in their three savings accounts, and they had points in The L Bar, a successful yuppie joint in downtown Miami, run by Frank Nunez, a retired cop friend of Max's. They'd owned their house and two cars outright, taken three vacations every year, and eaten at fancy restaurants once a month.
He'd had few personal expenses. His clothes?suits for work and special occasions, khakis and T-shirts at all other times?were always well cut but rarely expensive. He'd learned his lesson after his second case, when he'd got arterial spray on his five-hundred-dollar suit and had to surrender it to forensics, who later handed it to the DA, who recycled it in court as Exhibit D. He sent his wife flowers every week, bought her lavish presents on her birthday and at Christmas and on their anniversary; he was also generous to his closest friends. He had no addictions. He'd quit cigarettes and reefer when he'd left the force; booze had taken a little longer but that had gone out of his life too. Music was his only real indulgence?jazz, swing, doo-wop, rock 'n' roll, soul, funk, and disco; he had five thousand CDs, vinyl albums, and singles he knew every note and lyric to. The most he'd ever spent was when he'd dropped four hundred bucks at an auction on an autographed original double ten-inch vinyl copy of Frank Sinatra's 'In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.' He'd framed it and hung it in his study, opposite his desk. When his wife asked, he lied and told her he'd picked it up cheap at a house-repo sale in Orlando.
All in all, it had been a comfortable life, the sort that made you happy and fat and gradually more and more conservative.
And then he'd gone and killed three people in the Bronx, and the wheels had come off and everything had skidded to a loud, ungainly stop.
Postprison, Max still had the house and his car in Miami, plus $9,000 in a savings account. He could live on that for another four or five months tops, then he'd have to sell the house and find a job. That would be hard. Who would employ him? Ex-cop, ex-PI, ex-con?three crosses, no ticks. He was forty-six: too old to learn anything new and too young to give in. What the fuck would he do? Bar work? Kitchen work? Pack shopping bags? Construction? Mall security?
True, he had some friends and people who owed him, but he'd never called in a favor in his life, and he wasn't about to start now that he was on his knees. It would be tantamount to begging, and that went up against his every rule. He'd helped people out because he could at the time, not for what they could do for him later, not for points in the karma bank. His wife had called him nadve, marshmallow-soft under the concrete-and-razor-wire carapace he showed the world. Maybe she'd been right. Maybe he should have put self-interest before others. Would his life have been any different now? Probably, yes.
He saw his future, clearly, a year or two from now. He'd be living in one of those one-room apartments with stained wallpaper, tribes of warring roaches, and a set of dos and don'ts on the door, handwritten in semiliterate Spanish. He'd hear his neighbors arguing, fucking, talking, fighting; upstairs, downstairs, left and right. His life would be one chipped plate, a knife, a fork, and a spoon. He'd play the lotto and watch the results go against him on a portable TV with a shaky picture. Slow death, gradual extinction, one cell at a time.
Take Carver's job or take his chances in the postcon world. He had no other choice.
* * *
Max had first spoken to Allain Carver over the phone in prison. They didn't get off to a good start. Max had told him to fuck off as soon as he'd introduced himself.
Carver had been pestering him pretty much every day of the last eight months of his sentence.
First came a letter from Miami:
Max stopped reading there. He gave the letter to Velasquez, his cellmate, who used it to make a joint. Velasquez had smoked all of Max's letters, except for the personal ones. Max nicknamed him 'The Incinerator.'
Max was a celebrity prisoner. His case had been on TV and in all of the papers. At one point, almost half the country had had a strong opinion about him and what he'd done, a sixty-forty split, for and against.
During his first six months behind bars he'd had fan mail by the sackful. He'd never replied to any of it. Even the sincerest well-wishers left him cold. He'd always despised strangers who corresponded with convicted criminals they'd seen on TV, or read about in the papers, or met through those fucked-up prisoner pen-pal clubs. They were the first to demand the death penalty when the boot was on the other foot and that foot had stomped one of their loved ones to death. Max had been a cop for eleven years. There was a lot of it left over in him. Many of his closest friends were still on the force, keeping these very same people safe from the animals they wrote to.
