Deal with the Dead

by Les Standiford

  He realized he had edged over into the left lane, looking by instinct for the break in the median that would take him down a lane to the Terrell estate, six acres of prime bayfront property eagerly sought after by real estate speculators. It was where he’d been going every day for the last couple of weeks, after all, no surprise that he’d nearly made the turn without thinking.

  What did surprise him was his failure to turn back out into the traffic lane and continue southward to his intended destination. Instead, he waited for a couple of oncoming cars to pass, then made his turn across the double lanes and onto the crushed coral path that led to the big double gates. He reached above the visor, where he kept the remote that Terrell had provided for him, found the unit, and pressed the “Entry” button. The gates began their ponderous inward swing and Deal nudged the accelerator of the Hog, edging forward in synch with the doors.

  He told himself he was simply going to check on the job, make sure everything had been wrapped up as he and Gonzalez had discussed before he’d left on Friday, but he knew that wasn’t really it. What he was looking for was something far more important, though God knows why he expected to find it on the estate of computer guru Terrence Terrell.

  He shook his head at himself, easing the Hog along the tunnel-like driveway through the oaks and palmetto and sea grape. The thick vegetation was not only a barrier between the main house and the busy road, but a reminder of the previous state of affairs in the area. Not a hundred years before, the whole near coastline of South Florida had consisted of such an unbroken tangle—until the late 1890s, Miami was virtually uninhabited, nothing more than a couple of muddy streets hacked through the undergrowth. Now Terrell had one of the few pieces of the original wilderness left, and the hounds were baying, waiting for him to tire of life in the tropics and sell out so that another tower or two might rise on the site.

  Deal broke out of the dense vegetation then, catching sight of the impressive main house up ahead, its barrel-tiled roofline silhouetted against the glow from downtown. Maybe not so strange that he found himself drawn here, he thought as he pulled to a stop in front of the ever-splashing fountain.

  He got out, glancing up at the empty house. Lights in random rooms, each of which would change over the course of an evening, simulating the activity within an occupied house, all of that controlled by Terrell-designed devices, and what else would you expect from a man who had once controlled the biggest part of the non-IBM personal computer market? Competition had eaten into Terrell’s once fabled position, of course, but discussing the decline of his fortunes was a little bit like feeling sorry for General Motors.

  Deal rounded the side of the house by his usual route, his eyes adjusting to the dark now that he was out of the car. He sidestepped a piece of sculpture—a woman folded serenely into herself—and caught sight of the outline of his gazebo on the broad lawn that sloped down to the water. Not “his” gazebo at all, of course, though until the day he finished the work, it would be.

  He stepped over a pile of two-by-twos stacked near the steps to the porch of the structure and pulled himself up onto the deck that would someday hold a set of chairs and a table, and perhaps a couple of chaise longues, where guests would sit and gaze out at the untroubled waters of Biscayne Bay and, if they chose, turn their attention further northward to the dramatic skyline of modern Miami. Now it was just himself, an unfinished railing, and a couple of piles of sawdust, Deal thought, at the same time realizing that this was where he’d been heading all along. Some force drawing him to this very spot where he could hold fast to an unfinished spar of pine and stare across half a mile’s expanse of inky water toward a breathtaking skyline that his father—and, yes, he himself—had helped create.

  He wasn’t sure what he expected to find there in the sight before him, but there was some measure of comfort in the very thought that he’d had a hand, however small, in creating that cityscape out there, reflecting against the bay. Nor did it matter really that such a concept would, along with a couple of dollars, get him a cup of coffee in any snappy restaurant that was a part of all that glitter. You have done things that matter, Deal. As did your father before you. Never lose sight of that much…

  “Something to look at, ain’t it?” the voice came from behind him.

  Deal turned, startled, then felt something strike him above the ear. He went down on his hands and knees, then felt a foot drive into his ribs. His breath left him as his chin bounced off the wooden deck.

