Voodoo Eyes (53 page)

It was Elias Grimaud. Vanetta’s deputy, Osso’s accomplice.

Boukman had always used doubles. This was no exception.

Had Boukman even
been
here?

‘Where is he?’ Max yelled.

Grimaud dropped the swords and started coming towards Max, walking through fire in a suit of burning clothes.

Max hesitated, couldn’t take the shot, almost didn’t want to. Grimaud was a goner. Let him burn.

But Max was covered in paste himself, a potential torch.

Grimaud reached out, his arms in flames, whether for help or to kill him, he didn’t know.

Max fired twice. The first bullet hit Grimaud in the shoulder, the next in the chest.

Grimaud fell backwards, the incinerating
vévé
receiving his body whole and closing quickly around him.

Max watched the outline of his body burn a few moments more.

Then he ran for the basement.

It was empty.

No Boukman.

Nothing there but bare walls, a cement floor, three thick wooden beams holding up the ceiling, and pink neon tubes for lighting.

Boukman would have got out this way. And this was where Osso and Grimaud would have come through after they’d killed him.

Max looked for an exit.

Thick acrid smoke was rolling down the stairs and settling on the floor. The paint on the ceiling was bubbling and blistering. The striplights flickered. One of the tubes blew and spat sparks.

Max moved quickly to the centre of the basement, sweeping it with his eyes, turning in one direction, then another, checking behind the beams. The condensing smoke and failing lights made him see shadows and shapes all around, made him feel like he was encircled by ghosts.

He shifted to the left. The smoke thinned for an instant. He thought he saw a door in the far corner.

He started towards it.

Then he froze.

Someone was standing there.

Max aimed his gun.

‘Boukman!’

The lights suddenly went out. A pair of neon tubes dropped out of their sockets and smashed on the ground. It was pitch black.

Max found it hard to breathe; the air was pure smoke and gasoline fumes. White spots were dancing before his eyes, his head was spinning, he wanted to heave.

He knew he was close to passing out.

Piece by piece the house began falling apart, as the fire raged through the floors above, burning out the supports. Masonry, metal, timber and slate broke off and came crashing down. The basement ceiling shook and screeched and fractured with every impact, leaking rivulets of fine dust, and the walls hummed with terrible vibrations.

Max felt something touch his face, swore it was a hand. He fired once, twice. He barely heard the shots above the crashing explosions. Muzzle flash lit up dense grey smoke and dust and darkness.

Then, behind him, near the steps, one of the wooden beams buckled and ruptured with a high-pitched braying sound. Part of the ceiling it was supporting gave way and a whole mass of concrete suddenly dropped into the basement, letting in a bonfire of rubble.

The area was lit up bright orange.

Max saw everything.

He’d inadvertently manoeuvred himself close to the door, so close that his leg was practically brushing the handle. And what he’d taken to be a person standing nearby was a tailor’s dummy. The dummy was placed by a table and chair. A vintage theatre mirror, complete with a bulb frame, hung on the wall above it. All the glass was smashed. There were tubs of black and white face paint on the table, tissues and make-up remover. A bundle of clothes was stacked on the chair.

Max turned the handle and pulled open the door.

He staggered outside.

The fresh air shocked his body. He went dizzy. He coughed and dry-heaved, tasting gasoline and smoke on his tongue, grit in his mouth. He blinked away dirt under his eyelids. His brows were singed and his skin raw and tender from the blaze. His body was made of pain. He wanted to lie down, or at least sit.

But he pushed himself forward a few more steps, away from the house.

Then he straightened up and started walking, and the walk became a jog, and the jog a run.

He tore over gravel. Next he was crossing cool wet grass. He slipped and fell on his face. He picked himself up almost immediately and kept going. He crashed through a boundary of trees, over dead leaves, broken branches and then more grass.

He only stopped running when he came to the end of the island. The ground fell away to the sea in a short sharp drop. To his right was a simple wooden jetty, where a speedboat was moored – an offshore catamaran with high-powered twin engines.

A short path led down to the ocean via a dozen steps cut into the rock face.

