by Dave Buschi
That made it even more complicated. Fucking around with the Bureau was never fun. They always took it personal. Body counts had that affect, particularly when civilians were involved.
Marks could only hope this wasn’t worse case. With all those UMP bursts, though, this thing could be bad. Like a delayed reaction, he felt his adrenaline coming down. Absorbing what they’d just left, what had just happened.
It almost felt like it hadn’t been real. But it had been. In the mix, Marks knew what the swirling blackness was inside him. He was pissed. Major League pissed. He didn’t like being shot at. Didn’t like being put in no-win situations. Way this was looking, it was going to be losers all around.
“It’s a lease,” Lip said.
Marks snorted. “You’re not thinking we come forward now?”
“Shit no,” Lip said. “We’re good.” He patted his jacket’s breast pocket where he’d put his Blackberry. “I got everything we need. Don’t worry, we were never here.”
“Except for our car?” Marks said.
“Which isn’t in my name,” said Lip.
Nice. Partner could manage to surprise him every now and then.
Light changed green. Good sign. Lip drove forward and took a series of turns. Left. Right. Then left.
“Do we have a destination?” Marks said.
“My house.”
“With the junk in the trunk?”
Lip gave him an amused look. “You know that phrase has a more colorful meaning?”
Marks ignored him. He looked back at Marion. She hadn’t said a word. There was a pinched look on her face. Her forehead showed stress lines. She was absorbing a lot right now.
“You okay?”
She didn’t seem to hear him. Marks didn’t press it. He wasn’t the best at these types of things. Coming up with the right words… the right thing to say.
Never was. Light and breezy? No problem. Marks had that down. He could be flip. But when serious stuff went down, or was about to come down, Marks fell flat. Best attempts always came out wrong.
Tiff couldn’t deal with it. She hated it.
Tiff. Tiffany. Ex-wife.
Marks looked straight ahead. He heard a sob in the back.
Waterworks.
Marks looked out the window. “Your house, huh?”
“Yep.”
“That’s going to be interesting.”
10
LIP pulled up to his house. His being relative. Lip lived with his mom. Or technically he lived in the carriage house behind his mom’s house.
The driveway needed paving. It was cracked and potholed. The neighborhood was an older one. Nice modest homes, well-kept yards.
Lip’s yard—or his mother’s yard—was by far the worst in the neighborhood. The grass, mostly just crabgrass and weeds, hadn’t been mowed for weeks. The paint on the main house was peeling. A gutter had detached on the side and was half hanging down. Boxwoods, the size of small trees, looked to have last been trimmed sometime in the late Nineties.
Carriage house was even more of a dump. Lip looked to have started yet another DIY project and quit halfway. The left side of the carriage house had its aluminum cladding stripped off, and was now just exposed insulation with clear plastic on top. Off to the side there was a pile of plywood. It was starting to warp, presumably from the rain and sun. Had probably been out for weeks. That’d be about the last time Marks had been out here.
Marks didn’t give Lip his usual grief. He didn’t have it in him. It had been a thirty minute drive being drained by Kryptonite.
Marion had finally stopped crying. She wasn’t a wailer, more the soft variety where you only heard a faint sob every minute or so, but crying was crying. Marks couldn’t take any form of it. He’d opt for three more rounds with the guys they just left, than having to sit in a car for any amount of time as a woman teared up.
It always made him feel powerless. More than once, Marks had thought the greatest weapons weren’t the ballistic kind. A woman crying—didn’t matter if it was from pain, grief, or from love lost—was twenty times more deadly. He’d comforted his fair share of mothers who’d lost their sons. His share of wives. Always sucked. What do you say? What can you say?
Nothing will bring them back.
This crying was no different. Except, for some reason it brought back Tiff. He couldn’t help it. Had to be the crying that brought her up. She’d come back into his head during the entire drive. Thirty minutes to chew on that failure in his life. At one point he’d almost yelled at Marion to shut the fuck up.
