by Nick Stone
He cleaned the dust off the voodoo drums and started on the aged Rastafarian ones.
The door open behind him.
He turned around.
It took him a few moments to recognize the person standing there.
‘What? You think you seein’ a ghost, muthafukka?’ Risquée snarled. ‘Well you ain’t. Yo’ peckerwood hitman fucked up!’
Carmine stood up slowly, looking at her, dumbstruck and utterly shocked. She’d changed quite a bit. She was a lot shorter because she was in Converse sneakers instead of high heels. Her wig had been replaced with cornrows, her hoop earrings with small gold studs, her short dresses with baggy black army pants and a loose black T-shirt. She had no make-up on. She’d lost a lot of weight. Her face was lean and tight. And she was missing her front teeth.
‘Why you ain’t sayin’ nuttin’ Kahmynne–huh?’
‘I–I–I didn’t send no one to kill you, baby,’ he offered weakly, his voice shredded with fear.
‘Yeah–right! An’ I’m Nancy-fuckin’-Reagan–BABY!’ she shouted.
Standing the way she was–straight and tense, eyes gleaming with rage–he couldn’t help but think of a cobra right before it strikes.
‘I swear it wasn’t me,’ he pleaded. ‘I–I had your money. I was gonna give it you.’
‘Boollshit! ’
‘I can get you yo’ money,’ he said.
‘I don’ wannit!’ She started coming towards him.
‘What?’ He started to panic.
‘I…don’…wannit! That’s English fo’ “fuck dat shit”!’
‘But it’s–$50,000!’
‘I said fuck dat shit! I don’t want yo’ money no mo’. We pass dat stage, bitch!’ She reached into her pocket and pulled something out. He couldn’t see what. He couldn’t move.
‘So–what d’you want? Why d’you come back? You know there’s–there’s people out lookin’ fo’ you.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Bonbon.’
She stopped in her tracks. Even she was scared of Bonbon. He saw her think things through for a second–but just a second.
‘An’ you gonna stand there an’ tell me you never sent someone ta kill me? You a DUMBASS MUTHAFUKKA, Kahmyyne! You know dat? Good thang yo’ dumbness ain’t contagious else tha whole world an’ its momma be a DUMBASS MUTHAFUKKA too!’
He heard the metallic click of a switchblade opening.
‘What are you doin’?’ he whimpered.
‘Killin’ yo’ sorry ass!’
Risquée swiped hard at his face, missing his head by a fraction. Then she lunged at him like a fencer, but he sidestepped and slipped behind her.
She spun around and slashed at him again, missing by a broader margin.
‘Stop this shit!’ he yelled.
‘Fuck dat! An’ FUCK YOU!’
She crouched down a little, her gaze dancing wildly all over his face. She feinted, made him move to the left, and then jabbed at his chest. Carmine turned away just in time and the edge of the razor-sharp blade nicked his forearm. He cried out.
She charged at him with a loud scream.
Carmine punched her straight in the face. It wasn’t a hard punch but she ran headlong into his fist and it staggered her. She stood still for an instant, swaying on the balls of her feet, blinking.
Carmine rushed her. He grabbed her hard by the wrists and yanked up her arms. He squeezed hard, trying to get her to drop the knife.
‘MUTHAFUKKA!’ she yelled and started kneeing him in the balls.
He pushed her back.
She kicked out.
He pushed her harder.
She lost her balance and they both went down, him on top of her.
Risquée’s head hit the top of a display case and shattered the glass. The knife fell out of her hand and clattered to the floor. Carmine got off her and grabbed the weapon.
‘Game over!’ he yelled at her triumphantly, brandishing her switchblade. ‘Now get the fuck outta here!’
She didn’t move. Her body was draped over the case, limp like a scarf, her feet twisted off at odd angles, her arms floppy at her sides.
