Mike Lawson - Dead on Arrival

His beginnings were predictably Lincoln-like: born in a rustic backwater, surviving on table scraps, never wearing a thing that wasn’t a hand-me-down. He had a passel of underachieving siblings, a saint for a mother, and a worthless bum for a father. The military saved him, he said. He enlisted right after high school, his brilliance was soon recognized, and he was sent off to college on Uncle’s dime and turned into an officer and a gentleman. He had spent some time in military intelligence, he said, coyly refusing to tell DeMarco exactly what he did.

After twenty years in the army, he retired and launched his own company. The company started off by providing rent-a-cops for businesses in Philly, and he soon squeezed out the local competition and expanded into other cities. Next he ventured into building security systems and opened branch offices up and down the eastern seaboard. He began doing employee background checks for private companies and state and federal agencies five years ago.

‘I have a bunch of retired guys working for me,’ he said to DeMarco. ‘FBI, people from OPM, ex-military, ex-cops. There’s nobody that can do background checks on people better or faster than my guys. I’ve got the right computer systems, the right contacts, and the know-how.’

‘I’ve heard,’ DeMarco said, ‘that you’re a strong supporter of Senator Broderick’s proposed legislation, the so-called Muslim Registry Act.’

‘You’re damn right I am,’ Dobbler said, his eyeballs swelling. ‘Broderick’s the only guy in Washington who doesn’t have his head up his ass about those people.’

‘I’ve also heard that maybe one of the reasons you’re supporting Broderick is if his bill passes, your company might get the contract doing the background checks on the Muslims.’

DeMarco got to see that he was right about Dobbler’s face changing color. A flush started at the base of the man’s neck and spread up his face toward his hairline like an out-of-control brush fire. ‘Are you implying that I’m doing something improper ?’ he said.

‘Oh, no, sir,’ DeMarco said. He then gave Dobbler his best impression of a D. C. insider’s smirk, added a conspiratorial wink, and said, ‘We all know that’s the way things work in Washington. One hand washes the other. We approve.’

‘Well, I’m not washing any damn thing,’ Dobbler said. ‘I’m just supporting a politician I believe in.’

‘Yes, sir, I understand,’ DeMarco said. To change the subject, he asked, ‘How many employees do you have?’

DeMarco left half an hour later without having come to any useful conclusion regarding Ken Dobbler. The guy was a pompous, self-satisfied, arrogant bully, but that didn’t mean he was coercing innocent Muslims into committing acts of terrorism to help pass Broderick’s bill.

He checked his watch. It was almost 5 p.m.: quitting time. He found the closest bar to Dobbler’s company. He was hoping a few Dobbler employees might stop in for drinks and that he might get some information from people who were less impressed with Dobbler than he was with himself.

The Cuban was patient — like a hunter in a deer blind — but being trapped in a car with Jorge for almost eight hours was beginning to grate on her. Earlier in the day he had tried several times to start up a conversation, the dimwit probably thinking he might be able to charm her into having sex with him. She’d seen tree stumps that were more appealing than Jorge, but even if he’d looked like Antonio Banderas he still wouldn’t have scored. Sex was simply not a priority for her. She finally told him to shut up, he was being paid to drive, not talk. So for the past four hours she’d sat in the car with him as he sulked, her only relief being when she sent him for food and coffee.

She’d been disappointed that DeMarco hadn’t been injured in the accident on the highway, but not really surprised. It had been an opportunity and she’d taken it, but it wasn’t an opportunity she had direct control over. Other opportunities would come along. They always did.

If all she’d been asked to do was kill the man, it would have been simple. She could have killed him from three hundred yards away with a rifle or from three feet away with a silenced pistol, just as she had done with Lincoln’s researcher Jeremy Potter. She’d also been trained by one of the best in the business in the use of explosives, and she could have blown DeMarco into tiny pieces when he started his car or opened his door or answered his phone.

She’d killed politicians surrounded by bodyguards and crime lords so paranoid they rarely left their fortified homes. Killing a man who had no training or protection, and had no inkling that he was a target, would normally be no more difficult than swatting a fly. But to kill him in the way that she’d been contracted to do — without making it obvious that he was the intended victim — well that wasn’t so easy, particularly in this country.

Like right now, he was sitting in a bar. If this had been Israel, she could have tossed a bomb into the bar and killed DeMarco along with a dozen others. The act would have been blamed on Hamas, and everyone would have thought that DeMarco, the poor schmuck, had just picked the wrong time and place to have a drink. But that wouldn’t work here, not in Philadelphia.

So she’d wait until the right opportunity presented itself. It always did.

It didn’t take DeMarco long to strike up a conversation with a Dobbler employee. He recognized the people in the bar who worked for Dobbler because they all had company ID badges on lanyards around their necks. When one man wearing a Dobbler badge started talking to the bartender about the Redskins’ chances of beating the Eagles on Sunday, he surprised DeMarco by saying that the Redskins were going to kick the Eagles’ green-clad butts. This surprised DeMarco for two reasons: the Skins’ chances of beating the Eagles were practically nil the way Washington was currently performing, and most folks in Philly were rabid Eagles fans. In fact, the word rabid didn’t come close to describing their fanaticism. For a man to stand in a Philadelphia bar and admit out loud that he wanted to see the Eagles lose was tantamount to a death wish.

But it gave DeMarco the opening he needed. He told the man that he was from D.C. and ‘Go Skins,’ and a bond was formed. They became two cowboys surrounded by heathens, standing shoulder to shoulder, waiting to be scalped, as they wished for the downfall of Philadelphia’s favorite team. Before too long, DeMarco got around to asking about Dobbler. DeMarco told the guy — his name was Chuck — that he’d had an appointment with Dobbler and that Dobbler had blown him off after he’d driven all the way from the capital. Chuck’s response to this complaint was that he wasn’t surprised because Dobbler was a prick. Yep, Chuck was his guy.

Chuck confirmed what DeMarco already suspected: Dobbler was ruthless, mean-spirited, tight-fisted, and cared more about his company than the people in it. Dobbler, Chuck said, would fire you if you looked cross-eyed at him. Chuck did mention one interesting thing. When Dobbler started up his company, there were four other security firms he was competing against. Three of these outfits went out of business because the buildings they were supposed to be protecting began to experience an unusually high number of successful break-ins. Dobbler went to the people who owned the buildings and said if they wanted to stop having their offices robbed and trashed, maybe they should hire somebody who knew what he was doing, so the companies did. The rumor was that Dobbler had hired the thugs who did the break-ins, but that was never proven.

When DeMarco asked Chuck if Broderick’s bill was going to be good for business, Chuck said, ‘Beat’s the shit out of me. I’m on the security systems side. But,’ he added, ‘I like what Broderick’s saying.’