House Reckoning: A Joe DeMarco Thriller

by Mike Lawson

  “I understand, boss,” Hanley said, and he did.

  The best-case scenario, Hanley was thinking, was if DeMarco actually pulled a gun, then Hanley, as one of the commissioner’s security people, would be perfectly justified in killing him. Or if not exactly justified, no one would really blame Hanley for killing the man. If DeMarco didn’t pull a gun—or worse yet, if DeMarco didn’t even have a gun on him—and Hanley killed him . . . well, that could be a problem, but he knew Quinn would protect him. Hanley would say: I thought he was going for a gun and I shot him—and Quinn would make the whole thing go away. He hoped. Whatever the case, he wasn’t going to let Quinn down. He owed Quinn too much.

  Quinn left the bedroom and walked back to the living room, where Pam was sitting. He took a seat on the couch next to her and picked up his wineglass.

  “I have half an hour or so before I have to go. So tell me again what the judge said.”

  Before he’d been called and told that DeMarco was lurking outside, Pam had been telling him about her day and a bizarre ruling a judge had made. The judge’s ruling was in fact so bizarre that Pam seriously believed the judge might have been bribed, as the case involved an enormously rich Wall Street crook. This was the sort of corruption that Quinn couldn’t tolerate and wanted to obliterate, but he really didn’t want to talk about the judge or the case.

  Quinn wanted to take Pam to the bedroom and make love to her before he left, but he knew she wouldn’t appreciate him having a quickie, then departing five minutes later. Plus, they weren’t a couple of teenagers and neither one of them liked to have sex that way. They liked to take their time. So Quinn suppressed the urge but he really wanted her. Maybe it was knowing that DeMarco was waiting outside to kill him that was making his desire for her so strong.

  Hanley called thirty-five minutes later, and once again Quinn walked into the bedroom to talk to him. Hanley said he was waiting at the corner and he could see DeMarco standing outside the building; DeMarco would be on Quinn’s right-hand side as Quinn came down the steps.

  “Hanley,” Quinn said, “I’m not going to look at him when I leave the building. Do you understand? I’m counting totally on you not to let him kill me. I’m putting my life in your hands.”

  “He’s not going to kill you, boss,” Hanley said.

  Quinn left the bedroom and walked over to Pam and kissed her softly on the lips. “I’m sorry, but I have to leave now.”

  “Okay,” she said, “but if you have a chance, call me later.”

  “I will,” he said.

  He left the apartment and immediately stopped thinking about Pam as he walked toward the stairwell. He needed to figure out how he was going to handle the media after DeMarco was killed; an attempt on his life would be a very big deal, and there were going to be a lot of questions from the press. To complicate matters, he’d asked Braddock to use the Ring of Steel surveillance cameras, as well as beat cops to look for DeMarco. That would probably be leaked to the media, who could then very well ask him why he was hunting for DeMarco before the man was killed. The other problem was that DeMarco had most likely talked to other people about his insane idea that Quinn had killed his father, and whomever he’d talked to might leak that information. So what would he tell the media?

  It looked as if he was going to have to tell them the truth: that DeMarco, who was certainly mentally unstable, had gotten into his head that Quinn was somehow responsible for the death of his mobster father, Gino DeMarco. Joe DeMarco had, in fact, accosted him in Battery Park a few days ago and had accused him directly of murdering his father, even though Quinn had never met Gino DeMarco. Then a confidential source in D.C. had told Quinn that DeMarco appeared to have gone over the edge, was headed to New York, and might be intending to assassinate him—and that’s when he’d told his cops to see if they could locate the nut. It was tragic that they’d been unable to capture DeMarco, and that one of his security people had been forced to kill him.

  Hmm. He’d have to give that some more thought, but he figured that would work. The good news was that after Hanley had dealt with DeMarco, he’d have the rest of the night to come up with an approach for dealing with the media. He wouldn’t hold a press conference until the following day, saying that he delayed until his people could gather the necessary facts. Then something else occurred to him: an assassination attempt could be a real bonus in terms of his confirmation hearing. Politicians’ approval ratings always rose after an assassination attempt.

