He grunted an unimpressed laugh. “What you wanna buy?” he asked.
“Oh,” Reeder said innocently, “did you want to deal right out here in the open? On your doorstep?”
Their host scowled and waved them inside, stepping aside for them.
The place was a loft, with an office area just inside, a metal desk with computer off to the right and a warehouse of goods to the left — three tall rows of shelves arranged by product: bags of weed, handguns, and cell phones. Beyond was a modern kitchen, like something from a Home Depot showroom, and to the left a spacious home theater area with overstuffed black-leather chairs and a couch facing a massive flat-screen, below which a low-riding doorless cabinet held electronics gear, two massive black speakers bookending the big screen. Down on the M Street end was an elaborate wall mural of classic rap and hip hop, interrupted by two doors — bathroom and bedroom, probably.
The place reeked of weed. A door in the mural opened and a beautiful young naked black girl with a retro ’fro leaned there and called out sleepily, “Come back to bed, Markie — your baby’s lonely.”
DeMarcus shrugged at them. “Don’t mind Sheila.”
Reeder was looking in Sheila’s direction; he didn’t seem to mind one bit.
“Bidness!” DeMarcus called back, and Sheila’s sigh could be heard all through the loft before she shut herself poutily back in.
They remained near the door in the office area as DeMarcus asked, “So, Joe. What you wanna buy?”
“Nothing.”
“Nada?”
“Not a thing. I want to rent something.”
“What the hell you wanna rent?”
“This loft.”
And Reeder handed the wad of bills toward DeMarcus.
“Like hell,” their host said, his brow wrinkled. Maybe he was closer to thirty, she thought. “I got a bidness to run.”
“That’s why this fistful of money isn’t really ten grand.”
“If it ain’t ten grand, then get you white asses outa my crib.”
“It’s fifty.”
“Say what?”
“It’s fifty K, DeMarcus. You old enough to remember when somebody won something, and a guy showed up with a giant damn check for them? Well, nobody uses checks anymore. You’ll just have to settle for cash. Here. Count it.”
DeMarcus, looking a little dazed, took the wad and counted. It was hundred dollar bills. Presumably five hundred of them.
Reeder waited until DeMarcus’s nod indicated the tally was right.
Reeder said, “There’s a string attached.”
Their host scowled again. “Would be.”
“You have to use that to take little Sheila someplace exotic for a week. Belize maybe. Nassau’s nice. When you come back, I’ll have another fifty for you.”
DeMarcus thumbed through the bills; he looked stunned. “A hundred K to rent the place for a week.”
“That’s right.”
“What for?”
“Why, are you afraid we might do something illegal? DeMarcus, the green rents the place and comes with no explanations. You have a passport?”
“Yeah, but, uh...”
“How about Sheila baby? She have a passport?”
“Yeah, we did Cancun last year.”
“Long-term relationship, huh? That’s good, DeMarcus. That’s healthy.”
“Reeder, I gotta know—”
“That’s not healthy. One week, the out-of-country dream spot of your choice.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Now?”
“Well... soon as you’ve packed, and broken it to Sheila. She’s not going to mind.”
“But I... man, I got a damn bidness to run.”
“Why, do you generally pull down a hundred K in a week? You send out word to your customer base, e-mail or text or whatever, that you’ll be away for a week. Anybody comes around, we won’t answer the door.”
“Maybe... maybe I should go pack now.”
“No maybe about it.”
DeMarcus started off, then turned and said, “I don’t really wanna know any more than this?”
“That’s right, you don’t.”
DeMarcus headed for Sheila’s door at the other end of the loft, but Reeder’s voice stopped him. “Consider part of that hundred K payment for any burner phones I might need. If I take any weapons, we can settle up later.”
“You can have up to five nines,” DeMarcus called back, “on the house,” and then slipped in the bedroom.
Their host and his lady friend had flown in an hour, but the weed smell remained. Rogers found some Febreze under the kitchen sink and got rid of it as best she could.
Using a burner phone from DeMarcus’s seemingly endless supply, Reeder rented a car to be delivered to a restaurant on L Street a couple of blocks north.
“We’ll walk over there together,” he said to her.
They were each in an overstuffed black-leather chair.
Rogers shook her head. “No need. Hey, you may have forgotten, but I’m a trained FBI agent. Me with your famous face is way too conspicuous.”
He reluctantly agreed.
“When the car gets there,” he said, “you drop the driver off at the rental agency, then go to Miggie’s, pick him up, and have him bring as much gear as he can carry.”
“Mig’ll work from here?”
Reeder nodded. “No one’s going to look for him at this address. We’ll keep the rest of the task force out on the street while we get things done here.”
“Mig should bring some clothes, too, I assume.”
“Unless he’s into Redskins and Georgetown threads, ’cause probably that’s all DeMarcus has. We’ll get some of your things when we pick Kevin up. I can cover my needs from some neighborhood bodega and the tailor downstairs.”
“You can wash what you have on, too. This place has everything. It’s the damn Batcave with burner phones.”
Reeder gave her half a smile. “DeMarcus is a smart cookie, as we ancient types say. He stays under the radar, and in the ten years I’ve known him, never served a day inside.”
“Why d’you never bust him?”
“His crimes aren’t federal. Anyway, he’s a resource. Like the CIA guys say, an asset... You better get going, Patti. That rental’s due in fifteen minutes. Oh, and grab one of those nine millimeters of Marcus’s on your way out.”
“Come on, Joe — I already have my service weapon.”
“Yeah. And it can be traced.”
“The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.”
Eleven
Anne Nichols, going up in her apartment building’s elevator, knew she owed her mother a phone call. Despite the fresh look of her light blue silk blouse and black flared slacks, the African American FBI agent was dead tired, and wanted nothing more than to get inside her apartment, maybe take a detour to the shower, then crawl between the sheets ASAP.
Nichols and her mother, a Chicago policewoman, usually talked at least once a week. But it had been almost two weeks now, and she was feeling guilty.
For almost a decade, she and her mom had been each other’s entire immediate family — her daddy, a CTA bus driver, came home one night and fell asleep in his recliner, never to wake up again. And her older brother, Trevon, died in Iraq. His framed Purple Heart was still on Mom’s mantle.
So Nichols felt a responsibility to keep in touch, however busy she might be, and the Special Situations Task Force had been plenty busy over this past year. Still, she knew that her mom wouldn’t shame her for not calling, and would rarely call herself, for fear of intruding.