Havana Run Read Free Page A

significant interest in the woman for so long. Whatever works, Deal thought, ignoring a little pang of wistfulness that rose and then popped like a bubble inside him.
    He turned away to check the schooner again, but the osprey had disappeared. That was one of the things about Key West: little amazements, how they come and go.
    “Speaking of that fat-ass Driscoll,” Russell said at his shoulder.
    “What about him?” Deal said.
    “He told me something interesting the other day.”
    Deal turned. “He’s giving up his efforts to have your parole revoked?”
    Russell ignored it. “He told me you used to be a cop.”
    “Did he, now?”
    Russell ventured a laugh. “I told him he was crazy.”
    Deal finished his tea. He liked the tea they served here. It had a fruity, tropical undertaste that seemed to go with the setting. He’d assumed it was a house recipe. When he’d asked, Tom had informed him it was Lipton’s.
    “What did Driscoll say then?”
    Russell looked at him more closely. “He said ask you.”
    “How much is riding on this, Russell?”
    Russell leaned back in his chair. “I didn’t say we bet.”
    “You didn’t have to. How bad are you going to feel when you have to pay up, Russell?”
    Russell narrowed his eyes. “You shitting me?”
    “Driscoll told you the truth,” Deal said.
    “Bullshit,” Russell said. “You’re just going along with him.”
    Deal reached into his pocket, found his money clip, extracted a twenty and slid it across the table. Russell glanced down at the bill, then shoved it back. “Man,” he said, shaking his head.
    “Keep it,” Deal said. “Call it gas money.”
    “Man,” Russell repeated. He finished his Red Stripe, then turned to the darkened service entry, the twenty held high in his hand. “Hey, Magnum,” he called. “Bring us another round.”
    Deal nodded as the bartender emerged and headed for the cooler. “You want to hear the whole thing, it might take two,” he said to Russell. And then he began.

Chapter Three
    Miami 1989
    It was dusk on the way, the heat lifting up from the South Florida streets as if the lid of a giant pot had been lifted somewhere high above. Just a breeze rolling in off the steely waters of Biscayne Bay and down the concrete corridors flanking Brickell Avenue, Deal thought, but why couldn’t a person imagine one of the Titans mucking about up there, past where the magic beanstalks end and some other world begins—right now, a curious, bad-news god checking what was cooking in the always boiling pot called Miami.
    Crazy, sure, but your mind tends to wander, doing what he was doing. And so what if it was crazy? One person hears thunder and calls it a weather-related phenomenon. Why couldn’t it just as well be the gods at tenpins?
    “So, who do you like in the Super Bowl?” his partner asked.
    Deal turned his gaze from out the open window of the Vic, glanced through the twilight gloom at Vernon Driscoll, who sat with both hands on the wheel, as if they were moving, as if they were headed somewhere. “It’s August,” Deal said. “I haven’t given it a lot of thought.”
    Driscoll shrugged. “Time flies,” he said. “Now’s when you get the odds you like. Brownies and the Cowboys, that’s what I’m thinking. Cowboys to cover.”
    “You must be bored,” Deal said. So, he had giants lifting pot lids from steamy skies, Driscoll had the Super Bowl on the very opposite side of the calendar. Each to his own.
    He turned his gaze back out the window. They had parked the unmarked car in the first slot on a side street off Brickell, just south of the Miami River, a stretch of the broad boulevard that had once been flanked by stately two-story homes occupied by the city’s movers and shakers, now a man-made canyon with bank towers for walls looming high overhead.
    As a matter of fact, Deal’s old man had built the colosus catty-corner from where they sat, twenty-four stories of shiny black glass that reminded him of the