Deal to Die For

by Les Standiford

  “She is swimming alone,” the old man continued, his voice echoing off the arched ceiling of the room. The air was cloying, the temperature far too hot. Mahler wondered which of the early tenants of the house had thought it a good idea to build such an addition. He’d always hated it. Despite the murals that ringed the walls—Italian gardens, disporting nymphs and satyrs, a view of the Tuscan hills—you couldn’t see the outside, you couldn’t breathe…it was like being in a dungeon with a diving board. But Rhonda had always done her exercising here, never in the outdoor pool, where she claimed the sun got in her eyes.

  “And being abusing of drugs and drinking in her distress…” The old man trailed off, shrugging. “Not at all a good practice,” he said.

  Mahler nodded, still uncomfortable. “I don’t see why we couldn’t have figured something else out, though,” he said. “We could have kept her on ice, finished the picture…”

  The old man held his hands up. “Please,” he said. “Trust instincts of mine. Two people come, more may come. Is best send everyone away right now. Start over.”

  “Sure,” Mahler said. “But your instincts are going to cost me about a quarter of a million dollars. You didn’t even ask me before you started chasing people out of here. I had relationships with some of these individuals. This could come back to haunt me.”

  The old man held up his hands, smiling as if Mahler were making a joke. “Any problem money can cause, not a problem,” the old man said.

  “Only when it’s not your money,” Mahler said. He paused as the doors to the pool area opened, and the smallest of the old man’s thugs, the one who could move about like smoke, backed in, Paige’s form flung over his shoulder like a rug. “Dear God,” he said softly, turning away from the sight. There had been a reason he’d started this nightmare. He was sure of it.

  Was there some way he could cut his losses, go back to the way things were when China was only something you ate off of? If there was, he’d be ready to accept it.

  The little man dropped Paige into a padded chaise lounge. Her blank eyes seemed to catch Mahler’s gaze for an instant, then her head lolled to the side, and he was spared of that much, at least.

  He turned back to the old man. “Can’t we get this over with?” he asked.

  “Of course,” the old man said. And he made a gesture over Mahler’s shoulder.

  He should have known what was coming, Mahler thought, even before he felt it: the fingers digging into his hair, someone back there Mahler flailed for but couldn’t reach. The person had a thick handful of hair, and was twisting. The pain in his scalp was like fire, so awful it rendered him helpless. And then there was something sharp, stabbing at the base of his skull, the terrible burning sensation, followed by a numbing flood of warmth.

  He felt the hand release him, the pain that had turned to mere pressure at his scalp suddenly gone altogether. For an instant he was sure he would be able to run, but then he realized that his legs had turned to rubber beneath him, and he was going down. His cheek cracked off the slick tiles at the poolside, bounced once, and settled. One eye could see nothing but a fiery redness. The other was sighted vaguely toward the ceiling. He saw the visage of the old man wavering above him. He tried to blink, close his eyes, and refocus, but it was as if he had all the volition of a video camera that had been set aside without being turned off.

  “Hurting a moment, yes,” the old man said. “But pull up on scalp like that, very hard to find needle mark after. Do woman in Florida that way. Work fine. Just hurt a little bit.”

  Other hands were on him, stripping his clothing away. “Swim around in drug state,” the old man was saying. “Fool around with pretty girl. Not a good idea.”

  Mahler felt a coolness envelop his body, felt his pants sliding over his hips, felt his shorts going after. The few times he’d allowed himself to think about dying, he’d pictured it happening in his sleep, maybe in the midst of a pleasant dream.

  One sleeve of his shirt was off, then the next. His arm slapped the cool tile, and he felt a twinge of pain, a slight tremor course through the fingers of one hand.

  “Don’t worry,” the old man said. “Film gonna get made. Your Mr. Cross going to come over to Hong Kong. Better for everybody.”

  Sure, Mahler thought. Another frigging dagger in the back. First Mendanian. Now Cross. Anybody else want to do him while there was still time? Hurry up now. Last chance!

