He was wide-eyed with terror.



She just couldn't imagine him pulling a gun on anyone, let alone pulling the trigger. He didn't have the nerve. You needed steel in your soul to kill. He had nothing but shit in his.



'I smell guns on you. Why? And don't even think of lying to me, boy!'



Lies smelled like the sweetest perfume but tasted like shit, and the odour was coming off him.



She glowered at him. He was petrified and she liked it — liked having him here, all wrecked, in the palm of her hand, a fish skewered on her hook.



'I — I was messin' around with one of Sam's guns and — and the thing went off. I swear thass what happened.'



'So, if I call Sam he'll tell me that?'



'Yeah, sure.'



'Get out of the bath.'



He was too broken up inside to hit the streets that night.



Besides, his head was so bruised and swollen it looked like he had most of his hair back.



He lay down on his bed and closed his eyes.



He wished he'd never wake to see another day again.



But he did wake up. And when he did his mother was standing over him.



'Who's Risquee?' she asked.



42 'Don't be angry, be thankful,' Sam said.



'Thankful! You damn well sole me the fuck out, man!'



Carmine shouted and slammed his palm on the marble cutting slab, his voice echoing around the basement.



'It wasn't like that. She knew something was up.' Sam stayed calm. Eva had called him in the early hours of the morning, asking him why her son smelt of gun smoke and panic. Sam had told her about Risquee and the shooting near the shop and said the whole situation had probably been preying on Carmine's mind.



'She knew something was up,' Sam continued. 'You know that gift she has. If you'd just let me take care of it from the start, none of this would've happened. But you had to go play the big man. See where that got you? Anyway, the problem's solved. She's put Bonbon on it. Who did you tell her Risquee was?'



'Some bitch I tried to turn, freaked out on me.'



'Exactly what I said to her,' Sam said.



'For real?'



'Absolutely,' Sam said. We must've had telepathy. Or else been really lucky.'



Sam had, of course, told Eva the truth about Risquee, and Eva had laughed.



'What if Risquee talks to Bonbon?'



'That animal won't let her. And, say she manages to say something, he won't listen. Listening's not his thing,' Sam said, almost feeling sorry for the poor bitch when Solomon's hitman caught up with her. And he would, for sure. Bonbon had never once failed his masters.



'Did you tell my mother 'bout our thang?'



'No.' Sam shook his head. 'Of course not'



'You sure?' Carmine was searching his face.



'Positive,' Sam said. 'We're both alive, aren't we?'



'Yeah, kinda.' Carmine nodded sadly. He was wearing a baseball cap to hide the damage to his cranium, but he couldn't do much about the cuts and grazes on his hands and face. He had small deep slashes to his cheeks, forehead and a thick cut on the bridge of his nose, all raw and burning.



And there was a buzzing noise in his head that wouldn't go away, like he had an angry wasp in there.



'What in the hell did she do to you?'



'Beat me fo' lyin' to her. Beat me wit' my favourite belt.



You know that Gucci gator-hide one, gold buckle? She beat me wit' dat, beat me bad. I tole her I was shootin' off some rounds witchu.'



'That's a big buckle,' Sam said, looking pityingly at Carmine's wounded hands, slashed so viciously the cuts looked like defensive knife wounds.



'Damn thing broke offvshtn she was beatin' me too. She went fuckin' loco on me, man. It was bad 'nuff lass night, but this mornin' she hauled me outta bed and made me give her the belt from my pants. My damn pantsl Look at what she done to me!'



Carmine removed his cap, wincing as it came off.



'Christ!' Sam gasped.



There were scores of cuts and gouges all over Carmine's black and blue cranium — savage slashes and gouges turned crimson-brown where the blood had clotted and scabs started to form — plus dozens of small lumps and swellings, so much so that the top of his head looked like he had at least a dozen molehills sprouting up under his skin.



'You need to get to a hospital,' Sam said.



'No way.' Carmine shook his head. 'What'm I gonna say?



My mamma went all Bates Motel on my ass?'



'Say you got beaten up or somethin'.'



Carmine shook his head sadly.



'Let me get the First Aid kit.'



But before he could, Lulu came down the stairs.



'There's a customer asking questions,' she said in Kreyol.



'Who?' Sam asked.



'White man.'



'I'll be right back,' Sam said to Carmine.



'Good morning. Welcome to Haiti Mystique. I'm Sam Ismael, the manager.'



'How you doin'?' the man said. He was close to six feet tall, solid, broad-shouldered and stern-looking. He had short brown hair, blue eyes and a smile that didn't really suit his mouth.



'Can I help you with anything?'



'Just lookin', thanks,' the man replied.



'I'll be over here if you need me,' Sam said, as he went and stood behind the counter and pretended to be busy checking the stocklist.



The man hadn't identified himself as such, but Sam knew he was a cop: his way of standing — straight, but with his shoulders slightly forward, feet apart like a boxer, in a state of anticipatory aggression; his typically bad clothes — the catalogue-inspired, utility formal look — houndstooth sports coat, black slacks, wingtips, open-necked white Oxford shirt; and then his eyes - cold, piercing, steady, all-seeing, all-appraising, taking everything in and breaking it all down, a spark of savagery about them.



Sam felt panic skim down his spine.



The cop looked at the dolls, the black religious icons, the crosses, the mounted monkey heads, the skulls, the candles.



He studied the noticeboard where the witchdoctors advertised their services. Eva's card was up there too. He moved over to the houmfor drums on the floor and tapped one,



346



I getting a deep undulating sound which planed out into a hum and lingered for a few seconds before fading away into the ether.



He looked at the shelves of herbs, seeds, roots and weeds.



'You from outta town?' Sam asked.



'Orlando,' the cop said. 'Say, do you sell calabar beans here?'



Sam felt his mouth dry up.



'I occasionally import them for customers. On request.



Why? Do you want some?'



'Say I did, could you deliver or would I have to come here to collect them?'



'Whatever's most convenient for you. What do you need them for?'



'I'm doing a paper on herbal cures,' the cop said.



'I see,' Sam said. 'You with Miami University?'



'Yeah.' The cop nodded.



'Probably work out cheaper for you if you ordered through the university,' Sam said. 'I add on import duties, storage and handling charges.'



'Budget's all used up,' the cop said, looking Sam straight in the eye, making him feel like he'd done something wrong.



'What kinda money are we talkin' about?'



'Depends on the quantity. But I usually add on $200 for storage and handling, paperwork too.'



'Must be some classy storage,' the cop quipped. 'What about the beans themselves? How much do they cost?'



'$10 each.'



'I'll think about it,' the cop said. He went over to the tarot-card stand in the middle of the store and slowly rotated it. 'These take me back.'



'Do you read?'



'Not me, no. An ex-girlfriend of mine did,' he said, looking at the decks. 'She used this weird deck though. Not common. French name.'



'Marseilles?'



'No … it was the - the . . .' He flicked his fingers, searching the air for an answer. 'The de Villeneuve deck. You sell that one?'



'Not here,' Sam said. He could feel his heart beating real fast now, and the tips of his fingers had gone cold. What the hell was this guy doing here? He thought Solomon had all the cops in his pocket. 'They're expensive and hard to come by.'



'My ex was real rich — and connected.' The cop laughed and carried on looking around the store. 'Well, thanks for your time,' he said, finally.



'You don't want the beans?'



'Sorry. My pockets ain't that deep.'



Then the back door opened a crack. Sam turned, thinking he'd see Lulu there, but it was Carmine, quickly peering through a gap before suddenly disappearing.



The cop had noticed. He stared at the door, then back at Sam. He nodded to him and left the store.



Moments later Carmine came out, looking scared.



'That guy's a cop! He's the same fucker beat me up in April. Took the beans offa me too — remember?'



Sam picked his telephone up off the floor and started dialling.



'Who you callin'?'



'Your mother.'



'He make you?' Joe asked when Max got back in the car, parked four blocks up from the store.



'Yeah,' Max said as he flipped out his notebook and started scribbling. 'He looked real worried.'



'What you get?'



Max showed him.



'Eva Desamours,' Joe read out.



'Only fortune teller he had up on his noticeboard. Otherwise it was all exorcisms, healings, spell-makings, spellbreakings and so on. Eva Desamour's on my list of fortune tellers who use the de Villeneuve cards. In fact, she's the only reader in Miami who does. My list didn't have a contact number. Now I got one.'



'What about Ismael?' Joe started the car.



'He ain't our guy, but he works for him,' Max said.



'Ismael's the front man. He owns most of Lemon City.



After Preval Lacour killed the Cuestas, he took over the redevelopment contracts. Ismael supplied the calabar beans and tarot cards that ended up in Assad and Lacour's stomachs. We're gonna need to take a closer look inside the store. It's got a basement'



'How you gonna get a warrant?'



Max looked at Joe and saw he was joking.



'Congratulations! You've won!' Sandra said, handing Max a silver envelope. She'd invited him to dinner at Joe's Stone Crabs in Washington Avenue. Despite living in the neighbourhood, Max had never eaten there because the place was always full; it was one of Miami's oldest restaurants and featured prominently in every tourist guide. They didn't do reservations, but Sandra's firm handled their accounts, so she got a table.



'Won what?'



'Take a look!'



Max opened the envelope and burst out laughing. It was six Casino Dance lessons at a studio off Flagler.



'That's real sweet and thoughtful of you,' he said sarcastically.



'This is so I don't embarrass you out in Calle Ocho?'



'You don't embarrass me,' she replied. 'The studio's just around the corner from your building. We can go after your ten to six shift.'



'My colleagues found out I was takin' dancin' lessons, I'd never live it down.' Max laughed.



'You'll be going with me,' she said.



'Won't make a difference.'



'Then don't tell anyone.'



'Won't make a difference either, Sandra. Cops find out everything eventually — especially when it's about one of their own.'



'You are coming,' she repeated. “Cause I'm not going alone.'



'You don't need to learn. You move like an angel.'



'Angels don't dance.'



35°



I 'But if they did, they'd move like you,' Max said.



They looked each other in the eyes for a moment and everything around them seemed to stop.



'It's good to see you,' he said, breaking the spell.



'And you too.'



They leant across the table and kissed.



'Does that mean you'll do it?' she asked.



'God, you're impossible!' He laughed. 'Just let me clear this case I'm workin' on first, all right? Then, yeah, I'll do it.'



'You'll love it.'



'I doubt it.'



'You'll learn to like it.'



'That's what my trainer said when I got my ribs separated in the ring one time.'



'And you carried on, right?'



'I sure did,' Max said.



'There you go.'



Their food arrived. They had ten jumbo crab claws, served with mustard-mayo sauce and melted butter, which gave the vaguely sweet but generally mild-tasting white meat an added kick. They also had a large plate of fried green tomatoes and the biggest hash browns Max had ever seen — the size of a loaf of bread and served in slices.



After dinner they went to the cinema on Lincoln Road to see Fort Apache, the Bronx. Sandra had picked the film.



Max would've opted for something else, like going to a bar, because the last thing he wanted to do was sit through a cop film, especially one which had been praised for 'gritty authenticity'; it would mean adding another two more hours to his working day. But he'd got more interested when Sandra had told him Pam Grier was in it. He'd seen all her seventies films, which were, without exception, terrible — especially the ones where she kept her clothes on, but, luckily for him, she'd made very few of those.



35'



The cinema was next to empty. They sat towards the front with their Cokes.



The film starred Paul Newman as a middle-aged, by-the book cop working in one of the worst, most run-down parts of the south Bronx. There were plenty of lingering shots of urban wasteland, which, had they upped the temperature, added sunshine and palm trees, could have been half of Miami.



