Deal with the Dead

by Les Standiford

  Deal stared at Rhodes. “More of your old man’s work?”

  “Hardly,” Rhodes said. “But picture this: Two days after the events on board the Polynesia, Anthony Gargano, convicted felon, sits in a cell perhaps larger and at least as well-appointed as this library, whiling away an afternoon working on the evolving appeal of his case, when a package arrives, special delivery, from Miami. Inside he finds a spool of audio tape with a note that suggests Mr. Gargano might like the style of music contained therein. It takes an hour or two, and considerable effort on the part of certain federal prison employees, but before the close of business on that day, a reel-to-reel tape recorder somehow makes its way into Gargano’s cell. Which is when Anthony Gargano gets to hear in no uncertain terms of the feelings his trusted lieutenant Sandro Alessio holds for his incarcerated boss.”

  “You’re saying my old man sent that tape?”

  “What does it matter who sent it?” Rhodes said. “The fact is, it had to be sent. The lives of decent men were at stake.”

  “So you say,” Deal replied.

  “You know I’m right,” Rhodes countered.

  “So the books are wiped clean, your old man makes a graceful exit out of Miami because he knows there’s a hundred more Alessios where the first one came from. He tidies things up and comes down here to live out his days in peace.”

  Rhodes shook his head. “You paint such a pretty picture…”

  “Well, I’m happy for him. And I’m happy for you,” Deal plunged on, thrusting the second clip back at Rhodes. “Your old man works on his gin and tonic and his tan the rest of his life, you go to private school, get a sports car for every A on your report card, what could be prettier than that? You still haven’t gotten to the point where I come in.”

  “You’ve always been in it,” Rhodes blurted, his jaw thrust, his practiced gentleman’s air gone hard.

  Deal paused. “What are you talking about?”

  Rhodes was working to calm himself. He glanced at the couch, where Kaia Jesperson had come awake. She pushed herself up from the soft cushions, wondering what was coming.

  “My father lived less than a month after he returned to this house,” Rhodes said. “He was found washed up on the rocks beneath the dock you walked upon.”

  Despite himself, Deal glanced out the darkened door of the study the way they’d come.

  “He was drowned,” Rhodes said. “It had been intended to look like an accident—one arranged by Gargano or one of his associates—but whoever did it wasn’t very careful. There was a chunk of his scalp torn away, and all his fingernails were broken from where he’d tried to claw his way back into the boat.”

  Deal started to say something, but Rhodes was going on.

  “He had a skiff he liked to take out, to flats-fish with a guide. On that morning, someone pushed him out of that boat, then held him under,” Rhodes said, his gaze gone elsewhere now. “Obviously, it hadn’t been an easy task.”

  “I’m sorry,” Deal said when Rhodes paused. He turned away, trying to conjure up the face of the man he’d seen in the snapshot with his parents—that visage of contentment and ease, now transformed to a wild-eyed mask, great explosions of air bursting up through the spangled water as “Lucky” Rhodes lunged and lunged again for the railing of his boat, his hair knotted in the fist of an expressionless thug.

  And another picture had come conjuring itself out of the past, this one of his own father, seated at the desk in the office of the house on South Miami Avenue, lining up the proper chambers of his .38, pressing the cold steel pistol tip to the flesh of his palate, then dialing home for good.

  “I found a picture,” Deal said finally, turning back to him. “In some of my father’s things. Taken on the dock down there, I think. My parents. It must have been your father they were standing with.”

  “This one?” Rhodes said. He reached for one of the wooden frames turned away from them on the desk, swiveling it around so that it faced them. Deal stared stupidly at the photograph encased there: an eight-by-ten, faded with time but the subject perfectly clear. It was a replica of the snapshot he’d found in his father’s hidden câche: his mother, his father, and Rhodes’ father standing on a dock beneath a mansion and a glittering Caribbean sky—a frozen moment on a perfect day in paradise.

