Presidential Deal (22 page)

“Okay,” Gavin said, ushering him toward the opened gate.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Driscoll said.

“Captain Billy said take care of you,” Gavin said. “A man don’t know his way around down here, he can use some help.”

Driscoll thought about it for a moment. “Just a second,” he said. He leaned into the bed of the truck, caught hold of Brisa’s manacled hands, found his key. He unsnapped one of the cuffs and Brisa started up, grumbling, but Driscoll jerked him toward the back of the truck bed and snapped the cuff shut around the heavy safety chain that dangled at the tailgate.

“Hey,” Brisa protested. “Let me loose.”

Driscoll hesitated. “You saying I can trust you not to run away?”

“I told you, man. I’m on your side.”

Driscoll thought, but he didn’t think long. “No can do,” he said. When Brisa hesitated, Driscoll reached over the tailgate and clipped him behind his knees. Brisa went down with a groan.

“Man having his troubles,” Gavin said as they moved off toward the gate.

“His troubles are only beginning,” Driscoll said.

Gavin made a chuffing sound that might have been a chuckle. The three of them moved quickly through the gate, then walked quietly toward the house along the graveled driveway, Tilton leading the way. They were out from under the canopy of trees now, and the rain seemed to have picked up, hissing at the thick carpet of grass.

When they had drawn even with the window where the lamp was burning, Tilton eased across the driveway and pulled himself up by the sill. He stared inside briefly, then dropped down and came back to join them, shaking his head.

Driscoll moved on toward the broad terraced entryway, wondering if he was doing the right thing after all, then just as quickly dismissed those doubts. At least he’d fallen into the right hands, it seemed.

He moved quietly up the smooth stone steps and over the threshold. “I need to go inside,” he said when the two had joined him on the terrace. He gestured at the doorway. “I need to find out what kind of place this is, what kind of business they do, and who’s involved. It might take me a little while…”

“Only midnight,” Gavin said mildly. “We got plenty of time. And Tilton get you in, no problem.”

“I appreciate it,” Driscoll said, “but you don’t have to…”

“Say, chief.” Tilton’s voice came to them then, not much above a whisper, but carrying a note of concern that brought both their heads around.

“See here,” Tilton said. His hand pushed lightly at the door, which swung inward at his touch.

“Not locked?” Gavin said. His tone suggested it wasn’t a charming local characteristic.

He motioned Tilton inside with a nod, then started after him, holding Driscoll back with his trailing hand.

“Sorry, pardner,” Driscoll said. He put his hand on Gavin’s wrist and they stared at each other for a moment. Finally, Gavin allowed a doubtful lift of his brows and dropped his hand.

Driscoll came in quickly on Gavin’s heels, noting the smell right away. Something of it was the slightly musty, damp-wood odor that all old houses seemed to have. Anytime he visited a place that provided the least whiff of it, Driscoll found his mind filled with images of himself as a child, puttering about his grandparents’ sprawling Victorian home in Ocala. Though the absurdity of such a Northern-style structure being imported to Florida had not struck him until adulthood, he’d loved it as a child: wooden staircases, fore and aft; dumbwaiters and laundry chutes connecting its three floors; window glass that bubbled and wavered in spots, warping the normal Ocala outdoors into a landscape of magic and mystery…probably another clue to how he’d gone wrong, Driscoll thought, watching Gavin move carefully down the hall away from him.

No sign of Tilton, and even though he heard what sounded like the creak of a stair tread somewhere above, the staircase itself was empty. Driscoll turned toward the front of the house where he’d seen the light burning, easing his way along. He knew that the oak floorboards, the plaster walls, and the age of the place were primarily to account for the smell, but there was something else there, some tang of machine oil, maybe whatever it was they used to wax all the wood, he thought: not only was the floor gleaming in the soft reflection of the light from the parlor up ahead, but so was the dark molded paneling that lined the hallway.

He reached the parlor door, which leaned a few inches ajar, leaking the lamplight that guided him. He waited for a moment, listening, but there was no sound, and besides, Tilton had already looked inside this room from outside, hadn’t he?

Driscoll nudged at the door with his hand, but nothing happened. Something seemed to catch at the bottom. A doorstop, he wondered? Or a bunched rug? He pushed harder, felt the door give a little. Something heavy sliding across the polished floorboards inside there.