  “Time to go swim now,” the old man said. He reached out with his foot, pushed at Mahler’s inert shoulder, sent him over the side toward the water. “Don’t worry, girl on the way,” the old man was saying, but his voice broke off when Mahler’s hand caught his pantleg going down.

  Two fingers, Mahler was thinking with satisfaction. The last part of himself that worked. And that was all he needed. Two fingers that caught the expensive silk of the old man’s cuff like a set of grappling hooks, two fingers that wrapped tight and closed and then locked up like all the rest of his body, now and forever.

  His hearing still functioned, and so he had the satisfaction of the old man’s cry echoing off the ceiling before the two of them plunged beneath the water. And then, even with hearing gone, he could savor the sight of the scrawny old bastard clawing frantically above him, his face in wild panic as they sank inexorably to the deep end of the pool.

  Maybe the old man’s bearers would get to him, and maybe not. But it didn’t seem important somehow. Mahler saw an explosion of bubbles from his own mouth, saw them merge with a similar burst from the craw of the old man, whose struggles were already weakening.

  Mahler heard a muffled explosion from somewhere above, saw a sheet of red cover the glittering surface of the pool above his unwavering, stinging eye. So this is how it happens, he was thinking. Paige, he thought. Rhonda, he thought. And then it all simply stopped.

  ***

  “Hai-karate!” Paco was shouting. He squeezed off a second blast that cut through the back of the leather chair where another one of the little pricks was trying to hide.

  The first one he’d shot in the ass while he was bent over trying to see what had happened to his boss. That one was floating facedown in the water, still kicking feebly, when Paco’s second shot sent chair and guy hiding in it cartwheeling into the pool as well, blood, red leather, and splinters spraying everywhere. He didn’t really want to kill anyone, but what were the alternatives, really?

  The guys would kill him given half a chance, already had tried to, in fact. Would kill him, that woman in there, and anybody else they got a chance to. He’d only done what had to be done. Saved his own ass and that pretty little girl, whatever was wrong with her, and now it was time to go get her and clear out before the big goon they called Gabriel showed up and that’s who he was still worrying about when he turned around and saw he’d been worrying about the wrong member of the choir. Paco hardly had the chance to squeeze the trigger again, had only one glimpse of the littlest bastard’s face before he caught the first of several blows that had turned his throat to jelly halfway to the ground. Texas, he was thinking. A goddamned beautiful place. He never, ever, should have left.

  ***

  Deal was moving cautiously through the cavernous living room, the automatic pistol raised at his side, when he heard the muffled blasts from somewhere beneath his feet. A shotgun, he thought instinctively. A semiautomatic, a hunter’s weapon, judging by the firing interval; either that, or a killer who was picking his shots. He hurried back to the hallway, glanced out through the open door, but Driscoll was still there, propped inside a rear window of the Suburban, pistol at the ready.

  They’d had a brief argument about it, but the ex-cop was too woozy and too banged up to move quickly. In the end he’d settled for playing rear guard, ready with his .38 for anyone who might come out behind Deal.

  Deal turned and hurried down the hallway in the opposite direction, past the kitchen on his left, dining room and salon on his right. At the end of the hall were three p
assages: One was a rear staircase that he assumed gave servants access to the upstairs bedrooms. Another doorway led out onto a kind of service porch. The property fell away in back—a broad, emerald lawn running down past a landscaped pool area to a lake that reflected the jagged peaks in the background. There was a seaplane tethered to a dock down there. He paused just long enough to be sure that the props of the plane were quiet, the broad sweep of lawn empty, then turned to try the third door, which he hoped would take him down.

  A gust of warm, humid air swept over him as he pushed the door open, and it took him a moment to recognize the chemical odor that came with it. Chlorine, he thought. An indoor pool down there? He ducked his head in and out of the passageway in an instant, but saw nothing except a set of concrete steps leading down to a tiled landing below.

