Deal, who’d inherited what was left of DealCo Construction from his late father, had come down from Miami to Key West to see a man about a job, as it were. Though it was summer and well ahead of the serious tourist season, which wouldn’t kick into high gear for months, the island paradise at the end of the American road—all one mile by four miles of it—was hardly sleepy.
Last evening, for instance, he and Russell, his newly promoted construction superintendent, had idled away part of the cocktail hour walking along the seawall at the Malory Docks, the city’s tour-boat port, elbowing their way through a crowd of easily a couple of thousand who’d come down for the ritual viewing of the sun’s fiery plunge into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Despite the mixture of heat and humidity that had combined to form a bank of thunderheads off to the west, obscuring the fabled sunset, there’d been no dearth of gawkers for the fire-eaters, jugglers, mimes, and bygone-era folksingers providing their own brand of entertainment at the steely water’s edge.
The number of tourists had simply been reduced to the very nearly tolerable, Deal thought, glancing around the crowded bar. He had promised himself that he’d never join that weary chorus who loved to tell newcomers how much better it had been “back in the old days,” before the swank hotels of the eighties, or before the highway in the thirties, or before Henry Flagler built his railroad at the turn of the twentieth century, when you could only get to the town by boat.
There had always been better days, Deal thought, anywhere you went. But even with Duval Street turned into one big market and high-profile restaurateurs turning cottages into Cafés See and Be Seen on every corner, Key West was still unique, a tropical island plopped down in the middle of the Gulf Stream a hundred miles from mainland Florida, enough of its original down-at-the-heels, Casablanca-like charm intact to beat the daylights out of a pleasure trip to Des Moines, or, worse, someplace like Orlando. In Orlando, they had pirate shows. In Key West, you could still find actual pirates.
Russell, meantime, had wrenched his gaze from the tawny waitress and turned to Deal, mulling his lesson on corkage. “I hang around with you long enough,” he said, “I’ll learn all sorts of civilized stuff.”
“Anything’s possible.” Deal shrugged. He’d shifted his gaze to something else.
From where they sat, on the second floor of the upscale but aggressively laid-back hotel, there was a good view of the harbor channel and the sunset sky beyond. Cloud banks lit up in boiling pinks and shades of lavender and teal, shorebirds twisting and diving in the foreground, a couple of sailboats thrown in for good measure…poor Turner, who’d done so well with England’s sunsets…he’d just been born in the wrong place, Deal thought.
“I never figured you for a wine drinker,” Russell persisted. It was easier to talk, now that the steel band on the open-air porch had packed it in. Their raucous syncopation had been replaced by piped-in piano Muzak. “Anybody’d look at you, they’d say there’s a beer drinker and a half.”
Deal paused, his glass halfway to his mouth. In truth, he’d been at the checkout counter of Sunset Corners up in Miami, a case of light beer in his cart, when he’d started down this other path. Iron Mike, one of the owners of the package store, caught a glance at what Deal purported to buy and insisted there was a less painful way to drop a few pounds. Mike talked, Deal listened, and the light beer had gone back on the shelf, replaced by a case of Merlot and a pamphlet-sized book on how to shed a few pounds without losing your mind.
The rest had been history, Deal mused, staring down at his glass. A more expensive history. He tasted the wine, then tried another sip. Maybe he should have asked for the cork, he thought. “I like beer,” he said to Russell. “But then I went on this diet.”
“For what?” Russell said. “You’re not fat.”
“Compared to whom?” Deal said, looking at Russell, who was wearing a T-shirt with a lifeguard emblem on its chest. He’d bought it earlier in the day at one of the tourist shops on Duval, an XXL that stretched over his massive chest and biceps like spandex.
“Basically, you’re not supposed to drink,” Deal continued, “but the guy who wrote the book said you could have a glass of red wine once in a while.”
“Once in a while?” Russell lifted an eyebrow. They’d been in town two days now, doing little besides wait. Then again, for the amount of money that might come the way of DealCo Construction, a bit of waiting behooved him.