  “Sure as hell don’t see much of this in Georgia,” came the voice at his ear. He felt a hand on his head, felt his hair twist tight, realized he was being hauled upward like a rag doll. “Not the part I come from anyway.”

  A fist struck his cheek and Deal went over backward, crashing through a temporary brace he’d toe-nailed himself, to hold the railing in place. He hit the railing with his shoulder, heard a sick wrenching of wood as his two hundred pounds torqued against it.

  In the next moment, the railing gave way and Deal was over the side in a mass of splintering wood. There was an instant of weightlessness, then a pile-driving blow as his back and shoulders slammed into the damp ground below. He glanced up, but this part of the house was in deep shadow. He sensed more than saw the silhouette of a big man diving after him, and though he was still out of breath, without the strength to offer any defense, he managed to twist aside, evading the man’s grasp.

  He struggled to get his feet under him, to push himself up, then felt a hand clamp onto one ankle. He clawed at the grass, trying to keep himself from being pulled backward. He felt his hand brush a broken chunk of porch railing, snatched it up, and swung weakly, desperately, behind him.

  There was a cry and Deal felt the grip on his ankle weaken. Still gasping for breath, he jerked his ankle free and rolled under the shelter of the deck, scuttling now like a wounded animal. By the time he had rolled around the shelter of a support post, the man was under the porch after him, but Deal was finally sucking air into his lungs. He braced himself against the post and lashed out with a solid backhand blow of the two-by-two.

  There was another cry, but the man managed to get hold of his club before Deal could draw it back. The two of them struggled for control of the club for a moment, and Deal felt the power there. Not anyone he’d have picked a struggle with, he thought, then abruptly let go of his makeshift club. He hooked his arm around the support post and pistoned his heel forward, only guessing his aim in the inky darkness. He felt a satisfying snap, like a wet rag slapping against concrete, and there came a matching groan.

  Deal pushed away from the post and rolled back toward the lawn. There were plenty of two-by-twos there. Concrete blocks. A spud bar you could drive through the heart of an ox.

  As his hands roamed blindly over the debris in the grass, he grabbed another length of railing and rolled back on the deck as a vague shape came out from under the structure beneath him. Ought to be getting onto his hands and knees about now, Deal thought, lunging forward with the length of wood in both hands. He leaned off the deck and onto his assailant’s back, dropping his hands over the man’s head. Then he pulled backward violently, wedging the broken spar tight against the man’s throat. The man struggled wildly, pulling Deal off the porch as if he weighed nothing, but still Deal held tight to the length of wood, one hand a fulcrum at the base, the other a lever at the back of the man’s head.

  Deal heard gagging noises, felt the power going out of the man’s struggles. In moments the man had collapsed into the grass, Deal on top of him still holding tight to the broken chunk of railing as if he were trying to strangle an ox with its own yoke.

  The strangling sounds were weaker in the man’s throat now, and the movements of his legs had changed from kicks to something more like galvanic twitches. “I can kill you,” Deal gasped. He gave a nudge at the base of the man’s skull to be sure he had his attention. “You know that, don’t you?”

  There was a gargling sound by way of answer and Dea
l released the pressure on the back of the man’s head by an infinitesimal degree. “One move, I’ll crush your throat, you understand?”

  Another gargling sound. Deal backed the pressure off another notch. “Who are you?”

  A coughing sound this time. Deal kept his arms poised, ready to increase the pressure in an instant.

  “Bown,” the man gasped. “Bil-bown.”

  It took Deal a moment to understand the man’s strangled speech. “Billy Brown?” Deal repeated, hearing the disbelief in his own voice. “What the hell are you doing? This is Deal, goddammit.”

  He had started to relax his grip at Brown’s throat when he felt an elbow smash into his ribs. “I know who you are, motherfucker,” Brown said, trying to buck him off.

  Deal, his mind a welter of confusing signals, felt himself slammed back against the edge of the deck. There was an electrifying pain in his back, and he felt his grip on the two-by-two beginning to give way. And that’ll be the end of you, Johnny-boy, came the voice from somewhere, willing him to hold fast.