He shoved again and nearly fell as the door gave way, sending him into the room in a drunken stumble. It might have been some granny’s parlor once, he thought as he blinked, adjusting to the glare. But now it had been converted into a waiting room of sorts: a couple of leather easy chairs flanked the table that held the lamp he’d seen from outside; there was a leather sofa hunched against one wall, a coffee table littered with magazines. There was an area rug on the burnished floor all right, a tightly knotted Persian rug in a dark pattern, the real thing, or so it seemed to his eye.

But the rug wasn’t what had been jamming the door, Driscoll noted. It was the guy lying behind it, facedown at the edge of a vast, muddy stain that had been smeared up considerably when he’d pushed the guy through it. Now he realized what he’d been smelling. If this
was
a waiting room, then this man was going to be waiting a long, long time. He glanced about the otherwise empty room, then circled the mess on the floor to get a look at the guy’s face.

A mistake, he thought, turning away from the mass of splintered bone and tissue where the bullet, or bullets, must have exited. He guessed that the guy had been Latino, but he couldn’t be certain even of that much. He was bending down, about to search the body for identification, when he heard hurried footsteps coming down the corridor.

Gavin came through the door, glanced at the body, took in Driscoll’s hand that hovered inside his coat. “Tilton’s upstairs,” he said simply. He turned, and Driscoll presumed he was supposed to follow.

The big man was already halfway up the stairs by the time Driscoll made it to the hallway, and had disappeared altogether by the time Driscoll hit the first landing. At the top of the staircase he paused, looking right and left, seeing nothing but darkness.

“Here,” Gavin’s voice came, a harsh whisper from the darkness straight ahead.

Driscoll realized there was a room opening directly across the hallway from him, could make out Gavin’s vague bulk in the doorway. He stepped forward and felt Gavin’s big hand on his arm. There was another rank odor in this room, a hint of what he’d noticed downstairs, but this time it was overshadowed. Kerosene, he thought. Or lamp oil, like the scented stuff Deal sometimes used in his outdoor tiki torches.

“Show him,” he heard Gavin say.

A vague nimbus of light sprang up, and Driscoll realized that Tilton had snapped on his flashlight, keeping one hand cupped over the lens. It wasn’t much light, but it was enough. More than enough.

Tilton stood a few feet away from them on the other side of a broad and gleaming cherrywood desk. Driscoll had a glimpse of a credenza, its files tossed wildly, a tumbled computer monitor with its screen shattered, its processor smashed by what might have been hammer blows.

There was also someone else behind the desk, a guy flopped in a high-backed swivel chair, this one frozen too in the eternal waiting position. He was an Anglo, a fair-haired guy with what you might mistake for a dark mole in the middle of his forehead, another such dot high on his cheek. Two neat little dots, Driscoll thought, glad that he didn’t have to look at what was on the wall behind the guy.

“See here,” Tilton said. He grabbed the dead guy’s hair and pulled his head forward, toward the light. The guy’s jaw gaped open and what Driscoll saw inside his mouth made his stomach heave.

“They took his teeth,” Gavin said. “Tore his teeth out, man. And look at his hands.”

Driscoll didn’t especially want to look at the guy’s hands, but he turned back anyway. Tilton had let the guy’s head fall back, now stood holding one of the corpse’s palms to the light. Five fingers, all right, but each one ending in a bloody stump. The palm had had most of its flesh hacked away; something waved from the thumb pad like a white worm.

“Both hands like that,” Gavin said. “Man still warm.”

Driscoll had turned away, swallowing against the gorge that threatened at his gut. Too old, he thought. Getting too old. He nodded finally, turned back to the two of them. Tilton, thankfully, had left the corpse’s side, was walking around the desk toward them.

“Some voodoo shit, maybe,” Tilton said.

“You think?” Gavin said.

Driscoll was shaking his head, trying to make sense of it. “No prints, no dental ID,” he said, as much to himself as to them. “Maybe the guy downstairs wasn’t in the bank.”

“What you say?” Gavin cocked his head at Driscoll.

“The data bank,” Driscoll said, still trying to get past the ghastly images, get his mind fixed on the matter at hand.

