Deal with the Dead (4 page)

“Doubt we could have got him squeezed down the barrel,” Basil observed.

Frank nodded, glancing up at the cage. “What’s fat and burned to a crisp?” he asked of no one.

“You ought to learn better jokes,” Basil said to his brother.

“What was that?” Halliday asked, pointing out over the platform steps, where he was sure he’d heard movement in the shadows.

In the next moment, Basil had knocked him off the side of the steps. He felt his breath go out of him as he hit the ground, realized that Basil was on top of him, shielding him with his thick body. Frank had already leaped down from the platform and was off into the darkness, his footsteps thudding rapidly away.

Halliday heard a cry, then a groan, the sound of bodies falling several yards distant. He struggled up, but Basil held him back.

“Sit tight,” Basil said. Halliday saw the glint of a pistol in his bodyguard’s hand.

In moments, Frank was back, a struggling form in a black cape tucked under his arm. “Look here, would you?” he said, jerking the cape back.

Halliday had pulled himself up by the railing of the steps. He blinked in the darkness, his eyes focusing on the captive Frank Wheatley held. The flashing eyes, the great mane of hair to match. As haughtily beautiful as he’d surmised. Perhaps more so, observed this close.

“You can let her go,” he said to Frank.

Frank hesitated. Halliday glanced at Basil, who nodded at his brother.

The woman stood, shrugging her cape back into place around her shoulders. She looked at Halliday, then up at the cage. The flames, though still formidable, had begun to languish.

“That’s
my
machine?” she said, her chin thrust forward. “Who do you think you are?”

“How long have you been here?” Halliday asked.

She stared back, gauging him. “Long enough,” she said at last.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Someone else Babescu screwed.” She glanced up at the cage. Something in that gaze, Halliday saw. “Too bad for him,” she added.

Halliday hesitated. He glanced at Basil, who regarded the woman as he might a rock or a tree, or a bale of aluminum scrap.

Halliday was a man well used to making rapid calculations. There were risks worth taking and those that were not. He had another look at Kaia Jesperson, then turned to his bodyguards.

“Babescu left us a bit of brandy, didn’t he?” he said to Basil.

It took Basil a moment to understand that Halliday was serious. “The bottle’s on the platform,” he answered finally.

Halliday nodded and turned to the woman at Frank Wheatley’s side. It seemed the perfect time to reclaim the identity that had once been his. Just as it was time to reclaim the money that was his as well. Bond trader Michael Halliday was dead. Let him stay dead. He was Grant Rhodes’ son. And he would get what was owed him.

“My name is Richard Rhodes, Miss Jesperson.” His tone was firm but untroubled, as though they might have been standing in the lobby of the Ritz. “Perhaps you’d be willing to join me for a drink.”

She stared back at him as if she’d expected the invitation all along. She flicked her gaze to Basil and to Frank, then to Rhodes, her expression neutral. “What do I have to lose?” she said. The way she lifted her chin made the words seem almost like a dare.

“Nothing,” Rhodes said. “Nothing at all.”

She shook her dark hair then and came on.

Chapter Two

Miami
November 6

“Somebody wants to see you,
jefe.”

John Deal glanced up from the set of blueprints he had laid out on a makeshift table: a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood on a pair of sawhorses, a couple of bricks for paperweights keeping the plans from sailing off with the breeze into nearby Brickell Bay. All these years that DealCo had been his own to run, and he still found it odd to be referred to as “boss.” As if Barton Deal, long since dead and buried, was still the
jefe,
and he was just the
jefe’s
son.
How to explain that,
he thought, as he turned to make sure the blueprints were secure.

He was back at work for Terrence Terrell, one of the original personal-computer tycoons, and a longtime patron of sorts for what was left of DealCo Construction. A few years ago, with the company about to fold for good, Deal had supervised the renovation of the ten-bedroom, neo-Mediterranean main house that dominated the grounds behind him, one of the more attractive examples of the florid style that had been so popular among the elite building their winter “cottages” in 1920s Florida. Now, while Terrell was off with his family for a month in the south of France, Deal was back at the compound, hard at work on what Terrell referred to as a “gazebo” on a section of the property offering a stunning view of the Miami skyline just across the bay.

