House Justice (45 page)

This had gone on long enough. DeMarco reached for his cell phone to call 911—and just at that moment Rudman abruptly turned into an alley that ran alongside the Goodwill store. It was the alley folks drove down when they were dropping things off at the store.

DeMarco could think of only one reason why they had driven into the alley: the man had been looking for an isolated spot in which to kill Rudman and he’d found it. He drove past the mouth of the alley, saw Rudman’s car stopped about thirty yards away, and he immediately pulled over to the curb and parked.

“He’s going to kill Rudman,” DeMarco said. “He’s going to kill him now.”

He reached past Angela, opened the glove compartment, and grabbed the gun he’d taken from the Russian kid wearing the “Dirty White Boy” T-shirt. As he exited the car, he said, “Call the cops.”

“Joe, wait!” she said—but he didn’t.

DeMarco ran into the alley. Rudman was on his knees near his car. The kidnapper was standing behind him, pointing a gun at his head.

“This is the way she died,” the florist said. “On her knees, terrified, waiting for the bullet that would end her life. She was only twenty-eight when she died. And you killed her.”

“Please! You need to let me explain,” Rudman said.

DeMarco stopped, spread his legs, and holding his gun in a two-handed grip aimed at the kidnapper. DeMarco had fired a pistol only a couple of times in his life, he was a lousy shot, and he knew that his chances of hitting a man standing thirty yards away were practically nil.

“Put down the gun!” DeMarco yelled.

Rudman’s assassin spun toward DeMarco, obviously surprised to see him, and pointed his gun at DeMarco. DeMarco should have fired then, but he didn’t. Fortunately, neither did the other man.

“Put down the gun!” DeMarco said again.

The man didn’t do anything for a moment, and then he did something completely unexpected. He smiled sadly at DeMarco and said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t do that.”

Then he turned as if DeMarco wasn’t there and aimed his gun again at Rudman’s head.

Three shots were fired almost simultaneously. DeMarco fired at the killer, the killer fired at Rudman, and Angela fired the third shot. Instead of calling the cops, she had followed DeMarco into the alley. DeMarco had no idea whose bullet hit the kidnapper—his or hers— but he guessed it was most likely hers.

DeMarco ran down the alley. The kidnapper was on the ground with a wound in his right side. His eyes were closed and he was bleeding heavily but he was alive. He had dropped his gun when he hit the ground and it was a couple of feet from his outstretched hand. DeMarco kicked the gun a few more feet down the alley.

“Is Rudman dead?” the man asked without opening his eyes.

DeMarco didn’t answer, but Rudman wasn’t dead. He was still on his knees, panting like he’d run a marathon. There was no way the
killer should have missed Rudman standing as close to him as he’d been. Angela’s or DeMarco’s bullet must have hit him just before he fired, throwing off his aim.

“Are you all right, Congressman?” DeMarco asked.

Rudman said, “I’m, I think … then Rudman grabbed his left shoulder and toppled over. Aw, Jesus, the son of a bitch was having a heart attack.

“Call an ambulance,” DeMarco said to Angela, and for once she didn’t argue.

He knelt down next to Rudman. “Hang in there, Congressman. An ambulance is on the way.” Rudman’s eyes were shut tightly. He was taking rapid, shallow breaths and was obviously in a lot of pain. And then his eyes popped open as if in surprise or shock and he gasped and stopped breathing.

“Ah, shit!” DeMarco said.

He started to perform CPR on Rudman but after a couple of minutes he stopped. Rudman was dead.

DeMarco turned and looked behind him. Angela had her gun in one hand and was watching the killer as she talked to someone on her phone. The killer was just lying with his eyes closed, seeming oddly content. He didn’t plead for help or complain about his pain, and DeMarco got the impression that he didn’t care if he lived or died.

Angela closed her cell phone. “Is Rudman dead?” she asked.

DeMarco nodded, too out of breath from performing CPR to talk.

“A city ambulance is on the way but we need to take this guy and get out of here. I know a place to take him and a doctor will meet us there.”