Shit. He was in a sour mood.
Buck up. Stop being a candy ass. The thoughts were for himself, not Marion. She deserved his sympathy, not his anger. Woman was smart. Probably knew that her husband wasn’t coming back.
In regards to Tiff, he only had himself to blame. He’d had the perfect woman once. The perfect life. Only she and he didn’t quite see eye to eye on that—the perfect life part. Him being a United States Marine. FORECON. Force Recon.
The Marines were already an elite. FORECON just took it to another level. They were the best of the best. An elite within an elite. What the SEALs were to the Navy, FORECON was to the Marines.
Leathernecks. Not a better damn fighting force known to mankind.
Tiff had known what she was getting into when she married him. Least that’s what he told himself in his own internal running monologue. Second guessing, wondering about what ifs.
What if he’d left FORECON when they were still together, would she have stayed? What if they’d had kids? He’d wanted to, but she’d wanted to wait. Did she ever even love him? But of course she had.
He’d felt it, known it. There was a name for it. Soul mates. She’d even uttered those exact words, more than once. First time was out on the beach, before his first deployment. He could still see her face as clearly as he’d seen it then: oval and sun kissed, which brought out her faint freckles. She hated those freckles, but he loved them. Loved to count ‘em. Drove her friggin’ crazy in a playful way.
Her eyes, though, they were in a league all by themselves. Bluer than blue. The color of the clearest ocean waters he’d ever seen.
She was his angel. He’d kept her beatific picture in his mind during the worst of times. She’d gotten him through things he never could have done himself. She made him into Superman. He could conquer the world just knowing she loved him.
The men in his unit had a field day with him. “She’s with Jody right now. He’s giving her a ride in his new Mustang.” “Hell, she’s riding him, in his new Mustang.” Yeah, yeah, whatever, you guys can go fuck yourselves.
Laughter. Wasn’t friggin’ funny when it all went south. When she did leave him. When she told him, tears in her eyes, face all swollen from crying, that she couldn’t take it anymore. It was either her or FORECON. Her or the Corps.
He didn’t think she was serious. She’d said those lines before, but they always made up, always got past that. But not the time when she visited him in the hospital. Seeing her face, wracked into a miserable caricature of herself—overwhelmed with grief and pain and hope. She’d stayed with him every day while he convalesced on that gurney of a bed. Wasn’t till six months later when he turned the corner that she’d given him the ultimatum again. Her or FORECON?
He couldn’t leave his brothers. She had to understand. She was a military wife. They’d gotten through three tours. They were old hats at this. This was his career.
Nothing changes about us.
But everything did. That time she was serious.
Felt like yesterday. But it had been seventeen years ago. You’d think he’d have gotten over her by now.
Marks banged the side of the door with his fist.
Lip looked over. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
Lip frowned. He looked worried. He knew Marks’s dark sides. “This about back there? The shooting?”
“I’m fine.”
Lip forced a smile. “So what d
o you think of my improvements?”
“What?”
“The house? Look what I’ve done.”
Marks looked at the carriage house. Same dump. Same look. Except…
“You added window boxes.”
“Yep. Need to paint ‘em and buy some flowers. But what do you think?”
“I think you need to back up.”
“Why?”
“You forget what we have in the trunk?”
Lip frowned. “Right.”
Lip put it in reverse and pulled back into the street. He did a three-point maneuver and backed up into the curving driveway. He pulled right up against the one-car garage that was attached to the carriage house.
“Shit, I don’t have my clicker,” Lip said. He opened the door and began to get out.
“Uh oh,” Lip said.
Marks saw what it was. Mrs. Lipkin was walking over from the main house.
11
MRS. Lipkin.
Lip’s mom. She was seventy-two. Looked every day of it. Her face was wrinkled like a dried old prune. Dark olive skin, dark eyes, very bushy black eyebrows, orange hair in a bouffant style. It was a wig, but as far as wigs went it was actually a pretty good one, if you looked past the color. She was under five feet in height and walked with a limp and bent over posture. She carried a cane, but didn’t use it for walking. It was more like a security blanket and also, of course, a very unveiled threat.
