Havana Run by Les Standiford

Nine
    “You were waiting out on that patio all night?” Deal asked, examining the shield under the bright fluorescents of his condo’s kitchen. Norbert Vines, the ID read. He was a bland-looking guy in his thirties, shortish dark hair, a face that looked like it had been designed to be forgetten.
    Vines shrugged as he took his shield back. “More or less,” he said.
    “‘More or less’? What does that mean?”
    “It means we’ve had our eye on you for a while, ever since Fuentes turned up at your offices in Miami.” Vines pulled a package in a courier pouch from under his arm and dropped it on the granite-topped kitchen table, some pages of typescript sliding free.
    “Fuentes had this sent over for you, by the way,” Vines said. “It must have fallen open after it got here,” he added.
    Deal stared at the man. The ache at the back of his neck had inched upward, turning into the beginnings of a real skull-pounder. He massaged his neck, wondering if there’d been somebody skulking in the bushes outside Angie’s place, earlier. The possibility made him want to drop his shoulder and charge, send Vines backpedaling out the door and over the rail beyond.
    “Look, I’m sorry if I frightened you out there,” Vines said. “It’s not my idea of fun, staying up all night, you know.”
    “Then why bother?” Deal said.
    “Because it’s important that we talk to you,” Vines said.
    “Who’s this ‘we’?”
    Vines cleared his throat. “I’m part of a special-investigations unit within the Department of Justice,” he said. He tapped the pocket where he’d replaced his shield, as if Deal might have forgotten. “You’ve been helpful to us in the past. It’s our hope you’ll be willing to be of help again.”
    Deal shook his head. “You must have made a mistake, my friend. I’m a building contractor…”
    “You worked with Talbot Sams,” Vines interjected, his tone more forceful.
    It stopped Deal, a wave from the past washing up over him like a blast from the surf outside. Just when you think a memory might be safely buried, he thought, it’s suddenly there again, as alive as the moments themselves…Deal entering the remote field offices of the company to find a man with a badge like Vines’, offering to keep him out of jail in return for the head of a client. Deal had had little choice but to comply, but things had not gone as anyone planned…
    “
Worked
with Talbot Sams?” he managed. “Are you crazy? You’re talking about a man who tried to kill me.”
    Vines shrugged. “Sams had an agenda of his own, I’m not disputing that. But the fact is that he was within the agency’s employ. He was carrying out an investigation of a highly sensitive nature when he…”
    “…when he did his damnedest to kill me and a bunch of other people I know,” Deal finished.
    He’d cut Vines off because he knew what was coming. The man might not have been callous enough to blurt out the details, but there was no disputing that a rogue agent named Talbot Sams was two years or more dead, and Deal had had his hand on the knife that killed him.
    The fact that he’d learned it was Sams who had likely driven his father to his suicide had some bearing on how Deal felt about the matter—not to mention that Sams had been intent on plunging that same knife into Deal during the course of their struggle—but it was another chapter in his life that he wasn’t eager to revisit, not with this stranger standing in his kitchen.
    He stopped, refocusing on Vines. “The way it started with Talbot Sams, he came by my office uninvited one day, then pressured me into feeding him some information. That wouldn’t be what you had in mind, would it?”
    Deal was trying to stop the images that paraded through his mind, but it was hardly the sort of thing he’d ever forget. Talbot Sams had had a storied career as one of the Justice Department’s in-house spooks, an undercover agent with more latitude and less oversight than