Presidential Deal
Authors: Les Standiford
Tags: #Fiction / Mystery & Detective / General
Presidential Deal
Copyright © 1998 by Les Standiford
First Trade Paperback Edition 2004
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2004106086
ISBN-10 Print: 1-59058-107-5 Trade Paperback
ISBN-13 eBook: 978-1-61595-299-1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Cover Design by Tom Corcoran
Poisoned Pen Press
6962 E. First Ave., Ste. 103
Scottsdale, AZ 85251
This book is dedicated to Brian Standiford…
and to his parents, Craig and Bethann, heroes all.
Contents
All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all. I am just like everybody else.
—Vladimir Ilych Lenin
No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown.
—William Penn
Deal and I would like to extend a special thanks to those who have helped: to Kimberly who kept me going; to Bill Beesting, Rhoda Kurzweil, and James W. Hall, my trusty readers; to Captain Robin Smith, for his advice on nautical matters; to Lieutenant Tony Rodriguez and Assistant Chief Ray Martinez, Miami P.D., for their input on police procedure; and finally, to those former members of the intelligence community who must remain anonymous—your input was invaluable.
By the time I started work on
Presidential Deal
sometime in 1996, I had come to know John Deal fairly well. I’d never intended to write a series character in the first place, but four books later I was not only committed, but quite possibly obsessed. I was reading news stories about ordinary citizens enduring one calamity or another—buried alive by avalanche, adrift in the uncharted Pacific for months, mercilessly audited by the IRS—and was immediately asking myself, “How would Deal have handled those situations.” As I told an interviewer, he had become as real and as omnipresent in my mind as a good friend living in a distant city.
As I had already involved Deal in several confrontations with evil-doers of a fairly ordinary type--Mafioso car dealers (
Done Deal
), ruthless right wing Cuban politicos (
Raw Deal
), murderous televangelists (
Book Deal/Deal on Ice
), and Chinese pornographers (
Deal to Die For
)—I thought it was time to up the ante. I decided to pit Deal against international terrorists and—even more fearsome—a crooked Presidential advisor. After pointing out to me that “crooked Presidential advisor” was a phrase ripe with redundancy, Larry Ashmead at HarperCollins signed on for the ride. I was going to do my utmost to put an ordinary man in a Schwartzeneggerian situation, I assured him, and wanted to make it all seem plausible.
The critics were kind to this Deal-on-a-larger-canvas, and perhaps not so surprisingly,
Presidential Deal
was the first in the series to attract the serious attention of Hollywood. The book has been optioned by three different producers since its publication, and while it has yet to be actually filmed, that may be for the best. After all, my first novel Spill was adapted, filmed, and released, and still shows up on late-night TV. It may not be the worst movie ever made, but it is among them. If it ever shows up on your set, turn it off quickly, before your cable box melts. A friend of mine heard me talking this way once and lamented, “Too bad you didn’t get to work on the screenplay.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I did.
Hollywood aside, I hope you do find
Presidential Deal
a real roller coaster movie of the mind. As for the believability factor, it’ll have to be your call. I can tell you that my friends in South Florida were unfazed, however. “We believe all your plots,” they tell me. “It’s the concept of an honest building contractor we have trouble with.”
Miami, Florida
June 2004
Near Coconut Grove, Florida
Late May, on toward evening of the perfect boater’s day. In the distance, hovering over the Biminis, a towering bank of cumulus reflecting the last pink glow of the sun. Stretched out just ahead, the waters of Biscayne Bay. Going steely now. Soon to be indigo, along with the night.
Now or never
, Deal thought. It was why they’d come out here, after all. Stop stalling.
He nodded to himself, reached for the controls, shoved forward, opened up the twin diesels on the
Miss Miami Priss
. He was wondering if he’d finally gotten things right, if the big engines were going to finally fire in synch, thrust him forward over the swells like something shot out of a sling. Just as likely, though, the balky SOBs would erupt in a thundering explosion that would put an end to all the agony. That’s what he was thinking when he saw what was on the surface of the water up ahead.
At first he thought it might be a cluster of lobster buoys, broken loose from their traps in Biscayne Bay, drifted out toward the Gulf Stream, but that wasn’t right. Too many of them for that, the color, the shape, the movement all wrong.
Some kind of floating debris tossed from a cruise liner headed for the islands, that’s what crossed his mind next. There were ship’s captains who liked to save a few bucks that way—why have your garbage hauled by surly Teamsters in the Port of Miami when you could just chug out past the limit, dump it in the unprotesting sea?
But it wasn’t that kind of debris, either. He was close enough to see that now. And was cursing the fact that for once in his life, his mechanical abilities had held.
