Mr. Clarinet

rage.

Max threw a combination of jabs and hooks at his assailant's head, stopping his run and forcing him back. Then he hit him with two huge, fast uppercuts that connected in the same spot?right under the mud man's chin?one after the other, a split second apart, lifting him off the ground and scrambling his senses. The guy was as good as done. Instead of landing more punches to his head, Max simply pushed him over, letting him fall, knocked-out cold.

He looked for Chantale. She wasn't by the column. She wasn't by the pond. He headed toward the crowd. They'd linked arms and weren't letting him through.

Max backed off. The drums were killing his head, a million pummeling jackhammers running relay around his brain.

He turned around and went back toward the sculpture. She couldn't be far. All around him, men and women were down on the ground, naked, fucking, multiple positions. The air reeked of sex and sweat.

He headed for the pond.

Then he saw Chantale standing near the water. A mud man had ripped off her shirt and was tearing off her bra. She was offering no resistance, watching the man's titanic struggle with her underwear with a glazed look and a dumb, detached smile.

Max sprinted over and pushed the mud man headfirst into the pond.

He grabbed Chantale's hand, but she pulled out of his grasp, slapped his face, and started ranting at him in Kreyol. He stood there, at a loss. Then she gripped his head and crushed her lips against his, snaking her tongue into his mouth, running it up and down his tongue, licking it, tasting it. And then she grabbed his crotch, drew him toward her, and started dry-humping him.

The pain left Max's skull and the drum migrated back to his loins. He felt himself slipping again, surrendering, wanting nothing more than to fuck Chantale in the dirt.

He was watching her pulling down her jeans when a mud man smashed into him. They went down together, Max taking the brunt of the fall and their combined weight on his shoulder. The mud man tried to punch him, but it was a wild, bullshit strike and he missed completely. Max kneed him hard in the solar plexus, so hard he caught the blast of stinking air the blow forced out of the mud man full in the face.

The mud man withered away, puking bile on the ground. Max took hold of his neck and what he could hold of his skinny buttock, picked him up like light luggage, and tossed him toward the pool.

Chantale was still where he'd left her, only with another man?normal, but naked and glinting with sweat?standing in front of her, jerking off, getting himself hard, ready to rush her.

Max snatched Chantale by the arm and fast-walked her away, heading for the exit. At first, she snarled and kicked and tried to get away, but then, as they got closer to the crowd and farther from the ceremony, she stopped fighting, grew limp and then heavy, her legs dragging. Max asked her if she was OK. She didn't reply. She tried to look at him through rolling eyes.

He hoisted her over his shoulder. He pulled out his gun and thumbed off the safety. The crowd didn't budge.

Then, right in front of him, stood Dreadlocks. People were moving out of his way, opening up space.

Max didn't slow down.

Dreadlocks came out of the crowd and headed toward them, carrying his blue-rose box before him in his hands.

Max raised his gun and sighted Dreadlocks's head.

'Stop!'

Dreadlocks didn't pay any heed. He pushed the box into Max's chest and rushed past him. Max took the box in his free hand.

He glanced back.

Dreadlocks was gone, but five mud men were running toward them, brandishing machetes and knives.

With Chantale on his back, Max pushed, nudged, kicked, and stamped the rest of his way out of the temple.

* * *

Chantale slept most of the way back, dressed in Max's shirt, her snores accurate facsimiles of busy-barnyard noises.

He drove with the window cranked open and the radio playing an all-night Haitian talk show. He couldn't understand a word they were saying, but it was better than the wall-to-wall Bon Jovi all the other stations were blasting.

After five hours, he was back on the airport road, heading up to Petionville. Chantale woke up and stared at Max as though she'd expected to find herself in bed at home.

'What happened?' she asked.

'What's the last thing you remember?' Max switched off the radio.

'We were dancing in the temple?together.'

'Nothing after?'

Chantale thought about it for a while but drew a blank. Max told her what she'd missed, starting backwards with the box, editing out what had gone on between them, but sparing no detail in describing how he'd saved her from a potential rapist.

'I was never going to get raped, Max,' she said angrily. 'It was a banda, a ritual orgy. People get possessed and they fuck each other's brains out. No one knows what they're doing.'

'Looked like rape to me?voodoo date rape, conscious or unconscious, whatever you wanna call it. The guy was tearin' your clothes off,' Max said.

'People do that when they're having consensual sex, Max. It's called passion.'

'Yeah? Well, I don't know how you can just go fuck a stranger like that. He could've had AIDS. Jesus! '

'You mean you've never fucked strangers before, Max?'

'What? Yeah, but that isn't the same thing.'

'Why? You meet a woman?where? In a bar, a nightclub? Music's loud, you're both loaded. You go someplace, you fuck, and in the morning you leave and never see each other again. Same thing?only with us, it has more meaning.'

'Right,' Max sneered sarcastically. 'We decadent, soulless Americans just go around having empty one-night stands, but over here when you do it in a voodoo temple it's a religious experience. You know what I think, Chantale? I think it's a crock of shit. Fucking's fucking. Rape is rape. And that guy was gonna rape you. End of story. No way would you've made it with some guy covered in mud, if you'd been in your right mind.'

'How would you know?' Chantale snorted.

Max didn't respond. He gripped the wheel tight and gritted his teeth, wishing for a good long while that he'd left the ungrateful bitch to get gang-raped in the dirt.

He'd intended to let her stay at the house, but he drove fast through Petionville and took the road down to the capital. At night, every big American city was lit up like a mini-galaxy. Port-au-Prince had a few grudging scraps of light floating in the black, like stray white butterflies caught in an oil slick, otherwise nothing. He'd never known a place so dark.

Chapter 39

IT WAS STILL dark when he got back, but the insects had gone to ground and the birds had started singing in the courtyard. Daylight was on its way.

There was a message on the answering machine from Joe. It was too early to call him back.

* * *

Inside the box Dreadlocks had given him, Max found a croc-hide billfold containing numerous cards?ATM, AmEx, VISA, MasterCard, library, blood donor, Gold's Gym. They all belonged to Darwen Medd.

Max also found half a dozen black-on-white business cards held together by a paper clip. If he was still alive, Medd worked out of Tallahassee, where he specialized in missing persons and corporate affairs. The latter was probably a recent diversification, something he was gradually setting himself up in so that he'd still be working when he got too old and too slow to look for runaways and abductees. Working in the business sector was safer and paid a lot better. You sat at a desk and followed paper trails by phone, fax, and computer. The only fieldwork involved was meeting your client for lunch, dinner, or drinks. If you were good, you never stopped working. Some companies kept you on a retainer. The better you were the more you were retained. It was a nice life. Boring as hell, but something Max had once been planning to move into himself.

There was no money in the wallet but, tucked in a corner of the change pocket, he found a single folded piece of paper.

It was a page torn from a Haitian phone book dated 1990. Letters I?F, one section circled in blue ballpoint: all the Faustins in Port-au-Prince?thirteen of them.

Medd had been on the same track.

Who was Dreadlocks? Why did he give Max the box?

Was he Medd? No. Dreadlocks was a black man. He was crazy, and quite possibly mute. He hadn't made a sound near the falls, nor in the temple.

Perhaps Dreadlocks had seen Medd at the waterfalls when he'd visited Mercedes Leballec. Maybe Medd had befriended him. Or maybe he'd just found Medd's body and taken his