Mike Lawson - Dead on Arrival

‘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 .

‘The guy’s going to be out of the hospital in a day. A day!’

The client was furious, and Oliver Lincoln could understand why. He had been paid very well to execute a simple assignment, and he’d failed.

‘Do you want me to try again?’ Lincoln asked. ‘No charge, of course.’

The client was silent for a minute, apparently thinking. ‘No. If you try again it’ll be obvious that he was the target of the DEA shooting. Just forget about DeMarco. It’s time to execute the last part of the plan.’

‘Are you sure?’ Lincoln said.

‘Yes. The bill’s stuck in the House. That goddamn Mahoney.’

Lincoln had hoped it wouldn’t come to this. He was very good and very careful, but if he executed the last phase of the client’s plan … well, every cop in the country would be looking for the people involved, and they’d be looking for years. But, he thought, the only way they could get to him was if the client talked, and that wasn’t ever going to happen.

‘You blew it,’ Oliver Lincoln said to the Cuban. ‘You were supposed to incapacitate the man. He was barely wounded.’

The Cuban was embarrassed; she’d failed only one other time during her career and that had been nine years ago. But she’d be damned if she’d apologize to Lincoln.

‘You still need to pay my expenses,’ she said.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Lincoln said.

‘You will pay my expenses. Now, do you want me to try again or return the money you gave me? Minus my expenses, that is.’

‘No, to both questions.’

‘What?’

‘No, I don’t want you to try again, and no, I don’t want you to return the money. It’s time to take care of the target that you prepared for last month. The client wants that target eliminated now.’

‘Is the plan still the same?’ the Cuban asked.

‘Yes. Nothing’s changed.’

‘If you’re thinking that I’m going to accept the payment you gave me for DeMarco for this subject, you’re a fool. We already negotiated the price for that assignment.’

She was correct. Her fee for her next assignment was much larger than the amount she’d been paid to kill DeMarco, which was only appropriate considering the risk.

Lincoln said, ‘Of course I’ll pay the price we agreed upon.’ Then he smiled. ‘ And I’ll let you keep the money from the last assignment as well, even though you failed.’

‘Why?’ the Cuban said, immediately suspicious. ‘Why would you do that?’

‘So you’ll sleep with me,’ Lincoln said.

The Cuban didn’t say anything; she couldn’t tell if Lincoln was serious or not.

Lincoln struggled not to smile. He knew the last thing she wanted to do was have sex with him, but would she for seventy-five thousand dollars? Exactly how greedy was this woman?

The Cuban still didn’t respond. She stared at Lincoln’s face, her eyes blazing, yet at the same time he could tell she was considering his offer.

‘No,’ she said at last, but he could tell it just killed her to say that.

‘A hundred thousand,’ he said. ‘For one night.’

She cursed in Spanish. She looked at Lincoln, then looked away, then back at Lincoln. He could tell she couldn’t make up her mind. But enough of this; he had to get going. He had a date in an hour. ‘I’m just teasing you,’ he said. ‘I’m letting you keep the money because the next assignment is so critical and because I’ve moved up the date. And because I like you.’ What he didn’t add was: and because it’s not my money .

The Cuban’s face was flushed, embarrassed that she’d actually considered his offer — and that Lincoln knew it. Finally she said, ‘Well, I don’t like you. And maybe I’ll kill you one day for nothing.’

The materials finally arrived. Praise be to God.

A man, a Muslim, someone he didn’t know, knocked on his motel room door at two in the morning. He’d been sleeping and he woke up, terrified that it was the police. He looked through the peephole in the door, and when he saw the man’s face, his dark skin, his features, he was instantly relieved. He opened the door and the man, who never said a word, handed him a box and left.

The next day, a Thursday, he and the boy connected the C-4 to the radio receivers and the blasting caps. There was enough material to construct one more device than he needed, and he was trying to decide what to do with the additional material. He could keep it for the next operation or have the boy plant it somewhere in the refinery, but keeping the material would be dangerous, particularly when he was traveling, and he didn’t want the boy to spend any longer inside the refinery than they had already planned. The longer the boy was inside the facility, the higher the likelihood that he’d be discovered.

And then he thought of a better use for the extra device — a humane use.

When the devices were ready, he told the boy that he would place the bombs in the plant the following Monday night, and detonate them Tuesday morning. He wanted to breech the tanks on a weekday, and he preferred Tuesday to Monday because so many of these people tended to take three-day weekends.

The boy simply nodded his head.

Oh, he would miss this boy.

And then the boy finally asked him the question he’d been expecting for some time. ‘What will happen to my mother?’ he said.