Duby's Doctor (12 page)

Carinne strove to keep her clothes and her
dignity intact. “Mister Iglesias!”

“Before I met you, your father told me you
were lovely...”

“Please, don’t!”

“... but this is better than I expected.”

“No! Please!”

“In my country, a woman your age would be
married already.”

A car door slammed. Iglesias was glad the
driver had been discreet enough to leave the vehicle. He pressed
himself upon the squirming, protesting Carinne, but suddenly felt a
rush of air as the door behind him swung open. Something yanked him
backward by his collar and dragged him out of the car, dumping him
onto the beach sand.

“
Mademoiselle
said not tonight,”
said the man standing over him.

Duby then lifted Iglesias by the lapels, set
him on his feet, and released him. “Why don’t we just take a walk
and cool off,” Duby suggested.

Iglesias swung his fist in a roundhouse punch
designed to take off the chauffeur’s head. Mistake. With effortless
grace, Duby blocked the incoming blow and delivered three
counter-punches in rapid succession.

Staggering backward, anger somehow keeping
him upright, Iglesias fumbled a pistol from a holster at the small
of his back. Swaying on his feet, he grasped the weapon in both
hands and aimed carefully at Dubreau. Before he could pull the
trigger, however, his opponent’s well-placed kick sent the pistol
south and Iglesias’ jaw north, in a blurry-fast double whammy.

Both men were still standing, and they came
at one another like grizzlies, scrabbling in circles while locked
together, chest to chest, each man’s hands clutching his foe’s
shoulders. Together, they had stumbled to the water’s edge when
Iglesias shoved free and launched a killer roundhouse punch.
Dubreau ducked it, allowing Iglesias to whirl himself right into
the bay.

Iglesias lay panting in water three inches
deep. For a moment, he worked to get back into his lungs the
precious air his fall had knocked out of him. In seconds, he was
able to focus again on the chauffeur. With a snarl, Iglesias heaved
himself to his feet and took two sloshing steps toward his
opponent. Dubreau brought a left uppercut out of nowhere. It met
Iglesias’ chin and lifted him onto his toes before dropping him
like an anvil. The well-dressed anvil did not move. Tiny wavelets
less than two inches high lapped against the sides of his inert
form.

The man was indeed fortunate to have landed
face-up in the extremely shallow water at the shoreline. He could
easily have drowned, if his nose and mouth had been submerged. And,
Dubreau would not have taken the trouble to turn him over, though
he did take the trouble to remove a cellphone from the man’s pocket
and toss it fifty yards out into the bay.

Duby looked up from the downed man to see
Carinne standing a few yards away, hugging herself and trembling.
He went to her and touched her elbow, turning her toward the
limousine.

“Wh-, what will you do with him?” Carinne
whispered.

“Nothing,
mademoiselle
. He will
wake, or he will not. If he does, he can hitchhike back to town.
Come, I will take you home.”

“No! I can’t go home yet. It’s too early.”
She shivered, but the air was warm. Her eyes were wide, and she
chewed at her lips. “I’m supposed to ‘entertain’ him after the
play. If I go home now, Daddy will know something went wrong.”

“He will know that pretty soon anyway, I
think.” Duby gestured toward Iglesias. “You should get to your
father before he does.”

She shook her head.

“But, you must tell your father how this man
mistreated you,” Dubreau insisted.

“You are a kind man,” she said. “You cannot
understand a man like my father. His business is everything to him.
People are merely tools to get the job done. My mother, before she
died, and now me. My father meant me as a treat for
Señor
Iglesias tonight. It was part of a big business deal they are doing
together. I did not do what was expected of me. Which of us do you
think my father will say was treated unfairly?”

Dubreau’s face was stony. He gave no
answer.

“Please,” she said, begging with her eyes. “I
need to get my head together for a little while, first.”

The chauffeur hesitated, no doubt mentally
listing at least a dozen reasons this was a bad idea. He made the
decision anyhow. “You can come to my place,” he said.