  Quinn walked down the stairs but didn’t step into the foyer. He called Hanley from the stairwell. “I’ll be stepping outside in exactly thirty seconds. Don’t fail me, Hanley.”

  Hanley knelt down and pretended to tie his shoe. As he did so, he took out the backup piece he carried in an ankle holster. The little .32 automatic could hardly be seen when he held it in his big right hand, a hand big enough to palm a basketball. He stood up, the gun held down at the side of his right leg, and began walking toward DeMarco.

  DeMarco was looking to his left, toward the entrance to the apartment building. He’d been looking in that direction the whole time Hanley had been watching him, so he didn’t see Hanley coming toward him. Hanley was an excellent shot with the .40-caliber Glock he carried in his shoulder holster but not so good with the stubby-barreled .32. He wanted to be no more than ten feet from DeMarco when he fired.

  30

  DeMarco was surprised when the front door opened and Quinn stepped outside the apartment building. DeMarco had not expected him to leave for at least another hour. His heart began to hammer in his chest as he thought about what he was about to do. He took in a deep breath to calm himself, then reached inside his jacket pocket and placed his finger on the trigger of the P30.

  Quinn came down the steps without looking in DeMarco’s direction, and as DeMarco had expected, walked over to the curb and looked up the street as if he was searching for a cab.

  DeMarco glanced up and down the street quickly. There was an old lady walking toward him on his left-hand side and behind her, a young couple. Coming from the other direction, from his right, were two single women, a single man, followed by another single woman. DeMarco figured that when he fired at Quinn, most of these people, with the exception of the old lady, were going to be very close to him. Some might be standing right next to him; some might even hear the shot being fired even though the gun was silenced. And if any of them happened to be looking in the right direction, they would see his face clearly—but there was nothing he could do about any of those things.

  DeMarco took a stride toward Quinn—he wanted to be just a couple of feet away when he fired—and aimed the gun in his pocket at Quinn’s back. Then he stopped, unable to move. He froze. Was he really going to do this? Was he really going to kill a man and probably ruin his own life in the process?

  “Joe! Stop!”

  At the same time he heard the woman’s voice, he heard something metallic clatter on the ground behind him. He turned and saw Emma. A black man was lying on the ground near her, and a few feet from the man’s hand, there was a small gun on the sidewalk. Emma was holding something in her hand, but DeMarco couldn’t see what it was. What the hell was she doing here?

  An instant later, Emma was standing next to him, tugging on his arm, hissing, “Come with me, you idiot.” Quinn had turned to face him when Emma yelled. Emma tugged again on DeMarco’s arm, then stopped and pointed at Quinn. “Gun!” she yelled. “That man has a gun.” And DeMarco could see Quinn pulling his weapon from his shoulder holster. Emma threw something at Quinn—whatever it was that she’d been holding in her hand—and it bounced off Quinn’s chest, making him stagger backward. “Gun!” Emma yelled again, and a woman started running, another began screaming, and a man yelled something DeMarco didn’t understand.

  Emma tugged hard on his arm again, but DeMarco didn’t move, and for just an instant DeMarco and Quinn looked directly into each other’s eyes—Quinn’s gun was now in his hand but he wasn’t pointing it at DeMarc
o—and then DeMarco broke eye contact, cursed, and turned in Emma’s direction and they both started running. As they ran, they stepped over the man lying on the sidewalk and DeMarco realized he was one of Quinn’s security people, one of the guys who had taken him to see Quinn in Battery Park.

  He and Emma were running hard now, weaving their way through pedestrians on the sidewalk and the whole time DeMarco was expecting Quinn to shoot him in the back. He glanced back once and saw Quinn holding his left hand up in the air—his right hand, the one holding the gun, was down at his side. DeMarco realized later that Quinn was probably holding up his badge to calm the people on the street.

  They reached the corner at the end of the block when Emma suddenly darted out into the street and raised her hand to stop a passing cab. The driver had to slam on his brakes to keep from hitting her. She yanked open the back door of the cab and turned to DeMarco and said, “Get in!”

