Dead on Arrival (10 page)

As DeMarco lay in bed he could hear the shower running – and the voice of a content woman singing in the shower.

Could life possibly get any better than this?

He’d been in Key West for five days, and for once his vacation had been exactly as advertised. The daytime temperature had been a balmy 80 degrees, the breezes had been mild, it hadn’t rained once, and the sea was as warm as tepid bath water. His second night in Key West he’d been sitting in a bar on Duval Street, looking out at the ocean. He’d had swordfish for dinner and the bartender had just cleared away his plate when a woman in her late thirties sat down one bar stool over from his.

He had glanced at her and then, because she looked so good, he immediately did a ham actor’s double take.
Oh, great
, he’d thought,
that was really suave
. He sat there, staring down into his drink, desperately trying to think of something clever to say, something other than
How do you like Key West? Isn’t the view
great? Isn’t the weather wonderful?
But his brain chose that moment to vapor-lock; he couldn’t produce even a passable, much less original, opening line. And then she said, ‘Hi, my name’s Ellie. Isn’t the weather wonderful here?’ It didn’t sound bad at all when she said it.

Ellie Myers was cute and funny and bright. She had dark hair and bright blue eyes and a light-up-the-room smile that made little dimples in her cheeks. She also had legs that looked very good in shorts, though a bit on the pale side, as if she too resided somewhere far north of Florida. DeMarco soon found out that she was a teacher from Iowa, divorced, no kids, and, like DeMarco, had just decided to escape the grim midwestern winter to enjoy the sun. They wondered together if there was something wrong with them, going on vacation by themselves, and soon concluded that there wasn’t. They went to bed together that night and for the three nights that followed. And they still had one night left, thank you, Jesus.

They had been snorkeling and had taken sunset walks on the beach. They had sat naked in a Jacuzzi, even though it had been too hot to do so. They drank too much and ate too much and made love – but not too much. And DeMarco never once thought about John Mahoney or Reza Zarif. He barely thought about his ex-wife and his asshole of a cousin.

He did make one call to New York the day he arrived in Florida and found out that Danny’s case wouldn’t go to trial for six months. DeMarco wondered if Danny’s boss was hoping the witness would die during that time or lose her memory, or maybe he was thinking about
forcing
her to lose her memory. DeMarco wondered – but he didn’t care.

Ellie came out of the bathroom. Her hair was uncombed – wet and tangled – but she was already dressed in shorts and a T-shirt that she’d bought in a tourist shop. They’d been living together for three days but she still didn’t feel comfortable dressing in front of him. The T-shirt had a grinning alligator and a pink palm tree on it, and there were glittery things on the palm tree’s fronds; it was okay to wear T-shirts like that when you were in Key West.

She smiled at him and said good morning. He smiled back and said he’d already called room service, and coffee and croissants were on the way. She turned around to rummage in her purse for her comb, and DeMarco admired her backside and wondered if he could talk her into getting back into bed. He had concluded a long time ago that there should be some way to stop time and cause all relationships to stay forever at the four-day point.

At that moment there was a knock on the door. Ellie opened it and took the tray from the room service guy and overtipped him because she was feeling so good. She placed the tray on the dresser and handed DeMarco his coffee. Then she glanced down at the paper that had been delivered with the coffee.

‘Oh, those bastards!’ she said when she saw the headline:
TERRORIST SHOT ON D.C. SHUTTLE
.

Ellie went shopping, to buy Florida trinkets for her nephews and her sister and all the other poor souls she knew who were freezing back in Iowa. She asked DeMarco if he wanted to go with her but he’d begged off. He enjoyed shopping almost as much as having his teeth extracted. So instead of trailing behind Ellie, walking from store to store, bored out of his skull, he sat in a lounge chair and read the morning paper. It was the first time he’d looked at one since he’d been in Florida.

