Raw Deal Read Free Page B

old-fashioned desk with his head in his arms. Bats and strange-looking owls flapped in the shadowy air above him.
    She had been reading the title of the piece aloud. Deal gave her a smile. “You’re not imagining it. There’s a painting right there on the wall.”
    Janice made a face. “Don’t be funny, Deal. It’s a Goya. I just wondered if it was
original
.” There was a leatherbound book inside a glass case nearby. The book lay open at a page bearing a reproduction of the same engraving on the wall.
    Deal checked the book, then turned back to the engraving. He inspected the little brass plaque nailed to the engraving’s frame, then took a step back, cocking his head for a new angle. Finally he shook his head. “It’s not original,” he said with authority.
    Janice glanced at him, curious.
    He shrugged. “I feel like that every month when it’s time to pay the suppliers.”
    “You’re awful,” she said. “We should have gone to the boat show.”
    “No,” he said, making a grab for her. “This is a great building. I’m glad we came.”
    She swatted his hand away. A matronly woman inspecting a massive abstract across the room glanced disapprovingly at them. “Stop it, Deal,” Janice whispered.
    “What do you say we hide in this place?” he said, tagging close on her heels. He gestured at a massive bronze sculpture in the middle of the room, Adam and Eve with their backs to one another. “We’ll pretend to be statues. When everybody’s gone home, we’ll reenact the Fall on that bench over there.”
    Janice tried to look stern, but her face was coloring. The matronly lady stiffened and turned back to her abstract.
    “You’re going to get us thrown out,” Janice said. He could tell she was holding back her laughter.
    You ever get married, make sure it’s to a woman with a sense of humor
, that’s what his father had told him. Given him that along with a bunch of other advice, most of which had turned out to be worthless, just like the construction business he had left, Deal thought. Still, one pearl of wisdom made up for a lot.
    Janice stopped in front of a Picasso. “I can’t believe all these things are here,” she said. They had heard about the place from a friend, David Coetzee, who collected Latin-American paintings. “A hidden gem,” David had called it. “Right here on Brickell Avenue.”
    And he was right, Deal thought. In a city without a proper museum, it was doubly surprising to find this collection, and nearly as surprising that few people seemed to know of it. They hadn’t seen a dozen others. He and Janice, along with the frigid matron, who’d fled the room, seemed to be the only visitors left, and if it hadn’t been for the rain that had kept him off the job that morning, there might have been only one person in the place.
    As it was, Deal had taken a rare Saturday off and fulfilled the idle promise he’d made to Janice the night David had told them about the place. He’d been cranking hard on the job, a massive home in the Grove he was rebuilding for Terrence Terrell, the computer genius who’d brought major league baseball—the Manatees—to South Florida.
    Although home-building had not been Deal’s major interest, the hurricane had changed all that. People had been desperate to put their lives back together, and Deal had come to find more satisfaction in that, less in throwing up storage warehouses and strip shopping centers.
    Terrell had seen some of Deal’s work, the renovation of a home in Gables by the Sea that had taken the brunt of the storm surge, eight feet of Biscayne Bay right through the doors and windows. Although Deal had his reservations about working for such a legendary stickler, Terrell had badgered him until he’d finally relented. And he was glad he had. He and Terrell’s architects, a group Deal had worked with before, had free rein. No more project managers urging him to cut corners, find a way around the building codes. Terrell had money