House Justice (41 page)

It didn’t sound as if Marty was lying, but Yuri called Bollinger to confirm his story. The CEO said he was telling the truth.

Before he hung up, Yuri told Bollinger that he wanted him to go home and that he would come to his house before the day was over. Bollinger didn’t argue; he knew better than to argue with Yuri.

When the call was finished, Yuri stood there looking at Marty. He could kill him now. He had power of attorney, so he didn’t really need him to sell the remainder of his possessions. He finally decided, though, that as much as he hated to do it, he should delay the pleasure of killing him. Some issue could arise, something he hadn’t thought of, and he still might need the man to complete the sales. But he
wanted
to kill him. He was so angry about how badly everything was going that he wanted to take out all his rage on this weak, pampered shit. To calm himself, he poured a shot of vodka and drank it in one swallow.

With Marty, Andrei, and Stephan all watching him, wondering what he’d do next, he walked over to the window and looked down at his pit bull in the backyard. It was shitting again. He was tired of cleaning up the animal’s shit but he was the only one who could because the dog would attack anyone else. He felt like shooting the dog, too.

He had taken almost four million dollars from Bollinger, Taylor, and Taylor’s company. But half of that had gone to Uncle Lev, and
20 percent had gone to paying his crew and his other expenses, leaving him with just a little over a million in the bank. If he could sell all of Taylor’s possessions, even at fire-sale prices, he’d make about twenty million. But the question was, could he evade being captured by either the FBI or Uncle Lev until the sales were finalized? He had no choice. He couldn’t leave the country with only a million. So what he needed to do next was find a place to hide until the agents completed their work. And if he was caught before that happened, so be it.

Gesturing with his head at Marty, he said to Andei, “I want you and Stephan to take this piece of shit to a motel. Take him out of town, someplace within an hour’s drive of San Diego, maybe someplace up in the hills, like Julian or Santa Ysabel. Get a place that has little cabins, not adjacent rooms. And don’t let anyone see him. I’ll call you later and find out where you’re staying.”

Then he turned to Stephan, the man with the cleft palate. He’d heard rumors that when Stephan was in prison in Russia he’d enjoyed sodomizing the other prisoners, particularly the young, pretty ones. That sort of behavior made Yuri sick to his stomach, but then who was he to judge? He’d never spent any time in prison.

“Stephan,” he said, “I don’t want Marty killed and I don’t want his face disfigured in case I need him later. But if you become bored while you’re with him and want to amuse yourself in some way that doesn’t show, I won’t object.”

Marty immediately went pale and asked, “Hey, what are you talking about?”

Yuri ignored him and asked Stephan, “Do you understand?”

Stephan’s face remained expressionless and he merely nodded— but Yuri saw the wet gleam in his eyes.

Stephan took Marty by the arm and led him from the kitchen. Andrei started to follow but Yuri called him back and whispered to him to take from the garage any tools they might need to dispose of a body. Plastic sheets, shovels, maybe a pick. The usual stuff. Andrei nodded; he’d disposed of bodies before.

When everyone was gone from the kitchen, Yuri reviewed the situation.

Mikhail was at the doctor’s house and would soon be dead—which was probably for the best at this point.

Ivan and Pyotr were hunting for Pamela Walker but he didn’t have any real expectation that they’d be able to take her.

Most important, the agents were busy selling Marty’s assets.

His next task was to pay a visit to Mr. Bollinger.

Angela was pacing the hotel room like a caged cat.

She had called LaFountaine to find out what he wanted her to do next but he hadn’t returned her call. It was always possible, being the director of the CIA, that he had other things on his mind but DeMarco wondered if LaFountaine was ducking Angela’s call for some reason.

He hinted, subtly, that crawling into bed with him might relieve some of her tension but he could tell that sex was the last thing on her mind. Consequently, he spent his time in the most productive manner he could think of: watching a baseball game on TV with the sound muted. The Padres were playing Pittsburgh and both teams sucked, but since he was a fan of the worst team in the league, the Washington Nationals, he couldn’t be too critical.

“I’m going for a run,” Angela said. “I’m going nuts just sitting here. You wanna go?”