  DeMarco got into the cab and Emma slid in after him. To the cabbie, she said, “Move it!”

  The cabbie started driving. He was a tiny Asian man barely tall enough to see over the steering wheel. He looked frightened. “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “Just drive,” Emma said.

  DeMarco looked behind him and could see Quinn’s bodyguard, the man Emma had hit, standing in the middle of the street, looking at the cab. He was holding a gun in his hand, but he wasn’t aiming at the cab. He was probably trying to get the license plate number. DeMarco also wondered why Quinn hadn’t shot him and figured the reason was because DeMarco hadn’t shown a weapon and Quinn was afraid to shoot an unarmed man with witnesses nearby. He’d already made that mistake once before with Connors.

  Emma and DeMarco were both breathing heavily—more from the surge of adrenaline than from the distance they’d run. A few blocks later, Emma told the cabbie to pull over. Emma quickly paid the fare, they got out of the cab, and Emma immediately flagged down another cab. “Take us to Brooklyn,” she told the driver.

  A few minutes after they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, Emma told the cabbie to pull over. She and DeMarco exited the cab, and as soon as the cab pulled away and they were alone, DeMarco said, “Goddamnit! What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Give me the gun,” Emma said.

  “What gun?” DeMarco said.

  “The gun in your jacket. Give it to me. Now.”

  “No.”

  “Joe, I just hit a man on the head and assaulted the commissioner of the New York Police Department. I can be arrested for what I did. I could also be considered an accomplice to the stupid thing you were about to do. And if you get caught with that gun, that’s going to make things worse for both of us.”

  “I didn’t ask you to help me.”

  “Give me the damn gun.”

  DeMarco looked around to make sure no one was watching, and pulled out the gun.

  “Christ! A silencer!” Emma said. She jacked the shell out of the chamber, ejected the magazine from the gun, and unscrewed the silencer. She walked a few paces over to a gutter drain, tossed the gun down the drain, then dropped the magazine and silencer into a waste container.

  DeMarco started to say something, but she held up her hand, silencing him, and pulled her cell phone off her belt.

  “Susan,” she said, “it’s Emma. I need a favor.”

  DeMarco had no idea who Susan was, but whoever she was, she had a small beach house near the town of Islip on Long Island. It took him and Emma more than two hours to get there from Brooklyn because they changed cabs two more times on the way.

  DeMarco followed Emma around to the beach side of the house—he could hear the surf but couldn’t see the ocean in the dark—and waited as she groped into a planter box for a key. Once inside, she shrugged off her jacket and walked directly to a cabinet in the small living room—she’d obviously been to the place before—and pulled out a bottle of vodka.

  “Martini?” she said.

  As Emma made the martinis, DeMarco paced the living room. His emotions were in turmoil. He was angry at Emma for stopping him from killing Quinn, and at the same time, if he was honest with himself, he was relieved that he hadn’t actually killed the man—and yet he still wanted to kill him. He also thought that because of what Emma had done, he’d never get another shot at Quinn.

  Emma handed him his drink, flipped a switch near the fireplace, and a gas fire came to life. She took a seat in a rocking chair near the fireplace and took a sip of her drink. “Um, that’s good,” she said. “Sit down,” she ordered DeMarco, and he sat on a small couch across from her, still agitated.

  “How did you find me?” DeMarco said.

  “Neil,” Emma said. “He called me this afternoon and told me about everything you asked him to do. I don’t know why he didn’t call earlier. Anyway, he said he was worried about you, so I caught a shuttle up here and had Neil track you down using the phone he sent you.

  “When I saw you standing outside that apartment building, I didn’t approach you right away because I wanted to see if you were being watched. I was also trying to figure out what you were doing in that part of town, because I was pretty sure that Quinn didn’t live in the East Village. And that’s when I spotted the man I hit. I saw him watching you and then I saw him take a gun out of an ankle holster and start walking toward you, and I crossed the street and fell in behind him. He was so focused on you, he didn’t notice me. I hit him when he raised his hand to shoot you.” She paused then said, “Joe, if I hadn’t been there he would have killed you.”