Coconut Grove could be loud and lively, even
very late at night. Laughing revelers crowded the sidewalk
restaurants, and well-amplified live music barged into the street
whenever a nightclub door opened and closed. Every lamppost,
awning, doorway, and even every plant was lit with neon or
floodlights or tiny, twinkling LED bulbs.

But, at the bend of the road where Dinner Key
Marina lay, the lights were fewer and dimmer; the voices, music,
and traffic were muted. Aboard a sailboat, the Do Bee 2, moored
sixty yards offshore, only giggling and low voices could have been
heard – but there was no one around to hear them. The lights from
the main cabin shone from its windows and reached only far enough
to pick out the rowboat tethered alongside.

In the cabin, Carinne and Dubreau sipped hot
tea at the galley table. The boat’s interior was clean enough, but
it had the sloppy/homey look of a boat that was lived in. This was
no shiny, weekend hobby toy.

Dubreau was amusing Carinne by drawing
caricatures on pages from a sketchpad. She was nervous at first,
but he beguiled her into enjoying a sort of revenge upon her
enemies without exposing herself to any danger. At least, for
now.

He began with her tennis coach, the
housekeeping and gardening staff, the chef – all people she knew
and did not fear. Then, when he felt she would be able to laugh and
not cry, he created a wolf-like cartoon–Iglesias. When she smiled
at that, he went on to draw her father, Kyle Averell, as a wacky
Attilla, the Hun. Finally, he made a joke of putting his own face
onto a silly super-hero labeled The Masked Avenger.

They laughed together as he closed the
sketchpad and left the table to refill their tea mugs. Carinne
flipped back through older pages of his pad, while his back was
turned. She found a drawing of Agent Frank Stone.

“Uncle Francis!” she cried in surprise.

Duby gave a quick glance and turned away
again. “Ah,
oui
. The policeman from the cemetery. I did not
know his name. Is he always so bad tempered?”

“I don’t know,” she said, moving on to other
pages. “I don’t see my mother’s family much.”

Dubreau brought their mugs back to the table
and took his seat again. Carinne had found a self-portrait of
Dubreau’s head on the body of a sphinx. She showed him, and he
nodded.

“Why don’t you just run away,
cheri
?
Your uncle is a policeman. He would help you, no?”

“You sound like Uncle Francis. What you don’t
understand is ... I know my father does bad things, and I can’t
stop him. But, my father needs me. I know he does. And he loves me,
and I’m all the family he’s got now.”

“And you love him.”

“He is my father.” Her tone said the
discussion was over.

Dubreau thought through the situation and
decided to take another tack.

“What do you want,
mon petit
? From
your father. From life.”

Carinne closed the sketchpad and looked at
him, taking a few seconds to consider his question carefully.

He waited, quiet as a sphinx.

“I wanted to finish college. I was thinking
of becoming a veterinarian, you know? Taking care of animals.” Her
eyelids drooped and she looked downcast, but she straightened her
shoulders and continued with greater energy. “And, I’ll do that
someday. Just, not right now. Daddy needs me now.” She looked into
his eyes. “You can understand that, can’t you?”

The sphinx did not answer that question.

“If you change your mind,” he said evenly,
“you must tell me. Tell me if you ever decide you want to leave.
C'est bien
?”

Carinne reached out to where his hand sat
beside his tea mug on the table. With a firm grip on his hand, she
urged him: “Don’t take my side. I can secretly think of you as a
friend, but my father must not think you are for me, because then
he will say you are against him. You never want him to think that.
Never. Once, one of the men took up for my mother, and then he ...
he was just gone. She didn’t come out of her room for weeks after
that.”

Pulling his hand away gently, Dubreau left
the table and paced around the small galley/cabin. With his back to
her, he gritted out the words, “I was younger than you are now when
I left Quebec. I loved my father, too, but I was finally big enough
to hit back. I knew, the next time he came at me in a drunken rage,
I would kill him.”

He turned to look at Carinne, took a deep
breath, and continued in a voice empty of emotion. “I had no Uncle
Francis policeman to help me. I spent years in the streets, moving
south for the warm winters, working my way through school, becoming
a citizen. It was hard. It made me hard. I would hate to see that
happen to you,
chéri
.”