  He ignored the pain at his kidneys and locked his legs tightly around Brown’s ribcage, squeezing for all he was worth. Brown growled beneath him, a sound that rattled through Deal’s own ribs, then bucked once more, trying to drive Deal against the projecting timbers of the deck.

  Deal twisted as they fell back again, managing to get his hand locked at the base of Brown’s neck. He levered his hand forward, jerking backward at the end of the broken spar, and felt Brown’s legs buckle. When the two of them went down this time, Deal did not let up.

  He dug in against Brown’s frantic struggles, pulling on one side, shoving on the other, until finally the man went limp. Deal hesitated one more instant, then released his hold on the club. He pressed his fingertips to Brown’s neck, felt the throb of a pulse still working there.

  The stack of two-by-twos had been tied with baling twine, he knew. He’d cut it open earlier that morning himself. He scrambled quickly to the tumbled stack and pawed through the wood until he found the cord. He hurried back to Brown’s inert form, pulled his thick arms behind him and bound him at the wrists. He pulled the end of the cord down to Brown’s sneaker-clad feet and was finishing the hasty job of hog-tying when he felt the man begin to stir.

  “I’ll kill you,” Brown coughed, and thrashed about, trying to free his hands.

  Deal dropped down, pinning a knee on the man’s chest as he flopped onto his back. “You won’t kill anybody,” he said. “Calm down. Tell me what this is about.”

  “Fuck you,” Brown growled.

  Deal stared down, trying to get a look at the man’s face in the darkness. Was he high on some drug? Deal wondered. Or just indulging in some normal psychosis? Docile job-seeker by day, deranged killer by night. Welcome to Miami—now draw your weapons.

  “You sure you know where you are?”

  “Know exactly,” Brown said, his voice raspy, almost a hiss.

  Deal glanced about the darkness, wondering briefly if Brown were alone. “Somebody sent you after me? Is that what this is?”

  “Know who you are, what you did.”

  Deal stared down, puzzled by the remark. The psychosis theory was starting to seem more and more convincing.

  “What are you talking about, ‘what I did’?” He patted his pockets but knew it was a futile gesture. His cell phone was still in the Hog, uncharged, where he’d left it the day before.

  “Don’t matter now,” Brown said, his voice more somber.

  “Well, you don’t have to talk to me,” Deal said. “You can explain it all to the police.” Of course, the words seemed something of an idle threat to Deal. He doubted the twine would keep Brown immobilized for very long, once he’d gone for help. And it seemed out of the question to try to carry the solidly built man back to the Hog. What was he going to do, then? Choke the man back into senselessness? He was trying to remember if there was something more substantial in the Hog that he might use to beef up his job of hog-tying, when Brown broke the silence.

  “Ought to be you talking to the police,” the man muttered. Not exactly the tone of a psycho, nor of a hard-bitten killer, Deal thought. He leaned aside, trying for a confusing look at the expression on Brown’s face.

  “What are you talking about?” Deal said. “What is it that you think I’ve done to you?”

  “Not me,” Brown said. Deal heard an unfathomable bitterness there. Then Brown added, “What you did was to my brother.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Deal stared down through the darkness at the man he had pinned to the ground, wondering if he had heard correctly. “Your brother?” He shook his head, searching the roster of men whom he had fired, refused to hire, had beaten out for jobs, but there was simply nothing there. “I don’t know anybody named Brown.”

  “Ain’t my name,” Brown said. “Wasn’t his, either.”

  Deal sighed. So that explained the reluctance to come up with an ID during their “job interview” of the day before. Another jailbird pinned under his knee, then, trying to hide a past in order to get a decent job. But that didn’t exactly explain everything, now, did it?

  “You want to tell me your real name, then?” he asked the man beneath him. “Or just wait and talk to the cops?”

  “Russell’s my name,” Brown said. “Russell Straight. My brother, name of Leon.”

  “Leon Straight…?” Deal was repeating the words even as it all swept over him like a storm-driven tide off the bay. Whatever was in his voice must have satisfied the man he’d pinned to the earth with his knee.