The first weather front of the season had passed through during the night like a giant squeegee, dragging a mass of hot, soggy air off the tip of the peninsula and south toward the islands. What the front left behind was a trailing breeze and the onset of what passed for fall in the American tropics—Deal, wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt for the first time since March, noted the Wedgwood blue sky arching down toward a cobalt sea, not a cloud in sight.

“Where is he?” Deal said to Gonzalez. He assumed the visitor was the county building inspector, a man who’d wanted to see Deal quite a bit lately, or so it seemed.

Gonzalez pointed vaguely toward the front of the Terrence Terrell compound. Gonzalez was as short, stocky, and bronzed as Lee Trevino, with a similar block-shaped head and a broad face that he kept as impassive as his Mayan genes prompted. This trait did not endear Gonzalez to some of the Hispanics with whom he worked, but the fact that he did not complain seemed to compensate. If they did not exactly trust a man not given to histrionics, still they tolerated him.

All that notwithstanding, Deal thought he could read something in Gonzalez’s face, a set to those neutral features that was even more determined than he’d expect if it was the universally despised building inspector. Besides, the inspector wouldn’t be waiting around front. He’d have been right there on Gonzalez’s heels, waving a copy of the
South Florida Building Code
and spouting violations as he walked.

“Who is it?” Deal said.

Gonzalez shrugged.
“No se.”

The kind of “I don’t know” that meant he wasn’t offering any opinions, either. Deal found a third brick on the ground beneath the table and set it on the breeze-rattled set of plans, then started off. He noted that Gonzalez was watching carefully, as if uncertain whether or not to follow.

Who could it be? Deal wondered. Terrell’s next-door neighbor in this grand old stretch of Brickell Bay—the male-action-movie star—there to complain about the construction noise? Not likely. The star was on location, shooting
Death March VII,
the latest in a seemingly never-ending series—that’s why Terrell had put Deal to work this month.

Or maybe it was Chief Jimmy Two Panther, the Native American spokesman who’d shown up last week when they were digging the footings for the gazebo. Chief Jimmy had been involved in the protest that halted work on a downtown high-rise when ancient Indian artifacts had been unearthed. Now he was turning up at any building project that commenced along the southern bay shore, a kind of ad hoc inspection force all his own. But Deal had given Chief Jimmy free rein to inspect the featureless contours of the footings his men had dug, and the old man had gone away content, even pausing to bless the site with a mumbled chant.

No, not the chief. And that left whom? Madonna? She’d once offered to buy the compound from Terrell, after all, just after the male action star had moved in. Maybe she hadn’t given up. That would be okay, Deal thought. He could claim to be Terrell’s property manager, which wasn’t far from the truth, start off his Monday giving Ms. M. a tour of the palatial estate, see if he couldn’t stretch it through Tuesday or Friday.

But it wasn’t any of those, he saw as he rounded the corner of the wing of the estate, where Terrell maintained his home offices. There was a pickup truck parked in the broad gravel driveway on the distant side of the splashing central fountain, an old Chevy from the early fifties bearing a Georgia plate, its rounded fenders glowing cherry red even in the shade of the towering ficus trees that lined the circular courtyard.

Beside the truck stood a black man in white T-shirt and jeans, his shaved head glistening, his shoulders and thighs as rounded and bulky as the contours of his truck. He had his hands clasped in front of him, watching as Deal came crunching across the gravel, his lips set in a casual droop but his gaze unusually keen. No wonder he’d seen something in Gonzalez’s face, Deal thought. The Mayan had met his African-American counterpart.

“You’re John Deal?” the man asked, his hands still clasped.

Deal felt himself being measured. “That’s right,” he said.