Marks had learned early on not to underestimate the little old lady. She may have looked wizened and old, but her mental acuity was as sharp as a whip. She didn’t miss much, but luckily for her son, she loved him. Otherwise the bum would have been on his ass in the street a long time ago.
“Thomas?” Stern voice, not an ounce of weakness in her. She had good lungs.
“Yes, Ma?”
Lip. Forty-five years old. Instantly brought down to being a five-year-old kid that ate unsweetened applesauce.
She appraised him with her eyes, a tilt of the head. “Are you having company today?”
“Yes, Ma. Is that okay?”
“Certainly. I would just appreciate some type of call to tell me. I don’t have anything prepared, haven’t been to the store.”
Seventy-two. Believe it or not, she was still driving, picking up and bringing home all the groceries by herself. Yes, Lip was a bum. On top of that, his mom still cooked for him.
She looked at their vehicle. “Did you get a new car?”
“Yes, Ma. Do you like it?”
“It’s a little… severe.”
“I’ll take it back,” said Lip.
“No no. I didn’t mean that. It’s very nice, but I liked your old car better.”
“Yeah, Ma, I need to talk to you about that. You may be getting some phone calls.”
She frowned. “Phone calls?”
“The car was stolen.”
“Thomas.” She looked at him with a very stern expression. “Was it really stolen?”
“No, Ma. But can you do me that favor?”
“Of course. When should I say it was stolen?”
“Yesterday. You were just going to report it.”
“Was it parked in my driveway?”
“Yes, Ma.”
“Okay. Now are you going to introduce me?”
Lip nodded, like a scolded child. “Sorry, Ma—this is Marion. She’s the wife of a good friend of mine.”
Mrs. Lipkin looked at Marks. Her eyes actually seemed to light up. She broke into a big smile. “Did you remarry?”
“Hi, Mrs. Lipkin. No, Marion and I are not married. This is Johnny—John Claiborne’s wife. We worked with him.”
She nodded. “I see.” She gave Marion a warm smile. “Marion it is wonderful to meet you. You are coming in for tea. But just give me a few minutes. Okay?”
Marion had a bemused look on her face.
Lip fidgeted. “Ma, we have a few things to do. We don’t have time for tea.”
“Nonsense. Ten minutes. And then all of you are having tea with me. I wouldn’t hear of it. Thomas has nothing in his refrigerator except beer.”
“Ma! You haven’t been in my place again, have you? You know how I feel about that.”
“Mother has a right to make sure her son is doing okay. I didn’t see you this morning. You’ve just gotten back. Barely said hello, yesterday. Still haven’t heard about your trip.”
“Ma, it was business. You know I can’t talk about that.”
“Well, I missed you. Ten minutes.”
Mrs. Lipkin turned on her heel. She was actually pretty spry. She proceeded to walk back towards the main house.
Marks sighed. “We can’t have tea, Lip. You need to go talk to your mother.”
Lip shook his head. “C’mon. We’ll make it quick. You know she doesn’t like no.”
Every time. Marks didn’t bother arguing. “Well, let’s get things set up. Open the garage. I want this car out of sight.”
Lip seemed relieved. “Got it.” He hustled to his door and fumbled with his keys.
Marion looked at Marks. “That was his mother?”
Marks nodded.
Marion’s face had cleared up well. It was swollen, but not too much so. She wasn’t wearing makeup, Marks realized. There were no streaks on her face. No mascara to fix or other guck to reapply. So much simpler that way.
“She seems nice,” Marion said.
“Yeah. I figure Lip must be adopted.”
12
LIP rolled the garage door up. Looking at the boxes, tools and other junk Lip had stored in the parking bay, Marks realized they were kidding themselves. There was no way the car was fitting in the space.
