Deal with the Dead (17 page)

Russell didn’t know how to account for what happened next, might never be able to find the words, in fact. He was intelligent enough to know that the manner of his upbringing figured in, as he also realized the deep hatreds fostered in the place he’d grown up had encouraged it as well. And he was honest enough to admit that some part of what had always been inside himself had surely figured in. But still, he could not truly explain it, not to judge nor jury, not to psychiatrist nor prison counselor, not even to himself.

All he knew was that he had done it, had found himself on top of the fallen white man in a makeshift boxing ring in a pissant south Georgia town, shrugging off the referee who tried in vain to stop him. Ignoring—if not inspired by—that frenzied crowd of white men, to strike again and again at the motionless form beneath him…

Fist after falling fist…

Until there was a moment of blessed darkness, followed by light as bright as truth, and he was standing on the unfinished porch of a rich man’s guest house somewhere in the tropics of Florida, shivering as if with fever and as if it all had happened only moments before.

***

“I said, it’s a tough sport,” Vernon Driscoll repeated. “But then again you look like a tough guy.”

Russell regarded Driscoll calmly. “You don’t know the half of it.”

Driscoll lifted an eyebrow then turned to Deal. “I’ll give Osvaldo a call when I get home,” he said. “I’ll see things get handled.”

“I appreciate it,” Deal said. He noticed Driscoll seemed to be waiting for something. “I have to close up here, Vernon. You don’t have to wait.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure,” Deal said.

Driscoll nodded then and started down from the deck.

“Nice to meet you, Russell,” Driscoll added as he started toward the front of the main house.

“You too,” Russell Straight replied, his face an equally neutral mask.

Two big dogs,
Deal found himself thinking. They’d done everything but hike their legs on the corners of the porch. He sighed and turned to Russell. “You got everything picked up in there?”

Russell held out the hammer he’d been using. “This belongs to Gonzalez. He said give it to you when I’m done.”

Deal stared at the hammer. He heard the sound of Driscoll’s car starting, the sound of gravel crunching as the ex-cop drove off. “Go ahead and keep it. Soon as you pick one up, you can give it back to Gonzalez yourself.”

“You’re the boss,” Russell said doubtfully.

“That I am,” Deal said. “Go on, Russell. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Russell saluted him with the handle of the instrument, then stepped down and traced Driscoll’s path toward the front of the house.

Chapter Twenty

“You can’t dock that boat here.” The voice came out of the shadows, startling Frank Wheatley so that he almost went backward over the rail of the Cigarette.

That was the down side of a tropical lifestyle, he thought. All these plants and trees and underbrush, a zillion birds squawking, bunch of creepy nocturnal animals on the prowl, how were you supposed to see if somebody was sneaking up on you?

“Yeah?” Frank said, peering up through the evening shadows toward the top of the seawall where Basil had tied them off. His voice was steady, but he was sure the guy had seen him nearly go overboard. He hated that, feeling the least bit vulnerable, but what could he do now but make the best of it? “Why’s that?” he added.

“Because I say so,” the guy responded. He moved a step or two out of the shadows to loom over the boat, his silhouette about as thick as one of the concrete pilings that rose at the edge of the seawall. “This is private property.”

Frank nodded. He knew that there was a snazzy condo hidden back there behind all the foliage, but he wasn’t really agreeing with anything. He was nodding because he saw that the guy had a stubby-barreled pump-action shotgun tucked under his arm. He also noted that the guy carried the weapon in a decidedly casual way, which suggested that he knew very well how to use it.

“You some kind of security guard?” Frank asked, though he knew better. He might have left school midway through the ninth grade, but it wasn’t because he was stupid. His shop teacher had gone to smack Frank alongside the head for fooling around with a band saw for the
third
time in a day, and Frank had snatched the man’s hand in midair and turned to sling him right on out a second-story window of West Trenton Vocational Tech. The teacher had suffered some cuts from the glass, along with a fractured collarbone and a fair ration of bumps and bruises, but Frank had known the fall wasn’t going to kill him. Throwing him out a third-story window, now
that
would have been stupid…

As would thinking that a condo security man had been issued a weapon modified in a way that violated several federal firearms statutes. The fact was that the guy up there stood surely on the same side of the law as did Frank and his lamentably absent brother, Basil.

“That’s right,” the guy on the seawall said. “For your security, I’m telling you to get your ass out of here.”

“I can’t,” Frank said. There was a mosquito on the back of his neck inserting what felt like a hot icepick deep into his flesh, but he held off slapping at it, not wanting to do anything to alarm the man with the shotgun.

He was also wondering what was taking Basil so long. On their way down the channel that led to this dockage, they’d spotted the market where his brother had gone off for something to drink. Distances on land were a little deceptive when judged from the perspective of a boat, but surely there’d been plenty of time to walk there and back.

