Voodoo Eyes by Nick Stone Read Free Book Online Page A

1996.
    There was a kind of sick symmetry to that, he had to admit, the way the fire had taken everything but those two pictures. He’d met Sandra around the time he’d been drawn into Solomon Boukman’s orbit. She died the year Boukman had been released from prison and deported to Haiti.
    Solomon Boukman … Christ.
    Thinking about him sent fresh chills down long-distance wires. Max had been as good as broken by that case, the career-maker turned career-ender – the proverbial abyss he’d stared into and seen his true reflection winking back at him. He’d always thought that was some smartass bullshit made up to dodge the burden of personal responsibility, but the truth of it hit him right between the eyes in the shape of Boukman.
    Boukman was into everything big and illegal in Miami in his heyday: drugs, prostitution, gambling, extortion, gun-running, money laundering – the works. Yet he was more than the sum of his crimes and the multi-million-dollar organisation that he ran. He used voodoo, black magic and extreme violence to control his people and to keep anyone who ever heard his name in a state of fear. He practised human sacrifice. He zombified his enemies with potions and hypnosis and used them as weapons – his very own suicide killers. And he turned himself into a myth, an urban legend in his own lifetime, a spook story parents told their kids at night to terrify them into goodness. Newly arrived Haitians swore Boukman was the earthly incarnation of Baron Samedi, the voodoo god of death. Others said he was the Devil incarnate because he’d been seen in multiple places at the same time. Most agreed that he was a shapeshifter – he could transform his appearance at will, from a young Californian blonde woman to an old black man, and everything in between. No one knew what he really looked like. Or so went the whispers on the street.
    In reality, he was just a man – albeit a clever, manipulative, evil man who dressed himself up as a superstition and played on fear.
    Max and Joe caught Boukman in 1981. They’d chased him through Little Haiti, Boukman bleeding from a cut femoral artery. Boukman had collapsed inside a disused building. Max had tied off the wound and given him mouth-to-mouth. Then they’d taken him in.
    A year later, Boukman was tried, found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. In court he refused to take the stand and said absolutely nothing throughout his trial, until Max had finished giving his testimony. Then Boukman had locked eyes with Max and broke his silence for the one and only time: ‘You give me reason to live,’ he said.
    Those words had haunted Max for a good long while. Boukman’s quiet, hissy murmur lodged in some corner of his mind, echoing back at him. He hadn’t understood what the Haitian meant then. Was it a threat, a promise or the desperate bluster of a sinking man? He’d tried to let it go, tried reasoning with himself. But the case had gotten to him, fucked him up good. When Max and Joe were closing in and Boukman’s grip had started weakening, the Haitian had kidnapped Max, tortured him, zombified him and then put a gun in his hand and turned him loose on Eldon and Joe.
    In his dreams, Max had relived those memories and woken up screaming, reaching for his cigarettes, his booze, his tranqs. One by one, Sandra got rid of the pacifiers until the only thing he could reach out for when he woke in terror was her. She held him and soothed him back to sleep, telling him it was just a bad dream, that Boukman was long gone, that dreams always passed. And she was right.
    Over time the nightmares faded.
    Then Max went to prison.
    And Sandra died a year before he was released.
    Which was why he’d taken the job in Haiti – where he’d last encountered Boukman, unwittingly, unknowingly.
    Although he’d been on death row, awaiting the outcome of his penultimate appeal, Boukman had been deported back to Haiti in 1995. The year before, the US had invaded