The engines had kicked in just the way he’d dreamed. He’d felt the pop at the back of his neck, the kind a schoolboy yearns for when he sees a powerful car.
Miss Miami
was a forty-five-foot Bayliner with a flying bridge and a patched-up hull. She was a charter fishing craft well past her prime, the kind of boat you see in a backwater marina in the wrong part of the Keys—you might drive by and notice her and think to yourself,
She must have been something once
.
Her glory days were long gone. There were a million younger, faster, better-designed boats out there now. But
Miss Miami
had belonged to his father and she was his now—another albatross he should have had the good sense to stay away from, but it was all he had left of his old man, really—and he’d poured everything there was to pour into her, and she had responded. Here she was now, just trying to please, show him she had a few moves left after all. An over-the-hill fishing boat hurtling over the waves like she was trying to get up on plane.
“What the hell is that?” Vernon Driscoll cried in his ear. Driscoll, in keeping with his bulk and his methodical ex-cop’s nature, was not an excitable man. But he had just come up from the galley, a couple of Red Stripe beers in one of his big hands, had not been ready for this.
Deal didn’t have time to answer. He shoved the throttles forward, threw himself against the wheel. The
Miss Miami
banked hard, riding up high against the waves, pushing out towering sheets of spray ahead of their starboard side.
Driscoll lost his footing and careened across the cockpit. The beers flew from his hand, one sailing over the rail, the other exploding like a grenade against the windscreen.
Deal sensed the stinging of glass shards at his cheek, saw from the corner of his eye Driscoll slam head-first into the console, felt the thud as the big man went down. Deal wanted to go for him, but he couldn’t. He was holding desperately to the wheel, praying to God they wouldn’t flip, praying to God they’d miss those people out there. All those people, bobbing in the waves just ahead.
***
Nineteen of them
altogether. Nineteen women and children from Cuba and he’d nearly driven his boat through them as if they were a school of sea cows spread out to die.
He pulled the last woman over the transom, screaming back at her in his fractured Spanish, “Yes, yes,
tenemos su niña
, we have your baby.”
She heard him, but he couldn’t tell from her expression if she believed him. Still, she allowed herself to be dragged into the boat.
Once he had her aboard, Deal sagged back against the rail, gasping from exertion, staring at the ragtag cargo before him. All of the women wore orange life jackets, most of them so old they tied rather than snapped together. A few of the children had jackets, but most were too small. They’d had to cling to their mothers as they bobbed in the sea. They were still clinging, screaming, crying. The
Miss Miami Priss
had become a little corner of Hell.
Driscoll was still propped in the corner of the cockpit where Deal had dragged him, beginning to stir now. His eyes flickered open, blearily surveyed the scene around him, closed again.
“You want to change the channel?” Driscoll called, his hand lifting to the makeshift bandage tied about his head.
Deal nodded. He’d love to change the channel, find the one where two guys finish their cruise on the bay without incident, put in at Matheson Hammock Park, eat yellowtail snapper and drink island beer at the Red Fish Grill. But that channel seemed to be on the blink.
He’d used his T-shirt to wrap the gash on Driscoll’s forehead, had cinched it tight, but the fabric was already soaked through with blood. Plenty of stitches to come, he thought. Probably a concussion, too.
No time for lollygagging, Deal
. He pushed himself up, heading for the wheel.
One woman who had no child clinging to her was fighting at the far rail of the boat, screaming, while two of her companions struggled to hold her.
“For God’s sake,” Driscoll said. He was struggling up now, his movements awkward and drunken, though the beers he’d been carrying when he’d come up on deck would have been their first.
“Yeah,” Deal answered, making his way toward the scene. The woman wanted to dive back into the water, he didn’t have to know Spanish to understand that much. Nor to understand why.
He and Driscoll staggered through the bodies sprawled on the deck to the opposite rail, helped the two friends pull the distraught woman back.
“Is her son,” one of the woman cried to him in broken English. “Her son.”
Deal stared out over the empty water. “Where?”
The woman stared back at him, her face a mask of despair. “
En la agua
,” she said helplessly, waving her hand over the sea.
Driscoll was still out of it. “What happened? How’d they get out here, anyway?”
Deal shook his head, scrambled up onto the flying bridge, turned a quick circle to scan the water. The light was going fast now. No ships in sight, though maybe something out there, a smudge on the eastern horizon.
Then, closer to the
Miss Miami
, he saw it, a dim shadow, just below the surface. Maybe a bread bag slithering in the current. Maybe a chunk of cloth. Maybe the backside of a T-shirt, ballooned up with air.
