Done Deal

by Les Standiford

  “What happens if I don’t sign? You’re going to put my hand in hot water?”

  Leon gave her a neutral look, jiggled the pot handle, as if that might make it heat faster. He reached in his pocket, dumped a handful of white tablets into the water. “No,” he said. “Be a shame to mess up something as pretty as you.” He peered into the pan, jiggled it again, then turned to point at her. “How about you hand me that spoon over there.”

  There was a teaspoon poking out of a cup on the table beside her, an old butter knife lying alongside it. She wondered briefly if she might use the knife as a weapon, then discounted it. Leon looked like the kind of person you could run over with a truck, and you’d only hurt the truck.

  “Give me the spoon, sweet cheeks.”

  She saw the look in his eyes. Not hurt her? It was true, he’d done nothing to her yet, but she had no illusions about that. If the thought struck him, he’d have her for breakfast.

  “That’s better,” Leon said as she handed him the spoon. He examined it, wiped something off on his sleeve, then stirred what was in the pot.

  She could smell something bitter, almost coppery. He pointed at Janice again. “Let’s see the cup.”

  She hesitated a moment, then handed him the cup. Leon didn’t bother to see what might have dried up in there, what might have fallen in and died trying to get out. He dunked the mug into the pan, scooped up some of the liquid, then turned swiftly and caught her by the hair. He jerked her head back, and she felt her eyes water with the pain. He held the steaming cup under her nose. The bitter smell was overpowering, choking her.

  “This ain’t warm milk. This here’s some pills will have your insides clutching up like you took an alum douche.” He shook her by the hair in case she hadn’t heard. “You have any hopes of carrying that baby inside you, you sign these mother-fucking papers.”

  She felt a stab of fear deep inside her. How could he know that? “What makes you think I’m pregnant?” She managed to get it out despite the fiery pain, her scalp on fire as he tightened his grip.

  Leon shook her again. “I work for people whose business it is to know. Gonna sell or buy from folks, you have to know all the buttons to push. But it don’t matter how, you sign or I’ll pour this stuff down you like you was a Christmas goose.”

  Finally he let her go. She wiped the tears from her eyes, trying to control the trembling that seemed to come from her very core. She stared at the cup. She didn’t doubt it was what he said it was.

  She shook her head, dazed. Who was this man? Who were these people he worked for? If you could call them people at all. A few days ago she’d been on her way home, her biggest problem how to explain to Deal why she had been so bitchy lately, trying to decide how she could let him know that she’d stand behind him no matter what. Now, here she was, in some unknown place, at the mercy of a monster who wanted to kill her and her unborn child, unless she sold him her husband’s company. As if she could even do that.

  Leon stuck his finger in the cup, testing it. “Just about ready to drink,” he said.

  She closed her eyes, shuddering. She thought of the look of triumph on the doctor’s face when he finally had been able to give her the news. She thought of Deal and his goofy smile when she told him. She thought of all those toys he’d bought. Of all the things they had planned, that they’d be a family at last.

  She let out her breath and opened her eyes. She stared at Leon, willing every ounce of hatred she’d ever felt into her gaze. “This won’t do you any good, without my husband’s signature,” she said.

  He stared back at her, unfazed. “You want to drink this shit, or sign?” he said.

  She gave him a last, vicious glance, then snatched up the pen and scrawled her name.

  Leon nodded his approval, then picked up the contract from the table. “That man’s as good as dead,” he said. “And once he is dead, your signature’s the only one that counts.”

  He folded the papers away. “If he don’t manage to die somewhere else real soon, then I’ll let him know where to find his pretty little wife.” He tapped the phone that was still belted to his side. “Let him know if I have to take out an ad in the newspapers.”

  He smiled, waving the contract in front of Janice. “Kind of guy he is, he’ll put himself up in my face. And once he does, we’ll tidy up what has to be.”

  “You’re crazy,” she said softly.

  “Naw,” Leon said. “I’m in real estate. Now let’s get you back in that bedroom, tuck you away safe.”

