Troubleshooters

Maria bit her lip. Then she looked at Ray and back to me.
She took the card with a hurried, nervous little motion and scampered back, closing her apartment door. Several locks clicked shut.
I didn’t say anything else. I walked out of the building. I was halfway across the lot, heading back to Will’s place, when I heard quick footsteps coming behind me. I turned with one hand close to my Sig, but relaxed when I recognized Maria.
She stopped in front of me and said, “I s-saw something.”
I nodded and waited. “There were some odd sounds, late last night. Like . . . like thumps. And a little while later, a car rolled in. It pulled up to the building across the lot, and a man got out and left it running, like he wasn’t worried about it being stolen.”
“Did you recognize him?” I asked.
Maria shook her head. “But he was big. Almost as big as Ray, but he . . . You know, he moved better. He was in shape. And he was wearing an expensive suit.”
“What else can you tell me about him?” I asked. Maria shrugged.
“Not . . . not anything, really. I saw him come out again, right away. Then he got into the car and drove away. I didn’t see any plates or anything. I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” I said quietly. “Thank you.”
She nodded and turned to scurry back toward her building. Then she stopped and looked back at me. “I don’t know if it matters,” she said, “but the man had one of those army haircuts.”
I stiffened a little. “Do you remember what color hair?”
“Red,” she said. “Like, bright orange-red.” She swallowed. “If it matters.”
It mattered—but I didn’t want to scare her, so I nodded and smiled, then said, “Thank you, Maria. Seriously.”
She tried to smile back and did pretty well. Then she looked around her, as if uncomfortable standing in so much open space, and hurried back to her building.
A big guy in a suit with a bright red crew cut—it was almost word for word the short description in the notes of the file that CPD kept for a man named Hendricks.
Hendricks was a former college football player. He weighed upward of three hundred pounds, none of it excess. He had been under suspicion for several mysterious disappearances, mostly of criminal figures who seemed to have earned his boss’s displeasure. And his boss had, presumably, sent him to Will and Georgia’s building late last night.
But why?
To get an answer, I was going to have to talk to Hendricks’s boss.
I had to go see “Gentleman” John Marcone.

Side Jobs, Aftermath, Page 361-362


I kept my heart on lockdown. The cocky bastard’s tone made me want to scream and tear out his eyes. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d rattled me. “I’m here for another reason.”
“Oh?” he asked politely.
Too politely. He knew. He’d known why I was coming since before I came through the door. I stopped and played the past several hours back in my imagination, before I spotted where I’d contacted his net.
“Maria,” I said. “She was one of yours.”
Hendricks eyed Gard.
 She rolled her eyes and withdrew a twenty-dollar bill from her jacket pocket. She passed it to the big man.
Hendricks pocketed it with a small, complacent smile.
Marcone took no evident note of the interaction. “Yes. The superintendent you met had been providing the means for some of my competitors to operate. Maria was observing his business partners, so that we could track them back to their source and encourage them to operate elsewhere.”
I stared at him, hard. “She just let Ray treat her like that?”
“And was well paid to do it,” Marcone replied. “Admittedly, she was looking forward to closing the contract.”
Maria hadn’t been a broken little mouse. Hell, she was one of Marcone’s troubleshooters. It was a widely used euphemism for hitters in Marcone’s outfit. Everyone knew it was the troubleshooter’s job to identify trouble within the organization—and shoot it.

Side Jobs, Aftermath, Page 368-369