Done Deal (3 page)

“I was just going to find her,” Deal said. He nodded at Terrell, already on his way out of the cabin. “Nice meeting you. Buy the team, Mr. Terrell.”

Penfield raised his glass. “Better keep track of that one, Johnny,” Penfield was saying. “And think about that offer we had…” but Deal had already spotted her outside and was gone.

***

They were alone in the water taxi—brought over from Venice, the captain had volunteered on the way out—heading from
The Queen
’s mooring back to the hotel docks where they’d left the car. Deal had his head back over the cushions, his feet up on the seat across from them. He watched the still-blazing
Queen
recede in the distance behind them.

“Maybe we could call off morning,” he said. He put his hand on her leg.

“I had a nice time,” she said. She put her hand atop his. Laced their fingers together.

A hopeful sign, he thought. “We’ll have to start getting out more,” he said, nudging his hand higher.

“
Deal
,” she said, pushing it back.

“It’s okay,” he said. “The captain won’t mind.”

“Deal!”

“Really. The owner’s a friend of mine.”

And so it went until he fell asleep.

***

“Janice, all I said was maybe we could try to cut back for a while.” He sat on the edge of the bed, trying to will his headache away.

She came to the bathroom door and took the toothbrush out of her mouth. She’d pulled off the T-shirt she’d slept in.

“There’s a baby on the way,” she said, mildly. “We’re going to need things.” She glanced around the bedroom, their furniture crowding every space, waved her arm about. “We
need
a bigger place.”

Deal nodded, still staring at her. It was only her second month, but there were signs. Deal liked that, her changing that way. He found himself aroused. He remembered they’d started something last night, but he’d been so tired…

“I know,” he said. “Things are tight. But we have to take the long view. By the time the baby’s here…” he trailed off, suggesting a future of endless possibility.

She wiped toothpaste from the corner of her mouth, giving herself a moment. “By then,” she said, “we’ll be bankrupt.”

He wanted to say something, but he wasn’t sure what. Every argument seemed weary, even to him. Janice stuck the toothbrush back in her mouth and disappeared into the bathroom.

Deal swung his legs down from the bed and sighed. He felt exhausted, as if he’d spent the entire night running in place. He was almost weary enough to do it: Forget DealCo and all the hassle, take the supervisor’s job with Kendale Homes. Security, security, security. Maybe it was the smart thing to do.

He reached for the television remote and pointed it at the tiny set that rested on their dresser. The face of a local weatherman congealed gradually and Deal pressed the volume button in time to hear “…back to a normal summer pattern, high in the low nineties, an eighty percent chance of thundershowers. We’ll keep an eye on those developing tropical waves for you.”

“Terrific,” he said, flipping the channel.

He caught a brief glimpse of a reporter finishing a standup in front of a burned-out gas station, police milling about in the background. The place looked familiar but the image faded into another weatherman about to proclaim the same sad news. Deal snapped off the set and stood up.

He was pawing through his sock drawer, looking for a mate to the only white one he’d come across, when Janice came out of the bathroom in her walking gear. She had gotten involved with a group from the condo, and he was glad for that, though he suspected they encouraged her more extravagant tastes.

Her dark hair was pulled back beneath a sweat band, her breasts hidden now under a spandex top. She wore a dark leotard beneath that, and white socks crumpled in rolls at her sneaker tops. She looked like the kid he’d met fifteen years ago.

Something in his gaze must have caught her. She stopped and sighed, then came to him. “Oh, Deal,” she said. She looked at him sadly for a moment, then reached to kiss him on the cheek.

She started to pull away, but Deal held on.

“I’m late,” she said.

“
Be
late,” he said, nuzzling her.

“Deal,” she said. But she arched her neck at the touch of his lips.

He edged them backward, toward the bed. He licked the underside of her ear. “They’re waiting on me,” she said, but her breath was quickening.

They toppled over onto the bed. “I’m already dressed,” she said.

Deal had his hand hooked under the band of her leotard. “Not for long,” he said, his own voice thick, his fingers probing.

“Oh, Deal,” she said again, lifting her hips against him. And then he was lost in the heat and the musk and the dampness.

