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Double Deal

St. Martin's Press

The Days Before

The first question was, would Elmo Finn agree to assassinate the governor? Though he had never accepted such an assignment, Finn immediately said yes.

Which led to question two: Could he actually pull it off? On this point, opinions were furiously mixed.

Yes, if ...

No, unless ...

Maybe—it depends.

Seizing on the turmoil, Finn's pal Graves set up a calcutta and the wagers poured in—Finn wouldn't get on the grounds, he wouldn't get past the metal detector or the troopers, he wouldn't make it upstairs, he'd never even lay eyes on the governor.

Or he would.

And side bets. Finn would face a drawn gun, feel the cold pinch of handcuffs, blacken his hands on a fingerprint pad, suffer the trashing of his glossy reputation on the talk shows.

Or not.

Everyone haggled over odds and terms, especially the spy crowd, who knew Elmo Finn from Vietnam. They'd seen him do some things. The various cops and ops weren't as picky. They'd seen Elmo Finn do some things, too, but different things. George Graves merrily played each clique off against the other, egging everyone on to sweeten the pot, and soon was e-mailing weekly "Snuff the Guv" updates to all the far-flung gamblers. Although George was operating his casino right under Elmo's nose, from the guest room of Finn's sand-colored villa on Longboat Key, he decided it was safer to keep Elmo himself in the dark. Couldn't predict his reaction—Elmo Finn the purist who might stand on some principle no one else could even divine; Elmo Finn the perfectionist who had once refused a six-figure reward for capturing a serial killer (he insisted he should have caught him sooner); Elmo Finn the ... everybody had a story.

The gamblers cyberdickered over every conceivable detail except how the wagers would finally be decided: by Finn's own account of what went down. Elmo Finn would tell the truth—no one questioned that. George Graves covered everything that anybody wanted to lay off, then shut his gaming window at thirty-six thousand dollars and bought a ninety-day CD. Elmo went into his cocoon to plan the job. He cut back the golf schedule to eighteen holes a day—a three-hour forced march at sunrise when the course was empty. "Redneck golf," George sniffed, emitting great groaning yawns and pointedly refusing to share the coffee in his silver thermos. After golf, Elmo labored alone in the high-ceilinged office with the lazy overhead fans, ignoring the postcard view of the Gulf, ignoring George, ignoring Sandra, ignoring the menagerie, ignoring everything ... whisking through cyberspace on his souped-up modem, e-mailing god-knew-whom, downloading God-knew-what ... and transacting long, late-night phone calls with the louvered doors closed and the Miles Davis up. George and Sandra stubbornly refused to ask how it was going. Elmo Finn's two closest friends were sorely miffed—Sandra because her sabbatical from the Broadway dance studio was running out, and her idiosyncratic lover had selfishly cocooned himself; and George because he wasn't in on it, whatever it was.

Elmo appeared for most of the meals and never missed cocktail hour, but for weeks no one had even proposed a fuck-dinner toast, much less insisted on a vote. Life at Finn's had become "just too goddamned British," George groused: drinks at five-thirty, dinner at seven, back to the war room, tut-tut.

Sandra and George lazed through the torrid afternoons under a ring of umbrellas on the narrow Longboat beach. Watching the pelicans soar and dive and swallow. Knocking back icy straight Absolut from George's silver thermos. Wading out far enough into the bathwater Gulf to find the cooler currents. And calling Elmo Finn vile names. They had a storehouse of vile names, and agreed that for someone who believed God created day and night largely to accommodate golf and sex, Elmo Finn was sacrificing both ends of the hourglass. They discovered he had even spent an afternoon prowling the Palm Avenue galleries, and two full days in the Selby Library among the drudges.

"At least you get to sleep with him," George muttered to Sandra one afternoon. "Doesn't he say anything?"

"About what, George?"

"About anything. Whatever. Who cares? Go do a flip or something."

Sandra stretched her dancer's legs and assumed a pose of indifference. But couldn't hold it. "George, seriously, could he get shot or something ... some state trooper hiding in the shrubbery? How dangerous is this?"

"How would I know? Seriously?"

"Did all those guys bet on it?"

"Those sonsabitches'd bet on anything."

Even Elmo Finn's menagerie was out of sorts. Dr. Watson, the lopsided English bulldog who according to George "looked like Churchill and acted like Stalin," spent most of the day lying flat on the cool tiles in the foyer, his jowls spread forlornly around his face like a bib, his bloodshot eyes despairing. This was Dr. Watson's normal state of misery when Master Elmo was on the road, and apparently it applied to cocooning as well.

Falstaff, the red-and-green "imperial cockamamie" who could croak out several Shakespearean classics—including "Out damn spot" and "Kiss me Kate"—was definitely backsliding. Without his daily tutoring from Elmo, he had fallen back on an old standby—mimicking the cat. His perfect meows always fooled Macduff, the cross-eyed orange tabby, who would saunter into the den, spring to the back of the sofa and then to the top of the birdcage, and perch there for hours as if he had conquered something, while Falstaff fluttered and orated on his trapeze.

