Havana Run

by Les Standiford

  ***

  “This is a lot better,” Russell said, once they’d settled themselves at a table in the cool Pier House lounge.

  Deal nodded. He felt something prodding him in the hip and reached to find the wad of memos Russell had given him earlier.

  He tossed them on the table beneath his foreman’s baleful gaze. “Don’t you pretend I didn’t give you those, now,” Russell said.

  Deal held up a hand in surrender, his gaze traveling over Russell’s shoulder out the windows of the second-story lounge. A three-masted schooner was at anchor a hundred feet or so off the marina docks, its sails furled, its decks quiet. Deal had fleeting thoughts of Tahiti, flaming sunsets, grass skirts and flowers tumbling like snow. A dark silhouette on the central mast transformed itself as he watched, growing huge momentarily, then subsiding again.

  “You ever see an osprey?” Deal asked Russell. Most of the company’s work went on in Miami, but Deal had come down to Key West a year or so ago to see about this job, and now he was finding it hard to get the sand out of his shoes. He’d opened an office of DealCo in Key West, in fact, and had come to spend more and more of his time here. It had fallen to Russell to do much of the running back and forth.

  “I don’t get into fish,” Russell said.

  “It’s a bird,” Deal said. “Eagle of the sea. There’s one right out there, perched on the mast of that ship.”

  Russell glanced out the window. “Looks like a crow to me,” he said.

  “It’s bigger than a crow,” Deal said. “Not to mention of a different color.”

  “Whatever,” Russell said.

  “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen an osprey on a boat mast before,” Deal said, thinking that there couldn’t possibly be anyone on board. He looked at Russell. “Have you ever read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner? It takes up the matter of birds and boats.”

  “Every time I went to the prison library, they said that one was out,” Russell said.

  Deal nodded. “I’ve got a copy. I’ll lend it to you.”

  “My stack is pretty thick right now,” Russell said. He glanced toward the bar. “What’s it take to get a drink around here?”

  Deal raised his hand. In moments, a tall curly-haired guy with a square jaw, piercing eyes and wearing a floral-print shirt appeared from the service passage, wiping his hands on a towel. “What’ll you have, Mr. Deal?”

  “The usual for me,” Deal said. “I’m not sure about my associate. He seems thirsty.”

  “We can fix that,” the guy said, giving Russell his professional smile.

  “Tom Selleck, meet Russell Straight,” Deal said.

  The bartender extended his hand. “Good to meet you. Tom is right, actually, but the Selleck part, that’s just Mr. Deal’s joke.”

  “He looks just like him, though, wouldn’t you say?”

  Russell looked at Selleck quizzically. “Now you mention it,” he told Deal. “How about a beer, Tom?”

  “You have a preference?”

  “Give him a Red Stripe,” Deal said. The bartender nodded and went off.

  “Who’s Tom Selleck?” Russell asked, watching the bartender duck into a cooler for the beer.

  Deal thought about it. “Did they have television in prison, Russell?”

  “Wasn’t anybody like him on it,” Russell said, glancing toward the bar. He turned back to Deal. “You know what they do to guys who say actually in the joint?”

  “I can guess,” Deal said. “Tom Selleck is an actor. He had a series a few years back. He played a private detective who lived in Hawaii.”

  “So you say,” Russell answered. “Instead of fat and ugly like your pal Driscoll, he looks like our bartender?”

  The affable Tom was back by then, with Deal’s tea and a squatty bottle of Red Stripe and a glass for Russell. “More or less,” Deal said, downing half of his tea. He’d been out on the site since seven, and it had been hot even then.

  Russell had a drink of his Red Stripe, then held the bottle away for inspection. His hand was so big he had to rearrange the bottle to finish reading the painted-on label. “This is from Jamaica,” he said.

  “So it is,” Deal said.

  “What are you drinking?” Suspicion was heavy in Russell’s voice.

  Deal held up his glass. “Iced tea,” he said. “With Sweet’N Low.” He patted his stomach.

  “That’s all you put in it?”