Deal shrugged again, a gesture he’d picked up from his erstwhile partner Vernon Driscoll. Driscoll, an ex-Miami homicide detective and now point man for D&D Investigative Services (Deal was the second D, an otherwise silent participant), could shrug in a hundred different ways, Deal had learned, each move with a slightly different meaning, everything from “Right you are,” to “You are a wiseass, but I am going to wait at least thirty seconds before I take you apart.” For the taciturn Driscoll, the shrug was a way of life. Deal was just beginning to appreciate the simple elegance of the gesture.
“This guy say how big of a glass?” Russell asked.
Deal shook his head. “Why do you think I went with his diet?”
Russell nodded. “I was on a diet once,” he said, taking a swallow of his beer. His hand was so big you could hardly see the bottle.
“Please,” Deal said. It was the kind of banter that seemed to spring up in Key West, born of tropical malaise, he supposed. What the hell, he thought. He’d been busting his buns in Miami—he deserved a bit of downtime in paradise.
“The prison diet was what they called it,” Russell said, unfazed. “How it worked, they fixed everything so it tasted like crap.”
Deal smiled again. “You lost weight, huh?”
“I turned sideways, I was like a crack in the wall.”
Deal shook his head. “How much do you weigh right now, Russell?”
Russell pursed his lips. “Two-forty maybe. Maybe two-fifty.”
“You wish,” Deal said. “And you’re how tall?”
“Six-three. Is this a job interview?”
“You already work for me,” Deal said mildly.
“I ain’t going on no diet,” Russell said. “You might as well leave this right where it is.”
“I was just curious,” Deal said.
“What you are is miserable, and looking for company,” Russell said. “Get that fat-ass cop to go on a diet with you. He could stand to drop some poundage.”
Deal laughed. When it came to an argument, about even the slightest things, Russell could be as tenacious as Vernon Driscoll. Maybe it was something that perpetrators and cops had in common, Deal thought.
Russell’s gaze had wandered back to the waitress, who was bent over a nearby table, reaching for an empty. Deal glanced at his watch. “Stone said seven o’clock, right?”
“Was his secretary who said it,” Russell answered. “I already told you. Far as I know there isn’t any Franklin Stone.”
“Oh, there is a Franklin Stone, all right,” Deal said. “And there is only one.” Flamboyant Franklin Stone, the man who’d invited Deal to Key West, owned a majority interest in the hotel where they were staying, as well as a goodly portion of the commercial real estate on the island.
Russell Straight made a noise in his throat that sounded like a rhino rooting something distasteful out of its muck pool. “I don’t know why you brought me down here,” he said. “Sit around and do nothing. That’s what a cop is good for. You should have brought Driscoll along.”
“He’s got work of his own,” Deal said. “I thought you might like to see Key West.”
“Can I get you something else?” It was the waitress, smiling down at Russell.
Russell smiled back, then checked the beer in his hand. “Another one of these.”
The waitress smiled. “Got it,” she said, then glanced at Deal, who shook his head.
“I think she likes the cut of your jib,” Deal said, as the waitress walked away.
“There’s women everywhere,�
� Russell observed, unimpressed. “I got to go to the can.”
He unfolded himself from the chair and started across the room, weaving gracefully through the tightly packed tables, despite his size. Big, good-looking guy with his shaved head and chiseled upper body, you might take him for a professional athlete, Deal supposed. After all, his older brother had been, before he’d fallen in with the wrong people, anyway.
Deal had seen Leon Straight when he’d played for the Dolphins, Leon taking out the whole side of an opposing line Sunday after Sunday, before he’d gotten hurt and gotten into painkillers and things beyond. Later, Deal had seen Leon take on a helicopter full of killers and nearly win—he might have won, in fact, if the copter’s shattered rotor blade hadn’t happened to cut him in half.
He had finished his wine now, and when he glanced around for their waitress, realized that he was the only one left in the section. He waited a few more moments, watching the sun-struck clouds go from pink to purple, before he stood and moved to the bar.
