House Justice (34 page)

Yeah, blowing the whistle was the holy thing to do—but the outcome was all wrong. Yet not blowing it meant that innocent people could get hurt. Maybe there was some way he could stop Yuri before anyone was killed, but he had no idea if he’d get that opportunity. All he knew for sure was that he wasn’t walking away. He wasn’t going to leave Angela on her own, not when a man like Yuri Markelov might be coming after her.

An annoyed Angela joined him in the bar ten minutes later.

“Let’s get a table,” she said, and he dutifully followed her to one.

She looked at his martini and he thought for a moment that she might order one, too, but then she ordered her usual Diet Coke. He would have thought that after the stress of meeting with Yuri, and considering it was after five p.m., she might relax her standards a bit. But no.

“Look,” DeMarco said, “I’m sorry I—”

“Never mind that,” she interrupted. “Tomorrow, we need to meet with Marty Taylor and—”

Her cell phone rang. She looked at the caller ID screen and smiled, and when she said hello her tone of voice was different, like she was really glad—
desperately
glad—to hear from whoever had called. But then after a moment the smile disappeared and she said, “I see,” and he watched her lips compress in irritation.

“Why don’t you come out here, instead,” she said. “I think I’m going to have some free time this weekend. We’ll drive up the coast, see the sights. It’ll be fun.”

See the sights
?

She listened for a moment then said, “Yeah, right. Who the hell do you think you’re kidding, Brad?” Then she snapped the cell phone closed. She sat there for a minute staring down at the tabletop, then looked up and waved at the nearest barmaid.

“Gimme one of those,” she said, pointing at DeMarco’s martini.

“Is there a problem?” DeMarco asked.

She didn’t answer him, and when her drink arrived she drained half of it in a single swallow.

“My jackass husband is having an affair. He was just calling to tell me that he’s flying to Key West for a conference. What he’s really doing is taking a little holiday with the bitch he’s currently screwing, probably some twenty-four-year-old resident who thinks he’s God.”

She drank the rest of her martini and ordered another one.

“You might want to slow down on those,” DeMarco said, gesturing at the empty glass. “They have a tendency to sneak up on you.”

She ignored him.

As they were waiting for her second drink to arrive, she muttered, “What the hell is it with you men?”

“What?” DeMarco said.

“Yuri was with some girl young enough to be his daughter. Marty Taylor dates women who still get carded in bars. And my damn husband is the same way. I mean, do all you bastards…”

She suddenly rose from the table, bumping it with her hip as she did, almost spilling DeMarco’s drink, and left the bar.

DeMarco sat there, wondering if she was going to come back. He’d known her husband was an asshole the minute he saw the guy.

Fifteen minutes later, she did come back and it looked like she’d bawled her eyes out—and he bet it took a lot to make Angela DeCapria cry. If he ever got the chance, he was going to beat the crap out of her husband.

She picked up her martini and once again chugged it down like it was a tequila shooter. Martinis are not meant to be drunk like that.

“My husband’s a heart surgeon,” she said. “And you remember what Robert Redford looked like when he was young, when he was in
The Sting
? Well, that’s who Brad looks like.”

DeMarco didn’t bother to mention that he’d seen her husband, and he didn’t think the guy was
that
good looking.

“When I married him, my mother got down on her knees and thanked God. She couldn’t believe it, her little tomboy daughter married to a doctor, and a handsome one at that. Then she started in on me: You oughta stop working, Angie. You oughta get pregnant, Angie. Have some babies. Stay home and take care of your kids and your husband.” Angela said all this in a high-pitched whine that DeMarco assumed was an imitation of her mother’s voice.

“And maybe she was right. At first Brad thought it was pretty cool having a wife that worked for the CIA. But then it wasn’t so cool because instead of me being there all the time to do whatever he wanted, I had a career. And I learned pretty quickly that Brad’s the type who needs a lot of attention. A lot of
adoration
, actually. He’s used to having people, especially women, fawn all over him.”

“He’s an asshole,” DeMarco said.

“Shut up! What do you know?”

Oh, boy.

