Havana Run Read Free Page B

obelisk in
2001: A Space Odyssey
—Awe inspiring; Mysterious; Nothing much inside.
    The first two floors of the building housed the National Bank of the Caymans. The other twenty-two floors were largely unoccupied. The owners, whoever they were, must not have been concerned. Rent had held steady at $42 per square for four years, ever since the day his old man had signed off on the certificates of occupancy and gone on to the next distinguished set of clients.
    “I don’t get bored,” Driscoll was saying. “I savor the nature of my work, even the most miserable, minutiae-ridden aspects of it, such as this.”
    “You have a screw loose,” Deal said. There was an elevated plaza in front of the bank, with a big fountain surrounded by some black marble benches. During the day, secretaries came out to sit in the shade of the towers and eat their lunches and watch the water spritz over the bronze sculpture of Triton, who lay practically naked in the middle of the fountain. Now the plaza was empty, except for Triton, who lay back on one elbow looking just about as excited as Deal’s partner.
    “I do have a screw loose,” Driscoll said. “Why else would I be a cop?”
    “
I’m
a cop,” Deal said, shifting his weight from one buttock to the other. He felt the nudge of a spring in the Vic’s seat beneath him. How many had sat here before him, how many hours spent sitting and waiting for something to happen?
    “You are a poseur,” Driscoll said, his tone affable.
    “The last guy told me that is still sucking soup through a straw,” Deal said. He glanced down at his palms, brushing them as if there were dust there.
    “There’s not another person on the force who knows the meaning of the word,” Driscoll said. “Besides, I didn’t say you couldn’t handle yourself.”
    Deal took his eyes off the façade of the bank building for a moment. “Why’d you let them stick me with you, anyway?”
    “That’s not the way it works, buddy boy. I just do what I’m told.”
    Deal stared at him. “My old man spread a little juice around—some of it came your way?”
    Driscoll made a grunting sound deep in his throat. “He’d have to pay a hell of a lot.” He examined one of his own thick hands, front and back, like maybe there was writing on one side, he’d forgotten which. “You like action, why didn’t you become a fireman?”
    “I thought about it,” Deal said, “but my old man plays cards with the fire chief.”
    “He plays cards with the police chief, too,” Driscoll said.
    “But he doesn’t like
him
,” Deal said.
    “You do have a screw loose,” Driscoll said. “Anybody else wouldn’t mind a little suck with the brass.”
    “Funny,” Deal said. “That’s exactly what my old man said when I told him I was going up for detective.”
    Driscoll sighed, an indication that went far beyond the shrug. “You could be building bank towers for offshore clients, knocking down some real jack, instead of sitting here trying to put them away.”
    Deal nodded. “Apparently this pisses some people in the department off?”
    Driscoll raised an eyebrow. “It makes them think you’ve got a screw loose. Either that or your old man set you down here.”
    Deal felt heat rising up the back of his neck. Following graduation from Gainesville, he’d spent a few desultory years running from job site to job site as one of his old man’s construction supervisors, marking time as an overpaid flunky, waiting to take over the reins of DealCo Construction when his old man got ready to chuck it in and move down to the Keys, sometime around the middle of the twenty-first century.
    There’d been a hell of a blowup when he’d left the job, another one when he’d joined the force. His old man thought he’d lost his mind, snorted that Deal would be back, groveling for his job inside of a month.
    But he’d stuck it out, spent three years on patrol, another year and a half as assistant to the assistant chief, before he’d