Nick Stone: Mr. Clarinet

"One day he took me and Treese to one side and told us he was going away. We were real sad. My sister started to cry. And he said not to worry, he'd take us with him if we wanted to come. We said yes. He told us to promise not to tell our parents anything, otherwise he couldn't take us.

"We agreed. We left the village that afternoon without telling anyone. We met our friend in a car all the way down the road. There was another man with him. We'd never seen him before. Treese started saying maybe we should go back. The stranger got out of the car, grabbed her, and threw her inside. He did the same to me. We both started crying as they drove off. Then they injected us with something, and I don't remember much else that happened after that-how we got to the house on La Gonвve or anything."

They'd passed the Carver estate and were heading uphill along a bumpy, potholed stretch of road. They'd had to stop once for a broken-down truck and another time for a man coming down the mountainside with his herd of skeletal goats.

"You saw the tape, right? The one I left for you? You watched it?"

"Where'd you get it?" Max changed gun hands.

"I'll tell you later. You saw what was on it-the potion they gave us?"

"Yeah." Max nodded.

"My memory's pretty fucked up from that whole 'indoctrination process.' You couldn't put me on a witness stand because whatever I've got up here"-Huxley tapped his cranium-"my brain is like spaghetti. I remember things like they were in a dream. I don't know how much of it is disassociation and how much is down to the zombie juice they fed us.

"It wasn't as strong as the stuff the voodoo priests make people catatonic with, but it was enough to make you lose all control of your senses. They used to feed it to us every day. Like communion. We'd go up, receive this green liquid in a cup, drink it.

"Then there was the hypnosis with music notes. Gustav Carver would sit in the middle of this all-white room and we'd stand around him in a circle, holding hands. He played his clarinet to us. And while he was playing we'd get our 'instructions.'"

"What about your sister? Where was she in all this?" Max asked.

"I don't know. The last time I remember seeing her was in the back of the car when we were kidnapped." Huxley shook his head. "She's most likely dead. We weren't allowed to grow up."

"How do you know this?"

"I'll come to that too," Huxley answered, and then resumed his story. "I was sold to a Canadian plastic surgeon called Leboeuf. He always looked at me like he was stripping me down to the bone. He made me watch him doing his operations. I learned how to cut people up. I got handy with knives. I taught myself to read out of medical books.

"Justice was on my side when I killed him, but it was also in Gustav Carver's pocket because they never tied Leboeuf in with him. No one believed what I told them about being kidnapped in Haiti, about being brainwashed, about Tonton Clarinette, about my sister. Why should they? I'd just cut a man up into little pieces and redecorated the house with his insides."

"What about when the cops searched the house for evidence, right after they'd found the body?"

"They didn't find anything linked to Carver-or if they did, it never found its way out into the open. The old man had tentacles everywhere," Huxley said. "I busted out of the hospital they had me in because Gustav tried to have me killed in there. No one believed a damn word I said. It was a nuthouse. I wasn't surprised. By the time they did start thinking that maybe there was something in it, I was gone, a fugitive, on the run, a wanted man.

"I lived on the street. I hustled. I did what I had to do. I didn't like some of it, but that's the life I was handed. All the while I was on the run I started putting it together-what had happened, who was behind it. I remembered a person LeBoeuf had known-not someone from the surgery, a friend of his. Shawn Michaels. He was a banker.

"I tracked him down. I made him tell me about Carver's business-how it worked, everything."

"Then you killed him?" Max said.

"Yeah." Huxley nodded. "I took his address book. He knew other pedophiles, people he'd recommended Carver's service to."

"You went after them?"

"I only got to one."

"Frank Huxley?"

"That's right. He had a stack of videotapes of what went on in La Gonвve and Noah's Ark. The tape you found was a compilation I made-you know, a preview of forthcoming horrors."

"What about the rest of the people in the address book?"

"They were too hard to get to."

"What about Allain, when did he come into the picture?" Max asked.

"In Canada I lived out on the street most of the time. I knew a lot of hustlers," Huxley said. "So did Allain. He went in for rough trade. We had mutual acquaintances. These two guys I knew were always bragging about this wealthy Haitian they were bangin'. I got curious. I found out who he was.

"I went to this bar Allain always went to to meet his pickups. We got talking. When I found out he hated his old man almost as much as I did, we were in business."

"So you put together a plan to bring down the old man?"

"Essentially, yes. Our motives were very different. Allain was just this poor spoiled little rich boy whose daddy didn't give him any love on account of his sexuality. He could've lived with this if one of his lovers hadn't worked for the family's law firm in Miami. He told Allain the old man had completely cut him out of his will. He'd left it all to his in-laws and closest lieutenants.

"The way the Carver business is set up is that if the old man is taken ill or has to go away somewhere urgently, responsibility for running things falls to the next most senior Carver in Haiti. Allain had covered for his father while he was away before, so he knew the ropes. He'd found out there was over half a billion dollars in various 'rainy day' cash accounts. As head of the Carver empire he could do what he wanted with the money-"

"But he needed the old man out of the way first?" Max finished.

"That's right," Huxley said. "Allain didn't have the first fucking clue how to get at the money. The guy's got cunning but no street smarts-and waaaay too many feelings. Mine are pretty much dead."

"So it was your idea to kidnap the boy?"

"Absolutely," Huxley confirmed proudly. "Most of it was. We'd kidnap the boy, hole him up somewhere very safe, bring in an outside investigator and steer him toward discovering Gustav."

"By 'steer' you mean plant a trail of clues?"

"That's right."

"Or literally hand them to me like you did-"

"-out by the waterfalls? Yeah. That was me under that wig."

"Suited you," Max said sourly.

It was now dark. Huxley had killed his speed. They were the only people out on the road. Max had checked behind him to see if Vincent Paul's escort had kept up. Max had been followed to the beach house, and then back to Pйtionville. He couldn't see anyone behind them.

"Of course it was important you got on with Vincent Paul too. He had to trust you, open up to you. He didn't do that with Beeson and Medd."

"Is that why you killed 'em?"

"I didn't kill either of them," Huxley began. "I made examples of them."

"You cut Medd's tongue out and stuffed him into a barrel-some fuckin' example!"

"He choked to death," Huxley corrected. "Look, I admit what I did was a bit…extreme-barbaric, even. But with reward money that big, we couldn't afford to have every asshole and lucky-chancer coming out here and trying their luck. It acted as a deterrent. People got wind of what had happened to Beeson and suddenly they had better offers for jobs out in Alaska. Yours is a small world, Max. All you private eyes know each other."

"But what did they do wrong?"

"Beeson was too close to the old man. He was reporting directly to him, bypassing Allain. Plus he fucked up with Vincent Paul. They didn't hit it off. He was next to useless to us," Huxley explained. "And Medd-he was almost there, but then he got suspicious about the clues he was getting. He told Allain it was all too obvious, too easy. It was only a matter of time before he found us out. I took preemptive action."