Nick Stone: The King of Swords

Now Max and Joe were going to Lacour's home address. Max had called the house before heading over to North Miami, but there had been no response. He'd checked with Missing Persons. Nothing on record.

'And what about that shit they found in his stomach?' Max flicked through to the autopsy notes and read out the inventory. 'A tarot card, sand-mixed with bits of ground-up bone, possibly human, as yet unconfirmed-plus vegetable matter, also as yet unidentified.'

'Sounds like some kind of potion,' Joe said.

'His lips had been sewn up, nose too.' Max closed the report and threw it on the back seat. 'What d'you think about that? Some kinda ritual?'

'I ain't thinkin' too hard 'bout this one,' Joe answered, ''cause it ain't gonna be our problem after next week.'

'True.' Max lit a cigarette and wound down the window. As of the following Monday, North Miami PD took back the case, which had been theirs in the first place, as the body had been found in their jurisdiction and the matter wasn't deemed either urgent or sensitive enough to be dealt with by the Miami Task Force-commonly known to cops and the press as the MTF-which Max and Joe worked for. North Miami PD, sinking under the burden of a record number of unsolved homicides, had begged MTF to handle the Primate Park stiff, but they for their part were under exactly the same pressure, if not more so because, as Dade County's supposed elite task force, they were expected to solve crimes at lightning pace. Max and Joe had thirteen unsolved homicides and twenty-two missing persons on the case board in their office. And Eldon Burns, their boss, was breathing down their necks hard, screaming at them to bring him 'Results, results, results-GOOD. SOLID. FUCKEN'. RESULTS!'

Theoretically they shouldn't even have been out here, working the Primate Park case, but Max had wanted to get out of the office and do something simple to accomplish and tick off. He and Joe always did this whenever they hit a wall with their cases-look for something easy to do and solve and then come back to their problems with renewed confidence and a fresh perspective.

They headed down North Kendall Drive, passing the Dadeland Mall. The previous July the mall had been the scene of one of the worst shootings in living memory. A posse of cocaine cowboys had rolled up on a rival and his bodyguard and sprayed them with submachine-gun fire in the middle of the day when the place was crowded with shoppers. The incident had put Kendall on the map. Prior to that it had been one of Miami's best kept secrets, known only to real estate brokers and locals.

If you had money and craved attention you lived in Coral Gables, where guides would point out your house to tourists with Instamatics, otherwise you made your home in Kendall. Part of its appeal lay in its anonymity. Drive through it and you wouldn't know you were there. It could have been anywhere residential, its main streets lined with modest houses sporting flagpoles and the occasional motor boat outside. Beyond the main streets lay larger, more expensive houses, but you'd need to know where you were going to find them. The area appealed to the retired or semi-retired, who liked the fact that it was far enough away from the beach to avoid the hustle and bustle of tourism, but still close enough to central Miami for shopping, socializing and emergencies. Kendall was also especially popular with ex-dictators and their henchmen, fugitive foreign embezzlers, exposed conmen, political exiles, lapsed criminals and disgraced public figures from all walks and stumbles of life.

Before he'd spun out of control, Preval Lacour had been doing OK. He'd lived on Floyd Patterson Avenue, a road lined with arching banana palms where all the houses were situated inside gated compounds with their own private security, closed-circuit cameras and individual hotlines to the emergency services. This way of living-away from the street and under armed guard-was becoming more and more popular with upper-income Miamians scared by the city's escalating crime rate. Home invasions had risen by 150 per cent in the last six months alone, and they'd become far more violent: where once criminals would have tied up the homeowners before making off with their money and belongings, now savage beatings and rapes were commonplace, as were murder and arson.

They stopped outside the entrance to the Melon Fields estate, Lacour's address. Max badged a security guard behind a double gate and told him who they'd come to see.

'Now this is some livin',' Joe said as they drove into a wide cobbled courtyard with an ornate water fountain in the centre, depicting four dolphins, back to back, frozen in a mid-air leap, water coming out of their open mouths and landing in a wide round shallow pool filled with pink and yellow flowers.

The three storey houses with their tiled ochre roofs and shuttered windows were partly hidden behind bushes and trees like shy, magnificent beasts. The Lacours lived in the second from last house on the right. Max and Joe headed up a short driveway and parked next to a white Volvo station wagon which was covered in leaves and burst seed pods-debris from the recent rainstorms.

Joe rang the bell. Gentle chimes, but loud enough to hear outside. Max looked through the window to the left. He saw a room set up for a party: gold tinsel hanging across the ceiling, deflated balloons, a fully laid dining table with several bottles in the middle and two jugs but no food and no people. But Max swore he could hear something behind the window, and there were shadows moving about the room.

Max drew his gun and stepped away. Something crunched under his shoe. He looked down and saw he'd just obliterated part of a long procession of green-bodied hister beetles making its way into the house. He followed the line as it disappeared under the door. He was about to go on when he noticed another column of the same beetles on the opposite side of the steps, except this one was exiting the house and moving at a slower pace. When he looked closer he saw the insects were carrying small scraps of pale matter and live maggots in their mandibles.

Joe rattled the letterbox. A dozen blowflies whizzed out, carrying with them a gust of air so foul it made him gag.

Max turned around sharply. He saw his partner backing away from the door with his hand clamped over his mouth and nose.

Then he smelt it too.

'There'll be more'n just one this time,' Joe said over his shoulder, as he hurried down the steps to call it in.

They found six bodies.

Most of them were strewn around the living-room floor, contorted, twisted, bloated, skin stretched out to a greyish near-translucence, big balloon people, bursting out of their clothes-tuxes for the men and glittering designer gowns for the women-threatening to float off up out of the room, over the house and into the Miami sky.

The room was decked out for a party. A gold and red tinsel banner was strung from either wall over the room reading 'Felicitations Preval!'. Bunches of balloons, wilted and wrinkled by the evil heat and poisoned air, hung from pieces of string fixed to the four corners of the room. A lot of the furniture-armchairs, a sofa, a black granite coffee table-had been moved out into the hallway. They'd been planning to dance after dinner.

They'd been shot dead to a record called The Joys of Martinique by the Swingin' Steel Band. It was still playing, after a fashion, because the needle was stuck in the run-off groove and the album had warped a little so the turned-down edge was scraping the side of the turntable, making a sound like a spitball hitting a hotplate-TAK!-pffsssttt…TAK!-pffsssttt…TAK!-pffsssttt…TAK!-pffsssttt-a warped metronome keeping time over the scene.

Max and Joe walked around the room with plastic covers on their shoes, rubber gloves on their hands, nets over their hair and menthol-scented surgical masks over their noses and mouths. The window hadn't yet been opened because a woman from forensics was dusting it for prints. Plenty had turned up under the black powder.