Deal with the Dead (30 page)

Chapter Forty-three

“God loves a party,” Talbot Sams said, smiling out over his pistol at them.

The bare bulb that dangled from the ceiling still jittered on its cord, sending shadows flittering about the room even though no one moved a muscle. Basil lay on his stomach, his head twisted to the side, his jaw opened at an odd angle. There was a thin trickle of blood inching out from the spot where his forehead met the concrete. His upturned eye stared blankly at the cobwebbed floor joists above.

Frank lay not far from his brother, face down, the back of his skull oddly flattened. His arms stretched back at his sides, his fingers twitching like worms writhing up toward light. Tasker stood above him, an aluminum baseball bat in one hand. He nudged Frank’s shoulder with the toe of his shoe. There was a shuddering gasp, and Frank’s shoulders drew up for an awful moment, then collapsed. After that, even his fingers were quiet.

What had happened to the Wheatleys wasn’t the worst part of the scene before them, though. Deal realized now that the blue flame he’d seen belonged to a still-hissing acetylene torch, its tip hanging down from a wheeled cart not far from where Sams stood. He also saw that the trousers and brogans he’d had a glimpse of did in fact belong to Vernon Driscoll: His friend sat on the floor a few feet away, unmoving, his legs splayed out in front of him, his arms tied behind a rusting steel floor support. There was a purple knot on his cheek and his head lolled quietly to one side. Only the fact that they’d bothered to gag him with a strip of duct tape across his mouth gave Deal hope that he was still alive.

In the far corner of the basement, Russell Straight lay on his side, trussed with duct tape like a silvered mummy, his hands and heels joined behind him in a knot of tape. He had been gagged as well, yet he was still conscious. Deal could make out the frantic blinking of his eyes, as if Russell might be trying to send some coded message out his way.

Tasker noticed Deal’s gaze. “There’s two strikes right here,” he said, waving his bat vaguely at the fallen Wheatley brothers. “Maybe you’d like to be number three.”

“Be quiet, Tasker,” Sams said mildly. “Turn around, the three of you, lean forward, hands up against the wall. Feet back and spread apart. No foolishness, now, or I’ll give Mr. T. his head.”

Deal turned, and saw that Kaia and Rhodes had obeyed as well. Kaia’s face was set in a mask, her gaze stony. Rhodes, on the other hand, sent Deal a scathing glance.

“If you’re responsible for this—” he hissed through his teeth at Deal.

“Are you crazy—” Deal began, then from the corner of his eye caught a glimpse of something moving: It was Tasker striding forward, using both hands to piston the end of the bat, striking Deal just above his kidney. His legs went numb with the force of the blow, and he was on the floor before he realized fully what had happened.

He was gasping for breath, fighting the pain that held him rigid while Tasker’s hands roamed his body, searching for weapons. By the time Sams’ man was through, feeling was beginning to return to Deal’s legs, first a tingling at the tips of his toes, then a fire that flew to every nerve ending. Maybe that meant he would still be able to walk.

He blinked, managing to lift his chin off the grimy floor. Tasker stood behind Kaia now. He kicked her feet further apart, then ran his hand up the insides of her thighs, the front of her shirt, pausing as the mood struck him. Kaia stared at the wall, expressionless, as if she could see through stone. You can
encounter
her, Deal thought, sure. Not even Tasker could get beyond that point.

In a few moments, Tasker had moved on to Rhodes, pausing as he found something in the man’s jacket pocket. “Bad boy, Mr. Rhodes,” Tasker said, coming out with a pistol in his hand. He leaned close, the tip of the pistol jammed hard against the flesh in front of Rhodes’ ear. “I think I’m going to use this,” he said. “First on her, and then on you.”

“Get away from there, Tasker,” Talbot Sams called. “On your feet, Mr. Deal. Your hands on the wall above your head, where I can see them.”

Deal managed to make it to his hands and knees, steadying himself for a moment before he rose. As he leaned into the wall, an awful burning awoke in the small of his back. He’d taken such hits in his linebacking days. He could remember how it felt to be pissing blood.

He resisted the urge until it lessened, then looked over his shoulder at Sams. Someone else over there in the dim reaches of the basement, a tall man, an old man, tied to a support post in a standing position. He was upright but motionless, his chin resting on his chest.

“You remember Mr. Nieman, don’t you?” Sams said, lifting the man’s head by his white shock of hair.

What Deal saw sent his stomach tumbling. The stoop-shouldered bank officer he’d met only yesterday, though it seemed an eternity had passed. Good-natured, out of the loop Nieman. Not a clue about anything.