When Carver's first letter arrived, Max's mail was down to letters from his wife, in-laws, and friends. His fan base had moved on to more appreciative types, like O. J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers.
Carver met Max's silence over his first letter with a follow-up two weeks later. When that, too, elicited no response, Max received another Carver letter the next week, then two more the week after that, and, seven days later, two more again. Velasquez was pretty happy. He liked Carver's letters, because the paper?thick, water- marked cream stationery with Carver's name, address, and contact numbers embossed in the right-hand corner in emerald-foil letters?had something in it that reacted fantastically with his weed and got him more stoned than usual.
Carver tried different tactics to get Max's attention?he changed paper, wrote longhand, and got other people to write in?but no matter what he tried, everything went by way of The Incinerator.
So, the letters stopped and the phone calls started. Max guessed that Carver had bribed someone high up, because only inmates with serious juice or imminent retrials were allowed to take incoming calls. A guard brought him from the kitchens and took him to one of the conference cells, where a phone had been plugged in, just for him. He spoke to Carver long enough to hear his name, think he was English from his accent, and tell him what was what and never to call him again.
But Carver didn't give up. Max would be interrupted at work, in the exercise yard, at meals, in the shower, during lockdowns, after lights-out. He dealt with Carver as he always did: 'Hello,' hear Carver's voice, hang up.
Max eventually complained to the warden, who thought it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. Most inmates griped about hassles on the
Max told Dave Torres, his lawyer, about Carver's calls. Torres put a stop to them. He also offered to dig up some information about Carver, but Max passed. In the free world, he would have been curious as hell; but in prison, curiosity was something you gave up with your court clothes and your wristwatch.
The day before his release, Max had a visit from Carver. Max refused to see him, so Carver left him his final letter, back on the original stationery.
Max gave it to Velasquez as a going-away present.
* * *
After he got out of jail, Max was all set to go to London, England.
* * *
The round-the-world tour had been his wife's idea, something she'd always wanted to do. She'd long been fascinated by other countries and their cultures, their histories and monuments, their people. She was always going off to museums, lining up to get into the latest exhibitions, attending lectures and seminars, and always reading?magazines, newspaper articles, and book after book after book. She tried her best to sweep Max along with her enthusiasms, but he wasn't remotely interested. She showed him pictures of South American Indians wearing pizza plates in their bottom lips, African women with giraffe-like necks fitted with industrial springs, and he really couldn't begin to see the attraction. He'd been to Mexico, the Bahamas, Hawaii, and Canada, but his world was really just the USA, and that was a world big enough for him. At home, they had deserts and arctic wastes and pretty much everything in between. Why go abroad for the same shit only older?
His wife's name was Sandra. He'd met her when he was still a cop. She was half Cuban, half African-American. She was beautiful, clever, tough, and funny. He never called her Sandy.
She'd planned for them to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary in style, traveling the globe, seeing most of the things she'd only read about. If things had been different, Max would probably have talked her into going to the Keys for a week, with the promise of a modest foreign trip (to Europe or Australia) later in the year, but because he was in prison when she told him her plans, he wasn't in a position to refuse. Besides, from where he was, getting as far away from America as possible seemed like a good idea. That year out would give him time to think about the rest of his life and what best to do with it.
It took Sandra four months to organize and book the tour. She arranged the itinerary so they'd arrive back home in Miami exactly a year to the day they'd left, on their next wedding anniversary. In between they would see all of Europe, starting with England, and then they'd move on to Russia and China, followed by Japan and the Far East, before flying on to Australia, New Zealand, and then on to Africa and the Middle East, before closing out in Turkey.
The more she told Max about the trip during her weekly visits, the more he started looking forward to it. He took to reading in the
