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.
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