Voodoo Eyes (54 page)

After the police picked him up on the beach, they locked him up in a camp outside Hialeah for a week. He shared a dormitory with a boatload of Haitians waiting to be sent back, a few newly arrived Cubans waiting to be welcomed in, and people of other nationalities, mostly South Americans and Caribbean islanders, their fates undetermined.

He was interviewed four times. The police threatened to charge him with breaking the law for travelling to Cuba. He wanted to laugh at that and lecture them on the realities of the place, but he knew better; you can’t beat a forty-something-year-old law in an argument, no matter how absurd and contradictory and hypocritical you find it. Then it was the FBI’s turn. They took two passes at him. They asked about his dealings with Vanetta Brown and how he’d come to be in possession of classified government files. He told them a selective version of the truth, which omitted all names and most of what had really happened. It was a simple, solid story, and therefore easy to remember, so his interrogators didn’t catch him out on contradictions, no matter how many different ways they asked the same question. They were good but he was better. The last person to interview him was some asshole from Homeland Security, who asked more of the same, only with a terrorism angle worked in. When he asked Max if he’d had contact with Muslim extremists, he almost told him, sure, when he drove past the Gitmo perimeter. Instead he dropped Wendy Peck’s name. His interrogator left the room quickly, promising to return. He never did.

They let him go the next afternoon. No explanation. Just ‘You’re outta here’ and approximate cab fare back home.

He opened his door to a few bills and a dusty void.

He made coffee in the kitchen and savoured the cup. He finished it too fast and made another, which he took out on his balcony. The view was exactly the same as the one Solomon Boukman had shown him, the one he’d filmed from the very spot where Max was standing. He saw it and tasted petrol.

Everything was familiar, as it had been. But then everything had changed too, and nothing would go back to the way it was.

A week later he was watching the news when it was announced that Wendy Peck had resigned her position with immediate effect – to spend more time with her family and pursue new opportunities, the statement said. Her superior commended her on a job well done and wished her the very best for the future.

Max logged on to his computer and looked up Justice4Dennis.com. The site had been taken down.

Vanetta Brown, however, still remained on the FBI’s Most Wanted list: a domestic terrorist with a half-million-dollar bounty on her head, whose current whereabouts were believed to be Havana, Cuba. Like she’d said, her innocence was academic.

He wasn’t surprised. Not at all. He knew how things worked. But it still made him sick.

In early December, he’d visited the Liston family. He told Lena and Jet what had happened in Cuba and everything that led up to it. He wasn’t convinced that Lena hadn’t known about Joe’s secret activities, but he didn’t push it. What did it matter anyway? And what good would the knowledge do him?

They both listened without much in the way of comment. They didn’t ask if he’d killed Solomon Boukman. They assumed he had. When he left the house, Jet walked him to his car. He thanked Max and they shook hands and hugged, because they both knew it was his last visit, that he wouldn’t be back, nor would he be asked back. Too much had happened on account of him. It was painful, but it was for the best.

He thought a lot about Rosa Cruz. Had she managed to blackmail her way back into her old job? He hoped so, but he had no way of knowing.

As for Benny Ramirez, Max was fairly sure it was him he saw in a small, empty café on the corner of Ocean and 6th one night: a tall thin man with longish brown hair, a handsome but hollow face, and a still-healing pink knife-scar extending the end of his mouth to the edge of his cheekbone. He was muttering to himself, or maybe singing, as he mopped the floor. Max considered taking a closer look, but he thought the better of it and moved on.

In mid-December he’d finalised the sale of his penthouse. A Uruguayan property developer offered him a million for it. It was almost twice what he’d originally paid and he was lucky to find a buyer. He took the deal.

He’d been packing up the little he was going to transfer to his new home, when there was a knock at the door. He found an urn outside with a note taped to it. The urn was moulded plastic sprayed in oak tones, the kind you could buy in any Walmart for about twenty bucks.

The note read: ‘
You’ll know what to do. J.Q.
’

And he did.

He took Vanetta’s remains to the City of Miami Cemetery, where the bodies of Ezequiel and Melody Dascal were buried side by side. He scattered the ashes over their graves. He stayed there a good while, trying to think of something to say, but no words came.