He kicked off his deck shoes and dove.
He came up to get his bearings, found Driscoll at the bridge now, pointing, shouting, “Twenty feet. That way.”
Deal turned, began to stroke the water wildly.
He was still trying to force himself to calm—no good comes out of panic—when his hand came down with a smack on the boy’s back. He stopped, steadied himself, treading water, got the boy turned over, his puffy face under the crook of his chin, out of the water.
He glanced up to find Driscoll at the wheel of the
Miss Miami
, the blood-soaked shirt making him look like some kind of latter-day pirate. He eased the
Miss Miami
toward them and Deal saw the gunwale of the boat sidle up, saw all the grasping hands descend. The boy was lifted up, the inert form dragged over the rail, and then Deal had Driscoll’s meaty hand in his and followed.
The boy was sprawled inert on the deck, his burr-cut head lolled to the side, the mother, a thin woman with a ribboned scar down one cheek, screaming, trying to claw her way toward him. “Hold her back,” Deal commanded the women closest to her. No one had to translate.
He bent over the boy, checked his air passage, thrust his hand beneath his neck. He bent, pressed his lips to the boy’s cold and clammy flesh, began mouth-to-mouth.
“They didn’t wreck,” Driscoll was calling down as Deal gave his breath to the boy. “I thought maybe their boat sunk. It wasn’t that at all. Some sonofabitch put them off in the water.”
Deal left off his breathing, rose to push down on the boy’s chest. He watched water erupt from the boy’s lungs, glanced briefly up at Driscoll.
“Contract smugglers,” Driscoll said, nodding at the woman who’d been speaking halting English earlier. “The bastards saw a boat, thought it was the INS, they were going to get busted. They threw one life raft in the water, forced the rest of them off at gunpoint.”
“Where’s the raft?”
Driscoll barked something like a laugh, then winced, his hand going back to his head. He reached out, steadied himself against the rail. “It lasted about two minutes before it came apart.”
Deal was back at work on the boy now. A familiar story, he thought. But he’d heard worse. Contract smugglers who promised passage from Cuba, from Haiti—pick any agonized nation—the bastards collected their fees, carried their passengers out to sea, then simply shot them. Land of the brave, home of the free. Streets paved with gold. Dear Lord.
Wailing above him, wailing within. He pressed his lips to the lips of the boy and gave it all he could.
***
News item:
The Miami Herald
, Friday, May 28:
Contractor Pulls Twenty from Sea
John Deal has contributed more than his share in a career dedicated to the restoration of Dade County’s architectural treasures, but nothing compares to what he managed Thursday. Deal, son of legendary Miami builder Barton Deal, was out for a test run off Soldier Key late yesterday, on a boat that had belonged to his late father, when he came upon a group of Cuban refugees, women and children tossed overboard in the aftermath of an apparent contract smuggling operation gone sour.
Deal, 38, and his companion, former Metro Dade detective Vernon Driscoll, 51, were on their way into port at about 7:00
P.M.
, aboard the
Miss Miami Priss
, an aging forty-five-foot Bayliner Deal had been restoring, when they spotted the group floating in the water about six miles off the coast.…
“…I just did what anyone else would do,” Deal said as he left Coast Guard headquarters in Coconut Grove, where the refugees were delivered. “Vernon Driscoll is just as responsible as I am for saving these people.”
Deal is the owner of DealCo Construction, a firm that helped to sculpt the Miami skyline in its heyday. DealCo was the principal contractor for the Dorado Beach Hotel and several other luxury hotels constructed on Miami Beach in the 1950s. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Barton Deal and several associates spearheaded the development of the Brickell Banking Center, as well as downtown’s First Federal Tower, still the tallest building in South Florida. Stung by a building glut and an economic downturn, the firm went into receivership in 1989, and Barton Deal committed suicide soon after.
The younger Deal fought to rebuild his father’s firm from the ashes, however. Following the devastation wrought by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, he turned the company’s efforts toward the rebuilding of several of the area’s architectural landmarks, including the Denby estate in South Dade and the former Vanderbilt family compound in Coconut Grove, LaGloria, now occupied by computer tycoon Terrence Terrell. “It was either that or build strip malls the rest of my life,” Deal said. “I didn’t have to think too long about it.”
As to what took him out on the water late yesterday: “The
Miss Miami
is about the only thing my father had left when he died. It had been sitting down at Monty Trainor’s marina for years, just rotting away. He loved the boat, and I finally decided it was time to put the old girl back in service. She’s been a money pit, but I’d have to say it was worth every penny I put in her now. I think my old man would agree.”