Dead on Arrival

Chamberlain shrugged. ‘They offered the most money. And all I do is train the people they hire.’

There was nothing to be gained by pointing out that the people he trained provided protection for dictators who butchered their own people. So instead, Emma said, ‘Did you find out why Edith Baxter hired Prescott?’

‘Yeah. You remember the deck-of-cards thing in Iraq? Saddam and the other fifty-one bad guys we were trying to capture over there? Well, Edith had her own deck made up, fifty-two radical Muslims. She’s offering a hundred thousand a head for the capture of these guys.’

‘Their capture or their deaths?’ Emma said.

‘The contract says capture, but well … you know. The thing is, Prescott’s just screwing her. Governments — ours, the Europeans, even the Saudis — have been after some of these guys for years. Prescott’s chance of catching them is practically nil, but he’s billing Baxter for the hours he’s spending looking for them.’

‘Is Prescott helping Edith do anything here in the States?’

‘In the States?’ Chamberlain said.

‘Yes, anything to do with Muslims here in the U.S.?’

‘Not that I know of. I can try to find out if you’d like.’

‘Well, if you could, I’d appreciate-’

Emma’s cell phone rang at that moment. The caller ID screen said it was Howard University Hospital calling.

44

The wound in DeMarco’s side was less serious than the one in his leg, but it hurt like hell. He supposed the reason the one in his leg didn’t hurt so much was because the doctor had given him a local anesthetic when they’d patched him up. He bet, after the drugs wore off, the hole in his leg was going to hurt too. But the doctor hadn’t seemed very worried; he told DeMarco to stick around for a couple of hours so they could watch him a bit and then he could go home. DeMarco thought they should have kept him longer, but the way hospitals operated these days it seemed you could get shot twice and be home in time for dinner. They probably wouldn’t have kept him overnight for anything less than a heart transplant.

Including DeMarco, four people were injured and three were killed at the DEA building. The couple he’d walked out the door with were among the dead. DeMarco found out that the woman had been a DEA agent, but her husband worked for the Department of Agriculture and had just stopped by to take his wife to lunch. A security guard had also been killed. The FedEx carrier that DeMarco had dodged to get to the door had been shot in the side. He was alive but was expected to lose a kidney.

The other thing DeMarco thought about as he lay there in bed was the way he’d acted when the shooting started. All he’d wanted to do was get away from all the screams and breaking glass and flying bullets. He didn’t think about anything other than saving himself, and he was embarrassed by that. He wondered how soldiers did it. He assumed that when soldiers were in a firefight, bullets zipping past their heads, they somehow managed to return fire. But DeMarco knew, even if he’d had a gun, the last thing he would have thought about was shooting back. He’d just wanted to get out of that doorway; that had been his only thought. If he’d been able to, he would have dug a hole right in the floor and climbed into it.

And when they pulled the bodies off him, his only thought had been, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive. He could still hear the bullets hitting the body of the DEA woman who’d been lying on top of him.

Emma came into his hospital room. She didn’t have the worried, terrified expression on her face of a woman rushing to the bedside of a dying man, or at least one who’d just missed death by inches.

‘Thank God you were just nicked,’ she said.

‘Nicked?’ DeMarco said. ‘I’d call the hole in my leg more than a nick.’

‘I’ve already talked to the doctor,’ she said. ‘The one shot barely grazed your side, didn’t even hit a rib. And the one in your leg was a through-and-through and just hit meat, nothing vital. Anyway, he said you can leave in an hour or so. They just want to make sure they didn’t miss anything.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ DeMarco said. ‘I can’t believe they’re kicking me out of here so fast. I mean, I haven’t even tried to walk yet.’

‘So get up,’ Emma said, ‘and see if you-’

‘How is he?’ Mahoney said, blowing into the room, topcoat flying behind him. He spoke to Emma, ignoring DeMarco as if he was comatose.

‘He was just scratched,’ Emma said.

‘Well,’ DeMarco said, ‘I don’t know if I’d exactly call the hole in my leg a-’

‘He’s fine,’ Emma said. ‘One shot grazed his side and the other just went through the meaty part of his leg, no big deal.’

‘You know,’ DeMarco said, ‘that one shot, if it had been a little higher, it could have-’

‘Shit, is that all?’ Mahoney said to Emma. ‘Hell, when you called and told me three people had been killed, I figured he’d been all shot up. I mean, you wanna see a wound …’ and he started to tug up his pant leg.

‘Nah, that’s okay,’ DeMarco said. He didn’t feel like watching Mahoney and Emma, both combat veterans, re-create that scene in Jaws where Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss compare their scars.

‘So what the hell happened?’ Mahoney said. ‘The radio said it was some kind of drug drive-by thing, a couple of idiots who decided to shoot up the building.’

‘Maybe,’ Emma said. ‘One of the people killed was a female DEA agent with an impressive arrest record. I talked to someone I know, and he thinks they may have been after her specifically. But he said the shooters could have been retaliating against the DEA in general for some friend getting busted or killed.’

‘So you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ Mahoney said to DeMarco. ‘What the hell were you doing in the DEA building anyway?’

Before DeMarco could answer Mahoney, Emma said, ‘I’m not so sure I’d conclude that. The DEA agent or the building may have been the target, but it’s also possible they were trying to get Joe.’

‘Why do you think that?’ Mahoney said.

‘A witness got the license plate on the car as it was pulling away and the cops found the car less than two blocks from the scene, near a metro entrance. The driver had a bullet in the back of his head, and that’s what bothers me. If a couple of gangbangers had decided to shoot up the DEA building, why would one kill the other? It’s more like the driver was executed so he wouldn’t talk. That’s something a pro would do.’

‘So maybe some drug lord hired a pro to kill the DEA agent,’ Mahoney said.

‘Maybe,’ Emma said again, ‘but I don’t like the timing of this either. I mean, here we are, looking into these terrorist attacks, and Joe is coincidentally a victim in this supposed drive-by.’

‘Huh,’ Mahoney said. ‘What have you guys found out that’s worth killing you for?’

‘I don’t know,’ DeMarco said, and he quickly filled Mahoney in on everything they’d learned, the biggest news being that Edith Baxter and Ken Dobbler were giving lots of money to Broderick.

Mahoney rolled all this around in his brain and said, ‘Well, hell. You don’t have shit.’

Mahoney, always the complimentary employer.

‘But if they tried to kill Joe,’ Emma said, ‘maybe we’re close to something and don’t know it.’

‘But what?’ Mahoney said.

Emma just shook her head.

Mahoney shrugged back into his topcoat. ‘I gotta get back to work,’ he said. ‘And you,’ he said to DeMarco, ‘since you only got winged, you need to get back to work too.’

Jesus, what did he have to do, get a leg blown off to impress these two? But then he thought, I’m alive.