Book Deal

by Les Standiford

  “It does feel good,” she said, coming to join him at the window. She stretched and yawned mightily, arching her back, thrusting her breasts against the fabric of the T-shirt, and, once again, Deal felt the odd, conflicting sensations. He wanted to take her in his arms, pull her close…and yet something held him back. Was he afraid she’d rebuff him, was that it? Or was it that he was afraid that she wouldn’t? That whatever might happen then would lead to even greater heartache than what he’d felt to date?

  He shook off the questions, irritated at himself for letting his thoughts twist into such impossible spirals. Janice, for her part, was leaning on the sink counter, her chin on her hands, staring sleepily out into the crisp Florida morning.

  “That’s some dog,” she said, watching as the thing snuffed amidst a bed of impatiens.

  “It needs a name,” he said.

  “It probably has one.”

  “Probably,” he agreed. “What’d Mr. and Mrs. Thin call theirs?”

  She turned, gave him a look. “Asta,” she said. “They called it Asta.”

  Deal glanced out into the yard. “Doesn’t seem to fit,” he said. “What do you think of Shark Bait?”

  She followed his gaze, shook her head. “Too sentimental.”

  Deal nodded. He’d be happy to do this for a hundred years or so.

  “Where’s Isabel?” he said after a moment.

  She turned, gave him a real smile this time. “Back asleep,” she said. “And snoring.” She paused. “I’d forgotten how much I missed that.”

  Deal smiled back. “She’s sure happy to see you.”

  Janice rolled about, hip cocked on the counter, regarded him. Deal fought the urge to check his own appearance. He was wearing a “We Will Rebuild” T-shirt left over from Hurricane Andrew’s aftermath, a pair of rumpled sweatpants with a panther’s head emblazoned on one leg, along with the logo of the Miami branch of the state university. He hadn’t shaved, hadn’t even combed his hair.

  “Is she the only one?” Janice said.

  Deal wasn’t sure if he’d heard her tone correctly, took another look at the expression on her face. The smile was gone, but her gaze was unwavering, and, it seemed to him, inviting.

  The same nagging questions were forming in his brain, but he dismissed them this time, no missed chances this time around. He leaned into her, bending to her upturned mouth. He heard her gasp involuntarily as their hips interlocked and he pressed himself into her.

  Her mouth met his, her tongue probing, her breath harsh and driving his to a matching pace. He wasn’t sure how long the kiss lasted, nor how long it took for him to get the drawstring to the jogging pants undone. It seemed to take only an instant, and on the other hand, it seemed to go on forever.

  He had gotten his own sweatpants halfway down his legs when Janice raised one foot to the balky waistband and stamped down, jamming the pants into a wad about his ankles. He raised her onto the counter, noted vaguely that though the tile seemed almost frigid to his touch, she made no sound of complaint, gave only a groan of pleasure as he drove himself into her.

  She fell back, throwing her hands apart to brace herself, to meet his thrusts with lunges of her own. One of her hands sent the blender cup bouncing off the still-glowing TV, the other knocking the still-open bag of coffee beans flying to the floor. Deal got one foot out of his wadded sweats, kicked vaguely to clear beans for a place to stand, though he was moving rapidly to a place where he could have done what he was doing while dancing on nails.

  Janice had slid down, her head pressing against the counter’s back-splash, pressing first the switch for the overhead lamp, then the other that started the disposal grinding. Outside, the dog had begun to bark at something, and a jet roared overhead, inbound, outbound, who the hell knew. Deal heard it all as a kind of music that counterpointed the growing white frenzy in his head.

  Janice had twisted onto her stomach now, her toes barely touching the floor. Deal was behind her, his hands cupping her breasts, his feet crushing coffee beans against the tiles. Vaguely, he realized that the faucet had somehow gotten turned on in the sink, that the spigot was pushed too far sideways, that water was gushing freely onto the counter.

  Outside, the dog’s barking was an unbroken clamor. The jet seemed as loud as a rocket, the disposal an earth mover.