  Chapter 34

  Deal had tried to keep his dive shallow but the pitch of the boat had tossed him forward at the last instant. He felt the tickle of eel grass along his gut as he kicked his way back toward the surface. About ten feet deep here, he guessed, breaking atop a swell. He glanced back over his shoulder at Miss Daisy. The boat heaved and rolled, but seemed to be holding steady. He turned from the rancid smell of diesel exhaust and began a steady crawl toward a group of abandoned pilings a hundred yards ahead.

  There might have been a house atop these supports once, but now the columns jutted out of the water empty, like the pillars of some lost civilization. Their caps were splintered, tendrils of reinforcement steel silhouetted against the vague glow from the city’s lights. Deal felt something slither past his hand and froze in midstroke, instinctively jerking back, his head dipping in a swell, sucking in a half-pint of seawater.

  Fucking-a, he thought. Grab a handful of seaweed and fall to pieces. Some commando. For a moment he imagined Flivey, sitting atop one of the ruined pilings, shaking his head—“When are you going to get it, Deal? No heroes in this life.” But he shook off the vision, regaining the rhythm of his strokes. The swells threw him in and out of the water, but the current was pushing him steadily toward the ruined pilings. The burble of Miss Daisy’s engines was gone now, lost in the wind and the rush of the tide. Another five minutes and he was whooshing on an upswell, past the first of the barnacle-encrusted pilings, surprised at how fast he was moving. He was nearly past the second stanchion before he had a chance to swing himself into position, make a lunge for a ladder bolted there. His fingers closed around one of the crudded-up rungs and his shoulder wrenched with the force of the water. Maybe he’d underestimated the speed of the current. Or, more likely, the wind had picked up in the few minutes he’d been in the water. The swells seemed nearly twice the size now.

  He pulled himself up a step on the ladder, testing its strength. Twenty five years of salt spray, you couldn’t trust anything to hold. He got his toes curled around an algae coated rung and stared across the last hundred yards of open water to where the Donzi was moored. He struggled to calm his ragged breath.

  “You sure you’re up to this, my man?” Flivey’s voice crowding into his brain. Flivey a ghostly imp just a few rungs up the ladder now, giving the groaning metal a shake every time a swell came past. Deal closed his eyes, forcing himself to think. Leon in there, that’s one, and with luck, one more of Alcazar’s men on duty. And Janice.

  That’s the way it was, he told himself. She was there. She had to be there. Never mind that there were no phone lines from Stiltsville. They’d have a cellular out there. She’d gotten her hands on it, made her call while the guy was pissing off the front porch. Out here on the edge of the service area, that’d account for the crossed connections. That’s what had happened.

  “And what if she is in there.” It was Flivey again. “Gonna get yourself a team of dolphins, tail walk ’em up the steps, flipper Leon into submission?”

  “Something like that,” Deal muttered.

  He opened his eyes again, then froze: there was a splash of light atop the pilings over there, somebody standing in a doorway, somebody too big to be anybody but Leon. Leon taking his time, staring out over the water, then glancing back inside, a last look, making sure everything was set…

  Deal strained forward, away from the pillar, trying to get a better look…and the rung in his hand
snapped, tossing him into the surging water. He went all the way down to the bottom, one hand plunging through the eel grass into the gelatinous muck, his other crunching onto a knot of spines—a fucking sea urchin, he realized, as the pain shot up his arm. He shook the thing off, fought away from the bottom, clawing his way back to the surface, was gasping for a breath…

  Then a wave slammed him forward into another of the ruined columns. He felt his eyes roll inward, his face tearing against the razor-edged barnacles. He spun away, carried into the open water, hearing Flivey’s laughter over the roar of the waves.