DeMarco thought about what she had said. He didn’t really care if the killer died, and Rudman was already dead, so there was no point in staying and waiting for the ambulance. If they waited, the cops would ask questions that they’d refuse to answer and inevitably the media would find out what had happened and would begin to speculate in print as to why a CIA agent, a congressional lawyer, and a gunshot man were in an alley with the body of a dead congressman. He
didn’t need any of that, particularly anything that got his name in the paper or his picture on the news.

DeMarco picked up the killer’s gun and then he and Angela carried the man over to DeMarco’s rental car and laid him down on the backseat. He didn’t resist in any way.

DeMarco looked over at Rudman’s body and, for some reason, thought about how bad his grandkids would feel when they heard he was dead. He also thought that when the cops arrived on the scene, they were going to ask themselves a lot of questions. They were going to wonder why Rudman, instead of going to the market to buy ice cream, had ended up having a heart attack in an alley miles away from the store. They were also going to find a fresh pool of blood that didn’t belong to Rudman and three shell casings from three different weapons. The only good news was an autopsy would show a fat man had died of a heart attack, and that was all that really mattered.

“Where are we taking this guy?” DeMarco asked.

“A veterinarian’s clinic,” Angela said.

“You don’t think an emergency room for humans might be smarter?”

Angela didn’t answer.

The man in the backseat groaned and DeMarco turned and looked at him.

“Who are you?” DeMarco asked.

The man’s lips twitched briefly in that same sad smile DeMarco had seen before he tried to kill Rudman.

“I’m a florist,” he said.

Ivan sat at the kitchen table in his mistress’s apartment in Escondido, bouncing his son on his knee. The little tyke seemed almost fully recovered from the horrible cough he’d had.

Yuri had told him to go to a motel but he had decided that he wasn’t going to waste the money. How would the police know about his mistress, anyway? Until Yuri called and gave him another assignment, he would just enjoy his children.

His cell phone rang. He looked at the caller ID and didn’t recognize the number but the only people who had his number were people in Yuri’s organization.

“Hello?” he said.

“Ivan, this is your Uncle Lev. There’s something you need to do for me.”

Marty Taylor thought that maybe, just maybe, everything was going to turn out all right.

He had run about three miles after he got away from Stephan and Andrei, then was able to wave down a ride from an old coot driving a Jeep. He had the guy drop him off at the first motel he saw and checked in using cash and a phony name.

The first thing he did was call the agents who were selling his stuff.
He told them to stop the sales immediately and if they didn’t he was going to sue their asses off. Fortunately, the houses and land in Arizona hadn’t been sold yet. Some of the artwork had, and a couple of his cars were gone, but he still had almost everything else. After that had been taken care of, he had called the good-looking lady from the Justice Department and told her where he was.

The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea of going into witness protection. He’d be safe from Yuri, and if he testified against him, he wouldn’t have to worry about getting tossed in jail for what Diller or Yuri had done. But it was more than that. He just wanted to start over. He was tired of his company and he didn’t want to work anymore. He was tired of being Marty Taylor. He just wanted to sit on a beach some place and surf. He wouldn’t be as rich as he was now, but with the twenty or thirty million he got from selling his possessions… well, he’d be just fine.

There was a knock on the door. He pulled back a curtain and peeked out the window: two serious-looking guys in suits. One of the men knocked again and said, “Mr. Taylor. FBI. Please open the door.”

Marty flung open the door and said, “Thank God, you’re finally here. I was getting kinda worried. I called Walker hours ago.”

“Walker?” the FBI agent said.

“Yeah, Pamela Walker. That’s why you’re here isn’t it?”

“Sir, all we’ve been told is that you’re willing to testify against Yuri Markelov for crimes he’s committed. Is that correct?”

“Yeah, as long as you hold up your end of the deal.”

“Deal?”

“Yeah. The deal Walker agreed to. You’re taking me to the witness protection guys, right?”

“Mr. Taylor, I have no idea what you’re talking about and I don’t know a Pamela Walker. We were just told to take you into custody.”

“No, no. You need to call Walker.”

“Mr. Taylor, we’re not calling anyone. We’re taking you to the federal prosecutor in San Diego. You may want to call your lawyer when we get there.”