Fifteen minutes in Max was bored stiff. The plot was meandering and Pam was nowhere in sight. He needed a cigarette and a drink. Paul Newman and his partner tried to talk a transvestite out of throwing himself off a roof.



Paul Newman - in his fifties and looking it — started an affair with a young Latina junkie. He yawned and looked at Sandra, who was engrossed. He didn't know why. Maybe he was missing something deep. He remembered the liquor store close to the cinema. He thought of going out to get himself a quart of bourbon and have a smoke. Then Pam appeared and he briefly forgot about his needs. She looked rough in this, because she was playing a psycho junkie hooker who kills two of Paul Newman's corrupt colleagues. He'd never paid attention to her acting talent before, but he had to admit she was pretty scary, killing people with razor blades hidden in her mouth (she'd used the razor blade in mouth trick in Foxy Brown, but that was to free herself), and oozing cold-eyed menace. She killed a couple of corrupt cops and disappeared. He waited for her to come back for a good while, but realized she probably wouldn't be taking her clothes off and decided to slip out.



At the liquor store he bought a quart of bourbon and smoked a Marlboro outside the cinema.



When he sat back down next to Sandra he tipped some of the bourbon into the cup. He offered Sandra some. She



352 shook her head and looked at him with a mixture of disgust and worry.



After the film was finished she insisted on driving his Mustang. He could see she was pissed off with him.



'Did you enjoy the film?' he said as they went down Alton Road.



'How much do you drink?' she asked.



'I'm sorry about that '



'How much do you drink, Max?'



'On and off, some days more than others.'



'So you drink every day?'



'Yeah.'



Why?'



'All kindsa reasons: unwinding, socializing, something bad's happened. And 'cause I like it,' he said. 'A lotta cops drink.'



'Why did you drink in the cinema?'



'I thought the film was boring. I needed a break.'



'You were with me.' She sounded hurt.



'You weren't up on the screen,' he quipped.



'Do you have a drink problem?'



'I don't think so, no.'



' 'Cause I'll tell you this now, I am not having a relationship with an alcoholic. There'll be four of us in the same room: you and me, the person you turn into when you're loaded and the bottle. I am not going to live like that. No way.' She was angry.



'Jeez, Sandra, I'm sorry, all right?'



She was having none of it.



'I had an uncle who was an alcoholic. He died of cirrhosis.



I le was in a lot of pain at the end, puking blood, scratching his skin raw. I don't want to have to go through that with you, if I can help it.'



They turned on to 15 th Street. Max lit a cigarette.



35 3 'And that's something else that's going to have to go.'



'Damn, Sandra!'



'Kissing you's about as close as I can get to licking a dirty ashtray. You ever licked an ashtray, Max?'



'I like smoking,' Max protested.



'No, you don't. You're just hooked. A junkie like Pam Grier was in the movie.'



'A junkie} Me? Get outta here!'



'Have you tried to quit?'



'No.'



'Bet you can't imagine life without one, huh?'



'I wasn't born with a cigarette in my mouth,' Max said.



'Have you ever smoked?'



'I tried it once and thought it was disgusting. Which it is.



And it's dangerous too.'



'So's livin' in Miami.' Max chuckled. 'Besides, cigarettes go great with coffee, drink, after sex, after a meal —'



'They don't go great with life.' Sandra cut him off. 'Are you going to be one of those guys you see, aged sixty, wheeling an oxygen tank around with tubes in their nose 'cause they've got emphysema and can't breathe? Or one of those people with a hole in his throat and a battery-operated voicebox?'



'You're assuming a lot,' Max said.



'Like what?'



'Like we're going to be together that long. I mean, we haven't even — you know — slept together.'



'You haven't asked.'



'I have to ask you?'



'I'm an old-fashioned girl,' Sandra said.



'I thought you wanted to take it slow.'



'You haven't even made a move in — in what's it been? — a month?'



'I didn't wanna scare you off. But since you're offerin' — your place or mine?'



3 54 'We're going to yours,' she said.



'I warn you, it's a tip.'



'I figured that,' she replied. 'Besides, my mama always told me to beware of a man with a tidy house. He's either loco or a maricon?



45



In his apartment in South Miami Heights, Joe put on his favourite sad song — Bruce Springsteen's 'The Promise' and sat back in his armchair with a glass of red wine.



Lina had just cleared away the plates and blown out the candles from their dinner. It should have been a happy occasion for him — a quiet confirmation of his love for the woman he wanted to marry. But instead, Joe felt bad. He couldn't slip away from the shadows in his mind and let go the heaviness in his heart.



'The Promise' was an unreleased song from the Darkness on the Edge of Town sessions, which Bruce had played sporadically on his 1978 tour. It was a tortured, tragic dirge about betrayal and broken dreams, a loser's lament played solo on piano. The recording wasn't the best, taped at a Seattle gig by a member of the audience, but you couldn't hear another sound in the building, save that of someone who's reached the end of the rainbow and found absolutely nothing there but a cold open road to nowhere. To Joe it was the greatest, most moving song Bruce had ever written, and one whose words were coming to mean more and more to him every day.



Joe could have done with a joint right now, to go with the booze and the music. It would have been nice to get his head up a little. He'd always smoked grass with Max, and they'd always ended up laughing hysterically about stupid shit. Like the time they'd played the only white rock record Max owned — a 12 inch single of the Rolling Stones' 'Miss You' — about fifty times over, taking it in turns to imitate Jagger's mid-song rap about Puerto Rican girls that was juss



6 daaahyunnn ta meeetchooo. Eventually, when the high had worn off and they'd got sick of the song, Max had taken the record off and they'd gone down to the beach and played frisbee with it. The thought that he'd have to betray his friend and turn all those good memories to shit was killing him and poisoning everything in the process.



'Bad day?' Lina came into the room and sat down next to him. She still looked every bit as good to him as when he'd spotted her in church across from the altar: petite, dark-skinned, with short hair, high cheekbones, slightly slanted eyes and the kind of smile that could pull him out of the deepest darkest hole, but she wasn't smiling now. She was sharing his troubles.



'Forgot what a good one is.' Joe sighed, gulping down half his wine. He'd told her some of what was happening, how MTF was really run and how he was going to get transferred to public relations after the Moyez case was over.



And that would be soon: Casares had given up most of his contacts, including Carlos Lehder, and they were planning swoops on the major players. After that would begin the long process of bringing the 'guilty' to trial, but Joe would be out of the picture way before then, possibly as soon as August. And he hated August in Miami the most. It was always way too hot, people went way too crazy and hurricanes were always one wrong breath away.



'You been goin' to church?' she asked.



He shook his head.



'You should.'



'What in the hell would God say to me about what I'm doin'?'Joe asked bitterly. 'I'm schemin' to betray my partner and best friend, the guy who's had my back and been nothin'



but loyal to me ever since we hooked up. It was only 'cause o' him I made Detective.'



'You're doing what's right for you, Joe. And sometimes doing the right thing is the hardest thing of all.' She spoke



tenderly but firmly, like he imagined her doing to one of the kids she taught. 'Sooner or later MTF will get exposed. Bad will always out. And you don't want to be there when that storm breaks, because it always rains on the little people the hardest'



'Yeah, right.' Joe looked in the distance, but saw only the framed, fully autographed Born to Run sleeve on his wall.



'The buck's gotta stop somewhere, Joe. Those people you two put away might not have been upstanding citizens, they might even have been monsters, but you, Mingus, Sixdeep and MTF had no right to do what you did. You all broke the law.'



'So whatchu' doin with me then?' Joe asked, searching her eyes.



'Because I believe you can change. And I believe you want to change. And I believe the good in you is sick of all this bad stuff you've done.' She took his hand as she spoke. “You've got integrity, decency and self-respect, Joe Liston.'



'You think so?' Joe sneered with self-disgust. “You wanna know why I went along with this shit, Lina? Huh? You wanna know? 'Cause I wasn't meant to make Detective. I was just a simple doughnuts and coffee Patrol cop, roustin'



hookers and pushers ten to twelve hours a day. I was the guy old ladies called out to get their cats off the roof. I was the guy kept the crowds back at homicide scenes. I was a uniform, not a brain.



'See, it didn't matter that I saw things the dicks missed.



Didn't matter that I talked to witnesses they didn't bother with. Didn't matter that a lotta the time I had a good idea who the perps were. 'Cause in the Miami PD it don't matter how clever you are, or how good you are, or what good you could do if only someone gave you the chance, opened that door up a little to let you in. No, sir! It's down to the colour of your skin. Sure, they just love to say they employ plenty



35ť of black folk, but what they don't tell you is what they employ them as: Dispatch, Records, Patrol, Front Desk, Lock-up. That's all we ever get. Sure, you'll find one or two black Detectives, but it's a damn small number. So, when I got that shield, it felt good — hell, felt good. Proud of myself. I'd achieved somethin'.



'And it was all thanks to Max. He didn't owe me squat.



He was the golden boy with the predestined future. I was supposed to show him the ropes, help him up his street IQ then fade away. He didn't let it happen. He took me with him. He damn well refused to work with anyone else. You hear that, Lina? He refused. He told Sixdeep he'd rather stay in Patrol than work with some cracker who was gonna cut corners on a case so he could go watch a ballgame or ball some hooker. You talk about integrity and decency, that motherfucker's got it in spades!



'You say it's about doin' what's right for me?' he continued as the song ended and the needle left the vinyl and went back to its cradle. 'But it ain't just about that. See, every day in Miami innocent black folks get pulled over by a white or Latino cop. Sometimes it's for a genuine reason, sometimes it's because the cops just want someone they can fuck with. Black man starts to protest, they arrest him for assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest and disturbing the peace. He gets hauled up before a judge, and all the jury see is the colour of his skin. If they're lucky they go to jail. If they're not they end up like McDuffie. And you know what?



I hadn'a been a cop, that could've been me takin' that shit, just because of havin' the misfortune of being' born the wrong colour in this so-called civilized society of ours. Sixdeep, MTF, the way they do things — ne do things — they're all part of the problem, and a big part of the problem. And yeah, you're right, Lina, I'm sick of it. Sick to my stomach.



And they gotta be stopped. Simple as that. And that's what I'm gonna do. But Max is gonna go down with 'em.'



'Because he's part of the same problem you've been talking about,' she said.



'I suppose so,' Joe answered and finished his wine.



'I want to meet him,' Lina said.



'Who? Max?



'Yeah, Max. Your partner.'



'Why?'



'I want to put a face to him. I want to look him in the eye. I want to see what kind of person he is.'



'I've told you.'



“You have. But I want to know for myself.'



'I don't think that's a great idea,'Joe said. 'I'm gonna fuck this guy's life up, and you wanna make nice?



'It's about being sure. Because I'm going to go through this with you too.'



'I'll think about it,' Joe said. And right then a big part of him saw a chance that somehow he could find a way of accepting his well-paid desk job and paper over the humiliation with the material comforts a bigger salary would bring; that he wouldn't have to take the hard option, that he could let it all pass. Lina might like Max as much as he did. Lina might talk him out of it for Max's sake. But then, what about their case? He felt they were getting closer to cracking it every day. It wouldn't be long now before the truth started to show itself.



PART FIVE



June—July 1981 46



'Guess you're gonna have to go get yourself some whole new voodoo, Solomon, 'cause there ain't no cops investigatin'



you,' Eldon said without turning around, but keeping his eyes on the dark outline in his rearview mirror.



Solomon didn't answer.



It was after 10.00 p.m., and Eldon was parked in a side road facing his house. The lights were on. He was beat.



He'd had a long old day. He needed a hot bath and his bed.



Instead he had this: Boukman doing his pop-up act in the back of his car for one of their talks. Eldon hated their 'talks' because talking wasn't one of the nigra's strengths.



