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Nick Stone: The King of Swords

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Nick Stone The King of Swords

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And yet, despite this, Joe had put off voting until the very last moment. Reagan wasn't someone he trusted or liked the look of, and the only film of his he'd ever enjoyed had been The Killers, where he'd had a minor role as a hitman's victim.

Max had had no such qualms about voting for Reagan. He'd bled and breathed Republican since the day Joe had met him, ten years before, when Max was a rookie and they'd partnered up in patrol. Max had been a Nixon man then, and he still had good things to say about him, Watergate or no Watergate.

Max looked at the entrance to Primate Park.

'Who the fuck'd want to bring their kids here-except as a punishment?'

'Exactly what I thought.' Joe laughed. 'Brought my nephew Curtis here. Kid's five. He wanted to see some real monkeys. So I gave him a choice of here, which was closest, or Monkey Jungle over in South Dade. When we pulled up where we're at now, Curtis starts bawlin' and says he ain't goin' in.'

'So where d'you go?'

'Monkey Jungle.'

'He like it?'

'Nah, them monkeys scared him half to death.'

Max laughed aloud.

The gateway to Primate Park was in the shape of a twenty-five-foot-high black roaring gorilla head. Visitors walked through a gate in the open mouth, passing under its bared pointed teeth, followed every step of the way by its enraged eyes. The high surrounding wall on either side of the entrance was also painted with monkey heads, meant to represent every species in the park, but they were angry renditions, capturing the primates at their most bestial and intimidating, savages completely beyond the reach of human temperance. How someone ever thought the design would be a crowd-puller was a mystery.

They got out of the car. Max stretched and yawned and rolled his neck while Joe got the crime-scene materials he kept in the trunk-green, powder-filled latex gloves, wooden tongue depressors, glassine evidence bags and envelopes, a Polaroid camera, and a pot of Vicks mentholated grease they'd smear on their upper lips to ward off the stench of death.


They made an odd pair, the two detectives, Jenny thought, as she watched them going about their business, talking to witnesses and inspecting the body on the grass. They couldn't have been more different. Mingus, the white one, was brusque to the point of rudeness. When he'd introduced himself and his partner, Detective Liston, she'd smelled stale booze and cigarettes on him. He looked like he'd slept in his car, if at all. His clothes-black chinos, grey sports coat, open-necked white shirt-were crumpled and hung off him like they wanted to be on someone else; he was unshaven and his close-cropped dark brown hair needed a good combing. He was squat, solid and broad, with big shoulders and little to no neck separating them from his head. He was a good-looking guy-behind the stubble and the bloodshot blue eyes-but there was an air of unpleasantness about him, a sense of a tightly coiled meanness just waiting to spring and sting. She was sure he was the kind of cop who beat the crap out of suspects and gave his girlfriend-he had no wedding ring-hell at home.

Detective Liston was a well-groomed black man in a navy blue suit, light blue shirt and matching tie with a gold clip. He looked like a sales rep for a big corporation just starting his day. He asked her questions about finding the body, whether she'd seen or heard anything suspicious the previous night, what she'd been doing. He was professional, very much by the book, but he was also genuinely courteous and engaging, to the point where she wished she knew more so she could help him out. He reminded her of Earl Campbell, the running back. Same height, same build, same demeanour. Like his partner, he had no wedding ring.


'Looks like he's been dead two weeks,' Max said, undoing his shirtsleeves, folding them over the cuffs of his jacket and pushing them up to his elbows, the way he always did whenever he was inspecting a cadaver. It was just in case he needed to stick his hand into a wound to retrieve an important fragment of evidence.

'Smells like three,' Joe said, turning away from the stench, which had broken through the barrier of Vicks and gotten up his nose and into his stomach. It was as intense as it was vile, like a whole dead cow left in a dumpster in high summer. He didn't know how Max could stand to get in so close.

The body was that of a black man, naked, and in an advanced stage of decomposition. It was swollen and misshapen, pumped up with a cocktail of malign gasses emanating from the liquefying insides; the skin was stretched as tight as it could go, in places semi-transparent like gauze, allowing glimpses of the body's afterlife, the shadowy movements of the parasitical worms and insects now colonizing it.

The mouth was completely covered in a grotesque pout of busy fleshflies-told apart from common blowflies by their candy-striped black and white bodies. The eyes were long gone, as were their lids, both eaten by insects. The sockets had become two teeming nests of writhing maggots, the colour and texture of rancid butter. They were being picked off one by one by an orderly procession of metallic-green hister beetles, which were travelling in single file up from the corpse's left ear, grabbing a maggot in their jaws, pulling them out of their communal home and carrying them, wriggling fiercely, back into the right ear, in parallel descending streams. Viewed from above, it looked like the black man's squirming eye sockets were crying big shiny green tears.

Max and Joe were the only ones near the body. The paramedics were tending to the security guard who'd discovered it and swallowed a mouthful of flies for his trouble. They were explaining what stomach-pumping involved. He was talking about needing coffee. Two North Miami PD officers were standing away to the left, one young, one old, fingers hooked around their belts, smoking cigarettes, looking bored. The rest of the Park staff had all congregated in the public tunnel and were watching the scene through the wire. Neither forensics nor back-up had arrived.

Meanwhile, behind them, Max and Joe could hear the zoo's inmates getting increasingly restless. Ever since they'd arrived they'd heard loud, fearsome roars coming from the trees. It sounded like a lion, only angrier and edgier, with more to prove. Howler monkeys-the veterinarian had explained with a smile, when she'd seen Max and Joe exchange worried looks-it was what they did in the morning to warn off any competition: nothing to be scared of, they were harmless, all bark, no bite. Then they'd heard more sounds, coming from other kinds of monkey-screeches, hollering, howls and something like the high-speed cackling of a hen on steroids. The noises, uninhibited and completely abandoned, came together in a mad primal cacophony, not unlike a bar filled with drunks speaking in tongues.

There was plenty of accompanying movement in the jungle too, the unmistakable sound of disturbance, crashings in the trees and bushes, branches snapping, things being knocked over and broken, all of it getting louder, clearer and closer.

Max looked over at the jungle-an impressive but completely incongruous legion of tropical trees, too tall and wide for the area of flatland they occupied and way too tall for Miami-and clearly saw monkeys, lots and lots of them, hopping from branch to branch and tree to tree, heading towards the high perimeter fence.

Max stood up and walked over to the corpse's feet. The ends of the toes had turned completely black and sticky. He noticed puncture marks in the legs, teeth and claw marks, all of them leaking clear slimy fluid, some already squirming and yellowy with maggot nests.

He looked along the body and into the trees, then returned his gaze to the area of grass beyond the feet. A stretch of grass behind and beyond the head, approximately the width of the dead man's shoulders, was lying flat. The grass in front of the toes, leading to the main building, was upright. The body had been dragged here.

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