  Deal tried to make sense of all the thoughts that rushed through his mind. Rhodes’ father had found this place, his mother and father had come to visit…then the elder Rhodes had been murdered. Was that what it was? Perhaps Barton Deal had been followed by the men who wanted Rhodes’ father dead…or perhaps the son’s suspicions were even darker than that. Above all, where did Talbot Sams figure in all of this?

  “Are you suggesting that my father had something to do with your father’s death?” Deal asked, looking up from the photograph.

  Rhodes laughed, a short, barking sound so unexpected it seemed more like a cry in the quiet room. “The thought’s never crossed my mind,” he said.

  “Then what…?” Deal shook his head, still holding the photograph before him.

  “This photograph was taken years before his death,” Rhodes said. “My father bought this place in 1946 from a German on his way to Brazil. The man was in a great hurry, I’ve been told. There wasn’t much haggling over price.”

  Rhodes took the framed photograph from Deal and placed it back on the darkly polished desktop as he continued. “Your parents came here often in the early days, that’s another thing I’ve learned. If I ever met them, I don’t recall. I would have been very young.” He took a deep breath and glanced at Kaia, who seemed as intent as Deal on this tale.

  “But I owe your father a great debt of gratitude, that’s the plain truth of it,” Rhodes continued. His expression suggested that Deal would understand.

  Deal stared back at him, feeling his head starting to throb again. It was late, and he was exhausted. He’d fought a pair of thugs, been knocked cold and ferried across the Straits of Florida to some off-the-map island in the Bahamas, where he’d awakened and been assured he wasn’t kidnapped. He’d learned his father had been friends with the gangster father of the man who claimed not to have kidnapped him, and now it seemed that all this man wanted to do was make friends.

  “You brought me all this way to say thanks?” Deal said. “Why not just send me a note? Or we could have hooked up at the next Gullickson Prep reunion, that’s probably rolling around any day now: ‘Hey, Deal, let me buy you a beer.’”

  “I don’t think they’ll be inviting me to Gullickson’s any time soon,” Rhodes said.

  “Yeah? You’re behind in your alumni dues?”

  “It’s a bit more than that, I’d say.” Rhodes shrugged. “About fifty million more.”

  Deal stopped. Gullickson Prep. Fifty million dollars. He looked more closely at the man standing in front of him. A lot of good work on that face, all right, but the shape was still vaguely the same, and if the smarmy George-Hamilton–like features had been chiseled into something a bit more rugged, the overearnest stare was still the same. All those headlines. The white-collar take of the century. Of course.

  “Halliday,” Deal said at last. “You’re Michael Halliday.” Rhodes/Halliday gave him a nod of recognition. “The Prep School Flimflam Man.”

  “I never liked the ring of that,” Rhodes said. “Far too tacky for the complexity of what went on.”

  “You brought all your rich buddies into a bond-trading Ponzi scheme, then flew the coop.” Deal paused, then glanced at Kaia, who seemed amused by it all.

  “Vastly oversimplified by the press, I assure you,” Rhodes said. “And if my clients hadn’t been such greedy bastards to begin with, they’d have never lost a dime. Stupidity doesn’t respect a bank account, that much I can tell you.”

  “You’re an innocent man, is that your story?”

  “I took risks, bent certain regulations, as was expected of me. What do you think the unhappy client will say when the luck runs dry
?”

  Deal shook his head. They could go on like this forever, he realized. And something else had occurred to him. “You’re also supposed to be dead.” He’d read the accounts: Notorious bond trader over the side of a yacht in the Mediterranean. Eyewitness accounts. Good riddance to a bad actor.

  “Drowned, in fact,” Rhodes said, nodding. He paused, glancing out the open doorway himself. “You might appreciate the poetry of that.”

  Deal was still examining the man’s features. “Whoever you went to did good work,” he said, “but I don’t think a little plastic surgery’s going to get you back into any good restaurants in Miami.”

  “I have no interest in going back to Miami,” Rhodes assured him.

  “Then what’s all this with Aramcor and the free-trade port?”

  Rhodes shook his head. “Call me an unwilling partner on the project,” he said. “As soon as I can liquidate my interest, that will happen. But when I saw you had bid for a piece of the action, it gave me much easier access to the information I needed.”