There was no one in the boat and no one on the pier. The catamaran was rocking side to side, the hull thumping against the wood, the moorings slapping at the water, which was disturbed and choppy, even though the rest of the ocean appeared calm.

Then he heard a sound.

A motor, still loud but becoming fainter by the second.

He panned the ocean.

He saw the multi-coloured marker buoys in the distance.

He saw the first hints of dawn on the horizon.

He saw a pair of gulls swooping low.

He saw clouds fringed bright orange, as if they too had fled the burning house.

And then he saw a boat.

It was speeding away – well away – heading out of Cuban waters, making for Haiti, almost airborne as it skimmed the tops of the waves, leaving behind a heavy wake, thick and pale and frothing.

Max looked back at the jetty. He saw a rope tethered to a post, its severed end in the water, the planks splashed and puddled with spray.

Boukman
had
been here …

Max didn’t understand.

Why hadn’t Boukman watched him die? Why did he bring him this far, only to leave before his helpers finished the job?

Max checked the gun. He still had four rounds left.

He started towards the jetty.

But he didn’t make it.

He heard another sound, another engine.

A car, coming up fast behind him, headlights pinioning him.

A screech of brakes.

He dropped the gun and put his hands up.

59

It was Rosa Cruz, in one of the hospital jeeps.

She left the engine running and stepped out.

‘Took your time,’ Max said.

‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

‘No.’

He looked out across the water. The boat was long gone, its wake blended with the waves, as if it had never been there.

Max turned and saw part of the house for the first time. A three-floor, red-brick building, more suited to New England than the Caribbean, partly hidden by a copse of palm trees. Flames were massing in the upper windows, and smoke was emptying from a hole where a section of the roof had collapsed.

‘She told me what happened.’ Rosa nodded to the jeep, where Vanetta Brown sat swaddled in a dressing gown, looking at them both. ‘She wants to go home.’

‘Me too,’ he said.

He carried Vanetta down to the jetty and placed her very gently in the boat.

After he’d strapped her in, he stepped away and gave her a moment with Rosa.

Vanetta used all the strength she could muster to hug Rosa and kiss her on both cheeks. They exchanged a few words in Spanish, Rosa sniffing and wiping away tears the whole time.

Max stood awkwardly on the pier, out of earshot, to give them privacy, but he was desperate for them to hurry because they needed to get away before people came.

He looked at the horizon, towards Haiti, towards where Boukman had fled. He considered taking off after him instead of going to Miami, but he knew he’d never catch him. He’d had his chance to kill Boukman twenty-seven years ago. Joe had stopped him. He wished he hadn’t now – for both their sakes, especially Joe’s.

But were things really that straightforward, that simple, that brutal? Kill one person and live happily until you die of old age? Or had their lives always been on this course, locked in to a destiny they couldn’t prevent, with Boukman one of a billion interchangeable axes wielded by fate?

And Max thought he understood now why Boukman had left when he had. Boukman had said that killing him outright was too easy, that it wouldn’t have been enough. Boukman had wanted to watch him suffer. Boukman had wanted
satisfaction.
That’s what all this had been about.

So maybe Boukman had decided that he didn’t want to see him die at all, that he wanted to remember him alive – but alive on his own terms; as his prisoner, at his mercy. That way he’d have a sweet memory he could revisit over and over again for the rest of his days; a memory of Max Mingus in his final moments on earth, tied to a chair, watching the last twelve years of his life flash by. Only it wasn’t the life Max thought he’d lived, but the one Boukman had given him.

That made some kind of sense. Even if it turned out to be completely wrong.

What would happen when Boukman realised Osso and Grimaud were dead? Would he think they’d accidentally perished in the fire? Or would he guess the truth?

Max didn’t know.

Rosa came over to him. She took off the rucksack she’d been carrying on her back. Inside were the CDs, the flow chart and all the notes he’d made.

‘Who was Solomon Boukman?’ she asked.

‘Unfinished business.’

‘Is it finished now?’

Max glanced across at the ocean, then back at her. ‘Did you get what you came for?’

She nodded.

‘I hope it all works out the way you want,’ he said.

‘Same with you.’ She held out a hand.

Max took it and held it for a moment. They pressed palms and disengaged.