“Whoever this guy was, somebody didn’t want him identified. Maybe the guy downstairs was just a nobody.” He glanced up at Gavin. “Or maybe there wasn’t time to finish the job,” he continued.

He registered the stink of the lamp oil again. “Maybe whoever did this got scared off. In fact, maybe
we
…”

He might have continued, but he’d heard the creak of a stair tread again, the same sound he’d heard when he entered the place. He broke off and turned to the doorway of the room, sliding his hand inside his coat for his pistol. He saw Gavin moving toward the doorway as well, and turned back to Tilton.

“The light,” he whispered.

“Yo,” said Tilton, realizing, and he might have snapped it off if he’d been just a little quicker.

There was no sound to speak of, but Driscoll saw the muzzle flashes, saw Tilton fly forward, gasping as if a battering ram had cracked against his spine. The flashlight flew out of his hand, spinning a crazed zigzag about the room before it crashed to the floor and blinked out.

Driscoll was going down as well, rolling to his left by choice, still trying to get his hand on the .357. He saw another pair of muzzle flashes, heard a groan behind him, then a heavy thud: Gavin, he thought. Gavin hitting the wall and sliding down with a sigh.

Driscoll finally felt the cool grip of his weapon and came up on his knees, squeezing off two rounds of his own in the direction of the muzzle flashes. The explosions were deafening in the airless room. Driscoll went down again as he fired, rolling back the way he had come.

He thought he had the desk between himself and their assailant now, thought that even if his shots hadn’t hit home, they might be on somewhat equal terms. He tried to quash his harsh breathing, tried to will away the slamming pulse in his ears. Give him anything to lock onto, he thought. A stumble, the slightest scuff of leather on wood.

He heard a wet, rattling sigh behind him. Tilton, his wounds sucking air, sucking hard. He heard another groan from further away, where Gavin had gone down. And then he heard a door slam on the opposite side of the room, heard a strange soft popping noise, and next, the sound of footsteps rapidly descending stairs.

It couldn’t be, he thought, his mind rebelling for a moment. The stairs were at his back. The gunman would have had to run right over him to make it out the door and down those stairs…

But in the next instant he understood: there was a service stairwell on the other side of the room, just like the one in his grandmother’s house.

He was on his feet and out the door, bounding down the front staircase three steps at a time, one hand steadying himself on the banister, something else he’d done at his grandmother’s house nearly forty years ago, except this time the silver pistol raised in his other hand fired real bullets, and the bad guy who’d taken the back stairway in an attempt to escape was no figment of a childhood imagination.

He hit the landing with one foot and launched himself all the way to the bottom with his next step. He bounced off the opposite wall, steadied himself, then turned and ran toward the back of the house at full tilt, hitting what he hoped was the same swinging door of his youth with his leading shoulder.

As it turned out, it wasn’t a swinging door, but other things were different as well. He probably had put on a good two hundred pounds—maybe two and a quarter—since the time he’d done this as a child, enough weight, at least, to splinter the frame and send the door rocketing back on its hinges.

He went on into the kitchen sliding on one knee, the .357 braced in both hands. There was light from a distant streetlamp, light enough for Driscoll to see the door from the service stairwell shuddering on its own hinges, enough to see the shape of a tall man at the back door of the house turned and firing his way.

He saw the silent muzzle flashes and knew it was good that he saw those brilliant flowers, that he had registered them without pain, or even worse, an icy numbness. He was still sliding across that highly polished floor as he fired in return, was still moving as he emptied his weapon and the tall man who’d tried to kill him flew out the doorway, shattering its glass panes as he went.

Driscoll rose unsteadily, moving toward the open doorway, cursing himself for not holding at least one round back. He hesitated with his back to the jamb for as long as he could stand it, hearing nothing but the hiss of the rain, then finally spun out onto the landing holding an empty gun in his hand as if it might accomplish something, as if he really were ten again, he thought.

But it wasn’t an imaginary man who came forward to meet him. He saw the underhand pass coming toward him, the glint of steel in the light of a distant streetlamp. He staggered back, watching the blade slice an arc an inch in front of his gut. The force of the thrust pulled the tall man slightly off balance and Driscoll cuffed him with an awkward left, sending him into the side of the house.