Presidential Deal (21 page)

“You must be crazy, man,” Brisa said as if he’d been reading Driscoll’s thoughts.

“I am, Ray,” Driscoll said. “Just keep it in mind, how crazy I am.”

He reached into his pocket then, found the key for the cuffs. He twisted his arm up, trying to catch some light reflected from the dim runway lights, but finally had to do it all by touch. He slid the key into his cuff and twisted his hand free.

“What’re you doing?” Brisa asked warily.

“I’m tired of smelling your breath,” Driscoll said.

He worked his wrist for a moment, trying to get the feeling back, then snatched Brisa’s free hand and snapped the cuff in place. He looked like some unlikely choirboy suddenly—or a sullen undertaker.

“Stick close now, Ray.”

“You can’t do shit like this,” Brisa said, raising his clasped hands in protest.

“So file a complaint,” Driscoll said. He grabbed Brisa’s manacled hands and had turned in what he hoped was the direction of the hotel when he saw the dim lights bordering the landing strip blink out and, at the same time, heard the soft thudding of footsteps running across lush turf.

He sensed movement behind him, and spun about to find a massive silhouette blocking the sky, a few feet away. He tensed, his hand going automatically inside his coat.

“Mr. Driscoll.” A deep voice issued from the darkness.

Brisa, who hadn’t noticed the guy’s approach, staggered backward, giving a yelp of fright.

“Who is that?” Driscoll said.

“No time for talking,” the voice said. “You want to come with me, come quick.”

Driscoll hesitated, then heard the sound of motors approaching in the distance. “That would be the policeman,” the deep voice said. “Say come or go, right now.”

Driscoll glanced again in the direction of the approaching motors, then regained his hold on Brisa. “Come on, dickhead,” he said, and they began to chase the big man through the darkness.

***

There were four
of them in the bed of the pickup: Driscoll and Brisa in the forecorners, two dark-skinned youths in the rear, all of them holding on desperately as the truck crashed and wallowed up the rough hillside terrain. Driscoll supposed they were following some sort of road that led up from the seaside golf links through the sandy pine barrens, but the clatter of gravel in the wheel wells and the ache of his tailbone as it slammed against the metal flooring suggested that it wasn’t any paved thoroughfare.

Driscoll ducked as a limb whipped over the cab and downward, heard Brisa curse as it slapped against him. “Come on, Driscoll, undo these cuffs,” he whined.

“Dream on,” Driscoll said. He clutched the top of the bed as the truck shot over a rise, leaving them as weightless as astronauts for a few moments. Brisa had his cuffed hands curled over the bed holding on for all he was worth, his chin clamped against the metal edge in desperation. When the truck slammed back down, Brisa took every bit of the force. His head snapped up off the edge of the truck bed as if he’d taken a Mike Tyson uppercut. He went over backward without a sound, sprawling unconscious over the coils of runway lights the two kids had loaded.

The two of them stared down at the handcuffed Brisa, then back at Driscoll, their expressions betraying nothing. “This is a guy who never listened to his mother,” Driscoll said.

One of the kids glanced indifferently again at Brisa. The other lifted an eyebrow, then turned toward the forest. They were fourteen, Driscoll thought, fifteen at most, doing the grunt work right now, but give them a couple of years, they’d be doing things that were beyond Ray Brisa’s imagination. Driscoll had run enough of the island brothers through the Miami justice system to know.

The pickup broke through another screen of pines, careening out of the forest onto a crumbling asphalt road in an impressive power slide. The big guy behind the wheel—Gavin, he’d finally said—hit the accelerator in earnest then, and Driscoll felt his head lean toward his shoetops as whatever was under the battered hood caught hold. By the time he straightened up, the slipstream around the side of the cab was enough to whip his breath away. The two kids at the tailgate had bent their heads forward against the windblast, as if in prayer.

It wasn’t long before he saw one streetlamp whip past in their wake, then another and another, and soon ramshackle houses were looming up, more and more of them crowding together and pitching their tottering porches forward toward the street. Saw through his tearing eyes a scrawny yellow dog trotting indifferently away, as if unaware of their passage, a white-haired man in a scoop-necked T-shirt leaning against a lamppost, solemnly watching them fly by, old guy, dog, and houses dwindling rapidly into nothing as they whisked away from that settlement and down a long tunnel of overhanging trees.