  He came around the door frame then and paused again, the strange pistol held in front of him now, finger poised stiffly at the trigger guard. Driscoll had shown him how the thing worked, where the safety was, the switch that toggled the weapon between single-fire and automatic. “Just be careful once it gets going,” the ex-cop had said. “Keep it pointed the right way.”

  Deal didn’t doubt his technical abilities with the weapon. His father had him on the firing range from the time he was five, plunking away with pellet guns, then bolt-action .22s, and ultimately whatever plaything his father fancied at the time. Deal had fired .45 pistols that bucked straight to the sky unless you were careful, 12-gauge shotguns that numbed his ears and bruised his shoulder blue, even an Uzi, a little bit of a gun that had astonished Deal with its ability to shred a silhouette target in a matter of moments with hardly a tremor of recoil passing through his hands.

  What he did wonder about was his ability to fire the weapon he held now should another human being suddenly appear in the passage before him, even with someone else pointing a weapon his way. Deal hadn’t so much as shot at a bird since that day when he was twelve, and despite his awareness of what these men were capable of, maybe because of that awareness, he was doubly concerned.

  Yes, he knew he could will himself to pull the trigger. Self-preservation was a significant motivator. What he worried about was that instant of hesitation, that infinitesimal moment that might have him staring, gaping, thinking about what to do, while the other person was turning him into a walking colander. And even as he thought these things, he realized he was wasting valuable seconds. He forced himself on down the stairway, willing himself to focus on the image of the huge man coming down the rocky slope after them, this same weapon poised to blow him and Driscoll into afterthoughts. It was the same man who had killed Barbara, he reasoned, who’d been ready to kill him, and in the next instant there could be others just like him appearing in that wavering rectangle of light below.

  His feet moved down the steps as slowly and stiffly as if he had aged fifty years in the past hours, and in some ways he supposed he had. He was nearly at the bottom of the staircase now, and paused when he heard the crash of something, or someone, plunging into water.

  He took the last three steps in a rush, skidded on the wet tiles of the landing at the bottom, had to clutch at the open doorway to keep from going down. He realized he had spun out into the room where a sizable indoor pool was housed, had only an instant to take in fragments of the bizarre scene: an upended leather chair bobbed at the surface of the water, one of the black-clad men floating facedown near it. On the far side of the pool, the small Chinese man who had let them into the house earlier, dripping wet himself, was struggling to pull an old man up over the side after him.

  The little man had one hand on the back of the old man he was trying to drag from the pool, was training another of the automatic pistols on something in the water beneath him. He squeezed off a short burst that seemed to drive the very air from the room, then a second. He was kicking then at whatever it was down there in the water, and still trying to drag the old man out when he noticed Deal.

  Their eyes met, and for Deal it was the apotheosis of a nightmare, the very moment that he had dreaded. Deal staring, one hand clutching the door frame, the other holding his weapon upright, watching a little man save another from drowning in the pool. And the little man hesitating not at all.

  He slung the old man aside onto the pool apron and began to fire, the tile at Deal’s cheek exploding into shrapnel as he tumbled back into the doorway. Deal tucked himself into a ball as the firing continued, fragments of tile and concrete peppering him like buckshot.

  There was a lull then, and Deal heard the sounds of a metal door grinding open. He eased his head around the door frame, caught sight of the little man dragging the old man out into a shaft of sunlight, had to duck back as another volley of shots slammed into the wall.

  When he heard the door slam shut, he was on his feet and after them, moving as quickly as he dared across the water-slick apron of the pool. He was on the far side of the room, was moving toward the metal doorway, might have missed her altogether. But the sound of someone choking drifted up from the water behind him and he turned to glance in that direction, frozen for the instant it took for Paige Nobleman’s face to rise briefly from the cloudy waters, then disappear again.

