“In the kitchen. Second drawer on the right,” she says.
When we get in the bedroom, Laurie closes the door. With Marcus, Ugly, and his buddy now out of range, I become a little more assertive. “What the hell is going on?”
“Marcus said we can call the police in fifteen minutes. He’ll know what he needs to know by then.”
“What is he going to do?”
She shrugs. “Be Marcus. But he said he won’t kill them, and he won’t do anything on the carpet.”
I nod. “Well, that’s comforting.”
“Andy, those guys were trying to break into this house. They might well have killed you, or even us.”
She’s got a point. “Fifteen minutes?” I ask.
She nods. “Fifteen minutes.”
Except for the agonizing times I’ve felt waiting as verdicts were about to be delivered, these are the longest fifteen minutes I’ve ever spent in my life. I strain to hear any noises coming from downstairs, but it seems, as they used to say in Westerns, to be “quiet out there, too quiet.”
At the moment the fifteen minutes are up, I pick up the phone and call 911, reporting that two men have broken into my house. I then call Pete Stanton at home, and he agrees to come over. I think he gets some kind of perverse kick out of Marcus and doesn’t want to miss out on what is going to be an entertaining evening.
Laurie and I go downstairs. I don’t know about her, but I’m cringing at what I think I am about to see. The trio is not in the living room or den, and we find them in the kitchen. Ugly and his pal are sitting with Marcus at the kitchen table, drinking diet sodas. They look unhappy but are no longer tied together with the hose and look none the worse for wear. Marcus looks impassive, which is not exactly a stunning piece of news.
Five police cars pull up less than two minutes later. The process takes only a short time; I explain that these two guys tried to break in and that my bodyguard caught them and held them here so that they could be turned over to law enforcement.
Pete Stanton arrives just as the cops and their captives are leaving, and I let him listen with Laurie and me to the mysteries of the agonizing fifteen minutes, as told by Marcus Clark.
It takes almost an hour and a half for us to understand his cryptic grunts, but basically, the pair admitted to him that they were sent by Quintana and this time were told to “kick the shit out of the lawyer.” They also revealed that it was money that Quintana believes Kenny took from Preston that night, a total of four hundred thousand dollars. The night Preston died was drug receipt payment night, but Preston was killed before he could make that payment. My two visitors were supposed to find out with certainty whether I know where that money is.
Pete points out the obvious. “Quintana’s going to keep coming at you.”
“Why can’t you arrest him once these guys tell you what they told Marcus?”
Pete shakes his head like I just don’t get it. “They won’t talk to us. We’re not allowed to be as persuasive as Marcus. They go down for breaking and entering, then maybe serve a little time, maybe not. There’s no way they rat out Quintana.”
“Which means Quintana remains a big problem,” I say.
“I could kill him,” says Marcus.
Pete jumps up as if somebody shoved a hot poker up his ass. “I’m outta here,” he says, and walks out the door. He’s a friend, but he’s also a cop. He has no love for Quintana, but he’s not going to sit and listen while somebody plots his murder.
Once Pete leaves, Laurie says, “Don’t kill him, Marcus. That’s not going to solve anything.”
I’m torn here. I’m not usually one to countenance murder—after all, I’m an officer of the court—but in this case I’d be tempted to make an exception. To say the least, if I heard that Quintana died, it wouldn’t prompt me to sadly shake my head and say, “Boy, that really puts things into perspective, doesn’t it?”
“You need to protect Andy full-time,” Laurie continues.
I turn to Marcus and nod. “I want you on that wall. I need you on that wall.” Either he recognizes the line from A Few Good Men or he doesn’t; with Marcus it’s hard to tell. He grunts a couple of times and leaves.