Mike Lawson - Dead on Arrival

The Cuban hit the woman but she also hit DeMarco. She was sure she hit him. She was positive. And even if she didn’t hit him with her first shot, the type of bullets she was using would pass right through the woman unless they struck bone. She saw the woman fall and she saw DeMarco go down under her and then she saw a man standing behind DeMarco fall. She fired five more shots into the pile of bodies and then screamed at Jorge to drive.

She directed him to drive one block and turn right at the next corner. He never even questioned her orders. He was high from the adrenaline rush of what they’d just done. As he drove he said, ‘Oh, man, that was cool, just fuckin’ cool ! Did you see those windows blow ?’

‘Stop at the next corner,’ she said. She could see the big red M for the Gallery Place metro station.

‘What?’ Jorge said.

‘Stop the car!’ she screamed

And he did — and she shot him in the back of the head.

She exited the car and closed the door and walked quickly but calmly toward the metro station. With the tinted windows in the Honda, no one could see Jorge’s body slumped over the steering wheel. As she descended the escalator to the subway platform, she heard the cars behind Jorge start to honk.

Emma had known Doug Chamberlain for twenty years. He’d been a Green Beret, and then he’d trained special ops guys before he retired from the army. He now worked for Prescott Security, the mercenary outfit that Edith Baxter had hired.

‘Why are you involved with these people, Doug?’ Emma said.

Chamberlain looked away, embarrassed. ‘Because of Maggie,’ he said. Maggie was his wife. ‘I got drunk one night, three years ago, and drove the car off the road. Naturally, I didn’t get a scratch. Maggie broke her jaw. The insurance paid for the first surgery, but the docs screwed something up. She was in pain for a year. And it affected her mentally too; she was so depressed I was afraid she was gonna kill herself. Anyway, the HMO wouldn’t pay for another surgery so I paid out of pocket to have her taken care of. She’s had two operations now and might have to have a third. I’ve got two mortgages on the house and I’ve wiped out our savings.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that Doug. But Prescott?’

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.

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.’