Authors: Les Standiford
Tags: #Fiction / Mystery & Detective / General
“There’ll be local photographers—maybe something extra because we’ve got that Miami person in the mix—and the usual contingent from the national press and newsmagazines, as well as someone from the White House staff, of course, but it’s the guy from
Parade
we have to spend some serious time with.”
It was Leslie Blanding, one of the aides who’d stuck from the days in Missouri, who was briefing Linda as the Secret Service team led them down a hallway to the room they’d be using before the ceremony began.
“Frank didn’t mention anything about a special shoot,” she said. But Leslie seemed not to hear. Linda sighed. She was still holding out hope of a few minutes in the sun before the day was out. Wasn’t that what Florida was about, after all?
She hadn’t been in the state since she’d come to Fort Lauderdale with some girls from her sorority her sophomore year, but the minute she’d stepped out of
Air Force One
into the warm bath of air, the memories had been sneaking back with surprising clarity, maybe because it was the last time she could remember being so foolish.
Like any other winter-frozen coed who wanted to get the most out of five days in the sun, she hadn’t even unpacked before she had hit the beach with the others, blanket spread, lathering herself with a mixture of baby oil and iodine, drinking beer until she was woozy and burned to a crisp. The following morning, a maid at the motel where they’d crammed six to a room had walked in to find her alone in bed, wracked with chills and frozen with fiery pain. The maid took one look at her skin and disappeared, to call for help, Linda had supposed.
A few minutes later, the maid had reappeared, carrying what looked like a dusty spear tip in her hand. It had turned out to be a leaf she’d sliced from something called an aloe plant in the motel’s courtyard. She’d split the inch-thick leaf open to expose a gelatinous inner material so vividly green it looked radioactive. The maid reassured Linda that the Seminole tribe—of which she was a member—had been using the plant for centuries. She scooped some of the green stuff into her palm and began to spread it gently across Linda’s shoulders. The effect was instantaneous. Linda felt as if she had been dipped into a tub of cooling liquid anesthesia. In less than an hour the chills were gone and she was able to sit up straight again, the pain a whisper of what it been. She had tried to give the maid money, but the woman refused and Linda had settled for buying the woman a huge basket of fruit and leaving it in the room upon their departure, along with a card of thanks. Lucy, her name, the desk clerk had told Linda. Sure, you get sick, Lucy’ll have something for you to try.
So odd, she thought as Leslie Blanding ushered her inside the waiting room. One trip, so long ago, and such details still vivid. She’d spent the rest of the week in the shade of a clutch of coconut palms at the edge of the beach, her pink and peeling nose in a series of books, while her sorority sisters cooked themselves bronze and flirted with a group of lazy-eyed college boys from South Carolina who spoke in melodious drawls of such mysteries as barrier islands and beach music.
It had been as if she were an invalid parked in a deck chair on a cruise ship while exotic scents and tropical scenery glided past. She could still feel the giddiness born of the palpitating heat, the tang of cocoa butter everywhere, the faint grittiness of sand that clung to her skin no matter how many cool showers she took, the soft
crash-crash
of the coconut fronds above her head, and the easy smiles of the boys from coastal Carolina who danced in the sand, some slow jitterbug step they called the “Shag” that seemed to lend itself to almost any song.
Truly odd, Linda thought, walking to the window of the waiting room to stare out over the hotel’s marina at the calm waters of the bay. Something about that visit she’d never really gotten over. Some vision of paradise born of a sheltered Missouri girl’s postadolescent experience, and though nearly a quarter-century had passed, and she had traveled the world, and taken degrees, and practiced law and married a man who had turned her from a career-driven attorney into the First Lady, she still indulged that improbable, exotic vision of a life under the cocoa-buttered palms.
She turned to Leslie Blanding, who was standing nearby, studying her notepad. “Did you ever come here, Leslie, back in college, I mean?”
Leslie gave her a curious glance. “To Miami?”
“Well, you know, Fort Lauderdale, spring break,
Where the Boys Are
, all that.”
Leslie smiled, shook her head. “I was a California girl, remember. We always had the beach.”
“Right,” Linda said. “I’d forgotten.” Blonde, slender, self-assured, untroubled Leslie. She looked like she’d grown up in a place everyone else had pined for. No pent-up longing for a life in some far-flung paradise for her, Linda thought. No yearning to escape small-town life and small-town thinking. None of the Midwestern baggage of self-doubt, the Gatsby-like compulsion to prove yourself on the bigger stage. What must that be like, she wondered? No Calvinistic baggage of guilt, no innate tendencies toward self-denial. Leslie Blanding had probably had one of those mothers who took their daughters in for birth control pills as casually as Linda had been fitted for braces.
