Havana Run

by Les Standiford

  To Deal, who’d grown up in brightly lit and pastel-stuccoed Miami, these secluded streets and their clapboard houses exuded a fairy-tale charm, lending even this drive an out-of-time, otherworldly feel.

  “Down there,” Angie said, pointing out a lane obscured by shrubbery. One of the more impressive Victorians, converted now to an upscale bed-and-breakfast, took up the corner just ahead.

  Deal slowed and swung the Hog into a turn. Branches brushed the sides of the doors as they went. “We could park on the street,” she told him, “but then we’d have to walk.”

  “Perish the thought,” Deal said, peering down the tunnel of greenery ahead.

  “Right in here,” she said, pointing to a suddenly appearing turnout off the narrow lane.

  Deal obeyed, the lights of the Hog washing over the front of a neatly painted cottage just off the lane, nearly hidden beneath a looming banyan tree and fronted by a tangle of crotons and waist-high asparagus ferns. There was a tin-roofed porch running across the front of the place, with a wicker chair posted on one side of the entry and a motor scooter perched on the other.

  “This is home,” she said, pointing. “We could have taken my scooter, I guess, but somehow it wouldn’t have been the same.”

  “How did you ever find it?” Deal said. He cut the motor, then the lights, leaving the faint glimmer of moonlight filtering through the overhanging limbs.

  Angie’s arm lay on the back of the seat behind him, her fingertips lightly poised on his shoulder. He felt light-headed but knew it wasn’t the drinks. Maybe it was a dream, he thought. And why try to rouse yourself from a dream like this?

  “A friend rented it from the guys who own the B and B up front,” Angie said, pointing through the gloom. “When she moved out, I took over the lease.”

  “It looks great,” Deal said. “Like Hansel and Gretel.”

  “You should come see,” she said, one finger at his collar.

  He turned. She leaned forward. He felt her lips on his. Dream or not, he thought, right thing or wrong, such thoughts no longer computed, whisked away like Fuentes’ envelope out the Hog’s window.

  He was vaguely aware of the crinkling of paper as he pulled her against him. “The check,” he heard her say, her lips at his ear.

  “Forget it,” he said. He levered himself out from behind the wheel, sliding down with her onto the broad seat of the car. For once, he thought, a reason to love this ungainly car.

  His hand found her breast, he felt hers at his shirtfront, felt a button pop. “But John…”

  “Forget the check,” he repeated. And so they did.

  ***

  Deal awoke with his head jammed into the corner of the passenger seat, his chin pressed nearly to his chest. Angie lay with her cheek pressed against his chest, her breathing quiet and regular, until he tried to ease away from the armrest that seemed to want him in a headlock.

  “Hey,” she said sleepily, lifting her chin. “Look what happened.”

  “Just look,” Deal said. He levered himself up a bit, working his neck muscles against their stiffness.

  The moon had shifted, sending more light from its new angle. He glimpsed the graceful curve of a shoulder, the rise of her hip, a tangle of clothing on the floorboards. “Good thing we didn’t park on the street after all,” Deal said.

  “Mmmm.” Angie made a sound of agreement, nuzzling against him. After a moment, she raised her head to look at him. “Maybe it’s time to go inside.”

  Deal managed to bring his watch around into the light. Almost five, he saw. In less than two hours, his crews would be at work. “Almost time to go to work,” he told her.

  “On Saturday?” she said. “Don’t construction moguls take the weekends off?”

  “Maybe some do,” he told her. “The rich ones.”

  “You’re rich,” she said, rearranging herself against him. “I happen to know.”

  “Not anymore,” he said. “We vaporized that check. I felt it go up in one flash of heat and smoke. There’s a scar here, right on my chest.”

  “No such luck,” she said. She pushed herself up on her forearm, allowing him a view of her breasts as she reached for something on the dashboard.

  “I saved you,” she said, turning back, the check between her fingers. “That’s twice.”

  Deal shook his head. “How’d you manage that?”

  She smiled. “You were preoccupied,” she said.

