Voodoo Eyes by Nick Stone Read Free Book Online

they got together. On paper it didn’t look too bad – she was thirty-seven (although she looked ten years younger, thanks to a healthy lifestyle). In public, however, they looked like the typical Miami Beach couple – the rich, bald old white man with his young, statuesque exotic trophy squeeze. It couldn’t be helped. It was what it was.
    They had some great times. The sex was wild – intense, gymnastic and inventive. He found it went even better with coke – which he’d only ever tried once before. He fell in love and told her so. She said she loved him too. He contemplated marrying her. She told him he’d make a good dad.
    Over the next year he and Tameka got through most of the Haiti millions. They moved into the penthouse. She had it redecorated. He gave her half a million dollars to start up her own gym. He took her to the Bahamas. First class, five star, everywhere. He took her to Vegas, and lost a fortune at the tables, to Mexico and Rio. He bought her a Mercedes and himself a Porsche. After totalling the Porsche, he bought a Mercedes to go with hers.
    Joe saw what was happening and where it was all going. He didn’t like Tameka, felt there was something not quite right about her. He ran her prints. Nothing whatsoever on record, not even a parking ticket to her name. But he trusted his instincts and dug deeper. First there was the teenage daughter she’d left behind in Tucson, Arizona. Then the boyfriend in Miami Springs, the one she visited every other day, the one she was giving Max’s money to. His name was Hector Givens. He’d done time in Arizona for an insurance scam.
    When Joe told Max, he didn’t believe him and got seriously pissed. Then he went round to Givens’s condo and Tameka opened the door, wearing one of the Chanel towels he’d bought her. She didn’t even bother denying it. He was the biggest dumbass of all, she told him, if he hadn’t so much as suspected what was going on: the only reason her fine ass was with him was money, honey. He told her she was a great actress and a complete bitch. She gave him a weird smile – a smirking grimace he interpreted as sadistic glee – and then slammed the door. Hector came after him with a tyre iron, yelling something about how he couldn’t be calling his woman a gold-digging bitch, or whatever it was he’d said to her. Max busted Hector’s front teeth with one punch and his jaw with another. He thought of going back and doing the same to Tameka, but he didn’t hit women. Instead he went to a bar on Ocean Drive, got too wasted to walk and tripped down some stairs on the way to the bathroom.
    He came to in hospital. Broken collar bone, broken left arm, broken leg, Joe standing there with a bowl of grapes and two sets of news: Tameka and Givens had split town for places unknown, and the Twin Towers had just come down in New York. It was September 11, 2001.
    When he got out of hospital, Max vowed never to drink, smoke or take drugs again, and if a woman that hot ever so much as smiled at him, he’d make sure he vetted her before he smiled back.
    He moved back into the Key Biscayne house. He had trouble sleeping and his healing bones were causing him pain. He took pills for both. On December 19, he woke up on the sidewalk, being slapped awake by a paramedic. His house and the house next door had gone up in flames. How he’d gotten out – or who’d gotten him out – he didn’t know. Investigators later said the next-door neighbour had doused himself and his house in gasoline and set himself ablaze.
    They told Max he was lucky to be alive. He wasn’t so sure. The fire had taken almost everything from him. His money was gone, as were every single one of his physical memories of Sandra, which hurt the most. Police later gave him back the only things they’d been able to salvage from the ruins – two photographs: one of him and Sandra on their wedding day in 1985, and the other of Solomon Boukman holding a gun to his head in Haiti in