He had this thing for silence, for saying nothing, for being Ia conversational black hole. It pissed Eldon off and also made him ill at ease.



Boukman was unique in that way. A lot of the people Eldon had done business with in the past had been talkative as hell. Some you just couldn't shut up. The spies and guineas were the worst offenders; talked the whole fucken'



time, like they considered silence a personal affront. Niggers could talk some too - not that they talked properly, no they jived in that shouty sing-song way they had, like they was all trying to be James Brown. He'd stopped doing business with Jamaicans because of the way they talked — he couldn't understand a single word they said, and when he got himself an interpreter, he couldn't understand a word he said.



The cop Boukman had asked him to look into was some guy who'd walked into Sam IsmaeFs store a week ago, asking about calabar beans and the de Villeneuve tarot cards. The guy had claimed to be a researcher from the university and



36, hadn't given his name. Even if he had, it would've been a false one. Any cop investigating something on the sly wouldn't exactly go and give out his real name, would he?



All he had to go on was a description — short brown hair, blue eyes, under six feet tall, big build, 190—200 pounds, mid thirties — which narrowed it down to about 3,000 people, including Max and Brennan.



Not that anyone was investigating Boukman. Eldon had checked, double-checked and triple-checked every department.



The Feds too. It had taken four days — days when he'd been swamped with work because of all the planning and backstage politicking that was going on with the Moyez case. They were in limbo because the Turd Fairy was discussing the potential fall out of busting a major Colombian drug ring with his people in Washington. Some players weren't comfortable arresting so many spies all in one go.



Spies had that strange way of suddenly bonding together because they spoke the same lingo. And spies had too much political clout, so they had to be managed with care.



Anyway, it was bullshit. Even if someone was looking into Boukman they wouldn't get far. There wasn't a single picture or accurate description of him on file. No criminal record, no social security number, no immigration documents. Nada, as the spies would say. Boukman didn't officially exist. Some of this was down to Eldon erasing all and every trace of him, beginning with his one and only arrest in 1969 for cutting a nigra's Adam's apple out (charges were dropped due to lack of evidence), and continuing to this day, destroying any eye witness reports for anything remotely close to a positive ID and then letting Boukman know the source. But most of the Boukman myth was created by the nigra himself, and, Eldon had to admit, it was a masterstroke of pure fucked up ruthless genius. Boukman used 'doubles'



who didn't remotely look like him - out of work actors and actresses, mostly, recruited through small ads — to imperson 364 ate him at meetings Ś, and if anyone outside his tight inner circle clapped eyes on him he had them killed. Misinformation is the same as no information, and the dead don't talk.



'Maybe it's someone you don't know about,' Boukman said, finally, in that toneless, emotionless, slightly French voice of his.



'Highly unlikely,' Eldon replied. 'Nothing gets investigated in this city without me knowing about it well in advance. How did Ismael know it was even a cop?'



'It's in the cards,' Solomon answered.



Oh, then it must be true, thought Eldon. He yawned and stretched theatrically to let the damn nigra know his voodoo paranoia was boring him. Shit, if those things are so damned accurate why can't you predict who'll win the World Series and make yourselves some nice, easy, legal money instead?



Because those things are horseshit — that's why.



'You're takin' this mumbo-jumbo crap way too seriously, you know that?' Eldon said.



Solomon didn't reply, so they sat in a silence which dragged towards the uncomfortable — for Eldon at least.



He wondered what Boukman was like with other people, the rest of his voodoo mob, or his woman — if he had one.



He didn't care exactly, but he was curious, wouldn't have minded a little genuine insight into the man. In the thirteen years they'd done business they'd never had much in the way of small talk. Actually, they'd had none. The miniscule scraps of what passed for conversation between them involved big subjects, like drugs, delivery, money and death.



The street outside was still. No cars in the road, no people walking around. The neighbourhood was just great that way.



An oasis of tranquillity; everything bad happened to someone else, somewhere else, never here. Here it was safe, middle class and very white. If you saw a spic or a nigra they were delivering your mail or moving your furniture in or out.



?6?



Eldon started humming Frank's 'Last Night When We Were Young'.



'Only a fool mocks what he doesn't understand,' Solomon interrupted him.



Eldon turned around at that, expecting to see Boukman behind him, but his guest had moved to the left — noiselessly as always — so he was close to the door, a form moulded out of darkness.



'You know what I understand? I understand you're born, you live, you die. With the livin' part you do the best you can, for as long as you can and then you're gone. Worm food or ash. That's . Simple.'



No response.



Jesus! thought Eldon, we could be here all night. He broke into a few bars of 'In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning'.



Frank had a tune for every asshole situation.



'I want the photographs and names of every cop in Miami.'



'Excuse me?'



'If the cop's from Miami, Sam can pick him out.'



'Have you been listening to a word I said?' Eldon was angry now. 'There ain't — any body — investigatin' — you.'



Boukman didn't reply, so more silence. Eldon peered into the darkness behind him, trying to see him, wanting to switch on the damn light, go eyeball to eyeball with this piece of shit. Eldon was mad. He wasn't going to show Boukman his files. That was police business - his turf.



He couldn't see Boukman at all. He turned around, frustrated, crossed his arms and faced the windscreen, looking longingly at the warm yellow lights in his house.



'Things have changed,' Boukman said, his voice now almost in Eldon's ear, making him jerk in shock. The fucker had moved again, right behind him. He'd felt his breath on his neck, the brush of ice-cold feathers.





366 I 'Yeah? How so?' Eldon snapped. Christ, was he pissed!



Boukman had given him a fright — him!



'We have a new supplier.'



'Who? Baby Doc?' Eldon laughed.



'No. His father-in-law, Ernest Bennett. He's bought Air Haiti and taken over trafficking from the Haitian army, which means no more Cessnas with small loads every two days. Now we'll be using proper cargo planes - DC3s. That means five or six times the volume.'



'How many plane loads?' Eldon asked. His heart rate was up.



'Two a day to begin with.'



'Starting when?'



'Next Wednesday.'



Eldon thought about it. This was a serious step up. Solomon Boukman would become the single biggest importer and distributor of coke in Miami. Bigger than the Colombians and Cubans. It would mean a lot more money. Way more risk too. Risk everywhere. The Colombians and Cubans wouldn't exactly like the competition. There'd be another war, far worse than the one going on now with Griselda Blanco's people. Then there was the government.



The Haitian link would eventually get found out and Reagan would probably hit them hard - topple Baby Doc, bomb or invade the country. But that was later. He'd be long gone before the first storm cloud rolled in. For now he'd make as much damn money as he could. DC3s! Jesus!



'Why didn't you mention this first?'



'The photographs are a priority,' Solomon replied.



Sure they are, thought Eldon. I know you now. You're nothing special. You scare like the worst of them. The stakes get higher so you get more paranoid, more suspicious. A predictable cycle. You can never be too cautious, true, but there was a fine line between caution and shooting your own shadow. He knew how this was likely to go. Boukman



37 was one of those guys who killed their entire crews over a hunch. Trouble is, behaving like that only made them even more mistrustful than before because they were suddenly surrounded by people they didn't know, didn't go back with.



The end was just around the corner.



Still, there was business to attend to and in business there was always a little give involved before you took.



'OK. I'll get you what you want,' Eldon said, after a suitably studied moment where he'd controlled the silence.



'Not that it'll do you any good,' he added.



A taxi pulled up outside Eldon's house. Leanne got out and walked up to the front door, stopping to wave as the cab pulled away.



Boukman leant forward. Eldon felt his icy breath on the side of his neck again. He didn't move. He could feel Boukman studying his daughter, taking her in. He didn't like it one darn bit, didn't like what he knew was going through the nigra's brain. Leanne was a beautiful girl. She turned a lot of guys' heads. He wanted to yell at her to hurry the fuck up, find her keys in her bag and get in the house. He could hear Solomon breathing through his nose, the air sounding like something heavy being dragged up the passages.



Leanne went inside and closed the door.



Eldon let out a sigh of relief he was sure Boukman heard.



'Bring me the pictures in three days,' Boukman said, opening the car door.



Eldon sat in the car long after Boukman had ridden off in the Mercedes that had been parked behind them. He couldn't believe it — the creep had actually unnerved him.



This wasn't good. This wasn't good at all.



47



'Solomon Boukman — man or myth?' Drake mumbled as he looked around his tower of Babel — a sandwich so big it could have fed a small elephant: six solid inches of pastrami, beef and turkey inter-layered with pickles, sauerkraut, onions, lettuce and piercingly bright yellow mustard, the whole structure topped and tailed with a thin slice of rye bread and held together by a long wooden skewer. Max had a Cuban coffee and his cigarettes.



They were facing opposite directions in adjacent end-of aisle booths in Woolfies on Collins Avenue, a vast diner with mirrored columns, plush red leather seats, art deco lamps, and a beige and brown tiled floor.



Word is he's the crime lord of Miami. Got his finger in absolutely everything there's a law against. Dope, prostitution, extortion, gamblin', numbers, auto theft, etcetera, etcetera.' Drake took the tower apart and partitioned it into five smaller sections, but his meal still looked daunting.



'So how come I never heard of him before?' Max asked.



Today his informant had come dressed as a Brazilian soccer player - yellow and green shirt, blue shorts, white tube socks. He had the boots and a ball by his side.



'Thass juss it. Dependin' on who you talk to, Boukman either exists or he don't. Some folks are sayin' the Haitians made him up so they could scare off the niggas that was preyin' on 'em — kinda like a criminal scarecrow or sumshit.



The Haitians say he's for real. At least them simple ones straight off the boats do. The rich ones I deal with in Kendall think it's all bullshit too.'



'What about you? What do you think?'



369 'I ain't the cop here, Mingus. I juss tell you what I hear an' see. But if you want me to take a worthless guess — a guy like that? — you'd-a had to have some paper on him by now. No one that big goes undetected. Leaves a trail.'



'True,' Max said, chasing his sweet, thick black coffee with a pull on his Marlboro.



'Strange thing is, the people who say he's real don't know what he looks like. Or they do, but all the descriptions is different. Some of 'em say he's white, some say he's black, some say he's Latino - and there was this one ole girl tole me he was Chinesey lookin'. And then no one can agree if he's really a he or a she. Or an it. Or an evil genius midget man chile. I even heard he's got two tongues. Can you believe that?'



'Two tongues?' Max laughed quietly. 'The ladies must love him.'



'What I thought.' Drake shovelled a wedge of mixed meat and sauerkraut into his mouth.



'So, all this you heard is just word-of-mouth stuff? Nothing concrete?'



'All porch talk. Other thing I found out is that Boukman's got hisself a gang. They call theyselves the Saturday Night Barons Club. The SNBC. You heard of 'em?'



Max shook his head.



'You know why that is? 'Cause they don't exist neither.'



'Right.' Max sighed heavily through a cloud of smoke.



'They ain't like the gangs we got here, or like you seen in The Warriors, or them Crips and Bloods in LA, feudin'



over colours and area codes. The SNBC don't have no identification, no territories, none o' that. But, you can't miss 'em if you see 'em 'cause they supposed to be twelve feet tall.'



'This is all soundin' like you sat around a campfire listenin'



to a bunch of stoners who watch too many horror movies.'



Max chuckled as he spoke, but his patience was wearing



370 I thin. The information was ridiculous, even if there were parallels with what he and Joe had found in the files.



'I'm tellin' you what I heard, Mingus.' Drake glanced at him sharply, looking genuinely affronted, mustard bracketing the ends of his mouth.



'OK. Go on,' Max said. 'Why's it called the Saturday Night Barons Club?'