“This isn’t multiple choice, asshole. Get going.” The man had turned so that the shotgun pointed straight down into the Cigarette. He didn’t have his finger on the trigger, but still it was unnerving. Frank had seen what his own brother could do with a weapon just like it, after all.

Very slowly, Frank lifted his hand to point at one of the pilings. “I’m tied off,” he said. “How’m I supposed to go anywhere?”

“We’ll take care of that,” the guy with the shotgun said. He backed carefully toward the piling where the stern line was looped and, keeping the shotgun on Frank, undid the rope with his free hand. Frank heard the soft thump of the rope as it fell onto the deck behind him.

Frank watched carefully as the man moved along the seawall to where the second line was tethered. There was another insect digging into the back of his hand and a third boring a hole in his cheek. “Aren’t the mosquitoes biting you?” he called to the man on the seawall.

The guy undid the forward line and tossed it onto the Cigarette’s prow. “You come back here again, you’re dead meat,” the guy said.

“Sorry to have disturbed you,” Frank said. He was about to reach for the ignition when he saw the dark shape rise up suddenly behind the guy with the shotgun.

“Hey—” the guy said, but the word was quickly cut off, replaced by weird sucking noises that sounded like a pool vacuum with something jammed in its line. The man’s feet were lifted off the ground now, kicking wildly.

Frank saw the shotgun tumble from the man’s hands. He lunged for it, but the thing went into the water with a splash and disappeared. A few moments more, and all was quiet on the seawall again.

***

“Why do you figure he wanted us out of here so bad?” Frank asked, following his brother over the thickly landscaped grounds. In the distance sat the place they were headed for, an interesting-looking building with lots of wood and jutting angles and plenty of smoked glass. Balconies and patios were everywhere, though no one seemed to be outside. All the windows were closed, lights burning golden and cozy behind them, everybody safely tucked away for the night, or so it might seem.

Basil glanced back at the Cigarette where they’d stowed the body, then shrugged. “This’d be a good place to bring in some contraband, don’t you think? Maybe we interrupted us a drug deal.”

“You think?” Frank asked, glancing around.

“Who knows?” Basil shrugged again.

“Maybe we ought to wait around, take it off ourselves.”

Basil stopped then and turned to him, his hands on his hips. “Didn’t we just have this conversation earlier? Keep your eye on the plan, and all that?”

“Like
the Zen?”

Basil sighed. “You going to start that again?”

“I was just thinking, that’s all.”

“I told you…”

“Forget it,” Frank said. “I’m focusing as we speak. I am seeing this operation going down exactly as we planned.”

“That’s my little brother,” Basil said, and then they were off again.

Chapter Twenty-one

“You are something else
,
Osvaldo,” Driscoll said to the powerfully built man in the wheelchair.

“The computer does the work,” Osvaldo said in his soft-spoken way, no false modesty in his voice. He wore a full beard neatly trimmed, his jet black hair pulled back tight into a ponytail. His arms were those of a bodybuilder, his chest swelling the fabric of a sleeveless T-shirt. Though his trouser legs were empty, neatly pressed and pinned just above the knees, he radiated enough energy to make Driscoll feel tired just looking at him.

At the moment, Osvaldo’s gaze was still fixed intently on the glowing screen before him. They’d been tracing through the various reports together, Osvaldo navigating around and over the various computer fire walls constructed by one state agency after another like an eel whisking through a drift fisherman’s nets.

Driscoll turned away to rub at his burning eyes and glanced at the humming printer that was churning out hard copy of the facts they’d so far unearthed. “You’re not surprised he’s a con, are you,” Osvaldo said over his shoulder.

Driscoll shook his head, waiting for a growling eighteen-wheeler to crest the overpass that coursed only a few yards away from Osvaldo’s third-story apartment door. “I didn’t figure him for a killer, though.”

“Maybe he’s not,” Osvaldo said, pushing back from the Formica-clad door that served as his desk.

“You beat a man to death with your bare hands, what does that make you?” Driscoll asked.

Osvaldo shrugged. “An avenger, perhaps…sometimes a martyr.”

Driscoll shook his head. “The law is not a philosopher, Osvaldo.”

“I hear the law is an ass,” Osvaldo countered.

Driscoll glanced at Osvaldo’s empty trouser legs. The law had hardly done this man any favors, now, had it? He turned, gesturing toward the tiny kitchen. “You got any beer?”

Osvaldo nodded. “I keep it just for you.”

Driscoll walked to the refrigerator as another eighteen-wheeler cranked its way up the overpass, then began a spine-rattling series of shifts back down. Six bottles of Jamaican Red Stripe on the bottom shelf, squat brown soldiers, each with a red-and-white label glistening out at him. Osvaldo hadn’t been kidding about who the beer was for, Driscoll thought. The man hadn’t had a drink in better than three years now. Three years and counting.

