Voodoo Eyes Read Online Free

did you start?’ Max asked, feeling anger creep into him.
    ‘Is there a problem with your room, sir?’
    ‘Have you got an address for Teddy? Or a number?’
    ‘We can’t give out that information, sir.’
    ‘How much?’ Max sighed.
    ‘Sir?’
    ‘How much for his details? What’s this going to cost?’
    ‘Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I’m not giving you his details,’ the man insisted self-righteously, underlining it by puffing out his small chest and squaring his coathanger-frame shoulders.
    ‘Who put you up to this?’
    The manager raised a hand and beckoned to someone over Max’s shoulder.
    ‘Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave the hotel with immediate effect. Security will escort you back to your room to pack.’
    In the mirror behind the reception Max could see the fat, bald black security guard standing ready, thumbs hooked in the huge leather gunbelt slung around his bulging stomach like a lethal rubber tyre. A thin moustache crested the edge of his upper lip like dirty foam.
    Max caught a look at himself. Bald too. Snow-white-dome stubble mingling with small beads of sweat. Tired-looking. Face flushed with anger and humiliation, eyes icy blue pinpricks. He still just about had his powerful build, but flab was starting to gain on muscle. The manager was thirty years younger. Back in the day he’d have hauled the little prick over the desk and threatened the information out of him. Back in the day he’d been a cop.
    He glowered at the little man. Was he in on it? Maybe not. He was just a guy working the shitty end of a shitty job in a shitty hotel. There were a lot of them around here.
    He walked past the security guard and out into the street. The hot blast of nocturnal Miami air hit him in the face. The breeze carried smells of food, perfume and the sea. As he walked, music came from everywhere – cars, restaurants, clubs, stores. He didn’t recognise any of it. They were alien sounds, no more than bleeps to his ears. Hip hop, R & B, robotic salsa and something that sounded like an elephant’s coronary. People passed him by, brushed against him, bumped him. Summer clothes, all young, smiling, talking excitedly. Heading down to Ocean Drive for dinner and pussy or to Washington Avenue for clubs and pussy. Not a care in the world. Problems parked at the door. He envied each and every one of them.
    He thought about what to do next. Go to the Shore Club, to see if Fabiana was there? He wouldn’t get much information that way. Deluxe hotels guarded their customers well. He was curious about what had just happened, but another part of him really didn’t want to know, just wanted to walk away, forget it.
    In the middle of his confusion and indecision, he saw a tall black man across the street looking right at him. He couldn’t make out the man’s face too clearly; it blended in with the night and blurred with the neon. But he sensed the stare, its probing insistence, its magnetism. The man had specifically picked Max out in the milling crowd, focused on him, targeted him. There were a lot of homeless crazies in Miami. They migrated here for the climate and the guilty generosity of tourists. Max might have dismissed him as one of those, but his old cop instincts kicked in, the sense of a person not being right.
    Just then his phone rang, Bruce Springsteen’s irritatingly chirpy ‘Waitin’ on a Sunny Day’ playing out of the pouch on his hip. It was a ringtone he’d assigned to Joe Liston – his ex-partner and the only black Springsteen fan he’d yet encountered.
    Joe never called Max at night. He was usually home with his family.
    This had to be urgent, had to be bad.
    Joe was a Captain in Homicide.
    Max braced for the worst.
    It came.
    ‘It’s about Eldon,’ said Joe. ‘They found him in the 7th Avenue gym two nights ago. He’s been murdered.’
    It should have been a shock, but it wasn’t. At the very moment he heard the news, Max’s mind was