'You ever see that James Bond flick — Live and Let Die?



'With Gloria Hendry out of Black Caesar? Yeah, I saw that.'



You remember that guy at the back of the train at the end — big ole brother in whiteface, top hat and tails — laughin' his ass off?'



'Uh-huh.'



'That's Baron Samedi, voodoo god of death who only comes out at night. Samedi means Saturday night in French.'



'So Boukman's gang meet up on Saturday nights, like a Mormon prayer group or something?'



'I don't know when they meet up,' Drake chew-spoke.



'But they supposed to have these ceremonies where they worship Baron Samedi. Human sacrifices take place. Only — OK, I know you gonna laugh — the people they kill, they don't really die. I mean they do, but they come back as — erm — zombies.'



Drake paused, waiting for Max to ridicule him.



'Anyone mention the courtroom shooting in April? The name Jean Assad?' Max asked.



'S'matter o' fact people did, yeah - said he was the guy clone the shootin'. They said he was a zombie.'



'Were the SNBC behind that?'



'Yup. Assad stole smack from Boukman and wound up gettin' sacrificed and zombified. He popped that Colombian in the courtroom, right?'



Max ignored the question.



'Tell me what else you heard about the gang.'



37'



'Way I hear it, the whole gang's Haitian - at least the principals are. They got a lot of like subcontractors workin'



for 'em. Cubans, Colombians, Jamaicans, blacks and whites, Jews — damn near ev'ry one. Only the subcontractors ain't actual members. They do one job or ten, get paid, bye bye.'



'They know who they're workin' for?'



'Only if they fuck up or flip.'



'What about names?'



'Only heard the one: Carmine Desamours. He's Haitian.'



Max immediately thought of Eva Desamours.



'He's that green-eyed pimp you as'd about. Guy runs the best hos in Miami. Got 'em divided up into playin' card suits — based on looks and earnin' potential. Hearts are cream, Spades blue cheese — street meat, y'know? — and the in-betweens are milk and yoghurt. All Carmine's girls got a small tattoo on the inside of their thigh to identify whatever suit they from. If a girl starts out a Diamond and ends up a Club, she has a new tattoo put next to the old one, and the old one gets crossed out.'



'Like a cattle brand,' Max commented, more to himself.



'Carmine ain't like The Mack — all fur coats, diamonds 'n'



gold 'n' all that pizzazz,' Drake continued. 'He's low key, dresses like a bidniss man and don't drive around in no pimpmobile. Fact, you'd never know him fo' a pimp if you saw him. You'd think he be workin' in a bank or sumshit.



Smooth motherfucker, pretty boy too, what I hear. But all them other pimps on the track be scared o' him 'cause he got this guy, this enforcer he uses. Big fat motherfucker goes by the name of Bonbon, on account o' how he eats candy the whole time. Bonbon ain't got no teeth neither.



He's got these sharp dentures. Bites people's faces off. Pimps see Carmine comin', they run. Carmine wants to knock they best-lookin' hos, they gots to give 'em up. They give him any static, that Bonbon dude come by an' kill 'em. Right



there on the street. He don't give a fuck. Way it is out on the track now, pimps won't even put no pretty girls out on the street no mo' 'cause they know Carmine's just gonna come by and knock 'em.'



'Bonbon got another name?'



'Bonbon's all he go by.'



'What else did you hear about him?'



'Nuttin' much, 'cept he's one scary, fearless motherfucker.



Rides around wit' these two dykes. Fine-ass bitches, but they be as bad as him. They his security.'



'Get their names?'



'No. Say, you remember Cook Gunnels?'



'Sure,' Max said. Back in the early seventies, Cook Gunnels had had over a hundred hookers working for him.



He called himself the King of Pimps and sometimes you used to see him riding around in a pink open-top caddy with a real gold crown on his head and an ermine cape. Gunnels was a nasty sack of shit. He had a reputation for pouring drain cleaner or battery acid down his girls' throats if they held out on him. He had even filmed himself doing it so he could show his new recruits what he was capable of.



'You know how he juss disappeared one day?' Drake said.



'Everybody thought the mob had put concrete boots on him and dumped him out in the ocean. Now I'm hearin' it weren't the mob, but the SNBC killed him. Did him the way he used to do his girls too. 'Cause straight after he went Carmine came on the scene, took over Cook's bidniss.'



'Interesting,' Max said. 'I've seen this Carmine around though. And he ain't twelve feet tall.'



'Yeah, I hear that.' Drake licked the mustard off the sides of his mouth. 'Figured that part for bullshit anyways.'



'Maybe not. The gang could all be standin' on stilts - like in the circus,' Max joked. 'The name Eva Desamours come up in any of your conversations?'



'Yeah. That's his moms. Badass bitch, the way they tell it.



Her and Carmine used to live over in Pork 'n' Beans. People around there still talk about the beatin's she gave him — right there on the street, front o' everybody, like he was some kinda dog done wrong. No one said nuttin' to her 'cause they was scared to. She was supposed to be some kinda voodoo priestess. She told people's fortunes, and she used to do all the abortions in the area, plus she could cure the clap. Thass how she got to know all the hos.'



'Did Boukman know 'em?'



'He musta done, 'cause he came up in Pork 'n' Beans too.



He had his gang even then. People was scared o' him too at least all the non-Haitians was. He looked after his own.



You so much as touched a Haitian in the projects, Boukman and his crew would come after you.'



'Noble,' Max commented sarcastically. 'Bet the Haitians paid a lot for his services. Tell me about Sam Ismael.'



'He's good people - legit - far as I can tell.' Drake leant back and belched quietly between mouthfuls. 'Comes from a rich Haitian family. Owns most of Lemon City, runs this voodoo store out on North West 54th.'



'No SNBCBoukmanDesamours ties?'



'None I heard about.' Drake shook his head. 'Most people seem to like him. They say he's gonna redevelop Lemon City into a Haitian quarter, like Little Havana.'



'What's he gonna call it? “Little Haiti”?'



'Has a nice ring to it, don't it?' Drake smiled. He'd now eaten half his Tower of Babel. 'Maybe you should go by an'



tell him.'



'Maybe I just might.' Max checked the time. Just gone 9.15. He thought through the information Drake had given him, what best to start working on first. Eva. He'd traced the number he'd taken down in Haiti Mystique to a house in north Miami.



'What can I do for you?' he asked Drake.



'Put this one here in my favour bank an' let it grow. You



did right by me with them Palmetto Expressway motherfuckers.'



'It was a pleasure,' Max said.



“You find out their secret formula?'



'They're still working on it in forensics,' Max lied as he got up to leave.



'Prolly some complex shit,' Drake said, shoving another layer of meat and pickles into his mouth. The formula was actually simple — 5 o per cent cocaine, 5 o per cent bicarbonate of soda, water, heat, stir until solid, then break off into small quantities and sell cheaply. Anyone could make it and soon everyone who wanted to would. McCalister at the DEA had told Max this new way of smoking coke had already started taking off in the ghettoes of LA, New York and Chicago, and that if it went nationwide it would be an epidemic.



'No way niggas would get hooked on somethin' that fast there wasn't some Einstein shit behind it,' Drake said. 'No way.'



48



Max went to the garage. He found Joe sharing the couch with a thick stack of papers. He'd been there a good while.



He'd gone through five large cups of McDonald's take-out coffee and two cans of Coke. He looked beat — bags under bloodshot eyes, face sagging, a downward slope to his shoulders — and there were large sweat stains under the armpits of his powder-blue shirt and damp patches on the front too.



'You sleep here?'



'As good as.' Joe yawned.



“What you got there?' Max asked.



'Revelations,' Joe said. 'I saw Jack Quinones over the weekend.'



'Yeah? How is he?' Max smiled fondly. Jack was a whole bunch of very rare things — a Fed he liked, a Fed he trusted, a Fed he could work with and a Fed with a sense of humour.



They'd frequently cooperated when he'd been stationed in Miami - another rarity, because while police departments grudgingly shared information and resources, getting more than a straight refusal from a G-Man was like getting Mount Rushmore to crack a smile. Feds looked down on ordinary cops; liked them to know they not only had more power, better resources, better training and bigger brains, but that they could walk on water too, as and when duty called. Jack was the exception. He was more interested in solving crimes and saving lives than in winning bureaucratic pissing contests.



Since the previous September, he'd been in Atlanta, trying to catch the killer who'd so far claimed the lives of twenty black children.



'He called me up for some intel on those two Aryan Brotherhood pricks we took down in '79.'



'Lund and Wydell?'



'Remember the uncle, Dennis Kreis? Jack thinks Kreis might have something to do with Atlanta — or at least know the button man. He wanted copies of our files on Kreis. So I traded up for some Fed intel on Boukman.'



'That's some intel.' Max glanced over at the block of paper cratering the couch.



'There's at least three dead trees of bullshit there — you know, the usual rumour and conjecture stuff, the guy changin' appearance, the guy being' in five places at once, the guy havin' two tongues - but someone has accurately IDed Boukman.'



'As what? A blonde three-legged midget?' Max laughed.



'No.'Joe shook his head. 'There were photographs.'



' Were photographs . . . ?'



'Yeah, they're gone,' Joe said. 'What happened was this: December the fifth last year, the Feds arrested a nineteenyear-old Haitian called Pierre-Jerome Matisse for sellin' coke to feat kids. They'd had him under surveillance for four months. He was gettin' his shit from Haiti. Best quality — high 80s, low 90s. A Pan Am pilot was bringin' it in for him, a kee at a time. The pilot was workin' for the Feds.



'Once they get him in custody Pierre calls his dad in Haiti.



Daddy is Legrand Matisse, a colonel in the Haitian army.



Daddy has been importin' coke into Miami from Haiti for the past three years. Daddy calls his lawyer, the late Coleman Crabbe of Winesap, Mclntosh, Crabbe and Milton.'



'Moyez's lawyer?' Max asked as a cold feeling passed into his stomach.



'The very same.'Joe nodded. 'Up until two years ago, the I'eds, the DEA and the Coastguard all thought most of the coke coming into Miami was gettin' in via the Colombians — go-fast boats and light aircraft. It is, but that ain't the main



route. A lot of the shit we've been gettin' here is comin' in from Haiti.



'They already had intel that Solomon Boukman was a player in the Haitian drug connection, only it wasn't until Matisse that they realized the magnitude of what the guy is actually doin'. I mean, he is the Haitian connection.



'The Feds originally thought Boukman was a link in the chain — just another small fish workin' for the Colombians, or maybe workin' with the Cubans. But Boukman ain't just collectin' from point A and deliverin' to point B. They've now established that the motherfucker buys from the Colombians direct, flies it over to Haiti and from Haiti to here. Then he sells and distributes. I mean, all he needs to do now is find some place to grow coca leaves and he'll be a one-man industry.'



'How did they know all this?'



'Colonel Matisse. He was workin' for Boukman. According to the report, half the Haitian officer corps are. Matisse was in charge of the pick-up from Colombia to Haiti and the Haiti—Miami drop-off.' Joe wiped his sweaty brow with his hand. 'Matisse cut a deal with the Feds. He'd give 'em Boukman and his entire Haitian operation in exchange for his son's freedom. Crabbe negotiated the whole thing.



'But the Feds have the same problem we do. Who exactly is Boukman? What does he look like? There's nothin' official on him — no social security number, no immigration papers, no criminal record. Nada.'



'Maybe he's an illegal who's been real lucky,' Max said.



'Maybe.'Joe nodded. 'But the Feds know Boukman's got himself some serious juice in high places. I'll come to that.'