"Serve him right if they all just dropped dead," George groused to Sandra after Elmo had vanished following another desultory cocktail hour and dinner. "He's paying no more attention to them than he is to us. The goddamn dog is severely depressed, needs constant meds for his gas, the goddamn bird is severely confused from all that Shakespeare, and the goddamn cat is just severely stupid. And the great goddamn Elmo Finn is severely ... ungrateful."

"Ungrateful for what, George?" Sandra asked, giggling.

"Go do a flip."

Then one innocent morning after the sunrise eighteen, Elmo drove the golf cart back to the first tee, where the starter waved him on. "Thirty-six, anyone?" he asked cheerily. "Finally," George said with a tiny twitch-smile, "finally a full round of golf." Inspired, George finished birdie-par-birdie and won eighty dollars. Then they revived another custom that had lately surrendered to the cocoon and went to the Colony for a late lunch. The customary flirty hostess. The customary table looking out on the skinny beach and the skinny pier and the great blue Gulf, flat and still as a lake. The customary lunch—Amstel Light, conch chowder, shrimp salad. The customary talk—embroidering the good shots, rationalizing the misses, musing whether the latest fad, stroking short putts with one's eyes closed, was Zen-inspired or true madness. George thought it had possibilities.

The two men looked like brothers. Mid-forties, give or take. Elmo Finn was about six-one, trim, at one-eighty just ten pounds above his Vietnam weight, with an angular face and gray eyes softened by warm gold flecks, and a cleft in his chin like a bullet hole. George Graves was as tall as Finn, a little stockier, with musician's hair and a thin mouth that could twitch a range of smiles but which always settled into a turned-down expression of doubt or irritation or worse. Depending on the lookee.

Elmo put away his leather notebook after recording his calories and fat percentages, which he could estimate with annoying precision. Without looking up: "George, can you go tomorrow?"

George drained the second Amstel to cover his shiver. "So it's on."

Elmo nodded pleasantly. "'The game is afoot.'"

George glared for a moment. "That's not the Shakester—that's Conan Doyle."

Finn shook his head. "King Harry said it first. 'Once more unto the breach' and so forth. I think. I'm pretty sure."

"Don't cudgel your brains about it. Pack big, pack small?"

"Small will do."

"I'm already packed."

"I assumed so. 'The readiness is all.'"

"Hamlet."

Elmo inclined his head a few inches.

"Act Five."

A few more inches.

"Hamlet telling Horatio, I'm ready for Laertes. Bring that dipstick on."

Elmo's eyebrows shot up and he made a full-fledged bow. George took another sip from the empty glass. His mouth turned down to the maximum.

"Sandra will certainly be pleased," George said.

"She settled for Bermuda. Said it was the perfect hideout for assassins. If you and Angie don't come, we'll have you kidnapped and brought. That'll be a snap after snuffing a guv-nah."

George flashed an indulgent smile, followed by another dry sip, followed by another plunge of the mouth.

"If it's not too much bother, Colonel Finn, perhaps you might give me some tiny little hint of what is expected of me. Since I am not in the goddamn loop. Since I ain't snuffed all that many guv-nahs lately. Since the readiness is all, don't you know. Forsooth."

Elmo was chuckling and smiling broadly. "Combat rules, George. Need to know. Thought you'd want it that way, all those bets you've been covering."

Nashville, the capital city of Tennessee. A metropolis of a half-million people, home to empires in medicine and publishing and insurance and education, yet whose image remains country music, whose image to many, according to the mayor, remains Hee Haw.

A West Nashville neighborhood of boxlike old houses groaning under ancient oaks and elms, houses once deemed mansions, where the upper crust had lived, where the Sunday afternoon streets had been cruised by legions of the envious in newly-washed cars. A mixed neighborhood today—half the mansions sliced into apartments, half the residents retired, the Sunday streets yawningly empty after church.

Two men and a woman sit inside a cream-colored van with opaque windows parked diagonally across the street from one of the old three-story gray-shingled mansions. Unlike its dark and shuttered neighbors, the house is brightly lighted inside and out. A broad porch extends along the front and down one side.

"Lit up like fuckin' Disneyland," the woman code-named Red says from the backseat. "I don't know, Blue. Where can you hide on that porch?"

"You can see everything from right here," the driver, White, says, glancing back at the woman called Red. "Everything—the front hall, the whole porch—"

"Looks like a fuckin' movie set," Red says.

"It does! It sure to hell does! Take some cojones try to hide on that porch," White, the driver, says. "Even you, Miz Red, with your very righteous pair."

