Deal to Die For

by Les Standiford

  She heard Mahler’s departing footsteps, heard the door to the room open and close, heard someone in the hallway talking to Mahler in a deep Texas drawl.

  “Who’s the babe in there, Mr. Mahler? She one of ours?”

  And then Mahler’s voice, reassuring, always in control. “Just one of my clients, Paco. Another one in trouble. She’s had to come down to the desert for a little private detox.”

  There was more, then, something else that Texas Paco wanted to know about her, and Paige wanted to scream, kick, shout out for him to save her, that she’d tell him everything he wanted to know…but the very thought of such exertion seemed to exhaust her, empty her even of thought and intention, and what she did, in fact, was go to sleep.

  Chapter 35

  “Does the name Rhonda Gardner mean anything to you?” Driscoll asked. It was a question he’d rehearsed posing to Paige Nobleman, but he’d considered things on the way back to the fourplex, decided it’d be better to try it out on Deal first.

  Deal was on his back on the living room floor of his apartment, his hands and feet up in the air like some circus bear, balancing—or trying to balance, was more like it—his daughter in a hand-to-hand, foot-to-foot position that mirrored his own. Isabel was giggling furiously as one and another of her limbs wiggled and threatened collapse, and at first Driscoll wondered if Deal had heard him.

  Then, abruptly, Deal snatched his hands away, sending his dau-ghter into a shrieking tumble onto his chest. He hugged her, let her go, rolled over onto his hands and knees and glanced up at Driscoll.

  “Are you kidding?” Deal said. “African Drums? Wrong Way Street? High, Wide and Lonesome?”

  “I just wondered,” Driscoll said.

  “Rhonda Gardner was the hottest thing in movies when I was a kid,” Deal said. “The way she wore those blouses…” He stopped himself, giving a look over his shoulder at Isabel, who was clambering onto his back for a horse ride. He turned back to Driscoll.

  “Anyway, what about her? She still alive?”

  “She’s maybe ten years older than me,” Driscoll said dryly.

  Deal thought about it. “Kind of funny. You haven’t seen her around for years.”

  Driscoll nodded. “They like a young blouse out there, I guess.”

  “So what about her?” Deal said. He was bucking and swaying now, sending Isabel into fresh gales of laughter.

  Driscoll wasn’t sure about the way Deal was behaving. From morose, Eeyore-like Deal to breezy, howyadoing Deal, not a problem in the world in less than twenty-four hours? Or maybe it was just an act he needed to put on for Isabel’s sake.

  “Look, I can come back in a little while,” Driscoll said.

  Deal glanced up from the floor where he’d tumbled onto his side. “Horsey’s dead!” Isabel shrieked happily.

  “It’s okay,” Deal told him. “It’s her bedtime.”

  Mrs. Suarez, who’d been watching their games from the hall passage, nodded her agreement. “Is late,” she said, stepping forward to scoop Isabel up in her arms. “Bath time.”

  “Noooooo,” Isabel wailed, but she brightened when Deal stood, chucked her under the chin, gave her a kiss.

  “Daddy’ll come and give you a good-night kiss,” he said. “But you have to mind Mrs. Suarez now, okay?”

  Isabel gave him a doubtful look, but after a moment buried her face in Mrs. Suarez’s neck. Deal gave her another nudge in the ribs as the two of them went off down the hall, then turned back to Driscoll.

  “Okay,” he said. “Rhonda Gardner. What about her?”

  Driscoll hesitated. There was a brightness in Deal’s eyes, a hard quality about his smile. “You all right?” Driscoll asked. “Everything okay over at the clinic?”

  “Peachy-keen,” Deal said. His smile seemed an eyeblink away from a snarl.

  “You taking something? Some kind of pills?”

  Deal’s mouth opened as if he were about to snap at him, then closed. He rubbed his face with his hands, glanced down the hallway at the splashing sounds that were emanating from the bathroom, then turned back to Driscoll.

  “You got any beer at your place?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Driscoll said.

