Presidential Deal (29 page)

Chapter 49

“He’s got to have something to drink on that boat,” Linda Sheldon was saying.

“And dry gasoline,” Deal said, swallowing thickly. “And a radio or a cell phone…”

“Maybe some clean clothes, something to eat…”

Deal nodded, feeling vaguely like a man who’d topped a dune in the desert to find a glistening oasis in his path. He’d donned his shirt and tattered slacks, stepped into his still-soggy shoes. They were standing on shore on the opposite side of the island where once a dock had been, staring out through the gloom. A second Cigarette, a near duplicate of the craft Deal had salvaged from the reef, bobbed serenely at anchor, perhaps two dozen yards away.

Linda glanced at Salazar’s inert form, his hands bound with his bloody shirt. He’d started to come to as they dragged him across the island, but Deal had taken care of that. “I can’t believe it. Larry Chappelear…” She broke off, shaking her head.

“We’ll find out the truth. That much I promise you.”

She stared back, long enough for that contract to be sealed. Then, abruptly, she was moving away from him, picking her way down the rock toward the waterline. Deal’s gaze moved on out over the water toward the boat Angel had brought, still trying to put his finger on something that was bothering him. Then he glanced back at her, realized what she had in mind.

“Wait,” he called.

She didn’t seem to hear. She was at the water now, had tossed one of her shoes off, stood balancing herself as she tugged at the second.

“Linda…”

He hurried down the slope, caught her just as she was about to jump.

She came around at him swinging. “What are you doing?” she cried. “Let go of me.” The heel of her hand banged off his chest. “Let go!”

“Linda,” he cried, ducking another swipe of her hand. He caught her other arm, forced her away from the water. “Just wait a minute, all right?”

“I don’t want to wait a minute,” she cried. She was out of control now. “I’m thirsty. I’m starving. I want to get out of this place before more of them come. I want you to let go of me…”

“Just wait,” he shouted, shaking her roughly.

The gesture seemed to stun her momentarily. He let go of her shoulders, turned, spotted a sizable chunk of coral rock lying just out of the water. He bent and hefted it, his eyes meeting hers briefly. Then he turned and heaved it at the boat. The rock struck the side of the hull and fell into the water with a splash.

“What are you doing?”

He held up a finger to silence her. He found a shard of timber half in, half out of the water, snatched it up by one end. He hefted it, decided it would be a better test.

“Get back a ways. Up behind that pile of brush,” he said, pointing at a twisted clump piled not far from where they’d hidden earlier.

She stared at him in amazement.

“Go on,” he commanded. She gave him one last glance, then moved reluctantly up the slope toward the pile.

When he was satisfied she’d gone far enough, Deal turned, gauged the distance again. Then he spun around like a hammer thrower, hurling the water-soaked timber out over the water. The chunk of wood soared across the intervening space, disappeared over the boat’s gunwale, landed with a thud.

Deal didn’t see it happen, though. He’d been running the instant the timber left his hand. He reached the pile of brush, dove, tackled Linda, drove her to the rocky ground beneath him.

They both heard it, the dull thud of the timber striking home. A strange crackling sound right after.

“What…?” was all Linda had time to say.

She was fighting, trying to twist out of his grasp. Then came the thundering explosion. Where the boat had been was now a bright, angry flower, and for a moment the dark sky turned to day.

***

“You want me
to ride out
there
?” Linda Sheldon said, pointing out the long prow of the boat, the Cigarette he’d nursed back to life. No radio on this boat, no cell phone, no case of Red Stripe. But there’d been no bomb aboard, either. Salazar prepared for every contingency, you had to give him that.

“Just for a little while, until we get past the reefs,” he told her.

She glanced at the sky. “It’s practically dark.”

“You’ll still be able to tell,” he said. “You see something coming up like a bright shadow under the water, you just yell.”

She nodded uncertainly. “What if I fall off?”

He appeared to ponder it. “Then I’ll come back and get you.”

She thought a moment, her expression softening. “That’s right,” she said. “You do come back, don’t you?”

He stared at her: her face bruised and scraped, her hair a tangle. There was a sticky-looking smear on her cheek where she’d wiped her mouth from the one swallow of
jugo de papaya
he’d found for her.

