BACK IN MIAMI, back at the Kendall Radisson Hotel. They hadn't given him the same room that he had before, but they might as well have, because it was identical to the last one-two single beds with brown-and-yellow tartan bedspreads, a bedside table with a Gideon's Bible inside, a writing desk and chair with a hazy mirror that needed a more vigorous polish, a medium-sized TV, and an armchair and table by the window. The view wasn't any different either-Starbucks, Barnes amp; Noble, an ice cream parlor, a carpet warehouse, and a cheap Chinese eatery; beyond that, some of Kendall's quiet houses, set away from the road, drowned in trees and shrubbery. The weather was good, the sky a deep, liquid blue, the sun nowhere near as intense as he had become used to in Haiti.
When he'd got out of the airport, he hadn't even bothered trying to take the route home, just told the cabdriver to bring him straight here. He'd made the decision on the plane, right after takeoff, when the wheels had left the runway and his guts had dropped through his seat. He didn't want to spend Christmas or see 1997 in at his house, the memorial to his past life, his past happiness. He'd return there on January 2, when he was set to check out.
It wasn't over.
He couldn't get Charlie Carver out of his head.
Where was the kid?
What had happened to him?
He'd never left unfinished business for this very reason-it kept him up nights, it haunted him, it wouldn't let him be.
He hit Little Haiti. The shops, the bars, the market, the clubs. He was the only white face there. No one bothered him, plenty of people spoke to him. He often thought he recognized faces he'd seen in Port-au-Prince and Pйtionville, but they were no one he'd met.
He ate dinner every night at a Haitian restaurant called Tap-Tap. The food was great, the service temperamental, the atmosphere warm and raucous. He sat at the same table-facing a noticeboard with a missing-persons poster of Charlie stuck in the middle.
He chewed over the case in his head. He went through it chronologically. He laid out the evidence. He added it up. Then he worked in other detail-background, history, people.
Something wasn't right.
There was something he hadn't seen, or something he'd overlooked, or something he wasn't meant to see.
But what, he didn't know.
It wasn't over.
He had to know what had happened to Charlie Carver.