Free Voodoo Eyes by Nick Stone Page B

just above his ear. He felt it right down to the tips of his toes.
    Joe’s head rocked back sharply. The people behind him were splattered with blood.
    Liston pivoted on the chair’s hind legs, balanced an instant, and then fell back, his legs upending the table.
    Max had dived off to the side, instinctively, reflexively, away from the sound.
    He rolled over on his back and looked up, but all he could see were people running in different directions, falling over each other. Through the din in his ears, he heard screams and shouts, glass and crockery shattering, panic.
    He scrambled over to Joe.
    His friend’s right eye had been shot out. He lay motionless. Max grabbed his wrist and yelled his name. No pulse. No motion. The hand was still warm. But it wouldn’t be for much longer. Blood was seeping out of the back of his head, thick and dark red.
    Max grabbed Joe’s gun out of his holster and stood up.
    He heard crying, people screaming. Everywhere, people were running, ducking into doorways, stores. The front of the restaurant had emptied. Tables had been overturned. Food all over the floor. Customers cowering behind the bar, looking at him, terrified.
    He couldn’t move. He had gunsmoke in the back of his throat.
    ‘Drop your weapon!’
    Cop’s command at his ear, behind him.
    ‘Drop your fucken’ weapon!’
    He dropped Joe’s gun and put his hands in the air. Someone grabbed his arms and locked them behind his back. He was forced down on the ground, his face almost touching Joe’s feet. His hands were cuffed. He was patted down. Cops surrounded him. He heard sirens, the sharp crackle of police radios and, in his head, the echo of a gunshot.

7
    He’d been here before, on the wrong side of the interrogation room, getting grilled about murder. Only this time he hadn’t killed anyone.
    They were treating him like a suspect, keeping him in this white room with its bolted-down furniture. The chair he sat in was slightly lower than the one opposite and a good half ass-cheek too narrow for basic comfort. The table surface, knuckle-dented and fogged with graffiti and bored scratches, resembled the inside of an old tin pan. Cast iron loops for chains had been bolted to the floor and presiding over the whole dull scene were black cameras, bracketed high on adjacent walls.
    No one had said a single word to him.
    Two hours in and he was still waiting.
    Joe was dead.
    A uniformed cop had confirmed it. He walked in, put a picture on the table and pushed it over to Max without saying a word. Then he walked out.
    Max stared at the picture.
    Joe.
    A single bullet to the head, clean through the eye.
    It had been taken within an hour of the shooting – the glow of life hadn’t fully faded from the flesh. Joe didn’t look dead, more the victim of a grim Halloween prank – like someone had put make-up on him in his sleep.
    Ha ha ha. Not funny. Not funny at all.
    Max knew his friend was gone.
    For ever.
    And he felt sick.
    Then came deep disorientation. Compass points had been switched around, gravity realigned. A few hours before, they’d been having dinner, talking, like two regular guys on a night out. He could see the edge of a Mariposa menu in the corner of the picture. That was their last ever time together.
    Max couldn’t feel anything.
    No sorrow, no anger – no emotions of any kind.
    The grief would come later, he knew. You never got over losing those closest to you. You made room for the emptiness and you learned to live with it.
    He wanted to call Lena – Joe’s wife – and go and be with the family.
    He thought of Joe’s children. He thought of how Joe had been just seven months away from retirement. He thought of the grandchildren Joe would never see.
    That name.
    Vanetta Brown.
    Still a mere chime, a distant bell tolling in the fog of memory.
    Joe was about to tell him who she was. Then he was shot.
    Through the eye.
    Shot like Eldon.
    Shot by Eldon’s killer.
    The cops had arrived at the scene in under a