Havana Run (8 page)

“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.

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 his 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?”