  He was on his back in the tub-warm water, sinking slowly, almost sleepily, down, the water pouring up his nostrils, faintly burning, but with all the other pain signals, not so bad. No. Not so bad. Just another minute or so, slide on down the tubes and into the muck, the prehistoric dark, his head reeling, Flivey motioning him forward, “Come on man, you get to sit around, drink beer, nothing but imports, we got a five-hundred-channel TV dish, get to sit on Jack’s lap for the Laker games…”

  No, he thought, fighting against the darkness, struggling to home in on the keen signals of pain that were still pulsing. He fought toward the pain, savoring it, fighting for anything that would keep him conscious…

  …thought of Janice, that picture of her in her dumpy socks and sweatband, that sad look in her eyes, “Oh, Deal,” and the growing tightness in her belly, about a fingerling’s size now, a little bigger, little kicks, turning and twisting in a salty, amniotic sea…

  …and then Deal felt his own legs responding, scissoring beneath him, his arms leaden but doing their best, until finally he was turned over, rising, breaking the surface of the water again, gasping great gulps of air.

  He opened his eyes to find himself atop a swell, no more than a hundred feet from the house, the huge engines of the Donzi roaring into life, a few extra revs and then a lower rumble as the props cut in and the boat pulled away from its moorings, Leon racing the growing fury of the storm back toward Miami.

  The lights on shore were gone altogether now, obliterated behind a bigger squall that had swept up the bay. A bolt of lightning split the sky ahead of the Donzi, illuminating a square mile of ocean in a breathtaking instant of light, the darkness snapping back with a terrific blast of thunder. In a moment it was gone, leaving only the roar of the big racing boat.

  Deal treaded water for a moment, bringing a hand to a ragged tear on his cheek. There was a swelling there, running up to his temple, but it wasn’t anything so bad, nothing he wouldn’t survive for another fifty feet of swimming, anyway. A little blood for barracuda spoor, maybe, but they’d be out in the deep, riding out the storm, or so he hoped.

  He waited for a wave of dizziness to pass, then began to swim, ignoring the pain in his hand—a couple of sea urchin spines broken off there, no big thing. More worrisome was the current, which wanted to pull him away from the house toward the channel the Donzi had taken, but he could fight it. He would fight it.

  This time, when the swells took him under the shadow of the pilings, he was ready. He flipped himself around, back-paddling, fending off the first piling with his feet, far enough under the water line to miss the really crusty shit, then a graceful twirl in the momentary eddy of a back swell, and suddenly, he was belly-flopped over the floating wooden dock where the Donzi had been only moments before.

  He steadied himself for a moment, his cheek resting against the slick wet grain of the wood, his legs dangling in the water. Finally, he heaved himself up. Any barracuda down there, sorry, they’d have to wait. He drew his rubbery legs beneath him, resting a moment, listening to the receding drone of the Donzi. With his teeth he tried worrying at the stub of one of the sea-urchin spines, then gave up. Take care of that another time.

  He got gingerly to his feet, braced against the rolling of the waves. There was a step up to a fixed landing, just above the dock, and he felt another wave of dizziness as he accustomed himself to the lack of motion beneath his feet. The pilings blocked the rush of the wind and the platform shielded him from the sheets of rain that had covered the bay. At the end of the landing was a flight of wood stairs that led up to the platform above. He could see a slightly brighter square of sky where the stairs emerged. He grasped the railing, felt the crisp edges on the planks. Everything freshly built.

  He was halfway up the stairway when he heard the sound of boat engines. He stopped. It was just a scrap of sound, quickly swallowed again by the storm. He waited, and it came again, unmistakable.

  “Sonofabitch!” he hissed, hurrying on up the stairs. By the time he stuck his head out above the deck, the sound was clear. He glanced out to sea. Sure enough, there was the Miss Daisy, visible through a break in the curtain of rain, cresting the waves, Homer barreling toward the platform to the goddamn rescue.

  Deal scanned the top of the platform hurriedly. It was larger than he had anticipated, with room for another house the size of the one that had been finished off. The owners had probably closed in what they could when the zoning gurus appeared, he thought.

