King of Swords

He couldn't see Boukman at all. He turned around, frustrated, crossed his arms and faced the windscreen, looking longingly at the warm yellow lights in his house.

'Things have changed,' Boukman said, his voice now almost in Eldon's ear, making him jerk in shock. The fucker had moved again, right behind him. He'd felt his breath on his neck, the brush of ice-cold feathers.

366 I 'Yeah? How so?' Eldon snapped. Christ, was he pissed!

Boukman had given him a fright — him!

'We have a new supplier.'

'Who? Baby Doc?' Eldon laughed.

'No. His father-in-law, Ernest Bennett. He's bought Air Haiti and taken over trafficking from the Haitian army, which means no more Cessnas with small loads every two days. Now we'll be using proper cargo planes - DC3s. That means five or six times the volume.'

'How many plane loads?' Eldon asked. His heart rate was up.

'Two a day to begin with.'

'Starting when?'

'Next Wednesday.'

Eldon thought about it. This was a serious step up. Solomon Boukman would become the single biggest importer and distributor of coke in Miami. Bigger than the Colombians and Cubans. It would mean a lot more money. Way more risk too. Risk everywhere. The Colombians and Cubans wouldn't exactly like the competition. There'd be another war, far worse than the one going on now with Griselda Blanco's people. Then there was the government.

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.