Where Nieman’s pale blue eyes had been were vacant, blackened sockets. Deal gaped at the hissing torch, then back at Sams, who let Neiman’s head fall back limply on his chest.

“We’d managed to work up to the location of the safe, Mr. Deal.” Sams turned and gestured toward a distant wall of the cellar. The feeble light of the bulb barely reached that corner, but Deal was able to make it out: a section of shelving jammed with paint cans, grimy jars, cast-off kitchen appliances—all the detritus of a household life—had been swung out from the wall, revealing the massive strongbox that rested in a niche behind. The ship’s safe that Rhodes had described, Deal realized. He’d known it would be here somewhere. He wondered if he would have ever found it himself.

“We were working on where we might find the key when you arrived,” Sams said. “Foolish of Mr. Nieman to resist, really. We’ll cut it open if we have to,” he added, nodding again at the idling torch. Deal stared at the strongbox again: Where he might have expected a combination dial to be was a silver lockplate and keyhole instead. So much for safety deposit boxes, then.

“Klaus…?” Deal heard Rhodes mutter at his side.

“Stay right there!” Tasker barked.

Deal turned to see that Rhodes had pushed himself away from the wall and was moving toward Nieman’s limp form. Tasker took one pivoting step, bringing the end of the bat around in a vicious arc. Rhodes, his gaze still frozen on Nieman, never saw it coming. The blow took him in the stomach, dropping him in an instant. He was writhing at Deal’s feet, clutching at his gut, painful strangling sounds rising from his throat.

Deal started away from the wall. “Please,” Tasker said, bringing his pistol up. “Do me the favor.”

“Back in place, Mr. Deal,” came Sams’ unctuous voice.

Two pistols trained on him now, Deal registered. Grudgingly he resumed the position.

“They’re old chums, you see,” Sams explained, glancing down at Rhodes’ writhing form. “Klaus Neiman worked for Mr. Rhodes’ father in various capacities. He served as a kind of guardian for the boy after his father’s demise. Quite loyal, it would seem. Though there’s been no contact for many years, not since Rhodes—or Halliday, as he was known—fled the country. Once I discovered who Nieman was, I’ve kept close watch.”

Deal’s mind was running snatches of Rhodes’ stories helter-skelter, as if a series of movie projectors had snapped on simultaneously: a tall, cadaverous man who’d dealt chemin de fer and wielded a welder’s torch himself, who had bandaged his father’s wounded shoulder, who’d greeted him and Russell inside the offices of a private bank…

Meantime, Rhodes still struggled at Deal’s feet. Bleary-eyed and gasping, he lifted his chin off the seeping floor, an expression of loathing directed at Sams.

“You’re scum—” he managed before Tasker stepped forward to place his foot on top of Rhodes’ head, pressing it back firmly to the concrete.

“Look who’s talking,” Tasker said.

“Bastards,” Kaia Jesperson muttered. The expression on her face chilled even Deal.

“Perhaps the girl can help us with the keys,” Sams said, gesturing at the hissing acetylene torch. “Bring her over, won’t you, Tasker? We’ll let her twist tongues with our pet snake here.”

“Fuck you, Sams,” Deal said. Let him and Tasker shoot. He was beyond caring. “Here’s your goddamned key.” He jammed his hand into his pocket, then flung the thing across the room. At the same moment, he saw Rhodes’ hand shoot out, the fingers uncoil.

Two glints of silver, two dull clinking sounds, twin chunks of stamped-out metal tumbling across the scarred flooring to rest at the feet of Talbot Sams. Sams smiled at Tasker, who’d stepped back warily, his pistol at the ready.

Sams turned back to Deal. “A surfeit of riches,” he said. “Very noble of you both.”

“He’ll kill us anyway,” muttered Kaia Jesperson.

“Of course I will,” said Sams. “But it will be far less painful now.”

“Who are you, Sams?” Deal said. “You’re no agent—”

“Oh, indeed I was,” Sams cut in. “How else do you think I’d have come upon this felon’s trail?”

“He’s a thief,” Rhodes said, trying to raise himself to a sitting position. His face was pale. He coughed and his lips were suddenly spattered with blood. “He’d come to make a practice of stealing from the targets of his investigations. When it was discovered, the Department drummed him out.”

“Sticks and stones—” Sams shrugged, shooting a glance at Rhodes. “Mr. Pot-Calling-the-Kettle-Black here had more than two hundred million dollars with him when he fled the country. I just missed laying hands on it a couple of times, and I’ve spent a long time looking for it since.”

He glanced down at Rhodes with what might have passed for fondness. “When he was reported dead, I thought the money might be gone for good. But when Ferol Babescu was murdered, it struck me. For that much money, perhaps even the dead had learned to walk again.”