  “That’s right, Deal,” Flivey in his ear, again. “Maybe you can get hold of the property. Make it a duplex. Just knock, leave your card with the guy inside…”

  There was a stack of lumber out there, a sheet of plywood shuddering in the wind, ready to take wing any moment, but nothing big enough to hide behind. Behind him, the house itself, dark windows, the vague outline of a door.

  Whoever was in there would hear the Miss Daisy any second now…“Where to, Deal? Wanna borrow my wings?”

  Deal glanced back down the stairs, waves crashing over the dock now, lifting it, slamming it back down, like it was about to wash away…

  He scrambled on out of the stairwell, moved to the house, pressed himself against the weathered paneling, waited, rain pelting his face. He shuddered in the chill, forced himself to concentrate.

  No sounds of alarm in there. No sounds of anything in there. He fought a pang of doubt. Miss Daisy’s engines were a steady grind mixed with the storm now, rising to a momentary howl when the props heaved out of the water and spun madly in the air.

  Another fucking catastrophe express, Deal thought, his stomach sinking. Homer had about as much chance of docking the boat in these conditions as Deal would have of landing the space shuttle. He felt the same sense of helplessness as when he read of planes going down, buses going over the side of cliffs, subway trains roaring full-bore into commuter-clogged stations, conductor puffing contentedly on his crack pipe, “Yeah, folks, everything going to be all right…”

  He turned and began to hammer the door beside him with his fist. Let someone be in there, let it work…though he had no idea what it was, really…

  …until the door was swung open and a guy in a watch cap stuck his head out like the goddamn geek Deal had been praying for, some kind of knife in his hand.

  Deal was on him in an instant, taking him down, rolling, his hands on the knife—a butter knife??? Which he tore from the guy’s grasp, hurling it out into the storm. All the while he prayed he’d been right and there was only this one, this one whose scrawny neck he was going to snap like a stick…

  He twisted over onto his back, his arm around the guy’s throat…

  But this is too easy, his mind was telling him. The flesh too soft, the neck a thin stalk about to snap. Not enough strength there…

  …Something not right, Deal! And finally he registered the voice of the person he held in a death’s grip atop him. The gasps, the choked desperate whispers…“Stop,” she was saying. “Please…stop,” and Deal did.

  Rolled her off of him. Held her by the shoulders. Stared down at her face in the dim light that spilled from the open doorway. “Janice?” He could hardly draw his breath. His heart was racketing. “Dear God,” yes, it was. Janice.

  Chapter 35

  She was still panicked, trying to pull from his grip, choking, kicking against the rain-slick planks of the platform. When he called her
name again, she hesitated. He shook her, called her once again.

  Finally, she seemed to focus on him. He felt her go limp in his grasp.

  “Deal?” Her face pale, drawn. And she seemed so very thin. But it was her. Janice. Alive.

  He drew her into his arms. Held her as tightly as he dared. “Oh my God,” she was saying. “Oh, Deal.”

  He glanced through the open doorway into the dimly lit interior of the house. No movement, no sign of life. Still…

  “Is there anyone else?” He pulled back from her. “Anyone inside there?”

  She shook her head. “I thought it was Leon, coming back. I had this knife. I used it to pry the lock on the bedroom…”

  He shook his head, uncomprehending. “It’s okay, Janice. Calm down…”

  There were the sounds of engines, loud again, cutting in and out of the chaos around them. But it wasn’t Leon, Deal thought with dismay.

  He glanced out into the darkness, trying to shield his face from the rain that swept over them in sheets. Lightning exploded atop them, and then again, peals of thunder nearly instantaneous, overlapping into a constant roar.

  He began to pull Janice toward the doorway when he heard the engines again. The roar was practically on top of them now, a new pitch in Miss Daisy’s whine, the big diesels straining as they dropped into reverse.

  “Deal!” Janice shouted, pointing into the darkness over his shoulder.

  Deal turned in time to see Miss Daisy: huge, lit in the glow of continual lightning, hurtling out of the mists of rain like a ship from a nightmare. The boat was being borne high on a mighty wave straight for the platform.