  Deal leaned his glass toward Russell in answer.

  “Sometimes you sound like you got a load on,” Russell said.

  “Sometimes I do,” Deal said.

  Russell shook his head. “Driscoll is like that,” he said, after a moment.

  “Like what?”

  “Always wants to be the last man talking, you know?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” Deal said. “But I am going to watch that about myself, from now on.”

  Russell had another swig of his beer. “Maybe you been spending too much time down here in the tropics. The heat cooks your brain.”

  “You’d be spending more of your time in Key West if Denise were still here.”

  Russell allowed himself a smile. “She likes Miami just fine,” he said.

  Deal smiled himself, thinking how the two had met in this very bar, how Russell had steadfastly denied any significant interest in the woman for so long. Whatever works, Deal thought, ignoring a little pang of wistfulness that rose and then popped like a bubble inside him.

  He turned away to check the schooner again, but the osprey had disappeared. That was one of the things about Key West: little amazements, how they come and go.

  “Speaking of that fat-ass Driscoll,” Russell said at his shoulder.

  “What about him?” Deal said.

  “He told me something interesting the other day.”

  Deal turned. “He’s giving up his efforts to have your parole revoked?”

  Russell ignored it. “He told me you used to be a cop.”

  “Did he, now?”

  Russell ventured a laugh. “I told him he was crazy.”

  Deal finished his tea. He liked the tea they served here. It had a fruity, tropical undertaste that seemed to go with the setting. He’d assumed it was a house recipe. When he’d asked, Tom had informed him it was Lipton’s.

  “What did Driscoll say then?”

  Russell looked at him more closely. “He said ask you.”

  “How much is riding on this, Russell?”

  Russell leaned back in his chair. “I didn’t say we bet.”

  “You didn’t have to. How bad are you going to feel when you have to pay up, Russell?”

  Russell narrowed his eyes. “You shitting me?”

  “Driscoll told you the truth,” Deal said.

  “Bullshit,” Russell said. “You’re just going along with him.”

  Deal reached into his pocket, found his money clip, extracted a twenty and slid it across the table. Russell glanced down at the bill, then shoved it back. “Man,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Keep it,” Deal said. “Call it gas money.”

  “Man,” Russell repeated. He finished his Red Stripe, then turned to the darkened service entry, the twenty held high in his hand. “Hey, Magnum,” he called. “Bring us another round.”

  Deal nodded as the bartender emerged and headed for the cooler. “You want to hear the whole thing, it might take two,” he said to Russell. And then he began.

  Chapter Three

  Miami 1989

  It was dusk on the way, the heat lifting up from the South Florida streets as if the lid of a giant pot had been lifted somewhere high above. Just a breeze rolling in off the steely waters of Biscayne Bay and down the concrete corridors flanking Brickell Avenue, Deal thought, but why couldn’t a person imagine one of the Titans mucking about up there, past where the magic beanstalks end and some other world begins—right now, a curious, bad-news god checking what was cooking
in the always boiling pot called Miami.

  Crazy, sure, but your mind tends to wander, doing what he was doing. And so what if it was crazy? One person hears thunder and calls it a weather-related phenomenon. Why couldn’t it just as well be the gods at tenpins?

  “So, who do you like in the Super Bowl?” his partner asked.

  Deal turned his gaze from out the open window of the Vic, glanced through the twilight gloom at Vernon Driscoll, who sat with both hands on the wheel, as if they were moving, as if they were headed somewhere. “It’s August,” Deal said. “I haven’t given it a lot of thought.”

  Driscoll shrugged. “Time flies,” he said. “Now’s when you get the odds you like. Brownies and the Cowboys, that’s what I’m thinking. Cowboys to cover.”

  “You must be bored,” Deal said. So, he had giants lifting pot lids from steamy skies, Driscoll had the Super Bowl on the very opposite side of the calendar. Each to his own.