“Jogging?”

“Yeah,” she said.

He wanted to say,
I’d like to go jogging about as much as I’d like to get a hip replacement
. But he didn’t; he didn’t want to come off as a slug who didn’t like to exercise. Instead he said, “I’d love to but I jogged for about ten years and it destroyed my knees.” And this was actually true. His right knee
was
a mess: he could hear the little bones or cartilage or whatever it was grinding together every time he flexed the joint. “Now I just lift weights and work out on the heavy bag,” he added.

“Well, okay,” she said. Then, being Angela, she just had to add, “You probably couldn’t keep up anyway.”

She changed into shorts, a T-shirt, and jogging shoes that had these weird-looking heels with little air-bubble pockets in them, then clipped her cell phone to the waistband of the shorts. She was about to leave when he said, “I’ll go down with you. I want to get a paper, see if there’s anything on Tully that wasn’t reported on TV. And maybe take a walk around the block.”

“You’re going to walk
all
the way around the block?” she said.

Sheesh.

Ivan did not want to call Yuri and tell him he didn’t have any idea what to do next, but what else could he do? He supposed they could just park near the hotel for a couple of hours and hope Pamela Walker would appear, but what were the odds of that happening if she wasn’t staying at the hotel? Then it occurred to him that maybe she was staying with someone or using a different name. Okay, that was possible, but how did that help him?

Maybe what he should do was have Pyotr start a fire in the basement of the hotel then pull the fire alarm. If Walker was in the hotel, she would have to go outside when the alarm sounded and maybe he could get her then—assuming he could spot her in the crowd of people that would be streaming out of the hotel. And it was a big hotel.

He sat there for a moment stroking his goatee. He wasn’t used to thinking this hard; he was actually getting a headache. Maybe he should…

Wait a minute. A man and woman had just come out of the hotel. He’d noticed the woman because she was wearing shorts and had good legs, although she was a bit skinnier than he preferred. Then he realized he’d seen the man before. Where had he seen him? The beach! He saw him and the woman talking to Marty Taylor on the beach!

“Give me the binoculars,” he said. “In the glove compartment. Quick!”

Pyotr handed him the binoculars and he focused on the woman. It was Pamela Walker. She had blonde hair when she came to Yuri’s house and now she was a brunette, but it was definitely her. She was too pretty to forget.

The woman was doing stretching exercises; it looked like she might be going for a run. The man with her, though, wasn’t dressed for running; he was just talking to her, watching her as she stretched. She gave the man a little wave and started running.

This was good.

He could wait until she reached some fairly isolated place and snatch her, but he had no idea where she was going. Right now she was jogging on the sidewalk of a busy street and she just might stay on busy streets for her entire run. He looked around. There weren’t many pedestrians that he could see, but cars were streaming by. It would be almost impossible to grab her and not have someone see them. On the other hand, they were driving an unremarkable white van. It had been stolen months ago, and they had replaced the original license plates with plates they took from another vehicle. And if they showed Walker a weapon, they might be able to get her into the van without her making a fuss. Yes, that’s what he would do: tell Pyotr to show her his gun, threaten to kill her if she screamed, and order her into the van.

“You see that woman, the one running?” he said to Pyotr.

“The good-looking one with the nice ass?”

“Yes. I want you to get in the back and open the sliding door. Don’t open it all the way, just unlatch it. I’m going to drive up next to her and you’re going to jump out when I stop, show her your gun, and tell her to get in the van. If she screams or tries to run, hit her and throw her in.”

“You don’t think it’s a little too busy here to be doing that?”

“Just do what I tell you.”

The kid shrugged, raised the “Dirty White Boy” T-shirt, and pulled out his gun.

DeMarco pulled a newspaper from the machine, then looked up and down the block for a place to get a cup of coffee and read. There had to be a Starbucks somewhere nearby; you couldn’t walk a block in most cities without seeing one. He looked across the street to see if maybe there was a coffee shop over there, and as he did a white van passed in front of him, blocking his view.

