Voodoo Eyes (4 page)

Yet once he’d followed Manny inside, a whole other world had opened up and swallowed him whole. Blacks, Latinos and a few whites of all ages and sizes. Industrious, busy, concentrated, intense, focused. Do-or-die ambitions. Dreams of glory and wealth. Broken noses, sliced-up brows, cauliflower ears. Hard faces, dripping wet. Trapped heat. The smell of sweat, blood, leather, rubbing alcohol. Choreographed violence. Punches thrown so fast hands blurred into a haze. The muffled poly-rhythm of fists on bags, rattling speedballs, the whirl and whip of a dozen jump ropes, the pit-a-pat of bouncing feet.

Eldon Burns had stepped out of the middle of it all, its embodiment, its soul. A big guy in track pants and a short-sleeved shirt. Big freckled arms, big square hands, scarred scowling face, steady but impatient eyes, a round reddish wart at the edge of his forehead. ‘Hit me in the face,’ he’d said to Max. And Max had knocked Eldon on his ass with a short fast right hook. First time a newcomer had ever touched him, let alone put him down. Eldon had looked up at Max from the floor, smiling. Everything in the gym had stopped and fallen absolutely silent.

Just like it was now.

The outline of Eldon’s body was marked out on the floor in bright white chalk, the contours rendered in crude geometry, everything straight. If it hadn’t been for the crescent of blackened blood that clung around the head in a hellish halo, the image would have been primitive in its simplicity. But then, wasn’t murder the most primitive of acts, the deed that linked man to his dumb cave-dwelling forebears?

Joe handed Max a set of photographs.

The first showed Eldon’s body. Arms thrown back, fists clenched, legs slightly apart in a wretched parody of a victorious boxer at the end of a bout. A rat sat on his chest, bearing two long front teeth, its black eyes looking into the camera.

‘Had to get pest control in here. Rats everywhere,’ said Joe. ‘Couldn’t wait to get at him, huh? Some would find that fitting.’ Max looked across at his friend, met his eyes, watched them dip.

Joe had hated Eldon and Eldon had hated Joe. Behind his back Eldon had referred to him as ‘that nigra’. Joe had dubbed Eldon ‘Sixdeep’ – ‘Sixth Degree Burns’ – the worst.

Eldon had been their boss when they were partners in the Miami Task Force, an elite unit within the Miami PD, active during the 1970s and most of the 1980s, when the city was a cocaine delta and its population collateral damage in an escalating war between rival drug gangs. Eldon ran MTF like a paramilitary outfit, another armed gang, only with badges and a licence to kill. He had a mandate from state politicians to solve all high-profile crimes by any and all means necessary – or at least to be
seen
to solve them. An illusion of safety was better than no illusion at all.

‘Make it fit and make it stick’ was his motto. It didn’t matter who MTF took down for the crimes, as long as they had criminal records and were guilty of something. MTF broke every point of procedure and every damn law. For every single crime they genuinely solved, they framed and sometimes killed people for dozens more. It didn’t make the slightest bit of difference. The innocent continued to die in droves and Miami turned into a billion-dollar sewer.

Eventually Joe found it all too hard to stomach and got himself transferred out. A year after, Max, damaged by his last major case and sickened by many of the things he’d done in and out of MTF, quit the force altogether. Eldon begged him to stay, made all manner of promises. When Max refused, Burns called him every obscenity ever invented. He’d intended for Max to follow in his footsteps, run MTF as before, while he climbed the last few rungs of the career ladder. Max had fucked up his carefully laid daydream, for ever ruining the order of succession.

They didn’t speak for close to sixteen years after that.

Yet the bond between them remained curiously strong. Eldon had been a father figure to Max when he’d most needed one. Max had been the son Eldon never had. Eldon never stopped watching over him. When Max went to prison for manslaughter in 1989, Eldon paid off the gangs in Attica to ensure nothing happened to him. His reach was long and occasionally benevolent.

The next pictures Max looked at were close-ups of Eldon’s head. He’d been shot clean through each eye, making the sockets look like they were covered with black pennies.

‘Shooter got real close here,’ said Max, pointing to the powder burns above and under Eldon’s right eye, far more on the top than the bottom.

‘They’re saying this was a gang initiation,’ said Joe.

Max went back to the photograph of the body on the floor. He shook his head.

