Voodoo Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page A

went back to the photograph of the body on the floor. He shook his head.
    ‘Killer shot him through the right eye at close range. Eldon went down. Killer stood over him, put another bullet in the left eye,’ he said. ‘This was no initiation. This was an execution.’
    ‘What I thought too. When they moved the body, the casings fell out of his hands. The killer put them there, closed the fingers around them. Rigor mortis sealed them in,’ said Joe.
    Max gave him a quizzical look.
    ‘Yeah, beats me too.’ Joe shrugged.
    ‘What was it? A forty-five?’
    ‘Haven’t seen the ballistics report, but the mess says yes.’
    Max looked around the gym and tried to picture the murder. Had Eldon been on his way out when he’d met his killer? Had the killer come to the gym before? The powder above the brow meant the killer had fired the first shot at a downward angle, which meant he was taller than Eldon. The old man was around five foot eleven. That made the shooter at least six-two.
    Why shoot him through the eyes? Was that a message? Something Eldon had seen that he wasn’t supposed to? Or was it the killer’s MO, the way he liked to do things?
    Max stopped right there. He hadn’t thought this way in years. He hadn’t had to. He was amazed at how quickly it came back.
    He’d last worked a crime scene with Joe twenty-seven years before, when they’d been after Solomon Boukman, the Haitian who’d ruled over the Miami underworld in the bad bad old days of cocaine and chainsaws.
    They still collaborated on cases now, occasionally and strictly off the books. If Joe needed information he couldn’t get through normal channels, he asked Max to look into it. And if Max needed to do a background check on someone, he called Joe. But that was as far as it went, favours asked and rendered in private. Nothing more. No facts, no details.
    ‘Why d’you bring me here, Joe?’ Max asked, although he already knew the answer and was preparing his response. ‘We both know I’m not meant to be here. And you’d cut your head off before you’d violate procedure.’
    ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’
    ‘Could you be a little more cryptic?’
    ‘You know who’s heading-up this investigation? That inspiration to morons everywhere: Deputy Commissioner Alex Ricon,’ Joe said.
    ‘He couldn’t catch air in a bag. Eldon hated him as much as he hated you. And the feeling was mutual.’
    ‘What’s that tell you?’
    ‘They’re not serious about catching the shooter.’
    ‘Exactly.’
    ‘But you know how it goes with hits,’ said Max. ‘You never go after the triggerman. You go after the person who paid him. Takes time and perseverance. The bigger the victim, the longer it takes. A lot of digging in dark corners. And with Eldon, you can be sure there’s going to be a major excavation.’
    ‘That’s just it,’ said Joe. ‘The only digging that’s gonna get done around Eldon is his grave. Tomorrow morning, they’re gonna tell the press it was some local teenage gangbanger popping his cherry.’
    ‘You’re kidding, right?’
    ‘Wish I was.’ Joe frowned and his brow creased into deep, broken grooves. ‘They don’t want to dig in case they don’t like what they find. And they know some of what’s down there. MTF put a lot of innocent people away. Most of ’em are doing life without. Imagine what would happen if an investigation led to just one of those guys being sprung? We’d have one overturned conviction after another. And then the multi-million-dollar lawsuits. The city can’t afford that.
    ‘Rumour is the Commissioner wants to run for Mayor soon. The Commissioner was tight with Eldon. That would squash his campaign dead on the drawing board.’
    ‘So they’ve put Ricon on it because he really won’t give two fucks if Eldon’s killer goes free,’ said Max.
    They were quiet for a moment. Max looked back through the photographs, and again at the dried blood on the ground, all that remained of