Presidential Deal (14 page)

She broke off then, as if she were suddenly aware of how she sounded. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath. “No bugs,” she repeated. “There are no bugs on me.”

“That’s right,” Deal said.

It took a moment while her breathing gradually calmed. Finally she opened her eyes and looked at him mournfully. “So where?” she said. “Where am I going to sleep?”

Deal glanced around the room, which danced with eerie shadows now. He was still trying to come up with a suggestion when they heard the sounds of footsteps approaching once again.

There were muffled voices outside, what sounded like cursing, and then fumbling with the keys and door bolt. When the door opened this time, the men were not so cautious as before. One man stood boldly in the doorway, his weapon in one hand, a flashlight in the other. Two others stood nearby, peering over their partner’s shoulder. One had his weapon slung over his shoulder and seemed nervous, shifting his glance from inside the shed to the brush behind him. The first man had fixed the flashlight beam steadily upon Linda Sheldon. He seemed to lose his balance momentarily, and the beam shifted focus as he reached out to catch the doorjamb.

“They’re drunk,” Deal said quietly to Linda.

“Dear God,” she said. Her voice equally subdued.

The first man mumbled something in Spanish to his companions, handed off his weapon. He stepped up onto the concrete floor of the shed and stood wavering for a moment, his shadow sliding about the wall behind him.

“I don’t think this is good…” she began, her voice fearful.

“
Silencio
,” the man blurted. He glanced at Deal, then turned and motioned one of the others inside.

The second man seemed unsure of all this, Deal thought, but he had his automatic rifle at the ready. As the first man moved on inside the room, the gunman stepped between Deal and Linda, the muzzle of the weapon now level with Deal’s chest.

“Linda…” Deal began.

“Don’t worry,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “If this worm so much as touches me, I’m going to puke in his face.”

“
Silencio
,” the first man said, and strode forward, sending a backhand across her cheek. She cried out as the blow sent her reeling backward, her heels catching the edge of the mattress. She went down hard, her legs flashing in the beam of the first man’s flashlight. The man tossed his flashlight onto the bed and moved toward her, fumbling at his belt, guttural noises sounding in his throat.

Deal lunged forward instinctively, but the gunman swung the butt of his weapon toward his jaw. Deal tried to duck, felt a bright jolt of pain, saw the room turn sideways as he went down. He was trying to right himself when he saw a boot—enormous boot, he found himself thinking—growing bigger with every millisecond until it passed somewhere beneath his shoulder and he felt pain drive deep into his chest, his breath flying away with the force of the blow. He was on his back, his side, then his stomach…Finally he managed to lift his chin, found himself a foot away from the mattress where the first man had wedged himself between Linda Sheldon’s flailing legs.

He heard screams as the man fell upon her, then she was silent as a meaty palm clamped down over her lips. He saw her fist banging on the man’s broad back and Deal lunged forward, caught the man’s flapping shirttail and fell backward, pulling for all he was worth.

He heard the man’s grunt of surprise, felt his weight shift, and then they were both tumbling together over the rough surface of the floor. Deal felt a blow between his shoulder blades, another in his ribs. The second man up there, trying to drive him off his partner. At least he wouldn’t shoot, he thought. Or would he?

Deal twisted away from the blows, rolling the first man atop him, and heard a groan and a sudden outrush of air from the man’s lungs. The bastard had taken one of the kicks, Deal thought with satisfaction. But hardly had he thought it than there was a stunning blow at his temple and he felt his fingers, his hands, his arms going numb.

He slumped back to the floor, saw vaguely that the first man was astride him now, his face twisted into a grimace of fury. The man drew back a fist, drove it down, past Deal’s useless arms, past the edge of his blurry vision.

He managed to turn his head aside so that the blow glanced away, but still he felt his lips flatten, the warm bath of his blood in his mouth. He heard Linda Sheldon cry out again, caught a glimpse as she came clawing at the man atop him, saw a hand lash out, heard her groan as she went down.

The man turned his attention back to Deal, brought his hands into a knot, raised them high, as if he held some imaginary axe. The man brought his hands down in a pile-driving motion against Deal’s chest and he felt pain compounded upon pain. He saw the fury on the man’s face as he raised his hands again and knew that the man intended to beat him to death.

He saw the man raise his hands even higher above his head, saw his face redden with fury and effort, saw his eyes widen with anticipation…

…and suddenly everything changed. What had been a face transformed itself into a froth of tissue simultaneous with an explosion that rocked the tiny room. The man went over sideways, what was left of his face bouncing wetly off the unfinished concrete.