  Deal nodded, then turned to call down the hallway. “I’m going across the hall, Mrs. Suarez.”

  She poked her head out the bathroom doorway, waved at him, and then the two of them walked out.

  ***

  “She wants a divorce, Vernon.” Deal had drained most of his beer in his first swallow, and was threatening to finish it now, on his second.

  Driscoll sat across the kitchen table from him, stunned, trying his best to finish swallowing his beer. “Well, yeah,” he managed, finally. “She might say anything right now, but that doesn’t mean…”

  “She means it, Vernon,” Deal cut in. “Whoever she is now, anyway. Whoever she’s become.”

  “You make it sound like a science fiction movie,” Driscoll said.

  Deal shrugged. “That’s what it seems like. The scary part is, it’s really happening. You live with somebody for fifteen years, you think you know them, then one day you wake up and take a ride to the Everglades…” He broke off, shaking his head.

  Driscoll rose, went to the refrigerator, brought him another beer. “I wouldn’t put too much stock in this, pardner. She’ll spend some time down there, mellow out…”

  Deal shook his head. “She wants to leave the clinic,” he said.

  Driscoll stared at him. “What’s that doctor say?”

  Deal shrugged. “The same thing he has from the beginning. She checked herself in, she can check herself out.”

  “Can’t you do anything about that?” Driscoll said.

  “Baker Act her?” Deal said. “Baker Act Janice?”

  “Whatever it takes,” Driscoll said.

  “I don’t know that I could do that,” Deal said. “Besides, what are the grounds? I’m going to go to a judge, say, Your Honor, my wife doesn’t love me anymore, I want to lock her up?”

  “Yeah, but the thing with the credit cards, running off with Isabel, all that,” Driscoll said. “You’d be willing to trust her with your daughter?”

  Deal looked at him mournfully. “She doesn’t want to take Isabel.”

  “What?!” Driscoll stared at him, dumbfounded.

  Deal threw up his hands. “Janice knows she’s confused. She wants to go off somewhere by herself, try to get her head straight. She’s got a friend from college, a woman who runs an art and frame shop over on St. Armand’s Key. She wants to stay with her, work in the shop…”

  “You gotta be fucking kidding me,” Driscoll said, falling back in his chair.

  “She feels it’d be in Isabel’s best interest to stay with me,” Deal said, weary. “She’d be willing to go over there for a while and defer any precipitous decisions,” he said.

  “Precipitous decisions? That’s the kind of words she used?”

  Deal nodded.

  “A mother doesn’t want her child, that’s all you need,” Driscoll said, waving his hands about like John Madden diagramming a football play. “You gotta get her locked up, get some real shrinks working on her…”

  He broke off as the sound of someone knocking on a door outside drifted through the open kitchen window. They looked at each other for a moment, then the knock came again.

  “That’s your door, pardner.”

  Deal checked his watch, then rose and moved down the hall, a concerned look on his face. Driscoll was close on his heels.

  He swung Driscoll’s door open, looked across the breezeway to find two smallish men in dark clothing standing before the entrance to his own apartment. He glanced out toward the street, wondering if he’d see some kind of delivery truck idling, some service van, but there was nothing.

  “Can I help you,” he called.

  One of the men turned toward him, and Deal realized for the first time that they were Asians. “Look for
John Deal,” he said. He said it more like “John Dear,” and it took Deal a moment to respond.

  “I’m John Deal,” he began…and then, in the split second it took for the second man to spin about, raising something in his hands, Deal realized what was about to happen.

  Though he’d never felt more urgency, though he willed every fiber of himself to respond, it was as if time had ground to a halt and he were moving in a dream, forcing himself forward through an atmosphere of oil.

  He heard Driscoll’s footsteps echoing distinctly in the hallway behind him and felt himself turn, shout some unintelligible cry of warning, heard Driscoll’s grunt of surprise as his shoulder drove into the big man’s chest and sent him over as the explosions roared from the passageway behind them.

