King of Swords

King of Swords by Nick stone

King of Swords By the same author

Mr Clarinet

for more information visit www.nickstone.co.uk

I

I King of Swords

NICK STONE

MICHAELJOSEPH an imprint of PENGUIN BOOKS MICHAEL JOSEPH

Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ori., England Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 2J0 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R orl, England www.penguin.coni

Published 2007

Copyright Š Nick Stone, 2007 The moral right of the author has been asserted All rights reserved Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

Set in 13.515.5 pt Monotype Garamond Typeset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

hardback isbn: 978-0—718-14922—2 For Dad Acknowledgements

With love to Hyacinth — who makes the world turn — and to my brothers, Seb and Rupert.

Very special thanks to: Beverley Cousins, Caroline Michel, Dorian Karchmar, Rowan Lawton, Tom Weldon, Jonathan Burnham, Rob Williams, Jason Craig, Ana-Maria Rivera, Henry Steadman and Graham Lowe for the info.

Muchas gracias a the Mighty Bromfields: Lucy and Cecil, Colin, Janice and Amy, David, Sonia, Isabella and Gabriella, Brian and Lynette, Dean, Bryony, Ashley and Cerilee, Gregory; Novlyn, Errol and Dwayne Thompson; Lyn Brown, Andrew and Donna Bent, Uncle Lenny, Sonia and Robert Phillips, Nadine Radford, Tim Heath, Suzanne Lovell, Tomas Carruthers, Sally and Dick Gallagher, Carol Reid, Maria Bivins-Smith, Ken Bruen and the Amazing Grace, the Count, Kim, Pasky, Laura and Mario at Don Pasquales, Cambridge {still the best), Ellen Kanner, Mitchell Kaplan, Angie Robinson, Tony Burns, Steve and Jeanette Markiewicz, Richard Townsley, Sally Riley, Ayo and Lizzie — the Mystery Girls, Chris Simmons, Nan Mousley, Chris Haslam, Joe Veltre, Jane Opoku, Tony Lacey, Rick Saba, Chris McWatters, Alex Walsh, Clare Oxborrow, Ryan, Gary, Chas Cooke, Thor, Seamus 'The (Ongoing, Original and Unsurpassed) Legend', Cal and Marcus De Grammont, Scottish John, Marcus, Pete Wild, Christine Stone, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Becke Parker, Andrew Holmes at 64 Clarke, Bill Pearson, Pauli and Tiina Toivola, Jim 'Six Fingers' Kelly, AK 47, Seflor Miguel, Emma and Tony, Stav Sherez, Dominic

VII Thompson, Big T, Nic Joss, Lloyd Strickland, Richard Reynolds, Fouad, Khoi, Abdul and Shahid, Steve Purdom, Frankie, Mark and Scott at CD Discounts, Battersea, Jan, Vi and Ayaz, Mister Allan George, Cookie, Richard Thomas, G-Force: Nick, Kate & Tess, Al & Pedro Diaz, Joaquim 'Akkes' Kaufmann, Harm Van Maanen - The Pride of Nijmegen, Gerald Laumanns, Michael und die Familie Schmidt, George und die Familie Bischof, Sascha Weber, Wrigleys, Whittards of Chelsea, Gaggia and, last but not least, to the great Don Winslow for his very mean Dog.

vm I have supped full with horrors. Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5 PART ONE

November 1980 It was the last thing he needed or wanted, a dead ape at the end of his shift, but there it was - a corpse with bad timing.

Larry Gibson, one of the night security guards at Primate Park, stood staring at the thing spotlighted in his torch beam — a long-stemmed cruciform of black fur lying less than twenty feet away, face up and palms open on the grassy verge in front of the wire. He didn't know which of the fifteen species of monkey advertised in the zoo's product literature this one was, and he didn't care; all he knew was that he had some decisions to make and fast.

He weighed up what to do with how much he could get away with not doing: he could sound the alarm and stick around to help when and where and if he was needed; or he could simply look the other way and ignore King Kong for the ten remaining minutes of his shift. Plus he craved sleep. Thanks to some Marine-issue bennies he'd popped on Sunday night, he'd been awake for fifty-nine hours straight; his longest ever stretch. The most he'd lasted before was forty-eight hours. It was now Wednesday morning. He'd run out of pills and all the sleep he'd cheated and skipped out on was catching up with him, ganging up in the wings, getting ready to drop on him like a sack of wet cement.