  He turned his gaze back out the window. They had parked the unmarked car in the first slot on a side street off Brickell, just south of the Miami River, a stretch of the broad boulevard that had once been flanked by stately two-story homes occupied by the city’s movers and shakers, now a man-made canyon with bank towers for walls looming high overhead.

  As a matter of fact, Deal’s old man had built the colosus catty-corner from where they sat, twenty-four stories of shiny black glass that reminded him of the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey—Awe inspiring; Mysterious; Nothing much inside.

  The first two floors of the building housed the National Bank of the Caymans. The other twenty-two floors were largely unoccupied. The owners, whoever they were, must not have been concerned. Rent had held steady at $42 per square for four years, ever since the day his old man had signed off on the certificates of occupancy and gone on to the next distinguished set of clients.

  “I don’t get bored,” Driscoll was saying. “I savor the nature of my work, even the most miserable, minutiae-ridden aspects of it, such as this.”

  “You have a screw loose,” Deal said. There was an elevated plaza in front of the bank, with a big fountain surrounded by some black marble benches. During the day, secretaries came out to sit in the shade of the towers and eat their lunches and watch the water spritz over the bronze sculpture of Triton, who lay practically naked in the middle of the fountain. Now the plaza was empty, except for Triton, who lay back on one elbow looking just about as excited as Deal’s partner.

  “I do have a screw loose,” Driscoll said. “Why else would I be a cop?”

  “I’m a cop,” Deal said, shifting his weight from one buttock to the other. He felt the nudge of a spring in the Vic’s seat beneath him. How many had sat here before him, how many hours spent sitting and waiting for something to happen?

  “You are a poseur,” Driscoll said, his tone affable.

  “The last guy told me that is still sucking soup through a straw,” Deal said. He glanced down at his palms, brushing them as if there were dust there.

  “There’s not another person on the force who knows the meaning of the word,” Driscoll said. “Besides, I didn’t say you couldn’t handle yourself.”

  Deal took his eyes off the façade of the bank building for a moment. “Why’d you let them stick me with you, anyway?”

  “That’s not the way it works, buddy boy. I just do what I’m told.”

  Deal stared at him. “My old man spread a little juice around—some of it came your way?”

  Driscoll made a grunting sound deep in his throat. “He’d have to pay a hell of a lot.” He examined one of his own thick hands, front and back, like maybe there was writing on one side, he’d forgotten which. “You like action, why didn’t you become a fireman?”

  “I thought about it,” Deal said, “but my old man plays cards with the fire chief.”

  “He plays cards with the police chief, too,” Driscoll said.

  “But he doesn’t like him,” Deal said.

  “You do have a screw loose,” Driscoll said. “Anybody else wouldn’t mind a little suck with the brass.”

  “Funny,” Deal said. “That’s exactly what my old man said when I told him I was going up for detective.”

  Driscoll sighed, an indication that went far beyond the shrug. “You could be building bank towers for offshore clients, knocking down some real jack, instead of sitting here trying to put them away.”

  Deal nodded. “Apparently this pisses some people in the department off?”

  Driscoll raised an eyebrow. “It makes them think you’ve got a screw loose. Either that or your old man set you down here.”

  Deal felt heat rising up the back of his neck. Following graduation from Gainesville, he’d spent a few desultory years running from job site to job site as one of his old man’s construction supervisors, marking time as an overpaid flunky, waiting to take over the reins of DealCo Construction when his old man got ready to chuck it in and move down to the Keys, sometime around the middle of the twenty-first century.

  There’d been a hell of a blowup when he’d left the job, another one when he’d joined the force. His old man thought he’d lost his mind, snorted that Deal would be back, groveling for his job inside of a month.

  But he’d stuck it out, spent three years on patrol, another year and a half as assistant to the assistant chief, before he’d taken the shot at plainclothes. Schnecter, the detective they’d paired him up with after he’d aced the exam, had made the kind of insinuations Driscoll had brought up. The results had not been pretty. Deal was riding with Driscoll now, on probation, one slip away from directing daytime traffic out there on Biscayne.

  “Is that what you think?” he said to Driscoll.

