Free House Revenge by Mike Lawson Page B

were. She said she didn’t, but suggested he go to the basement where all the equipment was—the electrical panels, the furnace, that sort of stuff.
    He descended the staircase to the basement and because the landing lights weren’t lit, kept his hand on the rail to keep from tripping and breaking his neck. He found the McNultys in a room that had a scarred workbench with a vise on one end and hand tools hanging on hooks attached to a pegboard. They were eating hoagies and drinking Budweisers and he heard one of them say, “So one thing we gotta do is put in a new bulb.”
    DeMarco didn’t know what bulb they were talking about but later he would remember that one simple sentence.
    At that moment, they saw him standing in the doorway and one of them graciously said, “Who the fuck are you?”
    DeMarco smiled. “My name’s DeMarco. And I just wanted to see you two and let you know that you’re going to end up in jail if you keep harassing Elinore Dobbs.”
    Both men immediately stood up. They were wearing cargo shorts and tight white T-shirts and tennis shoes without socks. DeMarco knew their names were Roy and Ray, but didn’t know which one was which. He did notice that one of them was missing a piece of his right ear. They were shorter than DeMarco by a couple of inches but powerfully built, with long muscular arms and big hands with knobby knuckles clenched into fists.
    â€œWhat did you just say?” The one who spoke was the one with both ears intact.
    And DeMarco thought: Oh-oh.
    â€œGuys, I’m here to pass on a message. I work for Congressman John Mahoney and he sent me here to let you know that he’s got Elinore’s back. And I just finished talking to a superintendent in the BPD, and he’s got her back, too. He’s going to have his cops dropping in on her to make sure she’s okay. If you guys harass her or threaten her, you’re going to get arrested.”
    â€œArrested for what? Talking to her?” the other one said.
    DeMarco ignored the comment, because, for one reason, the guy had a point. They weren’t likely to get arrested unless there was a witness.
    â€œI’ve also got a lawyer looking into ways to sue you,” DeMarco said. “And I mean you personally , not Sean Callahan. The lawyers are going to show that you turning off the power is putting the people who live here at risk. If one of these old people dies of heatstroke because it’s a hundred degrees outside and you’ve intentionally disabled the air-conditioning system, they can put you in jail for manslaughter.”
    DeMarco didn’t have any lawyers looking into anything and had no idea if he could make a manslaughter charge stick if someone died—but he figured the McNultys knew even less about the law than he did.
    He’d expected that after his little speech the McNultys would deny that they were doing anything illegal—but that wasn’t the response he got. Instead the one with two good ears said, “We’re gonna kick your ass.”
    DeMarco realized at that moment that he should have listened to Superintendent O’Rourke. Like O’Rourke had said, these were two people with zeroimpulse control . They were very likely to beat him to a pulp and then, while he lay bleeding and broken on the floor, realize that they’d done something they shouldn’t have. But, as O’Rourke had warned him, they wouldn’t think about that until after they beat him half to death. It had been a mistake confronting them by himself, and even worse to do so down in the basement of the building.
    DeMarco thought about running, but didn’t. He had too much pride to run from these two. He did look to see if there was something he could use for a weapon and figured if he could make it over to the workbench there were a couple of big crescent wrenches that would do. The problem was that these long-armed apes were between