Voodoo Eyes (50 page)

‘Last – last
month
you say? But …
My prints?’

She tried to laugh sarcastically, but coughed feebly instead.

‘You’re saying
I
killed him?’

‘No, Vanetta, not me. They are. The Miami PD.’

‘Is this why you’re here?
To bring me in?’

‘No. Not at all.’ Max shook his head. ‘I don’t blame you for wanting Eldon dead. He and Abe Watson killed your husband and daughter, and they killed Dennis Peck and framed you for it. All with the same gun. And that very gun – Abe Watson’s .45 – was used to kill Eldon Burns. Your prints were on the casings they found at the scene.’

‘That’s
ridiculous.’
She was more astonished than angry. ‘After everything we’ve just talked about – about how I was set up.’

‘For what it’s worth, I had my doubts from the start,’ he said. ‘It seemed implausible, to say the least. Unless you thought time was running out to do things the right way.’

‘Do I sound that twisted to you?’

‘No,’ he admitted.

‘You said,
they’ve
said, I “had” Eldon Burns killed? Who did I “have” do this?’

‘A man with a hare lip – a Cuban.’

‘You don’t mean Osso?’

‘You know him?’

‘Of course I know him. I’ve known him since he was a child. I just saw him this morning.’

Max’s heart skipped a beat.

‘Where?’

‘He lives here.’

‘In the hospital?’

‘No. In a house on the other side of the island. Why are you asking me this?’

‘Osso killed Eldon,’ said Max. ‘And … he killed Joe too.’

Her mouth dropped. She put her hand over it. Closed her eyes. Breathed. Her lungs fought the air. Her chest wheezed. ‘What did you just say? Joe’s … Joe’s
dead
? Is that what you just said?’

‘Yes. That’s why I’m here, Vanetta.’

‘Joe was … was
murdered
?’

‘Right in front of me. On Halloween. Same gun. Same killer. Same prints on the casings. Yours. Someone’s framed you.’

Her eyes wandered. From Max. Around the room. To the table. Then back to Max.

‘Joe is … Joe is my
friend.
Joe is …
dead
?’

‘That’s why I’m here, Vanetta.’

‘I’d never hurt anyone … not even Eldon Burns. Or Abe Watson. God knows they deserve it. And I would never ever even think bad of Joe. He saved my life. He risked everything coming here to try and clear my name,’ she said, crying. ‘And you’re saying … they think I … I had him
killed?’

And Max knew for sure, without a doubt, that she was innocent. Someone had got her to handle the bullets, probably when she was asleep or whacked out in a painkiller daze. Someone had set her up as a cop-killer. Again. Someone who knew her history.

But why? Why her? And why them?

‘You said Osso lives here. Is it with the man who owns the island? Who is this man? What’s his name?’

She was sitting up, angry, trembling, feeble, her eyes bulging with anger.

She couldn’t talk.

‘Your deputy Elias Grimaud introduced you to this man. He funded your centres during the Special Period. Who is he? What’s his name? Please tell me. Tell me and I’ll leave.’

He reached out and took her arm. He cupped her wrist. Barely a pulse. He felt her eroded muscles reacting against his touch.

‘Please, Vanetta. They killed Joe. Your friend … my friend. Our friend.’

Behind him, there came a sound. Two quiet taps. It sounded like a knock at the door.

But it wasn’t that.

It wasn’t that all.

Max turned, and a mighty pain exploded at the base of his neck, mushrooming into his head, rattling and blurring his vision.

He tried to stand. He tried to get his gun. But the room was tilting left and right, the floor was suddenly fluid, a rolling wave. And the pain in his head was intensifying.

The last thing he saw before he blacked out was Vanetta Brown looking at the person behind him. She was screaming, but he couldn’t hear her.

And he realised that they hadn’t been alone.

57

He opened his eyes to a bright blue-white blur.

First thoughts: it was daylight somewhere, morning – and he had a hangover, a great big fucken’ hangover. Just
when
had he started drinking again? And how long had he been out?

