Done Deal (6 page)
Leon tried three pay phones on the street near the dealership before he found one that worked. The first one was lacking its handset and cord. The second one took his quarter. When he dialed the eight-hundred number for help, the recording told him to deposit fifty cents.
The third one, outside a convenience store, looked battered, but the call went through. He got the recording that wanted to know if he was at a touch-tone phone. Leon glanced at the keypad. It looked as though someone had touched it repeatedly with a pickax. You really couldn’t read any of the numbers, but he pressed what had to be the “one,” just like the voice wanted him to. Then he pushed the code that would get him through to Alcazar. Just one more of his boss’s paranoid safety measures. A secure line. Like he was the fucking president.
While Leon waited for the connection, he shifted his feet and felt something crunching under the Balys. He glanced down. There was a regular snowdrift of broken bottle glass there, beer bottles, wine bottles, who knows what all. A flattened work glove. A mangled butter knife. By the post that held the phone, a pile of grunt that looked too big to have come from an animal.
Leon shook his head. Ten blocks south, you could see sky scrapers, bank buildings, the big red-tiled roof of the cultural center. Up here they were shitting in the streets.
“Yes?” It was Alcazar’s voice. Impatient, as usual. Like who was Leon to be interrupting the president.
“We got bad news and good news,” Leon said.
“Get to the point,” Alcazar said.
“Alejandro fucked up,” Leon said, feeling a smile on his lips.
“What happened?” Alcazar said. Leon knew he had his jaw clenched. You could hear breath hissing through the man’s teeth. Guy was going to blow out a blood vessel before long.
“Nothing happened,” Leon said. “That’s the point. Except for the biggest traffic jam you ever saw. Man drove away from it, not a scratch on him.” Leon kicked glass over the grunt at his feet, glanced about the neighborhood. Boarded-up this, caved-in that. There was an old VW on its side down the block, all the wheels gone. Only two blocks off Biscayne, it looked like he was in Beirut. They ever got their business finished up in Little Havana, he’d mention this neighborhood to Alcazar.
“…supposed to be a simple accident. Can’t you do anything right?”
Leon tuned back to the phone, registered Alcazar’s barely contained fury. “Hey,” he said. “Was Alejandro fucked up, not me. He was ready to shoot the dude. Got his macho way out of whack, you know what I mean.”
Leon heard a sigh on the other end. When he spoke again, Alcazar sounded weary, his voice faint, like he was ready for a nap. “Why are you calling me, Leon?”
Leon nodded to himself. Now that was better. One of these days, the man was going to reflect back, tally up all the times of who was a help and who was a hindrance, he’d realize what he had in Leon Straight.
“Well, the man’s had him some car trouble,” Leon said. “And you’ll never guess where he went to have it fixed.”
“I don’t care, Leon…”
“Man is having his car fixed at Surf Motors,” Leon said, feeling his smile growing wide. He could hear the wheels in Alcazar’s head spinning all the way across town.
“Look, Janice, somebody’s got to pick up The Hog by six. Otherwise, you’ll have to take me down first thing in the morning.”
Deal switched the receiver to his other hand. It was one of the off-brand pay phones, bolted to the block wall outside a
Supermercado
. Between the static that rattled in the cheap receiver and the rumble of a low-rider that was idling in a parking space just behind, he could barely hear.
“You have to speak up,” Deal shouted.
The line was suddenly clear. “I said tomorrow is my tennis lesson. Can’t you take a taxi?”
Deal closed his eyes. “I don’t have any cash. I had a little emergency and…” He broke off as thunderous music erupted from the low-rider. Deal stared. The receiver was vibrating in his hand. He’d spent plenty on a pair of Bose floor speakers when they still had the house. The best sound wouldn’t have touched what was coming through the windows of the low-rider.
“Just a minute,” he shouted into the phone.
Deal left the receiver dangling, strode to the car. There was a skinny kid about eighteen leaning back in the passenger’s seat, his chin barely nodding to the blare of the music, his expression dreamy. When Deal’s shadow fell across his face, the kid looked up, not very interested.