Angela ordered a third martini. DeMarco was thinking he was going to have to carry her back to her room.

“Uh, maybe we oughta get dinner,” he said. “Have an appetizer or something.”

“Things weren’t so bad for the first four years, but the last three have been a living hell. I don’t know how many affairs he’s had, but he’s had a lot. And now he doesn’t even pretend he’s being faithful. I don’t know why he doesn’t just leave me.”

“Why don’t you leave him?” DeMarco asked.

Her eyes flashed and she started to say something, probably to tell him to shut up again, but then she just shook her head.

“Because I love the asshole,” she said.

“Okay. Tomorrow we’re gonna go talk to Marty Taylor,” Angela said.

She was halfway through her fourth martini and DeMarco noticed her eyes were beginning to have a hard time focusing. He could tell because he was only on his third.

“We gotta…”

“You know, you might want to talk a little softer,” DeMarco said, spinning his head around to see who was sitting near them. Fortunately, no one was.

“We gotta make sure he understands that…”

She stopped to take another gulp of her martini.

“… that he unnerstans …”

She stopped to suck the olive off the swizzle stick.

“Understands… Shit, I forgot what I was going to say. Oh, yeah. We gotta…”

She stopped again and looked at DeMarco, directly into his eyes. “Let’s go to bed.”

DeMarco felt his heart do a backflip. “Okay,” he said.

She kissed him as soon as the elevator doors closed. She fit perfectly. Her body just molded into his.

They reached her room and she had a hard time getting the key card to open the door, but she finally did it. She walked into the room, hips swaying, taking off her shoes as she went, stumbling a bit as she did. She began to unbutton her blouse and then saw that DeMarco was still standing in the doorway.

“What?” she asked.

“I can’t let you do this,” DeMarco said. “Because if we do this, you’ll hate yourself tomorrow and you’ll hate me. I don’t want that. If you weren’t drunk, it’d be different, but…”

“What, I’m not your type or something?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying…”

“You’re just like Brad and that ass-wipe Yuri, aren’t you? I mean, I’m almost forty for God’s sake. Is that the problem?”

“No! Hell, no. You’re beautiful,” DeMarco said. “There’s no woman on this planet I’d rather go to bed with. But not this way, not tonight.”

She walked toward him. He wondered if she was going to kiss him again. If she did, he wouldn’t be able to resist.

“Go fuck yourself,” she said, and slammed the door in his face.

Marty Taylor had disappeared.

He wasn’t at home or at his office, and he wasn’t answering his cell phone—and this was making Yuri quite angry. He was going to hurt Marty when he found him. In fact, he thought he might have Ivan jam Marty’s cell phone up his rectum as a way of reminding him to answer his phone in the future.

Yuri told Ivan to take a couple of men and find the fool. He gave him a list of Marty’s usual haunts: the marinas where he kept his boats, beaches where he liked to surf, and several bars where he liked to drink and look out at the ocean.

“Does he have a woman?” Ivan asked.

“Not right now,” Yuri said. Then he laughed. “Marty isn’t the ladies’ man he used to be. He’s been a bit despondent lately.”

DeMarco waited for Angela in the hotel lobby, wondering how she’d act toward him after what had happened last night. Not sleeping with her had been the right thing to do. So why didn’t he feel like he’d done the right thing? All he felt was regret for not having gone to bed with the most desirable woman he’d ever met.

And he felt even worse when he saw her get off the elevator, the trim body, the good legs, the long hair hanging to her shoulders. She was
wearing sunglasses this morning—probably to hide bloodshot eyes— but the sunglasses just made her seem more glamorous. To use an expression from his teenage days, Angela DeCapria just turned his crank.

“Hey,” he said when she reached him.

She ignored him and kept walking—so he followed her to their rental car, regretting with each step having lost an opportunity that he was sure would never come again.

They were two blocks from the hotel before she finally spoke.

“Thanks,” she said, her voice sounding hoarse.

“For what?” DeMarco asked.

“For not… you know.”

“Sure,” DeMarco said.

“And that’s all I’m going to say about last night. I had too much to drink, I said a bunch of things I shouldn’t have said, and almost did something stupid. And it’ll never happen again.”