  “The water,” Janice gasped, her hands splayed flat, sliding about the slick tile countertop.

  “Right,” Deal said, and drove himself to bliss.

  Janice might have started to say something else, but it dissolved into wordless cries. He was holding tightly about her waist with one arm, fighting a sudden weakness in his knees that threatened to send him down. Finally, without leaving her, he lunged for the faucet lever, managed to turn the thing off.

  “I like that move,” Janice murmured. She had her head resting against one crooked arm, was smiling, though her eyes were closed. “Can we try it again?” she said, wiggling back against him.

  “The water’s off,” Deal said, still trying to catch his breath. He felt like he’d been back on the practice field, running gassers.

  “We could fix that,” Janice said, still moving against him.

  “Maybe we could,” Deal said, grinning down at her. He was actually thinking about reaching for the water faucet again, when he heard a new sound and lifted his gaze out the window to find Mrs. Suarez rounding the top of the outdoor stairwell, moving onto the breezeway landing not five feet away from him, her netted grocery bag in her arms.

  It was only for a second that their gaze met, but the old woman had eyes a satellite sensor could use. Deal had no idea what expression he might have been wearing, but an impressive array swept rapidly over Mrs. Suarez’s features: surprise, shock, even a hint of a smile as she turned away.

  “What is it, Deal?” Janice said. She’d sensed something, popped her head up over the windowsill before he could say a word.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Mrs. Suarez!”

  “Buenos días, Señora Deal,” Mrs. Suarez said without hesitation, still moving, her gaze still averted. She tossed one hand up in a kind of a wave, scuttling off toward her own apartment. And this time, Deal was certain he’d seen the smile on the old lady’s face.

  ***

  “I suppose it could have been worse,” Janice said, dumping another dustpan full of coffee beans into the trash. “It could have been Isabel.”

  Deal nodded absently, watching the way the fabric of the running pants molded her as she stooped to gather a stray bean or two. He’d mopped up the spilled water with a couple of towels, tossed them in the tub to drain, poured them both mugs of coffee—heavy stoneware, “CUP OF JOE TO GO” their logo, things he’d found in a supply-house bin a few weeks ago. He liked them: their weight, the old-fashioned language, the sort of objects that helped anchor a person, he supposed. Janice’s coffee was still steaming on the counter while he savored his own, savored the simple pleasure of watching her move.

  He supposed there had been other times he’d felt as good, but it didn’t seem important to try and remember exactly when. “I liked the part where you turned on the disposal with the top of your head,” he said. “Something we’ve missed all these years.”

  “Along with a barking dog.” She gave him a smile, straightened to toss the last of the beans into the sink. She wiped her hands on her hips, picked up her coffee, regarded him over the cup as she sipped.

  “There was an airplane in there, too,” he said. “Or a rocket ship.”

  “Oh, there was a rocket, all right.”

  They laughed together, and then Janice grew quiet, sipping at her coffee thoughtfully.

  “It was good sex, Deal,” she said finally. She was staring out the kitchen window as she said it, her gaze fixed on something he could spend a lifetime looking for and never see.

  “That it was,” he said. He could hear the wariness in his voice, felt himself tightening, girding for…what? Carefree as he�
��d felt a moment ago, he sensed any calamity was suddenly possible.

  She turned to him then, her gaze back in focus. “That’s all we’re going to call it right now,” she said, as if she could read the dials trembling on his internal seismograph. She put out a hand, touched his arm.

  “We agreed we were going to take this a step at a time, right?”

  He nodded, let out his breath. “Any time you want to try that step over, make sure we got it right…” He trailed off, letting the suggestion linger.

  She gave him a tolerant smile, finished her coffee. “So what’s next?” she said, putting her mug back into the sink.

  “With us?” he said.

  She gave him a look. “I don’t think that’s a question we need to ask, Deal. Not right now.” Her gaze held steady on his. “I think we just find out.”

  “Make it up as we go along?”

  “See what happens,” she said, nodding. “What do you think?”