Max got in the boat. The keys were in the ignition.

Rosa untied the moorings.

He checked on Vanetta. She had her eyes closed and her breaths were shallow.

He started the boat and turned to wave goodbye to Rosa, but she was already gone.

60

They reached the Florida coast at daybreak. The sun was beginning to crawl up from under the ocean and joggers were already on the beach, getting their regulation miles in before it turned too hot.

Max still had the gun, stuck in his waistband. He took it out and inspected it, felt its considerable heft. Abe Watson’s pride and joy, his 1911 Colt – customised mother-of-pearl grips and its owner’s initials, knife-carved on the trigger guard. ‘A.J.W.’ Abraham Jefferson Watson. The gun had killed Eldon and Joe, and put Grimaud out of his misery. It had also been used to murder Ezequiel and Melody Dascal, and Dennis Peck – and many more besides, some guilty, some innocent. He thought about all that for a moment, then tossed the gun into the sea.

Max sailed the boat up to the shore and carried Vanetta out.

She’d said nothing to him the whole way. She’d kept on nodding off, despite the noise of the engine and the bumpy ride. At one moment he even thought she was gone, but when he’d taken her pulse her eyes opened and she’d looked at him full of indignation, as if to ask, ‘How dare you presume I’m dead?’

He laid her down in the sand, resting her head on a lifejacket.

She gazed up at the fast brightening sky, and then at him.

‘Where am I?’ Her faint voice was practically inaudible over the sound of the surf foaming on the shore and the tide’s gentle boom.

He heard a chopper moving across the sky and, behind it, approaching sirens; coming their way, coming for them. He hoped the convoy included an ambulance.

‘Home,’ he said.

Vanetta put her fingers on the sand, sunk them in and gripped a fistful. Then she moved her fist to her chest and rested it there, close to her heart.

Max took her free hand and held it. It was warm, yet her pulse was weak and halting.

He gently stroked her face.

She looked into his eyes and managed the slightest, faintest of smiles that could have meant anything – relief, happiness, gratitude, or perhaps irony, because she’d heard the sirens too.

‘Home?’ she said.

He wanted to say hang on a little longer, that help was almost here, but she’d closed her eyes now and her face had a deep serenity about it, a contentment and peace he didn’t want to breach in any way. So he watched over her, as the sirens grew louder and louder, mere seconds away.

Vanetta’s smile broadened. Her fingers began to loosen in his palm and the sand she’d grasped leaked through the gaps in her fist, draining faster and faster on to her heart.

Although the sun was starting to shine and the breeze was warm and it was going to be a beautiful day in Florida, he felt like he’d come to the coldest place in the world.

INAUGURATION DAY

Miami Beach was unusually quiet, but then it was a highly unusual day; a first-of-its-kind, milestone moment. History was on the verge of being made in America and everybody wanted to play a part; everybody wanted their little piece of it, their ‘I was doing this, when …’ stake in the passage of time. It was the next best thing to being on reality TV.

The streets and beaches and stores were near-deserted. People were at home or in hotels and bars and restaurants, watching televisions or computer screens, waiting on Presidentelect Obama to take the oath of office and give his inaugural address; waiting to seal the deal with him.

Up in Washington, DC, it was freezing cold. But that hadn’t deterred two million people from carpeting the length and breadth of the National Mall; a vast spread of humanity, all races and genders and ages, bearing witness, getting as close as they could and ever would to the paragon of possibility. It was the biggest-ever turnout for a Presidential inauguration.

Max watched the hushed and patient masses on one of the two plasma screens in the reception area of Sal Donoso’s office. He’d arrived early for his appointment with the lawyer, who was going to hand over what Eldon had left him in his will.

The receptionist was ignoring him. She was transfixed by the same screen he was glancing at. Max couldn’t help but read her the way he still automatically read people whose company he found himself in, no matter how temporarily. She was the wrong side of middle-aged to be working an entry-level job; glasses, short blue-rinsed hair, a brown suit and too much make-up. Her face bore unmistakable traces of an earlier life lived too hard, possibly to the brink. She gazed at the television admiringly, hands clasped together, no rings. He guessed she got lonely a lot.