  “I think you have a screw loose,” Driscoll said, pointing across the seat. “You’re going to pull that armrest off if you’re not careful.”

  Deal glanced down, saw that he was clutching the Vic’s door handle in a death’s grip, his knuckles glowing in the gloom. He pulled his hand away, wiped his palms together, brushing away more imaginary dust.

  “Your old man’s okay,” Driscoll went on.

  “He ask you to tell me that?” Deal said.

  Driscoll ignored it. “He builds things for slimeballs, that doesn’t make him a bad person.”

  “Barton Deal, toast of the town,” Deal said, his gaze steady on Triton, silhouetted against the tasteful nimbus of the façade lighting now.

  “He’s been Barton Deal for quite a few years, and he’s still walking around on the outside,” Driscoll said. “That ought to tell you something.”

  “Sure,” Deal said. “He knows how to spread the grease.”

  Driscoll shook his head. Maybe he disagreed, or maybe he was simply dismayed by Deal’s attitude.

  “You broke in standing guard outside his card games,” Deal went on.

  “That was another day and time,” Driscoll said. “Anyway, a guy likes to play hold ’em, that makes him a criminal? You can go buy yourself a ticket on a casino ship, right now, right over there on the river.” Driscoll pointed toward the glowing lights of a ship tethered beneath the prow of a downtown hotel in the distance.

  Deal glanced over. The Miami River wasn’t much of a river at all these days, more of an estuarial canal that had been dredged to allow for steamship loading and unloading. There had once been a slough there draining the Everglades, back when they’d called the town Fort Dallas, after a far-flung Army post. Prehistory, by Miami standards. All of ninety-five years ago. Now it was drugs and illegal aliens stuffed in cargo containers coming up from the Caribbean, stolen automobiles and trucks and bicycles by the thousands heading back. To put a dent in that trade, they’d need the fort brought back again.

  “It was a crime when it was happening,” Deal said to Driscoll. “It still is, as a matter of fact.”

  “Well,” Driscoll said, checking his watch, “it’s the right night, isn’t it? Maybe we ought to run on down to Casa Deal and bust him a
nd his pals,” Driscoll said. He was referring to the palatial bayside home not far from where they sat, the home where Deal had grown up, where his old man still lived and held court for the movers and shakers and favored clients of the moment, his mother in faithful if ever-more-blurry attendance.

  Driscoll was warmed up now, waving a hand in the direction of the National Bank of the Caymans. “Why waste our time staking out a Dade County commissioner who’s helping launder more cash than runs through Caesar’s in a month of Sundays? So what if it’s all to the benefit of the drug cartels and the petty dictatorships and the old Nazis still having their house parties in the jungle? We could put your old man and the fire chief in the hoosegow, make a real dent in crime down here.”

  Deal might have answered, but in the few weeks he’d been riding with Driscoll he’d already learned that there wasn’t much point in arguing with the man. He could point out that it was growing dark outside, a twenty-minute discussion would ensue, with no certainty about the outcome. Besides, he could grant anyone the oddity of the situation. How to explain what he’d done with his life? He wasn’t sure he could explain it to himself.

  “Maybe it’s Freudian,” he said to Driscoll. “I spent my whole life watching my old man skirt the law, I figure it’s my job to make up for it somehow.”

  Driscoll stared back at him, a moment’s disbelief flitting across his usually deadpan countenance. “You share these feelings with Schnecter, did you?”

  “Schnecter thinks Freud is a boxer’s first name,” Deal said. He paused, taking in Driscoll’s unprepossessing appearance: sansabelt slacks straining at the gut, short-sleeved dress shirt half untucked, a slob horse player’s mournful eyes and downturned lips. Never had looks been more deceiving, he thought.

  Driscoll’s reputation within the department was legendary, and never mind that as a young detective he’d spent time on “security” detail for various city officials. In one regard, Driscoll was right. In those days, the practice of keeping stick-up artists out of the mayor’s crap game and reporters away from the cathouses he and his cohorts visited might as well have been printed in the job description.