  “We’re going to get to the bottom line here, Rhodes—or Halliday, or whatever you want me to call you. I just know we are.”

  “After all you’ve heard, you surely understand the need for careful explanation,” Rhodes said.

  “I’m up to my ears in it,” Deal said. “And I still don’t know what you want from me.”

  “I want the money,” Rhodes said. “My money.”

  Deal stared at him blankly. “That’s probably what all those doctors and lawyers and judges said when you skipped town.”

  “That money’s long gone,” Rhodes said dismissively. “Others I did business with saw to that. I’m talking about money that belongs to me.”

  “And this is money you think I have? I’m sorry, Rhodes. You must have banged your head on your way back to life.”

  “I’m certain that you have it,” Rhodes said, disregarding the last. He reached into his pocket, then came out with his hand in a fist. He made a tossing motion toward Deal, as if ridding himself of something vile. As his fingers uncurled, something silver flashed in the dim light of the study.

  Deal leaned back instinctively and threw up his own hand to ward off whatever it was—knife, dagger, tiny weapon from the miniature martial arts parade…

  The glittering thing slapped against his palm and his hand closed around it in reflex. He knew what it was now, didn’t have to look, didn’t have to check in his pocket to see what might be gone. The key, he told himself. The goddamned key.

  “I only want what’s mine,” Rhodes was saying. Deal noticed that Kaia Jesperson had swung her slender legs to the floor and now leaned forward, listening intently.

  Her pajama top had loosened, presenting him with views of flesh vee’d by black silk that only made the moment that much more difficult to comprehend. He had opened his mouth to say something, though he wasn’t sure what it was going to be. What happened next made the issue moot.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  The window behind the couch exploded in a shower of fragments, at the same instant that the arm of the sofa, where Kaia had been resting moments before, erupted in a flurry of stuffing. The slug, flattened as it ripped through the heavy frame of the sofa, bit into Rhodes’ desk, blasting the photo of Deal and his parents into smithereens. The three of them were still staring at one another in shock as the echo of the shot rolled across the grounds outside.

  “Get down,” Deal cried, diving toward the couch. He caught Kaia Jesperson by the shoulders and took her to the tiled floor as another shot came through the shattered window, this one blasting a gouge of plaster from the opposite wall.

  “The lights,” Deal called as he twisted around looking for Rhodes. Feather stuffing and plaster dust swirled in the air of the study, a surreal tropical snowstorm.

  Rhodes, who was on his hands and knees behind the corner of the desk, yanked at the dangling lamp cord. The thing flew off the desktop, its glass shade splintering. There was a bluish pop as the bulb blew apart, and in the next moment the room was in darkness.

  Another shot sounded outside, this one striking the outer wall of the house. Large-caliber slugs, Deal reasoned, as the sound of impact reverberated through the room. Hollow points that would pierce a body cleanly, come out the backside transformed to the size of a plate, pushing everything it met right out of the way.

  “You all right?” he asked Kaia.

  “For the moment,” she said. If she was trembling, he couldn’t tell it.

  “Rhodes?”

  “All right,” the hurried reply.

  There was a fourth shot from outside and a section of books exploded into confetti on the shelf above them. Another shot sounded then, this from a different weapon. Another and another, and then a sharp cry.

  “That’s Frank,” Rhodes called. He was starting up from behind the desk when a fusillade of fire blew through the window, tearing the book-shelves to shreds.

  “Maybe not,” Rhodes cried, diving back to the floor beside them.

  There were more cries from what seemed to be the front of the house. Small-arms fire there, booming in the hallway, and the crashing of glass. More shouts and cries, then the sound of heavy footsteps in the hallway.

  “Boss?” The unmistakable sound of Basil’s deep voice.

  “We’re here,” Rhodes called. “Keep your head down.”

  Basil came through the doorway in a duck walk, his bulky form outlined in the moonlight that drifted through the shattered window. “Three of them at the front. I took them out, I’m pretty sure.”

