What the fuck had happened to him?
Max looked around the trailer. It seemed empty. Between him and Beeson was a linoleum-covered floor, an olive-green leather armchair with the stuffing popping out near the armrests, and an upturned packing crate he used as a table. The floor was filthy, covered in an oily-looking black grime, its original yellow color apparent through the pit bull's claw gouges and paw-print streaks. There was dog shit everywhere: fresh, dried, and semidried.
How had Beeson let himself go like this?
Max saw cardboard boxes stacked against the wall, from the floor to the ceiling, covering the windows to his right. Many of the boxes were damp and sagging in the middle, their contents about to spill out.
The light coming through the blinds sliced through air that was hung heavy with layered cigarette smoke and dotted with bluebottle flies hurtling past them and smacking into the exposed window, thinking it was the great outdoors. Even the flies wanted out of this pathetic cesspit.
The dog growled in Max's direction from a murky corner where the darkness had retreated and bunched up on itself. He could just about make out its eyes, glinting, watching.
He guessed the kitchen behind him was stacked with filthy dishes and rotting food, and he hated to think of what lay in Beeson's bedroom and bathroom.
It was roasting hot. Max was already covered in a thickening film of sweat.
"Come on in, Mingus," Beeson beckoned over with his gun-holding hand. He had a long-barreled .44 Magnum with solid steel cast, the kind of six-shooter Clint Eastwood used in Dirty Harryno doubt a major influence on its buyer. The gun was almost as long as the arm that held it.
Beeson noticed that Max hadn't moved. He was staying put, with his handkerchief clamped over his nose and a disgusted stare in his eyes.
"Suit yourself." He shrugged and smiled. He looked at Max through sticky, toadlike brown eyes propped up on puffy cushions of grayish flesh. He couldn't have been sleeping much.
"Who are you hiding from?" Max asked.
"Just hiding," he replied. "So Allain Carver has got you looking for his kid?"
Max nodded. He wanted to take the handkerchief away, but the stench in the room was so thick he could feel particles settling on his skin in a fine dust.
"What d'you tell 'im?"
"I told him the kid was probably dead."
"I never knew how you ever made a buck in this town wearin' an attitude like that," Beeson said.
"Honesty pays."
Beeson laughed at that. He must have been smoking three or more packs a day, because his mirth triggered a loud, raucous chugging cough that tore chunks out of his chest. He hawked a tongue-load of phlegm up onto the floor and rubbed it into the filth with his foot. Max wondered if there was tumor blood mixed in with the spit.
"I ain't doin' your spadework, Mingusif that's what you come for'less you pay me," Beeson said.
"Some things haven't changed."
"Force-a habit. Money ain't no use to me now anyways."
Max couldn't stand it any longer. He stepped back to the door and threw it open. Light and fresh air stormed the trailer. Max stood there for a second, breathing in deep, cleansing breaths.
The pit bull was barking, yanking at the chain and the thing that held it, probably desperate to flee the cesspool it had been living in.
Max walked back to Beeson, sidestepping a slalom path of dog turds leading into the kitchen. He'd narrowly missed standing in a tepee of turds that looked too deliberately arranged to be natural. Beeson hadn't moved. He didn't seem to mind that the door was open.
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 Godif there was onereally got involved in individual cases. Things happened for no particular reason, they just happenedand 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.
"OKwhat 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 nameVincent 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. Hetalkstoyou." Beeson said the last slowly.