She laughed then, chiding herself for her silliness. Good grief. Projecting all this on poor, sweet Leslie, who worked like a Turk and by all accounts idolized her and her husband, who never failed to mention how fortunate she felt to have such a job as this, attending to a million and one trivial details of protocol and public relations most hours of her waking life.
“Something wrong, Mrs. Sheldon?” Leslie was staring at her uncertainly.
Linda gave her a smile she hoped was reassuring. “Just thinking about the last time I was here,” she said.
“I don’t remember that,” said Leslie. She was clearly puzzled now, obviously trying to reference some forgotten affair of state.
“I was just a girl,” Linda said, and waved her hand in dismissal. “Now let’s see that speech that Frank was supposed to read. I’m sure there’s plenty of testosterone we’ll have to boil out before
I
can read it.”
Leslie Blanding smiled then, and Linda thought she caught a glimpse of something cross the face of the Secret Service man who stood at attention just inside the door to their room, though whether it was amusement, amazement, or disapproval, she couldn’t tell, and it really didn’t matter. She had come to be who she was, and she was comfortable with that, she thought as she took the sheaf of papers from Leslie. Anyone who wasn’t, they would just have to vote for another First Lady, now wouldn’t they?
“This is really some
do
, isn’t it?” The voice rose over the din of conversation that filled the room.
Deal shielded his face from the lights of a television crew panning the hospitality suite and turned to the person who had spoken to him, an ebony-skinned man in his late twenties wearing a cream-colored sport coat, dark brown slacks, checked shirt, knit tie. Despite what Driscoll had said, the guy looked like he’d stepped off the pages of
GQ
.
“It’s something, all right,” Deal allowed, watching as a pair of security men hustled the camera crew toward the doors. He was still wondering about his wallet. He supposed it was safe in the hands of a Secret Service agent, but still he felt a little undressed without it.
The two of them were standing by a table laden with finger foods and iced-down soft drinks at the back of the crowded staging suite where Fielding had delivered him. It was the rest of the heroes milling about the room, Deal assumed, though he hadn’t stopped to check any name tags.
Four burly guys in short haircuts and the kind of clothing Driscoll had described stood at the other end of the table, devouring tiny sandwiches by the handful and cracking jokes in rapid-fire accents that bespoke the outer boroughs of New York. They were the most obvious cops in the room, though Deal was sure there were others, even the two long-haired, emaciated types in a far corner who were either heroic hippies or narcs who had brought down untold weight.
For the most part, however, the group resembled an Amway dealers convention or some kind of casting call for a latter-day Norman Rockwell crowd scene: There seemed to be a fair complement of housewives, slightly paunchy middle-aged males, a goodly representation of blacks, several Hispanics, a couple of Asians. Also the hippies, the cops, a couple of younger men in Western-cut jackets talking together near the doors. There was one dark-haired woman wearing a black form-fitting cocktail dress standing alone near the center of the room who seemed uncharacteristically striking. Maybe she’d wandered into the wrong party, Deal thought.
“Myself, I think she humped a bad guy to death,” the black man at his side said.
Deal turned, feeling his face redden. “I was that obvious, huh?”
The black guy shrugged. “Everybody else been staring at her, why wouldn’t you?”
Deal laughed, and the black guy held out his hand. “Roland Wells,” he said. “What did you do to deserve this?”
“I’ve been asking myself that very question,” Deal said, shaking hands. “My name’s John Deal.”
There was a pause and then the black guy snapped his fingers, pointing at Deal’s chest. “I remember. You’re the guy that pulled all those folks out of the ocean.”
Deal nodded, the feeling of discomfort welling up inside him once again. “It wasn’t like I went out hunting for them,” he said.
Wells gave him a look. “I know what you mean, all this fuss,” he said, glancing about them. “Same way with me. I was driving home from work one day—I live just outside Columbus, that’s the Ohio one—I see a cop pulling a guy over up ahead, I don’t think much about it.” Wells took a sip of his Diet Coke, let his eyes travel to the knockout in the form-fitting dress.
“By the time I pass by, the cop’s just getting out of the cruiser walking up on this trashed-out RX-7 when all of a sudden the guy floors it and takes off.”
Wells stopped himself, turned back to Deal. “But you didn’t ask to hear this, now did you?”
“I’m interested,” Deal said. Something about Wells’s unassuming manner had engaged him. “What did you do when the guy took off?”
Wells raised his brows. “Nothing, at first. I mean, who the hell wants to get involved? Like I said, I was just on my way home.” Deal nodded, and Wells seemed to make some decision. He closed his eyes momentarily—it might have seemed just a blink in any other context—then took a breath, let it out in a sigh.