Holding the knife tight in his fist, in case she was trying to trick him, he looked into the case. Risquée was staring up at him with pitch-black eyes, her mouth wide open. The case held shrivelled, greyish, mummified hands–all sizes, both genders, fingers bent like sharp roots, skin the texture of prunes. They were said to be able to open any lock.
‘I said game over! Get out!’ Carmine snapped at her.
Then he noticed something else in the case. His mouth dried and a cold heavy weight crashed into the pit of his stomach.
There was a fast-blooming halo of blood around Risquée’s head.
‘No!’ he whispered.
She was dead.
He dropped the knife and lifted up her head and saw a three inch sliver of glass sticking out of the top of her neck, right below the curve of the skull. Her warm blood pumped over his hands and dribbled onto the floorboards.
He looked out of the window and checked the street. No one around. He lowered her gently to the ground, wiped his hands on her trousers, locked the door and turned off the light.
He had to move her. And fast. But all he could do was stare at her body lying there, blood seeping out of it in a thick puddle, wondering what the fuck he was going to do.
He could drive her out to the Glades and leave her for the gators. No one would miss her. But that was too far a trek in the pickup. And he couldn’t go now because he was due back home for his bath soon.
He looked at her face. He didn’t feel bad about her being dead–she’d come to kill him. It was self-defence: he hadn’t meant to kill her. Just like he hadn’t meant to kill that cop in the salon.
He thought of calling his mother, telling her what had happened. She could send someone to clean it up. She needed the store.
No, that might fuck up his escape plans. He had to be smart about this.
He looked at Risquée again, as if she could tell him what to do. With her eyes all black and somehow still mad, and her mouth open like that, despite her missing teeth, she couldn’t help but remind him of one of those dried gator heads they sold to tourists out in the Glades. The resemblance was almost uncanny.
He had to be smart about this. Very smart.
52
The first thing Max and Joe noticed when they broke into Haiti Mystique was the intense smell of bleach. The fumes saturated the air and made their eyes run.
They switched on their flashlights and almost immediately saw a smashed display case and the dried hands heaped up in a small pile on top of the case to its left. Max moved his beam down the stand and noticed a few drops of blood on the wood, then a large rough sandy-coloured circle on the floorboards, much lighter than the greyish-brown tone of the rest of the floor. The smell of bleach was strongest here.
Max touched one of the blood drops on the stand with his gloved index finger. It was dark and sticky and left a smudge. It was three to four hours fresh.
He looked inside the case and saw the whole of the inside was stained pink. He noted the fine upward arterial spray at the back of the case, and on the remaining shards of glass.
Joe examined the hands and noted the bloodstains on some of them.
‘Someone took a bad fall here,’ Max whispered. ‘And very recently.’
They looked around the rest of the store. Joe checked behind the counter. He found a sales ledger and a metal cashbox. There were only five pages of entries in the ledger going back to February 1977. He added up the sales figures for each year and laughed.
‘Ismael sure didn’t get rich here,’ he said. ‘Guy made all of $2,900 last year, $2,455 the year before that. His most successful year was 1979. He made a total of $3,233.’
Max studied a shelf of belljars–hands, fingers, tongues, testicles, brains, eyeballs of various colours, feet, human hearts, livers, a brain–all pickled in formaldehyde. The prices were drawn on the jars in marker pen. A hundred dollars bought yo
u an Adam’s apple, $200 a tongue, $300 a pair of blue eyes. Below were a range of foetuses in various stages of development, most of them black. These went from $750 for the smallest to $3,000 for the biggest. On the last shelf were chicken eggs, some part hatched with a small beak or part of a head protruding.
Joe came from behind the counter, treading on a loose floorboard which creaked loudly. He looked at the masks and drums, the books of spells and curses, the candles, the statues of saints, the skulls, and the roots and bunches of herbs and twigs hanging down from the ceiling like twisted baubles.
Max’s beam landed on the back door. He tried it. It was unlocked.
