Voodoo eyes, p.1
Voodoo Eyes, page 1
part #3 of Max Mingus Series
Also by Nick Stone
Mr Clarinet
King of Swords
Copyright
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 978-0-748-11601-0
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 Nick Stone
The right of Nick Stone to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
www.hachette.co.uk
Contents
Also by Nick Stone
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Empty Ring
Part I: City of Worms
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part II: The Outpost of Tyranny
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Inauguration Day
For …
My wife, Hyacinth
My agent, Lesley Thorne
My first editor, Beverley Cousins
My good friends, The Count and The Prince
And also in loving memory of Elaine Flinn,
Cal de Grammont, Dick Gallagher,
Birdie Lena Bent and
John Weller
Acknowledgements
With very special thanks to Sally Riley, for showing me that the way back was the way forward; Aurelien Masson, for ze tuff (gong) luv; Joe Finder, for his wise and timely counsel; Mister Burns, for the smelling salts and cornertalk.
Thanks also to David Shelley and all at Little, Brown; Clare Alexander and all at Aitken Alexander Associates; Seb and Rupert Stone, Nick Guyatt, Jan and Michael, Frankie, Mark and Tom, Big T, The Mighty Bromfields, The Bents, The Mabes, Ana-Maria Rivera, The Kanners, Mitch Kaplan, Roger Smith, Nic Joss, Stav Sherez, Darrell and Lynette Davis, Iain Munn – Honorary Councillor, Rory Gilmartin, Richard Thomas, Lloyd Strickland, Tim Heath and Clare Oxborrow.
‘Ah-ha-ha! Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’
Johnny Rotten
EMPTY RING
October 28, 2008
Every morning, without fail, Eldon Burns took a cab from his home in Coconut Grove to the boxing gym he owned on 7th Avenue in Liberty City – Miami’s roughest and most rundown neighbourhood, and no place for a sane man his age. Although the gym hadn’t functioned as such in over eight years, Eldon had refused to sell or rent out the building, because it was there, within its four walls, that he still felt a little like his old self, communing with his memories, smiling at the ghosts of past triumphs, remembering the time when, as Deputy Chief of Police, he’d as good as run the city.
Inside, the gym was an ongoing ruin. Every day it fell apart a little more. The concrete floor, once painted with intricate diagrams of numbered feet, lay buried under a coating of dust so thick it looked like rancid manna. And it just kept on coming. The air was cut with a steady snow of fine filth, sullying the thick slants of sunlight that poured through the windows. The heavy bags hung rigid from rust-stiffened chains and brackets. The gym’s huge ring – once the biggest of its kind in Florida – stood in the centre, an ungainly heap of rotted oak and mildewed fabric. It had collapsed after an unattended leak in the roof opened up into a waterfall during a storm. Rain had soaked through the canvas and got into the wood. With time, heat and neglect, the structure had subsided as would an overwhelmed fighter, one leg at a time. It was now home to a colony of large brown rats, whose squeals and scuttlings had replaced the sounds of the gym; as had the distinct drone of the thousands of airborne insects that had found their way in through the ever-widening hole in the roof. Sometimes parrots, gulls and even pelicans got in too, but rarely found their way out; what the rats left of them added to the smell of militant decay about the place.
The rats weren’t scared of Eldon. They were used to his daily visits, this eighty-four-year-old man literally retracing his steps across the dirt, walking slowly, his head bowed because he could no longer hold it as high as he used to. They’d peer out at him from under the canvas, eyes glinting in the darkness, as if wondering whether today was the day he too would become like those stray birds.
Eldon paid them no more mind than he did what was left of his gym. He went into his office, on the right, its door in the middle of a wall of mirrors. The mirrors were two-way, just like in police interrogation rooms.
He sat down behind the desk and looked out at the gym. He didn’t see it the way it was, but the way it used to be, back in the day, back in his day: a dozen fighters of all ages, skipping, sparring, speedbagging, shadowboxing in front of the mirror, as oblivious to his presence now as they had been then. He heard the sounds of fists slamming into bags, the steady patter of feet jumping rope; then he heard the three-minute buzzer and Abe Watson – the gym’s head trainer, manager and co-owner – calling time on the two prospects sparring in the ring. He saw his old friend, very much alive, in his red Kangol cap, giving advice to the greenhorns he’d just supervised.
Eldon Burns was so enraptured by the sounds and visions in his head that he didn’t hear the quiet creak of the gym door opening, and neither did he see the person who walked in.
Eldon’s fall from grace had been quick and hard.
