Mike Lawson - Dead on Arrival

There was always a downside when killing people.

She was mulling all this over as Jorge followed DeMarco’s car. Where was he going now? She hoped he stopped at a convenience store, a 7-Eleven, someplace like that. She wanted to get back home. She hated being away from the restaurant for very long; she just knew her employees were stealing her blind when she wasn’t there.

The subject drove over the Key Bridge, got onto the Whitehurst Freeway, and exited onto K Street. He drove to where 8th Street NW intersected K Street and started to make right-hand turns. He appeared to be looking for a place to park. He finally found one; then she and Jorge trailed slowly behind him in Jorge’s car until he entered a building on the corner of I and 8th Street NW. There were flags over the building’s entrance, and chiseled in stone above the entrance were the words DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION. Lincoln had not told her why he wanted this DeMarco person killed, but she found it odd that Lincoln would be involved in drugs. Drugs were so … she didn’t know what, but drugs just didn’t seem like something a dilettante like Lincoln would be involved in. But for whatever reason, DeMarco was visiting the DEA and now she had a third way to kill him, one that she liked and one that she could execute immediately.

She could see DeMarco inside the lobby of the building going through a metal detector. There were two guards that she could see and a number of people were in the lobby, waiting for elevators or exiting the building. DeMarco cleared security and then waited for an elevator himself. After he had entered the elevator, she sat watching the lobby a bit longer and was pleased when a group of four people came out together. It was almost lunchtime. That was good too.

‘Do you have a gun?’ she said to Jorge.

‘Chur,’ he said, and flipped open the glove compartment and pulled out a chrome-plated automatic with an eight-inch barrel, the weapon as gaudy as the chains around his neck.

‘How many bullets does the magazine hold?’

‘Twelve,’ Jorge said. ‘Why? Wazzup?’

She ignored him and checked the D.C. street map that she’d bought. The damn map had cost six dollars in a drugstore; even if Lincoln was paying for it, it was outrageous that they should charge so much. She found the location of the DEA building and then saw what she was looking for: a metro station. Even better, it was located only two blocks from where they were parked.

‘Jorge, how would you like to earn twenty-five thousand dollars?’ she said.

She’d almost said fifty thousand but decided that twenty-five sounded more realistic, a large number, certainly more money than Jorge had ever seen at one time, but not so big he’d think she was lying to him.

She was lying, of course. She didn’t plan to pay him a cent.

DeMarco’s talk with Patsy Hall had gone just the way he’d expected. She’d loved his idea. It was complex and was going to be difficult to execute, and she wasn’t at all certain it would work — but she loved it.

He now waited with another couple on the fifth floor for the elevator to arrive. On the way down to the lobby, two other guys entered the elevator on the fourth floor. DeMarco checked his watch. It was ten after twelve and he guessed all the narcs were heading off to lunch, which made him realize that he was hungry too. He had a sudden craving for a pastrami sandwich, one on that swirly kinda bread that was brown and white. Maybe he’d have a side of potato salad and a big pickle too. On second thought, he’d skip the potato salad and have a beer instead. He figured the beer and the potato salad probably had about the same number of calories, so that was a fair trade-off; the fact that the beer had little nutritional value was irrelevant.

He was trying to remember if there was a deli nearby but couldn’t recall one. Standing next to him was the couple who had entered the elevator with him. They were both white and in their early forties, and he guessed they were DEA agents. The man anyway, he looked like an agent, an athletic, cocky-looking guy. He reminded DeMarco of Michael Keaton when he’d played a cop in that Tarantino movie Jackie Brown . The woman, she just looked tough, not bad looking but tough. If she was an agent, he’d bet she had a great big gun like Patsy Hall and she’d kick you in the nuts if you gave her any crap. Or, of course, the couple could just be a pair of DEA pencil pushers, but he didn’t think so.

He turned and asked the man if there was a deli nearby. The guy said he didn’t know of one, at which point the woman jumped in and said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Mark, there’s one right across the street. You walked by it to get here.’ They must be married, DeMarco thought.

It was good manners that saved DeMarco’s life. He was following the couple when they left the elevator, but as he and the couple approached the exit, a FedEx carrier was entering the building and everybody did a little dance to get out of his way, and DeMarco ended up being the first one to reach the door. He started to walk through but then the habits his mother had drummed into his head from an early age took over. He pulled the door open and stepped back as he’d been trained by his mom to allow the woman who was behind him to pass through the door first — and that’s when all hell broke loose.

Suddenly glass was breaking all around him, and the woman slammed back into him, and at the same time DeMarco felt a stinging sensation along his left side. An instant later there was a sharper pain in his right leg, up high, on the inside of his thigh. He either collapsed to the floor or the force of the woman’s body being thrown backward pushed him to the ground. He was now on his back and the woman was lying on top of him; it registered in his mind that the woman’s left cheek was missing but all he was thinking about was getting out of the doorway. As another bullet struck the woman’s torso, DeMarco tried to push her off of him, to crawl out from under her, and that’s when the woman’s husband fell onto both DeMarco and the woman. He was now pinned down by the weight of two bodies. He could hear people screaming and more glass breaking and bullets ricocheting off the lobby walls. And he could hear — or maybe feel — bullets slamming into the bodies of the couple lying on top of him.

The Cuban was confident that the incident would be reported just as she intended. A couple of gangstas had driven up to the DEA building and shot up the place. Why they did what they did was anybody’s guess. Revenge over some recent bust? Retaliation for the killing of a gang member? Who knows why these crazy drugged-up kids do what they do.

She and Jorge had been parked in a loading zone right across the street from the entrance to the building. It was a fairly narrow street and the distance to the door was less than twenty yards. She got into the backseat and on her command Jorge was to power down the windows and start shooting at the security guards that they could see inside the lobby. She told him she didn’t care if he hit anybody; he was just to shoot as many bullets as he could as fast as he could.

Jorge, the idiot, didn’t even ask how they planned to get away.

What the Cuban had wanted was for DeMarco to come out the door with other people, and he did. She saw a man and a woman approaching the doorway and DeMarco behind the couple, and two other people, both men, behind DeMarco. Perfect. But then a damn FedEx guy, a chunky black hijo de puta , bounced up the steps, a box on his shoulder, and went into the building, momentarily blocking her view of DeMarco. Shit, she thought at first, but it turned out perfect: DeMarco was the first one to reach the door. He put his hand on the door, pulled it open, but then, goddammit, just as she was squeezing the trigger, he stepped back and allowed a woman to go through the door before him.