Presidential Deal by Les Standiford Page B

to talk to me?” Deal asked. He felt an odd jangling somewhere behind his eyes, synapses firing at cross-purposes, messages derailing, little sizzles where they plowed into slumbering gray matter.
    She glanced about the room, her smile widening a fraction. “There were a couple of people Carson and I discussed, actually, but you’re very high on our list. We think there’s a property here, a potential…”
    “As in make a movie out of what happened with me out testing my boat?” Deal heard his voice rising. He tried to imagine it: himself a dashing hunk behind the wheel, the young boy he’d given mouth-to-mouth transformed to some babe in a see-through sarong.
    “As in get to know you, Mr. Deal,” Valerie Meyers said easily. “Talk. See if there might be something to explore…”
    Explore exactly
what
, Deal thought. He’d stumbled into all this to begin with, and the people he’d pulled into his boat were in that water because they’d risked everything for a decent life. He and Valerie and Carson were going to sit down and talk about how that might make them all rich?
    Deal felt his throat go tight with anger, felt his hands begin to tremble. Serious mental weather, look out, storm about to come ashore…and then, just as quickly, everything kicked over into calm. That old standby, psychic circuit overload, he thought, the weird safety mechanism that had rescued him more than once from going absolutely haywire.
    “Gee, I wish I’d known,” Deal heard himself saying. He was surprised at how calm his voice sounded. He shook his head in a way that was meant to seem rueful. Maybe this was the tack that the wolf had taken just before he gobbled up Grandma.
    Valerie Meyers shook her head. “What do you mean?”
    “I already signed,” Deal said. He was careful to keep his expression glum. “With Robert De Niro, a guy from his company, I mean. Like a binder or something?” He glanced at her as if for help.
    “An option?”
    Deal copied Roland Wells’s gesture, made a pistol of his fist. “That’s it. An option.”
    She gave him a careful glance, but Deal kept himself fixed on rueful. Part of him wanted to tell Valerie Meyers to take a flying leap at the moon, another part yearned to dump the half-melted bowl of ice over her lovely head, but he focused on rueful and restrained and prayed that if she did nothing more than pass on his absolutely fanciful information to her boss, he would have achieved a greater effect.
    He took her hand, which was firm but delicately boned, and replaced the card she had given him in her palm. “I appreciate the thought, though,” he said. “Maybe some of the other folks haven’t been taken. There’s a lot of heroes here.” He swept his arm about the room good-naturedly.
    “Maybe you should keep the card,” she said. “In case things don’t work out…”
    “Everything’s just the way I want it,” Deal said. His expression felt as bland as wheat. He grinned happily, hoping that wasn’t laying it on too much.
    “Well,” she said. “Good luck.”
    “Oh, I’ve had plenty already,” Deal said. She smiled back, a bit uncertainly, he thought, and then she was moving across the room away from him, her hips winking in that black dress in a way that made him just the tiniest bit sorry he hadn’t heard her out.
    “Did I see what I thought I saw?”
    It was Roland Wells approaching, Diet Coke in one hand, can of ginger ale in the other. “Always happens to me,” Wells said. “Every time I go to the bathroom, I miss a good part.” He handed Deal the ginger ale. “You were talking to her? She came over here and talked? And you let her get away?”
    Deal thought about it for a moment. He fixed Wells with a forlorn expression. “She’s a man,” he said. Wells stared back at him, then craned his neck for a better look across the room.
    “No way,” he said. “No way.”
    Deal gave the shrug he’d picked up from too many years around Vernon Driscoll, the gesture