He read the three articles on the hijacking attempt, skipped the editorials on Broderick’s bill, and then, because he hadn’t been keeping his ear to the ground as directed, he called Jerry Hansen at Homeland Security to see if there was anything new going on with Reza Zarif. Jerry wasn’t in. Too bad. He’d tried – and he wasn’t going to try anymore. Hassan Zarif was just going to have to accept that his brother had done what he did for the reasons given by the boys in the Bureau.

So, beach umbrella shading his form, a drink in his hand, he picked up the novel he’d been trying to finish ever since coming to Florida. So far the novel had taken a backseat to sex, but maybe today he’d get past the sixth chapter. He’d just opened the book and started to flip through it to find the last page he’d read when his cell phone rang. He figured it was Ellie. She had said she would call him after she’d jump-started the island’s economy and tell him where to meet her for lunch.

‘Hel-lo,’ he said cheerfully into the phone.

‘Where the hell are you?’ Mahoney said.

Aw, shit!

‘I’m in Florida. Don’t you
remember
?’ DeMarco said. He could hear the whiny desperation in his voice. ‘I told you I had this week off.’

‘I don’t remember that,’ Mahoney said, ‘but you need to get your ass back here. I want you to check out this guy that tried to hijack the shuttle. Broderick’s goddamn bill reported out of committee yesterday, and the Senate’s gonna vote on it in two friggin’ weeks.’

‘I don’t understand,’ DeMarco said. ‘Is there some connection between the hijacking and Reza Zarif?’

‘Goddammit!’ Mahoney screamed. ‘How the hell would I know? That’s what I want
you
to find out.’

Rather than argue with Mahoney, DeMarco said, ‘I understand.’
I understand
is a really good noncommittal reply.

DeMarco had asked himself more than once why he still worked for Mahoney. He had graduated from law school the same year his mafia father had been killed, which made employment in any decent law firm on the eastern seaboard problematic. But then his godmother, his dear Aunt Connie, came to his rescue. She and Mahoney had had an affair when they were both fifty pounds lighter, and she pressed the speaker to give DeMarco a job, which he did, and which DeMarco gratefully accepted at the time. But why was he still with the bastard all these years later? The answer to that question, unfortunately, was because he had no marketable skills. When you’re a lawyer who’s never practiced law, a man who acts part time as a bagman for a politician, and when you can’t even put the politician’s name down on a résumé as your former boss, your career options become somewhat limited. And at this point, he was heavily invested in a federal pension, possibly the only good thing about working for Mahoney.

But, pension and future career prospects aside, there was no way DeMarco was leaving Florida that day. He’d leave tomorrow, meaning he’d cut his vacation one day short, and the only reason he was doing that was because Ellie was returning to Iowa tomorrow. As far as he was concerned, there was no urgent need to look into this hijacking no matter what Mahoney said. There’d been nothing to indicate that the Bureau was wrong about Reza Zarif, and therefore no rational reason to think that there was any connection between Zarif and this nut who’d tried to hijack the shuttle. Or maybe a better reason for not rushing back to Washington was this: What in hell did Mahoney think DeMarco could do that ten thousand FBI agents weren’t already doing?

If Mahoney called later in the day to see if he was back in D.C., DeMarco planned to lie to the inconsiderate shit. He’d tell him he’d been on his way but a massive accident on the bridge from Key West to the mainland had caused him to miss his plane, or that all the flights out of Miami had been delayed because security was so tight, or that …

Aw, screw it. He’d make up something when the time came.

He watched the boy for three days before he approached him.

The first day that he followed him, he saw the boy enter the public school he attended, but three hours later he left it. He was holding books in his hand when he left the school, just as he had been when he’d left his home that morning. He wondered why the boy was leaving school so early in the day.

The boy walked a block from the school – but not in the direction of his home – put his books down in an alley behind a Dumpster, and covered them with old newspapers. Then he began to walk.

He appeared to walk aimlessly, no destination in mind. He would stop occasionally and sit at a bus stop or on a park bench or on a stoop. But he would just sit, looking down at his feet, not even paying attention to the people around him. The boy was unhappy and something was weighing heavily on his spirit. This was good.