Max lit a cigarette and looked in the fridge for some water. There was only beer. He'd promised Sandra he wouldn't have any alcohol until after 7 p.m., and only every other day, and never when they were together — unless it



was wine with a meal. Only he didn't drink wine because it gave him an acid stomach and a headache in quick succession.



He closed the fridge.



ŚYou ain't havin' a brew?' Joe frowned at his partner with surprise.



'Too early,' Max said.



Joe gave him a knowing look. 'Must be love.'



'Carry on.' Max smiled.



'She gets you to quit the cancer sticks, I'll kiss her feet one toe at a time.'



'Carry on,' Max repeated, his smile getting broader.



'OK. So the Feds needed an ID. Matisse told Crabbe he had photographs of Boukman. He said he'd had 'em taken in secret, the last time they met face to face, in 1978. As insurance. Now, it was definitely Boukman, because they went way back. Had mutual friends or - no, that was it they shared a fortune teller.'



'Who?' Max asked. 'Eva Desamours?'



'I don't know. Or maybe it was in his deposition. Crabbe flew out to Haiti before Christmas and took a full deposition from Matisse. Matisse also gave him the photographs.



Crabbe then called the Feds to let them know Matisse hadn't just given up all the Haitian cocaine high command, but he'd also given him his contacts in Customs, the Miami PD, the DEA and the FBI.'



'Christ!' Max sat down. 'And Crabbe gave that stuff to his secretary, Nora Wong, right?'



'Yeah.' Joe nodded slowly and heavily, remembering the NYPD's crime scene report and the photographs. 'The Feds never got to see any of it because they didn't free Pierre-Jerome. They wanted to change the terms of the deal.



They said they'd have no way of knowing if Matisse wasn't making the whole thing up, so they'd only let the kid go home after they had people in custody. And they wanted Matisse to testify against Boukman in open court. Matisse



said no dice. Crabbe was in the middle of renegotiating when he got gunned down with Moyez.'



'So Moyez was never the target: Crabbe was.'



'That's right.' Joe nodded.



'Shit. Didn't he make any fucken' copies of the deposition?'



'If he did, they ain't turned up. My guess is they're gone,'



Joe said.



'What about Matisse?'



'He's dead. On the morning of May the fourth — the same day as the Moyez trial — Matisse, his wife and their two other children were all shot dead as they ate breakfast at their home in Port-au-Prince.'



'And Pierre-Jerome?'



'Found dead in his cell.'



Wasn't he in solitary?'



'Yeah. Someone put ground glass in his oatmeal. It's an old trick.'



'Mother-FUCKERV Max yelled, getting up. 'How in the fuck did Boukman pull this shit off?'



'Everyone has a price, Max, and everything can be bought.



Those drug guys have got a lot of money.'



'So Boukman hit everyone on the same fucken' day - in two countries!'



'Yup.' Joe sighed.



'But think of that! That's high-level counter-intel! That takes meticulous planning! You can't get shit like that together in what? - a week?



Well, he did it,' Joe said wearily, as Max paced back and forth across the garage. 'Boukman must've had a guy close to Matisse. It's the only explanation.'



'What are the Feds doing now?' Max asked.



'They're tryin' to plug their leak. Then they've gotta start on Boukman all over again. Their last report said Boukman has recruited himself a brand new employee — Ernest



Bennett, father-in-law to Baby Doc Duvalier, the president of Haiti himself.'



'Wouldn't surprise me if it was true, wouldn't surprise me if it was bullshit,' Max said gloomily. He crushed out his cigarette and lit another.



Joe knew Max's angers: there was the cold, speechless kind that was always the prelude to physical violence; frustrations and other people's fuck-ups would make him yell and shout; hitting a brick wall in a case would make him do the same - until he went and sat in a church and got his head together. Joe had seen him close to tears when they'd found the bodies of missing kids — but they weren't tears of sorrow, they were tears of rage. Now he was mad as hell all right, yet there was a worry about his anger, almost a fearful tone to his venting. Joe knew what he was going through. He'd been there this morning, feeling so stunted by the length of Boukman's reach he'd wanted to quit the case. He'd got as far as starting to dial Max's number from a nearby payphone to wake him up and tell him, but then he'd thought of the reasons he'd started this whole thing in the first place and put the receiver down.



Max stopped pacing. He thought of Sandra. He saw again her smiling face on his pillow last night when he'd told her he loved her. He saw her sitting at his kitchen table yesterday morning, dressed in one of his shirts, reading the paper.



He'd stood in the doorway just looking at her without her noticing, thinking how beautiful she was and how he was the luckiest guy in the world right then. If they carried on with this case the way they were, he'd be putting her in danger. But he couldn't let Joe down.



Max sat on the couch and looked at the black, sticky oil-stained floor. Outside he heard the rumble of thunder.



49



Carmine parked the dark green Ford pickup in the lot of the Hervis Family Supermarket on South West 8 th Avenue and discreetly checked himself out in a mirror. He was delighted with the results. He'd always wished he'd been born with straight hair, like his dad's, and now he'd fulfilled his wish. OK, so it was a wig, but it wasn't an obvious wig like some of the spades wore, or those ridiculous, blowaway-in-a-breeze toupees those white old timers in South Beach wore, this one was subtle - a short straight head of real black hair, parted in the middle with a little fringe falling over his right brow. He looked bona ride Cubano now.



It wasn't the first time he'd had straight hair. A few years back he'd had it 'chemically relaxed'. That was a nice moment, driving down Biscayne Bay in his coupe, sea wind blowing back his hair; it even had a little bounce to it when he walked — just like white folks in shampoo commercials.



Things had of course gone critically wrong when he'd gone home for his bath that evening. His mother had freaked out and hacked it all off with a pair of kitchen scissors — damn near ripped it out, when she couldn't work those shears fast enough - and then she'd stuffed it in his mouth and tried to make him swallow it. He'd almost choked to death. But, still, looking back at the momentary happiness he'd felt that afternoon, it had somehow been worth it. She'd never be able to take that away from him, no matter what she did.



Carmine had made other changes to himself too - a whole new disguise. He was pretending to be a house painter, after seeing a bunch of them driving by Haiti Mystique to go and work on the houses Sam was renovating on the corner of



62nd Street and North East 2nd Avenue, close to the Dupuis Building. Carmine had bought a pickup second hand, eight gallons of white and yellow paint, brushes and floor sheets to put in the back; and then, to complete his transformation, he'd got himself a set of khaki overalls and steel-capped boots, which he'd dripped multicoloured paint on for that 'used look'. When Sam had seen him he'd told him he looked like he'd stepped out of a Jackson Pollock exhibition.



He'd tried his disguise out on a couple of Clubs. He'd solicited them in espanol. They'd taken one look at him and said they weren't no soup kitchen pussy. He hadn't blown his cover. He'd just turned, walked out and punched the air in triumph. No one looked twice at a painter — not even hos — so this way he'd be safe from the cops. Not that he'd actually heard anything more about the guy in the salon on the news, but that didn't mean they weren't looking for him.



He checked his watch: 2.37 p.m. Good, he thought, she'd be right in the middle of her shift. He'd catch her unawares, just sneak right up on her. Julita Leljedal.



He'd been looking for Julita for a year and a half. She skipped town, owing him $1,250. Last week one of his Spades had told him they'd seen her working at the - get this — meat section of HFS.



When he'd first seen her, in 1976, Julita had been a stripper over at an upmarket club called Luckies on Le Jeune. Back then he used to go trawling a lot of titty bars for potential Diamonds and Clubs, and the girls were usually real easy pickings.



Julita was one of the prettiest, sexiest girls he'd ever seen long black hair, blue-green eyes like the ocean, Iight-bron2e skin. She was petite — just over five feet tall and flat chested but boy did she have an ass! Guys used to come from all over to see her dance. She had a routine she did with a silver baton. She'd catch a guy's eye, pout her luscious lips at him and then lick the stick and jerk her hand up and down it,



while she ground her hips and wiggled her ass. The guy would shower her with all the money in his wallet every time. She had an uncanny way of knowing exactly which guy to focus on too. The night they'd met she'd done her routine on Carmine and he'd thrown her not the usual five and ten-dollar bills, but a whole bunch of C-notes.



He'd put her and her cousin Kitty up in an apartment overlooking Maximo Gomez Park. She'd carried on dancing, only now she was taking the richest customers home and fucking them too.



Cousin Kitty didn't start off a ho. She was a trainee nurse and, anyway, she was so damn ugly - bad skin, thick pink-framed glasses and greasy brown hair that looked like the hide of a wet donkey — no way could Carmine even have turned her out as a Spade, even if he'd wanted to.



But then one night one of Julita's tricks offered her $1,000 to perform an enema on him. Kitty knew exactly what to do. The next night the guy came round for more of the same.



Sensing a too-good-to-miss opportunity, Carmine set Kitty up in business, servicing medical procedure fetishists.



She and Julita dressed up in rubber nurse's uniforms and gave those sick fuckolos the times of their lives. For a year, Carmine made serious bank. But then, in February 1979, it had gone pear-shaped. Kitty gave an enema wrong and ruptured a guy's intestine. He died in the apartment. Carmine took the body away and got rid of it. When he went back, Julita and Kitty had split. They'd taken their clothes and the $1,250 the guy had paid them. He'd been looking for them — specifically Julita - ever since.



He got out of the truck and walked over to the supermarket.



It was a big sprawling place which didn't just sell food, but clothes, plants, electrical tools, TVs and even minor car parts. Everything was in Spanish, from the signs to the canned music to all the conversation he heard around him.



He headed for the meat section.



It took him a while and two double-takes to recognize Julita, first because her hair was bunched up under white netting, second because of the uniform they had her working in — a shapeless dark blue dress with red and white piping — and third because she'd put on a whole heap of weight. Her hips were broader, her ass bigger, her calves were about the size as his waist and she had the beginnings of a double chin. She couldn't have been more than twenty-five when she was working for him. Now she looked ten years older.



Mamacita had lost all her sexiness.



He watched her from a distance, as she stacked plastic trays of juicy red steak on a shelf from an overflowing shopping cart. She finished what she was doing and pushed the cart along a little way and then started filling up the shelves again.



When her back was to him, he walked up and greeted her the way he always had.



'Hoa, chica?



She froze in mid-motion. He saw her shoulders expand :i little as she took a deep breath before turning around.



It was her all right. Her face had got broader and she looked tired and pale, but those eyes hadn't changed much.



'How d'you find me?' she said. She didn't look worried r scared like he'd expected her to, just looked him up and down from his paint-spattered boots to his hair.



'It's a small world, baby.' He smiled, wondering why she 11 ad n't commented on his appearance, let alone failed to recognize him.



41 ain't workin' for you no more, Carmine,' she said.



'I can see that.' He laughed, nodding at the shopping cart.



'You really landed on your knees, girl! Not that you wasn't tilrciicly on 'em.'



' I t:'s better than what I used to do,' she said.



“If you say so.'



3ť5 'What do you want?'



'My $1,250.'



'All the money you make off them stupid hos and you comin' after me for a itty-bitty $1,250?'



'So $i,2 5o's itty bitty, huh? Means you got $1,250 to gi'



me.'



'I ain't got no $1,250 to give you,' she said. 'Fact, I ain't even got twelve dollars and fifty cents to give you. An' I ain't got zip to give you no how, 'cause I'm outta that life.



You know why I left? It wasn't just 'cause of what happened to that old pervert, it was 'cause I was two months pregnant.'



'For real? You keep it?'



'Them.'



'You had twins?'



'Girls.'



'DayumP Carmine didn't know what else to say. It explained the extra pounds. Now, when and if— it was real rare, because contraception was strictly enforced - Cards got pregnant, they were made to have abortions. Well, the earners were. Spades, or Clubs on the slide to Spadedom, were just cut loose.



