Mike Lawson: Dead Man’s List

“What do you know about Terry Finley?” DeMarco asked.

Reggie drained his first martini. “The kid that drowned?” he said.

“Yeah, the kid that drowned.” Finley had been forty-two when he died.

Reggie shrugged, then reached for the full glass the bartender had just placed at his elbow. He swallowed a third of the drink before saying, “What do I know about him? Well, he worked the political beat, of course.”

“Why ‘of course’?”

“The only reason he got the job was because his dad was a congressman. The schemers in charge figured a kid whose dad worked on the Hill would give the paper an edge.”

“Did it?”

“No. Terry was an annoying, ambitious little shit, one of those guys who always thought he was gonna be the next Bobby Woodward, but he never tried to use his old man to get there.”

“Was he any good?”

Reggie swallowed the remainder of his second martini; as an afterthought he reached for the olives from his first martini. At the rate Reggie drank, DeMarco was thinking that they should just hook up an IV bag to his arm.

“Only in his dreams,” Reggie said. “A couple years ago he got everyone all excited when he said he’d discovered that this colonel over at the Pentagon was an al-Qaeda mole. The basis for his conclusion was that the guy—the Pentagon guy—was always meeting this dishy, Arabic-looking gal in these seedy hotel bars. Turned out the guy was just boffing the lady, who happened to be Egyptian, but was no more into Islam than the Pope. That was Terry: seeing a spy ring instead of two people fuckin’.”

“Huh,” DeMarco said. “Was he working on anything important before he died?”

“Maybe. I heard him and his editor going at it one day. Frank was trying to get Terry’s ass up to the Hill to write about some political squabble, and Terry kept telling him that he didn’t have time. He said he was working on the biggest thing since Clinton got a blow job.”

“But you don’t know what the story was about?”

“No. All I heard was Terry say that if Frank knew who his source was, he wouldn’t be giving him chickenshit assignments.”

“Shit. So now I have talk to this Frank guy to find out what Terry was working on.”

“Well, unless you got a hotline to hell, you can forget that.”

“What?”

“Frank’s dead.”

“Dead? When did he die?”

“A week ago, about two days after Terry.”

“Jesus,” DeMarco said. “Was there anything mysterious about the way he died?”

Reggie took his time finishing his last drink as DeMarco waited impatiently for his answer. Finally, he said, “Frank was sixty-three years old. He was five-seven, weighed two-fifty, and smoked unfiltered Camels. He thought high cholesterol was the name of a racehorse. The only mystery is that Frank didn’t have a coronary when he was forty-three.”

“Are you feeling lucky, punk?” DeMarco muttered, his lips twisted into an Eastwood snarl—then he fired the gun, a .357 magnum.

“Stop doing that,” Emma said.

DeMarco ignored her and looked at the man-shaped paper target. There were five holes in it, and although no hole was closer than six inches to any other hole, all of his shots had hit the punk.

“Well, pilgrim, what do you think of that,” he said to Emma, switching from Eastwood to Wayne.

“I think you’re jerking the trigger instead of squeezing it,” Emma said.

“Let’s try the Glock now,” DeMarco said. “I’m gonna use the two-handed, cop’s grip this time.”

“I give up,” Emma said.

Emma was tall and slim. She wore her hair short, and it was colored a blondish shade with some gray mixed in. Her profile was regal, like a Norse queen on a coin, and her eyes were light blue, cool, and cynical. She was at least ten years older than DeMarco, maybe fifteen, but in such good shape that she would have run him into the ground had he ever been dumb enough to challenge her to a race. She was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved navy-blue pullover, and black Reeboks. Clipped to her belt was a holster and in the holster was an automatic with a worn grip.

DeMarco had decided it was time to learn something about firearms. He was a firm believer in gun control—meaning that the only people who should be allowed to have guns were cops and soldiers, and himself, of course, if he thought he ever needed one—but a few months ago he came close to being killed because he didn’t know where the safety was on a weapon. So though he had no immediate plans to buy a gun, and hoped sincerely that he would never need one in the future, he figured a little basic education couldn’t hurt. And there was another thing: he thought it’d be kinda fun to shoot a few guns, which it was.

So under Emma’s less than patient tutelage, he fired three weapons that day: a 9mm Glock; a .22 automatic that Emma said was the firearm often preferred by professional killers; and the .357 magnum. He had wanted to shoot the Glock and the .357 because those were the guns they always mentioned in the movies.

DeMarco put a fresh target on the target-hanger, sent it down-range twenty yards, and picked up the Glock. He liked the way it felt. He spread his legs in what he considered to be a shooter’s stance, gripped the gun in both hands, said “Freeze, asshole”—and pulled the trigger six times. When he finished there were six holes in the target, three of them bunched fairly close together in the paper guy’s left shoulder. Other than the fact that he’d been aiming for the heart, not bad, he thought. Emma thought differently.

“Joe,” she said, “if you’re ever attacked, and if you have a choice between a bat and a gun, use the bat.”

“Well, let’s see you do better,” DeMarco said.

Now why in the hell had he said that? It must have been all the gun smoke in the air, the fumes short-circuiting those brain cells that caused him to actually think before speaking.

Emma was now retired but she had worked for the DIA—the Defense Intelligence Agency. She was, however, a person who rarely, and then only reluctantly, talked about her past, and consequently DeMarco had no idea what she had done for the military for almost thirty years. He did know that by the end of her career she’d been a senior player in the intelligence community in Washington, and that early in her career she’d been some sort of spy. And there was one other thing he knew—he knew that she could shoot a gun.

She hit a button that pushed DeMarco’s target ten yards farther away, pulled the automatic from the holster on her hip, and then, without appearing to take aim, she fired. BAMBAMBAMBAMBAM. Five shots fired so rapidly it was hard to distinguish one from the other. When the smoke cleared, DeMarco looked at the target.

The paper man had a two-inch-diameter hole where his nose had once been.

Emma’s reward for instructing DeMarco was dinner at a place of her choosing, and she surprised him by selecting a mid-priced restaurant in Alexandria that specialized in soft-shelled crab. She may have chosen the place because of the way they were dressed but DeMarco suspected that she was being kind to his wallet. Emma was rich; DeMarco wasn’t. As they waited for their dinners, Emma sipped a glass of white wine and looked at the ragged, water-damaged napkin that Dick Finley had taken from his son’s wallet.

“So what do you think?” DeMarco asked.

“I would guess that these are people’s names followed by a year, but who the people are and what the dates signify…well, your guess is as good as mine. As for the numbers, they look like a D.C. phone number minus the last three digits.”

“Yeah, I figured that. How ‘bout the ‘egg’?”

Emma shrugged. “Maybe part of a shopping list, but I doubt it. He would have written ‘eggs,’ not ‘egg.’ And it looks like there’s some word that comes after ‘egg,’ but I can’t even make out the first letter.”