Mr. Clarinet

The flies were all fleeing past Max, tearing through the air to freedom.

"How d'you end up like this?" Max said. He'd never believed in fate or karma or that God—if there was one—really got involved in individual cases. Things happened for no particular reason, they just happened—and rarely to the right people. You had dreams, ambitions, goals. You worked for them. Sometimes you succeeded, most times you failed. That had been Max's take on life. No more complicated than that. But standing there, looking at Beeson, gave him pause, made him question his beliefs. If this wasn't what divine retribution looked like, then there was no such thing.

"What? You feel sorry for me?" Beeson asked.

"No," Max said.

Beeson smirked. He studied Max, running his eyes up and down him.

"OK—what the fuck? I'll tell ya," Beeson said, moving away from the window, sitting down in his armchair with the gun rested across his lap. He took a pack of unfiltered Pall Malls from his shirt pocket, shook one out, and lit it. "I went out to Haiti September last year. I was there three months.

"See? I knew the case was a no-er from the moment Carver told me the specifics. No ransom, no witnesses, nothing seen, nothing heard. But what the fuck? I tripled my fee, seeing as Haiti ain't exactly the Bahamas. He said fine, no problem. Plus he mentioned the same dead-or-alive bonus thing he probably told you."

"How much did he say?"

"A cool mil if I dug up the body. A cool five if I found the kid alive. That what he's promised you?"

Max nodded.

"Now, I know this guy's a businessman and you don't get to the kind of money tree the Carvers live in by spending it on hope. I told myself the kid is as dead as Niggerown cop chalk, and the dad just wants to bury the body or burn it or whatever shit they do to the dead out there. I figured it'd be an easy mil, plus I'd have myself a little vacation. Two weeks' work max."

Beeson smoked his cigarette to the brand name, then lit another off the end. He dropped the butt on the floor and ground it out with his bare heel without showing any sign of pain. Max guessed he was on some serious dope, hardcore painkillers that put the body on ice but kept the brain in a candlelit bubble bath.

All the while he was talking, Beeson hadn't stopped staring Max dead in the eye.

"Didn't work out that way. First three weeks I was out there, showin' the kid's picture around, I keep hearin' the same name—Vincent Paul. I find out he runs the biggest slum in the country. And because of that people are sayin' he's the real power in the land. He's meant to have built this whole modern town no one's ever been to or knows where it is. They say he's got people working there naked in his drug factories. He's got 'em wearin' Bill and Hillary Clinton masks. Like a fuck-you to us. Forget Aristide or whatever monkey puppet Clinton is putting in there. This guy Paul? He's a major-league gangster. Makes all these nigger gangbangers we got out here look like Bugs Bunny. Plus he hates the Carvers. Never found out why."

"So you guessed he snatched the kid?"

"Yeah, clear as day. He's got motive and muscle."

"Did you talk to him?"

"I tried, but you don't talk to Vincent Paul. He—talks—to—you." Beeson said the last slowly.

"And did he?"

Beeson didn't reply. His eyes shifted downward, and then his head followed. He fell silent. Max stared at the front of his scalp, bare but for a few strands of long, reddish-brown hair. The rest was massed up behind in a rusty halo, like half an Elizabethan collar. He stayed like that for a long minute, not making a sound. Max was about to say something, when he raised his head slowly. Before, his eyes had been defiant pinpricks, daring in his squalor. Now the look was gone and his eyes had widened, the sacks below them deflated. Max saw fear creeping into them.

Beeson glanced out of the window and dragged on his Pall Mall until he started coughing and spluttering again. He let the fit pass.

He moved himself up to the edge of the chair and leaned forward.

"I never thought I was getting close to nothing, but maybe I was, or maybe someone thought I was. Anyway, one day I'm sleeping in my hotel. The next day I'm wakin' up in some strange room with these yellow walls, no idea how I got there. I'm tied to this bed, naked, facedown. These people come in. Someone gives me a shot in the ass and—kapow!—I'm gone. Out like a light."

"Did you see these people?"

"No."

"What happened next?"

"I woke up again. Obviously. I thought I was dreamin'. 'Cause I'm on a plane. American Airlines, midair. I'm flying back to Miami. No one looks at me like there's anything strange. I asked this stewardess how long I'd been there and she told me an hour. I asked the person behind me if they'd seen me get on, and they say no, I was lying there asleep when they got on."

"You don't remember getting on the plane? Going to the airport? Nothing?"