Havana Run

by Les Standiford

  She slid in easily, brushing against his arm as she moved. She settled herself, smiled and took a sip of her drink, then made a show of checking her watch. “Ray Bob’s about a year late, as a matter of fact. And I don’t look for him for at least two more, even with time earned for good behavior.”

  Deal found himself smiling, then, just as quickly, glancing around the bar. There was a piano player working the lounge at the far side of the room where a few older couples looking spiffy in jackets and go-to-dinner dresses nodded along to “Fly Me to the Moon.”

  “If you’re looking for any of Ray Bob’s friends, don’t bother,” she told him. “The Pier House is a little reserved for that crowd.” She made a face as she finished.

  “Just how much did you and Ray Bob have in common?” Deal asked. He finished what was left of his drink and nodded his assent to a questioning look from the barmaid at the service counter.

  Angie gave him a tolerant glance. “Hey, who knows what gets people together in the first place? Somehow it happens, then one day you wake up and look at who’s lying next to you. By then, it’s a little bit late to be asking the question.”

  She broke off for a sip of her drink. “But I’ll tell you one thing, when the guy you’re with takes a trip up the river, it tends to give you a whole new perspective on a lot of things.”

  Deal nodded. Her comment got him thinking briefly about Janice, or more precisely, about the two Janices he had known. The young, carefree, fun-loving woman he had married, and the wounded, inward-turning woman she had become.

  And as always, there came the pang of guilt, the voice that insisted that it had all been his fault. Men who’d tried to kill him nearly killing her instead, not once but twice.

  How do you begin to make up for something like that? he wondered. Just how?

  He picked up the fresh drink the barmaid had brought and turned to Angie. “Do you visit him?”

  “I’ve been up a couple of times,” she said, glancing absently around the bar top as if she’d misplaced something. She turned back after a moment, offering a rueful smile. “You ever smoke? I quit like a year ago, but it’s like sometimes I forget I don’t anymore.”

  “My mother smoked a lot before she died,” he said. “It sent me off the habit.”

  “Lucky for you, I guess,” she said. “Anyways, it’s not exactly a pretty picture, up there. Ray Bob could be tough to get along with even when he was walking around free…” She trailed off, then turned back to meet Deal’s gaze.

  “I write, end of every week, let him know what’s going on with the business, which isn’t all that much, tell him how his brokerage account is doing, things like that. It’s more like a business report.” She took some of her drink and gave her hair a toss.

  “I’d like to think he’d do the same for me, even though he probably wouldn’t,” she added, a thoughtful look on her features. “Whatever we had is gone, that’s for sure. But I haven’t had the heart to come right out and say so, him sitting behind bars and all.”

  “Given what you say about Ray Bob, that might be the safest time to tell him,” Deal said.

  She smiled. “You’re probably right,” she said. She sucked the ice of her drink dry and signaled to the barmaid for a refill. The piano player had finished with “Fly Me to the Moon,” and was now belting out a by-the-numbers rendition of “Cabaret.” Two of the well turned-out couples had begun to fox-trot on the small dance floor.

  “How about you?” Angie asked, turning to him. “What happens in your life when you’re not being a construction mogul? Is there a Mrs. Deal somewhere? Some little Deal juniors running around?”

  “There is a Mrs. Deal, in fact,” he told her.

  “I should have guessed,” she said.

  “And I have a daughter, Isabel, who’s ten.”

  “Wonderful,” Angie said. “Where are they, at the beach or something?”

  “Isabel’s mother and I are separated,” Deal said. “The two of them are out at a spa in New Mexico as we speak.”

  “That sounds nice,” Angie said, examining a nail. “Just how separated are you?”

  “It’s been awhile now,” Deal said. “Several years, in fact.”

  Angie considered what he’d told her. “Did she want it that way, or was it you?”

  When Deal hesitated, she held up a hand. “Never mind, I already know.”

  He glanced at her. “Am I that obvious?”