Deal shook his head, staring at the distant wall where the safe rested like a dumb and featureless god. Slowly, it had begun to dawn on him.

“You’ve known about my father and Lucky Rhodes all along—”

Sams turned to him, a look of bemusement on his features. “Of course I knew. It was something I stumbled upon during our original investigation of Halliday. When I finally realized who Halliday’s father actually was, I knew where he must have hidden his ill-gotten gains.”

Deal stared back, his mind racing. “You think Halliday—” He broke off, glancing down at the man sitting dazedly between them. Rhodes/Halliday wiped at his mouth, then stared in apparent confusion at the blood smeared across the back of his hand.

“—you think Rhodes stashed his money with my father before he fled the country?” Deal continued, shaking his head.

“You’re wrong, Sams,” Rhodes managed. His voice sounded thick. “That money’s gone. Gone forever.”

Sams smiled patiently. “Is it, now?” he said. He bent carefully to the concrete floor and picked up the two keys. “Well, we’re about to find out.”

He glanced at Tasker as he straightened, flashing the pair of keys. “Keep an eye on them, Tasker…”

He had turned then, on his way for the waiting safe, when there was a scuffling of footsteps on the stairs leading down from the pantry, and Sams abruptly stopped.

Chapter Forty-four

“Federal agents!” Deal heard a voice from the shadowy stairwell. “Stay where you are.”

Tasker, shielded from the man on the steps by the support posts, raised his hand to fire.

“Look out,” Deal cried, but he was too late.

The report of Tasker’s pistol echoed deafeningly off the stone walls surrounding them. The agent who’d asked everyone to freeze, a thin man with an acne-scarred face, took Tasker’s shot in the shoulder. Though the agent had managed to squeeze off a round of his own, his aim was wide. He’d spun halfway around when Sams fired, the shot taking away the side of the man’s face.

There was the sound of another set of footsteps retreating up the stairs, and Tasker hesitated only a moment before he ran in pursuit, ducking into the stairwell, squeezing off a burst. There was a muffled groan and the sound from above of another body falling.

Deal made his own move then, lunging over the groggy Rhodes toward Talbot Sams, who spun about, trying to raise his pistol into position. Deal kicked at Sams’ arm, catching him in the fleshy tissue just above the elbow. Sams cried out and his pistol clattered off into the dark reaches of the cellar. The man went over backward with the blow, tumbling hard against the tanks of the portable welding setup.

The hose uncoiled as the tanks went over, lashing at Sams with its blue head of flame. Deal was scrambling after him, trying to get a grip on a leg, an arm…

When he felt a searing pain trace across his chest, and smelled what he realized was his own charring flesh. He stumbled back, slapping at the streak of fire that ran across his chest, feeling his feet go out from under him as he stumbled over Rhodes.

Sams was closing in now, the acetylene torch in his hand. He lunged down at Deal with his face twisted in rage, ready to finish the job. Deal tried to turn away, but Sams’ knee dropped to his chest, pinning him. Sams spun a control knob and the flame shot out the length of a knife blade, the cool blue tongue transformed to orange. He brought the torch down toward Deal’s face, the flame close enough to singe his flesh.

“Let’s make you up like Mr. Nieman, shall we?” Sams gloated. He thrust the torch toward Deal’s eyes…

Then suddenly something interposed, turning the hissing flame back upon itself.

Sams swung his gaze up in astonishment. Kaia Jesperson stood there, her bare hand outthrust, blocking the flame from Deal’s face…

Deal caught his breath, waiting for her scream of pain, the stench and crackle of charring flesh, but inexplicably, there was none of that.

Impossible, but still it had happened, Deal thought. Kaia’s expression was neutral, her steady gaze seeming to reach Sams’ soul.

Sams had pulled the torch back. His mouth worked oddly, as if he might be trying to form some question, but he never got the chance to ask it. In the next instant, Deal twisted out from under the stunned man’s knee and came off the ground, swinging as he had never swung before.

His fist caught Sams’ cheek with a force that numbed his arm to the shoulder. The man staggered sideways, the torch sliding from his grasp. Deal followed with another blow that took Sams above the heart and sent him over on his back, where he lay unmoving, his eyes blinking vaguely.

Deal found himself closing in reflexively, thinking he could do it, aim one kick to the side of Sams’ lolling skull, cave in that exposed temple, snuff out one scourge of life with perfect justification…

When he heard a shot behind him and glanced to see that Russell Straight was on his feet and grappling with Tasker, holding the henchman’s gunhand upward in both of his own. Russell was still wrapped in tape, tatters of the gray stuff flying from his limbs, but he had worked himself free—likely what he’d been trying to signal earlier, it flashed through Deal’s mind—
I’ve got myself loose, just hang on
.

