lawyers. The last article he’d read about the boy in Santa Fe said that he was working in a movie theater, serving popcorn, while he tried to save up enough money to attend another college. Would that boy have the same fire in his belly as this boy in Cleveland? He wouldn’t know until he saw him, until he looked into his eyes.
39
The Cuban didn’t know where the subject was going.
She’d arrived at Reagan National two hours earlier, where she’d been met by a man named Jorge driving a Honda SUV with tinted windows. She didn’t know Jorge. She’d asked a man she knew — someone she trusted about as much as she trusted anyone — to supply a driver who knew the city and would follow orders.
Except for the fact that he talked too much, Jorge was acceptable. He was ugly and he was big, six-three or six-four. He had a shaved head and a stupid-looking little strip of beard beneath his lower lip. He was wearing a black hooded sweatshirt — the sleeves pushed up to show off the tattoos on his forearms — baggy jeans, worn so low you could see the upper half of his plaid boxer shorts, and big unlaced Timberland boots that were a hideous yellow color. Around his neck were four gold-plated chains and on his left wrist was a fake Rolex.
He had a brain the size of a cashew.
The good news was that he did what he was told without arguing and she liked his size. One disadvantage of being a five-foot-six-inch woman who weighed one hundred and thirty pounds was that she wasn’t physically intimidating. Usually that was good but sometimes, particularly if you needed to control several people, it helped to have someone like Jorge around.
After he’d picked her up at the airport she told Jorge she wanted to see the subject’s house, and just as they arrived at the address in Georgetown, a car pulled out of the garage. She looked at the driver and compared his face to the picture in her hand, one taken from a DMV file. It was him: DeMarco. She told Jorge to follow the car. The man stopped at a restaurant on Capitol Hill, had breakfast and read the paper, then forty minutes later got onto I-95, heading north. When he passed through Baltimore, the Cuban began to wonder just how far he planned to travel. Not too far, she hoped.
Then she had an idea, one that was easy to execute. Lincoln had said that he wanted this man either killed or severely injured in some manner where it would not be obvious that he had been singled out as the target. There were a lot of big trucks on the road, eighteen-wheelers, and today the highway was relatively clear so the trucks were traveling fast. She and Jorge were two cars behind DeMarco, and DeMarco was in the outside lane behind a big rig, a moving van. She told Jorge what she wanted him to do. She wanted him to pass the van and then cut right in front of it, so the truck driver would have to slam on his brakes. She was hoping the tractor-trailer would jackknife and that DeMarco would be caught up in the accident. It wasn’t a sure thing, but it was easy to do, and if she was lucky she’d be back in Miami tonight.
Jorge, it turned out, was a better driver than she would have guessed and he executed the move perfectly. He cut in front of the truck so closely that she was afraid that
* * *
DeMarco was flipping through a stack of CDs he had balanced on his thigh. He was trying to find one by Norah Jones that he knew was in the stack. He loved Norah Jones. He wished she’d marry him. Not only was she beautiful, but since she’d won about a hundred Grammys, she’d be able to support him in the style to which he’d like to become accustomed.
And then he saw the brake lights flash on the big rig in front of him.
‘Jesus Christ!’ he screamed and slammed down on the brake pedal, CDs flying all over the car. He was sure he going to rear-end the trailer — the bumper of which would go right through his windshield and turn his face to bloody pulp — when the trailer began to swing over into the left lane of the freeway, hitting a car that was just passing the truck. DeMarco didn’t see what happened to the other car because his car was now fishtailing, and he was struggling to control it, afraid he was going to roll over, but somehow, no thanks to any skill on his part, all four tires stayed on the ground. As he was fighting to bring his car to a stop, it barely registered in his mind that the eighteen-wheeler was now moving down the road on its side.
DeMarco’s car finally stopped skidding and came to a complete stop. His car was now perpendicular to the highway, the front tires on the paved part of the road, the rear tires on the gravel at the side of the road. Once his car had stopped, he immediately spun his head to the left, his eyes big as saucers, terrified that somebody was now going to plow into the side of his car. Luckily, the car that had been behind DeMarco when the accident started had been a safe distance back — not tailgating the way DeMarco had been.
DeMarco sat there for a minute with his eyes closed, his head on the steering wheel, breathing heavily. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t hit the truck or rolled his car or been smashed into from behind. Traffic was already starting to back up on the freeway, and four or five people had left their cars and were now running toward the wrecked vehicles to see if the occupants needed help. DeMarco’s hands shook as he undid his seat belt, then he slowly opened his door and walked unsteadily over to the truck that had overturned. He looked in through the front windshield of the cab and could see the driver was still in his seat, lying on his side. The driver was okay, not obviously injured, but madder than hell because he couldn’t get free of his seat belt or upright himself. Another man was talking to the driver, saying that he’d already called 911. DeMarco found out shortly that the man in the car that had been sideswiped by the trailer hadn’t been so lucky. He was dead.
Four hours after the accident, DeMarco pulled into a visitor’s parking space near the front entrance of Dobbler Security Systems, Inc. He had called Dobbler’s office earlier to say he’d been held up by an accident, and Dobbler’s secretary had become completely flustered, as if nobody, for
He was finally ushered into Dobbler’s office an hour later. Three of the four walls in the room were devoted to certificates and plaques and photos obviously intended to impress Dobbler’s visitors with his deep charitable commitment to the City of Brotherly Love. There were testimonies from every fraternal do-gooder organization in Philadelphia; pictures of him posing with Little League teams he sponsored; a newspaper shot of him dishing out Thanksgiving turkey to a line of men who all looked like winos.
Dobbler in the flesh, however, didn’t strike DeMarco as a man with a large strain of human kindness running through him. He was a big florid-faced guy in his fifties, and DeMarco knew the minute he met him that his complexion would go instantaneously from red to purple whenever anything upset him. He had short-cut dark hair, a meat-eater’s jaw, and somewhat protruding dark eyes, as if his elevated blood pressure was slowly forcing his eyeballs out of his head. He was six-three, over two hundred and fifty pounds — the type who would crowd you in an argument and try to intimidate you with his bulk. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt and a cheap-looking blue tie with red stripes. DeMarco would have bet fifty bucks that Dobbler was wearing white socks and his shoes were plain black lace-ups, but he never got a chance to find out because the man never came out from behind his desk.
To get the appointment with Dobbler, DeMarco had almost told the truth. He said he worked for Congress and was doing a little legwork for a congressional committee that was interested in — and approved of — the type of work that Dobbler’s company did. The nonexistent committee had tasked DeMarco to interview Dobbler, obtain a