  “Don’t ever play poker,” she told him, rolling her eyes.

  The piano player segued from “Cabaret” into “New York, New York,” and more couples were up to dance. “Is that guy the worst or what?” Angie said.

  Deal glanced at the piano player. “He’s better than the last one they had.”

  “The guy with the bad hairpiece?”

  “That’s the one,” Deal said, his gaze drifting into the distance. He wasn’t going to mention the singer who’d been paired up with the guy. He hoped Angie Marsh didn’t bring her up either.

  “Can I ask you something?” Angie said.

  He turned. “Are you feeling shy all of a sudden?”

  “I just wondered if you had eaten yet.”

  “I haven’t,” he found himself admitting.

  “And this guy you’re waiting for, is he coming or what?”

  Deal glanced at his watch, shaking his head. He’d given up on Russell Straight an hour ago, to be honest, even before Angie had turned up at the bar. A balmy summer evening, a guy who looked like Russell alone in Key West…well, Deal would get a play-by-play in the morning—if he allowed it, that is.

  “So why don’t I take you for dinner?” Angie was saying.

  Deal thought about it briefly, imagining Ray Bob listening in on this proposition, yanking the bars of his cell apart like taffy. “That’s nice of you to offer…” he began, but she cut in.

  “Come on,” she said. “You already turned down business. We can go for pleasure. I know this Mexican place out on Stock Island, if you’ll drive.”

  Deal was about to decline when something—the effects of his drink, the guileless smile on the face of the lovely woman in front of him, or maybe the remnants of the sensible self that still lurked inside him—intervened. “Mexican?” he found himself repeating.

  “You don’t like Mexican?” she asked doubtfully.

  “It’s my favorite,” he said.

  “Then what are we waiting for?” she said.

  In truth, Deal had no answer.

  ***

  “This is an unusual car you’ve got,” Angie said. She sat on the broad bench seat opposite him, her legs tucked beneath her, glancing around the cabin of the Hog as they drove slowly southward down Duval Street. He’d sent down the windows to let the stale heat out, then switched on the A/C to mix with the balmy summer air streaming through.

  It was dark now, and the foot traffic had picked up, tourists aimlessly milling from one geegaw shop to the next or looking for a likely bar. Plenty of them had already settled at the Bull & Whistle, where the sounds of a bluesy guitar player filtered out the open windows onto the street. Several steps up from “New York, New York,” Deal thought, considering the urge to pull straight to the curb, scratching the pretense of dinner altogether.

  “The Hog is what everybody calls it,” Deal told her. “It started out in life as a Cadillac.”

  Her eyes widened. “No kidding. What did you do to it?”

  Deal laughed. “It wasn’t me. A guy I was doing a job for went belly up in the middle of things. He gave me this for part of what he owed.”

  “And you took it?” She turned in the seat, peering through the cab window to what had once been the backseat of an automobile. Now the roof had been cut away, the backseat and trunk converted to a pickup bed by Cal Saltz, a man who had liked to dabble in the breeding of thorough-breds and had wanted a more genteel way of hauling a bale of alfalfa out to one of his steeds on a weekend afternoon.

&
nbsp; “I needed a truck at the time, and this seemed the next best thing,” Deal said. “I keep saying I’m going to get rid of it, but there are a couple of mechanics up in Miami who love the thing. They keep fixing it up, adding one thing after another, and I haven’t had the heart to make them stop.”

  She nodded, running her hand over the retooled leather seat between them. “Well, somebody’s been taking good care of it,” she said. “And it’s weird enough to be a real Conch-mobile. You could probably name your price for it down here.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. They’d left the crowded downtown streets now, and Deal nudged the accelerator as they swung onto South Oceanside, a less traveled water-front drive that would take them out to U.S. 1 and the short hop to Stock Island, the tiny island just to the north and east of Key West.