Meantime, the two men staggered about in a parody of a drunken dance, Tasker’s gun erupting again, and then a third time. The hammer fell a fourth time, but this on an empty chamber.

Russell released his hold on Tasker’s gunhand, and launched a punch that moved so quickly it was a blur. There was a sharp crack at Tasker’s jaw, and he groaned, falling backward under a rain of punches that came with mechanical precision from Russell’s fists, snapping Tasker’s head first one way, then another.

Deal was turning back toward Sams when he caught sight of Kaia. For a moment, the world seemed to stop. She was in a sitting position now, slumped with her back against the rain-leaking wall, a dark stain spread out at her shoulder…one of the rounds from Tasker’s pistol had struck home, he realized.

“Kaia?” he called, dropping to his knees in front of her. Her eyes flickered, fighting to focus.

She seemed to find him then. “I’m all right,” she managed, her voice faint.

His hand went quickly to her wrist, turned her hand over gingerly to inspect her palm. He saw a patch of reddened flesh and a blister the size of a half-dollar, but nothing compared to the damage he expected.

He shook his head. “That torch…how…?”

She looked at him with the barest of smiles. “A mistake about the blister,” she said woozily. “I do hot coals pretty well. I’m a little out of practice with blowtorches…”

“Kaia—?” he began, the questions piling up faster than he could comprehend. And Rhodes’ words echoing above it all:
She’s quite the trickster, Mr. Deal
.

“Some day I’ll explain it to you,” she began. She might have said more when her expression changed abruptly. She lifted her hand weakly, pointed over Deal’s shoulder. “He’s getting away—”

Deal whirled in time to see Talbot Sams staggering across the littered cellar floor and up the pantry stairwell. Deal brushed Kaia’s cheek with his hand as he rose in pursuit, spinning toward the stairs, clambering over the bodies of the fallen agents. He came through the pantry in a rush, his arms braced for a blow, but there was no one there, and no one in the wreck of a kitchen, either.

Dishes, he saw, towers of them stacked high in the sink, caked with moldering food, and newspapers piled crazily on the kitchen table. On his way out of the pantry, he leaped over a clutch of fallen brooms and mops—and what had those been used for in the last half-century?—then careened through the dimly lit dining room toward the front of the house.

He tried the entry door next, but found the deadbolt still in place. Sams had not escaped that way, then. He spun around to face the French doors arrayed opposite the great room, offering a spacious view out to the rear. It was still raining outside, the sky darkly overcast, but there was plenty enough light to see.

The doors were still closed, the grounds deserted. The man was somewhere in the house, Deal told himself. Still somewhere in this house.

He cut his glance toward the oak staircase leading to the second story, but it was blank, nothing moving there but dust balls, lolling in the drafty air. Deal turned and began moving across the broad living room, past the yawning fireplace—“
Never buy a house without a fireplace, son…especially in the tropics
.”

“You’re right, old man,” Deal answered. Maybe he said it in his mind, maybe he was mumbling aloud as he moved.

For it had come to him with unshakable clarity now, and his mind was elsewhere—ten years elsewhere in fact, all the pieces of the puzzle falling into place even as this chaos unfolded about him. He could see the scene playing out as surely as if it had happened before his eyes:

Michael Halliday fled, two hundred million dollars missing, and Talbot Sams comes calling, come to see Barton Deal one last time. Oh, yes, Deal thought. He knew now what had happened.

Deal glanced through an archway into the closed-in porch they called the Florida room then. His mother had kept her sewing table in there, also an easy chair and a lamp for reading, a few potted cacti in another corner. Nothing in there now, of course, nothing but more stacked and yellowing newspapers and an umbrella stand lying on its side.

Only one more room on the bottom floor, he thought, staring across the living room to the half-opened door of his father’s study. And it was fitting that room should be the last to check. Deal hadn’t been in it since the night he’d found his father, head flung back over his desk chair—what there was left of a head, anyway.

He eased quietly across the dark and dusty floorboards, replaying the words he’d found in his mother’s diary a few weeks after she’d died, words laid carefully in a spidery blue hand:

But decency hadn’t had anything to do with it. It hadn’t happened that way at all. But what it had cost them all these years to think so.

Deal moved on across the silent floorboards to the archway of the study and paused to stare through the partly opened door. No broad and gleaming desk inside there any longer, of course. No tufted-leather swivel chair. No old man to smile a welcome for his Johnny-boy.