  “That’s right,” Russell Straight was saying. “What you did to my brother, I come down to pay the favor back.”

  Deal stared off into the starlit heavens, scarcely believing what he had heard. Leon Straight. A former Dolphin defensive end from a small college in Georgia, a big man with bad knees and an attitude that would make a steroid abuser seem like a model citizen. He’d played half a dozen games healthy, a few more on painkillers, had left the team before the season was over. There had been a rancorous dispute over contract terms—a grievous oversight attributed to Leon’s since deceased agent.

  More cogent was Leon Straight’s post-football career: a stint as an enforcer for Hialeah racketeer Raoul Alcazar. In the course of which he’d crossed Deal’s path. And more importantly, that of his wife. He’d kidnapped her, held her captive in a Stiltsville fishing cabin, nearly killed her and Isabel, then their unborn child.

  “You’re Leon Straight’s brother?”

  “Am,” said Russell. The defiance had not left his voice.

  Deal glanced around their deserted surroundings, still trying to come to terms with it all. “You’ve been following me?”

  Russell stared up at him, unfazed. “The man that owns this place could use a faster-closing gate. There’s some more work for you, Mr. DealCo, you still alive to do it.”

  “Maybe we ought to leave the police out of it,” Deal said. He glanced at one of the scattered two-by-twos nearby. It wouldn’t take long to finish Straight, and it wouldn’t be hard to hide the body. By morning he could be part of an enlarged footing for the deck, and an archeologist could wonder at the remains a few hundred centuries from now.

  “Never thought otherwise,” Russell said. “You or me. I messed my chance. You might as well get it over with.”

  Deal stared down at Russell Straight. “I didn’t kill your brother, Russell.”

  “Doesn’t matter what you say now. Tell me you’re Puff Daddy come down to see Madonna, it’s all the same to me.”

  “I saw him die,” Deal said. “But that’s not the same thing.”

  He felt something move inside Russell Straight’s chest. Or maybe it was just his knee shifting on the man’s flesh. “Leon wrote to me,” the man said. “Told me you took what was his, he was going to take it back. He told me who to look for if things didn’t work out.”

  Deal considered this. “It took you long enoug
h to get here.”

  Straight made a sound that could have been meant as a derisive laugh. “I had myself otherwise indisposed.”

  “You were in prison.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  “He told you about the man he worked for, Raoul Alcazar?”

  “About both you two. He knew what he was up against. Up against the man all his life.”

  Deal shook his head. “You think Raoul Alcazar and I teamed up against your brother?”

  There was silence beneath him. “Raoul Alcazar wanted me dead,” Deal said finally. “He sent your brother after me. Then your brother decided he’d had enough of being Alcazar’s goon. Leon tried to turn the tables, which would have been fine with me, except that he kidnapped my wife as part of his scheme. I found out where she was and came to get her. It’s as simple as that.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t kill him,” Russell Straight said. There was something resembling uncertainty in his voice.

  “I didn’t,” Deal said, reliving the terrible night in his head. He’d had to pilot a cabin cruiser through the approaching bands of a hurricane all the way out to Stiltsville, that bizarre clutch of weekend homes and fishing camps built on pilings half a dozen miles out into the bay from where he knelt right now. He’d found Janice where Leon Straight had stashed her inside one of the homes, and had been about to chance their return to the mainland when all hell broke loose.

  First, Leon had blasted through the door and they’d begun their brutal struggle. Deal could still remember the strength in that big man’s body. If Raoul Alcazar and his men hadn’t turned up, he might not have been here to tell his side of the story. His good fortune, Leon’s loss.

  “Your brother and I were fighting when Alcazar showed up and stopped it.”

  There was no reaction from Russell, but Deal paused, a small distinction having occurred to him. “Your brother hated Alcazar. I was just a guy in the way. But things got ugly between the two of them. Leon realized Alcazar was going to kill everybody, leave your brother to take the blame.”