  They both crashed onto the cold white tile of the foyer, and Deal rolled onto his back in time to see the little man advancing methodically across the breezeway toward them, a strange boxy-looking machine pistol braced at his hip, the muzzle erupting in bright bursts, a strange chuffing sound accompanying the flashes. He saw the tiles of the foyer explode in a brilliant line of fire that traced itself inward from the doorjamb, down the hallway an inch from his cheek, and on into the apartment, where it sounded as if all the kitchen appliances had burst instantaneously into shrapnel.

  Deal’s vision blurred and he felt a stinging wetness at his face. There was an unexpected silence, and he blinked his eyes back into focus to see the man with the machine pistol dodge past his partner toward the open doorway. Another second or two and he’d be upon them, lacing the two of them with that fire, Driscoll and Deal would be a couple more human hamburger statistics for the morning Herald, and what would they say about them anyway…

  …when Deal braced his shoulders against Driscoll’s bulk and lashed out with his foot, propelling the entrance door closed. There was a satisfying thud and a cry of pain as the heavy steel door crashed into the little man—something good to say for the revised building code, Deal thought, he might have used wood before the hurricane had changed everyone’s attitude.

  He scrambled onto his hands and knees, saw that Driscoll was clawing for the pistol he kept holstered at his ankle. No time to discuss the matter, Deal thought, and lunged into the big man once again. Deal, who’d been too slow as a safety and thirty pounds out of his class as a linebacker, had nonetheless kept a spot on the Florida State special teams for a couple years until injuries benched him for good. He’d gotten in his licks from time to time, played respectably if sparingly, but he’d never made a tackle as big as this one.

  An inane play-by-play was running in his mind: “Whoa, Nellie, what a lick! The big guy never saw what hit him…” as his arms wrapped around Driscoll and rolled them both into the little closet Deal had insisted upon incorporating into each apartment entryway.

  “Northerners have foyer closets, Deal,” Janice had protested. “That’s where they keep their coats and snowshoes. Spend the money on something else.” But he had argued that Miamians needed a place for raincoats and so the closets stayed.

  And it was fortunate that he had won out, he thought, watching the steel door erupt inward from automatic fire. The hallway went up in a shower of splintered tile. Another burst rattled off the solid steel jambs he’d installed—proof positive against a hurricane prying your door off its hinges, he’d told her during the same conversation—and he heard cries, excited shouts in a language he couldn’t understand as fragments ricocheted outside.

  There was silence then, and Deal could imagine Mrs. Suarez hearing the strange noises, opening up the doorway across the hall, maybe Isabel in her arms…but surely she’d know better, surely she’d be bunkered down, the calls already flying to 911…

  …Deal was trying desperately to remember if he’d locked his own door on the way out when he saw the shredded door inching slowly open, the snout of another stubby automatic appear in the crevice. Driscoll was still clawing for his pistol, but Deal knew he would never make it in time.

  In another instant, the front door was going to swing open and whoever was holding that weapon was going to find them huddled in this thoughtful raincoat closet and blow them into a place where, snow or rain, you could skip along without a care.

  Deal didn’t really think about what he did next. Outrage, fear, instinct, some blend of all those things took care of it. He just did what it seemed he had to do. His feet were already tucked back under him, and it was a fairly simple move. He lunged forward, springing up out of the closet like some real-life jack-in-the-box. He flew upward, catching hold of the stubby barrel on the way up, driving it toward the ceiling just as the shots exploded again.

  He felt pain in the palm of his hand and thought at first that he’d been hit. Then he smelled something bitter and realized it was heat, intense heat that he was feeling, the steel of the muzzle and silencer searing his palm as if he’d pressed it to a griddle.

  He cried out as he went on over against the opposite wall, pulling the gunman through the now-open doorway. But his grip on the weapon was giving way, his skin seeming to melt, to grease his hand’s slide down the barrel. A slide that would end in oblivion, he was thinking, as he felt the gunman wrench the pistol free.

  Deal felt his shoulder crunch into the wallboard, his cheek strike the cool gray tile he’d picked out in that other lifetime, back when the world was still real.