His head was throbbing.

His mouth was dry and the light was frying his eyes. Typical post-binge syndrome. He shut them tight. He got a little relief, the pressure in his skull eased, the pain got turned down a few bars.

Then he remembered:

Vanetta Brown.

Who is this man? What’s his name?

The blow to the back of his neck.

Then nothing.

Now this.

He breathed in deep. The air scorched his nostrils. The smell was powerful and familiar; commonplace, universal, vital – and nostalgic. It was a smell he used to love as a kid.

But it was overpowering.

And dangerous.

Gasoline.

His eyes flicked open in alarm, his vision suddenly crystal clear.

But what the fuck was he looking at?

*

A beach in broad daylight, viewed from high up.

He knew the view.

He knew it well.

It was his view, the one from his penthouse.

Miami Beach, south-west end of Collins Avenue.

He blinked.

It was a video, shot from his seafront balcony, playing on the biggest flatscreen TV he’d ever seen – a solid, hi-tech megalith of plastic and plasma beaming out an image so specious and vibrant he could practically smell the ocean through the fumes.

Somebody had gotten into his home and filmed this.

The video could have been shot any time it wasn’t raining or cold – which was most of the year round in Miami. The beach was busy with sun-worshippers, little black dots doing their lazy to and fro across the cosmetic white sands.

He tried to move, to stand up, but the furthest he got was a slight upward lean of the torso and a minor shrug of the shoulders. He couldn’t physically leave his seat or change much about his posture. His wrists were rope-bound to the legs of the chair he’d been placed on, the knots so tight his fingertips were cold from constricted circulation. Someone had similarly trussed up his legs at the ankles. He was barefoot, but he could hardly feel the ground on his soles. He couldn’t even wiggle his toes. They were numb.

The metal chair had been bolted to the floor, the rivets shiny and new-looking, reflecting the glow from the TV.

The floor had been painted matt black, as had the walls and ceiling. He couldn’t gauge the size of the room. It felt both small and vast, confined and huge, verging on the limitless.

Something on the floor caught his eye: crude white markings several feet wide and several feet long. He turned his head to make them out properly. Hieroglyphics, rendered in a glistening chalky paste with the texture and consistency of cake icing, only laid on thicker.

He was looking at the outline of a coffin with three crosses inside.

He recognised the style but his head was too scrambled and his senses too overloaded to place it.

He scanned the rest of the floor.

The coffin formed part of a bigger design, one that took up as much of the floor as he could see. Its core component – its very nucleus – was him. He’d been tied and bolted to the middle of a great inverted cross with beams that ended in sharp, stake-like points. Separate drawings floated around the spaces between the beams.

The paste sketch to his immediate right was a snake bursting from an egg positioned upright in a nest –
crown?
– of thorns. The serpent’s body was formed of a mere three wavy lines, but its massive head had been carefully rendered: a semi-human face with diamond-shaped eyes, sharp, tapering brows, a thick-lipped mouth, two sabre tusks for front teeth, and a long forked tongue, which had lassoed a startled bird by the neck. The bird was a bald eagle.

Max was confused.

Then scared.

His heart began to pound, a desperate fist slamming at his chest, stodgy echoes rising from the well of his bones. His neck throbbed.

He knew exactly what he was looking at, exactly what he was sitting in, but he couldn’t understand why. Nor could he begin to comprehend how he’d gotten from questioning Vanetta Brown to here. His head was still too fucked to shake sense out of his situation.

But his fear was mounting by the second.

He looked at the drawing behind him.

He could see a stickman on a boat. An unseen hand was pulling it, dragging at a rope attached to its prow. In a corner, in the distance, across the water, was an American flag, flying back to front.

The final drawing depicted a grinning skull sporting a top hat, tilted rakishly to the side. The skull had one eye, painted bright green.

Bullshit naif.

He knew where he was.

He’d been here before.

Not in this place of course, but in this situation: tied to a chair, in the middle of a voodoo
vévé,
the ceremonial markings drawn to honour a particular god or to summon a spirit.