Scenes from an old Robert Mitchum film he’d caught on cable flashed past in Driscoll’s mind, Kentucky moonshiner Mitchum outrunning the feds down Thunder Road. Judging by the way he handled the deceivingly superpowered pickup, Gavin had probably seen the same movie.

Downhill now, slowing, and the streetlights snapping past overhead again. He blinked as they rolled onto an urban boulevard, a palm-lined, gently curving street that carved its way through a different world. He saw a clutch of exclusive shops set back from the street in a discreetly lit pedestrian mall, and a few yards further on, the grandly landscaped entrance to something called Atlantis, taxis full of white folks piling in, racing to beat the arrival of the storm. He caught a glimpse of the gleaming hotel towers he’d seen earlier from the air, and then they were up and over the steep hump of a bridge spanning a narrow river or canal and back down again, slowing to a stop at a tollgate.

Driscoll heard some quick back-and-forth between Gavin and the man in the booth, but they had lapsed into a singsong dialect that might as well have been Portuguese. He propped his leg atop Ray Brisa’s still-inert form, trying to hide the handcuffs, but he needn’t have. The guard didn’t look in the bed as they slid by. Driscoll noticed that one of the heavy truck batteries that had been stowed in the back had tumbled against Ray’s head, and he moved to shove it aside. Brisa stirred, and Driscoll gave him a pinch on the cheek that was enough to get his eyelids fluttering open, kept after it until Brisa had blinked awake and scrunched himself back into a sitting position in the truck.

They drove on uneventfully for a bit, down a street that was a slightly more dilapidated version of U.S. 441, the alley of ticky-tack that stitched South Florida from Miami all the way to West Palm Beach: a rundown gas station here, a grungy market there, sagging cars from other eras piled along the streets and jamming every possible space in the lots of blank-eyed businesses, a few pedestrians moving in their flapping clothes like shades haunting the litter of hell…the landscape was a testament to the failure of free enterprise, Driscoll thought. If Karl Marx saw it, he’d pop triumphant from his grave. The two kids in the back still had their heads bent on their knees. Maybe they were asleep, maybe the vision was too much, even for them.

A few minutes later the truck pulled off the main drag and eased to a stop in a residential area. It was several steps up from the rawboned settlement they’d passed through, but no place you’d be thrilled to call home. Rows of room-sized, paint-peeling houses, a wan streetlight every block or so, the sweet-sour tang of raw sewage in the air, a dog barking incessantly in the distance. There was a rotting sofa on the sidewalk before the cottage where they’d stopped, its cushions vomiting yellow foam stuffing everywhere.

“Looks like my neighborhood,” Brisa said.

Driscoll gave him a look. “Cockroaches have a neighborhood?”

“Fuck you, man. What’d I ever do to you?”

“Guys like you piss me off, Ray. Just looking at you sets my teeth on edge.”

Brisa shook his head. “These people you’re looking for tried to kill my ass, too. You ever think about that?”

Driscoll stared at him, nodded finally. “Sure I thought about it, Ray. The good news is, you’re my finger man. The bad news is, you’re still alive.”

Brisa turned away. “I’m just saying I wouldn’t mind a shot at the assholes myself. I never even got paid.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Ray. I find the right assholes, I’ll toss you in a room with them, see who walks out.”

The passenger door of the truck opened then and a wiry guy who’d been riding shotgun with Gavin got out. The guy had his head shaved, wore a waffle-weave, collarless polo shirt that clung to a chiseled physique. He gave Driscoll the same affectless stare the two kids in the back had. “Gavin say, where you want to go?”

Driscoll reached into his coat, saw the guy’s eyes careful on his every move. He drew out a slip of paper, handed it to the guy, who glanced at the address, then back at Driscoll, suspicion in his eyes. The little guy walked around the hood of the truck, handed the slip through the window to Gavin.

Driscoll heard mumbled conversation, then the little guy was back, smacking the two kids on the shoulders, motioning them out of the truck. The two jumped down from the truck without question and vanished into the darkness. The wiry guy fixed Driscoll with a glare. “Gavin say okay.” He shook his head, then went back to the cab and got in.

Driscoll wondered where he’d asked to be taken. “We can get a cab,” he called, whacking the glass in the back of the cab for attention. But neither of the men up there turned to look at him, and his offer was lost in the squealing of the pickup’s tires as it tore away from the curb.

