Max said. 'Which end you wanna bite on?'
'I'll look into missing person reports and multiple murders of families.'
'OK. I'll do the tarot cards and deal with the lab. How soon can you get our base camp set up?'
Til call my cousin tonight, soon as he gets home. He should be able to hook us up with somewhere in the next twenty-four.'
'OK. We're on.'
They shook hands.
'How's about that brew now?' Joe asked.
After Joe had gone, Max poured himself a shotglass of Jim Beam and sunk it in one. He took Bad Girls off the turntable and put it back in its sleeve. He went to the room where he kept his records. It was supposed to be an extra bedroom, hut three of the walls had floor-to-ceiling shelves with over two thousand albums lined up in alphabetical order on them.
There were more on the floor too wooden crates of LPs, and 12- and 7-inch singles. He'd won half his collection at a SAW auction. It had originally belonged to a drug dealer called Lovell the Lodger, who'd doubled as a DJ. The rest he'd bought himself, or confiscated during busts and kept, if they were rare.
He took out Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain and put it on. He flopped down on his brown leather couch. The deep-rooted melancholia of Miles' trumpet pierced him to the edge of his soul and made him feel suddenly very alone and empty, as close to vulnerable as he could be.
He closed his eyes. Quickly he fell asleep.
He awoke four hours later feeling a little refreshed. It was dark and hot and the room smelled of rain. The storm had broken in his absence, but there was still more to come.
He stepped back out onto the balcony. The Drive's pink sidewalks were wet but quickly drying. It was full of people, babe-in-the-woods tourists looking to get skinned, lowlifes looking to give or get cheap thrills. On either side of him he heard the usual barrage of Spanish songs and shouting.
Max took a shower, shaved and brushed his teeth. He dressed in a pale blue shirt, black chinos and leather slip-ons and went out.
I
I 25
La Miel was and always had been Max's favourite spot in Miami clubland. It was located in the Airport Hilton on Blue Lagoon Drive. There was no better place for meeting women you'd never see again, because half the club's clientele were travellers on overnight transit, specifically foreign airline stewardesses. He didn't have to bullshit them about what he did. In fact it was an asset in the pick-up game: once they heard he was a cop, they channelled their Starsky & Hutch fantasies and got all starstruck and tongue-tied, and from there it'd be a shortcut from club to hotel room.
Though Max had been going to clubs since 1968, he couldn't really dance for shit - his main moves being either a cracked mirror to what he saw men around him doing, or a sole to sole shuffle that had more in common with defensive boxing footwork than groovy gesticulation. He'd presided over the rise of disco, the 'Theme from Shaft' giving way to quarter-hour long epics with fourfour beats, easy to follow bass patterns and empty, innuendo-laden lyrics.
He'd loved it and he'd loved discos. They'd been a great racial melting pot whites, blacks and Latinos coming together for the single purpose of having a good time, everyone getting along, Dr King's dream in platforms, satin, sequins and on lots and lots of cocaine; and it had never been easier to meet black chicks, which was his main reason for going to so many, so often. Then Saturday Night Fever had come out and killed it. After that all you ever saw were random assholes in white suits and black shirts aping Travolta, while the women unfailingly wore red dresses and talked in phoney New York accents. He'd been glad when
the backlash had kicked in, with the 'Disco Sucks' campaign and the blowing up of a small mountain of records on Disco Demolition Night: it had cleared the air and the wannabe Tony Maneros had fucked off to Kiss and REO Speedwagon concerts, denying their past dalliance like Peter before the cock crew.
When he arrived, just after eleven, the club seemed strangely empty. The DJ was spinning the kind of salsified disco tune that was becoming all the rage in the city, but there were wide-open spaces on the dance floor and most of the people were standing on the fringes, looking on, barely moving.
Max got himself a beer from the bar. The music was too loud and the song was making him uncomfortable, nauseous almost. The bassy beat made the fluid in his guts slosh around, the squealing brass grated against his eardrums, and an adenoidal girl singer was belting out a two-word lyric Vamos! Dana! over and over and over in a shriek both pained and painful. Suddenly this wasn't music any more, but an endurance test in patience and tolerance, and he crashed at the first hurdle.
He lit a cigarette and checked out the women, but it was too dark to tell the shapes apart. Torture-by-saldisco segued into son-of-torture-by-saldisco. The crowd was still thicker at the edges of the dance floor, the vibe in the place curiously dead, frowns instead of smiles, stillness instead of motion.
He began thinking that coming here hadn't been such a good idea and wondered whether it was worth driving to his second favourite spot, O Miami in Miami Springs. He dismissed it as a trek too far and walked over to the dance floor, to see what was keeping the people at bay.
At first he thought it was some kind of competition, or maybe a 'couples only' segment of the night. There were maybe two dozen people getting down to the God-awful shit coming out of the speakers. Nothing special about them
at an initial glance, except for the fact they could all dance quite superbly, their movements at one with the musical squall, not a dip or turn out of time. You always got this at discos, the Cinderella effect transforming the drab into deities, deities to dust. But the longer he watched them, the more he realized what was happening: they were all dancing in the same way, and the dances were an incredibly complex mix of dazzling footwork patterns and unpredictable turn sequences. It all seemed pre-arranged, pre-planned and exclusive. To participate you not only had to know the moves, but know the dancers too. The couples were in a loose, tight circle, but were all interacting with each other, the merest look or hand signal announcing a switch in the pattern: perfect physical telepathy. And nearly everyone around them watched in defeated awe, as if suffering from a collective loss of confidence in their own hipster abilities.
A few men and a few more women were trying to copy the steps, but they couldn't keep time with the music, or were too uncoordinated to fuse feet and upper body, or simply glanced at the new masters of the dance floor and realized they'd never ever get it right.
Max moved around, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, trying to find women as bored and pissed off as he was, but their attention was undivided, to the point that the two times he tried to strike up conversations, he was completely ignored, frozen out at the first monosyllable.
He finished his beer and went back to the bar. He didn't want another, but he bought one anyway, hoping the music would change and normality would resume.
Unfortunately torture-by-saldisco had come with her whole fucking family, and after forty more minutes the scene had become so unbearable he began to long for some locked-in-a-timewarp dickheads to stride in in cheap white polyester suits and force the DJ to play the Bee Gees at gunpoint.