House Justice (19 page)

The florist opened it and saw that Benny had two driver’s licenses, one in the name of Benjamin Mark and one in the name of Benton Mandak. Clever—with either ID he could answer to the name Ben and not get confused.

“So who are you Benny, Benjamin Mark or Benton Mandak?”

“Mandak.”

The florist shook his head. “I don’t think I believe you, Benny. What will it be? The same foot or the other foot?”

“Okay, okay. I’m Benny Mark. I use the Mandak ID to travel when I’m working.”

“I don’t know, Benny. You’re such a liar.”

“I’m Benny Mark, I swear to God.”

The florist laughed. They all swore to God. “But how can I be sure you’re telling the truth?”

“I don’t… wait a minute. Look at the other stuff in my wallet. I got an AARP card there, an Allstate card, an HMO card. They all say Benny Mark. You don’t need to shoot me again.”

“Okay, Benny, I believe you. Now you’re probably thinking that you’ll call Mr. Jimmy Franco if I let you go. But if you do, and if Franco isn’t there when I get to LA, or if he looks like he’s expecting me, then I’m going to come to your house in”—he looked at the Benny Mark ID—“in Tacoma and kill you. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, I understand.”

“Okay. Good-bye, Benny.”

The cops dropped DeMarco off at the golf course and he was pleased to see his rental car was still in the lot. But two windows had been broken and there was glass all over the inside of the car and he wondered what kind of hassle he was going to have when he returned it to Hertz.

He brushed the glass off the seat and started the car, then just sat there trying to figure out what he should do next. He finally decided to go back to D.C. Dale Acosta was dead, so he wasn’t going to learn anything from him, and Sandra Whitmore could now get out of jail without telling the media nasty things about his nasty boss.

So, as that famous banner on that aircraft carrier had said, Mission Accomplished.

The florist returned to Benny’s motel, dropped off Benny’s car, and got into his own rental.

Now what
?

He knew a man named Jimmy Franco had hired Benny to kill Acosta, but he didn’t know why. He knew DeMarco had been going to visit Acosta, but he didn’t know why he was doing that, either. He had two
choices. Talk to DeMarco or fly to LA and talk to Jimmy Franco. The answer was obvious: he needed to talk to DeMarco. DeMarco was the key to all of this.

He drove back to the golf course, the last place he’d seen DeMarco, but DeMarco’s car was no longer there. So where had DeMarco gone? Was he still in Myrtle Beach, had he returned to Washington, or had he flown back to New York to see Whitmore again? When DeMarco had gotten on the plane he had an overnight bag so maybe he was still in Myrtle Beach. Maybe. Too many maybes.

Then he remembered that DeMarco had rented a car from Hertz. If he had left Myrtle Beach he would have returned his rental car. He called Hertz, told the lady who answered that he was a policeman and needed to know if a Mr. DeMarco had returned his rental car. He said the car had been involved in a crime and some of the windows had been shot out. The Hertz lady said if he came to her office and showed her his identification, she’d be happy to cooperate with him, but without seeing his ID she couldn’t give out any information about a customer. She was very polite—but very firm. The florist figured that his accent—not an accent similar to those who reside in the southern United States—didn’t work in his favor.

He was tired. He had been on the move for days and he needed to sleep. He also needed to wash his clothes; they smelled. He dropped his clothes off at a dry cleaners that advertised four-hour service, then checked into a motel, took a shower, and slept for a couple of hours. Then he called every motel and hotel in Myrtle Beach listed in the yellow pages to see if DeMarco had checked into any of them. He had not.

Tomorrow he would fly back to Washington, wait until DeMarco returned to his house, and make him talk.

Benny had thought for sure that he was gonna die; he couldn’t believe that the big bastard hadn’t killed him. But still, he was screwed. His foot was bleeding and it felt like every bone in it was broken. It
hurt like a son of a bitch. And he was out in the boondocks, miles from Myrtle Beach, and the guy had taken his cell phone and driven off in his rental car. It was like the man didn’t want to kill him, but didn’t care if he bled to death.