The next day when the boy left his apartment building, he put his schoolbooks down behind another Dumpster, this one right near his apartment, and began walking again. For five hours he either walked or sat. He did nothing, participated in no activity, spoke to no one, ate nothing, then returned to his apartment, picked up the schoolbooks he’d hidden, and went into the building where he and his mother lived. He had obviously decided to stop going to school but didn’t want his mother to know.

On his fourth day in Cleveland, two things happened: a man, a Muslim, tried to hijack a plane in New York and that was the day he approached the boy.

He needed to find out more about the hijacking, but from what he’d heard it appeared that his brethren had helped the hijacker. Unfortunately, just as
he
had failed in Baltimore, whoever had assisted the man in New York had also failed. But not completely.

What Sheikh Osama wanted was for the faithful who lived in Western countries to rise up against the infidels. If outsiders attacked, as they had on 9/11, people would die, and the cause would be advanced, but what was happening now was far better. In London, in Madrid, in Paris, all the recent attacks had involved Muslims who
lived
in those countries – and that was important. First, the security forces of those countries, which were already stretched thin, were now forced to spend more time looking inward, at their own citizens. And this provided the second advantage. By investigating their own citizens, they alienated them. People already scorned because of their skin color and their religion were now harassed by the police, detained, their houses searched – and sometimes, as had been the case with the boy’s father, their lives were destroyed. The fact that there had been two back-to-back attacks on Washington committed by Americans … Well, even though the attacks had failed, they clearly demonstrated that God listened to Sheikh Osama.

When he approached, the boy was sitting on the ground, on a small grassy bluff overlooking the Cuyahoga River. He had come to this place twice before; he seemed to like watching the river as it flowed away from this ugly town. He sat down next to the boy. The boy glanced over at him but didn’t say anything, and looked back down at the river. He greeted the boy in the language of the boy’s father and wished God’s blessings on him. He could tell the boy was surprised to be addressed this way, but still he didn’t respond.

He had been thinking for four days about what he would say to the boy during their first meeting. He had been thinking that he would begin by saying how sorry he was for what had happened to the boy’s father and then lie to him and tell him how something similar had happened to someone he had loved. But he didn’t want to begin with a lie, and he still had not come to a decision when he sat down next to the boy. And then God told him how to begin.

He said, ‘What do you think about this man who tried to hijack that airplane this morning?’ And the boy, though he was still looking at the river and not at him, said, ‘I think it’s too bad he was killed before he could do what he planned.’

There are times when you meet someone and you have an instant connection. It was that way between him and the boy. The boy, of course, needed a father – so he would become his father. Also his teacher, his brother, and his friend. He would become whatever he needed to become to make the boy his own.

He had found the boy on the Internet while hiding in Philadelphia. He had searched for tragedy, and there he was. The boy’s father had made the mistake of going home to see his dying mother in Pakistan and, through sheer coincidence, through sheer bad luck, he happened to be in his mother’s village at the same time that one of Osama’s warriors was passing through. The Pakistani spies who worked for the Americans relayed this information to the CIA, and when the man returned home he was detained and questioned. He was detained for three months before the FBI was finally satisfied that he had no connection with al-Qaeda – other than being a Muslim.

The boy’s father had had a weak heart to begin with, and the stress caused by his imprisonment worsened his condition. He had also owned a shoe repair business, and in the time he was in jail his business died like a plant that has not been watered. His wife, a simple woman who had never become acclimated to American life, was brought to the brink of a nervous breakdown from being questioned by the police and because of what was happening to her husband. And the boy, of course, was harassed by his schoolmates, all those Christians who had pretended to be his friends. Two months after being released from jail, the boy’s father had a heart attack and died. The boy’s mother, who now survived on a small Social Security check, had to sell her home and move into a small apartment in a dirty part of a dirty city. The boy told him later that his mother was still so stunned by what had happened that she barely spoke.

He put a hand on the boy’s thin shoulder and said, ‘You haven’t eaten all day. Let’s go somewhere and get some tea and some food. Let’s go talk about your father. Let’s talk about who you are.’