Free Deal with the Dead by Les Standiford Page A

Chrysler had drifted to the right, dangerously close to the curb. The old man up ahead had noticed what was coming, had begun to urge his wife back across the sidewalk.
    “Look out,” Deal said, reaching toward the wheel.
    “What’s the matter with you?” Padilla said, pushing Deal’s hand away. He jerked hard on the wheel, sending the Chrysler into a power slide off the boulevard, through a break in the curbing that looked like it had been gouged with a pick. They were bounding along an unpaved access road now, passing through a series of low-lying dunes that blocked the view of the Atlantic up ahead. “I could have had an accident.”
    Deal glanced back in the direction of the elderly couple, but the dust boiling up in their wake obscured everything. “I thought we were going to Bal Harbour,” he said to Padilla.
    Padilla nodded. “They are going to do that thing in Bal Harbour, too,” he said. “But this is even better.”
    Deal stared at him suspiciously. They were nowhere near the site Padilla had been telling him about, a proposed office building just off Collins near the 125th Street Causeway. This was a relatively undeveloped area of the beach where street signs hadn’t even been erected. A major chain had announced plans to build a resort complex along in here, but they were using their own people for the construction. Deal hadn’t even bothered to put in a bid.
    They were coming out the other side of the dunes now, the Atlantic in view, and Padilla slowed the Chrysler, which was beginning to wallow in the sand that grew softer near the water’s edge. A moment later, Padilla hit his brakes and they stopped altogether. Padilla turned off the engine and turned to smile at him.
    “So, what do you think?”
    Deal stared back at him. The surf, kicked up by a norther that had passed through just before New Year’s, was pounding a steady rhythm in the distance, hardly time for the crash of one wave to die away before the next thundered down. The breeze through the opened windows was stiff and steady, carrying with it the tang of seaweed and a hint of spray.
    Over Padilla’s shoulder, further northward along the beach where an old geezer with a nose protector was casting a line out into the surf, Deal could see great stacks of forming materials and rebar piled among the dunes. Up there, he realized, was where the great hotel complex would rise.
    “I always liked the seashore,” Deal said. “What else do you want to know?”
    “I am talking about this site,” Padilla said. “This land which is all around us.”
    “It’d be a great place to build a hotel,” Deal said. “I suppose that’s why Nicky Hilton is going to do it.”
    Padilla waved his hand, dismissing him. He reached to take off his sunglasses. “The Hilton is going up
there,”
he said, using his dark glasses to point toward the great piles of material in the distance. “Down
here
is where our friends wish to build.”
    Deal stared at him. Without the dark glasses, Padilla’s eyes took on a squinty, nearsighted look. Maybe that was part of the problem with his driving. “Build what?” Deal asked.
    “Ask
him!
”
Padilla said, smiling.
    Deal turned around, saw that a limousine had pulled up on the sandy track behind them, the sound of its motor masked by the crashing surf. Doors had already opened. A couple of big guys whose expressions suggested they gargled carpet tacks for mouthwash stood in front of the limo with their hands folded in front of them. A chauffeur was helping someone else out of the back.
    A man in a black suit and a maroon tie, Deal saw. Full head of silver hair, not a strand disturbed by the breeze. Dark brows, a thick nose, eyes that bored in on anything that moved—in this case, boring in on Barton Deal, who had swung open the door of the Chrysler, getting out himself.
    “Jesus Christ,” Deal said to Padilla across the top of the Chrysler.
    Padilla had put his dark glasses back on. He shook his head at