Deal to Die For by Les Standiford Read Free Book Online

boulevard from the broad band of beach. A long-haired guy tossing a Frisbee to a tireless mutt, a lemonade cart tended by another girl in a microscopic bikini, a person of indeterminate sex bundled in what seemed to be several coats asleep beneath one of the palms.
    He’d heard about it, of course, how the Beach had become hot, the crumbling Deco hotels given a coat of paint and a new set of room rates, the dodderers shoved off the porches where once they’d sat in rows, elbow to elbow, and stared out across the boulevard at the Atlantic. Now the porches and the shaded colonnades and the fanciful terraces had become sidewalk cafés and bars and restaurants of note, and glitterati from New York and Los Angeles crowded onto weekend flights just to schmooze along this ten-block strip where a dozen years ago you couldn’t have given away the property.
    Another business opportunity he’d failed to foresee, Deal thought, as he stepped lively across the boulevard. There was a red Testarossa bearing down on him from the right, a bargelike Buick convertible from the fifties, meticulously restored, lumbering up from the left. He squeezed between a Bentley and a gleaming ’65 Mustang parked on the opposite curb, thinking,
there is a serious car thing going on here
, and took a backward glance at the Hog. It seemed to fit right in. Maybe someone would make him an offer, he could go home in a taxi.
    He was also worrying that he had made a mistake in suggesting The News. The café was another facet of the “revived” South Beach that he had heard about but never seen. The place was a madhouse, tables spilling out onto the terrace, an adjoining courtyard, the sidewalk, all of the places filled, waiters and waitresses edging frantically through the throngs and the gauntlet of customers who waited under the front awning and clamored for a seat.
    Deal glanced around, thinking that he’d collar Barbara when she arrived, take her somewhere where they could hear themselves talk. There was a Newberry’s over on Washington, in the old downtown, had been there since he was a kid. That was the ticket. Orange soda in a paper cone plopped in a silver holder, BBQ beef sandwich that was really a Sloppy Joe, grease-dripping fries in another conical cup.
    He could taste it, suddenly, smell the tang of the ketchupy sauce, see the waitresses in their hair nets and starched white uniforms, feel his mother taking time out from the weekly shopping trip to wipe his mouth with a handkerchief she’d wet with her tongue…and thought for a moment that he was going to lose it, maybe just sit down on the curb and break into tears in front of all these pretty people and their automobiles.
    “Deal,” he heard then. “Deal!” And looked up to see Barbara, standing on tiptoes at the door of the restaurant, as pretty as an angel, elbowing a guy in mirrored sunglasses aside, and waving him her way.
    ***
    “I got here early,” she said, staring at him from across the wooden table. They were tucked away inside, in a rustic diner-styled booth, another world from the madcap scene outside. Although all the inside booths were full and the kitchen doors whipped steadily open and closed, the hubbub and the chatter seemed to be soaked up by the dark beams and paneling. Across from where they sat was a tiny library of books and newspapers—“feel free to browse,” the waitress had told them—which Deal assumed gave the place its name.
    He took the intensity in her gaze until he was the one to turn away. When he’d met Barbara, she’d been coming off a years-long affair with her boss, one of Miami’s movers and shakers, a lawyer with more money than Croesus and an unshakable arrangement with his equally prominent wife. The guy had eventually gone down in flames, and Barbara had professed gratitude at the turn of fate that set her free. She’d moved to Boca Raton, found a job she liked, dated, lived like a normal person, as she put it. Still, Deal