Red ignores the driver and scrunches forward into the space between the high-backed seats, her eyes cocked toward the other man, the silent man. "It is pretty well lit up, Blue, that's a fact."

Blue still says nothing, forcing silence from the others. Then he sighs heavily to convey his mounting exasperation. When he finally speaks, his voice is softer than theirs, barely modulated and thus more sinister, and he does not look at them but continues to gaze at the bright house across the street.

"On the side porch, past that planter thing. Down low. Nobody can see you there even with the porch lights on, and the porch lights will be out. The porch lights will be out."

After a moment Red asks, "Which room did he hang himself in?" She shivers a little.

"Top floor. Center."

"Jesus."

Another long silence. Then she says, "Is the first commercial in the eleven o'clock news always at the same time?"

"Close enough," Blue says.

"What's the cat's name? I never can remember that name."

"Baskerville. Baskerville. But the cat's name don't matter. The cat matters." Blue checks his watch, luminous in the dark. "Speaking of which."

"Is it time?"

Within seconds the door to the bright old house opens a few inches, then closes.

"See him?"

"Hell no!" White says.

Red says, "I saw a blur. I think." She scoots over to the window.

"You just saw Baskerville."

"Son of a seacook, that ain't much time!" White grips the steering wheel with both hands.

"It's enough," Blue says in a biting whisper, still staring at the house. He realizes he should have expected their jitters. "Be quick but don't hurry. You get it? Be quick but don't hurry. Take a deep breath and push right in. I know for a fact it's enough time. Look—look—that's her. Right there on the porch. Sometimes she comes out for the air."

A small woman bundled in a long robe walks to the edge of the porch and looks downward. She is mouthing something, apparently talking to the cat.

"And she's always alone?"

"Always," Blue says. "Always. I 'spect she'll need more than air, you two get done."

They laugh, as he intended. Better. Jitters are normal. Should have expected it. He can talk them through it.

"They can hear out there, you know. There's no privacy like in the Mansion ..." Nikki Gannon, the First Lady of Tennessee, lay sprawled on her back on pale yellow sheets in the California king, her arms flung wide. She stared at the high ceiling.

"They're down at the other end of the hall, Nikki, they can'thear. And I really don't think the Tennessee State Police are trying to eavesdrop on our bedroom. Just bear with it—we'll be back in the Mansion before long. Behind all those nice tight soundproof doors." Governor Lucas Gannon was stretched out on a flowered chaise in a corner of the spacious room, a stack of documents on his lap, a four-line telephone on the antique table at his elbow.

Nikki folded her arms tightly across her chest and let out a long low sound. She shuddered and curled under the goosedown comforter.

Luke Gannon said, "What's to hear, anyway? It's not like there's been any action in this room lately."

"I know, I know, that's what I mean! They listen out there and they don't hear anything and spread it around that the governor and his wife ... I can tell from their faces."

"Oh, now I get it—you want them to hear something? Okay, Nikki, fine, let's give 'em something to hear, let's give 'em somethin' to talk about, the First Couple actually coupling! We can wail and moan and—"

"Why are all these extra troopers around all the time, Lucas? I'm not blind, you know, I see them, all the extra body men. Have there been more threats? Tell me!"

"No, Nikki. No more than usual, every governor gets threats. Mostly crackpots, you know that."

"Mostly crackpots. Mostly! Oh that's comforting, Lucas. I feel so much better now. No more than usual! Mostly crackpots."

He closed his eyes and stretched for a long moment. His voice softened. "We're in a rut, Nikki, a bad rut. No quality time. My schedule's murder, your schedule's murder, the goddamn legislature ..." He laughed sourly. "The polls say we're very popular."

Governor Lucas Gannon got to his feet, allowing the documents of state to slide to the floor. He squared his shoulders beneath the silk robe, which seemed to fit tighter. He drew in his stomach. Then he threw off the robe and got into bed beside her.

"You and me against the world, babe," he whispered. This was their pledge, their compact, their mantra since a certain European history class at Vanderbilt twenty-five years before. "Can't let the bastards get us down."

"When it's us against the world, Your Highness, bet on the world."

He nudged her. "I didn't hear that."

"I didn't mean that." She nudged back with her hips.

"Am I getting fat, Nikki?"

"No. I don't care, I just miss you."

Nuzzling her soft chestnut hair, stroking her thigh. "I miss you too."

"Put on a CD."

"I thought you wanted them to hear."

"They'll hear enough—Lucas! Music first, soothe this savage beast. Then you can do that again. You better do that again."

He rolled to the bedside table, selected a compact disc, and inserted it in the player. The music surged from the twin speakers.

"Oh how fitting. How perfect. The King and I. You fucking governors."

"Isn't that what you wanted—a fucking governor?"

Closing her eyes, turning to him, pressing hard. "So who is she, Your Highness?"

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Excerpted from Double Deal by Michael McClister. Copyright © 2000 Michael McClister. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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