Presidential Deal (16 page)

Chapter 25

“This was taken from the body of one of ours,” Agent Knowles said, leaning to place the wallet on the desk of the Special Agent in Charge.

Harvey Clyde, the SAC, stared down at it. A workingman’s wallet, it appeared. Dark stains marred the leather surface. There was a dimple on one side of the wallet, a tattered eruption on the other, where the bullet had exited.

“This the shot that took our man out?” Harvey Clyde asked, fingering the ragged edges.

“I don’t think so,” Knowles said. He consulted a slip of paper in his hand. “Agent Gerald Casenovich. With the Service less than a year. He took fourteen rounds, including that one. The wallet was found in the front pocket of his pants.”

Harvey Clyde nodded. Fourteen rounds. He tried to imagine it. If there had been pain, it would have ended quickly. Please, God, let it have ended quickly.

“And we’ve found no trace of this John Deal?”

“None, sir.”

“What’s the story on…” Harvey Clyde broke off, consulted his own notes. “…on Vernon Driscoll?”

Knowles shrugged. “An ex-Metro Dade homicide detective. A friend of Deal’s, apparently. Deal was/is a tenant in a duplex owned by Driscoll.”

“Driscoll is convinced Deal was taken with the First Lady?”

“If that’s what he told you.”

Harvey Clyde took another look at the notes. “Do we find this plausible?”

Knowles shrugged, and Harvey Clyde nodded in agreement. Who knows? Who cares? John Deal was just a citizen. A hero, of course. Probably a great guy. But compared with the First Lady…

“But we’ve got someone watching Driscoll?”

Knowles nodded reluctantly.

“You figure he’s some kind of nutcase?”

“I dunno.” Knowles glanced away. “But we got a lot of people down here, most of them looking for something to do.”

Harvey Clyde nodded. “This is one hell of a situation, isn’t it, Knowles?”

“The worst, sir.”

“We’re all dressed up, there’s nowhere to go.”

“Something’ll break,” Knowles said. “They call in, we’ll find them.”

Harvey Clyde nodded and checked his watch. Despite Knowles’s confident words, they both knew the statistics. Ninety percent of kidnappings still unresolved after forty-eight hours went unresolved forever. First Lady or John Doe. Statistics really didn’t give a shit. If the people who took her didn’t make contact, if they didn’t want her to be found, well…

He glanced again at his watch. “Okay, Knowles. I’m late for a briefing at Command Central. I’ll tell them about Driscoll, that ought to take up a good ten seconds.”

Knowles nodded. “Watch yourself out on the streets. Drivers are crazy in this town.”

“They’re not the only ones, Knowles,” Harvey Clyde told him. “They’re not the only ones.”

Chapter 26

The rain had come in waves through the night and continued without letup into the day, torrents that turned the corrugated metal roof into a roaring drum at times, gentling off to a feathery whisper at others. Deal had come awake two or three times, gazed up groggily to find Linda Sheldon looking back at him in concern. This time—he sensed it was already afternoon—he’d found her asleep, still in a sitting position, her arms cradling his aching, cement-heavy head.

The hero
, he thought.
Flat on his back, fresh out of bullets, fresh out of tricks
.

The rain was still pounding, coming down in sheets that sprayed through the open-mesh windows, forming rivulets and puddles on the concrete floor. He raised his head gingerly, felt something on his forehead, realized she’d torn a sleeve from her suit jacket, soaked it in water for a compress. He peeled the cloth away, lifted his hand gingerly to his face.

Hard to tell without a mirror, of course, but it felt like someone had inflated the side of his head with an air pump. He worked his tongue around inside his mouth, found a couple of teeth that wobbled, but everything seemed intact.

He held himself steady on one elbow for a few moments, letting the throbbing in his head settle, the memories of the night reclaim him. He glanced across the room to the wall where Angel had executed the man who’d held the gun. Blast mark where the bullet had struck the wall, broad dark streak down the uneven courses of block. All in all, Deal thought, things could have turned out worse.

He turned back to Linda, found her coming awake. She brought her hands to her eyes, rubbed. Finally she looked up at him, shook her head.

“Your head’s lopsided,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Thanks,” he said. Smiling seemed out of the question.

“It’s not too bad,” she said. “It was worse last night, kind of horror show. Now you’re almost back to human.”

He nodded slowly. Very slowly. He felt his puffy cheek.

“How do you feel?” Linda Sheldon was asking him. There was concern in her voice once again, and she raised her hand gently to his cheek.

He pushed himself into a sitting position. “A lot better than the guy who hit me,” he said.

She nodded, shook her head at the memory.

He picked up the soggy coat sleeve, dabbed at his swollen jaw. There was a throbbing ache in his jaw, and he felt a little light-headed but otherwise clear, as though he’d come through a fever. He got a knee underneath himself, stood and moved to the windward side of the room, raised his face to the cool spray of the rain sweeping through the mesh.