Carinne was moved by his sincere concern for
her. She rose from the table, walked to him, and took his massive
hands into her small ones. “I’ve never had a best friend before,
have you?”

He shook his head. Like a sphinx, he allowed
no sentiment to cross his visage, neither positive nor
negative.

Carinne smiled at him. “Well, I guess we’ve
both got one now, want ‘em or not.”

He freed one hand and used it to tousle her
hair as if he were a big brother.

In the pre-dawn twilight, Dubreau piloted the
limousine up the front driveway of the Averell mansion. After
parking at the entrance to the home, he left the driver’s seat and
went to open the rear passenger door for Carinne.

He maintained his professional, aloof manner,
waiting at attention by the open door. She emerged from the car,
ignoring him as was proper and customary. An instant before he
would have closed the door, however, she turned back and delivered
a shy peck to his cheek.

Then she entered the house, and the chauffeur
continued about his normal duties.

It was late afternoon of the following day
when Iglesias, sporting a fresh set of cuts and bruises, relaxed,
smirking, in a leather guest chair in Kyle Averell’s opulent
office. He was not sure how long he had been unconscious or how
long he had walked along the highway before getting a ride. He knew
he had spent two unhappy hours with a doctor and several more hours
sleeping off his ordeal – a painful one in many different ways.

At any rate, he had finally made his way to
the Averell mansion, determined to share his news in person. He
expected that Averell would have heard some version of the debacle
from his daughter, already, and he was right.

With such an important business agreement in
the balance, however, he was not surprised that Averell was eager
to hear the other side of the story. While Iglesias had told his
version of the previous night’s events – in elaborate and lurid
detail – Averell had paced the Oriental carpet, listening.

The account finished, Iglesias reached for
his cup and took a sip of espresso. He winced when the hot liquid
touched his split lip.

Averell had come to a standstill in the
center of the room, facing Iglesias. Behind the guest’s chair, Rico
stood against the far wall, looking very pleased.

Averell eyed Rico and barked, “Where is
Dubreau?”

“In the gym,” said Rico, “training the new
man.”

Averell nodded. “Have Guillermo take Carinne
on an extended shopping trip, at least four hours. As soon as
they’re gone, bring Dubreau to me.”

Rico left the office a happy man.

Frank Stone’s office was in a bad part of
town. At least, it was made to look like a bad part of town. The
buildings resembled a cross between industrial park and ghost town.
The only color was the green of grassy weeds springing up between
the irregular cracks in the pavement. Empty parking lots surrounded
peeling, rusting, sometimes leaning, corrugated metal walls.

The lots were empty because the employees
parked inside the buildings. Entry doors, sheltered on walls not
visible from the street, were raised and lowered by security
officers. Those allowed to enter were few and, even though familiar
faces, were required to provide proper identification badges to
gain access.

Inside, however, was a different world, one
in which state-of-the-art electronics combined with government-drab
furniture.

Stone’s jowly face was reflected in the
computer screen on his desk. A schematic of the Averell estate
appeared on the screen.

A glass wall separated Stone’s desk from a
room full of similar desks, with telephones and computer screens as
well as briefing folders. Dozens of men and women, all of them
younger than Stone, worked at the desks in that room.

A young agent whose nametag read “Agee” set a
cup of coffee down between Stone and his computer keyboard and then
stood across the desk, sipping his own coffee. “Give it up,
Stoney,” Agee said. “The guy is like Osama Bin Laden. You’re not
gonna get to him.”

Stone pointed to the drawings of Averell’s
house. “You know who he’s got in there now? Iglesias. Friggin’
Iglesias, himself. Next week he’ll be having a fish fry with
Castro.”

“And the beat goes on,” said Agee.

“Only while the drummer’s still breathin’,”
growled Stone.

Agee leaned toward Stone as he would toward a
friend. “Frank, you’ll get an ulcer, you’ll get a heart attack,
you’ll get fatal lead poisoning, or you’ll get fired and lose your
retirement. What you won’t get is Averell. The guy is too well
connected and too well protected. That’s life. Give it up. Go catch
yourself a nice terrorist or something.”