He checked his watch. 5.21 a.m. He needed to get out of here, get home, get his head down, sleep. He had another job starting at one p.m. as a supermarket supervisor. That was for alimony and child support. This gig — cash in hand and no questions asked - was for body and soul and the roof over his head. He really couldn't afford to fuck it up.

Dr Jenny Gold had been dozing with the radio on when she got the phone call from the security guard in Sector i, nearest the front gate. Something about a dead gorilla, he'd said. She hoped to God it wasn't Bruce, their star attraction.

Jenny had been the head veterinarian at the zoo ever since it had opened, nine years before. Primate Park had been the brainchild of Harold and Henry Yik, two brothers from Hong Kong, who'd opened the place in direct competition to Miami's other primate-only zoo, Monkey Jungle. They'd reasoned that while Monkey Jungle was a very popular tourist attraction, its location — South Dade, inland and well away from the beach and hotels — meant it was only doing about 2 5 per cent of the business it could have done, had it been closer to the tourist dollars. So they'd built Primate Park from scratch in North Miami Beach — right next to a strip of hotels - making it bigger and, so they thought, better than the competition. At its peak they'd had twenty-eight species of monkey, ranging from the expected — chimps, dressed up in blue shorts, yellow check shirts and red sun visors, doing cute, quasi-human tricks like playing mini-golf, baseball and soccer; gorillas, who beat their chests and growled; baboons, who showed off their bright pink bald asses and bared their fangs — along with more exotic species, like dusky titi monkeys, rodent-like lemurs, and the lithe, intelligent brown-headed spider monkeys. Yet Primate Park hadn't really caught on as an alternative to Monkey Jungle.

The latter had been around for close to forty years and was considered a local treasure, one of those slightly eccentric Miami landmarks, like the Ancient Spanish Monastery, South Beach's Art Deco district, Vizcaya, the Biltmore, and the giant Coppertone sign. The new zoo was seen as too cold, too clinical, too calculating. It was all wrong for the town. Miami was the kind of place where things only worked by accident, not because they were supposed to. The general public stayed away from the new zoo. The Yik brothers started talking about bulldozing Primate Park and converting it into real estate.

And then, last summer, Bruce, one of the four mountain gorillas they had, picked up the stub of a burning cigar a visitor had dropped near him and began puffing away at it, managing to blow five perfect smoke rings in the shape of the Olympic symbol every time he exhaled. Someone had taken pictures of him and sent them to a TV station, which had promptly dispatched a camera crew to the zoo. Bruce put Primate Park on the 6 o'clock news and, from that day on, in the public consciousness too. People flocked to the zoo just to see him. And they were still coming, most of them with cigars, cigarettes and pipes to toss to the gorilla, whose sole activities were now confined to chain-smoking and coughing. They'd had to move him to a separate area because his habit made him stink so much the other gorillas refused to go near him.

Jenny found it inhumane and cruel to do that to an animal, but when she'd complained to the brothers, they'd simply shown her the balance sheets. She was now looking for another job.

When she got to the control room she found the guard staring out of the thick shatterproof window.

'You the vet?' he asked when he saw Jenny, his voice brimming with incredulity.

Jenny was petite and youthful in appearance, which led to some people — usually horny men and old ladies — mistaking her for a teenager. She was the only thirty-six-year-old she knew who still had to carry ID to get served in a bar.

'Yeah, I'm the vet,' she replied tetchily. She was already in a bad mood because of the election results. Ronald Reagan, a one-time B-movie actor, had won the White House last night. It was hardly unexpected, given Carter's catastrophic handling of the Iranian hostage crisis and the economy, among other things, but she had hoped the American people wouldn't be suckered into voting for Ronnie.

'Where is it?' she asked him.

'There.' He pointed through the window.

They were one floor up, overlooking the gently sloping wide grass verge which separated the zoo's buildings from the vast man-made jungle where the monkeys lived. It was dark outside, but daylight was just beginning to break through, so she could make out a black mound in the grass, like someone had doused the ground with petrol in the shape of a large capital T and set it alight. She couldn't be sure what it was.

'How'd it get through?'

'Power on the fence musta been off. Happens more times than you'd imagine,' the guard said, looking down at her.

The jungle was surrounded by a high electric fence which gave off a mild shock when touched — enough to stun any monkey who'd want to clamber up and over it.

'Let's go down and take a look,' she said.

They stopped off at the first aid room down the corridor so Jenny could pick up the medical kit and a tranquillizer gun, which she loaded with a dart. It was the biggest gun they had, the Remington RJ 5, usually used to subdue lions and tigers.

'Are we goin' outside? The guard sounded worried.