“What happened was I glanced down—I’m driving my van, see, I install tile for a living, got my own little shop—and I realize the guy’s right beside me, trying to crowd in off the shoulder, and about the time I realize what’s really happening, the guy points a gun at me, like get your black ass out of the way.”
“You didn’t get out of his way,” Deal offered.
Wells shrugged. “I sure as hell intended to, but I was in a solid line of traffic and I guess I wasn’t fast enough. The next thing I know the guy’s shooting, the glass is blowing out of my windows, I’m under the dash, one hand on the wheel and crossing myself with the other.” He gave Deal a brief smile as he continued. “
Then
I feel something slam into the side of the van, I realize—insult to injury—the guy’s trying to run me off the road.”
Wells stared at Deal as if he’d understand the outrage of it all, and Deal thought maybe he did understand. “Just what had this person done, anyway?”
“I’m getting to that,” Wells said. “Meantime, all I know is he’s an asshole trying to kill me and I just got the van out of the body shop that week, five hundred bucks for a big ding my wife put in there pulling out of a parking space. I mean, I know it’s not rational, but I am pissed. When the shooting stops, I come up out of my seat and I don’t even bother to see if the guy’s still got his gun out, I just pull hard right on the wheel of the van and smack back into him and all of a sudden, there we are, like a couple of billy goats butting head to head, going about sixty miles an hour by this time, chewing a big cloud of dust right down the shoulder of the road.”
Deal was hooked by now, was reliving flashes of a not-so-dissimilar encounter of his own, on his way to work one sunny Florida morning, when a cretin in a car he’d unwittingly cut off in traffic had pulled a gun and nearly killed him.
“What was happening with the rest of the traffic?” he asked Wells.
Wells’s face broke into a grin. “Oh, man, they were flying every which place, just trying to get out the way.”
Deal felt himself identifying more and more with Wells, this fellow hardhead who was just driving along, minding his own business, when trouble came calling. It reassured him in a way. If he and Wells had found themselves at such a gathering, then surely others in the room had ended up here under similar circumstances. Maybe there should be a special category of the awards, he was thinking; call it “Accidental Heroes.” Maybe he’d feel like less of an impostor, being here.
“We might have gone on like that until the guy reloaded or we ran out of gas, one,” Wells was saying. “But then I saw we were coming up to this underpass for 1-70.”
Wells paused, his expression sobering. “I’ll never know if the guy saw it coming, ’cause I know I caught sight of it just in time to hang a big-time left.” Wells shrugged. “My van clipped the support pillar on the rear end, but the asshole took it head-on. His car just blew up, man, burned to a cinder.”
Wells gave Deal a look. “He’d have been dead already, of course. I hope he was. Even with what he’d done, I’d hate to think about somebody burning to death like that, even him.” There was something almost pleading in his tone, something that made Deal nod in agreement.
“You were going to tell me what the guy had done,” he reminded Wells gently.
“Yeah.” Wells sighed. “Turned out he’d robbed some pissant little bank out in Grove City, marched three tellers and the woman manager into the vault and shot ’em in the back of the head.”
Wells shook his head. “One of them lived, but she’s in a wheelchair, can’t even say hi to her kids. The guy got six thousand dollars. It burnt up in the crash.”
He was staring at Deal hollow-eyed now. “Thing I can’t figure out,” Wells said, “what the hell have we come to, anyway? I mean, the guy had the money, wasn’t a soul going to contest him for it. He didn’t even have to shoot those women in the first place.”
Deal shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not the same world I grew up in. I know it must sound dumb, like it’s something my old man probably said in his time, too, but…” He trailed off, feeling helpless before Wells’s answerless question.
“I don’t have the first regret about doing what I did,” Wells said. “I just don’t feel like any hero, you know what I’m talking about?”
“I know,” Deal said. “I know.”
Wells managed a smile. He raised his hand in a fist, sent it forward in a slow tomahawking motion, tapped Deal lightly on the chest. “Didn’t mean to go on like that,” he said.
“It’s all right,” Deal said. “I’m glad you told me.”
“I’m gonna get me another Coke,” Wells said. He gave Deal a glance. “Probably be busting a kidney before this thing’s over. You want something?” He pointed to the nearby table.
“You find a Red Stripe in there, you can bring me one,” Deal said.
“That’s a beer, right?”
“The best,” Deal said.
Wells laughed. “Yeah? Well, then, I’ll bring us both one,” he said, and moved away toward the table.
Deal watched him go, thinking that his expectations for this event had already been exceeded.
Just goes to show you
, he thought.
