House Secrets Read Free Page B

was, he wouldn’t be giving him chickenshit assignments.”
    “Shit. So now I have talk to this Frank guy to find out what Terry was working on.”
    “Well, unless you got a hotline to hell, you can forget that.”
    “What?”
    “Frank’s dead.”
    “Dead? When did he die?”
    “A week ago, about two days after Terry.”
    “Jesus,” DeMarco said. “Was there anything mysterious about the way he died?”
    Reggie took his time finishing his last drink as DeMarco waited impatiently for his answer. Finally, he said, “Frank was sixty-three years old. He was five-seven, weighed two-fifty, and smoked unfiltered Camels. He thought high cholesterol was the name of a race-horse. The only mystery is that Frank didn’t have a coronary when he was forty-three.”

Chapter 4
    “Are you feeling lucky, punk?” DeMarco muttered, his lips twisted into an Eastwood snarl—then he fired the gun, a .357 magnum.
    “Stop doing that,” Emma said.
    DeMarco ignored her and looked at the man-shaped paper target. There were five holes in it, and although no hole was closer than six inches to any other hole, all of his shots had hit the punk.
    “Well, pilgrim, what do you think of that,” he said to Emma, switching from Eastwood to Wayne.
    “I think you’re jerking the trigger instead of squeezing it,” Emma said.
    “Let’s try the Glock now,” DeMarco said. “I’m gonna use the two-handed, cop’s grip this time.”
    “I give up,” Emma said.
    Emma was tall and slim. She wore her hair short, and it was colored a blondish shade with some gray mixed in. Her profile was regal, like a Norse queen on a coin, and her eyes were light blue, cool, and cynical. She was at least ten years older than DeMarco, maybe fifteen, but in such good shape that she would have run him into the ground had he ever been dumb enough to challenge her to a race. She was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved navy-blue pullover, and black Reeboks. Clipped to her belt was a holster and in the holster was an automatic with a worn grip.
    DeMarco had decided it was time to learn something about firearms. He was a firm believer in gun control—meaning that the only people who should be allowed to have guns were cops and soldiers, and himself, of course, if he thought he ever needed one—but a few months ago he came close to being killed because he didn’t know where the safety was on a weapon. So though he had no immediate plans to buy a gun, and hoped sincerely that he would never need one in the future, he figured a little basic education couldn’t hurt. And there was another thing: he thought it’d be kinda fun to shoot a few guns, which it was.
    So under Emma’s less than patient tutelage, he fired three weapons that day: a 9mm Glock; a .22 automatic that Emma said was the firearm often preferred by professional killers; and the .357 magnum. He had wanted to shoot the Glock and the .357 because those were the guns they always mentioned in the movies.
    DeMarco put a fresh target on the target-hanger, sent it down-range twenty yards, and picked up the Glock. He liked the way it felt. He spread his legs in what he considered to be a shooter’s stance, gripped the gun in both hands, said “Freeze, asshole”—and pulled the trigger six times. When he finished there were six holes in the target, three of them bunched fairly close together in the paper guy’s left shoulder. Other than the fact that he’d been aiming for the heart, not bad, he thought. Emma thought differently.
    “Joe,” she said, “if you’re ever attacked, and if you have a choice between a bat and a gun, use the bat.”
    “Well, let’s see you do better,” DeMarco said.
    Now why in the hell had he said that? It must have been all the gun smoke in the air, the fumes short-circuiting those brain cells that caused him to actually think before speaking.
    Emma was now retired but she had worked for the DIA—the Defense Intelligence Agency. She was, however, a person who rarely, and then