“It’s what Mr. Alcazar wants,” Alejandro repeated.
Alcazar was leaning back in his desk chair so that Deal could see the top of his head, where the hair was thinning. Deal turned back to Alejandro. “Like, he’d give me the Lotus, here?”
Alejandro stared back at Deal, widened his eyes enough to mean yes. It looked like he’d had his face sanded, but you could still make out the blue craters of acne scars in the bright lights of the showroom.
“So I could drive around in a little yellow car, forget anything ever happened?”
Alejandro shrugged.
“You can jam it up your ass, you want to,” Leon said.
“Mr. Alcazar wants us to give him the keys, Leon,” Alejandro said.
Leon glanced at Alejandro, then toward Alcazar’s office, as if he were about to seek confirmation. Finally, he grunted, then moved off to a wall cabinet, shaking his head. He spun the combination dial, opened the door to a bank of keys, took a moment finding the right ones. He brought the keys and tossed them at Alejandro. Alejandro caught them at his chest and after a moment of simmering at Leon, turned to hand them to Deal.
Deal took the keys, hefted them. He stared through the thick glass walls of the room where Alcazar was speaking vehemently but soundlessly into the phone, facing the showroom now. Deal watched, idly reading what the man was saying.…Doing exactly as we agreed, Alcazar said, his expression angry, as he listened to whomever was on the other end. Abruptly Alcazar broke in. Fuck your baseball, Deal read, or thought he did. Maybe he had missed something, or maybe it was some kind of idiomatic curse. Alcazar glanced up, saw Deal staring at him, then turned away.
There was a heavy rumbling noise behind him and Deal turned to see the skinny thug pressing a button at a control panel, the big glass doors that had slid shut behind the limo rolling open again.
Deal glanced at the Lotus, remembering what Morton had told him. He calculated the figures. Nearly quadruple what they’d offered him through Penfield. This was an automobile, as Cal Saltz would say.
“So that’s it, I just drive right out?”
“We’ll send you the paperwork,” Alejandro said.
Leon glared at Deal, his pupils down to pinpoints. Deal looked at the car. Maybe there was a bomb beneath the driver’s seat, Deal thought, but then discounted it. Nobody looked ready to run.
Deal nodded. They wanted to give him a car.
The strange hum he’d felt earlier that evening had returned, filling his ears, crowding out thought. It was his blood whistling down his veins, maybe, or his brain shorting out. So the streets were paved with gold. Little boys with hatchets ran wild.
Deal glanced at Alcazar, who had his back to them, waving his hand as he spoke into the telephone. Janice was dead. Deal was a madman. Raoul Alcazar was the prince of reason. A car. The universe inside out. Where a moment before, there had been blood running in his veins, Deal felt them now carrying nothing but a hot, angry wind.
Deal smiled at Alejandro. Or thought he had. The look on Alejandro’s face seemed unsure. Deal, on the other hand, had never felt more certain.
He opened the door to the Lotus, folded himself down inside, gripped the thick leather wheel. It took him a moment to find the ignition, another to get the seat back where he wanted it. He was aware that he was still smiling at Alejandro, through the windshield now. The wind inside him had risen to a scream. He saw walls of caverns pulsing with a volcanic light of their own.
Deal turned the key over, gunned the engine to life. The rumble was muted, but Deal could feel something immensely powerful coursing the frame of the car, some inexorable machine strength that came up through the soft leather and the wheel and leapt to join the maelstrom inside him. He found himself grinning as he gripped the wheel. Fuck your baseball.
The skinny thug stood nearby, motioning him to back out of the showroom. Leon looked as though he were considering throwing his considerable body in the way, but he simply turned aside.
Deal felt the heat inside him fanned to a white, cleansing force. So searing, he felt calm. He had surely ascended to some other plane. Beatific, he found himself thinking. Beatific. Still repeating this one-word mantra, he engaged the clutch and backed his Lotus slowly out.
***
As the heavy glass doors slid closed, Alcazar put down the phone and emerged from the inner office. He glanced at Alejandro, who reassured him with a nod. The second thug was turning off the lights in the showroom. Leon was locking up the key bank, still snorting his disapproval.
