Authors: Nick Stone
Tags: #Cuba, #Miami (Fla.), #General, #(v5.0), #Voodooism, #Fiction, #Thriller, #Mystery & Detective
Voodoo Eyes
Mr Clarinet
King of Swords
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
Contents
Part II: The Outpost of Tyranny
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
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
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.