“Why don’t you find yourself a quieter place, Osvaldo?” Driscoll asked, coming back into the room with an open beer in hand.

“I like it here,” Osvaldo said. “You should come by at rush hour. You open the windows and close your eyes, it sounds just like the surf pounding at the shore.”

“The surf, huh?” Driscoll snorted, as the echo of the eighteen-wheeler died away.

“Besides, they have a good workout room. You ought to see it.”

“I was going to get into exercise once,” Driscoll said. “Then I took a nap and the urge just disappeared.”

“Some nice-looking women come in there,” Osvaldo said.

Driscoll glanced at Osvaldo. He suspected some of the women weren’t visiting the place just to work on their abs. “I guess there’s an upside to everything,” Driscoll said.

“You could start out slow, build up to where you’d like to be,” Osvaldo said.

Driscoll put a hand on his formidable gut.
No six-pack there,
he thought.
More like a case, a case and a half.
“I’m where I like to be already,” Driscoll said. “A high wind comes along, I’m not going anywhere.”

“Suit yourself,” Osvaldo said, raising an eyebrow.

Driscoll had a slug of Red Stripe, thinking briefly about how life would be without beer. What he felt were probably the same emotions as the French philosophers contemplating the abyss. “You remember Leon Straight?” he asked, waving the beer at the growing mound of paper in the printer tray.

“Who doesn’t?” Osvaldo said. “A real bad actor. The Dolphins could use a guy like him these days.”

“Quite a family history,” Driscoll said. “I’m sorry I didn’t meet the old man.”

“You’re not as tough as you like to sound,” Osvaldo said.

“No?” Driscoll raised an eyebrow of his own.

“Deep down, you like to think the best of everybody.”

“Yeah, I’m going to nominate Russell Straight as a teen mentor,” Driscoll said.

“You could have turned your back on me, Driscoll.”

Driscoll made a noise in his throat. “That’s different.”

“No, it’s not,” Osvaldo said.

“You didn’t kill anybody just because they pissed you off. In fact, I believe it was the other way around.”

“Maybe I haven’t so far,” Osvaldo said, staring at him levelly. “But there’s hardly a day that goes by when something happens and I don’t think about it.”

Driscoll waved his beer again. “That’s different, too,” he said.

Osvaldo shook his head. “You sit in this chair all the time, you’d be surprised the thoughts that go through your head.”

“You going to get a rifle, climb up in a tower somewhere?”

“If I could climb, I wouldn’t care about the rifle,” Osvaldo said.

Driscoll felt it like a punch to his formidable gut. “I didn’t mean anything, Osvaldo. You know that.”

“I’m just trying to make a point,” Osvaldo said.

“Point’s made,” Driscoll said.

Osvaldo nodded. “So what are you going to do about Leon Straight’s little brother? Call his parole officer up in Georgia, arrange a pickup?”

Driscoll glanced at him. “First thing, I’ll let Deal know what we found out. The guy’s already assaulted him, for chrissake. Wouldn’t it make you nervous having him around?”

Osvaldo shrugged. “Maybe Deal was right. If Russell Straight meant business, he would have finished the job in the first place.”

“Bleeding hearts are everywhere,” Driscoll said, finishing the Red Stripe. He noted that the printer had finally stopped chunking out the pages. “I’ll tell Deal, then we’ll see. The more important question has to do with this Sams character.”

Osvaldo nodded, but his expression was anything but positive. “The guy is nowhere,” he said. “The name’s a phony. It has to be.” He gave Driscoll a bleak look. “I’m not sure there’s anything else I can do, unless you can come up with more on the guy.”

Driscoll nodded and glanced at the empty in his hand. He could have another, he thought, let the heavy thinking go until morning. Have six or eight more, in fact, see if he couldn’t stretch his already straining belt to a notch in the course of a night. He dropped the empty in the trash basket by Osvaldo’s door-top desk and patted his stomach. “I gotta go, Osvaldo.” He reached for the stack of papers in the printer tray and held them up in thanks. “I appreciate the trouble.”

Osvaldo gave him a look. “I get paid these days, remember?”

“That’s right,” Driscoll said, reaching automatically for his wallet. “How do we stand, anyway?”

Osvaldo held up a hand to stop him. “We have an accounting program now. It cuts checks automatically.”

“No kidding,” Driscoll said. “When did that happen?”

“I told you about it,” Osvaldo said. “Last month.”

Driscoll nodded. “You said something, I guess. This means you control my finances, huh?”

Osvaldo smiled. “Be nice to me, Driscoll.”

Driscoll waved on his way out the door. “It’s a brave new world,” he said.

“Welcome to it,” Osvaldo called back. And Driscoll was out into the night.