Voodoo Eyes Read Online Free Page B

short-sleeved shirt. Big freckled arms, big square hands, scarred scowling face, steady but impatient eyes, a round reddish wart at the edge of his forehead. ‘Hit me in the face,’ he’d said to Max. And Max had knocked Eldon on his ass with a short fast right hook. First time a newcomer had ever touched him, let alone put him down. Eldon had looked up at Max from the floor, smiling. Everything in the gym had stopped and fallen absolutely silent.
    Just like it was now.
    The outline of Eldon’s body was marked out on the floor in bright white chalk, the contours rendered in crude geometry, everything straight. If it hadn’t been for the crescent of blackened blood that clung around the head in a hellish halo, the image would have been primitive in its simplicity. But then, wasn’t murder the most primitive of acts, the deed that linked man to his dumb cave-dwelling forebears?
    Joe handed Max a set of photographs.
    The first showed Eldon’s body. Arms thrown back, fists clenched, legs slightly apart in a wretched parody of a victorious boxer at the end of a bout. A rat sat on his chest, bearing two long front teeth, its black eyes looking into the camera.
    ‘Had to get pest control in here. Rats everywhere,’ said Joe. ‘Couldn’t wait to get at him, huh? Some would find that fitting.’ Max looked across at his friend, met his eyes, watched them dip.
    Joe had hated Eldon and Eldon had hated Joe. Behind his back Eldon had referred to him as ‘that nigra’. Joe had dubbed Eldon ‘Sixdeep’ – ‘Sixth Degree Burns’ – the worst.
    Eldon had been their boss when they were partners in the Miami Task Force, an elite unit within the Miami PD, active during the 1970s and most of the 1980s, when the city was a cocaine delta and its population collateral damage in an escalating war between rival drug gangs. Eldon ran MTF like a paramilitary outfit, another armed gang, only with badges and a licence to kill. He had a mandate from state politicians to solve all high-profile crimes by any and all means necessary – or at least to be seen to solve them. An illusion of safety was better than no illusion at all.
    ‘Make it fit and make it stick’ was his motto. It didn’t matter who MTF took down for the crimes, as long as they had criminal records and were guilty of something. MTF broke every point of procedure and every damn law. For every single crime they genuinely solved, they framed and sometimes killed people for dozens more. It didn’t make the slightest bit of difference. The innocent continued to die in droves and Miami turned into a billion-dollar sewer.
    Eventually Joe found it all too hard to stomach and got himself transferred out. A year after, Max, damaged by his last major case and sickened by many of the things he’d done in and out of MTF, quit the force altogether. Eldon begged him to stay, made all manner of promises. When Max refused, Burns called him every obscenity ever invented. He’d intended for Max to follow in his footsteps, run MTF as before, while he climbed the last few rungs of the career ladder. Max had fucked up his carefully laid daydream, for ever ruining the order of succession.
    They didn’t speak for close to sixteen years after that.
    Yet the bond between them remained curiously strong. Eldon had been a father figure to Max when he’d most needed one. Max had been the son Eldon never had. Eldon never stopped watching over him. When Max went to prison for manslaughter in 1989, Eldon paid off the gangs in Attica to ensure nothing happened to him. His reach was long and occasionally benevolent.
    The next pictures Max looked at were close-ups of Eldon’s head. He’d been shot clean through each eye, making the sockets look like they were covered with black pennies.
    ‘Shooter got real close here,’ said Max, pointing to the powder burns above and under Eldon’s right eye, far more on the top than the bottom.
    ‘They’re saying this was a gang initiation,’ said Joe.
    Max