Benny Mark was crying. His wife was, too.

In about five minutes they were going to wheel him into an operating room and whack off his foot and part of his leg.

The gunshot wound in his foot had stopped bleeding by the time he got to the fishing resort in Canada and he had figured that with time his foot would heal completely. Betty Ann kept bugging him to go to a doctor but he had ignored her.

Then his foot got all puffy and streaks of red appeared up his leg. Then his foot turned kinda purple—but he figured it was just bruising from all the trauma.

Then his foot began to turn black and it started to stink.

It didn’t seem fair. As far as he knew, all the people he had killed had been criminals and the world wasn’t going to miss them at all. Well, there had been that one guy in St. Louis—the guy he’d shot by mistake because he had the same name as the target—but hell, everybody makes mistakes.

Whatever the case, fair or not, it looked like his days as a hit man were over. Who was going to hire a killer with an artificial foot?

But then he thought: a guy with a plastic foot and maybe a cane? They’d never see him coming.

Porter Henry tossed a ham and cheese sandwich and a yellow legal pad into his battered briefcase.

In half an hour, Marty Taylor was going to be interrogated by a federal prosecutor regarding his role in Conrad Diller’s attempt to sell classified technology to Iran. More importantly, Taylor had been dumb enough to say he was willing to testify against Yuri Markelov if he got some sort of deal from the feds. He hoped the fool hadn’t talked too much about Yuri.

Marty Taylor’s chief counsel had called Henry an hour earlier and asked him to attend the meeting and sit second chair if the case went to trial. He said he wanted Henry’s help because he knew the background
on Diller and had dealt with the prosecutor before. But Porter Henry figured the real reason Marty’s lawyer had called him was because he was a partner in a white-shoe law firm that dealt mostly with financial matters and had little experience representing criminals.

He wasn’t worried about getting Marty off regarding Diller. The feds had no evidence that Marty had been involved in Diller’s trip to Iran, and with Diller missing and Andy Bollinger dead, they wouldn’t get any. More worrisome was Marty’s ties to other crimes Yuri might have committed. Even if Yuri had forced Marty to cooperate in his illegal schemes, the fact still remained that he should have called the authorities and told them what Yuri was doing. And Marty’s stockholders—they would be screaming for Marty’s blood if it turned out Yuri had been stealing money from the company and that Marty had done nothing to stop him.

So he didn’t know how things were going to turn out for Marty, but there was one thing he did know: this was going to be his last case. He would charge young Mr. Taylor an outrageous amount of money to defend him, get his money up front, and if he could get him off that would be nice.

And if he couldn’t, who cared?

After he had received the call from Uncle Lev—the call that he hadn’t answered—Yuri hadn’t been quite sure what to do.

He had to assume that Mikhail had talked to Lev, and that Mikhail had told him everything—about how the FBI was pursuing him because of Diller and the dead spy, and the bungled raid on Rulon Tully. So Lev would be angry. Dangerously angry.

But he had thought,
Maybe the situation is still salvageable
. He could tell Lev he was selling Marty Taylor’s possessions and that the sale would gross millions, which he would, of course, share with his uncle. He called Andrei to see where they had taken Taylor, and Andrei informed him that Taylor had escaped and Stephan was dead. He called the sales agents next and they all told him the same thing: that
Taylor had stopped the sales and they wouldn’t proceed even if Yuri did have power of attorney.

He knew then the only option he had was to run.

He checked into a hotel so he would be off the street in case either the cops or Lev was looking for him. Tomorrow, after he’d gotten some sleep, he would drive to Canada. He was afraid to fly because airport security might already have his picture and be looking for him. But if he could get across the border, there was a man he knew in Vancouver who could smuggle him onto a cargo ship, and then he would … hell, he didn’t know what he would do. All he knew was that it was time to leave San Diego and get as far away from Lev as he could.

Then he got very drunk.

The next morning, he walked out to his car hungover, tired, and depressed. He keyed the remote to open the car door and at that moment heard a foot scrape on the concrete behind him. He turned. It was Ivan.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. Then he thought of another question. “How did you know where to find me?”