The Haitian link would eventually get found out and Reagan would probably hit them hard - topple Baby Doc, bomb or invade the country. But that was later. He'd be long gone before the first storm cloud rolled in. For now he'd make as much damn money as he could. DC3s! Jesus!
'Why didn't you mention this first?'
'The photographs are a priority,' Solomon replied.
Sure they are, thought Eldon. I know you now. You're nothing special. You scare like the worst of them. The stakes get higher so you get more paranoid, more suspicious. A predictable cycle. You can never be too cautious, true, but there was a fine line between caution and shooting your own shadow. He knew how this was likely to go. Boukman
37 was one of those guys who killed their entire crews over a hunch. Trouble is, behaving like that only made them even more mistrustful than before because they were suddenly surrounded by people they didn't know, didn't go back with.
The end was just around the corner.
Still, there was business to attend to and in business there was always a little give involved before you took.
'OK. I'll get you what you want,' Eldon said, after a suitably studied moment where he'd controlled the silence.
'Not that it'll do you any good,' he added.
A taxi pulled up outside Eldon's house. Leanne got out and walked up to the front door, stopping to wave as the cab pulled away.
Boukman leant forward. Eldon felt his icy breath on the side of his neck again. He didn't move. He could feel Boukman studying his daughter, taking her in. He didn't like it one darn bit, didn't like what he knew was going through the nigra's brain. Leanne was a beautiful girl. She turned a lot of guys' heads. He wanted to yell at her to hurry the fuck up, find her keys in her bag and get in the house. He could hear Solomon breathing through his nose, the air sounding like something heavy being dragged up the passages.
Leanne went inside and closed the door.
Eldon let out a sigh of relief he was sure Boukman heard.
'Bring me the pictures in three days,' Boukman said, opening the car door.
Eldon sat in the car long after Boukman had ridden off in the Mercedes that had been parked behind them. He couldn't believe it the creep had actually unnerved him.
This wasn't good. This wasn't good at all.
47
'Solomon Boukman man or myth?' Drake mumbled as he looked around his tower of Babel a sandwich so big it could have fed a small elephant: six solid inches of pastrami, beef and turkey inter-layered with pickles, sauerkraut, onions, lettuce and piercingly bright yellow mustard, the whole structure topped and tailed with a thin slice of rye bread and held together by a long wooden skewer. Max had a Cuban coffee and his cigarettes.
They were facing opposite directions in adjacent end-of aisle booths in Woolfies on Collins Avenue, a vast diner with mirrored columns, plush red leather seats, art deco lamps, and a beige and brown tiled floor.
Word is he's the crime lord of Miami. Got his finger in absolutely everything there's a law against. Dope, prostitution, extortion, gamblin', numbers, auto theft, etcetera, etcetera.' Drake took the tower apart and partitioned it into five smaller sections, but his meal still looked daunting.
'So how come I never heard of him before?' Max asked.
Today his informant had come dressed as a Brazilian soccer player - yellow and green shirt, blue shorts, white tube socks. He had the boots and a ball by his side.
'Thass juss it. Dependin' on who you talk to, Boukman either exists or he don't. Some folks are sayin' the Haitians made him up so they could scare off the niggas that was preyin' on 'em kinda like a criminal scarecrow or sumshit.
The Haitians say he's for real. At least them simple ones straight off the boats do. The rich ones I deal with in Kendall think it's all bullshit too.'
'What about you? What do you think?'
369 'I ain't the cop here, Mingus. I juss tell you what I hear an' see. But if you want me to take a worthless guess a guy like that? you'd-a had to have some paper on him by now. No one that big goes undetected. Leaves a trail.'
'True,' Max said, chasing his sweet, thick black coffee with a pull on his Marlboro.
'Strange thing is, the people who say he's real don't know what he looks like. Or they do, but all the descriptions is different. Some of 'em say he's white, some say he's black, some say he's Latino - and there was this one ole girl tole me he was Chinesey lookin'. And then no one can agree if he's really a he or a she. Or an it. Or an evil genius midget man chile. I even heard he's got two tongues. Can you believe that?'
'Two tongues?' Max laughed quietly. 'The ladies must love him.'
'What I thought.' Drake shovelled a wedge of mixed meat and sauerkraut into his mouth.
'So, all this you heard is just word-of-mouth stuff? Nothing concrete?'
'All porch talk. Other thing I found out is that Boukman's got hisself a gang. They call theyselves the Saturday Night Barons Club. The SNBC. You heard of 'em?'
Max shook his head.
'You know why that is? 'Cause they don't exist neither.'
'Right.' Max sighed heavily through a cloud of smoke.
'They ain't like the gangs we got here, or like you seen in The Warriors, or them Crips and Bloods in LA, feudin'
over colours and area codes. The SNBC don't have no identification, no territories, none o' that. But, you can't miss 'em if you see 'em 'cause they supposed to be twelve feet tall.'
'This is all soundin' like you sat around a campfire listenin'
to a bunch of stoners who watch too many horror movies.'
Max chuckled as he spoke, but his patience was wearing
370 I thin. The information was ridiculous, even if there were parallels with what he and Joe had found in the files.
'I'm tellin' you what I heard, Mingus.' Drake glanced at him sharply, looking genuinely affronted, mustard bracketing the ends of his mouth.
'OK. Go on,' Max said. 'Why's it called the Saturday Night Barons Club?'
'You ever see that James Bond flick Live and Let Die?
'With Gloria Hendry out of Black Caesar? Yeah, I saw that.'
You remember that guy at the back of the train at the end big ole brother in whiteface, top hat and tails laughin' his ass off?'
'Uh-huh.'
'That's Baron Samedi, voodoo god of death who only comes out at night. Samedi means Saturday night in French.'