Deal turned aside, looked up blearily at a tall man—
Angel
?—who towered over him, a smoking pistol in his hand.
And I am next
, Deal found himself thinking. But Angel turned from Deal and said something to the man who’d been holding the gun and extended his hand, and the second man held out his weapon uncertainly.

Angel took the weapon, nodding as if to say that all was well. There was another explosion then, and a burst of flame that seemed to leap straight from Angel’s hand. The man who’d given over his weapon threw his hands to his chest and fell backward. He struck the wall and slid slowly down into a sitting position, an amazed expression frozen on his sightless face. Angel watched him for a moment, then holstered his pistol.

Deal felt something hard against his chin, realized it was the tip of Angel’s boot. A flashlight beam struck him in the face, and he blinked and tried to raise his hand to block the light.

“
Bueno
,” he heard Angel say softly. The boot moved away from his chin and Deal’s head settled back against the concrete.

The flashlight beam slid over the filthy mattress to where Linda was pulling herself up. She got unsteadily to her feet, pulling her rumpled skirt over her legs. Her blouse was torn at the collar and there was an angry welt on her cheek. She started to say something to Angel, but nothing seemed to come. Then she shifted her gaze to Deal and started toward him.

“You bastards,” she muttered as she knelt over Deal. “Filthy bastards.”

“This is nothing I would permit,” Angel said. He waved his flashlight at the man who still sat slumped against the wall. A dark streak marked his path down the rough surface to where he rested.

She glared up at him. “You think that matters?” She turned back to Deal, lifted his head into her hands.

Deal felt a tingling in his fingertips, felt his arms dangling like heavy lumber at his shoulders. As if he’d slept in all the wrong positions at once, he thought. He swallowed, tasted blood, tried to force his tongue to work.

“You shouldn’t have tried to stop him,” Linda Sheldon said, staring mournfully at him. “I could have lived through it.”

“Mr. Deal is a soldier.” Angel’s words drifted down from up above. Deal thought he heard a note of approval there. The coach who watches the player limp back into the huddle, the boxer stagger out sideways to answer the bell.

“He needs help,” Linda insisted.

Other men were in the room now. One pair lifted the man who’d held the gun from his rest against the wall, someone else was dragging the man without a face out of the range of Deal’s vision.

Angel let the flashlight roam over Deal’s face. Even the touch of the light felt painful, Deal thought. With a steadfast effort, he found he could turn his eyes from the searing beam.

“No,” Angel said, “I think he does not. He is a soldier,” he repeated. “If soldiers live, they live with pain.”

Coach Angel, Deal thought, his mind beginning to fog over. Put a little heat on those fractures, those bullet wounds, run it out.

“You’re insane,” Linda Sheldon was crying. “
This
is insane. What do you want?” Linda Sheldon was shouting now, but the words seemed to come to Deal as from a great distance.

“What do you want from us?” Her voice again, echoing down a long dark tunnel.

“From you?” he thought he heard Angel say. Deal thought he heard the man laugh. “I want nothing from you.”

Nothing?
Deal thought, his head swimming.
All of this for nothing?

“You are my little proofs of chaos,” Angel was saying. “And that is all you are.”

Deal thought that he had only blinked his eyes then, but when he opened them again, Angel was gone, and the door was closed and locked, and sometime after that, the rain began.

Chapter 22

“And what makes you so sure this Deal person is with the First Lady?” The man Driscoll had been brought to see regarded him with the bored indifference an emergency room nurse might give anyone still able to stand. Utter self-certainty, Driscoll thought. Not a good quality for a cop, but then maybe being a Fed had something to do with it.

Driscoll stopped himself from offering his characteristic shrug. “You and I can agree he was up there on the presentation stand, right?”

The man nodded, glanced at his watch. They were in an airless room in the Federal Justice Building, where the local command center had been established. Only ten-thirty and the guy looked like he was in a hurry for lunch.

“And he’s not among the fatalities, he’s not in any of the hospitals…”

“These emergency rooms have been pretty busy,” the Fed offered. “Maybe he’s unconscious, somebody took him in as a John Doe.”

Driscoll shook his head. “There were a few of those, homeless types who hung around Victory Plaza, I’d guess. But none of them were Deal. I saw ’em all.” Driscoll added the last in response to the guy’s how-can-you-be-sure look.

