House Odds Read Online Free

he’d gone to work for John Mahoney—and then did things for the man that he couldn’t put down on a résumé. Nonetheless, DeMarco thought of himself as a lawyer and it always pissed him off that Mahoney didn’t.
    “What they’re doing right now,” Mahoney said, “aside from charging me six hundred bucks an hour, is chucking big paper rocks at the SEC to slow this whole thing down. And if the case goes to trial, they’ll tie Kiser into knots. But it shouldn’t ever get to trial, because Molly didn’t do it.”
    He didn’t bother to add: and it’s your damn job to prove it.
    Mahoney brooded for a moment, finished his drink, and set the glass down hard on his desk. “Someone’s framed my daughter, goddamnit. And when I find the son of a bitch . . .”
    “I don’t think she was framed,” DeMarco said.
    “What! Are you saying . . .”
    “Boss, you don’t frame someone with half a million bucks.”
    “What the hell are you talking about?”
    “I’m saying that if somebody wanted to frame Molly, I don’t think they would have thrown away half a million to set the hook. Maybe a few grand, but not half a million. I think there’s one of two things going on here. One, somebody’s using Molly for cover or . . .”
    “For cover?”
    “Yeah. Somebody—maybe somebody in her company—was trying to make a killing in the market just like Kiser thinks, but they did it using Molly’s identity so if anything went wrong she’d get the blame.”
    Mahoney nodded. “And two?”
    “Two is somebody’s out to get you. To get you, somebody might be willing to write off five hundred grand.”
    Mahoney was silent for a moment; it hadn’t occurred to him that he might be the target. “Maybe you’re right,” he finally said. “So you need to get your ass out there and find out what’s going on. You pull out all the stops on this one, Joe. You do whatever you gotta do. You understand?”
    What Mahoney meant was that if DeMarco had to break a few laws, Mahoney wouldn’t care. DeMarco also knew that if he got caught breaking those laws that Mahoney wouldn’t care about that either.
    DeMarco looked out at the protesters again. Their signs were waving back and forth in unison like they were singing Michael Row the Boat Ashore or some similar Kumbaya-ish chant. Maybe, DeMarco thought, he’d stop working for Mahoney and set himself up as a protest facilitator. All these folks would have to do was step off the bus and there he’d be with permits and face paint and signs emblazoned with clever, rhyming slogans. For a little extra, he’d provide straw-stuffed dummies to hang in effigy—and all the dummies would resemble Mahoney.
    * * *
    Gus Amato drove from Atlantic City to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where Gleason lived. He didn’t like to fly—crammed into a seat built for pencil necks and twelve-year-olds, surrounded by people always coughing and sneezing—and he really didn’t like to travel unarmed.
    Gleason’s place was even worse than he’d expected: a seven-hundred-square-foot shack that hadn’t seen paint in twenty years, the front lawn a tangled field of dandelions and weeds, and crap just strewn everywhere: beer bottles, an old toilet, a kid’s bike missing a wheel, a rust-covered barbecue tipped over on its side. The only thing that wasn’t broken or rusting was a four-door Ford 250 parked in front of the house. On a trailer attached to the Ford was an old fourteen-foot Boston Whaler, and locked to the transom of the boat was a big, shiny Mercury outboard.
    The man who came to the door was in his sixties. The little hair he had was thin and gray, and he had an enormous, bloated belly and the bloodshot eyes of a major boozehound. He was wearing a white wife-beater undershirt that showed off flabby arms and blue jeans stained in several places with rust-colored spots that Gus suspected were dried fish blood. He was six-two, which made him five inches taller than Gus, but the last thing Gus was worried