He picked up the briefcase he’d brought with him into the house, placed it on his knees, but before he could open it Pugh said, ‘Hold on there … what’d you say your name was again?’
‘DeMarco. Danny DeMarco.’
‘Yeah, well,
‘Sure,’ Danny said, spreading his arms wide, palms out, not a thing to hide.
Randy took the briefcase from Danny and took it over to a side table and opened it. ‘Nothin’ but paper,’ he said to Pugh. Pugh nodded, and Randy handed the open briefcase back to Danny.
Danny reached inside the briefcase, took out a manila file folder, and slid it across the coffee table toward Pugh. Pugh didn’t touch it. ‘In that folder,’ Danny said, ‘you’ll find a copy of my NYPD arrest record. There’s also a list of ten people that I did time with up at Altona. I did two years there for fencing stolen goods.’
And that was true.
‘If you don’t wanna call any of those ten guys, pick anyone you want who was up there from ’95 to ’97. Someone will know me — if they’re white, that is. There’s also a copy of a story from
Danny stood up.
‘If it’s okay with you and ol’ Randy here, I’m gonna leave now, Mr Pugh. But before I go I’ll tell you what we’re offering. We’re offering to buy a million to a million and a half bucks’ worth of product from you every quarter, provided you have a big enough opera tion to deliver that amount and keep on delivering. But we can’t afford a shortage.’
Patsy Hall had told him to say
‘Now, my boss knows all about you,’ Danny said. ‘He has two guys in the DEA that he pays to find guys like you. He knows you’re smart and you’re careful and you don’t get busted. On the front cover of that folder is my cell phone number and the name of the place where I’m staying in Winchester. I’m gonna be there all day tomorrow since I know it’ll take you some time to check me and Mr Benedetto out, but if I don’t hear from you by the day after tomorrow, I’m movin’ on down to South Carolina where there’s another guy just like you.’
Danny drove back to his motel in Winchester, the whole time thinking that if Pugh didn’t take the deal he was screwed. He was going to spend the next fifteen years in jail being … well, just screwed. There were times it was a liability to be so good lookin’.
He asked at the front desk if he had any messages and then flirted for a while with the cute chick behind the counter, a foxy little blonde with a good set of lungs. Inside his room, he turned up the heat and took off his suit and flopped down on the bed in his underwear, then used the motel’s phone to call Joe’s cell phone. He didn’t know where his cousin was staying because Joe wouldn’t tell him.
‘It went okay,’ Danny said. ‘I thought the guy’s eyes were gonna pop out of his head when I told him we wanted a million bucks’ worth of shit every three months. So either I’ll hear from him tomorrow or I won’t, but he seemed interested.’
Patsy Hall had told Joe that Pugh normally did business only with people he knew, and when he did hire outsiders he did an extensive background check on them. But Hall also said that if the payoff was big enough, Pugh might do just about anything. So Joe had figured that Pugh might go for a deal that was worth five million a year if the people he was dealing with were known, successful criminals — for example, a guy like Tony Benedetto. All Danny could do at this point was hope that Joe was right.
‘Good,’ Joe said. ‘Stay in your room tonight. If you have to eat, order a pizza. I don’t want you going out. You’ll just get drunk and in trouble.’
‘Hey,’ Danny said, ‘I know what’s at stake here. And I’m a pro.’
‘You’re a professional sleazebag. Stay in your room,’ Joe said, and hung up.
Geez, the guy really hated him.
50
Emma was sitting on the couch in her living room, staring into the fire in her fireplace, feeling lonely and disgruntled. In her lap was Christine’s rat-sized canine. Christine wasn’t there because she was spending the night in Hartford with her mother, and as her mother was allergic to dogs, Emma had become involuntarily responsible for the care and feeding of the creature. Twice she’d put the animal into the toy-stuffed basket that Christine had bought for it, but it insisted on coming into the living room and jumping on her lap as if it were lonely too. It was odd, but there was something strangely comforting about holding the dog, with its warm body and its rapidly beating heart — although she imagined the same sensation could be produced by holding a fur-covered hot water bottle.
Emma was disgruntled because she’d wasted part of the day trying to learn more about the people who had shot DeMarco. Although he didn’t seem to be worried for his own safety — which surprised her — and was satisfied that the shooters had been after the DEA agent who was killed, Emma still had her doubts. But after three hours of talking to people on the phone, in the end she learned nothing more than had been reported in the papers: Jorge Rivera, the driver who’d been executed, had been a small-time hood with links to a Hispanic gang. He certainly wasn’t a contract killer, but he did have drug connections. Regarding the second shooter, the person who had most likely shot Jorge, the police had nothing. Cameras on the outside of the DEA building didn’t get a clear shot of the person and the only fingerprints inside the car belonged to Jorge.
The remainder of the day had been spent with Fat Neil trying to find evidence that Dobbler or Baxter were tied in some way to the terrorist attacks. After five hours with Neil — nobody should have to spend five hours with Neil — they’d discovered nothing new. She did decide by the end of the day to focus on Dobbler and forget Edith for the time being. Edith was donating money to Broderick and every other organization and politician she could find with some sort of anti-Muslim bias, and she was paying Prescott’s company to find radical Muslims around the globe, but everything she did was done openly, and nothing she was doing was illegal. She was obviously out of her mind with grief and guilt and doing everything she could to avenge her son, but Emma’s gut told her that Edith wasn’t involved in the attacks. She could only hope her gut was right. She also wished there was some way she could help Edith. It was terrible to see her in the state she was in.
The phone rang and the dog in her lap jumped as if it had been tasered. She hoped it was Christine calling.
‘Hello.’
‘This is Anisa Aziz. I’d … I’d like to talk to you.’
‘Where,’ Emma said.
‘Uh, near the Rotunda? Is that okay?’ Anisa said.
‘I live in McLean,’ Emma said. ‘It’ll take-’
‘Oh. Well …’
‘No, it’s okay,’ Emma said. ‘I’ll come to you. I’ll be there in four hours. I’ll meet you about ten-thirty.’
She hoped the damn dog didn’t tear up the house while she was gone.
‘There were two men,’ Anisa Aziz said.
Emma was sitting with the girl on a bench looking out at a large terraced grass common in the middle of the University of Virginia’s campus. At the northern end of the common, where they were sitting, was the Rotunda, a building designed by Thomas Jefferson that looks like the Pantheon in Rome.
‘I don’t know how they unlocked the door,’ Anisa said, ‘but they broke into my room after midnight and put me in the trunk of a car. We drove quite a while, maybe an hour, maybe more; then they took me into a warehouse. In the middle of the warehouse was an office with glass walls. One of the men pointed a gun at me and then