He was reminded of something from that former life, the one when he’d been John Deal, building contractor, the guy who’d come home from work and prop his feet up on the coffee table and watch the nightly news. Most times it was the Prez who was on, of course. But sometimes it had been her. Tough lady, he’d always thought. And that had always appealed to him. But he’d always thought her a bit too patrician-looking for his taste. He made a soft sound that was almost like a laugh. The notion struck him as ludicrous now.

“What?” she said.

He stared at her. “Like the man said, we’re going to lose our light soon,” he said quietly.

She stared back. He thought he saw her waver. He thought she was leaning toward him, if ever so slightly. Her tongue ran over her dry lips.

“Maybe there’s something to drink down below,” he said. “Something I missed.”

Her gaze had not left his face. “I’m not going inside there,” she said.

He glanced down through the hatchway, caught a glimpse of Salazar’s form where it lay inside the gloomy cabin, and nodded. “Sorry to put you to work,” he said, waving vaguely at the sky. “But I’ve got to have help.”

She closed her eyes briefly, put her hand on his. Then she turned, and was scrambling out the long prow of the boat.

***

‘What are those lights?” Linda had to shout over the roar of the Cigarette’s engines. She pointed out over the prow of the boat toward a vague glow on the northern horizon. Aside from the distant lights of a freighter they’d spotted as they came upon the shipping lanes, it was the first sign of life they’d seen in hours.

“Let’s hope it isn’t Havana,” he called back to her. No radio, no range finder, no depth finder. He had only the vaguest idea of where they’d begun this voyage, and, other than that, a go-fast boat and a compass, and his rusty memory of navigation by the stars. Take us west, Captain Deal, wasn’t that the American way?

Steady as she goes. If they didn’t pile into something else first, they’d eventually find Florida. Now, judging by the lights ahead, it seemed they had.

He held their course steady until the glow brightened, gradually filling the horizon with a corona stamped on the night sky like a ghost’s thumbprint. A few minutes later, and the first beacon came into view: Fowey Light, unless he were mistaken, the northernmost of a series of lights that marked the shelf of the continent itself.

From where they were, it was a minuscule blip on the distant horizon. In reality, the lights sat atop huge towers of fifty feet or more, anchored where the depth of the waters had shifted from six hundred feet to half a dozen in the space of a few hundred yards.

He checked his compass reading again, then swung the boat abruptly southward, away from the lights of the city.

“What are you doing?” she called.

“That’s Miami all right,” he told her, keeping his eyes straight ahead, watching carefully for Fowey Light to reappear. “But that’s not where we want to go ashore.”

“Why not?” Her grip on his arm tightened. “Let’s get to the first place we can.”

He caught sight of the light, checked the compass, adjusted course once again. At last he turned to her.

“If what Salazar said is true, if this thing really had Lawrence Chappelear’s blessing from the beginning, then we don’t know what might be waiting for us.”

She stared at him in astonishment. “You can’t be serious.”

“Think about it,” he said. “If you were in Chappelear’s place, what would you do: go in, tell the President you made a little mistake, things just got out of hand?”

She shook her head slowly. “I’ve known Larry Chappelear since I was in college…He would never…”

“I don’t want to be paranoid,” Deal said, “but there’s a way to find out the truth. If I’m wrong, then we won’t have lost anything.”

She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again. She turned her face back into the wind, one hand gripping the side rail, another braced on the panel before them.

“What did you have in mind?” she asked.

“We’ll put in someplace safe,” he said. “I’ll make a couple of phone calls. Then we’ll see.”

He could imagine what was going through her mind. A hell of a note, all right. So near to salvation and yet so far. He glanced at the distant shadows on the horizon, the first of the shallow islands that still lay between them and where they needed to go. He throttled back and called out to her.

“I’m going to need your help again,” he said.

She turned to him, and he pointed over the prow of the boat.

“Some shallows up ahead,” he told her. “It won’t take long.”

“I can’t believe it,” she said. But she was up and climbing again.

***

“You sure
you folks don’t want to come inside?” the waitress asked. “These bugs are pretty bad out here tonight.”

