Nick Stone: The King of Swords

Monday mornings were when Gemma Harlan liked to teach her interns something new about autopsies. New week, new lesson was her motto. Today she'd be demonstrating the art and practice of organ removal. She had an ideal cadaver to work on, cause of death known-the police shooting at the airport-so no suspicious circumstances, therefore no detailed medical report to write up, just the basics, and perfect material to try out her new recruit on.

For the last two weeks a young man called Darius Vincenzio had been learning the ropes. Darius, who they all called 'V' around the morgue, was a quick study; he only needed to be told and shown something once to get the hang of it. Gemma was highly impressed with him and was even considering offering him a job at the end of his internship. The only thing that worried her was that he hadn't yet DNPed-dashed and puked. Most interns did that at their first or second sight of viscera-she had-but, so far, he hadn't betrayed so much as the slightest hint of discomfort around the dead. She hoped he wasn't holding back and damming up until something really gruesome came along, and that he wasn't a nutjob.

The body was fetched out of the Burger King refrigerated truck and wheeled into the morgue, where it was taken out of its bag, identified, measured and weighed.

Carmine Desamours. Sex: male. Race: black. Hair: black. Eyes: green. Height: 179 cm. Weight 154 lbs. Birthmarks: a mole to the left of the navel. Scars: extensive and historical.

The wounds were examined-two clean entry wounds on either side of the spine, consistent with.38 calibre bullets, the skin was indented and singed black with gunpowder. The exit wounds in the chest were larger-the size of quarters.

After Darius and Martin had washed the body and placed it on the slab, Gemma told her intern to make the cuts, as she hit play on the cassette deck and Bacharach and orchestra's 'Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head' came out of the speakers.

Darius made the Y-incision behind the ears and down the sides of the neck to the breastbone. Then he made the T-incision across the shoulders and down the trunk to the pubicbone. He concluded with a vertical cut a cross the middle of the neck. The openings were textbook perfect, as usual.

Gemma pulled back the flaps of skin and exposed the chest plate. She then took an electric saw and cut through the ribs to the side of the chest cavity, before very carefully lifting off the sternum and its appended ribs, exposing the heart and lungs.

Gemma went to work, explaining every cut and the importance of doing it in order as she worked the scalpel through the tissue, starting with the heart, and then moving on to the punctured lungs. She removed the left lung and then let Darius test out his new knowledge on the right. He was a natural, excising it perfectly.

They moved on to the first part of the digestive system-small intestine, oesophagus, pancreas, stomach, duodenum and spleen-a more delicate extraction procedure, which she preferred to demonstrate in full a couple of times, before letting her interns loose on it-even the most gifted ones like Darius.

After she'd removed the corpse's stomach, she handed it over to Darius to place on the scales.

He took it from her. And then he frowned.

'Somethin' don't feel right here,' he said, palpating a corner of the organ. 'What?'

'It's got like-something inside.'

'Probably food.'

'Don't feel like food,' he said. 'This is-like-hard.'

'Could be a bullet,' Martin said from across the slab. 'You'd be surprised where those things end up. One time, this guy who'd got shot in the head? We found the slug in his rectum.'

'This ain't a bullet. Less he got shot with a golfball.' Darius felt the floppy stomach some more.

'Hand it over.' Gemma stuck her hands out impatiently.

The stomach had a small round object inside it, like an egg.

'OK. Weigh it first, then we'll open it up.'

'Have some fruit.' Sandra plucked at the bunch of grapes at Max's bedside.

'I want a smoke,' Max said through lips so swollen they looked like they'd been transplanted from a cartoon trout.

'You want to infect your mouth? You heard the doctor. No cigarettes till you're healed.'

'I need a smoke.'

'You've had enough poison. Go on, eat some fruit. It'll do you good.'

'Later.' Max sat himself up on the hospital bed and took a sip from a glass of water.

'How are you feeling?' she asked.

'Hungry.' He started to smile, but pain tore into his lips as his skin stretched, so he let his mouth droop.

Yesterday morning he'd been rushed from Eldon's office to Jackson Memorial Hospital, where they'd pumped his stomach. While this was happening, Joe had contacted Raquel Fajima about working up an antidote to the poison that had already got into Max's system. She'd quickly given him a list of things to ask the doctors for and had rushed over to help them prepare it.

When the anaesthetic had worn off, Max had come to screaming, thinking he was still in the middle of the ceremony. He'd been restrained and shot up with a sedative that had knocked him out until the early evening. When he'd next opened his eyes it was to Eldon, Joe and Sandra all standing around his bedside.

A doctor had examined him and told him he'd have to stay in hospital for at least a week to undergo tests, assessments and evaluations.

After she'd left, Joe told him what had happened. Max was shocked and bewildered. He had no recollection of anything beyond thinking of the sunset.

'Looks like we both gave each other a fright,' Max said.

'Hopefully one cancels out the other.' Sandra took his hand. 'And we can get on with our lives.'

'I'm sorry.'

'You've got nothing to apologize for, baby.' She kissed him on the forehead and ran her hand softly over his bald dome and smiled. 'Except for this. It's not a good look, Mr Kojak.'

Max laughed, accidentally smiled and then winced in pain.

'You remember anything else?' she asked him.

'No, but…I had this dream this morning. It was like a continuation of the last thought I had at the ceremony, before everything went blank-bein' on the beach watching the sunset.' He took her hand. He thought hard about what he was about to tell her, and how he was going to have to explain it. He could, of course, keep it from her. It would have been the easiest thing to do, to lie with omission, but it was something she needed to know about him.

'In my dream, I'm not on the beach any more. I've moved on. I'm in this room. This dark room, no windows or doors. The kind you can't ever enter or leave. And I'm floatin' above this table, and there's these three men sat around it. They've all got bullet holes in their chests. And they're all lookin' up at me. No expression, just lookin'. Only their eyes are as dead as they are. No light, no blood, no soul. Nothing inside. And then one of them pulls out a spare chair and pats it, as in-"Come, join us". And I'm hovering there, above them, not moving. And I don't know what to do. And that lasted all through the rest of the dream, until I woke up.'

'Who were the men?'

And so he told her about the people he'd taken out to the Everglades. He explained what they'd done, told her about how MTF sometimes worked, and what he'd felt he had to do in the circumstances. She listened carefully and silently, her reactions minimal.

When he'd finished he told her the truth about MTF and the Moyez killing, and how he and Joe had found out about Boukman.

'I guessed as much-about those…those three men-from the things you said on our first night together,' Sandra said at the end. 'Do you still agree with what you did?'

'No, I don't,' Max replied. 'I don't think it's wrong they're dead. Only how. And why. But I had no choice.'