There was something familiar in the man’s face, but he couldn’t place it. Close up now, he saw a smooth thin ribbon of scar tissue looping down from one corner of the man’s mouth, accentuating the droll pooch of his lips. There was a knot at the bridge of his nose that made his eyes seem all the more deeply set, the gaze that much more intense. An athlete, Deal thought. Maybe the action hero’s trainer, an advisor in kicking butt and taking names. Deal wondered briefly if he should have invited Gonzalez along.

“William Brown’s my name,” the man said. “Billy Brown’s okay, too.” He stepped forward, put out his hand.

Deal felt a smooth dry palm, a surprisingly light grip. No macho gamesmanship there. Not yet, at least. “Gonzalez said you wanted to see me.”

Billy Brown was still staring at him intently. “Yes,” he said, something odd in his voice. “Yes, I did.” Then something seemed to shift behind his eyes and he relaxed, turning to point across the courtyard.

“I heard you were looking to sell your truck.”

Deal glanced at him, then across the expanse of gravel to where he’d parked the Hog. The vehicle had started off in life as a Cadillac Seville, but had long ago had its rooftop cut in half, its back seat and trunk removed and reconfigured. Rewelded, reglassed, and retrimmed by Cal Saltz, a man who, with Deal’s father, had loomed large in the Miami landscape back in the salad days of DealCo Construction, the Hog now had the form of a gentrified pickup truck.

It sat in shadows, shadows later, shadows all day long. As much time as Deal spent in the vehicle, it was like a mobile office. And in the tropics, a little thing like keeping cool was important.

“Who told you I wanted to sell it?”

Billy Brown shrugged. “Couple of guys did some work on mine,” he said, nodding at the cherry-red Chevy. “Named Emilio and Rodriguez.”

Deal nodded. The two mechanics who’d taken a special shine to the Hog. They loved the vehicle, whereas Deal only tolerated it. He might have sold it long ago but for their intervention.

“Is something very special,” Emilio would protest every time Deal suggested the two find him a buyer.

“Nobody else in Miami got one of these,” Rodriguez would chime in. “We’ll keep her fixed up, no reason to waste money on anything else.”

And that much was true, Deal had to admit. The Hog did double-duty: comfortable as a luxury car in the cockpit, but set up as rugged as a pickup for hauling various materials around from job site to job site. If he made a score one of these days, though, managed to get just a couple of jumps ahead, the Hog was going to be history.

His wife, Janice, had nearly died in the vehicle, after all—run off a bridge and into Biscayne Bay by a hired killer who’d thought it was Deal doing the driving—and scarcely a day went by that Deal didn’t glance at the Hog and think about that sorry time of his life when he had hardly anything and still it was enough for men to want to kill him for.

Janice had nearly died and it had been his fault—crazy guilt, Deal knew, but real guilt, nonetheless. Guilt that never left him, looming always, along with the ghosts of Cal Saltz and Barton Deal, visages as formidable in his memory as the faces of presidents cut into a South Dakota mountainside.

“I’ve talked about it,” Deal said to Billy Brown, “but I don’t know that now’s the time I’m going to sell.”

Brown nodded, as if he’d expected this response. Probably Emilio and Rodriguez had prepared him. “You get attached to your history,” Brown said.

Deal glanced at him. A philosophical turn he hadn’t expected. Or maybe it was some kind of bargaining ploy.

“I’m just not ready,” Deal said. Hardly about to get into the DealCo profit and loss statement with Billy Brown, was he? Explain how Terrence Terrell had thrown him another lifeline here while he waited for word on one of the half-dozen major project bids DealCo had floating about Miami? “Sorry you had to waste your time,” Deal said.

But Brown shook his head. “No problem,” he said. He moved his hand absently to one of his sizable biceps, scratching at still more scar tissue raised in gnarled welts there. Some kind of jailhouse tattoo, Deal realized, though he couldn’t recognize any pattern in it.

“Truth is,” Brown said, “I was wondering if you might have some work.”