The roar of the Lotus’s engines reverberated through the heavy glass as the car wound down the blacktop lane toward the freeway entrance. The brake lights flashed on as the car stopped at the juncture of the dealership property and the access road.
“Don’t know why we fuck with this guy,” Leon grumbled.
“Let him enjoy his car,” Alcazar said. “When the time is right, we…” Then he stopped.
Something seemed wrong. The Lotus was turning around, the headlights aimed at the building, flashing from bright to dim, back to bright again.
Leon started around the front of the limo, his hand going inside his coat. There was a tremendous engine roar outside, and a squalling of rubber that sent twin tendrils of blue smoke up into the bright sodium lights near the entrance to the complex. The headlights of the Lotus were fixed on Raoul Alcazar, or so it seemed. And they were growing very, very large.
The Lotus leapt up like some mechanized animal when it hit the ramp at the curb, and again when it clipped the ramp just outside the huge windows. When it roared through the thick plate-glass slabs, the driver’s door was flapping wildly open. It banged shut at impact, but flew open again as the car screamed on inside.
Alejandro had already bailed out over the hood of the limo. His partner dived through the doorway of the sales office. Leon was back-pedaling, a pistol waving in his upraised hand, but back-pedaling was one of the moves the several operations on his knee had curtailed. Still, he might have made it clear, if it hadn’t been for the door of the Lotus, which whipped into his good leg with a crack that was instantly lost in the chaos. He sent two shots into the ceiling as he went down.
The Lotus slammed into the limo, and glanced away, like a small-caliber bullet careening off the skin of a tank. It chewed its way up the hood of the Porsche, flattening the windshield, its right front tire dipping into the driver’s compartment and hanging up for an instant on the exposed bar of the Targa top.
That sent the Lotus catapulting end over end, ripping off the engine cover of the Porsche and slinging it high into the ceiling. The heavy sheet of metal tore out the main feeder for the sprinkler system and sliced the maze of ceiling wiring in a shower of sparks.
The Lotus dropped its hind quarters onto the rear of a Jaguar sedan, and snapped its front end into a kiss with the red Ferrari. The three cars slid against the “Miami Vice” imitation, squashing it against a section of outside wall. Shards of black Fiberglas snapped about the showroom like huge angry insects.
Finally, it was quiet, except for the gush of water from the broken pipes overhead and the ominous crackle of a mounting electrical fire. There was also the soft keening of Leon, who lay holding his second ruined leg, rocking back and forth, alternately cursing and groaning.
Alcazar pulled himself up in the backseat of the limo, peering out the lowered window at the wreckage. The television in the limo was still playing silently. The image was still black and white, now an enormous fat woman flat on her back, pinned to her kitchen floor by a refrigerator that had tumbled over. The woman was unfazed. She gnawed at the leg of a cooked turkey she’d been trying to pull out of the refrigerator, while Rod Steiger in his crazy makeup wrung his hands and looked on.
“Kill the sonofabitch,” someone said, as a fire alarm began to sound. There were murmurs, groans, even shouts of agreement. All of which were drowned in the roar of the first gas tank’s explosion.
Chapter 20
Deal was a mile or so from the dealership by the time he saw the glow in the sky. He’d heard a few muffled explosions earlier.
No mistaking what it was. He heard sirens far in the distance, but doubted there’d be much left of the place by the time the trucks arrived. One of the hazards of building on the fringes of civilization—you had to wait for all the city services to catch up with you.
He bent and massaged his aching knee. He’d banged it a good one rolling out of the Lotus, but as long as he kept moving, he’d be all right. Only trouble was, he wasn’t sure which way to move. He’d decided against using the highway, intending to cut cross-country to the television towers, then work his way to civilization on the levee roads. Now, he’d come to a broad canal flanked by feathery Australian pines that ran off in either direction as far as he could see. A chorus of bullfrogs pulsed rhythmically in the darkness.
It was probably the C-112, the broad flood-control channel that had always blocked development in this part of the county, at least until the turnpike extension had gone through. Deal should have remembered it was there—he’d heard his old man bitch about it often enough.