  He was waiting for the burst that would take the back of his head off when he heard a shot ring out, this one unsilenced, deafening in the confines of the foyer. There was another blast, and he felt something heavy strike him between the shoulder blades. Surely there’d be more pain than that, he was thinking. And there’d be more than one shot from the guy to take him out.

  Then he realized. It was the machine pistol that had fallen upon him, and it was now clattering onto the tile by his cheek. And then, in the next moment, the body of the gunman slumped down upon him. Driscoll, he thought, his ears still ringing from the twin blasts. Driscoll had finally gotten his weapon free, fired at the second man.

  He heard the sounds of running footsteps outside in the foyer and struggled up, out from under the inert form of the gunman. The foyer light was out, vaporized by the shots that had shredded the door, but he could hear Driscoll’s curses, his raspy breathing beside him as the two of them fought toward the doorway and the receding footsteps of the second assailant.

  “Shit,” Deal heard then as Driscoll’s foot hooked over his own. There was a heavy thud and a great outrush of breath as the ex-cop went down, and a clattering sound as his pistol went skittering out across the breezeway. By the time the two of them made it outside, they heard the sounds of a car door slamming, the shrieking of tires as a car disappeared into the night.

  Chapter 36

  Though the detectives from Metro would turn out to be far more interested in asking questions than answering them, Driscoll had managed to go over the body before the investigating team had arrived. He’d diverted the driver of the first patrol car that had responded back to his unit to put in a lookout for the car they’d heard escaping, then completed his own hasty search. As he would tell Deal later, the dead man hadn’t been carrying identification, but his suit held the label of a Hong Kong tailor. There was a half-eaten package of airline peanuts in his jacket, a thousand dollars in fifties and a package of matches from a Los Angeles restaurant in his pants. Once Deal had managed to get Mrs. Suarez calmed down and back inside in case Isabel awoke, Driscoll had beckoned him back to where the body lay. By now several squad cars had arrived, but no one seemed ready to interfere with Driscoll.

  The ex-cop was kneeling, holding up the hand of the dead man, nodding for Deal to take a closer look. On the skin between the thumb and palm was a tiny tattoo, something that wouldn’t ordinarily be visible unless the hand were splayed open, as Driscoll held it now. At first Deal had thought it was some abstract design, but when Driscoll trained a penlight on the mark, he could see that it was a Chinese hierogly
phic, very intricately done.

  “What is it?” Deal asked.

  Driscoll had shrugged, dropping the man’s hand back to the tile. “Gang bullshit,” Driscoll said.

  “Gang?” Deal said, disbelieving. “He’s part of some street gang?”

  Driscoll shook his head. “Gang, as in mob.” He glanced up. “Triad, to be more exact. You hear about them on the West Coast and New York, for the most part.”

  “What are you talking about, Driscoll? Chinese mobsters? Why would they come after me?”

  Driscoll shrugged. “You must have pissed them off.”

  “It’s not funny, Driscoll.”

  “Well, what’s your explanation, pardner? You think this was some everyday South Florida home invasion? The last I checked, the Chinese down here weren’t exactly involved in that.” He gestured at the body. “This guy’s from L.A., probably from Taiwan before that.”

  Deal shook his head. “But it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Oh, it makes sense, all right,” Driscoll told him as a white Ford, not unlike the one the ex-cop drove, pulled up to the curb. A pair of detectives got out, pausing as a patrolman filled them in. “The only problem is, we’re just not in the place where we can see how, as yet.”

  “So how do we get to that place, Driscoll?” Deal asked.

  “Hard to say.” Driscoll shrugged again, eyeing the body at their feet. He gestured downward then. “First thing, let’s get the mess cleaned up.”

  ***

  “She what?” Driscoll said into the phone. “When was this?”

  They were in Deal’s apartment now, the detectives finally gone, the body of the man who had nearly killed them taken away, though skeins of yellow police-line tape still draped the entrance and breezeway like some huge otherworldly spider had been at work in a place where Deal had just wanted to make a life.