Just a few fanned-out paperbacks on the shelves where leather-bound classics had once been housed, cheek by jowl with his father’s humidors, his pipe racks and geegaws, including a stuffed gray fox he’d hit with his car one night, coming drunk out of the parking lot of the Biltmore Hotel, another grand party in his wake. Barton Deal had taken the fox to be stuffed, then kept it as a joke.
That was the kind of a man he was
, Deal thought.
Who the hell else would have done such a thing?

Deal stepped into the room then, his eyes registering the empty gloominess ahead of him, some other set of senses telling him what was rushing at him from behind. He ducked and rolled, feeling the baseball bat glance off his shoulder as he fell. There was pain, of course, but nothing to compare with what would have come if he hadn’t been moving with the blow.

Deal rolled on, came on his feet, then ducked a mighty two-handed roundhouse that Talbot Sams aimed at his head. Instead of retreating, Deal stepped into Sams’ charge. He drove his one good fist into the man’s stomach, hard enough to lift him off his feet.

Then, as Sams doubled over, Deal drove his elbow down against the man’s skull, just above the ear. Sams fell to his knees, and the bat skittered wildly across the floor.

Sams started to scramble for it, but Deal kicked his hands out from under him and the big man’s cheek bounced off the bare floor. Sams was on his back now, staring vaguely up at Deal, both of them gasping with exertion.

“It was you, Sams. You did it.” Deal felt himself listing dizzily to one side, his shoulder throbbing, his arm dangling like a limb that had gone into endless sleep. “It wasn’t suicide. You killed him. You thought he had the money.”

Sams stared up at him, gathering his strength, his lips moving soundlessly at first, until the words began to come. “He
did
have it. I just couldn’t find it and I couldn’t make him tell me. But I did finally, didn’t I? It’s down there right now. All of it.”

He fell back, staring up at the ceiling, moistening his lips with his tongue. His expression suggested he might be talking as much to himself as to Deal. “For the longest time, I thought you’d taken it. But you live like a church mouse. All these years. I knew you didn’t have it.”

Deal stared down at Sams, shaking his head. Even though he was hearing the words, his mind had difficulty accepting them. “You ruined his life, and then you killed him. For money. For a fucking pile of money—”

For a moment, Deal was lost in his dismay, taken over by the enormity, by the senselessness of it. All these lives. All this waste…

It was all the distraction that Sams needed. He ducked toward something strapped at his ankle and rolled over, making a sweeping motion with his hand. Deal staggered back as the blade that had appeared in Sams’ hand swept an inch from his midsection.

Sams was up now, still panting, but his eyes had regained their porcine focus. He smiled. “You’re out of business, Mr. Deal. And it’s about time, I’d say.”

He made his rush then, and Deal let him come, twisting away at the last instant. Only a delaying tactic, sure, but what else did he have but time?

He shoved Sams hard as he went by, using the arm that still obeyed. Sams hit the wall with a force that seemed to shake the room. He hesitated, then spun about.

There was an odd expression on his face, a look that suggested he’d forgotten something important. After a moment, his eyes regained their focus, and he glanced down at himself. Deal’s eyes followed. Both of them stared now at the bone handle of the knife that protruded from Sams’ stomach.

Sams raised his hand to the knife handle, and for a moment, it seemed as if he intended to pull the blade free and come after Deal once more.

Deal took an unsteady sideways step, then bent and grasped the fallen bat in his one good hand. He willed his other hand onto the handle as well. He staggered back, wavering, trying to measure his swing. Talbot Sams’ bloated face wavered before him like a pumpkin, like a piñata, like a curve that would hang until the end of time.

Deal drew back, ready to swing. And that is when Sams went down.

***

For a few moments, Deal stared at the dead man lying at his feet. He wavered ready to collapse himself, wondering what the roaring in his ears might be. Then it came to him. Boat engines, he realized, the throaty roar of a departing Cigarette.

He staggered slowly from the study and across the dark boards of what had once been his family’s living room, the legendary gathering place where anyone who’d been anyone had come to tip a glass with Barton Deal. Past the Florida room and fireplace, through dining room and kitchen, pantry door and pantry, and down the gore-slimed stairs.

What he found did not especially surprise him:

Driscoll groaning now behind his duct tape gag, and Russell Straight on his hands and knees, groggy, trying to figure out what might have hit him.

Klaus Neiman still hung limply where he had died, and on the bloody floor between the bodies of Frank and Basil Wheatley lay the good Mr. Tasker, his arms splayed at his sides, one dark puckered dot placed squarely in the middle of his forehead.