Book Deal by Les Standiford Page A

Deal, it sometimes seemed a lot more clear-cut than what the doctors wanted to make it.
    Think of it this way: Hang around Deal, someone tries to drown you, then burn you to a cinder. What would anyone expect next? Earthquake? Avalanche? Most guys, when they pissed somebody off, at the worst you’d have to duck a haymaker, maybe get a call from a lawyer. Deal, on the other hand, seemed to have a knack for attracting psychotics and assassins.
    He laughed mirthlessly and shook himself from his thoughts, turned back to Arch. Decent, sensitive Dylan Archibald Dolan. His friend through thick and thin. The shy kid from high school who’d grown up to be tall, dark, and as exotically attractive as the poets his mother had insisted he be named after.
    “You’re the one who ought to be married, Arch,” Deal said. “I see all these women in here, running you around the sexology stacks. If there was anybody who could keep from screwing it up, it’d be you.”
    Arch laughed. “It comes back to my basic human decency,” he said. “I look into the limpid pools of a woman in love and I remind myself how that fervent expression is going to change when I show her the bank statement at the end of every month.”
    “Come off it,” Deal said. “One slow Sunday and you’re going to sing the blues?”
    “I wish that was all I had to worry about,” Arch said, his voice growing more somber. He finished his beer, used the empty bottle as a pointer. “You know what’s coming across the street?”
    Deal turned in his seat. The view out this set of windows was not particularly remarkable. A bank building on one corner, the abandoned Trailways station on the other. The VW convertible Deal had earlier taken for Janice’s was gone now, replaced by a Cadillac as new and shiny as the Grant Wood couple’s. The traffic seemed to have died away, everyone in place before the consulate’s big screen by now, he imagined.
    “What am I supposed to see, Arch?”
    “The bookstore that ate the Gables,” Arch said.
    Deal turned. “What are you talking about?”
    Arch reached into the wastebasket they were using for a cooler, found another beer and opened it. “Eddie Lightner called a few weeks back. You know Eddie, don’t you?”
    Deal nodded without enthusiasm. Lightner was a commercial real estate broker with a penchant for the offshore client. He kept one office in Miami, another in Grand Cayman. A goodly number of his stateside business associates had fallen into misunderstandings with one governmental agency or another, and Deal’s father had once threatened to make him part of the foundation of a condominium tower when Lightner came scavenging around the DealCo offices at a difficult time. But while so many others around him had gone down in flames, Lightner had endured unscathed for decades, friend and confidant to a dozen successive, wildly disparate city administrations.
    “Well, Eddie was just calling me as a friend,” Arch continued. “He wanted me to know that someone had finally picked up the lease on the Trailways station.”
    “The pedestrian mall people?” Deal said. That had been a much ballyhooed possibility for the property, which consisted of an entire city block, ever since the bus company had pulled out more than a year ago. Turn the whole thing into an inviting plaza with fountains, lush plantings, boutiques, and upscale shops that would lure Gables shoppers back downtown.
    “I wish,” Arch said.
    “The cineplex?” Sixteen theaters, a couple of restaurants, on-site parking, it was another proposal favored by Gables city fathers and business leaders.
    Arch shook his head, still glum.
    “Okay, the governor wants to build a prison there,” Deal said.
    Arch tried to laugh, but there wasn’t much joy in it. “I’d be the first to sign a petition for that,” he said, taking a healthy swallow of his beer. “The fact is, Lightner called to let me know that my new neighbor was going to be a Mega-Media