He’d been in nearly a dozen hospitals over the last fourteen hours, seen more dead and dying than he’d ever expected to look at the rest of his life. The gunshot victims were one thing—he’d seen plenty of that before. But the victims of the as-yet-unidentified gas were something else again. Many of them comatose, many on respirators, most of them with skin lesions, as if they’d been dunked in boiling water. Whatever the stuff had been, it worked like a combination of mustard gas and nerve gas: if it didn’t put you out, it made you look so ghastly you wish you had been, that was Driscoll’s take on it. Something sure to spread panic on the battlefield. And in downtown Miami, he thought.

At Gables General, he’d caught a glimpse of a bundle of bandages that had once been Gina Lozano, the stylish Channel 7 reporter who’d been on the scene when the gas was released. One of the nurses had confided in him that only the machines were still keeping her going. Aurelio Pincay was outside the building doing a blustery standup when Driscoll left…

“Your friend will turn up,” the Fed in the airless room was saying. “He could be out there somewhere, walking around in a daze. We’ve seen that kind of trauma before.”

“And he could be up at the North Pole tuning Santa’s sleigh bells,” Driscoll said. “Reason I came in here, I think there’s a good chance he’s been taken along for the ride.”

The Fed leaned back in the office chair he’d likely appropriated from some hapless staffer, tented his fingers at his chin. “Let’s say you’re right, Mr.…” He broke off to consult the business card on his blotter. “…Mr. Driscoll. Say whoever is responsible for this did kidnap your friend as well. What I’m not clear on is what you’d like us to do about it.”

Driscoll stared at the man in disbelief. Before he could say anything, the man had rocked forward in his chair, was jutting his chin defiantly at Driscoll. “The President’s wife has disappeared. We assume she was kidnapped by the same people responsible for everything else that’s taken place over the last twenty-four hours in this hellhole you call a city, but we’re not even sure of that, since nobody’s bothered to deliver any kind of ransom note. Nobody claiming responsibility, no scuttlebutt on the international terrorist hot line that anything was in the works. Meantime, there’s threescore people dead, a quarter of them federal agents, and a like number headed for the same destination. We have every available resource assigned to the matter of finding the First Lady, Mr. Driscoll. If your friend is with her, then you can be sure we’ll bring him back as well. But in the meantime, there are more than a few matters that need attending to.” The guy pushed himself up from his desk, letting Driscoll know the interview was over.

Driscoll didn’t budge. “Seems to me,” he said, “that in a situation like this—never mind that John Deal is a human being whose life is every bit as worthy as the First Lady’s—I’d want to know anything and everything about what I might be looking at, who I might be looking for, under what circumstances I might find them when and if I did.”

The man closed his eyes momentarily. “I gather you were a cop,” he said finally.

Driscoll nodded, thinking he heard a bit of emphasis on the
were
.

“That’s the only reason you’re in here to begin with,” the guy added. “Somebody talked to somebody and now I’m talking to you, and everything I’ve said is in strictest confidence, I might add.”

Driscoll nodded again. There was nothing the guy had said so far that couldn’t be inferred from what was on television. He was trying to keep himself calm, trying to remind himself that assault on a federal law enforcement officer was a serious matter.

“Well, rest assured that what you’ve told me will be passed along. The information will be evaluated, and if it’s determined that we need to speak with you further, then someone will get in touch.”

Driscoll threw up his hands then and stood. No use continuing with this guy. After all, Driscoll had delivered the same speech himself, hundreds of times. People come in wanting to help on a case they’ve read about, or demanding action on it, or wanting to confess to doing the crime, you make a quick assessment. Time demands it. And ninety-nine percent of the time, you’re right, you’ve saved your energies for more likely leads. It was just that he hated feeling like part of the one percent who had something important to be considered.

“Here’s my card,” the agent said. “Something turns up, feel free to call.”

Driscoll glanced at it. “Harvey Clyde,” it read. No agency, no address. Telephone number written out in blue pen below his name.

Driscoll nodded. “Sure,” he said. “Deal turns up, I’ll give you a buzz.”

If Clyde heard any of the irony in Driscoll’s voice, he chose not to acknowledge it. “Thanks for coming in,” he said, and extended his hand. “You might want to file a missing persons report on your friend,” he added.

Driscoll forced himself to smile. He made a gun of his fist, closed the hammer that was his thumb, then turned and walked out.

He used the stairs going down, wanting to work off some of the heat he felt still burning at his neck, telling himself he could have managed the same three flights going up, he was going to have to do something about the old waistline somehow, was about to step out into the busy lobby when he felt the beeper began to rumble at his belt. He checked the readout, found an unfamiliar number. He’d left his own with several nurses over the course of the night—maybe someone
had
found Deal, after all. Irrational as it was, he found his heart rate accelerating as he moved toward the bank of pay phones just outside the stairwell.

