Free House Justice by Mike Lawson Page B

time?”
    “No, but could I possibly purchase a cigarette from you?” the florist said. “Just one.”
    As DeMarco was walking down the Jetway at Reagan National, he turned his cell phone back on and saw he’d missed a call from Emma. He went to the nearest bar, ordered a beer, and called her.
     
    “Derek Crosby works at the CIA,” Emma said, “just as Neil told you.”
    “Yeah, I know, but what does he do there? Anything related to Iran?”
    “I didn’t finish,” Emma said. “Derek Crosby is five foot seven, bald, and wears glasses so thick he should be able to see the canals on Mars. And he’s the only Derek Crosby at the agency.”
    “Uh-oh,” DeMarco said.
    “Yeah, uh-oh. And he has nothing to do with Iran. He’s an analyst in the Cuban section, which means he probably monitors the cigar and sugar markets, Cuba being the big military threat that it is.”
    “Aw, shit,” DeMarco said.

Chapter 12
     
    When Yuri called, Ivan Dyachenko was in Escondido, a suburb of San Diego, eating breakfast with his Mexican mistress and their two children. He would eat dinner that night with his Russian wife and his other three children.
     
    Ivan loved children.
    Yuri told him what he wanted him to do and exactly how he wanted the job done. When he finished, Ivan tried to tell him that he could use a little extra cash because his wife’s car had broken down and one of the kids needed… but Yuri hung up. The man was a heartless bastard.
    Ivan returned to the kitchen, almost tripping over a pudgy baby boy clad only in a diaper, crawling around on the floor. He picked the child up and bussed him on his bare stomach, which was not easy considering the smell coming from the little tyke’s diaper. His mistress asked if he wanted more huevos rancheros, more sausage, more juice, anything at all. When he said no, she got a look of concern on her pretty, plump face, as if worried that he might waste away if he stopped eating after his second helping.
    People often asked Ivan if he’d been a weight lifter when he was younger and he understood why: he was a colossus with a head the size of a basketball and, like all the great Russian lifters, he had a big hard gut and massive arms and thighs. He wore a goatee, which he thought made his face look slimmer, but his Russian friends still toldhim that he was the spitting image of Andrey Chemerkin, who had won the weight-lifting gold at the Atlanta games in ’96. But Ivan had never lifted weights. In fact, the heaviest thing he could recall ever lifting was a Ukrainian who couldn’t have weighed more than seventy kilos.
    Ivan had thrown him off a roof.
    Conrad Diller’s place in Del Mar was a gorgeous white stucco house with an ocean view and a Spanish tile roof. It had a three-car garage, the lawn was professionally manicured, and there were majestic palm trees on the grounds. Ivan just shook his head. He knew he would never own a home like this one.
     
    Ivan rented the crummy two-bedroom apartment for his mistress in Escondido, the appliances so old they barely worked. He had to set off bug bombs every month to kill the roaches, something he hated to do because he was afraid the insect killer could affect the children. He and his wife lived in an equally dismal place in a run-down building near the Gaslamp district in San Diego, although he paid no rent for it because Yuri had an arrangement with the man who owned the building. But that was the only perk his job provided. He owned no real estate, had no pension plan or health insurance, and his income was unpredictable. He was supposed to receive a percentage of whatever the organization made but his salary was inconsistent and seemed to vary with Yuri’s moods. It had occurred to him more than once that he would have been better off driving a truck or working on the docks as a stevedore but how could he get such a job? What would he put down on a résumé? Education: none. Skills: strangulation. References: only Yuri, who