The bartender, a tall guy with a mustache and the look of a guy who could play a part on a cop show in Hawaii, poured him a generous refill. “You want me to start a tab?” the guy asked.
Deal glanced at the table where he’d been sitting. “I thought we had one going.”
The guy followed Deal’s gaze, then tapped a finger to the side of his head as he realized. “Right. Denise.” The guy gave Deal a look that might have suggested apology. “She closed her shift,” he said. He turned and found a ticket on the counter behind him, made a note, then moved off as a waitress working the other side of the room hurried toward the service station with an order.
Deal saw there was a guy in a white dinner jacket behind a baby grand at the far end of the lounge, and he realized for the first time that what he had taken for Muzak was live. The guy, in his late fifties, was wearing a jet-black hairpiece that looked as much a part of him as a coonskin cap would have. He finished an energetic rendition of “Greensleeves,” raising his hands in a flourish to a scattering of applause from the tables.
The Pier House crowd seemed a bit older and more coiffed than Deal remembered from his last visit, but that had been a while ago. He and Janice hadn’t been married long. They’d run down from Miami on the spur of the moment, stayed three days right here at the Pier House, hardly got out of bed. But that had been another life, he thought.
He sensed someone sliding onto a stool next to him and turned to see a decidedly un-coiffed black kid in baggy painter’s jeans and a loose-fitting basketball jersey settling in, propping his elbows on the bar. “How you doin’?” the kid said, jittering on his seat. When he nodded, Deal saw the handle of a comb planted in his luxuriant Afro.
Deal nodded back and reached for his wine.
“You diggin’ this freak at the piano?”
Deal glanced over. The kid was a little older than Deal had first thought—in his mid-twenties, maybe—but his slight build and wide-eyed gaze belied his age. His skin was light coffee-colored, and a scattering of freckles dotted his fine facial features. He might have been a Caymaner, Deal thought, but there was no trace of the Brit in his accent. “You missed the steel band, I’m afraid. If that’s who you came to see.”
The kid shook his head, then licked his lips nervously. “What it is, I came to talk to you.”
Deal looked at him. Out on the sidewalks you might be approached by some scrubbed and polished young man or woman who wanted to dragoon you into some resort’s time-share presentation. Somehow, this one didn’t seem the type. “Whatever you’re selling, I’m not buying,” he told the kid.
“You’re Deal, right?” the kid said, both his feet pedaling the rail of his stool.
Deal glanced around, as if there might be someone sitting behind him. Could the kid have said something else? That sort of thing had happened before, given the circumstances: Deal me in, deal me out, let’s make a deal.
“The builder,” the kid continued, his voice insistent.
So much for mistakes, Deal thought. “That’s me,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
Deal stared. “If you’re looking for work…”
The kid shook his head. “That’s not it,” he said. “I found something.” He glanced around, then reached suddenly for Deal’s arm. Deal felt his wineglass slip, then go over with a crash on the bar.
The bartender whirled from the service station, glancing in the direction of the sound. Then his gaze landed on the kid at Deal’s side.
“Sonofabitch!” Deal heard the bartender exclaim as he started toward them.
“I’ll catch you later,” the kid said, his eyes wide. He was off his stool and out the door of the lounge in an instant.
Deal turned back to the onrushing bartender, who had caught himself by the edge of the polished countertop. His wild gaze suggested he was ready to vault the bar and follow after the vanished kid.
“Little bastard!” the bartender said.
“What is it?” Deal said, shaking his head in wonder.
“I ought to break his neck,” the bartender grumbled. He picked up a rag, began to mop at the spilled wine.
“It was an accident,” Deal said, picking up the stem of his shattered glass.
“That’s not it,” the bartender said. “The little shit goes around trying to sell phony coins he claims came up from the Atocha.” Deal gave him a nod to show he understood. The Atocha was the famed seventeenth-century wreck salvaged by Mel Fisher, diver and himself a legendary Keys character. In the twenty years since the ship’s treasure trove had first been opened, a healthy underground trade had developed in the merchandising of its supposed artifacts, most of them worthless counterfeits.