'Who's the daddy?'



'I dunno,' she said. 'Some trick.'



'How'd that happen?'



'How d'you think?'



'But what about them pills I got for you?'



'They were making me fat.'



Not as fat as you are now, he thought, but didn't say it.



Truth was, he didn't know what to say. Congratulations, was the way it went, but he'd never congratulated nobody on nothin', 'specially not a ho on havin' no kid.



He was stunned, and a little disappointed. OK, he hadn't really come here for the money. It was sweat of a ho's back to him. Truth was, he'd felt a little hurt when Julita had upped and gone like that. He'd wanted to know why. A little



part of him had liked her, because in a certain light, dancing up there, before she started losing her clothes, she'd reminded him a lot of Lucita, his father's girlfriend. All right then, he had been a little sweet on her, sweetest he'd ever been on any ho. He'd had a few good times with her outside business hours. She was fun to be around - great sense of humour, made him laugh; sometimes she did this thing where she stopped talking and just looked at him with those eyes of hers that told him so many sweet things. He loved that. And he loved listenin' to her fuckin' those tricks. She just talked that sweet espanol — 'Si, papi. Siii, papi. Siii, siiii, mi amor' - and that got them, and him, all the way off. He'd even come close to fuckin' her himself a couple of times, when they'd had a few drinks and were fooling around, but the prospect of his mother findin' out had pulped his wood.



Still, in another life, he probably would've wifed her. And they'd-a had twins too — good-looking ones at that.



On the business side she'd been a great earner. She'd given him every cent she made from fucking. She'd never complained or whined or cried like most of his Cards. He was so impressed with this, he'd let her keep the money she made from dancing.



'You got a man now?' he asked.



'What's it to you?'



'Just a question.'



'What kinda man wants a woman with two kids, Carmine?'



A guy who could love you, he thought, but didn't say.



Shit, why was he being this way? She was a ho, he told himself, a ho — yd ho.



He looked at her, this time with his money eyes, figuring what he could still do with her. In her state he wouldn't even have put her out as a Spade. Sure, someone'd want to fuck her, but he had standards to maintain. Her tits had gotten bigger, which was a plus, but he was sure they sagged; even with a strict diet she'd have stretch marks on her belly



and her ass would never regain its money-making shape.



She'd be a Club at best, but not for too long.



Not worth it, he told himself. Leave her be. Say goodbye, then turn and go. Go get another ho.



'I'm sorry,' he said at last. Part of him felt responsible for what had happened to her, part of him wanted suddenly and very desperately to stop what he was doing.



'I'm not,' she said. 'You think I miss that life? I don't.



And now I gotta chance to help my kids do better than me.'



An idea began to form in Carmine's mind. He had over $10,000 in the glove compartment. He could give her half of it for her babies, like a — what was it they did in companies when they paid people off? — yeah, that was it — a golden handshake.



But as he was thinking this he saw the expression on her face change quite suddenly. Her eyes widened, her mouth opened a little and she went deathly pale.



She wasn't looking at him but over to his right.



Carmine heard slow, heavy and very familiar footsteps coming up and stopping right beside him.



'Well, ain't this nice?' a soft wheezing, lisping voice said in his ear.



Carmine smelt sugared almonds and the stench of rotting meat. It was Bonbon.



What you doin' here?' Carmine turned to look at him.



'Yo' moms sent me.' Bonbon was sucking on a piece of candy as usual.



Carmine didn't know how or why, dressed the way he was, the fat fuck wasn't sweating bullets. He was wearing a black fedora with a black band, a knee-length coat, black, dark grey wool trousers, a white dress shirt and a bright yellow and red striped waistcoat. His gleaming patent-leather loafers bulged at the sides.



'Why?'



'To run things.'



'Run what?'



To' bidniss.'



'What?



'Sam needs you to cover for him at the store for a couple-a weeks, 'cause he gots bidniss o' the important kind to handle,' Bonbon said. He had standard teeth in — small, gleaming white squares that made his mouth look like an open zipper.



'But I got bidniss o' my own important kind. I can't mind no store] Carmine said. Bonbon must've been following him all day although he couldn't remember seeing his car. Then again, he hadn't exactly been paying attention to the possibility of being tailed, so absorbed had he been with his new hair.



'You wanna take it up wit' yo' moms, she's out back in the car.'



Carmine didn't answer. He felt suddenly humiliated, cut down to three feet tall. He looked at Julita, who hadn't moved. She was gawping at Bonbon with pure terror, like he was an oncoming truck and she was nailed to the road.



Bonbon checked Carmine out, head to toe. They were about the same height, but Bonbon's hat gave him an extra few inches, his girth a few extra people.



'Dressed like you been in a paint fight. And whass up with that wack-ass wig, man? Look like a dead bat fell on you and liked it.'



Carmine wanted to say something to that, something about him being' a fat toothless stinking-mouth psycho fuck, but he saw the pearl handles of one of the two Smith & Wesson .44 Magnums Bonbon wore on either hip, jutting out from under his coat.



Bonbon turned to Julita.



'Whatchu' still standin' there fo'?' he hissed sharply, like venom hitting a hot frying pan. 'You owe $1,250. An' you gonna repay it — wit' two hundred po'cent interest.'



'Mister, I ain't got no money,' Julita pleaded.



'I can see that,' Bonbon sneered. 'But you gon' go an' get me some.'



'How?' she said, her eyes tearing up. She knew what was coming next and that she couldn't refuse.



'As o' today you got a new job. Corner of 63rd Street.



Call it a prom-o-shun.' Bonbon chuckled.



'But - but I got kids - babies . . .' The tears were pouring down her face.



'Sad, sad, too fuckin' bad.' Bonbon shook his head. 'Now go get outta that clown suit and come right back here.'



'Carmine . . . please . . .' Julita cried.



'Carmine ain't gonna help you.' Bonbon got closer to her.



'Go on get yo' things, walk out and get in the black Merc you see outside. Ain't but one. An' don'tchu be tryin' nuttin'



like tellin' the manager or callin' the cops, 'cause you know what I'ma do to you and yo' bebe's.'



Carmine looked at her sorrowfully.



'Sixty-third Street's in Liberty City,' she said, her voice trembling.



'Thass right. The brothers love theyselves some Cuban pussy, specially them white-lookin' ones like you. You gon be on that track and you gon stay on that track till you settle yo' debt.'



She opened her mouth and tried to speak, but nothing came out of her lips moving soundlessly liked a beached, dying fish.



'Hustie bitchY Bonbon hissed.



She walked away, off to the back of the store, head down, shoulders slumped, unsteady on her feet.



'Now thass how you handle hos, Carmine,' Bonbon said, turning back to him with a smile.



'Don't tell me how to do my job!' Carmine snapped.



'I built this damn bidniss.'



'Yo' moms and Solomon built dis bidniss,' Bonbon cor rected him. 'An' I made sure thangs was runnin' right. You done the next best thang to shit. Pimp always gotta have a whip in one hand and a leash in tha other. All you ever had in yo' hand Carmine was yo' dick. Why this is mines now.'



Carmine knew then that his mother had demoted him for good. Bonbon had never disrespected him like this, never talked down to him. He hadn't dared.



Carmine was too stunned to think straight.



He turned around and left the supermarket.



Outside he saw the black Mercedes with the tinted windows parked alongside his truck. He could sense he was being watched from the car. He thought he even heard women's laughter inside as he passed. He didn't look at the Merc. He got in the truck and drove out of the lot, heading for Haiti Mystique.



What the fuck was going on? Why had they done this to him? Sure, his mother hated his guts, but he'd always brought her a steady stream of top-class girls — earners. And he was damn good at finding and recruiting talent. No one could charm a bitch like him — no one — and certainly not Bonbon. It made no sense. No sense at all.



Then he thought of Julita, but instead he saw Lucita.



Stupid he hadn't realized this before, but even their names were similar. Julita and Lucita.



His heart grew heavy, his throat tightened and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness swallowed him. He couldn't do wrong or right without somehow fucking both up.



Without the pimping he was useless, good for absolutely nothing.



He saw his mother, imagined how she'd taunt him tonight in the bathroom, rub his failure in his face until he choked on it.



Julita wouldn't last long on 63rd Street. The Spades down there would give her hell 'cause she was the new girl on the block — and a white girl at that. Didn't matter she was Cuban.



39'



That'd make it even worse for her. The gangster kids would run trains on her at five bucks a pop. No way would she ever earn back that $1,250. She'd be used up in two months.



Bonbon knew this. It was his way of punishing her for stealing off them. Carmine wished he hadn't gone to see her, then none of this would've happened. He'd gone and ruined not just her life, but her little girls' too.



He tried to gee himself up, think of brighter things.



What did they say 'bout hittin' rock bottom? The only way was up.



There was Nevada to look forward to. What about all that money he'd stashed away? That was something to hold on to. All wasn't lost. There was still hope.



Yeah, right!



Who the fuck was he foolin'?



It was just him in here, on his own, cold light of day.



He might've been at the bottom of wherever he'd been kicked to now, but he sensed there was further to fall.



This was the start of the end.



5o



The number Max had taken down in Haiti Mystique was for a house on North East 128th Street, North Miami Beach. Both house and phone were registered to Eva Desamours.



Early on Wednesday morning Max and Joe drove out to North Miami Beach in a blue '78 Ford Ranchero they'd got from the car pool. The car ran fine, but outwardly it looked like a piece of shit — rusted fenders, scratches and chipped paint on the bodywork, dents in the hood and side — ideal camouflage for the area, where every vehicle was a third generation hand-me-down.



North Miami Beach wasn't quite the worst the city had to offer, but it was a million miles from the best. Its main tourist attractions were the St Bernard de Clairvaux Church off the West Dixie Highway — a medieval Spanish monastery William Randolph Hearst had bought in Europe and had had dismantied and shipped, down to the last brick, all the way over to the States - and a nudist beach at Haulover Park, across the Intercoastal Waterway, which was the target of regular protests by Christian fundamentalists. In-between the two was a drab area of working- and welfare-class homes, ugly-looking condos and cheapo stores where half the shelves were empty. Crime was high here, most of it comparatively petty and tame by Miami's current standards burglaries, home invasions, domestic violence, rapes and murders — but there was still too much of it for the understaffed and over-extended local police to deal with, so they were forced to prioritize. Violence against the very young



393 or the very old got their full attention. Anyone in-between was out of luck.”



They found the house — a small pale pink bungalow with a screened porch and a palm tree growing to its left. It was set back from the road and surrounded by a well-tended lawn with a flower-lined brick path leading to the front door, easily the best-looking home in a street filled with dismal bungalows struggling to stay upright, losing the battle against their own decrepitude. Although some owners had erected barbed-wire fences around them, put bars on the windows and left various breeds of attack dogs out in their front yards, gang graffiti still adorned two-thirds of the homes.



They rolled a little further down the road and parked behind a dusty, brown Pontiac, opposite the house,. It was 8.05 a.m.



Joe turned on the radio. The Rolling Stones' 'Start Me Up' was playing. The song was all over the airwaves and racing up the charts. Joe nodded his head along with the beat and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Max looked out of the window, first at the light grey sky, then at the matching tone of the street, wishing his partner had better taste in music.



Forty minutes later a gleaming black Mercedes 300D with tinted windows, eight-spoke silver rims and whitewall tyres stopped in front of the house. Max took out a Nikon FM camera fitted with a 5 o mm lens and started snapping.



A tall, fat, dark-skinned man, wearing a long black coat, white gloves and a fedora stepped out and opened the passenger door. A woman with short black hair and the same complexion as the driver emerged. She was dressed in an elegant brown trouser suit and pumps and carried an alligator-skin purse. She talked to the man for a moment.