He took off his shoe and saw that his sock was saturated with blood. He carefully peeled off the sock and saw one little hole in the top of his foot and a slightly bigger one in the bottom. There was also a hole in the bottom of his shoe, which was the least of his problems. He ripped a piece of cloth from his shirt and used it to make a bandage, but the bandage didn’t stop the bleeding. He wondered if you could bleed to death from a couple little holes in your foot and figured you probably could, so he took off his belt and cinched it around his calf. The only thing he knew about applying a tourniquet was that it had to be really tight but if he left it on too long his foot would rot off. But what choice did he have?

He crawled around the grove of trees until he found a fallen branch that would support his weight and then started limping down the road. His belt/tourniquet kept slipping down around his ankle so finally he just took it off and hoped for the best. Then he got lucky: he fell, and when he fell, a colored guy in an old pickup saw him and stopped to see if he was okay.

Benny couldn’t believe it: an honest-to-God Good Samaritan.

He told the colored guy his car had broken down and he’d been walking to find a phone and call a tow truck, but then he had stepped on this huge goddamn nail that was sticking up through a board lying in the road.

The man asked him not to swear, please, and not to use the Lord’s name in vain.

“You betcha,” Benny said. “Sorry about that. But could you please give me a ride back to my motel in Myrtle Beach?”

The man did—he was a saint—and when they arrived there, Benny thanked the man profusely and was delighted to see his rental car was back in the parking lot and that the keys were in it. He hadn’t checked out, so he went back to his room and the first thing he did was wash
off his foot in the bathtub. It was a mess. The bullet holes were still bleeding, though not as bad as before, but the pain was a lot worse, like there was a buffalo standing on his instep. The only good news was that the bullet wasn’t in his foot.

He knew he should go to a doctor but he couldn’t do that. The doctor might recognize that Benny had been shot and then he’d call the cops, and the cops might be able to figure out that he was the guy who had killed Acosta. So going to a doctor in Myrtle Beach was out of the question. He was just going to have to live with the foot until he got back home.

He called the front desk, told the hayseed clerk his stepping-on-a-nail story, and said that unless they wanted blood all over the carpet, he needed to bring him some big bandages, cotton balls, and tape. Oh, and a bottle of aspirin or Motrin or Advil or something. The clerk took his time but finally brought the stuff Benny needed. He washed his foot again, stuffed cotton balls in the holes, and bandaged it all up.

After he had swallowed six aspirin, he lay down on the bed and asked himself the question he’d been thinking about ever since he got shot: Should he, or should he not, call Jimmy Franco and warn him that one mean son of a bitch might be coming his way?

If he called Jimmy and told him he had admitted to the big guy that Jimmy had set up the hit on Acosta, Jimmy would most likely send someone to Tacoma to kill him. Jimmy—because he was a merciless, paranoid shit of a human being—would be afraid that because the big guy knew about the hit Benny might eventually be arrested and, if he was, he might testify against Jimmy for a better deal—which, of course, he would do if it ever came to that. On the other hand, if the big guy got to Jimmy in LA and didn’t kill Jimmy, then Jimmy would also know that Benny had given him up and then Jimmy would
definitely
send somebody to Tacoma to kill him.

But there was something the big guy didn’t know: Jimmy, because of the shit he was into and because of the shit he’d pulled in the past, had a lot of protection. He
surrounded
himself with bodyguards. So
the big guy was going to have a tough time getting to Jimmy, and if he tried, there was a very good chance Jimmy’s men would kill him before he ever talked to Jimmy. But then that presented another problem. When the big guy saw all the protection around Jimmy, he might figure the protection was there because Benny had warned Jimmy, and then he might come to Tacoma and kill Benny like he’d promised.

Benny groaned. This was just too fucking complicated—there were just too many different ways things could play out—and he was having a hard time thinking with the way his foot was hurting. He finally decided that no matter what he did, somebody was likely to try and kill him, and most likely it would be Jimmy, so therefore screw Jimmy. He would call Betty Ann, tell her to turn the bar over to her idiot brother, and meet him in Canada. There was a cheap resort on Vancouver Island in a town called Ucluelet. He’d gone there salmon fishing with some guys once, and the place was super remote. Nobody would ever think of looking for him there. Yeah, he and Betty Ann would hide out in Canada and fish for salmon until this whole thing was finished.