“Last week I caught him palming tips off the tables,” the bartender was saying. “I ever catch him, I’ll pop his head like a pimple.”
Or maybe throw a wall up around this island, Deal thought. He held his tongue though, and simply nodded.
“You okay?” the bartender asked, sweeping glass shards into a plastic bucket.
“I’m fine,” Deal said.
“Better make sure you still got your wallet,” the bartender said.
Deal put his hand to his hip in reflex, found the reassuring bulk still there.
“Sorry about the trouble,” the bartender said. He already had another glass in place, was pouring it near brimful. “On me,” he added, nodding at the glass.
“No harm, no foul,” Deal said.
The bartender gave him a nod of his own and moved off toward an impatient waitress at the service station. Deal glanced again out the door where the kid had disappeared, tapped his wallet idly, then checked to make sure his watch was still on his wrist.
Just another Key West moment, he told himself, though he was mildly curious as to just what scam he might have escaped. The kid had known who he was and what he did for a living. His rap was bound to have been interesting, at the very least.
Deal took a sip of his wine, noting that the clouds outside had gone steely. He checked his watch again and saw that it was past seven-thirty. Still no sign of Franklin Stone, and none of Russell Straight, come to think of it. Maybe he had managed to insult Russell. Maybe Russell had sent the kid into the bar to get some kind of a rise out of him.
Deal signaled to the bartender that he’d be back, then traced Russell’s steps to the men’s room, which he found empty. Deal glanced in the mirror and gave himself one of Driscoll’s moves, “Who the hell knows.” Then, since he was there, he turned to one of the urinals.
When he got back to the bar, he was surprised to note that the piano player had shifted into a lower gear, actually showing some restraint as he worked over the bridge of “When Sunny Gets Blue.” Deal wouldn’t have thought a guy who could get so involved with “Greensleeves” would even know Sonny Stitt, much less play him halfway well, but then he realized that a singer in a cocktail gown s
tood now by the piano, counting time, waiting to come in. The piano player glanced up, she nodded, and that’s when Deal realized that all the chatter on that side of the room had died away, and for good reason.
Her voice cut the room clearly, with a husky undertone that added authority to her perfect pitch. She was a bit too far away for him to get a clear look at her face, but there was an ease about her movements—the very opposite of those of her hardworking accompanist—that suggested she knew every nuance that her plaintive lyrics conveyed and then some. When she closed out the number, applause swept the room, and a guy in a lime-green sport coat actually stood up to clap.
As the clamor died down, Deal heard a cellular phone begin to beep. He glanced behind him, wondering who the oaf was, then realized it was his own phone chirping away in his pants pocket. He snatched the thing out, pushed the answer button, and made his way quickly out into the hallway that connected the lounge to the main part of the hotel.
“John Deal,” he said as the lounge door swung shut behind him.
“This is Lisa,” a woman’s voice came on the other end. “Franklin—Mr. Stone—asked me to call. He’s so sorry. Something came up. He’d like to reschedule.”
“Again?” Deal said, trying to keep his voice calm.
“I know,” Stone’s secretary said. “He’s truly very sorry.”
Deal glanced down the hallway in front of him. Where the passage dead-ended at an intersection, a tall blond woman walked by, her tan legs flashing. Denise, he found himself thinking. Their cocktail waitress. She’d switched the parrot-print blouse for a T-shirt, though, and it had taken him a moment to recognize her.
Deal turned back to the phone, trying to bury his annoyance with Lisa’s employer. “You’re working kind of late, aren’t you?”
“You know what they say,” Stone’s secretary chirped. “No rest for the wicked.” She sounded a little too cheery to understand the meaning of the phrase, Deal thought.
“When are we talking about?” Deal said. “I’ve got to get back to Miami sometime.”
“First thing in the morning,” Lisa said. “Mr. Stone would like to meet you in the hotel restaurant for breakfast.”
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