Deal with the Dead

by Les Standiford

  At the same moment, Frank Wheatley gave a yank on the controls of the Fire Shower of the Apocalypse, sending the steel cage hurtling toward the platform. The dangling cage, with Basil still inside, smashed through the flimsy railing like a wrecking ball, then drove itself into Babescu with a thud that vibrated the decking beneath Halliday’s feet.

  The fat man went down with a groan, the pistol he’d intended to draw skittering across the deck to Halliday’s feet. Halliday glanced at the weapon, then kicked it over the side.

  The fat man was struggling onto his hands and knees, his eyes glassy. Basil Wheatley had already jumped down from the dangling cage, steadying it with one meaty hand, while Frank played out cable until its floor rested solidly on the deck.

  In an instant, Basil was across the reviewing stand to drive a fist into the fat man’s broad back, just above the kidney. He drew back quickly and sent another to the base of Babescu’s skull. There was a dull popping sound, and Babescu collapsed to the deck as if he’d been shot.

  Basil snatched the fat man by the collar of his white coat and dragged him toward the cage. He jerked open the door of the cage with one hand, lifting Babescu inside as if he were stuffed with feathers.

  Basil slammed the door to the cage, then gave his brother the thumbs-up. In moments the cage was dangling half a dozen feet in the air, Babescu’s corpulent face pressed into furrows by the steel bars.

  “You stole from me,” Halliday said.

  Babescu blinked down at him, then out into the darkness where he’d stationed his bodyguards. Bodyguards so recently retired. Indeed, Halliday thought, money did talk.

  “For God’s sake, Michael,” Babescu managed.

  “You took advantage when I was in a position of weakness,” Halliday replied.

  “I’ll make calls,” Babescu said. He struggled to pull himself upright, but his legs seemed unwilling to obey. “I’ll see that you get everything that’s yours, and interest besides.”

  “This isn’t a banking transaction,” Halliday said. He turned to Basil. “Give him the documents.”

  Basil motioned to Frank, who cranked the cage down a foot or two. Basil stepped forward, thrust a sheet of paper and a pen between the bars.

  “What is this?” Babescu asked blearily.

  “The item requires your signature,” Halliday said.

  “We could have reasoned out these matters, Michael,” Babescu said, a plaintive note in his voice.

  “Sign,” said Basil Wheatley, rocking the cage with his hand.

  Babescu scribbled his signature and handed the document out to Basil, who passed it along to Halliday. Halliday scanned the document, then folded it into his pocket.

  “You want us to clean this mess up now?” Basil Wheatley said to Halliday, wrinkling his nose at a foul odor that had drifted over the stage.

  Halliday nodded curtly, then started for the steps.

  “Wait,” Babescu called. “If it’s money you want—”

  Halliday kept moving.

  “Your father’s trust, Michael…for God’s sake…”

  Halliday paused, his hand on the railing that led down from the stage. The fat man reached out to grasp one of the blackened bars of the cage and was pulling himself forward. “It’s gone, Babescu. You told me so yourself.”

  Babescu shook his head hastily. “More money than you’ve dreamed of,” the man said. “I know where it is.”

  Frank and Basil exchanged glances, clearly impatient to get on with their business. Halliday froze the pair with a glance, then turned back to Babescu. “If there was cash to be had, you’d have spent it. I think we’ve learned that much.”

  Halliday signaled to Frank, who threw a lever on the control panel before him. The machine groaned with Babescu’s weight, but the cable still began to coil, lifting the cage higher, inch by relentless inch.

  “I couldn’t get at it!” Babescu cried. “Damn it, man, listen to me!”

  Halliday raised his hand and the rising cage creaked to a stop.

  The fat man was slumped back against the bars like a hippo without a spine, his jowls gray and sagging, as if his flesh had begun to melt. “I can’t move my legs,” he said, as if he’d forgotten what he’d just been saying.

  “The trust, Babescu,” Halliday said, mimicking the fat man. “Or perhaps you’re lying,” he continued as Frank Wheatley gunned the engine of the heavy machine.