Deal hesitated. He glanced at the license plate on the Chevy. “You came all the way from Georgia looking for work?”

“Wasn’t that way at all,” said Brown, no edge in his voice. “But I’m here now—” He broke off, glancing around the spacious courtyard. They might have been standing before a Florentine palazzo, Deal thought, his eye roving the false bell tower, the red-tiled roof lines, the wrought-iron balconies hovering over them.

“Those two mechanics said you were always looking for a good man,” Brown continued.

That much was true. Emilio and Rodriguez had referred Gonzalez to him, and a number of others over the years—the Hispañolé pipeline, as Cal Saltz had often called it. And Deal was a little short on help. Terrell’s call had come in just as he was finishing up the shell on a strip center in far South Dade, and Deal had been shuttling crews back and forth trying to keep up the pace. He had less than a month to dry-in Terrell’s gazebo, in truth a two-bedroom guest house and pool, and a penalty clause was ready to kick in if he didn’t wrap up the shopping center by the end of next week.

“What kind of work can you do?” Deal said.

Brown shrugged. “You name it. I was on a framing crew last two years, until the work dried up. I can finish concrete, lay block, hang drywall, paint. I’ve done roofing work, but it isn’t at the top of my list.”

The last a mark in Brown’s favor, Deal thought. His own father had put him on with a roofing crew the summer of his sixteenth birthday to teach him the construction business “from the ground up.” The hottest, dirtiest, most exhausting work there was, most of the labor crew recruited from the ranks of the down-and-out and desperate. Deal had endured, but he still had flashes of the hell it had been.

Deal found himself smiling. “My father used to say he’d spent his whole life working just trying to stay off a roofing crew.”

Brown made some kind of noise deep in his chest that might have been a chuckle. “Must’ve been a smart man.”

“How long were you planning on staying down here?” Deal asked. He had no idea what had brought William Brown to South Florida and he doubted he was going to learn the real reasons any time soon. He did know that there was a high dropout rate among the new arrivals drawn here for the weather, the beauty of the place, the glitz.

After a few weeks in paradise, reality sets in. All these people speaking Spanish, the high cost of living, most of the available work in the low-paying service industry, not to mention the traffic, the heat, the confounding jumble of cultures: you could start at 79th Street, speaking Creole to a knot of Haitians standing on the street corner, drive the surface roads five or six miles south, by the time you got to Southwest 8th, you’d have passed though outposts of just about every Latin American and Caribbean civilization.

Deal, who’d grown up watching Miami change, loved what had become of it, but not everybody did. He wondered, for instance, how much William Brown knew of the fine distinctions some Hispanics could make among skin colors. Certain men who wanted to trace their lineage back to Christopher Columbus, if not Queen Isabella herself, could outstrip a group of Klansmen when it came to matters of race.

“Stay as long as it takes,” Brown was saying.

“Takes for what?”

“For whatever you got going,” Brown said, waving his hand toward the whine of a power saw behind Terrell’s imposing house. Brown rolled his big head on his shoulders. The gesture seemed apologetic. “Look, maybe you’re paying your squat labor about fifteen dollars, plus you got insurance, workmen’s comp and all that, gonna add up around twenty-one, twenty-two dollars an hour when it’s all over.”

Deal found himself amused. “Emilio and Rodriguez show you my books, did they?”

But Brown was going on. “What I say, give me a try. Pay me the fifteen, off the books. You don’t like the way I work, just say. I go on my way, everybody’s happy.”

Deal shook his head. “If I gave you a try,” he said, “it’d be on the books. Just like everybody else.”

“Then let’s go to it,” Brown said.

“Is there someone I could call up in Georgia, a foreman on that framing crew, say?”

Brown met his eyes and nodded. “Where I’m staying, I got the man’s card we worked for. He can tell you.”

Deal nodded. “Bring it by, I’ll make the call. If everything checks out, I’ll put you to work. I’ll also need your Social Security number and a copy of your driver’s license.”