Mr. Clarinet

Good-looking guy, close to pretty: smooth caramel skin, Oriental eyes, a thin mustache crowning his upper lip, and his hair cut in a fade, carefully shaped around the forehead and temples. He wore khakis, a short-sleeved white shirt, and sturdy black shoes. He was Max's height and a third of his build.

"Not me," Max grunted.

"Come on—it's no big thing. I'll buy you a drink and tell you about myself."

"No," Max said, turning away and facing the bar.

"I can imagine how you feel about the press, Max. What with those guys in the Herald digging all that stuff up about you before your trial—and all the trouble they gave your wife—"

Max glared at Huxley. He didn't like journalists, never had, not even when they'd technically been friends, on the same side. When his trial had gone nationwide, the press had dug up every single piece of dirt they could find on him, enough to bury him twenty times over. It played so well—one of the most decorated and respected detectives in Florida, a hero cop, had really built his glittering career on brutalizing suspects into confessions and allegedly planting evidence. They'd camped outside his house, dozens of them. They couldn't get enough of the fact that he was in an interracial marriage. White journalists had asked Sandra if she was his cleaning lady; black journalists had called her a sellout, an Aunt Jemima, and condemned him for having a plantation mentality.

"Listen, I wasn't bothering you, but you are bothering me," Max barked, loud enough to make people leave their conversations and look over. "And you mention my wife again and I will tear your head off and shit in the stump. You got that?"

Huxley nodded, looking petrified. Right then Max could have played with Huxley's fear, toyed with it, stirred it into terror and offloaded a few grudges that way, but he let it go. The guy—and all those media guys—had just been doing their jobs and chasing promotions, same as everyone born with ambition and enough ruthlessness to trample over people to get there. If he'd been an upright cop, never cut any corners, done absolutely everything by the book, the press would have been on his side, championing his cause—and he still would have done prison time for manslaughter. Either way he'd have lost.

Max needed a piss. He hadn't had one since he'd been driven to the Carvers'. The tension of the evening had distracted him from his expanding bladder. He looked around the bar, but there didn't seem to be any obvious doorway people disappeared through, let alone anything marked out. He asked the barman, who tilted his head right to a spot behind where the prostitutes were standing.

Max walked over. The girls perked up and smoothed and straightened their dresses with lightning downstrokes and turned on their open, inviting stares. Their looks reminded him of Huxley's look—instant, one-spoon-and-stir friendship, trust, and discretion, all available for the asking, as long as you paid the price—a salesman shedding his soul piece by piece with every successful deal. Journalists and whores slept in the same bed. Mind you, he thought, how much different was he? Working for the people he had worked for? Looking the other way as he cleaned up their messes? We all did things we didn't want to do, for money. It was the way of the world—sooner or later, everything and everyone was for sale.

There were two bathrooms, male and female gender symbols sloppily painted in bright blue and pink on doors fitted at ankle height above the sloping, dusty floor. In between them was a room behind a wooden-bead curtain. There was an open camp bed with a bare pillow on it and an overturned box of Bud with an oil lamp on it. Max guessed it was where the barman or caretaker slept.

Inside the cubicle, a polished black cistern was fitted low, level with Max's face. The toilet didn't have a seat and there was no water in the bowl, just a black hole. He pissed a long stream and heard it gurgle where it hit something soft and wet and hollow a few feet under. It smelled faintly of ammonia and rotten flowers—the scent of the industrial-strength lime and disinfectant they were throwing down after the day's sewage.

Max heard someone walk past the cubicle, light a cigarette, and inhale deeply. He stepped out and saw Shawn Huxley in the corridor, close by, back to the wall, one foot up against it.

"Was that interesting? Listening to me piss? Did you get it on tape?" Max sneered. He was drunk, not badly, but enough to recalibrate his center of balance.

"The Carver boy," Huxley said. "That's why you're here, right?"

"What if I am?" Max replied, getting up in Huxley's face, unintentionally spraying him with spit. Huxley blinked but didn't wipe it off. Max focused on a small pearly drop hanging off the edge of the journalist's mustache, close to his lip. He'd catch it if he stuck his tongue out.