Presidential Deal Read Online Free

back to the time six other kids jumped him and held him down and one kid on top of him with a baseball bat aimed at his head—Ray saw the look in the kid’s eye and knew the kid wanted to kill him out of pure fear, like “Wipe this sonofabitch out before we
all
die”—but then, wouldn’t you know it, a police cruiser happened around the corner and Ray got to live after all, the kid with the bat moved away with his family a week or so after.
    Ray leaned back against the wall of the building, found the edge of a brick he could use to dig into the muscles of his back, work out some kink that had arisen there. A hell of a thing to remember, wasn’t it, you’re maybe eight or nine years old and realize another person wants to kill you for reasons you don’t even know?
    Meantime, still no Zito, no Luis. He checked his watch. He should have gone along with them, and would have, except that he never liked to take a chance on being surprised, never again. There could be somebody with a bat come up on you when you least expected it, that was Ray Brisa’s philosophy, one of the many hard lessons of his youth.
    Nothing he’d worked consciously on, of course. It was just the way his mind worked. Like the one law of physics Ray remembered from his desultory years of high school, a cartoon movie with some Donald Duck character demonstrating, pound one end of a teeter-totter with a big hammer, the other end fires your ass into outer space—for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, so if you’ve got trouble in mind, stay far the fuck away from Ray Brisa.
    End of story, he nodded, for Zito and Luis were pulling up to the curb in a shiny new Suburban now, both of them grinning, jerking around in their seats to the beat of whatever song they had tuned to the max on the sound system of the vehicle they’d stolen. Big Zito behind the wheel, his pupils shrunk to the size of pencil points, whatever he was taking, Ray was surprised he could even see. Probably he couldn’t. It was Luis looking around for where Ray might be, half-assed kind of looking, of course. Ray shook his head, stepping out of the shadows toward them. If he was a barracuda, any kind of fish, then these two had to be sea worms.
    He hit the hood of the Suburban with the flat of his palm and the two inside jumped. “Whoa, man,” Luis said as the passenger window glided down. “Scare the shit out of me.”
    “Then there’d be nothing left,” Ray said. “Turn that radio off.”
    Luis obeyed.
    “There a hitch on this thing?” Ray asked.
    “You said get a truck with a hitch, that’s what we got,” Luis said. “There was a big-ass boat behind it, too. Zito wanted to take it along, drop it somewhere we could come back to, but I told him we didn’t have time.”
    Zito gave Luis a look. “Was Luis wanted the boat,” he said.
    “Fuck you,” Luis said.
    “Shut up,” Ray said. “Both of you.”
    There was silence.
    Ray listened to the purr of the big V-8 beneath the hood of the Suburban, calming down, readying himself, arranging every atom for the task at hand. Not even sea worms, he thought. What was it that fish ate? Plankton, wasn’t it? Then that’s what Zito and Luis were, plankton with arms and legs and faces.
    “Everything else in back?” he said, glancing toward the rear of the Suburban.
    “Sure, everything’s in back,” Luis said.
    Ray didn’t like the tone of Luis’s voice, but he put the thought out of his mind. They had less than an hour to get where they were going. “Then take it up over the curb, Zito,” he said. “What are you waiting for?”
    Pinholes for pupils or not, Zito could drive. He had the big Suburban in reverse and over the high curb in seconds, stopping just short of the heavy iron gates protecting the store’s entrance. By the time Ray got to the back of the vehicle, the rear window had already slid down. He glanced up the deserted street once again, then dropped the tailgate.
    He reached in, pulled