  “I’d really better get you inside,” he said.

  She felt him shifting beneath her. “Don’t you want to rephrase that statement?” she said.

  It took him a moment. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll never make it to work.”

  “Whatever you say,” she said. She found her top amidst the tangle on the floorboards and deftly pulled it over her head and into place. It gave Deal a momentary pang, like watching a moment’s rewind of a breathtaking piece of film.

  She opened the passenger door of the Hog and stepped outside to don her slacks, an equally downbeat moment, Deal thought, as the last pale glimmer of untanned flesh disappeared. He struggled into his own clothes in the meantime, finding one of his deck shoes under the seat, another on the dashboard. Maybe that’s where she had stowed the check, he thought, sliding out into the moonlight to join her.

  “You sure you don’t want to come in?” she asked, pausing at the stairs to the porch. She was carrying her shoes in one hand, along with a ball of white lacy fabric that he first took to be a handkerchief.

  “That’s the very problem,” he told her. “I’d love to. But I’ve got to be out there first thing.”

  She shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said.

  “Maybe I could get a rain check,” he said.

  “Maybe,” she said. Her tone was noncommittal, but her expression suggested otherwise. “Work hard,” she said. She took one backward step up and leaned to kiss him quickly. In the next moment, she turned and was gone.

  Chapter Eight

  Deal navigated the Hog through a network of back streets southward across the island to the condominium complex where he’d rented his apartment, rubbing his stiff neck all the way and debating whether or not he should try for one more hour of sleep. But the chances he’d be able to wake up again were about the same as being able to pry himself out of Angie Marsh’s cottage on time, he thought. He’d make himself a pot of coffee and head on out to the Villas, be there when the crews and the machine operator showed up, make sure things were right.

  On the right, he passed the glowing bulk of the Casa Marina, the hotel Henry Flagler had intended as the showpiece of his Florida chain back when the mogul was in his heyday, and one of the few outposts of commerce in this far-southern part of the island. The hotel, eighty years old but aging nicely, was another Florida monument to unqualified ambition, one Deal’s father had been particularly fond of, and the family had stayed there several times in Deal’s youth, Barton Deal never passing by one of the sepia-toned photos in the lobby without delivering some snippet of history.

  “There’s the man who invented Florida,” his old man was fond of saying, pointing at a portrait of a mustachioed Flagler. The man had built a series of hotels down the east coast of Florida—St. Augustine, Ormand Beach, Palm Beach, Miami—along with a railroad to bring the crowds to them—and then, in the ultimate display of hubris, had planned to make Key West his terminus, hopscotching the railroad a hundred and fifty-odd miles over mostly open water to the Southernmost Point.

  He’d somehow managed to pull the feat off, and even the fact that the rail line had been quickly blown to smithereens by the ungodly Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 had not dimmed his old man’s enthusiasm for the undertaking. “Flagler was a goddamned pyramid builder,” Barton Deal would proclaim loudly, happier if there were other tourists passing within earshot. “Wore seven-league boots. The kind of man in short supply these day.”

  Seven-league boots, Deal thought, turning eastward now, toward h
is complex. Surely that’s what his father aspired to wear. And perhaps he had, by some lights anyway. Mighty big shoes to fill.

  He was at the foot of South Roosevelt now, turning into the complex, pushing the button on the ponderous gate opener, finding himself wondering what his old man would have to say about his evening’s experience. The dangers of staying up too late, or getting up too early, he was thinking, listening to the clanking of the heavy operating chain as the gate drew back. His old man would scoff at the notion of any guilt, to be sure. And he’d be even more impatient with Deal’s tendency to deny himself pleasure, so he wasn’t really sure if they could discuss anything about his encounter with Angie. “Hell’s bells, boy. You’re going to look that gift horse in the mouth?”

  Still, Deal thought. Still…

  …for so many years, he had harbored the hope that somehow he and Janice would find their way back together, that he could climb the mountain of guilt he’d built, see past all the impediments she’d piled up…denial, hope against hope, those had been his mainstays, for above everything, there was his daughter, Isabel, to think about.