He could see the warning lights of the towers through the trees, no more than a mile away. There had to be a lock or service crossing somewhere nearby. But should he turn right or left? He listened to the sirens grow. The wrong choice could send him straight back the way he’d come, which did not seem like a good idea.
“I wouldn’t swim it, I was you.”
The voice rose from somewhere in the darkness, startling Deal, nearly sending him off the bank. He grabbed a limb for balance.
“Gator hole just across the way. Seen him poke his snout up just about dark. Big sucker.” The same voice.
A flashlight snapped on a few yards down the bank, the beam cutting across the water to the opposite shore. Deal made out the man’s image in the backwash of the light. His skin was ebony, his hair and shortish beard glowing white in the reflected light. He had a bamboo pole crooked in one arm, was sitting on an overturned plastic bucket. When he turned to Deal his eyes were glittering silver disks. It took Deal a moment to realize—just the light reflecting from the glasses that he wore.
Deal had a sudden flash—the old black man watching him dive into the current, headed for Dirty Dick’s, all those years ago—but it couldn’t be possible. This man didn’t look a day older. It was just that Deal had placed himself plop in the middle of another stupid action, that’s all. On the shore of shit’s creek and no paddle in sight.
“You scared the hell out of me,” Deal said, finally.
“You didn’t do a bad job on me,” the old man said. “I usually have this spot all to myself.”
“Yeah,” Deal said, glancing back at the glow in the sky. “Well, I broke down on the turnpike, a couple miles back. I couldn’t get anybody to stop, so I thought I’d just cut across here to call for a ride.”
“Mmmmm-hmmmm,” the man said, glancing up into the sky over Deal’s shoulder. Then he turned back to the water, waving the flashlight beam, indicating that Deal should look too. Deal followed the light out across the water, saw two points of red reflecting back at them from the darkness. That would be the alligator, all right.
“Just head on down that way a piece,” the old man said, using the flashlight for a pointer. “There’s a gas main goes across. That’s how I do it,” the old man said.
“Thanks,” Deal said.
The old man snapped off the light. He’d never bothered to illuminate Deal’s face with it. There was the glow in the sky behind them, occasional bursts of sheet lightning far off to the south. Just enough light to make out the old man’s silhouette, steady as a statue’s.
“You’re welcome,” the man said. “Hope you find your way home.”
Me too, Deal thought, heading off. Me too.
***
“You walked all the way here?” Saltz asked. He had Deal’s leg propped on a footstool in the little den of his condominium. Deal was in Saltz’s television-watching chair, trying to see what Saltz was seeing in his swollen knee.
“I got a cab from Pembroke Pines,” Deal said, trying to flex his leg.
“Sit still,” Saltz said. He probed the swollen tissue and Deal went rigid, his breath hissing in through his clenched teeth.
“We ought to wrap this,” Saltz said, standing up. He stared down at Deal, shaking his head. “Then tomorrow, we’ll get you to a doctor, see about a brain transplant.”
Deal looked away. “It was just instinct,” he said.
“Well, I didn’t suppose you thought about it,” Saltz said. “Jesus Christ, why didn’t you just drive that goddamn car into a brick wall and be done with it.”
Deal turned back to face him. “If he’d done anything else, Cal. If he’d said ‘go fuck yourself,’ if he’d had his assholes rough me up, if he’d said ‘I’m very sorry, please go home now,’ I think I could have handled it. But the sonofabitch wanted to give me a car…”
“Yeah, and I wish you’d have given it to me if that’s what you were going to do with it.” Saltz snorted and moved toward the door. “You wasted one hell of an automobile, Johnny.”
“That’s true,” Deal said, resigned.
“Well, I’m going to the drugstore,” Saltz said. He sounded as tired as Deal felt.
“The hell with that,” Deal said. “I don’t need anything.”
Saltz stopped to stare at him. “Maybe you don’t,” he said, pointing at the empty quart of Wild Turkey on the side table. “I know the guy runs the late shift. He’ll open up the liquor shop, slip me a bottle of whiskey.”
