Deal to Die For Read Free Page A

wasn’t short-range.
    Come on, hurry up, get lucky
, Paco was thinking. Some guy as dumb as Chico from the joint up there, doesn’t know what to do when the script changes. Then he heard another crack, realized that this time it was the sound of wood shattering…and finally, he felt a kind of relief, flying, going down to meet the great red fish.

Chapter 2
    “God in heaven,” Janice was saying. She shook her head at something she was reading in the paper. “It happens everywhere, doesn’t it.”
    Deal heard, but hadn’t heard, not really. His mind was out there over the vast plain of sawgrass, twisting and turning lazily with a squadron of November buzzards riding the rising currents.
    This was why Florida had been invented, he’d been thinking. A cold front had swept down the state earlier in the week, pushing a stubborn winter heat wave well out into the Caribbean, leaving behind bright skies and air that made you want to weep with gratitude.
    Something had awakened him early that morning, some signal from the gods, that’s how he saw it. Up before the sun, before Janice had even stirred, banging around the kitchen, brewing a pot of coffee thick enough to spoon into the Thermos, laying out a phalanx of his special avocado and tomato sandwiches, sourdough bread on the bottom, slabs of hand-cut whole wheat on top, lemon pepper and a drizzle of vinaigrette dressing for Janice, Captain Rick’s Caesar for himself, then fruit yogurt, juice bottle, and any number of snack things for their daughter Isabel, all of it packed and their bikes loaded into the back of the pickup they called Big Red, and the sun still just a hint at the horizon.
    Janice had been grumpy at first, but was finally game—it was an annual trek, after all, their first foray into the Everglades with the mosquitoes gone into hibernation and the park empty, the crowds of snowbirds still massing up North, shining their Winnebagos and white shoes and dreaming of a paved spot in the Florida sunshine.
    The tradition had begun when they were courting, a dozen years ago, two rent bikes tethered to the trunk of his car, and a bottle of wine, out the Tamiami Trail past the dikes and the last tendrils of urban sprawl to the shuttered visitors’ center at Shark Valley, over the chained barricades with the bikes to the loop road, and a seventeen-mile circle through corridors of sawgrass and hammock. They had ridden past alligators, raccoons, ibis, and anhingas, all the creatures still too stunned with the rhythms of a solitary summer to pay much notice to a single pair of humans cruising through.
    That first trip they’d found the observation tower at the halfway point closed, but Deal had jimmied the door to the stairwell with the awl point on his Swiss Army knife. They drank the wine on this same shaded stairwell landing and made love there, their first time, while the sun sank steadily and the air grew cool, almost as cool as the air on this day, and had to ride the bikes back flat-out in the gathering dusk, dodging the rousing gators all the way.
    That’s where his mind had been on this day, twelve years later, while Janice lounged in a sunny spot on the landing, reading the copy of the
Times
they’d picked up from a box in a strip mall on the way. Isabel, no early riser, even at three, had stayed at home after all, watched over by Mrs. Suarez, their neighbor. “Let her sleep, Deal,” Janice had said. “Let’s do this, just you and me.”
    And now they
were
doing it: Deal was sitting with his legs dangling in space, his arms hooked over a part of the stair railing, his chin resting on the cool metal. He lay his cheek on the rail and watched her as she read, her brow furrowed, her head still shaking in consternation. He thought that she hadn’t changed much in the intervening years, not in physical ways, at least. She was a little leaner maybe, her hair shorter, with a fleck of gray here and there; if anything, her soft, pleasant features had acquired