Free Presidential Deal by Les Standiford

we’ll have your wallet returned, Mr. Deal,” Fielding said, smoothing his hair into place. It was impressive hair, Deal thought. The kind someone like Fielding would want to keep smooth. “Let’s get you up with the others, then I’ll take care of it.”
    Deal glanced at the silent doorway. Along with the expired license, he had maybe fifty dollars in the wallet, a wad of receipts and notes, Driscoll’s business card. Maybe they’d lose the wallet, he could say he’d been carrying a fortune.
    “What say we go on upstairs, Mr. Deal?”
    Deal turned to him.
What say?
Deal thought.
What say?
    “Sure,” he told Fielding finally, and followed the man away.

Chapter 7
    “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