The driver. It was that huge son of a bitch with the goatee he’d seen on the beach when they’d talked to Marty Taylor. He noticed then that the van was moving slowly—a lot slower than the other cars. And it was going in the same direction that Angela had gone. He looked up the street. She was less than a block away. She wasn’t
that
fast.

He yelled, “Angela!” but she didn’t hear him. He slapped his belt where his cell phone was supposed to be—and slapped nothing but belt. He’d left his phone in the room. He was always forgetting the damn phone! He took off sprinting.

“Angela!” he shouted again, as loud as he could, but at that moment a plane flew overhead and again she didn’t hear him.

Angela saw the young guy jump out of the van, and then he stepped right into her path. Without even thinking about it, she started to dodge around him but he grabbed her arm and pulled her close to him and she felt the gun barrel jammed into her side.

“Get into the van or I’ll kill you.”

There was no way Angela was getting into the van. She was dead if she got into the van. She also figured the kid wasn’t going to shoot her. This guy had been ordered to snatch her, not kill her. If he’d been sent to kill her he would have just shot from the van as it drove
past. So even though the kid had the gun jammed into her side, she pulled away from him, breaking his grip on her arm.

But the kid was quick. Before she could run away, he reached out and grabbed her by the front of her T-shirt and pulled her to him. At that moment, she heard the driver yell, “Get her in the damn van.”

She recognized the driver. He was the big bodyguard at Yuri’s house, the one Yuri called Ivan.

She was not getting in the van. She slammed her forehead into the kid’s nose and he let go of her T-shirt—and hit her on the top of her head with his gun.

DeMarco saw the van stop and watched in alarm as a skinny kid in long shorts jumped out and grabbed Angela. When she pulled away from him, DeMarco saw the gun in the kid’s hand. Son of a bitch.

He was less than fifty yards from the van at that point, running faster than he’d ever run in his life. He didn’t know what he was going to do when he reached the van—but he kept running.

He saw the kid grab Angela by the front of her T-shirt and he watched in amazement as Angela head-butted him—and then the kid hit her in the head with his gun. DeMarco was going to kill him.

He was twenty yards from the van now. Angela was on the ground, and the kid—his nose bleeding, holding his gun in one hand—was dragging Angela by one arm over to the open side door of the van— and that’s when he became aware of DeMarco running at him. The kid loosed his grip on Angela, turned toward DeMarco, and raised the gun to shoot him but at that moment DeMarco was flying through the air. He heard the gun fire while he was in the air but didn’t feel any pain and figured the bullet had missed him, and then he hit the kid like a defensive tackle taking down a quarterback. He slammed into the little bastard so hard he knocked the breath out of him. The kid was now on the ground, too stunned to bring his weapon to bear, and DeMarco was on top of him.

DeMarco hit him in the jaw with the best right cross he’d ever thrown.

He glanced at Angela: she was still on the ground, out cold. Then he heard the driver’s-side door of the van open. The driver, that huge bastard, was coming to help the kid. DeMarco grabbed the kid’s gun and just as the driver lumbered around the front of the van DeMarco pointed it at him.

“You take one more step, I’m gonna blow your head off.”

The big guy stopped and raised his hands.

DeMarco got off the kid and stood up.

He looked over at Angela, saw the blood trickling from her head, and it took all his willpower not to kick the kid.

The kid got to his feet, groggy from DeMarco’s blow, and leaned back against the van. The big guy with the goatee just stood there, hands still in the air, obviously not sure what to do next.

DeMarco needed to get Angela to a doctor. He didn’t know how badly she was hurt. He moved toward her, intending to get her cell phone and call the cops and the medics, but then it crossed his mind that getting the cops involved in this whole CIA mess might not be a good idea.

“Get out of here,” he said to the big guy. “I know who you are and who you work for, and if she’s not okay I’ll be coming after you. Now get out of here before I shoot you both.”

The big guy didn’t hesitate. He walked around the van and opened the driver’s-side door and got in. The kid, moving slower because he still hadn’t completely recovered from DeMarco’s punch, opened the passenger-side door but before he could get into the van DeMarco said, “Hey.” The kid turned to look at him and DeMarco hit him in the mouth with the butt of the gun hard enough to break his teeth.