You can’t get too cranky, can’t turn yourself into a recluse. You just never know where or when you might meet a kindred spirit, somebody who just might have the same, nearly inexpressible feelings you carry around day in and day out
. He turned to toss his own soda can into a trash receptacle, wondering if Wells were married, if he had trouble at home as well…when he heard a woman’s voice at his shoulder.
“Mr. Deal?”
He turned to find the dark-haired woman in the cocktail dress standing before him.
“I’m Valerie Meyers,” she said, eyeing him carefully. “
Are
you John Deal? The pictures they sent out in the packets weren’t very good, you know.”
Deal caught the subtle scent of some perfume that even he knew had to be expensive, some mixture of exotic flowers that grew only in France and Nepal and then got ground up into a powder along with hundred-dollar bills. Her skin was pale and flawless, her hair even darker up this close. He had to will his gaze away from the plane of her chest.
Act like a human being
, he told himself,
show her there are men of higher purpose in the world
. He ignored the donkey’s bray that sprang up from somewhere to accompany these thoughts.
“I’m John Deal,” he managed.
Now there’s a suave rejoinder, Deal
. What on earth
had
she done to find her way into this company? Why hadn’t he bothered to read the packet of material the organizers had sent along?
She reached into a small bag, withdrew a business card. “I’m with Far Horizons, in Los Angeles,” she said, holding out the card to him. He took it speechlessly, turned the card over a couple of times in his fingers.
“We make films, feature films,” she continued. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
Deal felt himself shaking his head dumbly. “You’re a movie producer?”
She smiled in response. “I work with Carson Parks.”
Deal shook his head again.
“He made
The Last Brotherhood, Three Friends, Shiver Rules
.”
When Deal didn’t respond, she paused to give him a closer look. “Is there something wrong?”
“A producer,” Deal said. He was feeling a bit giddy all of a sudden. He turned to the buffet table, but Wells was nowhere in sight. “Sonofabitch.”
“Excuse me?” she said. She was still wearing her Isis-like smile, but now he saw some shadow behind this appearance, something he might never have spotted from across the room. Dark red lipstick, flipped-under hairstyle something like the pageboys from his distant past; he realized she reminded him of the gangster’s moll John Travolta danced with in that movie about good-hearted killers. A guy could spend the rest of his life trying, Deal thought, no thing he could do which would ever get a rise out of this woman.
“Nothing,” Deal said. “There was a guy here wanted to meet you, that’s all.”
“Well,” she said. “Carson and I have been talking. He’s very interested in your story…”
“You came all the way to Miami to talk to me?” Deal asked. He felt an odd jangling somewhere behind his eyes, synapses firing at cross-purposes, messages derailing, little sizzles where they plowed into slumbering gray matter.
She glanced about the room, her smile widening a fraction. “There were a couple of people Carson and I discussed, actually, but you’re very high on our list. We think there’s a property here, a potential…”
“As in make a movie out of what happened with me out testing my boat?” Deal heard his voice rising. He tried to imagine it: himself a dashing hunk behind the wheel, the young boy he’d given mouth-to-mouth transformed to some babe in a see-through sarong.
“As in get to know you, Mr. Deal,” Valerie Meyers said easily. “Talk. See if there might be something to explore…”
Explore exactly
what
, Deal thought. He’d stumbled into all this to begin with, and the people he’d pulled into his boat were in that water because they’d risked everything for a decent life. He and Valerie and Carson were going to sit down and talk about how that might make them all rich?
Deal felt his throat go tight with anger, felt his hands begin to tremble. Serious mental weather, look out, storm about to come ashore…and then, just as quickly, everything kicked over into calm. That old standby, psychic circuit overload, he thought, the weird safety mechanism that had rescued him more than once from going absolutely haywire.
“Gee, I wish I’d known,” Deal heard himself saying. He was surprised at how calm his voice sounded. He shook his head in a way that was meant to seem rueful. Maybe this was the tack that the wolf had taken just before he gobbled up Grandma.
Valerie Meyers shook her head. “What do you mean?”
“I already signed,” Deal said. He was careful to keep his expression glum. “With Robert De Niro, a guy from his company, I mean. Like a binder or something?” He glanced at her as if for help.
“An option?”
Deal copied Roland Wells’s gesture, made a pistol of his fist. “That’s it. An option.”
She gave him a careful glance, but Deal kept himself fixed on rueful. Part of him wanted to tell Valerie Meyers to take a flying leap at the moon, another part yearned to dump the half-melted bowl of ice over her lovely head, but he focused on rueful and restrained and prayed that if she did nothing more than pass on his absolutely fanciful information to her boss, he would have achieved a greater effect.