Havana Run by Les Standiford Read Free Book Online Page A

beveled-glass insert. KEY WEST OFFICES was added just below. He gave Russell something of a smile. “It seems like that’s what I’ve been doing ever since, just fighting to keep my head above water.”
    Russell followed his gaze up toward the doorway. “Even now?”
    “Things are better,” Deal allowed. “Maybe that’s why I’ve been enjoying Key West so much.”
    Russell nodded, watching a young woman in a floralprint dress coming across Duval Street toward them. Orange dress with swirling white flowers, tanned and slender legs, flat white sandals that showed off her just-done, orange-tipped toes. She gave them a smile as she passed, on her way to unlock the door of the shuttered title-search and survey company.
    “What’s not to like?” Russell said, as the woman disappeared inside, leaving the smell of citrus cologne in her wake. “Good weather, rum drinks and beer, all this fine scenery.”
    “It is Lotus Land,” Deal agreed, his thoughts drifting again. He, too, had met someone in Key West, just about the same time that Russell had met Denise. But what city was it that Annie Dodds enjoyed right now?
    “You remember those phone messages?” Russell’s voice cut into his thoughts.
    Deal came out of his reverie, gave Russell a helpless look.
    “I didn’t think so,” Russell said. He reached into his pocket then and withdrew the pink wad, thrusting them Deal’s way. “And don’t forget to call the bookkeeper,” he said, pointing up the stairs. “You’re the boss of this outfit, okay?”

Chapter Five
    Deal’s call to his bookkeeper in Miami brought both bad news and good. The good news was that the trustees of a bankrupt development company for whom Deal had constructed a strip mall in South Dade had finally issued a check for his final payment, a year to the day after he’d finished the job. The bad news was that the automated payroll system they’d just had installed had run amok: Somehow $14,000 in checks had become $1,400,000. Luckily the mistake had been spotted before he’d turned his men into millionaires, but the replacement checks would have to be cut by hand and Deal’s signature would be required on each.
    “No way can I get up there tomorrow, Bernice,” he told the bookkeeper.
    “Who tells them they don’t get paid?” Bernice replied, her voice nonchalant.
    “Sign for me,” Deal said.
    “That would be forgery,” Bernice said.
    “You’ve done it before.”
    “For petty cash.”
    “What’s the difference?”
    Deal heard some tapping noises and the whir of an adding machine. “About thirteen thousand, eight hundred, and forty-two dollars,” she said.
    Deal sighed. “I trust you, Bernice. Sign the checks, will you?”
    “I could clean you out, you know. You’d come home to nothing.”
    “It wouldn’t be the first time,” he told her. “If you do it, go somewhere nice. Find yourself a man.” Bernice had celebrated her sixty-second birthday last month. She’d been married once, but it had ended sometime before the Beatles had played the Sullivan show.
    “Did you ever watch
Psycho
?” Bernice asked.
    “Sure,” Deal said.
    “Then you know what happens to thieving women,” she said.
    “Only in the movies, Bernice.”
    “You need to get back to Miami,” she said. “I don’t like the way you sound.”
    “I sound fine,” he told her.
    “Mrs. Suarez called from the concentration camp, by the way. She said to tell you everything was fine. She wanted you to know that she and Isabel will be released sometime next week.”
    Deal smiled. Mrs. Suarez was his tenant in the Miami fourplex he still called home. About Bernice’s age, she’d played surrogate grandmother for his daughter all her young life. The two of them had been dragged along to a New Age spiritual center cum fat camp by his ex-wife, who was “concerned” about their daughter’s weight.
    “This is a crucial time in a young woman’s life,” Janice had told him.
    “Isabel is ten,” he’d