He interpreted the
vévé,
reading the images in the intended sequence: anticlockwise, starting with the skull.

This represented Baron Samedi, dweller of cemeteries, stealer of souls, the voodoo god of death. Baron Samedi was habitually depicted as a skeletal Fred Astaire, tapdancing around graveyards in a hat and tails, singing in the pain. Yet here he’d been given an additional feature and an uncommon one – that bright-green eye. Max studied it a moment, isolating it from the skull, removing the context. It was emanating a glow, a radiance. And it was very familiar.

Of course …

It was the Eye of Providence – the same all-seeing eye that topped the unfinished thirteen-step pyramid on the back of every dollar bill.

Baron Samedi had been
watching.

Baron Samedi had unfinished business.

With him.

And it had something to do with money. Money was at the root of it.

‘It’ began to fall into place, quickly and terribly.

Joe and Eldon had been shot through the eyes.

Max was the stickman on the boat. He’d been lured here from America by a person he couldn’t see. And America was inverted; it had turned against him.

Wendy Peck.

She’d found out about the money he’d brought back from Haiti. She’d coerced him into coming here and looking for Vanetta Brown.

His mouth went dry.

His pulse was racing.

The room felt as small and tight as the trunk of a car.

He looked to the snake and the eagle. The approximation of the national emblem, the heart of the Presidential seal, was him again. He was American, he’d worked for the system. So this went back to something he’d done in his cop days, to something he’d done with Eldon and Joe.

And it was this:

He’d laid the egg the serpent sprang from. He’d created his own worst enemy; an enemy who’d always been with him, part of him – and so close he hadn’t even noticed.

Lastly, the coffin and its three crosses. That was easy. That represented three deaths.

Eldon’s, Joe’s and his.

He was going to die here.

Soon.

Who is the man? What is his name?

Max knew now.

It was Boukman.

Solomon Boukman.

But he couldn’t quite believe it.

Nor understand it.

He looked around the room.

‘Show yourself!’ he yelled.

His voice came back at him faintly. Which told him the place he was in was borderline cavernous.

‘Show yourself!’

The room seemed empty, but he didn’t feel alone. He sensed someone there, a presence – waiting, watching, taking its time to manifest itself. Boukman always did like his entrances.

The
vévé
was encircled by a wide ring of votive candles slowly melting on high silver sticks. The bodies of the thick purple, black and red candles were studded with animal teeth, broken glass, razor blades and run clean through with long nails. They’d been positioned well away from the
vévé,
because the paste was the source of the gasoline smell.

In between the candlesticks sat white porcelain bowls, some filled with water, others with red liquid, probably blood.

‘Show yourself!
’ he yelled again.

He jerked his head around, side to side, back as far as he could twist, then forward.

The image on the screen suddenly changed.

Again, he knew the view.

He knew it well.

All too well.

Room 30 of the Zurich Hotel. Those bird-shaped mirrors on the walls.

Rudi Milk’s porno flick was playing on the screen. ‘Fabiana’ and ‘Will’ were kissing and groping and stroking each other, their clothes coming off, as fingers popped buckles, unhooked clasps and straps, and lowered zips. Their exchanges returned to him from memory, the voices in sync with the action: Will mumbling, Fabiana laughing.

But no sound was coming from the TV.

No sound at all.

Then the screen twitched and the image cut out for a second, and that high-pitched, squealing static he remembered from the last and only time he’d watched the film came at him from every part of the room, stabbing at his head.

Yet he noticed a difference – not in the sound – but in the film itself. Something had just flashed up, something that had nothing to do with porn.

A solitary image he’d missed, both now and before.

As if the television was tuned to his thoughts, the film rewound to a few instants before the cut. It started playing forward again, only in slow –
slow
– motion, frame by frame, the action dealt out like gigantic poker cards.

There came the static burst, the sound slowed down, corresponding to the film’s arrested pace.

What he’d taken for white noise was really a speeded-up voice speaking a single phrase.