He felt something, looked down, realized the fly of his shredded trousers was gaping open. He started to zip himself reflexively, found the tab stuck in a gather of cloth. Something dawned on him then, and he glanced up at Linda.

“You had to go,” she said. He stared at her, checked his zipper again.

He dislodged the cloth that had jammed the mechanism, zipped himself up, wiped the mist off his face. “I find myself speechless,” he said after a moment. “But thanks.”

“You can make a contribution to the campaign,” she said. “If we get home,” she added.

When
we get home, Deal wanted to say, but false bravado had never been his strong suit. Instead he nodded.

“Just don’t mention why you felt compelled,” she said.

Deal could imagine the kind of saloon talk Driscoll could manufacture out of this one.
What does the First Lady say when she’s been kidnapped? No big Deal
. Har-de-har-har.

It occurred to him that there was not much likelihood that Driscoll would ever have the chance to turn any of this into a joke.
But would that he gets the chance
, Deal thought, stepping out of the suddenly chill draft.
Would that he gets the chance
.

Chapter 27

“…right here in Great Inagua, where the outlying storm bands are beginning to affect the local weather…”

There was a mackinaw-clad reporter on the screen of the tiny television as Driscoll followed Jameroski into the storeroom. Raindrops spattered the camera image and winds were whipping the background harbor waters of some Caribbean port into a frothy mass. “
SPECIAL WEATHER ADVISORY…SPECIAL WEATHER ADVISORY…
…” went a banner scrolling along the bottom of the screen.

Driscoll wasn’t paying much attention to the television, though. His eyes were on the guy tied to the cot.

“Is him,” Jameroski said. “Ray Brisa.”

The guy, who had his back and shoulder and a chunk of his face in bandages, looked up at Driscoll, then shifted to Jameroski. “You brought the frigging cops?”

Driscoll gave him a mirthless laugh. “You wish I
was
the cops, dick-head. Just wait a little while. You’re gonna be begging me to call one for you.”

“What’s going on?” Brisa demanded of Jameroski. “Who is this guy?”

Driscoll settled down on his haunches beside the cot. He could smell the tang of burn ointment, and also the sour hint of Brisa himself. Driscoll wanted to think it was fear. “My name is Vernon Driscoll,” he said. “And you are going to tell me everything I want to know.”

“Get fucked,” Brisa said.

“No,” Driscoll said. “You are the one that is fucked, my friend.” He turned to Jameroski. “Iddn’t that right, doc?”

Jameroski nodded absently. His eyes were on the television. “You know there maybe comes a hurricane,” he was saying.

“A hurricane?” Driscoll said, glancing at the set.

There was a studio shot there now, a weatherman standing before a satellite map of the Caribbean. The Florida peninsula seemed clear, but the islands to the south and east were another story. There was a huge mass of yellow- and green-pixeled clouds blanketing the farther reaches of the Caribbean, doing a steady crawl northwestward. Behind that was a tightly packed red-banded whorl with a black dot at its center. The weatherman was dancing in front of the map, pointing here and there with a computer pen like an enthusiastic John Madden diagramming NFL plays.

“What else, huh?” Driscoll turned back to regard Brisa, who had his chin set toward the wall, staring off into some world where hurricanes were irrelevant, where punks got only respect and cops sucked wind the livelong day. “Ever read the Bible, Ray? Maybe we got us a Second Coming on the way. Maybe you’re one of the weasels it talks about in there, gets puked up out of the bowels of the earth right before the scourge.”

“Not my Bible, man,” Brisa said, his eyes steady on the wall before him.

Driscoll nodded. “I didn’t think so.”

He glanced up at the television where John Groshner, ubiquitous special advisor to the President, had replaced the weatherman. Groshner, who bore an unfortunate resemblance in Driscoll’s mind to Bob Haldeman, was at a podium somewhere, heading up what looked like a press conference, speaking earnestly into the camera.
Enough for the calamity to come
, Driscoll thought.
Back to the ones we already have
.

“…a plea from the President to those responsible to come forward, for anyone who has information that might be helpful to come forward…”

Driscoll tuned out the pleas, which sounded pathetic, even desperate to him. He passed his hand over his face, trying to rub fresh feeling into the flesh there. Why couldn’t he just sit back and let other people take care of things? Leave the Ray Brisas and the bomb makers and gas leakers and First Lady kidnappers to their work and just wait for the old screen to go dark? He supposed he could, if it hadn’t been for Deal.

“Yo, Doc,” Driscoll said to Jameroski, who seemed immersed in the weatherman’s continuing dance. “Whyn’t you tell Ray here why you called me up. I think he’s having a hard time with the code of criminal conduct, trying to get it straight how a fellow offender like yourself might give him over.”

