His clothes-suits for work and special occasions, khakis and T-shirts at all other times-were always well cut but rarely expensive. They’d owned their house and two cars outright, taken three vacations every year, and eaten at fancy restaurants once a month. She’d put a fair bit of rainy-day money away in their three savings accounts, and they had points in The L Bar, a successful yuppie joint in downtown Miami, run by Frank Nunez, a retired cop friend of Max’s. His wife, who was a qualified accountant, had managed the business side of things. Max hadn’t made a fortune as a private detective, but he’d done OK-enough to get by and have a little extra to play with. I’ve never been there and-no disrespect meant-I’ve never wanted to go there. I’ve looked for ghosts in hellholes in my time, but they were American hellholes and there was always a bus out.
Prison had reformed his erstwhile tact and replaced it with coarseness. You’ve performed- miracles," Carver said. "You’ve succeeded at far tougher assignments. These were people you never said no to, people you never failed. Not rich, riche- old money, the worst connections plugged in at every socket, all the lights on, everybody home-multistory bank vaults, fuck-off stockholdings, high-interest offshore accounts first-name terms with everybody who’s anybody in every walk of life, power to crush you to oblivion. It also told Max what kind of rich he was dealing with. You’re asking me to look for a kid who went missing two years ago, in a country that went back to the Stone Age about the same time.Ĭarver managed a smile so faint it barely registered on his lips yet let Max know he was being considered unsophisticated. HONESTY AND STRAIGHTFORWARDNESS weren’t always the best options, but Max chose them over bullshit as often as he could.
Carver’s face turned grim and his skin lost a little of its color. Your predecessors, they…Things didn’t turn out too right for them. "If you take the job, it’s going to be dangerous…. There’s one other thing, Carver said when he’d finished talking. The search hadn’t resumed until late October, by which time the trail, already cold, had frozen over. Army had invaded the country and put it on lockdown, imposing curfews and travel restrictions on the whole population. The Carver family had had to call off its search for the boy after two weeks, because the U.S. There had been no ransom demands and there were no witnesses. Nothing had been heard or seen of him since. Why go to another?Ĭharlie had disappeared on September 4, 1994, his third birthday. The whole thing was already sounding like a bad idea.
They hadn’t left him with bad memories so much as the kind of wounds that never really healed, that opened up at the slightest nudge or touch. When it came to people, there were always plenty of exceptions to every generalization, and he’d come face-to-face with those. That went for most of the Haitians he’d met.
They were honest, honorable, hardworking people who’d found themselves in the most unenviable place in America-bottom of the food chain, south of the poverty line, a lot of ground to make up. Nevertheless, he had fond memories of most of the Haitians he’d met. They hadn’t had a decent thing to say about their homeland, bad place being the most common and kindest. He knew-or had known-quite a few Haitians, expats he’d had regular dealings with back when he’d been a cop and worked a case in Little Haiti, Miami. He knew this about Haiti: voodoo, AIDS, Papa Doc, Baby Doc, boat people, and, recently, an American military invasion called Operation Restore Democracy he’d seen on TV.
There were a lot of things he wouldn’t have to worry about again, and he’d been doing a lot of worrying lately, nothing but worrying. Optimistically, with things going according to plan and ending happily for all concerned, Max was looking at riding off into the sunset a millionaire ten to fifteen times over.
Most people said he was the best in the business-or at least they had until April 17, 1989, the day he’d started a seven-year sentence in Attica for manslaughter and had his license permanently revoked. Missing persons were his specialty, finding them his talent. Max Mingus was an ex-cop turned private investigator. Those were the terms and, if he chose to accept them, that was the deal. TEN MILLION DOLLARS if he performed a miracle and brought the boy back alive, five million dollars if he came back with just the body and another five million if he dragged the killers in with it-their dead-or-alive status was immaterial, as long as they had the kid’s blood on their hands.