Deal with the Dead by Les Standiford

boat traffic or mechanical hi-lifts hauling day-sailor craft back and forth from the landing slips to their dry dock berths, just didn’t appeal to him.
    He knew, in fact, that he had no business calling her at all, not until he’d had official notification, seen with his own eyes everything signed and sealed, no Eddie Barrios bullshit factor to consider, but he couldn’t help himself. That big ball of hope had burst loose from its full-fathom tether and exploded to the surface, and he was reeling in the seat of the Hog like a man with the bends.
    He knew he would tell her. He had to. He would be cautious, of course, play the matter down, share his suspicions that Eddie had cooked it all up in his mind, put it on Deal for whatever unimaginable reason…but he
was
going to call. He had known Janice for twenty years now, and nothing of the slightest importance had taken place in his life that he had not shared with her.
    Even now, the two of them living apart, sharing custody of Isabel, their daughter, Deal couldn’t shake that connection. Didn’t want to shake it, was what the truth was. “Come on, Deal, go out, meet somebody, get yourself a life,” that’s the sort of thing he was always hearing from his pal Vernon Driscoll, but who was Driscoll to talk? Divorced, half a dozen years out of harness as a Metro-Dade homicide cop, his idea of a big night was six bottles of Jamaican Red Stripe and watching whatever ball game was on the tube.
    The fact was that, despite everything, Deal loved Janice. He had simply never met a woman who came close to commanding his interest the way she did. Sure, she was having difficulties, but who wouldn’t? Twice, she’d nearly died at the hands of men who’d been intending to kill him. The first time she’d nearly drowned, the second time she’d been badly burned. And though time and surgery had erased the physical scars, the emotional damage had not gone away. Post-traumatic stress disorder, that’s what the doctors had finally diagnosed, but giving the condition a name had not made it any easier to treat.
    Time, Mr. Deal,
that was the doctors’ mantra.
Give her time, and give her love.
Sure, he thought, he could do that. After all, if it hadn’t been for him, none of it would have happened in the first place.
    He shook himself from his thoughts and turned over the ignition of the Hog, felt the powerful engine—bored, stroked, and turbocharged courtesy of Emilio and Rodriguez—set up its quiet rumble. Janice had almost died in this car, he reminded himself again as he pulled away from the vacant center. Maybe that was it: Every time he got in the thing, some of the bad karma rubbed off. He should get rid of the Hog, he told himself. He really should.
    ***
    About halfway back to the city, he wheeled the vehicle off Old Cutler Road, down an overgrown lane that bored through a thick stand of man-groves and holly toward the water, then into the parking lot of what passed for the offices of DealCo these days. It was a sun-bleached, double-wide portable building set up on a stilt foundation fronted by a dusty expanse of crushed coral, and had once been intended as the sales office for a time-share resort that a major hotel corporation wanted to build on the surrounding eight-hundred-acre tract of bayside property. Federal regulators and environmental interests had intervened, however, and the project had been scrapped more than a decade ago, the area designated as a natural preserve and park that was still waiting to happen.
    Deal’s father, a minority partner in the venture, had managed to hang on to the ninety-nine-year lease for the lone acre upon which the sales office stood. He couldn’t build anything new there—couldn’t even erect signage—but he’d maintained the right to access the office that DealCo had installed for the hotel chain in the first place.
    The place was hot and mosquito-plagued in the summer, isolated and hard to find in every season, but there was