Jameroski looked at Brisa like he was a worm crawling through snot. “The President,” Jameroski said, shaking his head.

Brisa cut a surly glance at Jameroski, turned back to his wall.

“I can tell that explanation eludes you,” Driscoll said. He poked one of his stubby fingers into Brisa’s bandaged shoulder, and Brisa howled in pain.

“What the doc is getting at,” Driscoll continued when Brisa’s cries had died away, “he’s different from guys like you and me in that he still has ideals, right, Doc?”

“This country.” Jameroski nodded. “Goot country.”

Driscoll poked Brisa once again, just to be sure he was paying attention, had to wait again before he could continue. “What we got here is a guy who grew up with Hitler. Every hear of Hitler, Ray?”

Driscoll poked him again, so it was difficult to tell whether Brisa was nodding yes or just writhing around in agony. “So anyways, the doc may have made his own mistakes, but he realizes that back where he came from somebody would have turned him into a lampshade for a hell of a lot less.”

Driscoll found a fresh spot, poked again. “Pity you didn’t know the doc was a patriot, that’s what I’m trying to tell you, Ray.”

Driscoll picked up a bottle of Pine Sol out of a scrungy-looking bucket, held it up to the light. “This looks pretty well aged, Ray. I’ll bet it feels pretty good on a burn, what do you think, Doc?” Driscoll uncapped the bottle, passed the pungent neck under Brisa’s nose.

“Goot.” Jameroski nodded.

“What the fuck you want from me?” Brisa screamed, tears leaking down his face now.

“You knocked over the Southern Police Supply couple of nights ago, right?” Driscoll said.

“Fuck you,” Brisa said.

Driscoll tilted the bottle and let a stream of liquid splash on Brisa’s shoulder. Brisa arched up as if electrified, setting his cot into a dance on the dingy tiled floor.

It took Brisa a minute to catch his breath. His shoulder was still twitching when he spoke. “I thought you weren’t a cop.” His voice was a breathless rasp.

“I’m not a cop,” Driscoll said mildly.

“Then why are you trying to pin some number on me?”

Driscoll held the bottle close to Brisa’s face, swished what was left of the Pine Sol around. “Ray, I don’t give a flea’s fart about you. I just want to know who you were working for.”

“You gotta be crazy,” Brisa said.

Driscoll capped the Pine Sol with his thumb, gave it a vigorous shake. He caught a corner of bandage on Brisa’s shoulder, yanked it up, shot a fizz of cleaner underneath. Ray’s howl was enough to set Driscoll’s teeth on edge.

“Looks a little nasty under here, Doc,” Driscoll said when the noise had dropped away to muffled groans. “Maybe you got something stronger, we can get it good and clean.”

“Sure,” Jameroski said. “Got plenty things.”

“Okay,” Brisa croaked, catching Jameroski going out the door. “For God’s sake. It was Eddie Left.”

“Eddie Izquierdo?” Driscoll said. Another noted sleazewad, best known for the string of escort services he ran. A former Miami mayor and a couple of his cronies had been run out of office for diverting several thousand dollars of campaign funds into Eddie’s tony brothels. Eddie would do anything for a buck, but he was nobody who’d kidnap the President’s wife.

“Eddie must’ve brokered the deal,” Driscoll said. “Who’d you deliver the goods to?”

“I don’t know, man.”

Driscoll raised the Pine Sol into the line of Ray Brisa’s vision.

“A bunch of Colombians, I think. Drug scammers.”

“Bullshit,” Driscoll said. “See if you got any carbolic acid, Doc.”

Jameroski nodded, went on out the door. An eager exit, Driscoll thought.

“I don’t
know
who they were, man. I’m telling you the truth. I’d tell you if I knew who they were. They killed two of my guys, they tried to kill me. Give me a frigging break.”

“How about I break your neck, Ray, do the world a favor?”

Jameroski was back already, an uncapped pharmacist’s jar of something purple in his hand. “Put this,” Jameroski said eagerly.

Driscoll waved his hand to fan away the ghastly smell. “Christ, Doc. Put the top on that thing. I think Ray’s told us as much as he knows. That right, Ray?”

“Go see Eddie,” Brisa said. “Maybe he knows who they were.” Some realization seemed to pass over Brisa’s face. “Maybe Eddie knew they were going to waste me, the bastard.”

“You got a mind like a steel trap,” Driscoll said, clapping Ray Brisa on the back as he stood. He ignored the fresh groans of pain. “Shame to waste it on these criminal pursuits,” he said.

He passed back through the time warp of Jameroski’s pharmacy, thinking that he would go see Eddie Left, all right, and after Eddie the next scumbag and the next, keep on slogging no matter what, as long as there was a trail to follow, unless somebody got lucky and found a way to stop him.

“What I should do with him?”