Deal glanced at her, shook his head. He and Linda were seated at one of the plastic tables set far out on the sagging docks at Alabama Jack’s, not far from the piling where they’d tied off the Cigarette. “We’re fine,” he assured the woman, who was waving her order pad at the cloud of mosquitoes circling her head.

“Kendall sprayed earlier,” the woman said. “But sometimes I think they just get high off the stuff.”

“I’ll have another iced tea,” Linda said, setting her glass down on the table between them. She’d ducked into the ladies’ room the moment they’d docked, gulped tepid water straight from the tap, she’d told him. She’d done what she could with her face, tied her hair back in a knot.

Deal too had washed up, slicked his hair back, but there’d been nothing he could do about his clothes. His once-white shirt was gray and torn. The knees were out of his filthy pants, which he had tried to keep hidden under the table. Still, the waitress seemed not to notice. She’d probably seen far worse come drifting up at this dockside.

Jack’s was the workingman’s gateway to the Keys, dropped down on Card Sound Road, an out-of-the-way route not much used by tourists. The roadhouse sat just short of the graceful bridge that connected the mainland to sparsely populated north Key Largo, cheek by jowl with a raffish houseboat colony. The last time Deal had been in the place was on a Sunday afternoon a couple years back when a throng of day sailors, laborers, and bikers had jammed the place, no special celebration, just marking the winding down of another weekend in paradise. But that was back when there were such things as carefree moments in his life. Now, late on a sultry mosquito-laden night, aside from a few stolid drinkers hunched over the indoor bar, he and Linda constituted the sole clientele, and fun seemed in short supply.

He noted that the waitress, also serving as the barmaid at this hour, had been studying Linda carefully. “You sure look familiar,” the waitress said. “You live over in Florida City?”

Linda managed a smile. “Just passing through,” she said.

“Yo, Iris,” a man at the bar called through the screening that separated outside from in. “I’m dry!”

The waitress glanced away for a moment, turned back to give the two of them a nod. “Your sandwiches’ll be right out,” she said. “I’ll get you a refill on the tea.”

“I just need a little phone change,” Deal said, holding up a bill as she started away.

The waitress reached for it, then stopped. “This is Bahamas money,” she said.

Deal nodded. “A five,” he said. “Worth the same as ours. I’ll trade you for a couple of quarters.”

The waitress peered at him suspiciously. “How about this dinner you ordered? You planning to pay for that in Bahamian, too?”

Deal glanced at Linda, then back at the waitress. “It’s all we’ve got,” he said, wondering how she’d feel if he explained whose wallet he’d taken the money from. “Say I give you twenty to one. How’s that for an exchange rate?”

“I ain’t some bank, mister,” the waitress said as she scooped up the menus from the plastic table. “The ice tea’s on me,” she said over her shoulder, “but maybe you and your wife ought to take it somewheres else.”

“He’s not my husband,” Linda said abruptly. Something in her tone caused the waitress to turn. “The truth is,” Linda continued, “I had a little trouble over in the islands. This man’s been good enough to try and get me home.”

The waitress had turned all the way around, was facing them once again now.

“Hey, Iris,” the man at the bar bellowed.

Iris turned fiercely on him. “Shut your yap, Bean.” She turned back to the table, drew a deep breath. She was a solidly built woman with hair that might have been red once, but had faded with years of sun and hard living. She stared steadily at Deal, who did his best to look honorable. After a moment, she let her breath out in a small explosion, reached one of her fists inside her apron, banged a mound of change down on the table in front of Deal.

“There’s for the phone,” she said, jerking her thumb over her shoulder. Deal followed her gesture toward a pay phone attached to a stanchion at the edge of the nearby parking lot. “As far as the sandwiches, they’re already working anyhow.”

“I appreciate it,” Deal said.

The woman nodded wearily, as if she’d spent a lifetime listening to hard-luck stories and still hadn’t found one she could resist.

“We’re very grateful,” Linda added as the woman left.

They watched her stride through a door in the screening, duck under the bar, go to snatch up the glass of the man she’d called Bean. She said something to him, pointing their way, and Bean peered quizzically out at them as Iris bent to pour him another drink.