As he left, it started raining, first heavy drops, then a downpour.

A television was also on in the boardroom where Sal Donoso had led Max. The volume was muted as Obama took his oath on Lincoln’s Bible, held by his wife. His two daughters and a couple of billion people around the world watched. The scrolling commentary explained the President had just fluffed his lines.

Donoso was immaculately groomed, his white goatee trimmed to a sharp point, his shoes shiny, his hands manicured.

The two men sat at the long conference table, on which were four box files and an envelope.

‘Eldon bequeathed you these.’ Donoso pushed his inheritance to him with his palm, as though closing a heavy door.

The files were labelled with Max and Joe’s names and old badge numbers. Max had three files devoted to him, with yellowed-paper corners poking out from under the lids.

He opened up one of his boxes and dropped back into the dark end of memory lane. It was the late 1970s and he saw photographs and skim-read records of every bad thing he’d done as a cop, enough to land him in jail again, only this time for life without. No surprise there. Eldon had had dirt on everyone, even his most loyal footsoldiers.

‘There are no copies,’ said Donoso.

With a sense of dread, Max pulled Joe’s box towards him. It slid across the table easily and felt light. When he opened it, he found it was empty.

‘What’s this?’

‘Eldon could never get anything on him.’ Donoso smiled. ‘That’s why he hated him so much.’

Max opened the envelope.

It contained the deeds to the 7th Avenue gym.

He managed a smile. Eldon had sent him back to the beginning, to where everything had started between them – and where it had finished. He didn’t know what he was going to do with a crumbling old building in a neighbourhood no one wanted to live in, and with property prices already depressed to hell. He guessed he’d let it rot a little more until he thought of something better: decay or decision, whichever came first.

‘What are you doing with yourself these days?’ asked Donoso.

Max told him the truth. ‘Going to bed early.’

He’d recently moved into his new home: a small house on a quiet residential street in a small town with an active neighbourhood watch scheme and a very low crime rate. It was a three-hour plane ride from Miami.

Max had no way of knowing if Boukman would come for him again, if he wasn’t already somewhere in this other life he’d started; embedded, watching, waiting, picking his moment. Maybe they were quits. Maybe they weren’t. There was no statute of limitations on revenge, but the only thing Boukman could take from him now was whatever time he had left on the clock. He slept alone. He had no friends.

‘I could use an investigator,’ said Donoso. ‘My main guy died of a heart attack the other week.’

‘I’m done with all that.’

‘If you change your mind …’

‘I won’t.’

He took MacArthur Causeway back to the airport. Miami Beach disappeared in his rearview and the city’s busy, overcrowded, still-expanding skyline came stomping up to him like a phalanx of juiced-up bouncers in designer suits, all bulging geometry and mirrored glass.

His plane wasn’t leaving for another five hours, so he had plenty of time to stop off someplace and burn the files.

He listened to the closing moments of President Obama’s address, which promised no easy fixes and tough times ahead, appealing to Americans to come together and work through the myriad crises facing the nation. It was a sober, inclusive speech, free of sunny-side-up mantras and any suggestion of triumphalism. When he finished, two million people applauded and chanted his name syllable by syllable, the way they’d done up and down the country for a whole year.

Max thought of Joe, who would have been watching at home.

And his heart started sinking. He found he suddenly needed music – any music – to take his mind out of the sad thought-spiral he’d just caught. He switched radio stations but all he got was post-address punditry. He roved the dial some more until he heard nothing. He thought he’d reached the dial’s limit and was about to go back to the beginning when a song started – a drumbeat, a count-off in the background and then a jaunty violin.

He recognised the song.

Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Waitin’ on a Sunny Day.’

Max was momentarily spooked. But once the shock had ebbed and the initial chills passed, he started smiling, hesitantly at first, and then quite broadly, as he welcomed in the song and started doing the unthinkable – singing along, singing along to
Bruce,
singing at the top of his voice, even though he didn’t know any of the words and he wasn’t sure how it went next.

LOS ENDOS

Table of Contents

Also by Nick Stone

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Empty Ring

PART I: City of Worms

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

PART II: The Outpost of Tyranny

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

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50

51

52

53

54

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56

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58

59

60

Inauguration Day