“I’m trying to talk,” Deal said, his words lost in the vortex of sound. Deal pointed at the telephone, then mimed holding the receiver to his ear. The kid glanced over the dash, then back at Deal. His face had taken on a pained, disbelieving look, as if he were staring at a roach crawling across his windshield. He shook his head and fell back in his seat, back to dreamland.
Deal felt something sizzle in his brain, a bright little spot snapping just behind his right eye. He lunged inside the low-rider, pinned the kid back against his seat with a forearm at his scrawny throat, snapped off the ignition with his free hand. He jerked the keys out, then spun in one fluid motion and tossed them far out into the nearby intersection.
“Hey, man,” the kid squawked. Although there was plenty of traffic, it seemed very quiet. Deal felt a wash of peace come over him.
“Don’t say anything,” Deal told the kid. “Just go get your keys.” Deal felt a throbbing in his shoulder. He could hear the echoes of a dozen coaches from his boyhood: “Never throw till you’ve warmed up, son. You don’t want to hurt yourself.”
The kid read something in Deal’s eyes, nodded, and got out, hurrying toward the intersection. Deal went back to the phone.
“You still there?” he asked.
“Deal, what’s going on?” Her voice was tired, faint. She’d been that way lately. Deal chalked it up to living for two people.
“Janice,” he said patiently, “my brakes went out and I nearly crashed into a busload of Yahwehs on the Dolphin Expressway. Then some asshole pulls a gun on me because I cut in front of him. Then the building inspector threatens to flag me up after I already paid him off…”
“Someone pulled a gun on you?” she cut in, a note of alarm in her voice. “What are you talking about?”
“Just some cowboy in a suit,” he said. “I spun out in his lane so he had to defend his manhood.”
There was a long pause on Janice’s end. “Deal, that’s not funny.” She sounded truly distressed, all her anger gone.
There was a long silence and Deal felt immediately guilty. Scare the shit out of your pregnant wife so she’ll cave in and do you a favor. That hadn’t been his intention. But still, you had to handle things. Put aside the problems that weren’t problems any longer, grind on ahead. He sighed.
“Janice, forget about the guy. He was just showing off.” When she didn’t respond, he plowed forward. “Look, you’ve got to help me out. I have to wait at the fourplex for Emilio. And the plumber. And the stucco man…”
“Where is it?” she said.
Deal nodded. So he’d won. She hadn’t said yes, but he recognized her tone. He watched the kid from the low-rider, out in the street now, dodging a concrete truck in the intersection, snatching up his keys. An enormous woman in her fifties had come out of the
Supermercado
with an overloaded shopping cart and stood by the silent low-rider, staring about impatiently.
“Where it always is,” he said to Janice. “At Carnes’s.”
He heard her groan. “You’re sure it’s finished? I’ve got a hair appointment and then I’m supposed to go to Lee Ann’s tonight, for that shower.”
“It’s ready. I just got off the phone with them. You just need to get down there before six, give them a check.” The kid had made it back to the low-rider. There was much animated back and forth between him and his mother, but no gestures came Deal’s way.
“Look, Janice, you don’t have to pick me up. Just get The Hog and go on to Lee Ann’s. I have a key to your car. Leave it in the lot. I’ll get down there later, somehow.”
“You mean you want me to
drive
that thing?” Her voice had risen dangerously.
“Janice,” he said patiently, “the door locks don’t work. I don’t want it sitting out after they close. I’ve got tools in there…”
“Why don’t you
sell
that car!”
He had his eyes closed. “It’s one of those things, Janice. Can you help me out, or not?”
There was a long pause. “Okay, Deal,” she said wearily. “I’ll do it.”
Deal knew he should have felt gratitude, but it was a difficult sensation to summon up. “Thanks,” he said, finally, but the lowrider had cranked up again, and he couldn’t be sure she’d heard.
After he’d finished with Alcazar, Leon made his way back to the dealership. He stationed the big Electra in a vacant lot a half block down from the service bays and went across the street to have a few words with Mario, the service manager. It was a struggle to get the guy to focus in on the matter at hand. He knew Leon had played ball and always wanted to talk about who was really bad, about getting in shape, stuff like that. Today it was about some muscle-building powder he was buying through the mail from Mexico, supposed to make steroids look like One-A-Day vitamins.