Next to him she looked starved and frail, but Max could see from the cowed expression on his face that she commanded his absolute respect.





394 I The woman walked briskly up to the house, unlocked the door and went inside. The man got back in the car.



'The driver looks like Fatty Arbuckle's shadow,' Joe quipped.



'Guessing from his appearance, that'll be Bonbon,' Max said, putting the camera down on his lap. 'And the royalty's Eva Desamours.'



At 9.08 a silver Porsche Turbo pulled up behind the Mercedes and a tall, slim, blonde woman got out. She was dressed expensively — tailor-made blue silk suit, gold jewellery on her wrists, hands, neck and ears — and long hair coiffed in a bouffant mane which didn't move at all as she clicked her way along the sidewalk and up the path to the house with the well-drilled grace of a catwalk model. She was beautiful, but it was beauty cut in ice — all the aloofness money could buy. Max knew who she was.



'She must be loaded. That's a brand new Turtle.' Joe nodded at the Porsche 911.



'Don't you recognize her?' Max asked.



'Sure, that's Cheryl Tiegs,' his partner joked.



'Bunny Mason.'



'As in Pitch Mason's wife?'



'Uh-huh.'



Pitch Mason was a major cocaine distributor who had slipped two elaborate DEA stings, because, it was widely rumoured, he'd been tipped off by someone on the inside.



During the past year, Mason had become a society-page regular because of the stables and stud farms he owned and because of his wife — a former swimsuit model — who he referred to openly as his 'favourite filly'.



An hour later, Eva Desamours came out with Bunny Mason, walked her to her car, air-kissed her on both cheeks and waved goodbye as she roared off down the road.



The next visitor arrived in a red Ferrari 308 at 10.25.



Latina, older, shorter and far stouter than her predecessor.



39 J She had a round, hard face, black hair in a short ponytail and a huge pair of sunglasses that reminded both Max and Joe of the kind of oudandish specs Elton John wore. She was dressed in a black velour tracksuit with diamante trim and matching slippers. She strode quickly up to the door with all the grace of a pissed-off pitbull.



'Know her?' Joe asked.



'No, but counting the Turde, we've got the drug dealer's automobile trifecta here,' Max said as he photographed the woman disappearing into the house. Mercedes, Porsches and Ferraris had become so popular with Miami's coco-riche that car dealers had virtually run out of them and waiting lists were eight months long.



As before Eva came out to the sidewalk with her client and stayed until she'd left the street.



Two more visits followed — a black woman in a Mercedes Benz 450SEL 6.9, a redhead in another Porsche, both in their late twentiesearly thirties, both wearing their money, both staying roughly an hour apiece.



'That's a high-end client base. She must be good,' Max remarked.



'Or a good bullshitter,' Joe said.



'Same coin,' Max said. 'You ever had your fortune read?'



'Nah,'Joe said. 'That shit creeps me out.'



'So you believe in it?'



'Sure. There's something in it. But outside of this job, I don't wanna know what's round the corner. Kinda defeats the object of living.'



When she'd seen off her last customer, Bonbon emerged from the car and opened the passenger door. Eva Desamours got in and they pulled away. As they did so, Max noticed a line of small pieces of paper lying in the gutter where the Mercedes had been parked.



He went over to take a look. There were at least twenty red and white striped candy wrappers lying there - identical



to the one he'd found in the Lacour house. He scooped them up in his handkerchief.



They tailed the Mercedes back to Haiti Mystique. Eva walked into the store at 3.15. Five minutes later Sam Ismael pulled up in an orange Honda and went inside.



They left together after five, each going in separate directions - Ismael east, Eva west.



Max photographed the comings and goings.



'When are we gonna look in there?' Joe asked as they drove past the store, following the Mercedes.



'Tomorrow night,' Max said.



Eva Desamours lived in an imposing coral-rock house in a wide, leafy residential road off Bayshore Drive; only the top tier and roof of her home were visible behind the high wall surrounding it and the palm, banyon and mango trees growing in its grounds.



The Mercedes stopped outside a spiked iron gate, which opened automatically from the inside. The car went in.



'Very flashy,' Joe commented.



'What did you expect? Dopers get high, dealers get to live in a piece of heaven,' Max said.



A few minutes later the gate opened again and the Mercedes came out.



At 5.45 a white Ford pickup truck went through the gate.



Max recognized Carmine at the wheel.



'That ain't a pimp mobile,'Joe said.



'Maybe he's been demoted.'



Max got a picture of the plates.



No one came out of the house. When it started going dark, at around 8.30, spotlights went on in the trees, bathing what they could see of the house in a deep green, shadow splashed pall, making it look like it was covered in camouflage netting. A light went on in one of the top-floor rooms,



but they couldn't see inside because the curtains were closed.



They waited another two hours, by which time the light upstairs had gone out.



Max and Joe called it a day.



It was close to midnight when Max got to Sandra's place.



They'd decided to spend alternate weeks in each other's apartments as a prelude to buying a home together. Yes, they both agreed things were moving fast, that maybe they should be taking longer, factoring in pauses, checking each other out, looking for fatal flaws, but it just felt right between them. No point in delaying the inevitable.



Before letting himself in, Max sat down on the steps and lit up a cigarette. The atmosphere was hot, humid and oppressive, with no wind and the smell of a downpour heavy in the air. Not that anyone seemed to notice or care. Little Havana was alive with its usual sounds — multiple parties trying to drown each other out with live salsa, car horns, firecrackers, arguments — good natured and angry. He smelled barbecues and Cuban cooking. He really wanted a drink, a shot and a cool brew - that'd be real nice. But Sandra would smell it on him and he'd promised her. He hoped he'd get used to not drinking, that he wouldn't be one of those secret sippers who used mouthwash after every transgression.



Solomon watched the white pig sitting on the steps of the apartment building, smoking his cigarette. He was sat in the back of the yellow cab he'd been following the cop in ever since he and his partner had left Eva's house.



'He's not Cuban,' Solomon said to Bonbon, who was at the wheel. 'His woman must live there.'



'Want me to take him?'



'Not yet,' Solomon said. 'Tomorrow I'll know everything about him.'



The cop flicked his cigarette out into the middle of the street, got up and went into the apartment.



Solomon got out of the cab and walked over to where the cigarette was still smouldering. He put it out with his foot, slipped the butt into a clear ziplock plastic bag and went back to the cab.



51



Every time it rained in Miami, it was like God was trying to wash the city into the sea. Today He was trying extra hard.



Rain, wind, lightning and thunder.



Carmine was getting his tic like crazy, his left cheek snapping back and forth every couple of seconds like a rubber band in the hands of a hyperactive child. He'd slap himself hard to correct it, but it would just get worse, his nervous spasm feeding off his anger and frustration and yanking up half his face, completely closing his eye.



He was stood behind the counter of Haiti Mystique, watching the deluge come down in slanted sheets, relentless in its intensity, transforming the street into a wide, fast flowing stream. The drains were choked and spilling their dark brown guts; solitary passing cars were throwing up knee-high waves, which would crash on the sidewalk, splash walls and windows and ooze under doorways.



Bad day to do ho bidniss, the sorry state o' my sorry ass, thought Carmine, before remembering, with something close to relief, that he'd been demoted to store manager.



That was some kind of joke. There wasn't anything to manage. In all the time he'd been in his 'new job', he hadn't served a single customer. In fact, the only people to come through the door outside of him and Lulu had been Sam and Eva, when they'd had their meeting downstairs yesterday.



Sam had been on the TV news and in the papers, standing in front of a row of derelict buildings on North East 2nd Avenue, talking about how he was going to renovate and reinvigorate the area, how he was going to turn it into a Haitian-themed neighbourhood, and how he was already



I 1





talking to city officials about renaming the place 'Little Haiti'.



The press were already referring to him as 'the Haitian George Merrick', after the man who'd transformed Coral Gables out of orange groves. Same concept, different fruit.



Tonight Sam was going to be at a big gala dinner at the Fontainebleau Hotel to formally launch the project.



So Sam was a busy man — too busy to talk to Carmine.



Carmine was wondering how much Sam knew about Bonbon taking over the pimping. Had he known about it in advance? Maybe, maybe not. Why would they have told him? It had nothing to do with him. But Carmine couldn't be sure. Just like he couldn't be sure that Sam hadn't told his mother about Nevada.



Nevada? Well, that was all fucked anyway. Wasn't going to happen. He didn't have the heart or guts or balls or mind to do that any more — not after what had happened to Julita.



He'd spent yesterday night seeing as many of his sideline Cards as he could find, telling them he was cutting them loose. A few had cried, asked him what they were going to do. Some had asked him what he was going to do. Most had taken it with a shrug and a see-ya.



He was still getting out of Miami though, and getting out soon — out of the city, out of his mother's clutches, and out of this sad, bad, broken-down existence.



He'd be gone next Wednesday. He was just about ready.



He'd moved all his money to a locker at the airport. He'd stashed the key at home, deep in his jar of coffee. On Departure Day he'd leave like he was going to work, but he'd go to Miami International instead and get on a plane.



He wouldn't tell a soul. Not even Sam. And definitely not his mother.



Where would he go?



He'd first thought of Phoenix, because of that Isaac Hayes song - an old favourite of his — where a man leaves a cheating wife for the last time. But he'd dismissed that as a



bad idea because the guy in the song never gets there, and, besides, Sam or someone would probably work it out. So he'd gone through the names of American towns he'd stored 3 could cop a plea, do a deal, sell out the SNBC and go into witness protection.



'Max?' That was the cop's partner, the big black guy, calling from behind the stairs, where the trapdoor was.



'Come see.'



The white cop went over to look.



A minute later they'd gone downstairs.



Carmine came out of his hiding place and crept up to the ground floor, leaving the rest of Risquee behind.



He drove straight home. The lights were all out in the house.



His mother had gone to sleep.



He was bringing his plans forward. He was leaving town now. He'd change his clothes, grab his locker key and go.



In his room he stripped off his bloody clothes, bundled them up into his laundry bag and changed. He got out his finest navy blue Halston suit, Pierre Cardin underwear and silk socks, Gucci shoes, his tailored powder-blue Oxford shirt. He had to look his best now that he was starting his new life — even if he would be entering it in a pickup.



When he was dressed, he gave himself a quick inspection in the mirror and winked at his reflection. He was still a handsome sonofabitch.



Time to go. He looked across the room at the coffee jar.



His mother walked into the room.



'Who did you just kill?' she asked him.



Standing on the balcony of his top-floor suite at the Fontainebleau, in his tux and hand-crafted black shoes, Sam Ismael felt like he was nearly there. He could almost taste victory. He was looking out at Miami Beach, transformed by nightfall from a flaking grey tourist trap, to an attainable galaxy of glittering, iridescent neon, a bejewelled lava which appeared to be moving, very slowly, in an unspecified direction. The streets were lit up like luminous veins, traffic flowing white one way, red the other, entering and fleeing.



The summer breeze carried stray music up from the clubs, mixed in with the smells of sea and city.



Twenty minutes earlier, a dozen floors below in the ballroom where the Lemon City Regeneration Project was sating itself on fine food and wine at $500 a plate, he'd had unofficial word from the mayor's office that they would approve his proposal to officially change the area's name to I ittle Haiti. This was due to extensive lobbying on his part, as well as sizeable donations to various interest groups'



campaign chests and preferred charities; there was never progress without corruption.



He felt good about what he was doing, good about what it would mean to and for Haitians. They would finally have a place of their own in Miami, a place to come to and settle in, a place where they could rebuild their lives. He didn't care that it was Solomon's drug money funding it. The Colombians and Cubans were doing the same thing, buying up miles of real estate and building condos to rent out to rich folk. They were Helping themselves. Sam was helping others.