“Doctor
who
?” Driscoll called into the phone. He held a finger to his ear to block out the clamor in the lobby. His heart was pounding now, and he felt his throat go dry. He didn’t remember speaking to any doctors the previous night, but that didn’t mean anything. Doctors liked to be the ones making the important calls, didn’t they?

“Jameroski,” the voice on the other end repeated. “Leo Jameroski.”

Driscoll tried to remember. “Yeah, you’re over at Cedars, right? I talk to you last night?” Driscoll shifted the phone to his other ear, glanced over his shoulder as a squad of plainclothes types jostled their way out of an elevator, began striding for the door. All of them in suits, good haircuts. Places they’d gone to college, Driscoll thought, he could buy a car for what they’d spent on a semester’s tuition, and yet none of them looked like the kind of guy he’d go to in a pinch.

There was a pause. “We talk some long time ago,” Jameroski said. “You help me out about some things.”

Jameroski. The name had finally registered with Driscoll. Doc Hammer. Junkie Doctor. Doctor Pump ’Em Up, get your steroids while they’re hot. He’d drawn a five and dime in a scandal that involved several ex-Dolphin football players at least fifteen years back, had lost his license in the bargain. Driscoll had investigated the case, found the good doctor a somewhat addled type who’d been manipulated by his partners. Driscoll had helped the doctor bargain a reduced sentence in return for his testimony regarding his co-conspirators. The last time Driscoll had seen Jameroski, he discovered the man had somehow managed to get a pharmacist’s license and was running a pharmacy out on the beach. That was Doc Hammer for you, cut out the middleman, go straight to the source.

“You remember,” Jameroski was saying. “I help you get those pushers couple years ago.”

“Right,” Driscoll said. Jameroski had, in truth, called to tip him about some kids selling stolen Dilaudid out of a van up and down the beach. “As I recall, you were trying to get rid of your competition.”

“Nah, nah,” Jameroski protested. “Were selling to kids, those punks. I
never
do something like that.”

Driscoll’s pulse, meantime, had dampened considerably. Whatever it was, the call couldn’t be about Deal. No self-respecting hospital would allow Hammer within rifle shot, not even as a patient.

“So what can I do for you, Doc? I’m a little busy here.”

“I think’s important,” Jameroski said.

“So tell me,” Driscoll said, his voice weary. He watched the quartet of trimmed and suited Feds push through the doors and hustle down the steps of the building where a dark sedan was parked. They moved like movie cameras might be trained on them, he thought.

“The phone,” Jameroski said, a note of protest in his voice.

“What about the phone?” Driscoll said.

“I tell you, ’s important.”

Driscoll sighed. He knew Jameroski didn’t want to talk about this “important” matter on the phone, but he wasn’t in the mood for a drive to the beach. Besides, what could it be? The doc wanting to rat out somebody he was writing downer scrip for? “You know I’m not with the department any longer?”

“Sure I know,” the doc said, sounding offended.

Not bad, Driscoll thought. It wasn’t every seventy-year-old junkie he knew who was capable of taking offense.

“I’m pretty busy here,” he said. In fact, he’d been wondering just what his next move was. Take out an ad in the paper, solicit leads? Consult a medium? He knew he should do what Harvey Clyde said, just go home, or go see what he could do for the Zaragosa brothers and their charcoaled charcoal hut, but it just wasn’t in him to walk away. He’d rather spin his wheels than give up.

“This kid I work on,” Jameroski persisted. “Was talking in his sleep, you know?”

“Uh-huh,” Driscoll said. The momentary rush was gone altogether now, had left him feeling even lower than when he’d walked out of Harvey Clyde’s office. Or was it Clyde Harvey? Probably a bogus name, the phone number probably hooked up to a machine that invited callers to take a howling leap at the moon.

Driscoll realized that Jameroski had been rattling on while his thoughts wandered. “Hold on a second, Doc,” he said. “You were
operating
on this guy?”

“I didn’t say that.” Jameroski’s voice had turned guarded.

Of course the doc didn’t want to incriminate himself, Driscoll thought, but he’d been busy trying to recombine everything he’d just heard. “Yeah, well forget about why, Doc. What were you saying about
police
uniforms?” Jameroski began to go through it all again, but he didn’t get far before Driscoll cut him off. “You’re absolutely right, Doc. You bet. You did the right thing. Right. That’s right. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Exactly. Don’t let him out of that room, no matter what.”