  Enough, he told himself, as the gate finally swung open to allow him access. He would think about it all tomorrow, as the lady once said, or at least wait for the cold light of day. In the meantime, a shower, a strong cup of coffee, a few aspirins to lighten the throbbing in his stiff neck. He glanced at the corner of the seat where he’d been wedged, asleep, shaking his head now. Sure, it had been enjoyable, what had led up to that nap, but wouldn’t it have been just as much fun in a proper bed?

  He left the car in the designated space beneath the building, then walked past the thick pilings to the seaward side of the complex. The front entrance was closer, but he favored the back steps, where he could get a dose of the sea breeze heavy in his face, and the reassuring slap-slap of the waves as well.

  This place had some advantages, then, he was thinking, but if he’d been more patient, he might have found himself a cottage like Angie Marsh’s, a hideaway in never-never land, and it was a short hop from that thought to the memory of the lacy panties she’d been holding as she kissed him good-bye, and an even quicker hop to the memory of that same bit of lace peeling away…

  “Nice night for a walk, Mr. Deal,” came an unfamiliar voice from the shadows.

  The sound caught him like a blow. Deal stopped short, his hands raised in reflex. “What the hell?” he said, his eyes combing the darkness.

  There was a tile-topped table and a clutch of lawn chairs arranged about a common area just ahead. Deal saw a shadowy figure rising from one of the chairs, the glow of a cigarette rising up, turning bright, then arcing away toward the sand.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” the man said.

  “Okay,” Deal said, gathering himself. He checked the shadows, wondering if the man had company. “My alarm is off. Way off. Who the hell are you?”

  The man was walking toward him now, and Deal drew back. Was there a pistol in that outstretched hand? Did he have a chance at making it to cover behind one of the support pillars?

  “Relax,” came the voice. A flashlight snapped on, illuminating what looked like a wallet in the man’s outstretched hand. A badge case, Deal realized—black leather surrounding a gold-and-silver shield, a photo ID beneath a plastic liner on the opposite side.

  “I’m with the Department of Justice,” the voice behind the flashlight said. “Does the name Fuentes mean anything to you?”

  Chapter Nine

  “You were waiting out on that patio all night?” Deal asked, examining the shield under the bright fluorescents of his condo’s kitchen. Norbert Vines, the ID read. He was a bland-looking guy in his thirties, shortish dark hair, a face that looked like it had been designed to be forgetten.

  Vines shrugged as he took his shield back. “More or less,” he said.

  “‘More or less’? What does that mean?”

  “It means we’ve had our eye on you for a while, ever since Fuentes turned up at your offices in Miami.” Vines pulled a package in a courier pouch from under his arm and dropped it on the granite-topped kitchen table, some pages of typescript sliding free.

  “Fuentes had this sent over for you, by the way,” Vines said. “It must have fallen open after it got here,” he added.

  Deal stared at the man. The ache at the back of his neck had inched upward, turning into the beginnings of a real skull-pounder. He massaged his neck, wondering if there’d been somebody skulking in the bushes outside Angie’s place, earlier. The possibility made him want to drop his shoulder and charge, send Vines backpedaling out the door and over the rail beyond.

  “Look, I’m sorry if I frightened you out there,” Vines said. “It’s not my idea of fun, staying up all night, you know.”

  “Then why bother?” Deal said.

  “Because it’s important that we talk to you,” Vines said.

  “Who’s this ‘we’?”

  Vines cleared his throat. “I’m part of a special-investigations unit within the Department of Justice,” he said. He tapped the pocket where he’d replaced his shield, as if Deal might have forgotten. “You’ve been helpful to us in the past. It’s our hope you’ll be willing to be of help again.”

  Deal shook his head. “You must have made a mistake, my friend. I’m a building contractor…”

  “You worked with Talbot Sams,” Vines interjected, his tone more forceful.