Driscoll realized it was Jameroski on his heels, the bottle of ghastly purple stuff still in his hand, little junkie doctor cum pharmacist looking more like some poor man’s wizard, ready to do his bidding. And it was a good question, he thought. He’d been so concerned with Eddie Left, he’d already dismissed Ray Brisa. But he might need Brisa, he thought. Like you need the aftermath of anything awful, just to prove that it had happened, if nothing else.

“You gotta open up now?” Driscoll asked.

“Open up?” Jameroski asked.

“The store, this place, as in ‘open for business,’” Driscoll said, impatient.

Jameroski looked around as if he’d just noticed where they were standing. “Ach,” he said, waving his hand in dismissal. “I have a customer now and then, most by appointment.”

Driscoll nodded. Customers by appointment. There was a twist. “Well, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to keep Mr. Brisa on ice for a while. Would that be something you’d mind doing?”

Jameroski gave a look in the direction of the storeroom. That expression, Driscoll was thinking. Anybody else might have called it revulsion, Driscoll saw a strange kind of glee.

“Sure,” Jameroski said. “On ice as long as you want.”

“Good,” Driscoll said.

He had also remembered one other piece of business, one more sorry job he had to take care of before he tracked down the infamous Mr. Left. “Now, you mind if I borrow your phone?”

***

“Vernon?
Is that you, Vernon?”

Driscoll standing at the counter of Jameroski’s time-warp pharmacy, heavy ebony phone receiver from another era in hand, assuring her that it was indeed him, listening to the catch in her voice, listening as she tried to stop herself from sobbing. “Just hold on a second, will you?”

He heard the sound of Isabel’s voice, of Janice saying something in an urgent tone, the sound of a door closing, then she was back.

“I wanted Isabel in the other room,” she explained. He could hear the intake of her breath on the other end. “What’s happened, Vernon? I’ve been calling the house, the police, the hospitals. No one will tell me anything…”

He nodded. He’d already heard that same panic-stricken litany when he pulled her message off his machine before coming to Jameroski’s.

“Nobody knows anything, Janice,” he cut in. “I’d have called you earlier, but I didn’t know where to reach you. I’ve been out doing the same as you, just trying to get some answers.”

“Was he there, Vernon? Is he…” She faltered then, her sobs breaking over the line. He was about to say something when she found her voice again. “Please, Vernon. Tell me the truth!”

“John’s not on any casualty list. That’s pretty certain. I been to all the hospitals, talked to some people…”

“Then where
is
he?” she cried.

“I don’t know, Janice.”

“I’m up here in Fantasyland,” she continued, “trying to pretend to Isabel that everything is just fine while the whole world’s turned upside down. Can you imagine what that is like?”

“I don’t want to imagine,” he said. “I wish to God I could do something, that’s all.” He heard more sobbing on the other end of the line. “You gotta think the best—. That’s what I been.”

“The best
what
?” she fairly shrieked. “Is he dead? Is my husband dead?”

“Janice, you have to calm down,” he said. “He’s not dead. At least that’s what I think, what I hope, anyway.”

“Vernon,” she began, a steely edge in her voice suddenly, “speak to me in a direct fashion. Tell me what you’re talking about. If you don’t, so help me, I am going to come absolutely and totally apart.”

He took a breath, glanced at Jameroski, who stood by the shuttered door of the shop, staring out onto the sunny Miami Beach brightness as if he’d turned to stone. “I think that maybe they took him, too,” he said.

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Thumps of someone pounding on a door. A distant child’s voice. “Just a minute, sweetheart!” Janice’s voice, muffled. Then clear, as she came back to him. “That’s not possible.”

He didn’t say anything. It seemed a universal sentiment.

“Is it true, Vernon? Is this something you’re making up for my benefit?”

“Janice,” he said, “I’m looking into it. I hope I’m right…or maybe I don’t,” he broke off, furious at himself for not being more adept. “Look, I’m going to call you back the minute I find out the slightest thing, okay? Meantime, you gotta hang in, take care of Isabel.”

He heard her blowing her nose, clearing her throat. “I understand, Vernon.”

“I dunno,” he said. “Maybe you ought to bring her on back to Miami, maybe Mrs. Suarez can help…”

“Then Isabel would have to know.” Driscoll heard the alarm in her voice.

“Yeah, well…”

“If we stay up here, I can keep her occupied,” Janice continued, her voice steadier. “I’ll just take her to see Minnie and Mickey, you know? It’s hard to believe, Vernon. I mean, Peter Jennings is on TV all day long, even the cartoon channels are having news breaks, but the Magic Kingdom’s business as usual, Mickey and Minnie are still dancing, they’d be dancing if bombs were falling, for God’s sake.”

A little humor, Driscoll thought. A good sign. “You’re probably right,” he said. “Keep her occupied. Keep yourself occupied. I’m going to call the minute I know anything. Just pray I’m right.”