Free House Justice by Mike Lawson

DeMarco—or, to be accurate, the U.S. Treasury—paid for his services. Emma was different. She wouldn’t take money but she would demand to know why she should help DeMarco and, in particular, she would want to know why Whitmore would give DeMarco—a complete stranger —the name of her source. So he told her the truth, that Whitmore was blackmailing Mahoney, and that he was trying to identify her source in an under-the-table way so Whitmore could get out of jail.
    “I’m not going to help you get her out of jail,” Emma said. “That woman should be shot.”
    “This isn’t about getting her out of jail,” DeMarco said. “It’s about exposing the rat in the CIA who gave her the information in the first place.”
    Emma didn’t respond.
    “Look, all I want you to do is find out what Crosby’s job is at Langley. I’m just curious about the guy and it won’t kill you to make a phone call.”
    “One phone call,” Emma said. But he could tell that at this point she was curious about Mr. Crosby herself.
    He gave her Crosby’s description in case more than one Derek Crosby worked at Langley.
    Tony walked out of the Hyatt, singing Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore” to himself.
     
    It had been a
damn
fine day—he had almost two thousand bucks in his wallet. Five hundred from that guy DeMarco, one fifty from a man who said his wife was gonna divorce him if he didn’t get tickets to
The Lion King
, over a hundred from out-of-town schmucks who just wanted to know where to go for this and that—and thereal prize: a grand from a private dick who needed access to a room registered to Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Tony didn’t know what the detective did in the room—he suspected he might have installed a video camera—and he didn’t really care. It wasn’t his problem that people named Smith kept screwing people they weren’t married to.
    So what should he do with the money? His old lady had been bitching because the TV was on the fritz, and his girlfriend was bitching because he wouldn’t take her to Atlantic City. With the money in his wallet, he figured he might be able to make them both happy for a change. Yeah right, like
that
was possible. But he knew a guy who could get him a fell-off-the-truck deal on a Sony, and if he could get a cheap room in A.C., then maybe…
    “That’s a gun pressed against your spine. It has a silencer on it. If it doesn’t kill you, you’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of your life. Now walk down the alley.”
    Oh, fuck me. Why today of all days? Why did this have to happen when I’ve got so damn much money on me
?
    “Hey, look,” Tony said, “my money’s in my wallet. Come on. Just take it. Don’t hurt me.”
    The guy prodded him in the back and Tony started down the alley. He didn’t want to go into that damn alley.
    “Please. My wallet’s in my back pocket, the left-hand side. Just pull it out right now.”
    The guy didn’t say anything. He just kept pushing Tony along. He hadn’t seen the guy’s face but he sounded big—and foreign. He had some kind of accent.
    They reached a Dumpster that had three big black garbage bags on top, and the man pushed Tony behind the Dumpster so they were hidden by the bags. Tony was facing a brick wall and he was eye level with a line of graffiti that read:
Jesus Loves You
. His first thought was,
If He loves me so much, why is there a gun stuck in my back
? But his next thought was that he hadn’t been to confession in years and the last time he’d been to Mass was his nephew’s wedding. He was going straight to hell if this guy killed him.
    “You talked to a man named DeMarco today. At five, you gave him a piece of paper. I want to know what you talked about and what was on the paper.”
    Maybe Jesus did love him. The guy wasn’t a mugger.
    Tony told him everything he wanted to know: that DeMarco was trying to find a witness who could place a man named Derek Crosby in the hotel with a reporter named Sandra Whitmore on a