  It stopped Deal, a wave from the past washing up over him like a blast from the surf outside. Just when you think a memory might be safely buried, he thought, it’s suddenly there again, as alive as the moments themselves…Deal entering the remote field offices of the company to find a man with a badge like Vines’, offering to keep him out of jail in return for the head of a client. Deal had had little choice but to comply, but things had not gone as anyone planned…

  “Worked with Talbot Sams?” he managed. “Are you crazy? You’re talking about a man who tried to kill me.”

  Vines shrugged. “Sams had an agenda of his own, I’m not disputing that. But the fact is that he was within the agency’s employ. He was carrying out an investigation of a highly sensitive nature when he…”

  “…when he did his damnedest to kill me and a bunch of other people I know,” Deal finished.

  He’d cut Vines off because he knew what was coming. The man might not have been callous enough to blurt out the details, but there was no disputing that a rogue agent named Talbot Sams was two years or more dead, and Deal had had his hand on the knife that killed him.

  The fact that he’d learned it was Sams who had likely driven his father to his suicide had some bearing on how Deal felt about the matter—not to mention that Sams had been intent on plunging that same knife into Deal during the course of their struggle—but it was another chapter in his life that he wasn’t eager to revisit, not with this stranger standing in his kitchen.

  He stopped, refocusing on Vines. “The way it started with Talbot Sams, he came by my office uninvited one day, then pressured me into feeding him some information. That wouldn’t be what you had in mind, would it?”

  Deal was trying to stop the images that paraded through his mind, but it was hardly the sort of thing he’d ever forget. Talbot Sams had had a storied career as one of the Justice Department’s in-house spooks, an undercover agent with more latitude and less oversight than any CIA agent ever dreamed of. He’d made a fortune by picking and choosing which of his targets to run to ground and which to blackmail, using the same tactics to pressure informants into cooperating when it suited him. He’d forced Barton Deal to help him with more than one of his schemes and—like father, like son, Deal supposed—had tried to do the same to him. Except it hadn’t quite turned out the way Sams had planned. Instead of pocketing a fortune, Sams had ended up dead.

  Vines held up his hands in a placating fashion. “I’m not here to pressure you, Mr. Deal. I’m here to plead with you.” He gestured at the packet lying on the
table once again.

  “Your buddy Fuentes is involved with a group of people who make the notion of sleazy seem attractive. Some of them we’ve been aching to put away for years. Most of the individuals are from South America, but their influence is wide-ranging. They have ties to drugs, death squads, worldwide terrorist organizations.”

  His eyes met Deal’s. “You were in the profession once; you ought to appreciate what we’re up against.”

  Deal stared, fighting the urge to laugh. The profession. As if he’d signed up for a fraternity that never let you go. “That’s something I don’t talk about,” he said to Vines, evenly. “Ever.”

  “That’s understood,” Vines nodded, his voice softening for a moment. He glanced away quickly—as if he’d read the dismissal files, Deal thought—and who was to say he hadn’t.

  “But we need help,” Vines said, turning back, “and you’re in a position to provide that help. That’s the truth of it. That’s why I’m here. Fuentes has a travel invitation for you in that packet. All we’re asking you to do is accept.”

  Deal sighed, his hand going to the back of his aching skull once more. “If you’re after Fuentes and his cohorts, why not go pick him up? Why are you bothering me?”

  “You know it’s not that simple,” Vines said.

  “I don’t know anything,” Deal said.

  “Fuentes is a middleman, that’s all, the consummate broker. We’re not interested in him, and his backers are well out of our reach.”

  Deal stared at Vines in astonishment. “Are you looking for me to go after one of these people?”

  “It’s nothing like that.” Vines shook his head. “We’re looking for information, that’s all.”

  Deal stifled a bitter laugh. “That’s all Talbot Sams wanted. A little information.”

  “I can’t speak to what passed between you and Talbot Sams, Mr. Deal. I can only speak for myself, and for the interests I represent. We’d like you to take Antonio Fuentes up on his invitation to visit Cuba. It’s as simple as that.”