MAX HAD KNOWN Joe for twenty-five years. They’d started out as partners in Patrol and moved on up through the ranks together.
The pair were known as “Born to Run” within the Miami PD. Their boss, Eldon Burns, coined the nickname because he said the way the two of them stood together reminded him of the cover of Bruce Springsteen’s eponymous album, where the pale, scrawny singer is propped up against Clarence Clemons, his gargantuan, pimp-hatted sax player. It wasn’t a bad comparison. Joe dwarfed everyone. Built like a linebacker who’d swallowed the team, he was six foot five in his socks and had to duck to get through most doors.
Joe dug the nickname. He loved Bruce Springsteen. He had all his albums and singles, and hundreds of hours of live shows on cassettes. It was virtually all he seemed to listen to. Whenever Springsteen toured, Joe would have front-row seats for all the Florida concerts. Max dreaded having to share a car with his partner after he’d seen his hero in the flesh, because Joe would describe the experience in excruciatingly precise detail, song by song, grunt by grunt. Springsteen’s shows averaged three hours. Joe’s reports would go on for six. Max couldn’t stand Springsteen, didn’t know what all the fuss was about. To his ears, the “Boss” ’s voice was stuck somewhere between throat-clearing and throat cancer—and the perfect soundtrack for white guys who drove station wagons in motorcycle jackets. He’d once asked Joe what the attraction was. “It’s like everything that moves one person and leaves another standing still: you either get it or you don’t. Ain’t just about the music and the voice with Bruce. It’s about a whole lotta other things. You get me?” Max hadn’t, but he’d left it at that. Bad taste never hurt anybody.
That said, he had no problem with their nickname. It meant they were being noticed. After they’d both made detective, Max had the album image and title tattooed on his inner right forearm. A year before he’d had a traditional cop tattoo—a shield bearing a skull and crossed six-guns, surrounded by the legend DEATH IS CERTAIN—LIFE IS NOT—inked into his left arm.
The L was named after the shape of its building, although you’d have to see it from above to know. Detective Frank Nunez had first spotted it from a police helicopter while giving chase to a vanload of bank robbers across downtown Miami. He got some of his friends to come in with him in return for points, including Max and Sandra, who put in $20,000. Until they had to sell their share to help pay Max’s legal bills, the bar had made them double their investment every year. It was a big hit with the downtown business-and-banking crowd, who packed it Monday through Saturday.
From the front, The L resembled a fairly typical bar, with its wide, black-shuttered windows and flashing beer signs spelled out in bright neon squeezed-toothpaste lettering. There were two entrances. The right took you straight to the bar, a big, high-ceilinged space with varnished wooden floors and a maritime theme in the ship’s wheels, anchors, and shark harpoons mounted on the walls. The left entrance led up a long flight of stairs to the L Lounge. The lounge was screened off from the bar by a tinted wall-window that allowed its patrons to see the goings-on down below unobserved. It was ideal for first dates and clandestine office affairs, because it was sectioned off into intimate booths, each softly lit with red and gold Chinese-style lanterns. The lounge had its own bar and served some of the best cocktails in Miami.
When Max walked in, he saw Joe sitting on the outside of a middle booth, close to the window. He was in a blue suit and tie. Max felt underdressed in his loose sweatshirt, khakis, and running shoes.
“Lieutenant Liston?” Max said as he drew up to his friend.
Joe smiled broadly, a capsized quarter-moon of teeth that glowed across the bottom of his dark face. He got up. Max had forgotten quite how immense he was. He’d put on a few pounds around the waist and his face was a little rounder, but he still looked like every suspect’s interrogation-room nightmare.
Joe gave Max a big hug. Despite his prison workouts, Max’s shoulders didn’t make either side of Joe’s chest. Joe patted Max’s arms and stood back a couple of steps to look him over.
“See they fed you,” he said.
“I worked the kitchen.”
“Not the barbershop?” Joe said, patting Max’s bald head.
They sat down. Joe took up most of his side of the booth. A ring-binder file was on the table. A waiter came over. Joe ordered a Diet Coke and a shot of bourbon. Max asked for a fat Coke.
“You dry?” Joe asked.
“Dry-ving. You?”
“Slowed drinkin’ down so much I might as well have quit. Middle age is beatin’ my ass. Can’t shake a hangover like back in the day.”
“You feel better for it?”
“Nope.”