Downstairs they found themselves in a hot, dimly lit room staring at two long rows of cages of various types and sizes, with a wide gap in between them. It stank of animal shit, and the air buzzed with the clucking of chickens, the flapping of agitated wings and the sound of bodies moving against the metal grilles that held them.
Max saw three mountain goats with long black fur and magnificent horns, which rose a foot above their heads and branched off into sharp points; he saw a chained vulture, a sleeping fox, a brown monkey, and, at the far end, where the cages ended, three chicken coops, and a tank filled with toads.
Beyond that were bales of hay and burlap sacks stuffed, Max guessed, with feed. Although they marked the end of the room, he sensed he hadn’t seen everything, that there was more to discover. He moved his flashlight over the hay.
‘Max!’ Joe whispered from the stairs. ‘Come see.’
Behind the stairs Joe was standing near an open trapdoor.
‘The fuck is this place?’ Joe asked, when the strip lights came on and they found themselves standing in an all-white tiled, cold and sterile space.
Again the smell of bleach saturated the air, far stronger than in the store.
‘Operating theatre?’ Max suggested, looking from the marble slab and the sluice drain that ran alongside it to the trolley of glinting, stainless-steel surgical instruments he was standing next to.
‘Or a torture chamber,’ Joe said, pointing to the meathooks hanging from the metal railing running across the ceiling. He went over to the nearby showerhead, which was still dripping. He looked at the plughole, then took one of the scalpels and scraped the blade around the opening. He showed it to Max. ‘There’s blood here too.’
They walked over to the six large rectangular freezers at the end of the room and each opened one.
They were empty.
They moved on to the next two. Also empty.
But the final pair were filled to capacity with alligator parts, all wrapped in clear ziplock bags, tails in the first freezer, headless torsos in the next.
‘That’s a lotta luggage,’ Max quipped as he hefted one of the carcasses out and placed it on the floor. He took it out of the bag and turned it over. There was a long vertical slash all the way down the animal’s trunk, where its insides had been removed. Apart from its tail and head–both removed with precise cuts–it was also missing its legs.
‘Got the belts, wallets and pimp shoes right here,’ Joe said, cradling a three-foot-long, deep-frozen tail.
They began emptying the freezer’s contents and laying them out on the floor. The tails and torsos varied in length and weight–some so long they’d been sawn in half.
It was Max who found the first human body part–a right arm, black, definitely female, about halfway down.
He showed it to Joe, who, just then, was looking at a black woman’s torso, wedged in-between two tails.
Max recovered the left arm and both legs. The head was at the very bottom of Joe’s freezer.
They removed the remains from the plastic. They were only partially frozen.
They took them over to the slab and laid them out in order.
Like the gators the body had been cut straight down the middle and all of its internal organs removed.
‘How’d she die?’ Joe asked.
Other than the clean amputations, there were no marks on the torso, arms and legs. Max inspected the head. When he turned it over he saw the deep gash in the skin below the cranium. He got some tongs and prised back the flesh. Something was imbedded deep in the wound. He reached in with the tongs and pulled out an inch of bloody glass.
‘Severed medulla,’ he said. ‘She was dead before she knew it. My guess is she fell backwards on the glass. Someone was either on top of her, or else they grabbed her head and pushed it down on the glass. So it was either an accident or a murder. And I’m guessing it’s murder. Why else would you carve her up?’
‘What d’you wanna do?’ Joe asked.
‘Go get the print kit and the camera.’ Max looked at his watch: 10.35 p.m. ‘Then we’ll go and see Ismael. He should still be at the Fontainebleau. He’s hosting that fundraiser there.’
They’d spent most of the day following Sam Ismael around, as he’d gone from one publicity junket to the next around Lemon City. It was culminating tonight in a black-tie dinner at one of Miami’s most exclusive hotels.
‘But he didn’t do this,’ Joe said.
‘No, he didn’t,’ Max agreed. ‘But this is still his store.’
‘When do you wanna call it in?’ Joe asked.