  He didn’t have to think this time. He tossed the pistol aside and went into the water in the same motion. He came up under her, cradling her in his arms, realizing the water was just shallow enough for him to stand, keep her afloat as he guided them back to the side. He had to nudge the floating body he’d seen earlier away from the pool gutter before he could boost her inert form up onto the apron.

  He vaulted up after her, fearful at first that she might have been shot, his eyes scanning her body until he was reassured she was unmarked. Still, something was wrong. She lay unconscious on her side, water streaming off her in rivulets. Her chest rose and fell in ragged breaths interrupted by involuntary coughs that spewed gouts of pool water from her throat.

  He saw the discoloration of a bruise at one eye, then ran his fingertips through her matted hair, wondering if she’d taken a blow there before she’d gone into the water. As he carefully probed, his eyes traveled to the end of the pool where the small Chinese man had been firing at something. He saw something wedged under the rungs of a ladder that curled from the water there: Mahler, he realized finally, a dark stain of blood drifting away from his listlessly bobbing head.

  From beneath the leather chair that floated like a dark buoy in the middle of the pool, a motionless arm extended, its black sleeve pushed up, the back of the palm puckered with buckshot wounds. On the side where Deal had entered the room, a young man lay with his legs tangled in fallen lawn furniture, his hands frozen at his throat. A shotgun lay on the wet tiles beside him.

  Deal turned from the sight to check on Paige. Her breathing seemed to have steadied now. The water she’d been expelling had become a trickle at the corner of her mouth. Deal heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs he had descended moments before, and remembered the automatic pistol. He lunged across the tiles to where the thing lay, rolled over twice to distance himself from Paige, and came up opposite the doorway, in firing position. There’d be no hesitating this time, he swore it.

  He saw movement in the stairwell, feet, a pair of legs. Steadied himself, waiting to be sure, his finger poised at the trigger…and then released his breath in a rush when he recognized Driscoll’s bulky form emerging into the light.

  “Whoa,” the ex-cop said, raising his good hand at the sight of Deal with his weapon trained on him.

  “They’re outside,” Deal called. He could already hear the grinding whine of plane engines coming to life.

  The sun was just clearing the peaks when he and Driscoll made it through the door. Deal had to shield his eyes from the glare to make out the plane, already taxiing out from the dock into deep water.

  Driscoll lumbered a few yards down the pristine lawn until he reached the lingering shadows of the mountains. He raised his pistol toward the receding plane, seemed to gauge
the distance, then lowered the weapon helplessly. Deal had reached him by then, and the two watched together as the plane made a whining circle at the far end of the lake, gunned its engines, and began to speed back in the opposite direction.

  The skids left the water in twin rooster tails that caught golden shafts of sunlight cutting the water here and there. The plane was up ten feet, twenty, had reached fifty feet perhaps as it cut the air in front of them.

  “What are you doing?” Driscoll said, noticing that Deal had braced himself, had raised the automatic, was sighting down its sightless barrel toward the distant plane. “You don’t aim that thing,” Driscoll was saying. “You take it into a crowded room and yell surprise.”

  But Deal wasn’t paying any attention. He was thinking of Barbara, of Paige, of Isabel, of Janice. He was thinking of the effortless way in which three men had tried to kill him within the past twenty-four hours. And worse, he was thinking of how it was going to be to live the rest of his life wondering when the touch of some stranger might fall upon his shoulder, or that of Driscoll, of any member of his family. How the world is now, Deal thought, how different from what he once believed it might be.

  He led the plane what seemed like an appropriate distance and pulled back on the trigger. As the jolts of each shell shook his hands and forearms, melding into an almost indistinguishable roar, he thought of an arcade game he’d favored as a boy, every year a trip to the county fair, find that box the size of an upright freezer with a replica of a machine gun roughly the size of what he held in his hands now mounted on it. He’d stand on a crate to reach the phony gun, squint through a window that gave a view of enemy bombers crossing a made-up sky, pull the trigger until a month’s allowance of quarters was gone.