  The sea breeze was stronger here, whipping through the cab of the Hog, carrying with it the tang of brine and beached seaweed, a smell that Deal had associated all his life with promise and adventure. And look where he was, after all, cruising the beach of an island paradise in a heavy car, a beautiful woman at his side, a couple of drinks in his belly and the night spread out before him.

  He heard a sudden rustling of paper at his side and caught the flash of something vaguely white as it whipped past his face and vanished out the Hog’s window in the slipstream. Something else was still whirling about in the vortex, thrashing like a crippled bird.

  Angie’s hand shot out and snatched the clattering paper before it flew out the window too. “What the heck?” she said, as Deal found the buttons for the windows and sent them gliding up. “Sorry,” he told her.

  “You ought to be sorry,” she said, her mouth open. She held up the paper she’d snatched from midair, brandishing it at him. “Do you know what this is?”

  Deal glanced over, saw her staring at him accusatorially, holding what seemed to be a check in her hand. The cashier’s check Antonio Fuentes had offered him earlier, no less. He’d carried the envelope out of his office—he couldn’t just leave it there—then had left it on the seat of the Hog when he’d gone into the Pier House and forgotten about it. If Angie had been a second slower, he thought…

  “Thanks,” he said, holding out his hand.

  “Thanks?” she repeated. “I’m not sure ‘thanks’ quite covers it. How about, dinner’s on me, can I buy you a new car, something like that?”

  Deal smiled, still holding out his hand. “Dinner was on me to begin with,” he told her.

  “You just ride around with million-dollar checks flying around your car? I think you need a better filing system. Look, we could close up Watkins Title and I could go to work for you full-time…”

  “It’s a long story, Angie,” he said.

  “I’ll bet it is,” she said.

  “Can I have the check?”

  “Sure,” she said. She pulled the check back to her breast. “Just indulge me for a minute, will you? I never held a million dollars before.”

  He shook his head. “It really isn’t what you think,” he said.

  “Well, I’m glad you told me, because I would have sworn I was holding a cashier’s check with a one and six zeroes printed on it.”

  “Angie…”

  “Oh, here,” she said, sounding exasperated, reaching to tuck the check in his shirt pocket as they slowed for the traffic signal at the junction of U.S. 1. He felt her hair brush his check, felt her breath on his neck as she leaned close. “Money’s way overrated, anyhow, or so I’ve heard.”

  ***

  The “Mexican place” Angie suggested had turned out to be terrific, run by a pair of brothers from Jalisco who had originally come to Florida to toil in the agricultural fields south of Miami. The place was small, a dozen tables or so, half of them on an outside deck covered with an awning, the last empty one of which they had snagged upon arriving.

  “You like the margarita?” Angie asked him, as their waitress, the daughter of one of the brothers, they’d discovered, deposited their second round and left.

  “I’m going to guess it’s better than the one you had at the Pier House,” he said, raising his glass to meet hers.

  “I had two at the Pier House,” she said. “And, yes, this is better. It’s the real thing. No lemonade. Just lime juice, tequila, some triple sec and ice.”

  “Spoken with authority,” Deal said.

  “I spent a little time in Mexico,” she said.

  “This was before Ray Bob?”

  “It’s been such a nice night,” she said. “Are you trying to ruin it?”

  “Just asking,” he said. “How about, ‘What took you to Mexico?’”

  She thought about it a moment. “An airplane,” she said finally.

  “Okay,” Deal said. “It can remain a mystery.”

  “I was a teacher,” she said. “I took a job teaching at an orphanage in Chihuahua.”

  Deal stared, trying to reconcile Angie the teacher of orphaned Mexican children, with Angie the companion of Ray Bob Watkins, flamboyant Key West drug runner and convicted felon. “Another surprise,” he said. “Where’d you go to school?”

  “Scottsdale Community College,” she said.

  “As in Arizona?”

  “As in,” she agreed. “My dad was in the service. We moved around a lot.”

  He nodded, still trying to build the bits and pieces he’d gleaned into a cohesive whole.