First, on the eve of their fiftieth wedding anniversary, his wife Lexi had asked for a divorce. She’d beaten the alcoholism Eldon had driven her to with his inattention and his affairs, and she’d wanted rid of the other bad thing in her life. Or so she claimed. In reality, things hadn’t been right between them since their youngest daughter, Leanne, and their adopted son, Frankie Lafayette-Burns – a Haitian boxing prodigy he’d trained – had died in a boat accident in Mexico in 1990. It later turned out they’d just got married and Leanne was pregnant. That had devastated Eldon more than the news of the accident – the kid he’d taken in and raised as his own had been fucking his youngest daughter.
Eldon was glad to be rid of Lexi though, so the divorce didn’t hurt much, even if the parting price did: $10 million and their house in Hialeah. He’d loved that house.
Then he lost Abe. His best friend and former partner in the Miami PD had been diagnosed with lung cancer in the summer of 1999. Abe had smoked two packs of untipped Chesterfields every day for forty-three years. Eldon watched him waste away on a hospital bed until he was little more than a wheezing head on a stick, breathing, feeding, pissing and shitting through tubes. He died a few minutes before midnight on Millennium Eve.
Abe had been buried according to his wishes – in dress blues, with his pearl-handled 1911 Colt on his hip and, on his feet, the boots his dead son had worn in Vietnam. His hand held a bottle of the Wray & Nephew rum he’d liked to drink and in his trouser pockets were two packs of smokes, his Zippo lighter and a bag of silver dollars. Abe had explained his burial requirements to Eldon thus: ‘I’m’a have ta buy or shoot my way outsa hell fo’ the shit I done. If I cain’t, then I’m’a have me a drink with the Devil.’
Over the next two months, the gym gradually emptied. Eldon had neither the time nor the desire to train the fighters himself and he wouldn’t hire a replacement for Abe. His stable drifted away, to other gyms, other sports or back to the streets they’d stepped in from.
Then came the rest.
Eldon started the new millennium as Special Consultant to the Chief of Police, but anyone familiar with the way things really worked in the city knew that the title was nominal, a way of legitimising his ongoing presence in the ranks after he’d officially retired from the Miami PD.
Then Internal Affairs began investigating Eldon’s links with Victor Marko, a political fixer who’d been indicted for murder. Eldon was suspended from duty while they looked into the association, which had spanned more than thirty years.
Three months later they brought him in for questioning. Eldon was ready for them. He’d always been ready. He went without a lawyer. He didn’t need one. Over his many years in the police, he’d amassed a mountain of dirt on just about anyone who’d ever taken the oath.
The investigators kept him in the interrogation room for all of twenty minutes. He spoke frankly and very plainly to them, revealing the tip of the shitberg he had on their superiors – all of whom were watching him on a videoscreen in the adjoining office.
He was offered a deal. He could keep everything – his fortune, his houses, his pension, his reputation and his freedom – but he had to resign immediately and go quickly and very quietly into obscurity.
So he retreated to the 7th Avenue gym, where, in many ways, it had all really begun for him.
It took Eldon a while to separate the man standing in front of his office window from the ghosts he’d conjured up in the gym. When he realised that the nigra wasn’t a figment of his imagination, the gym returned to its ruinous empty present, and it was just the two of them there.
The man seemed to be looking right at Eldon through the mirror, his steady and unwavering eyes two dark beams piercing his own reflection.
He was tall and thin, going on malnourished. His clothes – a short-sleeved black shirt and chinos the same shade of deep brown as his skin – billowed about him in the gentle breeze from the broken windows and ruptured roof. The shirt had gold birds on it.
Eldon didn’t know him. What the fuck did he want? In the last eight years Burns hadn’t had a single visitor here.
Not one.
The kid didn’t look like a bum. The clothes were too good for that, and his hair was too short.
Perhaps he’d come to learn to fight.
How about that?
Eldon thought about it. How long had it been since he’d tested a greenhorn? Could he still – even at his age?
The impulse went through him in a pleasant, invigorating surge and he chuckled to himself.
Eldon scoped the kid out. He looked all of fourteen. And soft. His features were still puppy-fat smooth, no edges, little character. Except for his mouth. Jesus – what a fucked-up kisser! How the fuck had that happened? But he couldn’t see him as a fighter, not really, not at all. A boxer’s punch would cut him in half. In fact, the more Eldon looked at him, the more he failed to see any athletic potential in him whatsoever. He had the height of a basketballer, but none of the robustness. Too wan, too wasted, too fucken’ feeble.
Then, as if he’d read Eldon’s thoughts, the kid walked away and headed for the front door.
He was leaving.
He couldn’t.
Not yet.
Eldon got up from his chair as quickly as he could. He had to catch the nigra before he left.
He opened his office door and stepped out.
‘Wait!’
The kid turned around and looked at Eldon, who started towards him across the filthy floor.
‘Elton Booorns?’ He had a strong Hispanic accent. An off-the-boat immigrant, Eldon guessed, possibly Cuban, even though the dry-footers were way down now.