Joe’s face hadn’t aged much—not in the lounge light at any rate—but his hairline had been beaten back from his forehead and he wore his hair lower than before, which led Max to suspect he was thinning in the middle.
There were a few couples in the lounge, all still in their office suits. Anonymous piano Muzak tinkled from corner speakers, the tune so indecipherable they might as well have been playing the sound of a horse pissing on wind chimes.
“How’s Lena?” Max asked.
“She’s good, man. Sends her love,” Joe said. He reached into his suit jacket, pulled out some photographs, and handed them to Max. “Mug shots. See if you recognize anyone you know.”
Max looked through the pictures. The first was a family shot with Lena in the middle. Lena was tiny, next to Joe almost fetal. Joe had met her at his local Baptist church. He hadn’t been particularly religious, but church was a better and cheaper alternative to trawling bars and clubs or dating fellow cops; he’d called it “the best singles spot outside of heaven.”
Lena had never liked Max. He didn’t blame her. The first time they’d met, he’d had blood on his collar from where a suspect had bitten his earlobe. She’d thought it was lipstick, and from then on, she’d always looked at him like he’d done something wrong; relations, like their conversations, had stayed the polite side of functional. Things hadn’t improved between them after he’d left the force, either. His marrying Sandra had appalled her. Even God didn’t cross the color line in her world.
The last time Max had seen Joe he’d had three children, all boys—Jethro, the eldest, then Dwayne and Dean, one year apart—but there were two baby girls on Lena’s lap.
“Yeah, that’s Ashley on the left and on the right is Bryony,” Joe said proudly.
“Twins?”
“Double trouble. Stereo.”
“How old?”
“Three. We wasn’t plannin’ on havin’ no more kids. They just happened.”
“They say the unplanned ones are the most loved.”
“‘They’ say a lot of things, most of ’em bullshit. I love all my babies equally.”
They were cute-looking kids, took after their mother, same eyes.
“Sandra never told me,” Max said.
“You two’s had more pressin’ bidnis to talk over, I’m sure,” Joe said.
The waiter brought the Cokes and bourbon. Joe took the shot glass, quickly checked around, and tipped the drink on the floor.
“For Sandra,” he said.
Pour out a little liquor for the dead, spirit for spirit. Joe did that every time someone close to him died. Right then solemnity threatened to invade their space, get the better of the moment. Max didn’t need it. They had things to talk over.
“Sandra didn’t drink,” Max said.
Joe looked at him, read the traces of humor left over on his lips, and burst out laughing. He had a big laugh, a rolling rumble of joy that filled the room and made everyone look their way.
Max stared at the photograph of his godson. Jethro was holding a basketball up on splayed fingertips. The boy was twelve but already tall and broad enough to pass for sixteen.
“Takes after his daddy,” Max said.
“Jet loves his ball.”
“Could be a future there.”
“Could be, but best let the future be the future. Besides, I want him to do well in school. Kid’s got a good head on him.”
“You don’t want him to follow in your footsteps?”
“Like I said, the kid’s got a good head on him.”
They clinked glasses.
Max handed him back the photographs and looked over at the main bar. It was packed. Brickell Avenue bankers, businessmen, white-collar workers with loosened ties, handbags on the floor, jackets draped carelessly over the backs of their chairs, hems trailing on the ground. He homed in on two executive types in similar light gray suits, both clutching Bud bottles and talking to a couple of women. They’d just met, exchanged first names, established common ground, and now they were searching for the next conversation lead-in. He could tell all that from the tensed-up body language—stiff-backed, alert, ready to run off after the next best thing. Both men were interested in the same girl—navy blue business suit, blond highlights. Her friend knew this and was already looking around the bar. Back in his bachelor days, Max had specialized in going for the ugly friend, reasoning that the better-looking one would be expecting attention and would play hard to get and leave him holding his dick and a big tab at the end of the night. The woman who wasn’t expecting to get hit on would be more likely to give it up. It had worked nine times out of ten, sometimes with the unexpected bonus of the good-looking one making a play for him. He hadn’t liked most of the women he’d dated. They were challenges, notches, things to be possessed. His attitudes had changed completely when he’d met Sandra, but now that she was gone all those old thoughts were coming back to him like the ghost of an amputated limb, sending him feelings out of nowhere.
He hadn’t had sex in seven years. He hadn’t thought about it since the funeral. He hadn’t even jerked off. His libido had shut down out of respect.