***

A light rain
had begun to fall as they left the shabby residential area and passed through another genteel shopping district, this one exuding a certain colonial flavor that contrasted with the flash of the first tourist enclave they’d passed through. This one reminded Driscoll of a section of Charleston Jean Ann had been fond of. She’d leave him cooling his heels on the sidewalk while she popped in and out of a similarly quaint series of jewelers, boutiques, and notions purveyors, seldom purchasing any of the overpriced merchandise but loving the process of inspection, a pleasure that had always eluded Driscoll.

He broke off his reverie as the truck made a quick turn, and they left the shuttered enclave of shops behind. They were climbing a gentle hill now, Brisa seemingly fully conscious but off in his own world, his manacled hands clasped about his knees, his surly gaze focused somewhere between his shoetops and the clutter on the truck bed between them. They had entered a far different sort of neighborhood than he’d seen so far, Driscoll saw. The deserted streets were actually cobbled here, and had become twisting tunnels draped by dense-leaved limbs of banyan and ficus, high whitewashed walls rising up on either side.

He caught sight of a consulate’s plaque mounted on one wall, some Latin American country whose name he didn’t catch, the brass face dimly illuminated and glistening with the soft rain. The next compound bore a discreet barrister’s shingle, while a gate in the wall opposite gave him a glimpse of a neatly tended courtyard and what resembled a French country home: mansard roof, massive toothing stones and cornices, an elegant brass lamp burning in a bow window downstairs.

The truck had scarcely passed the gate when he heard the engine die. He felt a soft bump as they drifted to a curb. Driscoll glanced through the rear window into the cab, but he couldn’t see much. An overhanging limb dripped moisture down his neck, and the truck’s engine ticked against the silence. After a moment, one of the truck doors opened and Gavin stepped down.

“Here it is,” he said to Driscoll.

Driscoll heard the other door open, sensed the wiry guy at his back. He stood, clutched at the curved roof of the truck’s cab for support, kicked the kinks out of his legs. Getting a little old for these shenanigans, he thought. Couple more years, he wouldn’t be able to get out of an easy chair.

He clambered down from the bed to stand beside Gavin, glanced about their surroundings. It looked like a neighborhood where people might actually live, but there were no sounds to suggest it. “This the high-rent district, is it?”

His eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough to see Gavin’s big shoulders rise in a shrug. “Use to be,” Gavin said. “Most people don’t like the old houses anymore. They like to build a new place out on the island where we was, you know. Most of these come to be offices now, and like that.”

Driscoll nodded. “Which one’s Tradewinds?”

“What we just pass,” Gavin said, pointing at the place Driscoll had taken for a country home.

“You sure?” he said.

Gavin stared at him, but didn’t reply. The wiry guy had come to join them. Driscoll heard Brisa sigh, mutter a curse, rearrange himself in the bed of the truck.

The wiry guy reached into the truck, found something, handed it to Gavin. A flashlight, Driscoll realized as a beam of light shot from Gavin’s hand to illuminate another of the tasteful brass plaques set into the brickwork on the opposite wall. Driscoll’s eyesight wasn’t what it had been, but he could make out the two-inch letters well enough.

There was a bell button set below the plaque. “Well, thanks for the ride,” he said. If nobody answered the bell, he thought, he could cuff Brisa to the gate, find a way inside, have a look around.

“You got somebody to see in there?” Gavin said.

Driscoll turned back. The big guy seemed in no hurry to leave. He gave him his shrug. “It’s possible.”

“Looks like everybody gone home to me,” Gavin offered. “Maybe you ought to find a place to stay, come back here tomorrow.”

“I’m in a little bit of a hurry,” Driscoll said.

Gavin nodded. “That’s what I thought.” He turned, nodded at the wiry guy. “Go on ahead, Tilton.”

Driscoll stared as the wiry guy scurried across the narrow street and disappeared through a screen of shrubbery that masked the wall of the Tradewinds headquarters up the hill a few yards. He heard rustling sounds and ducked down as a shower of droplets fell from the limbs overhead.

Moments later there was a soft metallic thunk and Driscoll turned to find a pedestrian gate swinging out from the wall of the Tradewinds compound. Tilton stood just inside the gate, waiting.