phone. Castro had also found DeMarco’s picture somewhere so his guys would recognize him, and that too was impressive. DeMarco didn’t have a Facebook page, and he’d never been photographed by the media, so how did Castro get his photo? DMV? His congressional ID? He didn’t know, but somehow Castro had gotten a photo. He imagined that Castro had also done other research on him. Whatever the case, Castro’s message was: I can find you anytime I want.