***

Though his eyes were closed, Deal had convinced himself that he was floating on a diving raft somewhere in the middle of a broad lake rimmed by snowcapped mountains. Where he lay, it was warm and pleasant, the planks as soft as cotton, the sun beating down on his bare body, drying him. There was a faint scent of jasmine, and of sex, and the comforting touch of Janice’s shoulder at his side. Only the slightest trembling of the raft to disturb him and the sound of quiet sobbing.

Sadness
, he thought. How could there be sadness in such a lovely world? And then he came awake.

Janice lay with her back toward him, her shoulders shuddering, her face pressed into a pillow. Deal pressed his eyes closed momentarily, longing for the dream to take him up again, but what he saw instead was an image of fighter planes swooping low, strafing a deserted beach. He was in the picture somewhere, a gaunt man shaking a stick at the planes, his eyes as crazed as Job’s.

He opened his eyes and moved close to her, his chin tucked over her shoulder. How many times had this happened, would it happen?

“Janice,” he said. He reached to move the pillow from her face. Her eyes were squeezed tight, her cheeks streaked with tears.

“Janice?” he repeated. He raised himself up and placed his hand on her shoulder. With his other hand, he began to knead the tautness at the base of her neck. Her sobbing began to subside. He moved both hands to her shoulders and pressed his thumbs into the long muscles of her back.

Gradually, he felt the tightness fading, and after a few moments she sat up, wiping at her cheeks with a corner of the tangled sheet. She took a deep breath, her hands folded in her lap.

“I’m trying to make this work,” she said, staring at her hands. “I am. I am.”

Deal had the odd sensation that she was talking to herself, that he was not even in the room at all, and he put his hand atop hers to reassure himself.

She glanced up at him. “I’m not going crazy, if that’s what you think.”

“I know,” Deal said. “I know.”

“Sometimes, things just get to be too much,” she said.

Deal nodded. “I’m going to take care of everything, Janice. You don’t have to worry.”

She glanced around the room again, and Deal saw it as an accusation. They’d had to sell the house in the Shores, almost a year ago now, and though they’d tried to keep contact, they’d apparently left most of their friends behind in the move. It had gotten to be a big city, Deal thought sadly. And he’d been so busy, busting his ass trying to stay afloat, that he hadn’t had time to put much of a personal life back together.

“Mr. Penfield told me he wanted to talk to you last night,” Janice said, breaking into his thoughts.

Deal nodded.

She was staring at him. “Well, did he?”

Deal felt the awful weariness piling down on him again. He’d managed to drive it away for a bit, and here it was, climbing back on his shoulders, ready to ride him around until he dropped, if it could.

He sighed. “He said he had somebody else interested in the fourplex.”

“And?”

“I told him the same as last time. We weren’t interested.”

She stared at him. “What was the offer?”

Deal shrugged. “Three sixty-two five.”

She nodded. “That means you could get three seventy-five.”

“Maybe.”

“The land is clear. Subtract the construction loan, that leaves nearly a quarter of a million dollars.” Her expression was determinedly neutral.

“Which we could piss away.”

She threw up her hands. “I don’t understand you. Look at how we live. We could buy a house…”

“We can’t sell the fourplex, Janice.” He was trying to keep his patience.

“You mean you
won’t
.”

Deal bit his lip, trying to keep his voice even. “We don’t want to sell when the market’s down. We have to finish the building. Then we rent it out. We’ll have something to put down where it says ‘assets’ on the balance sheet. And a little cash coming in besides. We use that all to finance the next project.
Then
we can sell. Times get better, the property will be worth another hundred thousand, finished and generating income. We’ll be on the road again.”

She seemed about to snap back at him, but forced herself to calm. “Deal, you’re building an apartment in a place where nobody wants to live. If it were worth anything, your father would have built on it when he was still alive. If it were a good investment, Mr. Penfield wouldn’t advise you to sell it. If he can find someone to buy it, take him up on it, for God’s sake.”

“He means well,” Deal said. “That neighborhood’s coming back.”

She stared at him for a moment, then shook her head in resignation. She turned and swung her legs over the side of the bed, bent to pick up her wadded clothes.

