Nick Stone: The King of Swords

Max grabbed the officer by the collar and dragged him back towards the building. Looking over his shoulder he couldn't help but notice what was going on in the background, by the fence. The gate was wide open and dozens of monkeys were spilling out onto the grass and heading towards them, led, it seemed, by the two large ginger primates he'd last seen on the other side. They stopped a few feet behind the beige ones. Max picked up speed-the wounded officer screaming as he bumped along the ground.

The beige primates had up until now been happily playing pass-the-lethal-weapon. Then, one of them turned around and noticed the ginger badasses coming up behind them, droopy chins swinging like irate pendulums.

Suddenly, the badasses roared so ferociously and so deafeningly loud they drowned out the sound of the gun going off. Max saw the flash and the smoke and threw himself to the ground. One of the beige monkeys was down on its back, but it scrambled to its feet and ran straight for Max in its desire to get away from the ginger primates and the horde of other beasts the jungle was disgorging-gorillas, baboons, chimpanzees, macaques, great apes, orangutans-now advancing on the crime scene at a fast clip.

As Max got up, the monkey jumped in his arms. The thing was shaking with terror and very very smelly. Max turned and ran, carrying the animal in one arm and dragging the cop with the other. He ran towards the open door of the building where cops, medics, forensics, Park staff and his own partner were pushing each other to get inside before they were overrun by screeching, excited primates. Max, the monkey and the cop were the last in.

The corpse stayed where it was, soon once again disappearing under the bodies of other species.

Gemma Harlan, medical examiner at the Dade County Morgue, liked to play music when she performed autopsies; something soothing, but at a loud enough volume to drown out the procedure's unique noises-the sawing and hammering of bone, the sticky squelch of a face being peeled back from a skull, the occasional farts and belches of released gasses-sounds of life's straggler particles leaving the building seconds before demolition. And then there were other things the music helped her get away from, the little things she hated most about her job, such as the way the spinning sawblades sometimes smoked as the bone dust landed on the hot metal and gave off a sour, ammoniac smell; the toxic aerosol jets the same saws sometimes threw back when they hit soft tissue; the way the exposed brain sometimes reminded her of a big ugly shellfish when she'd pulled the calvarium away from the lower skull. The music also drowned out the feeling that was always with her since she'd turned forty two years ago, a lengthening shadow with an icy cold centre. It was the notion that one day she would end up someplace like this too-an empty shell, her vital organs cut out, weighed, dissected then thrown away, her brain pickled and then examined, cause of death confirmed, noted down, filed away, another stat.

She hit the play button on her portable cassette deck. Burt Bacharach and His Orchestra Play the Hits of Burt Bacharach and Hal David-instrumental versions of those beautiful sunny songs she so loved and cherished, no vocals to distract her.

'This Guy's in Love with You' came out of the speakers as she looked down at her first cadaver of the morning-the John Doe found in Primate Park, whose discovery had sparked a mass breakout by the zoo's entire population of monkeys. Four days later they were still recovering them all over Miami and beyond. Many had died, either hit by cars or shot by people who thought they were burglars, aliens or dangerous. One had been found lynched. A few had escaped out into the Everglades where they'd joined the dozens of exotic pets dumped there by their owners every year. Lions, tigers, wolves, pythons, boas had all been spotted in the swamp.

Gemma worked with three other people. There were two pathologists of opposing levels of competence-Javier, originally from El Salvador, was almost as good as her, whereas Martin, five years into the job, still occasionally threw up when the sawing started-and an autopsy assistant, or diener, as they were known in the trade. The city's medical budget didn't stretch to hiring one full time so they usually had to make do with either a med school student on work experience, or someone from the police academy. These greenhorns usually all either puked, fainted, or both. It was here Martin proved invaluable. He'd played a little football in his youth and was still quick on his feet. He'd catch the falling interns before they hit the ground thus preventing injuries and lawsuits. Of course this was dependent on him being upright at the time of crisis, which he usually was. He still had a jock's pride about fainting in front of an intern.

Death had changed a lot in Miami since the cocaine explosion of the mid-seventies. Prior to that the bodies she'd inspected had been victims of gunshots, stabbings, beatings, drownings, poisonings-crimes of passion, home invasions, street and store robberies, suicides; although she'd occasionally also had to inspect the results of political assassinations and piece together the remnants of a mob hit which had floated to shore in instalments stuffed in oil drums. Cocaine had made her job far more complicated. The drug gangs didn't simply kill their victims, they liked to torture them to within an inch of their lives first, which meant she spent more time on a body because she had to be sure the victim hadn't died from the barbaric suffering he or she had been put through before they were dispatched. Even the weapons were excessive. When they used guns, they didn't use pistols or even shotguns, they used machine guns and automatic rifles, riddling bodies with so many bullets it often took most of a working shift just to dig them all out. There was a hell of a lot of peripheral death too: innocents caught in the crossfire or having the misfortune to be in some way related to an intended target. Gemma had never seen anything like it, not even when she'd worked in New York. Miami had gone from having a below average murder rate, when it was predominantly home to Jewish retirees, Cuban refugees and anti-Fidelistas, to the off-the-chart-and-still-rising homicide epidemic it was experiencing now.

The morgue was full. They'd recently had to lease refrigerator trucks from Burger King to store the overflow.

She needed a break, a long one, or maybe she needed to change jobs. She didn't even like Miami anymore. What had seemed like a great place to live after the dysfunctional urban nightmare of New York, now seemed like more of the same, only with better weather and different accents.

First she examined the outside of the body, noting for the record that it was completely hairless. Shortly before his death, John Doe had had a full body shave. Even his eyelashes has been trimmed off.

'Don't the hair and nails, like, keep growing after you're dead?' a young and unfamiliar voice piped up behind her. It was today's diener, Ralph. They'd only met five minutes ago, so she didn't know what he looked like because she could only see his eyes-blue and intelligent-under his green overalls and face mask.

'That's the movie version,' Gemma said, with a weary sigh. She was glad she'd never gone into teaching. She didn't believe in fighting losing battles. How could you compete with Hollywood myths? 'After death, the skin around the hair and fingernails loses water and shrinks. And when it shrinks it retracts, making the nails and hair look longer, and therefore giving the impression they've grown. But they haven't really. It's an illusion. Like the movies. OK?'

He nodded. She could see from his eyes that it had gone in, that he'd learned something new today.

She carried on, noting the sixteen puncture marks around the lips-eight above and eight below, as well as a series of deep indentations along the lips themselves, some of which had broken the skin. The mouth had been sewn up.