‘Killer shot him through the right eye at close range. Eldon went down. Killer stood over him, put another bullet in the left eye,’ he said. ‘This was no initiation. This was an execution.’

‘What I thought too. When they moved the body, the casings fell out of his hands. The killer put them there, closed the fingers around them. Rigor mortis sealed them in,’ said Joe.

Max gave him a quizzical look.

‘Yeah, beats me too.’ Joe shrugged.

‘What was it? A forty-five?’

‘Haven’t seen the ballistics report, but the mess says yes.’

Max looked around the gym and tried to picture the murder. Had Eldon been on his way out when he’d met his killer? Had the killer come to the gym before? The powder above the brow meant the killer had fired the first shot at a downward angle, which meant he was taller than Eldon. The old man was around five foot eleven. That made the shooter at least six-two.

Why shoot him through the eyes? Was that a message? Something Eldon had seen that he wasn’t supposed to? Or was it the killer’s MO, the way he liked to do things?

Max stopped right there. He hadn’t thought this way in years. He hadn’t had to. He was amazed at how quickly it came back.

He’d last worked a crime scene with Joe twenty-seven years before, when they’d been after Solomon Boukman, the Haitian who’d ruled over the Miami underworld in the bad
bad
old days of cocaine and chainsaws.

They still collaborated on cases now, occasionally and strictly off the books. If Joe needed information he couldn’t get through normal channels, he asked Max to look into it. And if Max needed to do a background check on someone, he called Joe. But that was as far as it went, favours asked and rendered in private. Nothing more. No facts, no details.

‘Why d’you bring me here, Joe?’ Max asked, although he already knew the answer and was preparing his response. ‘We both know I’m not meant to be here. And you’d cut your head off before you’d violate procedure.’

‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’

‘Could you be a little more cryptic?’

‘You know who’s heading-up this investigation? That inspiration to morons everywhere: Deputy Commissioner Alex Ricon,’ Joe said.

‘He couldn’t catch air in a bag. Eldon hated him as much as he hated you. And the feeling was mutual.’

‘What’s that tell you?’

‘They’re not serious about catching the shooter.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But you know how it goes with hits,’ said Max. ‘You never go after the triggerman. You go after the person who paid him. Takes time and perseverance. The bigger the victim, the longer it takes. A lot of digging in dark corners. And with Eldon, you can be sure there’s going to be a major excavation.’

‘That’s just it,’ said Joe. ‘The only digging that’s gonna get done around Eldon is his grave. Tomorrow morning, they’re gonna tell the press it was some local teenage gangbanger popping his cherry.’

‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘Wish I was.’ Joe frowned and his brow creased into deep, broken grooves. ‘They don’t want to dig in case they don’t like what they find. And they know some of what’s down there. MTF put a lot of innocent people away. Most of ’em are doing life without. Imagine what would happen if an investigation led to just one of those guys being sprung? We’d have one overturned conviction after another. And then the multi-million-dollar lawsuits. The city can’t afford that.

‘Rumour is the Commissioner wants to run for Mayor soon. The Commissioner was tight with Eldon. That would squash his campaign dead on the drawing board.’

‘So they’ve put Ricon on it because he really won’t give two fucks if Eldon’s killer goes free,’ said Max.

They were quiet for a moment. Max looked back through the photographs, and again at the dried blood on the ground, all that remained of Eldon Burns.

‘Eldon was one of those people I couldn’t imagine dying,’ he said. ‘And not like this. No way. I thought he’d live to be a hundred and ten and go in his sleep.’

‘I hear you,’ said Joe. ‘Someone close to you dying never makes sense, does it? Why them, why now? Questions no one can really answer, except to say it’s God’s way.’

‘Or it’s just the way it is.’

‘Some people grow more religious the older they get.’

‘I doubt Eldon did,’ said Max.

‘How about you? You used to go to church when you had problems.’

‘Problems with a case,’ Max corrected him. That had been his thing as a cop, a little habit whenever a case dead-ended. He’d go to the nearest, quietest, emptiest church. Get away from the incessant noise of the office – the ringing phones, the typewriter chatter, the arguments, the joshing – and its stink of overworked cops sweating bad diets and booze binges into the tobacco-fugged air. He’d sit in a pew and sift through the piles of information in his head, jotting things down in a notebook, hoping a vital piece of information would shake loose, help explain why people did the nasty, repugnant, depraved shit they did to each other. Sometimes it worked: the lead he’d forgotten to chase up, the dull clue he’d overlooked in favour of a shinier one, the throwaway witness remark he’d dismissed. Other times he’d drawn a blank; a solitary guy sitting in an empty church, looking at the stained glass and stone saints, getting nowhere.