“It’s not just you and me any longer, Janice. That’s the whole point. I sell out now, it’s all over. I’ll end up working for wages the rest of my life, we’ll never get anywhere. That’s not what I want for my family.”

She turned to him. “Let me get this straight. You’d sell the building if it
weren’t
for us?”

He threw up his hands. “Selling isn’t the point. Hanging on is the point. Doing what you have to do until things get better. Believing in yourself, that what you do is right…” He knew his voice was rising, that any moment she would turn away, that he would lose her. “Janice,” he said, quietly. “It’s for us. For all of us.”

She stared at him in silence, taking it in. Her anger seemed to have faded. He doubted he’d convinced her. But at least she was thinking about what he’d said, and that was a victory of sorts.

After a moment, she glanced away.

“Look at this,” she said, absently. She’d unfolded the leotard, was staring at a tear Deal had opened in the fabric.

“I thought it was kind of exciting,” he said.

She paused, then glanced up at him, finally gave him the smile he’d been angling for. “It was,” she said.

“Let’s try it without the clothes,” he said, reaching for her hand.

But she was up and hurrying down the hall. “Go to work, Deal.” She turned and shook her head. “Just go and get the damn thing built.”

***

Deal was moving across what had been an empty traffic lane when it happened. Some idiot barreling up from nowhere, heading for the same open spot. Deal, still feeling prickly from the argument with Janice—as if he’d bullied her into silence—never thought of backing off. He’d made his move, had been there first. He cut his wheels and settled in.

It was a black Supra, the windows smoked as dark as the paint, filling up his rearview mirror now. They were doing sixty-five, locked in by morning commuters on either side and the guy was maybe six inches off his tail.

Deal saw the Supra’s headlights roll up, the lamps flash. The guy had to be crazy. There was a Sunshine bread delivery truck a few feet in front of them, Deal close enough to read the “Bring Baseball to the Tropics” sticker on its bumper.

There was a flatbed carrying a load of coconut palms to the left, a pair of old school buses painted white taking up the right. Even if he’d been inclined to let the asshole past—which he wasn’t—there was no place to go.

Deal glanced up at the windows of the nearest bus. Rows and rows of white-turbaned blacks, staring implacably into the blaze of sun that was just clearing the bank towers downtown. Yahwehs, he thought. Two bus loads of Yahwehs going somewhere at seven thirty in the morning.

He didn’t know much about them—they dressed like some of the Black Muslims he’d encountered in college, back in the 1960s—but they seemed interested in things material as well as spiritual. They had bought up a bunch of hot-sheet motels around Seventy-ninth and Biscayne, which they had proceeded to paint black and white, with the emphasis on white. They were renting most of the motels, using some for temples, schools, whatever. A couple of coats of paint and tropical sleaze becomes Morocco.

He glanced back at the Supra, which had inched closer to his bumper. Deal thought about slamming on his brakes—let the guy pile into him, use the insurance money to cover a paint job for The Hog, which had begun a serious fade from sitting out so much. Ever since they’d had to let the house go and move into the condo, he’d let Janice use the one underground spot for her VW.

He lifted his foot from the accelerator, tapped his brakes lightly. The Supra fell back abruptly. Think about it, friend. Deal stared into the mirror, willing his thoughts backward. The sun was a white blaze on the Supra’s windshield—no way to see who might be driving. It closed in again as Deal accelerated.

One of the Yahwehs—a big guy who looked like it’d take two sheets to wrap him—glanced down at Deal, then back at the Supra. The man’s gaze came back to rest on Deal. He lifted his brows as if to ask a question, then he turned back to stare at whatever his buddies had discovered.

Deal remembered a recent news story. A pimp who’d had a certain interest in one of the motels transformed by the Yahwehs had come around to discuss things. A couple of big Yahwehs showed up and the pimp landed in the emergency ward at Jackson, a fracture in each of his arms and legs. There’d been some outcry about it, but the pimp lobby at city hall wasn’t very influential. Besides, the cops had been trying to clean up Seventy-ninth and Biscayne for years. If the Yahwehs could accomplish that, the city would probably let them paint the streets and the palm trees white.