“They got a lot of stuff you can’t buy in the States, man. My friend’s father, he went down there for this cancer he had?” Mario looked at Leon like he was supposed to care. “They fixed him
up
.”
It could have been Rice Krispies and rat shit Mario was stirring into his carrot juice, Leon thought. Listening to him rattle on, you knew it wasn’t brain food.
Leon had to promise to take him down to the Fifth Street gym, introduce him to one of the old-time trainers worked with Ali, before he could get him to pay attention. Mario brightened up when he found out whose car they were talking about. “Yeah,” he said to Leon, once he’d figured it out. “Deal. The guy who thinks he’s a bad dude.” After that, it was easy.
***
Leon, who had missed his lunch, caught the roach wagon out in the parking lot, took the last half-dozen Jamaican meat patties, the hot ones, and a large Coke. He walked back to the Electra, tears welling in his eyes as he finished off the blazing food.
He wedged himself in behind the wheel, slid the seat back to its last notch, and drained the Coke, then went to work on the ice, trying to put out the flames in his insides. When the heat died down, he kicked off his Balys, checked his watch and settled back to wait.
It was a good choice, the Electra. Big V-eight been bored out, had a four-barrel carburetor on it. Good for heavy work, and so old and faded-out, nobody would be able to describe it in any helpful way. “I dunno, officer. It was big. And blue. Or maybe brown.” Mmmm-hmmm. That was one thing about working for Alcazar: man owned a dozen dealerships, most of them with three or four brands. You need a car, you got whatever you wanted. Only trouble is, this one was so old it lacked a cassette. He was still thinking about that when he fell asleep.
He dreamed of a big coal fire, underground. Which he had started, playing with matches. His old man was there showing him where the seam had opened in the earth, right in the middle of the woods, a whole bunch of slash pines flopped over and smoldering in this big smoky hole, and when Leon looked over the steaming edge, he saw their piece-of-shit cabin had slid down there too. His mother stood on the porch with her hair up in flames, stretching her hands out and hollering for Leon to do something. Leon saw he had a bucket in his hand and, grateful for that good luck, flung what was in it toward her. Confetti showered down into the hole, each flake bursting into fiery pinpoints as the heat struck it. His mother was a whole pillar of flame now. His father kicked him in the ass so hard it snapped his head back.
Leon came awake with the jolt, sweating in the late afternoon heat, scared shitless by his dream, vaguely aware of a searing pain in his stomach. He blinked, checked his watch to see that it was almost six o’clock, then stared across the street in a panic. He relaxed when he saw the sawed-off Seville sitting there in the ready line, but tensed again when he felt a dull thud shake his own car.
He got his shoes on, jumped out of the car, shook his head to clear away the cobwebs. Then stared, wondering if maybe he was still dreaming.
A guy in a long overcoat and a leather cap with ear flaps was hunched down by the rear wheel of the car, hooking a length of logging chain around the axle and into a metal plate.
“Hey,” Leon said.
The guy glanced over his shoulder. One of his eyes might have been focused on Leon, the other one looked off toward Mars. His face had a flattened, scarred-over look, like somebody had decided to grind everything off and start over, then given up on the job.
He turned back to his work without a word. Leon heard something snap shut. He started forward. “What the
fuck
you doing?”
The guy stood up, turning toward him in one motion. “Boot!” he said. He dusted off his hands and pointed down at the Electra’s wheel. Leon stared. Some kind of parking boot, all right. He wondered how the guy had managed to steal it. The thick chain looped around his axle and fitted into an eye-bolt welded to a heavy L-shaped metal plate. There was a combination lock holding it together, set back in a protective niche, where you couldn’t bust it loose. Try to drive away, you’d shear the whole quarter panel off.
Leon grabbed the guy by the lapels of his coat. “Get it the fuck off my car,” he said, lifting him off the ground. The guy rattled around inside the floppy coat. He might have weighed a hundred pounds. It was like holding a moth.