He’d been faithful to Sandra, a one-woman man. He didn’t really want anyone else, anyone new, not now. He couldn’t even imagine what it would be like again, going through all that bullshit conversation, pretending to be a sensitive guy when the only reason you’d gone up to her was to see if you could fool her into a fuck. He was looking at the whole scene below him with the pioneer’s distaste for the follower.
Joe pushed the file over to him.
“Dug up a little on the Carvers of Haiti,” Joe said. “Mostly back story, nothing current. The video’s got a load of news footage about the Haitian invasion. Allain Carver’s in there somewhere.”
“Thanks, Joe,” Max said, taking the files and putting them down on the seat beside him. “Anything on them here?”
“No criminal records, but Gustav Carver, the dad? He’s got a mansion in Coral Gables. Got B&E’d six years back.”
“What they take?”
“Nothing. Someone broke in one night, took one of their fine-china dinner plates, shit on it, put it on the dining-room table and left without a trace.”
“What about the security cameras?”
“Nada. I don’t think the case got followed through. Report is only two pages—looks more like a complaint than a crime. Probably some pissed off ex-servant.”
Max laughed. He’d heard of far stranger crimes, but the thought of Allain Carver finding that on the table when he came down to breakfast was funny. He started to smile, but then he thought of Boukman and his expression wilted.
“So, you wanna tell me what happened with Solomon Boukman? When I went to New York he was sitting on death row, one last appeal away from the needle.”
“We ain’t in Texas,” said Joe. “Things take time in Florida. Even time takes time here. A lawyer can take up to two years to put in an appeal. That stays in the system for another two years. Then you got yet another two years before you get in front of the judge. Add all that up and it’s 1995. They turned down Boukman’s last appeal, like I knew they would, only—”
“But they fuckin’ set him free, Joe!” Max said, raising his voice to a near shout.
“Do you know how much a one-way ticket to Haiti costs?” Joe said. “A hundred bucks, give or take—plus tax. Do you know how much it costs the state to keep a man on death row? Hell—forget that. Do you know how much it costs the state to execute a man? Thousands. See the logic?”
“The victims’ families ‘see the logic’?” Max said bitterly.
Joe didn’t say anything. Max could tell he was angry about it too, but there was something else eating away at him.
“You wanna tell me the rest, Joe.”
“They cleaned out Boukman’s cell the day he left. Found this,” Joe said, handing Max a sheet of school exercise-book paper sealed in an evidence bag.
Boukman had cut out a newspaper picture of Max at his trial and stuck it in the middle of the paper. Underneath it, in pencil, in that strange, childlike writing of his—capitals, all letters bereft of curves, strokes linked by dots and drawn so straight he appeared to have used a ruler—he’d written: YOU GIVE ME REASON TO LIVE. Below that, he’d drawn a small outline of Haiti.
“Fuck’s he mean by that?” Joe asked.
“He said that to me at his trial, when I was givin’ evidence,” Max said and left it at that. He wasn’t going to spring the truth on Joe. Not now. Not ever, if he could help it.
He’d come face-to-face with Boukman twice, before his arrest. He’d never been so terrified of another human being in all his life.
“I don’t know about you, but there was somethin’ really scary about Boukman,” Joe said. “D’you remember when we busted in there—that zombie-palace place?”
“He’s just a man, Joe. A sick, twisted man, but a man all the same. Flesh and blood like us.”
“He didn’t so much as groan when you laid into him.”
“So? Did he fly off on a broomstick?”
“I don’t care how much Carver’s payin’ you, man. I don’t think you should go. Give it a pass,” Joe said.
“If I see Boukman in Haiti, I’ll tell him you say hello. And then I’ll kill him,” Max said.
“You can’t afford to take this shit lightly,” Joe said, angry.
“I’m not.”
“I got your piece,” Joe lowered his voice and leaned over. “New Beretta, two hundred shells. Hollow point and regular. Gimme your flight details. It’ll be waitin’ for you in Departures. Pick it up before you get on the plane. One thing: don’t bring it back. It stays in Haiti.”
“You could get into serious shit for this—arming a convicted felon,” Max joked, hiking up the sleeves of his sweatshirt to just below his elbows.
“I don’t know no felons, but I do know good men who take wrong turns.” Joe smiled. They clicked glasses.
“Thanks man. Thanks for everything you did for me when I was away. I owe you.”
“You don’t owe me shit. You’re a cop. We look after our own. You know how it is and always will be.”