“I’ve been meaning to reorganize,” Lip said.
Marks shook his head. He should have taken the lead.
“The car was stolen? You’ve reached a new low, Lip.”
Lip looked annoyed on being busted that the car was in his mother’s name. “Well what do you want to do? Should we just present ourselves now? Here you guys go, we brought presents.”
“That’s a start.” But Marks wasn’t serious. He had no intention of going to the police. That simply was not an option. Not yet. They needed answers, and they needed to squirrel Marion away to safety. They wouldn’t be able to do that once they came forward. Eyes would be on them. Their movements would be limited. Hell, they’d spend the majority of the time just convincing folks they weren’t the bad guys. Probably have to pull some major favors just to get that accomplished.
The car thing, Marks should have known. Lip’s credit sucked. Back when they left the outfit, Lip had decided for some cockamamie reason he wanted to be the next Donald Trump. He’d bought ten rundown properties in less than a year, all gung-ho on fixing and flipping them. That was back when Flip This House and other real-estate shows were popular on TV.
He knew that because he’d watched those shows a few times with Lip. Lip was addicted to those shows. That was back in 2007. There was a whole string of them back then. One of them—the cherry in the bunch—would show what the house cost when it was bought, the amount doled out for the renovations, and then the sale cost. Tallied up was the profit total. A big shiny number. Smiling faces all around. Aren’t we smart, isn’t everyone else stupid. Lipstick on a pig. Made it look easy.
“I need to be doing that,” Lip had said.
Well, he did. Five years later, Lip still owned all ten of those properties. Him and half the nation had seen those dumb-ass TV shows.
If you asked him, those hacks that ran those shows were 90% responsible for the damn recession. Housing bubble my ass. It was fuckin’ Hollywood’s fault—making everyone think they could be Norm from This Old House.
Lip was now a reluctant landlord—slumlord was probably more fitting—that somehow had managed to keep one step ahead of bankruptcy court. Because of that royal fuckup, everything to do with their joint business was now sheltered with shell companies and other sophisticated tax havens and quasi-legal front companies, all in
an attempt to prevent anything and everything from being seized when Lip’s personal finances officially went the route of the Titanic.
It wasn’t a question of if. It was just a question of when. The fact that Lip had managed to keep afloat this long, was actually pretty impressive. Not impressive, of course, was Lip’s fallback tendency to get his mother involved. It wasn’t the first time he’d used her as an alibi. Mrs. Lipkin had various talents. One being she could play the best damn senile old woman he’d ever seen. He already pitied Montgomery County PD trying to get anything out of her. “I’m sorry, sonny, I can’t hear you. Can you speak up?” And her dingbat routine was Oscar level. “Now where did I leave my keys? Officer, my car can’t have been stolen… I can’t find my keys. How would they steal it without my keys?”
Marks surveyed the garage. They had a clear space of about ten feet deep and fourteen feet wide. It wasn’t great, but it was going to have to do. “We need duct tape, a solid chair, and your Taser.”
“On it,” Lip said.
Two minutes later, Lip brought out the asked for items, as well as an old wooden chair. The chair was sturdy looking, but Marks realized it wasn’t going to be enough.
“Shit, we’ll just hogtie him. That thing wouldn’t last ten seconds.”
Off to the side, Marion looked horrified.
Marks gave her a calm serious look. “I know, it sounds terrible. But this guy was their driver. He’s a killer just like them. You should probably go inside. We’ll just be a minute.”
Marion nodded and didn’t ask any questions. She was either amazingly quick on the uptake or she was in shock. She went into Lip’s humble abode and shut the door.
Back to business.
No noises were coming from the trunk. Guy was being unusually quiet. Marks looked past the car and down the driveway. Lip’s pathetic gardening skills actually were advantageous. The overgrown bushes that lined the property, and the way the driveway took a slight turn before it reached the carriage house’s connected garage, meant that neighbors couldn’t see a thing.