“You pay,” the guy said, pointing at something. His good eye was a little wider, but he seemed more angry than afraid. Leon turned away from the guy’s horrifying breath, saw a faded sign on the warehouse at the back of the lot. “ort Authority Parking—five dollars—No In and Out,” he read. There’d probably been a
P
there once, but it was covered up by a realtor’s sign that had been nailed overtop of it. Both signs were peeling and sun blasted. It looked like they’d been painted in another century.
Leon turned back to the guy. He couldn’t believe it. A free-lance parking lot attendant. He was almost ready to laugh until he heard a motor rev up across the street, saw a cloud of exhaust smoke puff up behind the Seville.
“Get it off there,” he said, shaking the guy again. “Get it the fuck off, now.”
“Five dollars for parking, five dollars boot charge,” the guy said. The Seville had backed out of the ready line, laid a short burst of rubber on the slick concrete.
“I’ll tear your fucking head off,” Leon said.
The guy saw him looking at the Seville, which was now pulling out onto Biscayne and was speeding away north. “Plus five dollars combination charge,” the guy said. “My lot, my boot. Seventeen dollars.”
“Mother
fuck
-er,” Leon said, dumping the guy back to his feet. He found a twenty, wadded it into the guy’s hand. “Do it.” The guy held the bill up between the sun and his wandering eye, finally nodded. “Get in the car,” he said to Leon, warily.
“Yeah, sure,” Leon said. He gave the guy a last murderous glance, then got into the Electra. The Seville was a tiny dot way up the boulevard now, and by the time the guy got the boot unhooked, Leon had lost sight of it altogether.
Leon checked his rearview mirror in time to see the guy stand up and throw his hands into the air like some cowboy just tied off a bull. That meant he was finished, Leon hoped. He stomped the accelerator, his wheels chewing thin, rocky soil all the way to the curb, which he banged over, losing a hubcap on the way. He saw it rolling crazily across the boulevard in his rearview mirror, the crazy guy swooping out after it, the tails of the heavy coat lifting like wings.
***
Leon’s only hope was that Deal was on his way back to the condo they’d tailed him from that morning. Only one way out to that part of the beach from where they were, and maybe he could catch up, but once he hit the commuter traffic, he knew that his chances of overtaking him were nil.
He fumed all the way up the boulevard, light after light, then everybody slowing down to a crawl to watch a guy up on the curb changing a tire—what the fuck went on in these people’s
minds
, he wondered, that something like that could be interesting. It took him half an hour to reach the turn, out across the causeway, then a left and across a series of bridges connecting the islands, the traffic thinning as he went, but still no sign of the Seville. He was ready to give up, already rehearsing his speech for Alcazar, tell him all about the crime problems of that neighborhood around Surf Motors, when he caught sight of the Seville, moving up from the dull horizon onto the ramp of the last drawbridge between them and the guy’s building.
Leon felt his spirits rise. Still a chance to make something of his day. He floored the Electra, felt the slight hesitation, then the powerful lunge as the jets kicked in. He was doing eighty when he hit the ramp, felt the heavy car sway as the tires bit into the steel grid-work of the bridge.
The Seville seemed to be dawdling, maybe the guy slowing down to have a look out over the railings at the birds swirling around, the pink sky reflecting the last of the sun, a couple of boats churning out to sea. Nice view, Leon thought. Nice way to check on out of life.
He cut his speed, timing it, drew up on the Seville’s flank as they started down from the crest of the bridge. Way down the street was a car pulling out of a parking garage, but heading the other way. Everything fine.
He floored the Electra once again, cut his wheels sharply to the right. The big car jumped forward like a big jungle cat, taking down something soft and choice on the plains. It happened so quick, it was almost like it didn’t happen. The Seville veered off as if sideways gravity had taken it. It climbed up the concrete abutment, cut the aluminum rails like they weren’t there. The car seemed to hesitate at the top, everything stopping, a picture in Leon’s mind:
The driver’s window down. A big bird swooping overtop of them. Bunch of pink sky. Clank of metal from somewhere. Whitecaps out on the ocean.