  “What did you hit him with?”

  Emma laughed. “A sugar container; you know, one of those heavy ones made out of glass. I picked it up off an outdoor table at that coffee shop just up the street from where you were standing. And that’s what I threw at Quinn when he reached for his gun. Did you recognize the man I hit?”

  “Yeah. He’s one of Quinn’s goons. One of his security guys.”

  “Well, he wasn’t planning to arrest you. He didn’t bother to identify himself as a cop before he raised his gun. Somehow Quinn knew you were waiting for him outside the building and he told that man to kill you. And because you were dumb enough to be carrying a weapon—one with a silencer, no less—it would have been a free killing. Quinn would have claimed you were trying to assassinate him—and he would have been right—and you would have been dead. What in God’s name did you think you were doing, Joe?”

  “He killed my father.”

  “So what?”

  “What do you mean, so what?”

  “Just because he killed your father—and keep in mind it was some mafia lowlife who told you he did—that doesn’t give you the right to assassinate the man.”

  “There was no other way to get him. I tried to screw up his confirmation hearing but I couldn’t pull it off.

  “What are you talking about?” Emma said.

  DeMarco told her how he’d gone to Senator Beecham’s chief of staff and how he’d videotaped Tony Benedetto telling all the things that Quinn had done—and then how Tony had betrayed him.

  “Beecham was going to have Tony testify at Quinn’s nomination hearing. He was going to get him to talk about Quinn killing my father and Jerry Kennedy and covering up the shooting of Connors. The video I made of Tony’s testimony was in case Tony croaked before the hearing. But then Tony sold me out to Quinn to keep his son from going to jail, and Quinn disappeared the teacher. The only thing I could think to do was kill Quinn.”

  “Yeah, except if I hadn’t been there,” Emma said, “Quinn’s guy would have killed you. And if you had killed Quinn, you would have almost certainly been caught and spent the rest of your life in prison. Now I have a problem because I assaulted a cop and the police commissioner.”

  “Hey, the guy you hit pulled a gun and you didn’t know he was a cop.”

  “I’ll be sure to mention that to my lawyer. Fortunately, you never showed the gun you were carrying and there were a lot of people around who saw the cop’s gun. I don’t know
if any of those witnesses will come forward, but there were witnesses.”

  Before DeMarco could say anything, she said, “I’m going to have another drink. Do you want one?”

  “Yeah,” DeMarco said. “I might as well get hammered since I can’t think of anything else to do.”

  Emma went into the kitchen, made two more martinis, and when she returned to the rocking chair near the fireplace, she said, “Quinn could have us arrested, but I don’t think he’ll do that. I don’t think he wants us—particularly you—blabbing to the press right before his confirmation hearing. On the other hand, I don’t think Brian Quinn is going to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder for you or waiting for you to come up with something that could screw up his life.”

  “So what do you think he’ll do?” DeMarco said.

  “I don’t know. But if Benedetto’s telling the truth, Quinn killed two people in cold blood to save his career when he was a young man. And now he’s a different person than he was back then—meaning he has a lot more power—so maybe he’ll decide he doesn’t have to kill you. Maybe he’ll frame you for a crime and get you tossed in jail. Or maybe, considering some of things you’ve done for John Mahoney, he won’t have to frame you. When Quinn is in charge of the Bureau, he just might give his agents a new prime directive: Get DeMarco. At that point, you can say all you want about him killing your dad but since you have no evidence, you’ll sound like a maniac. Quinn on the other hand will have evidence. So I don’t know, Joe. Maybe Quinn will try to kill you or maybe he’ll try to put you in a cage—but he’s going to do something.”

  DeMarco just shook his head. He wasn’t denying what Emma was saying—she’d just said almost the exactly the same thing Quinn had said to him in Battery Park, about what he might do if DeMarco continued to “annoy” him. He shook his head because he couldn’t believe that his life had come to this.