‘You ever think about what’s next – after this?’ Joe asked.

‘No.’

‘Never?’

‘No.’

Joe looked around the gym and then at his friend.

‘Well, I do. And I’ve got something to ask you. It may sound strange.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that. Ask away.’

‘If you … go – as in, die, before me, can you do me a favour?’

‘What? I’ll be busy being dead.’

‘I mean, if this is just the first stop on some big old ride we’re all on, if there’s something after this – this life – can you let me know? Send me a sign. Let me know you’re OK and there’s nothing to worry about.’

Liston was being serious. And Max didn’t find the request at all strange. In 1997 Joe had lost both his parents within months of each other. The following year, his younger brother dropped dead of a heart attack. Since then Joe had been given to ruminating on mortality, mostly his own. Max had always indulged him. He knew Joe was scared of dying in a way he wasn’t. In fact, he didn’t even think about death, because he didn’t have to. Max was essentially alone. His parents were gone. He had no wife, no girlfriend, no kids, no siblings, no nephews and nieces. In short: no responsibilities, no one to leave behind, no one to worry about, no reason to hold on. Joe, on the other hand, had a family of five and a loving wife. He wanted to stay with them for ever.

‘If there is a heaven, you think they’re gonna let me in?’ Max asked doubtfully. ‘You think God’s going to forgive me for the things I’ve done?’

‘Guess we’ll just have to wait and see.’

‘What kind of “sign” do you want me to send?’

‘Oh, I dunno,’ Joe shrugged. ‘Something – anything – so I’ll know it’s you.’

‘And you’ll do the same for me, right?’ Max smiled.

‘You can count on it. I’ve got one already picked out.’

‘Can you do something for me now – as in right now?’

‘Sure,’ Liston said.

And Max lanced the uncomfortable feeling that had been growing in the back of his mind ever since he’d stepped into the gym.

‘Tell me the real reason you brought me here.’

‘I didn’t like Eldon Burns. I’m sorry to say it now and here, but it’s the truth. Eldon was the worst thing ever happened to Miami – worse than any hurricane, race riot or drug epidemic. Those things peak ’n’ pass. People like Eldon they peak but they do not pass. What they do gets followed, handed down, refined, repeated. Ricon’s doing to Eldon what Eldon did to hundreds. You can call it “divine justice”, but it isn’t. It’s the same old, same old “make it fit, make it stick”. And I can’t be a party to that. I wasn’t then. I’m not now.

‘To me, this isn’t Eldon Burns getting killed. This is an old man being gunned down in cold blood and nobody wanting to know. And I’m seeing
all
the consequences coming down. The media spin – an old, defenceless white man killed in a black area – an area I grew up in, an area you did some growing up in too. Liberty City’s gonna be officially fucked and scorched. All the grassroots progress that’s been going on here, that nobody ever talks about? It’ll count for nothing. It’ll go back in the dirt. They’ll blame those dumbass rappers for all the guns and drugs here, and Ricon’s freshly minted goon squad’ll roll in and start knocking heads, until eventually there’s another race riot.’

Joe was out of breath and sweating. Max waited until he’d regained his composure a little before speaking.

‘This isn’t your fight, Joe.’

‘I’m making it my fight.’

‘You’re seven months away from retirement.’

‘Means I got seven months to do this.’

‘But it’s not like before,’ said Max. ‘When we were chasing down Solomon Boukman, we had options. We could afford to get shitcanned by Eldon, because we were young enough to start over. You’ve got nowhere to go after this. You can’t start over. They find out, they’ll take your pension.’

‘By the time they find out, it’s their pensions that’ll be getting took.’

‘What about Jet? Think of him at least.’ Jethro – Jet – Liston was Joe’s eldest son, and Max’s godson. He’d been a promising ball player until a bad tackle put an end to his career. He was now a Patrol cop, like his father had been.

‘It ain’t gonna come down to that, Max. I’ve got a plan.’

Max knew what Joe was about to ask of him.