Oh, man, don’t say that
.

“We’re going to save Marty Taylor’s life,” Angela said.

“I thought LaFountaine was hoping that Yuri would just whack Marty? You know, save the government all the time and trouble of actually having to prove he’s guilty.”

“He changed his mind. He doesn’t want to sit around forever waiting for Yuri to take care of Tully, and it occurred to him yesterday if Marty disappears that’ll put pressure on Yuri and maybe make him move quicker against Tully.”

“So what are we going to do? Kidnap Taylor?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. What we’re going to do is convince him that his only option at this point is to be the government’s best witness against Yuri and let us hide him until the right time comes. Then, after Yuri takes care of Tully, we’ll turn Taylor over to the Bureau and they can nail his ass to the wall.”

DeMarco shook his head. “In case you haven’t noticed, LaFountaine’s plans haven’t been working out too well. He figured Tully would take care of Rudman, but that hasn’t happened yet. And maybe Yuri will decide that going after Tully is too risky and, thanks to you warning him yesterday, he may just take off.”

“I’ve got my orders.”

There was no point going down that road again, so instead DeMarco asked, “What makes you think Taylor’s going to be willing to risk his life by agreeing to testify against Yuri, not to mention giving up his reputation without a fight?”

“We’re gonna be persuasive,” Angela said.

Marty Taylor straddled his surfboard, four hundred yards from the beach, looking over his shoulder at the incoming waves. He’d been sitting there a long time, at least half an hour. The waves weren’t great today but he didn’t really care. He was content just looking out at the ocean.

He needed to get free of Yuri. His life just couldn’t go on the way it was. It was time to stop thinking about it and take some kind of action.

This thing with Diller had been the last straw. The fact that Yuri had killed Diller—and had used him to help—didn’t bother him as much as the fact that the Justice Department was coming after him. Right now he didn’t see that they had a case, or so the old lawyer, Porter Henry, said—and Marty’s own lawyers agreed—but God knows what sort of mistakes Yuri and Diller might have made.

Nor could he stand Yuri running his life any longer. He’d become the man’s puppet, a frightened, trembling puppet. He didn’t want to die and he didn’t want to go to jail and he didn’t want to be poor, but he knew that if he didn’t do something to help himself, one or all of those things were going to happen. Yet for some reason he just couldn’t seem to do
anything
.

Like cashing out his assets. He’d been thinking about contacting a broker to get things started but he hadn’t done it yet. He was afraid
Yuri would catch him if he tried to sell his possessions but it was more than that. It was as if he didn’t have the energy, much less the will, to do anything. He’d read that’s what happened when you were clinically depressed but he didn’t know for sure. Until he’d met Yuri, he’d never been depressed.

Then he saw a wave. And he caught it. And for maybe a hundred seconds he forgot about his problems.

“There he is,” Angela said.

DeMarco looked out at the beach. There were two dozen people on it: kids running around shrieking when their feet touched the water, mothers watching the kids shrieking, teenagers with surfboards, all of them tanned and in good shape—particularly the girls.

Sitting apart from everyone was a well-built man in his late thirties. He had longish blond hair and baggy swim trunks decorated with cartoon characters, and he was lying on his back, using his elbows to prop himself up on the sand as he looked out at the water. Next to him was a red surfboard.

“How did you know where to find him?” DeMarco asked.

“I’ve had someone watching him.”

Just like that:
I’ve had someone watching him
.

Angela opened the driver’s-side door, swung her legs out, and took off her shoes. Then she stood up, raised her skirt a bit, and pulled down her pantyhose. She was one of the few young women DeMarco knew who still wore pantyhose and he wondered why she did. Knowing her, it was probably a professional dress-code thing. All he knew for sure was that watching her take them off was killing him.

“You might want to take off your shoes and socks,” she said. “That sand looks pretty wet.”

DeMarco did what she said and rolled up his pant cuffs. The sand felt good squishing between his toes and he wished they were sitting on a blanket, drinking champagne, watching the waves come in.

He wished her husband was dead.