  “Fair enough,” he said. He noticed the tightness in his gut had relented again, his breath had evened out. He reached out to touch her cheek and she squeezed his hand momentarily in return.

  “More coffee?” she asked then.

  He nodded, handed her the cup. She turned, poured for him. How long since anybody’d done that, he wondered.

  “New mugs, huh?” she said, handing the cup back.

  He shrugged. “I broke the last of those Matisse ones you bought.”

  She raised her brows in acknowledgment. “These look like they came from some diner in Bowling Green.”

  “They still have diners in Bowling Green?”

  “If they have them anywhere,” she said, shrugging. “I’m not going back to find out.”

  He thought a moment before he spoke. “You ever talk to the shrink about your folks?”

  Her eyebrows came up again. He wondered for a moment if he’d transgressed again, shifted the conversation to forbidden ground, but she seemed relatively unbothered by it. “Some,” she said finally. “We’ve been working more on the day-to-day stuff, mostly. We’re leaving the Freudian matters for the major excavation team.”

  He had another sip of his coffee. “I never finished telling you about me seeing the shrink, you know.”

  She nodded. “The therapist probably had to go for therapy after you left.”

  “It went fine,” he insisted.

  “Yeah?” she said. “What’d you talk about?”

  “Stuff,” he said. He massaged his neck, checked the floor, the ceiling, came back to find her still staring at him.

  “That it’s hard, us being apart,” he said, relenting. He took a breath. “About how to talk to Isabel, that sort of thing.”

  She nodded. “Well, I think it’s great, your doing that, if it helps you feel better, I mean.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said, nodding. He was remembering the confrontation with the meter reader cop, but decided to keep it to himself. Instead, he thought, he would tell her about the difference between carpentry and therapy. He was about to begin when first he noticed the news bulletin logo flashing on the TV screen and then he saw the familiar shape of the Biltmore swimming up to take its place.

  ***

  They watched in silence as the announcer passed along what few details had been released: Martin Rosenhaus, founder and CEO of Mega-Media, the nation’s largest chain of media outlet stores, had plunged to his death, falling fourteen stories from the balcony of the palatial suite once regularly occupied by Alphonse Capone into the pool of the fabled hotel where Esther Williams herself had performed aqua ballet. Police were tight-lipped, but unidentified sources reported that a cleaning woman, herself unidentified, had stumbled into the suite only moments after the incident to discover a suicide note.

  Deal switched off the set as a white-robed woman wearing something that looked like a turban on her head began to explain for the second time how big the splash was when Rosenhaus hit the water.

  “Suicide…” Janice said, shaking her head in disbelief. She glanced at Deal in alarm. “We couldn’t have frightened him that badly…”

  “Rosenhaus was right about the asbestos problem,” he said, shaking his head. “It may have slowed him down a bit, but it’s not the sort of thing that could stop him, not all by itself.”

  “But if he killed himself…”

  “It was suicide all right,” Deal said grimly. “The assisted kind.”

  “I knew he was hiding something,” she said, still stunned. “But I thought it was him, something he’d done…” She trailed off, staring helplessly at Deal.

  “Well, I wouldn’t rule that much out,” Deal said, thoughtful.

  “But who would want to kill Rosenhaus?” she said.

  Deal shook his head, still pondering.

  “The police must have learned we were with him last night, Deal. Why haven’t they been here?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe because Floyd Flynn’s in charge,” he said. “We were long gone by the time it happened, after all.”

  Janice walked slowly through the kitchen archway, sank down on one of the barstools on the other side of the pass-through. “First Arch, then Eddie Lightner, now Rosenhaus…”

  As she spoke, an image began to form in Deal’s mind, something from a kid’s primer, a series of ever-larger sea creatures churning a kind of conga line through the depths, each about to swallow the one just in front, each about to be swallowed by the one just behind. “There’s always a bigger fish,” he said, softly.

  “What?” Janice said, staring at him in puzzlement.