Eldon nodded and approached him, noticing how the kid’s eyes were moving around the gym while keeping him in view. He was sharp and very quick. Eldon bet his reflexes were on point.
Eldon decided to have himself a little fun, treat the nigra like every newcomer who stepped through the gym doors wanting to be a fighter. Back then Eldon had had his own particular – and legendary – way of sorting out the serious from the seriously deluded.
‘What do you want?’ Eldon stopped and stood in front of him. Nothing but a kid – a kid who was a good foot taller, with a head a couple of sizes too big for his emaciated body. And Eldon couldn’t help but stare at his mouth, at that heap of natural, arbitrary carnage piled up under his nose.
‘You wanna be a fighter? Usted desea ser boxeador?’
The kid nodded.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Osso.’
‘Osso? You what, Cubano?’
Osso didn’t respond. Probably an illegal, thought Eldon. Like Frankie’d been.
‘Good fighters come out of your country, you know that? Best amateur boxers in the world. Los mejores boxeadores son Cubanos.’
The kid smiled at that, and his smile was a horrible sight, like a strip of fresh roadkill splattered across a freeway. No discernible teeth. In a way, thought Eldon, it was a good start. Up close he saw that he’d been wrong. The kid was young but far from fresh. He didn’t have much of a face to lose. His nose was already flat and there were two deep parallel scars across his right cheek. Maybe Eldon could do something for him, send him to one of two gyms he knew, run by ex-fighters he’d trained.
But first he needed to see how much Osso wanted to fight, just how determined he was. The kid needed to pass the test.
‘OK, Osso. Here’s what I want you to do,’ said Eldon. ‘I want you to hit me in the face.’
Osso looked at him with complete bewilderment.
That was always the greenhorn’s first reaction, and it meant nothing. But their next one did.
‘Hit me in the face. I mean it,’ Eldon said. Osso didn’t budge. He looked confused.
Then Burns realised that maybe the nigra hadn’t fully understood him, so he made a fist and said it in Spanish.
‘Golpée me en la cara. Da me to mejor golpe. Vamos cabron!’
That got through. He saw it in the eyes. Something passed behind them, like a shadow had crossed his brain.
Osso drew back his right arm and Eldon got ready to duck a wild haymaker.
But the kid didn’t throw a punch.
He pulled a gun instead.
Not just any gun.
Abe’s gun – his .45 Colt, his pride and joy – the gun he’d been buried with.
Eldon recognised the pearl grips, the chip at the mouth of the barrel and, lastly, Abe’s initials – ‘A.J.W.’ – scratched up the trigger guard.
Eldon had lived half his life expecting this moment, but now that it had finally come, he wasn’t even scared. Only people who believed in God or had something to live for feared death. He wasn’t one of those people. And at this range it would be as painless as dying in a coma. He’d be dead before his body knew it.
The only thing he felt was curiosity.
‘Quién le envió?’ he asked his future killer.
‘Vanetta Brown.’
‘What?’
The door opened behind the gunman. And the very last thing Eldon Burns saw was a person walking back into his life.
PART I
CITY OF WORMS
1
Miami was bad for marriages. That’s what Max Mingus concluded as he sat in Room 29 of the Zurich Hotel on the corner of 8th and Collins waiting for the adulterers next door to get down to business so he could get along with his.
Of all the people he knew, only his best friend, Joe Liston, was still with his first wife. The rest were either on second or third marriages, divorce-stunted loners, or – like him – widowers who lived with ghosts.
This city wasn’t a place for long-term commitments. Its nature was transient, its spirit restless. It was ever evolving; shedding one glitzy layer of skin after another, like a rhinestone snake on speed. Miami was the midpoint between somewhere else and somewhere better, so hardly anyone was from here and hardly anyone ever stayed. People passed through, moved on and made way for more of the same. That was Max’s theory, how he understood things. Miami was a river rushing over quicksand: you couldn’t stand up in it and you sure as hell couldn’t build on it.
He wiped the sweat from his brow. He hadn’t been in the room long, but his handkerchief was already soaked to the corners. The air con was broken. The heat was damn near stifling and the place smelled of puke and food fights. He didn’t want to open the window because the noise from the street would drown out the goings-on next door. Right now the two of them were talking. That’s what they liked to do first. Talk. And laugh a little. Her mostly.
*
He’d been watching the couple for six weeks. Fabiana Prescott and Will Cortland. They were both married to other people. Cortland, thirty-one, worked for a chauffeured-car company called Island Limos. He was tall, blond, gym-built and had the sort of safe, wholesome, all-American good looks you’d see in TV ads for banks or holiday resorts. Fabiana, twenty-five, was the fourth trophy wife of Emerson Prescott, Max’s client. She was a Latin firecracker: long black hair, olive skin and big dark eyes set atop the kind of body whose curves were too perfect and generous to be real. She turned every straight man’s head wherever she went.