“Good morning, Ms. Whitmore,” the judge said. “I understand you’re now willing to identify your source.”

“Yeah,” Whitmore said.

They were in the judge’s chambers. The only people present were his honor, the federal prosecutor, a court stenographer, Whitmore, and her stick-up-his-butt lawyer—which was fine by her. The press would find out within the hour that she’d given up her source but this way she’d be able to leave the courthouse without having to fight her way through a gauntlet of reporters. She didn’t want to deal with the media until she had a chance to change her clothes and fix her hair—and get a drink.

“I would have told you yesterday,” she said to the judge, “but you weren’t here.”

“Sorry about that,” he said, “but I had to make a little trip to Washington.”

She noticed he smiled slightly when he said this, like he was tickled pink about something. In fact, the man seemed to be in a pretty good mood in general and not the crabby asshole he’d been in open court. Whatever.

“So, if you’re ready, Ms. Whitmore,” the judge said, nodding to the stenographer.

“My source was a man named Dale Acosta who lives in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.”

“And who is Mr. Acosta?”

Whitmore looked over at her lawyer and then said, “I don’t think I have to tell you anything more. You wanted the name of my source and you got it.”

She saw the judge’s lips compress, his good humor instantly evaporating—but then he relaxed. It was as though he didn’t feel like letting Whitmore spoil his good mood.

“Very well,” he said. “Now that the court has the man’s name I’m sure the government will learn whatever they need to know about Mr. Acosta. Pay your fine and you can leave.”

“Fine? What fine?”

“Ten thousand dollars, Ms. Whitmore. If you’d been paying attention the day I held you in contempt, you would have heard me say that.”

“I don’t have ten thousand on me. Hell, I don’t have ten thousand in my bank account.”

The judge gave her a little not-my-problem shrug.

She turned to her lawyer, who had yet to open his mouth, and said, “Well? Are you gonna help me out here?”

Her lawyer cleared his throat and said, “The
Daily News
will pay the fine, Your Honor.”

The judge made an I-could-care-less face.

After they left the judge’s chambers, her lawyer had wanted to talk to her about her source and what she planned to do next, but Whitmore told him to take a hike. She went to her apartment and the first thing she did was go to the cupboard where she kept the scotch and found out she had no scotch, which meant she had finished the bottle the last night she was home. She thought she should take a bath and change clothes before going out for a drink, but decided to hell with that. She had never needed a drink so bad in her life. She grabbed
her purse and her cell phone and practically sprinted to the nearest bar.

She slammed down the first drink and immediately ordered another one. The bartender gave her a funny look and she figured it probably had to do with the way she looked, her hair all wild, no makeup on her face. And she sorta stank, too—but she didn’t care. She was going to have at least one more drink, and then she’d go home and take a bath.

As she was sipping the second drink—cheap scotch had
never
tasted so good—she thought,
Now what
? What was her next step?

She took out her cell phone and was pleased to see the battery wasn’t dead. It was her lucky day. It got even luckier when DeMarco answered on the second ring.

“DeMarco, I’m outta jail,” she said. “So, thanks,” she added, although she didn’t feel particularly grateful to the hard-nosed bastard. “But now I need to know more about Acosta, who he’s working for and all that.”

“Sandy,” DeMarco said, “I don’t work for you. My job was to get you out of jail, and you’re out. We’re done.”

“Well, maybe I’m not done with Mahoney,” Whitmore said.

“Threatening Mahoney is not a good idea. He helped you out on this one but if he thinks you’re going to blackmail him for the rest of his life… Sandy, John Mahoney is not a nice man.”

Whitmore snorted. “You think I don’t know that?”

“I’m just telling you that you don’t want to push him into a corner. People have tried to do that before and it’s turned out badly for them.”

Before Whitmore could say anything else, DeMarco added, “Anyway, Dale Acosta’s dead.”

“What?” she shrieked. “How did he die?”

“He was shot at his home in Myrtle Beach.”

“Jesus. Well, who killed him?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know who he was working for and I don’t know who killed him. Direct any other questions you have to the cops in Myrtle Beach.”