Depending on what they’d done to get there (most rapes and all kiddie-sex crimes were out, but everything else was tolerated, cops who went to jail were protected by the system. There was an unofficial national network, in which one state police department looked out for a felon from another state police department, knowing that the favor would be returned in spades sometime down the line. Con-cops would sometimes be kept in a maximum-security prison for a week or two and then quietly transferred out to a minimum-security white-collar jail. That was what happened to those who’d killed suspects, or got caught taking backhanders or stealing dope and selling it back on the street. If they couldn’t swing a transfer, a fallen cop would be segregated, kept in solitary, have his meals brought to him by the guards, and allowed to shower and exercise alone. If solitary was all booked up, as it frequently was, the cops would be put in General Population, but with two guards watching their backs at all times. If a con did make a move on a jailbird cop, he’d get thrown in the hole long enough for the guards to put the word out that he was a snitch, and let out just in time to get shanked. Although Max was arrested in New York, Joe had had no trouble making sure his friend got five-star security treatment at Attica.
“Before you leave you should go see Clyde Beeson,” Joe said.
“Beeson?” Max said. Out of all the Florida PIs, Clyde Beeson had been his major competition. Max had always despised him, ever since the Boukman case.
“Carver employed him before you. Didn’t work out too good, way I heard it.”
“What happened?”
“Best you hear it from him.”
“He won’t talk to me.”
“He will if you tell him you’re going to Haiti.”
“I’ll see him if I got the time.”
“Make time,” Joe said.
It was close to midnight and the bar crowd below was peaking. They were drunker, looser, their walks to and from the bathroom unsteady, their voices raised to shouting pitch above the din of the music threading through a hundred different conversations. He could hear the muffled din through the glass.
Max checked on how the executives were doing with the women. He saw the blonde and one of the men at a table near the back. Their jackets were off. The man had rolled up his sleeves and taken off his tie. The woman had on a sleeveless black halterneck. From her well-toned and proportioned arms, Max saw she worked out regularly. The man was making his move now, leaning closer to her across the table, touching her hand. He was making her laugh too. It probably wasn’t even that funny, but she was interested in him. Her friend was gone, so was the man’s competition—probably separately; losers rarely left together.
Max and Joe talked some more: who’d retired, who’d died (three—cancer, bullets, drunk and drowned), who was married, divorced, what the job was like now, how things had changed post–Rodney King. They laughed, bitched, reminisced. Joe told him about the fifteen Bruce Springsteen concerts he’d seen while Max had been away. Mercifully, he kept the details to a minimum. They drank more Diet Cokes, scoped out the lounge couples, talked about getting older. It was good, it was warm, time passed quickly, and Max forgot about Boukman for the whole while.
By two o’clock, the bar had emptied of all but a few drinkers. The couple Max had been watching had left.
Joe and Max made their way out.
It was cool and slightly breezy on the street. Max took in a deep breath of Miami air—sea, mixed with swamp and mild traffic fumes.
“How does it feel? Bein’ out?” Joe asked.
“Like learning to walk and finding out you can still run,” Max said. “Tell me something? How come you never came to see me?”
“Did you expect me to?”
“No.”
“Seein’ you in there would’ve messed with my moral compass. Cops don’t go to jail,” Joe said. “Besides, I felt kinda responsible. Not teachin’ you some restraint back in the day, when I could’ve.”
“You can’t teach a man his nature, Joe.”
“I hear that. But you can teach him sense from none-sense. And some of that shit you pulled back then, man? That was some senseless none-sense.”
Those parental tones again. Max was close to fifty, two-thirds of his life as good as gone. He didn’t need a lecture from Joe, who was only three years older than he but had always acted like it was ten more. Anyway, it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference. What had happened had happened. There was no undoing any of it. Besides, Joe was no saint. When they’d been partners, there had been as many brutality complaints against him as there were against Max. No one had given a flying fuck or done anything. Miami had been a war zone. The city had needed to meet violence with violence.
“We cool, Joe?”
“All-ways.” They hugged.
“See you when I get back.”
“In one piece, man—the only way I wanna see ya.”
“You will. Give my love to the kids.”
“Take care, brother,” Joe said.
They went their separate ways.
Opening the door of his rented Honda, Max realized that Joe had called him “brother” for the first time ever in all of the twenty-five years he’d known him. They might have been best friends, but Joe was a segregationist when it came to his terms of endearment.
That’s when Max guessed things were going to be bad in Haiti.