  “I’ve only got an AA,” she was saying, “but I found out that’s all I needed for the job. The orphans didn’t seem to mind.”

  And why would they? Deal thought. Then something else occurred to him. “You speak Spanish, then?”

  “Fluently,” she said.

  He shook his head, recalling his fractured conversations with their server. Angie had listened patiently, making her own requests in English. “How come you don’t…” He broke off, waving his hands about their surroundings, trying to find the way to say it.

  “…order my flautas in Spanish?” she finished for him.

  When he nodded, she went on. “I’m not in Mexico anymore, and I’m not Spanish. I only speak the language when I have to.”

  “That’s an interesting take,” he said.

  “I’m an interesting person,” she told him.

  He laughed. “I’ll drink to that,” he said. “So what’s the Chihuahua-to-Key West connection?”

  Her expression dimmed. “There are cockroaches everywhere,” she said.

  “Is this where Ray Bob comes in?”

  “I thought we had an agreement,” she said with a sigh.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You don’t have to talk about your million-dollar checks.” She shrugged. “I don’t have to talk about cockroaches.”

  “I told you, I don’t even know if that check is real.”

  “It looked real to me.”

  “You know what they say about appearances.”

  “No,” she said. She put her glass down, then lay her hand on top of his. “Why don’t you tell me about appearances, John?”

  He took a breath. What the hell? What the living hell? “A guy showed up in my office this afternoon, late, after you’d gone home.”

  “How do you know when I went home?”

  He stared at her, every bit of his innate, fight-having-a-good-time reserve suddenly vanished. “I heard you close the front door of Watkins Title. I went over to my window and watched you walk down Fleming Street, right out of my life.”

  She paused a moment. “That’s sweet,” she said, finally, her eyes on his. “But I wasn’t gone for long.”

  “You weren’t,” he agreed. This is Key West, he was reminding himself. Such things as this could happen here. One could let them happen.

  “You were telling me about this man in your office,” she said.

  “You sure you want to hear?”

  “Of course,” she said. “If he’s the one who gave you the check.” />
  “He called himself Antonio Fuentes. He wanted me to build some things for him in Cuba.”

  “Is that allowed?”

  “Not presently, but someday. He’s betting on the come.”

  “He must have a lot to bet,” she said, pointing at his shirt pocket where the check still nestled.

  Deal shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Are you going to take his money?”

  He gave her a smile. “You think I should?”

  “Does it matter what I think?”

  “I was just curious.”

  “Too bad,” she said, dropping her gaze. “I was hoping that it mattered.”

  “It’s more complicated than it seems,” he said. “I mean, you don’t just take a million dollars from someone you don’t even know.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Of course not. Who knows what this guy really has in mind.”

  She thought for a moment. “Still, it seems like he’s the one taking all the chances. You’re the one who’s got the check.”

  He stopped. “Sure, but who knows what he’s after?”

  “What you’re saying is, someone comes along and offers you something that seems almost too good to be true, you don’t want to take it.”

  “In this case, sure.”

  “In every case?” She had his hand in hers now and was staring at him intently.

  His drink was nearly gone, he noticed. Somehow hers seemed to have vanished as well.

  Their waitress, someone who would have struck him as a lovely woman under ordinary circumstances, was whisking by their table toward the kitchen. “The check?” Deal managed quickly as the woman strode by. She nodded, without breaking stride. Deal could have sworn he saw her hiding a smile as she disappeared.

  ***

  Angie directed him back onto the island, down North Roosevelt this time, past Sears Town and its attendant stripmall fallout, on across First Street and then White, until they were once again beneath the leafy canopy that shaded the streets of Old Town, the area that Deal had come to think of as the true Key West. Away from the hectic bustle of Duval, Old Town was an eclectic mix of grand Victorians built by the seafarers and wreckers who had founded the place, cheek by jowl with modest saltbox cottages that would have looked at home amidst the dunes of the north-eastern shore.