  “Rosenhaus,” he said. “He thought he was the biggest fish, but he was just chum, compared to the thing that got him.”

  She was about to snap back at him, demand some human terminology here, but then she softened, sat back in her chair.

  “But who?” she said. “Who could have more riding on this than Martin Rosenhaus?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I’ll bet if Driscoll were here, he’d tell you that was the key.”

  “If you’re not going to talk to me, Deal…”

  He saw the threatening look in her eyes, held up his hands. “I’m serious,” he said. “That’s exactly it. You ask the right question, sooner or later you’re bound to find the answer.” She still had her hands on her hips, was still glaring at him, when he picked up the phone and began to dial.

  Chapter 17

  “And such a plan demands a certain way of thinking, the need to take the long view. You can see that, can you not?”

  When she hesitated, James Ray Willis’s face darkened. Not just a frown or a scowl, but a manifestation of doom incarnate, a massive wave poised on the horizon and about to crash down. It suggested the dismay of the Egyptians, cowering as vast clouds of locusts obliterated their sun, the fear of the fleeing money-changers as the splintering of their tables echoed through the temples and the lash split their backs, the agony of the masses of Sodom as the fire rained down and lit them like tinder as they ran.

  It was an expression that the Reverend Willis had spent years perfecting, and it had become effective enough even when viewed from distant rows in vast pavilions, or passed through the cool, filtering lens of the television camera. But viewed up close within the confines of an airless, windowless editing room buried under countless tons of rock and rich Midwestern soil, the effect would be palpable. A reminder that while the promise of the Word was of gentleness and forgiveness and of ultimate transcendence, there was nonetheless no unpleasant measure that would not be undertaken in order to move the benighted toward the light.

  “Can you not?” Wills crooned again in his oddly formal speech. No one had ever spoken in such a way in the various places where he’d grown up, but that was part of the point, wasn’t it, big Oakie boy with a moon face and the mark of a century’s in breeding, overlay a hundred-dollar haircut and an off-kilter Alistair Cooke accent. Throw them off-guard, never give them what they expect.

&n
bsp; Along with the odd syntax had come a note of urgency, however, and this time she nodded.

  “Good,” he said, settling back in his chair. The mask of doom was replaced by an avuncular smile, everything forgiven in an instant, a harbinger of God’s gentle rain drifting down in endless bounty. Years of practice, years of preparation. “Of course you understand the plans. You read all these before you sent them off to your brother, didn’t you.”

  He lifted a sheaf of papers from the desk beside him, riffled the pages with a finger, noted the widening of her eyes. “Oh yes, I had to take these papers back, the ones you sent off to your brother, Sara. I had to go to considerable effort and expense, send some of my best people all the way down to Miami to see that these were reclaimed. We just couldn’t have knowledge of all these plans floating about, because it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, Sara. One little piece falls out of a great big puzzle like this…” He smiled, tapped the sheaf of papers. “Well, the whole works could get tangled up.”

  He paused, gave her a fatherly look. “And I want you to remember who sent these documents where they shouldn’t have gone in the first place. It wasn’t your intention, I know, but everything that’s happened, Sara, well, ask yourself who’s responsible.”

  He saw the look of pain and despair in the eyes, knew that if the gag were to be lifted from her lips, he would see the lips tremble, too. It was not his purpose nor his intention to distress her unnecessarily, but he was human, and she had disappointed him mightily.

  “I am sorry,” he said, and renewed his smile to show that he was sincere. “But you have been meddling in some extremely important matters, Sara.” He gave her a sadder version of the smile meant to convey how much he cared, how difficult this was. “And before I decide what we’re going to have to do, I thought we would take this opportunity…” He paused, searching for the words. “…to reorient ourselves, to rededicate”—he waved his arms in an encompassing circle—“to let you understand fully, once and for all, the importance of this mission.”

  He sat back in his chair, gazed up at the unpainted concrete ceiling past the blank eyes of half a dozen television monitors as if seeking counsel. He closed his eyes, began to shake his head gently from side to side.