Deal sighed and waved him out.
“I’ll pick up one of those knee bandages they make for the ball players while I’m at it,” Saltz added. “I’ll get one with Michael Jordan on the box.”
He was still talking when the door closed.
Deal stared at the closed door for a while, then reached for the drink Saltz had poured him while he’d told the story. Enough of the ice had melted finally so that Deal could sip the whiskey. The pain in his knee had seemed to abate now that Saltz had stopped poking around. A couple of aspirin, another drink or two, a good night’s sleep, he’d be ready.
But ready for what? Call Penfield and beg for a deal, I’ll say I’m sorry if you will first? Fat chance. And the funny thing was, he didn’t even feel sorry. He didn’t feel justified, necessarily, but he sure as hell didn’t feel bad about what he’d done. How would George Washington handle this one?
He reached out for the television clicker, snapped on the set. The host was interviewing a man from Omaha, the second richest man in America. What was he doing living out there, the host wanted to know. “All you need’s about one good idea a year,” the man said. “Omaha’s good for that.” The host laughed and they cut away to a commercial.
Deal was about to change the channel when the Channel 10 news brief came on. First it was Ann Bishop, ramrod straight in her anchorperson’s chair, “…on a fast-breaking story in north Dade,” then a cutaway to a young, impeccably dressed Cuban woman in front of the entrance to Alcazar’s new dealership.
You could hear the big flag snapping over her head as the young reporter spoke breathlessly into the microphone. Deal was struck by the way her lipstick glistened in the light, by the soft drape of her beige linen suit. This one was destined for the networks, he thought.
“…where firefighters have just about wrapped it up, Ann.
“We’re told that Raoul Alcazar was in the building when it burst into flames, but that he and some of his employees escaped without serious injury. Officials are telling us that it was an electrical fire, but they’re keeping everyone away from the building while the investigation continues.”
There was some commotion off-camera, and the reporter glanced over her shoulder, then began to edge away, directing her cameraman with little gestures of the mike. She smiled and spoke as she edged along. “We’re just ge
tting out of the way here, Ann.”
An EMS van bumped down over the curb, followed by a fire chief’s sedan. Neither seemed in a hurry—no flashers, no sirens. “We don’t have any firm estimate of damage yet, but the building looks like a total loss, and we understand there were several luxury imported cars in there.”
The camera shifted to a long shot of the main showroom, which was still smoldering. A pair of firemen were halfheartedly guiding a stream of water about. Another fireman poked cautiously at the edge of a smoldering car with a long pole.
“She means automobiles, Ann,” Deal said, taking another swallow of his drink.
The image cut back to the reporter. “They were all set for a grand opening on Saturday, but that seems out of the question, now.” Her voice was cheery, her smile wide. Deal wondered what the expression on Raoul Alcazar’s face was. “Back to you, Ann,” the reporter chirped.
“What a shame,” Ann said, shaking her head, her lips pursed in disapproval.
Deal hit the power button, and Ann became a white point of light that faded into nothing. He dropped the clicker back on the table, finished the drink, and closed his eyes. He would just rest a moment before Saltz came back to berate him further. He fell asleep like a baby.
***
In his dream, he was back at the canal, stymied, pacing back and forth, wondering where the old black man had gone. Ann Bishop sped down the levee road on the opposite bank in a yellow Lotus. Little Homer, wearing nothing but a jockstrap and a big pair of rubber car washing boots, stood up in the passenger’s seat, gripping the top of the windshield for balance and whooping like a cowboy.
They saw Deal and waved, someone shoved Deal from behind and he was in the frigid water, which was salty, and also heaving with waves when it should have been piss warm. But still, he panicked, for he knew what was under the surface, that monstrous creature with eyes glowing bright enough to turn the water red and even redder, the jaws of the thing widening, bearing down on him…
When the phone rang, and he came awake, clawing at the air, gasping as if he were about to drown. He looked about the empty apartment, getting his breathing under control, checking his watch, still groggy. He’d been asleep a couple of hours. The phone rang again, and this time Deal registered it.
Done Deal Page 16