  “Is Frank in the back?”

  “Out there somewhere.” Basil nodded, glancing toward the window.

  Several smaller-caliber shots erupted on the grounds once again, followed by a longer period of silence this time. “That’s him,” Basil pronounced. “That takes care of our sniper.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” Deal said.

  “We’ve got to move,” Rhodes said. “No telling how many there are.”

  “Those fucking Turks,” Basil growled.

  “Turks?” Deal asked.

  “Follow me,” Rhodes called. He was already scrambling back around the desk. “Lend a hand, Basil.”

  The big man followed after his boss, leaving Deal and Kaia to scramble in their wake.

  “Watch the glass,” Deal said.

  “If that’s the worst thing that happens…”she muttered, scooting past him.

  Deal found himself nodding, though he knew she couldn’t see him.

  He heard a grunt from around the big desk, the sound of stone grinding on stone, the creak of unoiled hinges. There was a deep thunk as something fell back, and Deal felt a gust of dank air sweep over him.

  By the time he made it around the desk, scattering glass shards heedlessly with his palms, he’d understood. Basil crouched above the port that had opened in the library floor, his fingers curled under the heavy lid. Rhodes had already disappeared into the passage, and Basil was assisting Kaia as she backed down the dark steps.

  “Get a move on,” Basil said to Deal. Something heavy was battering at the front door of the house now. Shrieks of wood, more shattering glass.

  Deal struggled over the upturned lid and ducked through the passage where Kaia had disappeared just as the front door gave way with a crash. He found himself staggering backward down a narrow, rough-hewn stairwell, moving by touch alone, clawing at the sides of the passage to keep from pitching over. He heard the passageway door slam closed above him, and suddenly the clamor from the front of the house was silent, just the sound of a bolt sliding home, followed by the scuffing sounds of Basil’s footsteps above him and the harsh rasping of the big man’s breath.

  “Keep moving,” Basil called. “I don’t want to trip over your ass.”

  “Just take it easy,” Deal said.

  “Here!” He heard Kaia’s voice out of the darkness in front of him, felt her hand at his chest take a fist
ful of shirt.

  He was at the bottom of the steps, he realized, and felt her pulling him along down a gently sloping passageway. He stumbled momentarily, threw up his hands, felt warm flesh beneath her flapping pajamas.

  “Richard’s gone ahead,” she told him as he steadied himself. “The passage leads to the docks. Hurry now.”

  She was off then, and Deal followed wordlessly, his fingers tracing the damp contours of the passage to keep himself from falling, urged on by the steady panting of Basil at his back. Though the flow of air had lessened, there was still a steady breeze that suggested Kaia was right.

  The passage was cut through the same soft coral as that underlying the Terrell estate, he realized, as fragments fell away beneath his touch, and sandy grime drifted down into his hair.

  Billions and billions of sea creatures had laid down their lives to save his: that’s what Deal found himself thinking as he scurried along. Running for his life, and musing on the wonders of oolite.

  “Careful.” He heard Kaia from up ahead, felt her hand at his shoulder. “We’re near the entrance, now.”

  “Let me past,” Basil said quietly. “I’m the one with a gun.”

  Deal was in no position to argue. He stepped aside, pressing his back against the rough wall of the passageway as Basil pushed his way on by.

  Deal’s eyes had adjusted to near cave-fish level by now. He saw Kaia beside him, her pajamas reknotted firmly, and beyond her the vague glow that filtered in through the opening to the passage, a cleft in the rock shrouded by hanging ferns and tendrils of underbrush.

  Rhodes stood just inside the mouth of the passage, where the shadows kept him hidden. Deal crept quietly up to join him along with Basil, Kaia just behind. Rhodes turned, his eyes widening as if to question the quality of the silence outside: the slightest lapping of waves at the reef-protected shore, the rustle of the breeze through the fronds, the distant pulse of tree frogs and insects from the land above.

  “Could be they’re all up at the house,” Basil said quietly.

  Rhodes nodded. “Only one way to find out,” he said, edging toward the entrance to the passage.