  “I’m not,” Babescu said quickly. “It’s all there. I’m certain of it.”

  “You can produce all this?”

  Babescu stared down at him. The whites of his eyes were yellowed now, and spidered with lacy red. “The trust resides in Miami,” the fat man said. He thrust his hand into his jacket pocket and came out with a wallet. He fumbled with the wallet for a moment, then produced a key. “In a vault,” he said, tossing the key toward Halliday.

  Halliday snatched the key out of the air. He glanced at Basil Wheatley then back at Babescu, regarding him thoughtfully. “It wouldn’t be there if you could have gotten at it. Tell me the story, Babescu. Quickly!”

  The fat man’s mouth opened and closed twice before the words began to issue. “Your father and I…” he managed, “we had something of a falling out just before he died.” Babescu waved his hand as if it hardly mattered. “He revoked my right of trusteeship.”

  Halliday’s nostrils flared. “Just a detail you’d neglected to pass along.”

  “The last time you and I met, we hardly had time for a heart to heart,” Babescu said, his breathing ever more labored.

  True enough, Halliday thought. He’d been tipped by informants within the Justice Department as to what was coming, but even so, he’d had less than a week to convert what assets he could and still make it out of the country. Eight years he’d been on the run, and no glittery residences for him, either. The glorious watering holes, those were the first places they came looking for you when they wanted their money back. Then the agonizing months of surgery, in and out of one clandestine clinic and another…And then the money had run out. And he’d had enough. He’d paid for what he’d done and more. He was going to live again, and nothing was going to keep him from it.

  “Who has access to this vault?” Halliday said.

  Babescu shook his head, staring down at the front of his trousers where a dark stain had spread. “I need medical attention, Michael. Immediate medical attention.”

  “You’ll get it,” Halliday said. “Who has access? A Miami law firm? One of your dubious CPAs?”

  Babescu shook his head. “Your father wasn’t one to trust organizations, Michael.”

  “Tell me, Babescu. Tell me, and I’ll see that you’re attended to.”

  Babescu stared back at him, the expression on the fat thief’s face perhaps the most candid Halliday had ever seen. “I’d have never stolen from your father,” he said, his voice a ruin.

  “But you are willing to steal from me?” Halliday said. “Give me the name, Babescu. Let’s get this over with.”

  Babescu hesitated, then turned away as he spoke. “Barton Deal,” the fat man said, defeat evident in his tone. “DealCo Construction. Your father’s old friend.”

  Halliday paused. “Barton Deal is dead, Babescu. He shot himself years ago.”

  Babescu turned back, defiant suddenly. “Barton Deal’s the man Grant Rhodes gave his money to. And I haven’t received a penny since he died. If you’re interested, go to Miami and look for it. Now get me out of here.”

  Halliday stared at the fat man thoughtfully, then finally nodded. “That I will,” he said. He put the key in his pocket, then turned to Frank Wheatley and gestured. Frank grinned and pressed a button on the console before him. There came a faint popping noise, and tiny blue tongues of flame began to dance about the perimeter of the cage, a lacework of flame that quickly grew to red and gold, and finally to a white hot storm.

  ***

  “You want us to put it out?” Basil Wheatley asked.<
br />
  Halliday, né Rhodes, stared up at the swaying fireball and past it, noting that the tips of the ruined temple once again glowed red in the reflection of the Fire Shower’s flames. There had been no spinning cylinder of fire this time. Just the flames and the screaming and the eventual near-silence, as now.

  “Let it take care of itself,” he said.

  Basil nodded and motioned his brother down from the control panel of the machine. “He says to let it go.”

  Frank nodded and clambered down from the seat of the machine. He glanced up at the glowing cage as he joined Halliday and his brother on the platform. “I’d have shot the fat fuck out of that cannon,” he said. “See what happens to one of those trucks when a tub of guts like that hits it.”

  “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 bu
ilding 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.