‘Before we go talk to him.’
53
The cop who’d beaten him up and stolen his money and the beans had come back. Carmine watched him from the gap in the feed sacks praying he wouldn’t come all the way over here and discover him crouching there with the bag full of Risquée’s insides.
The cop was looking at the cages now, taking in the white chickens, the black roosters, the fox, the vultures, the goats, getting closer.
He’d been coming up the stairs when he’d heard feet on the floorboards. He’d thought his mother had sent people to look for him after he’d missed his bath. So he’d hidden. The animals already knew him as the person who fed them, so they’d made a ruckus.
He wished he’d worked faster when he’d cut up Risquée, but there had been so much to do. Now he knew how humans were different from gators. It was in the guts. Risquée had had miles of them. And they’d stunk. He’d had to stop what he was doing to puke. Four times. Then, for some stupid reason, when it had come to taking off her head he’d cried like a fucking baby.
The cop was real close to finding him now. The last two cages were empty. He was real thorough this one. He was looking at each of the animals, inspecting them. Black chinos, black guayabera shirt, black Converse Allstars. Dressed just like Risquée had been. Except for the piece at his hip. And the tattoos inside his forearms.
What would he do when he got caught sitting next to a bag of human offal? It would look like murder. Maybe he could cop a plea, do a deal, sell out the SNBC and go into witness protection.
‘Max?’ That was the cop’s partner, the big black guy, calling from behind the stairs, where the trapdoor was. ‘Come see.’
The white cop went over to look.
A minute later they’d gone downstairs.
Carmine came out of his hiding place and crept up to the ground floor, leaving the rest of Risquée behind.
He drove straight home. The lights were all out in the house. His mother had gone to sleep.
He was bringing his plans forward. He was leaving town now. He’d change his clothes, grab his locker key and go.
In his room he stripped off his bloody clothes, bundled them up into his laundry bag and changed. He got out his finest navy blue Halston suit, Pierre Cardin underwear and silk socks, Gucci shoes, his tailored powder-blue Oxford shirt. He had to look his best now that he was starting his new life–even if he would be entering it in a pickup.
When he was dressed, he gave himself a quick inspection in the mirror and winked at his reflection. He was still a handsome sonofabitch.
Time to go. He looked across the room at the coffee jar.
His mother walked into the room.
‘Who did you just kill?’ she asked him.
54
&nb
sp; Standing on the balcony of his top-floor suite at the Fontainebleau, in his tux and hand-crafted black shoes, Sam Ismael felt like he was nearly there. He could almost taste victory. He was looking out at Miami Beach, transformed by nightfall from a flaking grey tourist trap, to an attainable galaxy of glittering, iridescent neon, a bejewelled lava which appeared to be moving, very slowly, in an unspecified direction. The streets were lit up like luminous veins, traffic flowing white one way, red the other, entering and fleeing. The summer breeze carried stray music up from the clubs, mixed in with the smells of sea and city.
Twenty minutes earlier, a dozen floors below in the ballroom where the Lemon City Regeneration Project was sating itself on fine food and wine at $500 a plate, he’d had unofficial word from the mayor’s office that they would approve his proposal to officially change the area’s name to Little Haiti. This was due to extensive lobbying on his part, as well as sizeable donations to various interest groups’ campaign chests and preferred charities; there was never progress without corruption.
He felt good about what he was doing, good about what it would mean to and for Haitians. They would finally have a place of their own in Miami, a place to come to and settle in, a place where they could rebuild their lives. He didn’t care that it was Solomon’s drug money funding it. The Colombian sand Cubans were doing the same thing, buying up miles of real estate and building condos to rent out to rich folk. They were helping themselves. Sam was helping others.
Only one thing spoiled this moment–well, four in fact –Solomon Boukman, Bonbon and his two skanky dyke sidekicks–Danielle and Jane–were inside, waiting for a delivery of photographs he had to go through. He hoped it wouldn’t take long.