()nly one thing spoiled this moment - well, four in fact



4M - Solomon Boukman, Bonbon and his two skanky dyke sidekicks — Danielle and Jane — were inside, waiting for a delivery of photographs he had to go through. He hoped it wouldn't take long.



Behind him the window slid open.



'We're ready,' Solomon said.



Sam drained his tumbler of neat Barbancourt rum and walked back into the suite. The lights had all been turned off except for a reading lamp by an armchair. A thick pile of black and white Miami PD headshots was waiting for him on the chair.



Sam sat down and went through them.



Ten minutes later he recognized the man who'd come into his store.



'That's him,' Sam said, holding up the picture.



Solomon's hand reached out from behind him and took it. He turned the picture over.



'Max Mingus. Detective Sergeant. Badge Number 8934054472. Date of Birth 8 March 1950,' he read out. And then, after a short pause, and with a hint of laughter. 'Miami Task Force.



'You can go,' Solomon said to Sam, as he began punching telephone keys.



Before rejoining his guests at the function, Sam went to the restroom to wash his hands and face and get back into schmoozing mode.



He barely registered the two men who came in while he was by the sink, a split second's glance telling him they were nobody he had to bother with.



'Mr Ismael?' the big black man asked him in a tone that sounded official, that sounded like how a cop would speak.



'Yes?' He looked up from the sink, in time to see the other man coming up behind him.



He felt a heavy blow on the back of his neck.



I They drove Sam Ismael to the MTF condo in Coral Springs, two hours out of Miami.



They dragged him inside and cuffed his right arm to a metal chair welded to the floor of a windowless room with whitewashed walls, a single lightbulb and a table, also bolted down.



Ismael was still groggy from the blow Max had dealt to his neck with a lead-shot-filled beavertail sap. Joe threw a bucket of cold water over him and he came to with a gasp and a start, blinking rapidly, panicked yellowy-brown eyes darting from Joe to the ceiling, to the table, to the door and then to Max, where they stopped and settled.



'Where am I?' he asked Max.



Well, it ain't the Fontainebleau.'



“Where am I?' Ismael banged the table with his free hand.



'I don't believe I correctly identified myself, the last time we met — in your store, remember?' Max looked at him and saw that he did. 'I am Detective Sergeant Mingus of the Miami Task Force. That over there' — motioning his head to Joe, stood against the wall with his hands in his pockets and a plastic carrier bag at his feet - 'is Detective Liston.



And you, Sam Ismael, are officially fucked.



'Now, let me clarify just what 'officially fucked' means. It means fuck your lawyer, fuck your civil rights, fuck your human rights, fuck the rights we didn't read you and, most of all, fuck you. And it also means that your life, as you knew it, is officially fucken' over. Do you understand?'



'What do you want?



4'7 Max held up a Polaroid photograph of the severed bead and placed it in the middle of the table.



'Who is she?'



'How should I know?'



'You should know.' Max lined up half a dozen pictures of the girl's body, laid out in loose order on the floor, with inch-wide gaps between the amputated parts. 'That's the basement of your store. And that's what we found in your freezers.'



Ismael looked at the photographs. He went pale.



'I don't know anything about this,' he said.



'No?' Max dropped three clear bags of surgical instruments one by one on the table, where they each landed with a bang. 'These have your prints all over them. And forensics will also find blood, tissue and hair samples that match the victim's. Do the math. Prints, plus tissue, plus hair, plus blood equals you.'



'But I didn't do it!' Sam shouted. 'And you haven't even got my prints on those.' Ismael pointed at the instruments.



'We sterilize them after use.'



'Your prints are on there, trust me.' Max smiled. 'Every digit.'



'Then you put them there when I was out cold!' Sam yelled. 'This is an outraged Max ignored him.



'OK, let's just say, for the sake of argument, you are innocent. You're still gonna be charged, and you're still gonna have to stand trial. Now, the press will have themselves a field day. Think about it. All that shit you've got in your store, all those body parts, religious icons, candles, masks —'



'Don't forget the chickens,' Joe prompted.



'And the chickens too. Can you imagine the headlines?



“Prominent Miami Businessman in Human Sacrifice Deep Freeze Voodoo Death Riddle.” This'll be our very own Black Dahlia.



'So it doesn't matter if you're innocent, you'll look guilty.



And that's all that counts. Appearance is everything in this country: if you look the part, you get the part.'



'I didn't do it,' Ismael repeated, but quietly, looking at the photographs, horrified.



'Who's this “we”?' Max asked. 'As in we sterilize our tools after use? You got an accomplice? Or are you thinkin' of pleading temporary insanity?'



Ismael shook his head.



'Charge me or release me. But if you charge me I'll beat it. And then I'll sue. False arrest. Loss of earnings. Loss of reputation. Psychological damage.'



Max looked him in the eye.



ŚYou forgot police brutality.'



Ismael couldn't stare Max down.



ŚWhat's Florida famous for — apart from gators, sunshine, Disney, girls in bikinis and a skyhigh body count?' Max asked.



'I don't know.' Ismael looked puzzled.



'It's not a trick question,' Max said. 'Think.'



Ismael did. Sweat had massed on his forehead and was trickling down his temples and large parrot-beak nose.



'Oranges?' he offered.



'Exactly,' Max said. 'Oranges. They're very good for you.



Great source of vitamin C. Which I'm sure you know. You eat oranges?'



'Sometimes.' Ismael shrugged.



'I love oranges,' Max said. 'In fact we've got some right here.' Joe handed him the carrier bag. Max took out the contents, one by one — eight large, ripe Florida oranges. He placed one over each photograph and held on to the last.



'What the doctors don't tell you about oranges is that they can also be very fucken' bad for you. There's eight of them there. If I put them back in the bag' — he replaced the fruit in the bag one by one and did it very slowly — 'I have



myself a lethal weapon. You've heard about the phone-book trick cops use in interrogation? Hit you in the torso, maximum pain, no external bruising? Real convenient. Same principle with oranges, except there's a twist.' Max knotted the bag. 'A phone book just hurts you inside. If I hit you hard - with a bag of Florida's finest, your insides will be a medically irreparable mess. Kidneys, liver, spleen, stomach, bladder all haemorrhaging. It'll take you days to die. Long, drawn out, painful days. You'll piss, shit and puke blood.



Very nasty. Wouldn't wish it on anyone - except the twisted fuck who sawed that girl apart.'



Max got off the table and motioned Joe over.



Joe undid Ismael's cuffs, grabbed him by the shoulders and lifted him to his feet like he was made of string. He held him steady.



Max walked up to him.



'Please!' Ismael screamed.



Max swung the bag and — deliberately — narrowly missed IsmaePs torso's.



'Shit!' Max said. 'Old age.'



He measured Ismael. Stared hard at his stomach like he was taking aim, took a step back, arm extended, all set to swing — 'Let me see the photo again!'



'Sit him back down,' Max told Joe, who shoved Ismael towards the table.



Ismael picked up the head shot and studied it closely. His eyes widened and shock spread over his face.



'You know her?' Max asked.



'That's - that's Risquee. I - I - I didn't recognize her . . .



immediately,' he stammered. 'She's a — a — a girl. Look, I didn't do this. I swear?



'Who did?' Max asked again.



Ismael took a deep breath and stared at Max with the eyes of a man who has just heard the ground starting to



give way beneath his feet and the roof caving in above him.



'Carmine,' he said very quietly, the name coming out of him reluctantly. 'It was most likely Carmine. He's been working in the store.'



'Carmine, as in Carmine Desamours?' Max prompted.



'That's right.' Ismael sighed.



'Eva Desamours' son?'



Ismael nodded.



'I thought he was a pimp. What's he doin' in your store?'



Max asked.



'He — he changed jobs.'



“What? He get promoted? Joe laughed.



'No. The opposite.'



'And this Risquee - was she one of his girls?' Max tapped the head pic.



'Yeah. He owed her money.'



'He owed her money. What kind of pimp is thai? Max laughed.



'Carmine isn't any more a pimp than I am,' Sam said bitterly. 'And he isn't a killer. It was probably an accident and he panicked.'



'No accident about a dismembered corpse,' Max said, putting the bag of oranges down and looking at Joe. They'd talked tactics in the car, on the way over. All was going to plan. Bamboozle Ismael, push him to give them a name, then really push him for what they wanted to know. Joe nodded slightly to Max: Ismael had cracked, now he was ready to break.



But he beat them to it. The panic and fear suddenly left his face. He sat back and smiled at Max.



'Something funny?' Max asked.



'What were you doing in my store?'



Max didn't miss a beat. He'd been ready for this.



'I wanted to see what Solomon Boukman's money



I



launderer looked like. And I was very interested — w pounds — he motioned to Joe — 'were very interested in the person who supplied some of the ingredients found in the stomachs of Preval Lacour and Jean Assad. Calabar beans and a very expensive tarot card - the King of Swords from the de Villeneuve deck — both of which came from your store.'



The smile didn't leave Ismael's face.



'I suppose you're going to offer me a deal. Witness protection and a new identity if I tell you everything? Life or death?



Something like that?'



'Something like that,' Max said.



IsmaePs smile turned into a smirk.



'You think your witness protection's going to protect me from Solomon Boukmari? Ismael said to Max. 'He can reach through any wall and close anyone's eyes. Doesn't matter where or who they are. And he'll kill my whole family too — even if they're completely ignorant of my affairs — because that's what he does.'



“You're assuming we won't get him first,' Max said.



'You're assuming you will. You know he has a — how should I say? — guardian angel?' Ismael pointed upwards with his free hand.



'Who?' Max asked. 'Lucifer?'



'Before you knocked me out in the bathroom, you know where I was? I was with Solomon on the top floor of the Fontainebleau. Suite 467. He won't be there now. You know what I was doing? I was looking at another set of photographs. Headshots. From the Miami police personnel files, trying to identify the plainclothes cop who'd walked into my store. And I did: Detective Sergeant Max Mingus.



He knows who you are. That makes us both dead men talking.'



Max went numb inside. He looked at Joe and saw surprise and a lot of worry on his partner's face.



Then he looked at Ismael — his smirk, his thin, sweaty



face, his small eyes, his huge curved nose — and he was lost for words. An icy cloud settled on the middle of his back and its chill travelled the length of his spine and then went into his bones. He saw Sandra. He thought of losing her.



And he shuddered.



'Where d'he get his information?' Joe asked.



'I don't know. And if it's none of my business, I don't want to know. I launder Solomon's money and front his construction schemes. That's it,' Ismael said. 'But I did overhear him talk about a contact once - a while ago - with Eva. No names mentioned, but she referred to him as the Emperor. As in the tarot card. So I knew this was someone important, someone big, someone whose name they didn't want to broadcast.'



'The Emperor's in the Major Arcana. The dominant cards, the deciders in the deck,' Max said, taking his cigarettes out of his pockets and lighting one. The Emperor didn't signify a person, but a desire to control one's circumstances or surroundings, have dominion over them, influence fate.



'That's right. This isn't just anybody. Like every major drug player in Miami, Solomon's got plenty of cops on his payroll, but the Emperor's in a different league. Either he's an equal partner or he's Solomon's boss. And he's very powerful. He's the one who wipes Solomon's prints off everything.'



'Tell me about that conversation you overheard. What was said exactly?' Max asked.



'It was something to do with an FBI operation Solomon had heard about. Eva said “Talk to the Emperor, he'll make it go away,”' Ismael replied.



'Did it?'



'Of course. Everything's always gone away. Solomon


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