And Leon, seeing who was driving, saying, “Jesus Christ, what else?”
***
You are out of control
, Janice was telling herself, just before it happened.
Bitchy and whiny and totally out of control
. The way she’d seen her mother grinding on her father those last years. Reason had nothing to do with it.
The hum of The Hog’s tires on the bridge grid had set her mind drifting. She’d been sitting with her mother at the breakfast table one morning, a view out the back windows of one hundred and sixty acres of frozen flat farmscape, a leaden Midwestern sky, the haze of her mother’s cigarette smoke, the nasal twang of the radio announcer reading the glum news of grain futures. They hadn’t spoken a dozen words to each other, Janice girding herself for a day at work, she’d be a happy little teller at the First National Bank of Findlay, her mother girding herself for another day.
And then the clump of her father’s heavy boots down the stairs, across the living room floor, out into the kitchen. Janice turned, about to say good morning to her father.
“Oh shut up, Francis,” her mother barked.
Her father stopped, stared at her mother, then went to pour his coffee, went on out without a word. Janice watched him from the window, moving stiffly toward the barn, shaking his head, his coffee trailing steam in the frigid air. A month later her parents were dead.
She shook her head, noticing some crazy driver coming up fast in the mirror behind her, somebody crazed to beat the drawbridge, afraid to spend an extra five minutes getting home. She edged The Hog farther to the right, and checked her watch.
Was that it? she wondered. Some genetic code kicking in, triggered by her pregnancy—
stomp on your man
. Dear God, she’d thought she’d left all that behind her. And now, here she was, unable to have a discussion, unable to talk at all, really. She loved Deal. She wanted this baby. And yet she was scared and angry and feeling so alone…
Stop it
, she told herself.
You have got to break out of this
. She checked her watch, again. She could blow off the shower. Go by the market, pick up something for dinner. Surprise Deal. Maybe they’d have a bottle of wine, although she’d been drinking too much for the baby lately, hadn’t she? Still, they had to talk. Deal could help her. He had always been there for her.
It was a plan. And she would follow through on it.
First step, Janice, turn around, back to the market
. She sent her window down, catching the rush of salt air. Checked the lane beside her.
And screamed.
She caught one glimpse of the big man’s face as his car slammed into hers. His eyes were set ahead, his expression grim. There was a grinding shriek of metal, and a smell of burning rubber. She felt The Hog lurch sideways, toward the spindly guard rails on her right—she had told Deal once, wasn’t it nice on this old bridge you could still see out, over the water, no high curb to block the view.
She jerked the steering wheel back to the left, felt something snap, felt a shudder all the way up her arms. She stared in horror. The steering wheel was turning freely in her hands.
The Hog skipped the low curb of the walkway and her head drove up hard into the padded roof. She felt something warm and wet in her mouth and realized she’d bitten her cheek or her tongue.
The Hog tore into the railings with an awful rending noise, like train wheels chewing through glass. She glanced out her window at the car that had crashed into her. The driver was still beside her, staring back now, his face registering shock, or surprise.
“Deal!” she screamed, as The Hog soared out into space. “Deal!”
And then she was in the water.
She wasn’t sure how long she was under. She watched the light above her go slowly black and realized her hands were clawing to release her seat belt. The passenger cabin was full of water, slowing her movements, pressing her deeper and deeper into the seat cushions as they sank. The car pitched over in the swift current, and she felt her ears caving painfully inward.
She felt something give at her shoulder and then she was tumbling free, her face sliding along the slick inner surface of the wind-shield. It was pitch black now and she sent her hands scrambling frantically for the steering wheel, then the door frame.
Something soft and bulky brushed past her face, and she recoiled. Just her purse, she told herself. The pressure was tremendous now, like gravity doubling, then doubling again, pressing her down and down with the tumbling, plummeting car. She grasped the door frame with her other hand and pulled herself forward, forcing her shoulders through the open window. The car was rolling again, threatening to flip her back inside, but she levered her foot against something hard and shoved with all her might.