'That's what I meant by “taking a look”. Why? Is there a problem?' She looked up at him like he really wasn't impressing her. They locked stares. She turned on the contempt.

He took the bait. 'No problem,' he said in a bassier, more authoritative tone and smiled in a way he must have thought was reassuring but in fact came over as nervous and near rictal.

'Good.' She handed him the tranq gun. 'You know how to use this, right?'

6 'Sure do,' he said.

'If it wakes up, shoot it anywhere but the head. You got that?' The guard nodded, smile still in exactly the same place.

He was starting to make her nervous. 'And, if the power's really down on that fence, we could have company. Some monkeys may come to see what we're doing. Most of them are harmless, but watch out for the baboons. They bite.

Worse than any pitbull. Their teeth'll cut clean through to the bone.'

She could tell from his eyes that fear was now doing fast laps in his head, but he was still smiling that damn smile. It was as if the lower half of his face was paralysed.

He noticed her staring at his mouth. He ran his tongue quickly under his lips. The speed had dehydrated him so much that the inside of his lips had stuck to his gums.

'So what do we do if we're . . . outnumbered?'

'Run.'

'Run?'

'Run.'

'Right.'

They went downstairs to the tunnel entrance, Jenny grinning wickedly behind the dumbass security guard as he timidly took each step like he was negotiating a steep rocky hill on his way to his own execution.

'I'll open the door; you go out first,' she said. 'Approach slowly.'

She handed him the tranquillizer gun and then unlocked and opened the door. He slipped off the safety catch and stepped outside.

They heard the cries of the monkeys — snarls, growls, whoops and roars, guttural and fierce; territories and young ones being protected - all underpinned by the snap and crack of branches being jumped from and to, the dense timpani of leaves and bushes being crashed through. And then there was the smell of the place: the animals, acrid and heady; ammonia; fresh manure and wet hay mixed in with the jungle's humid earthiness, its blossomings and decay, things ripening, things growing, things going back into the soil.

Larry approached on tiptoe, coming in from the side as instructed. The vet shone a torch on the ape, which lay some twenty feet away, still not moving. As he got closer he saw that the beast's fur had a slight metallic green tinge to it, as if there were sequins strewn across its body.

He heard it make a sound. He stopped and listened more closely, because it had only been the faintest of noises, something that could quite easily have come from elsewhere.

Then he heard it again. It was faint and painful breathing, a low moan, barely audible over the sing-song of the dawn birds now coming from the nearby trees.

'I think it's alive,' he whispered to the vet. 'Sounds hurt.

Bring the light in closer.'

He stood where he was with the tranquillizer gun pointed at the prostrate animal's side, his finger on the trigger. The vet approached. The animal's moaning got a little louder as the light on it grew brighter. It didn't sound like breathing now, pained or otherwise. It was more of a whining drone, which reminded Larry of the time he'd once trapped a hornet under a whisky glass. The thing had attacked the glass with everything it had, trying to get out, flying at it, butting it, stinging it, getting angrier and angrier with every failed attempt until it had died of exhaustion.

The vet came in closer. Larry didn't move. His hands were getting wet holding the gun.

'What - the - HELL? the vet shouted.

The ape woke up. It raised its head off the ground.

They stepped back. The noise grew louder, a kind of high-pitched hum came out of its mouth. Then, suddenly, with a speed belying its bulk, the animal sprang to its feet and rushed at them.

Larry pushed the vet away and heard her scream. The light was gone. He fired his gun. The dart must have missed because the animal kept coming straight at him with a hideous dull whistling scream, like the noise of a lathe cutting through sheet metal, amplified to an excruciatingly sharp pitch.

Larry went for his pistol, but before he could get his hand to it he was hit everywhere and from every angle by a blizzard of small hard pellets. They smashed into his hands, ears, neck, legs, arms, chest. They stung exposed flesh. They got up his nostrils and down his earholes. He opened his mouth and screamed. They shot down his throat and massed on his tongue and bounced around the inside of his cheeks.

He fell on the grass, spitting, coughing and retching, confused and giddy, still expecting to be trampled and mauled by the ape, wondering where it was and what was taking it so long.

Jenny rushed back to the control room and dialled 911. She was immediately put on hold. She looked out of the window at the security guard still spluttering his guts out on the floor. She felt sorry for him. He hadn't realized what he was looking at until it was too late.

When the operator took her call Jenny asked for two ambulances — one for the security guard who'd swallowed a mouthful of blowflies and the other for the body of the dead man those same flies had been feasting on before the guard had disturbed them.ť 'Who said this was murder?' Detective Sergeant Max Mingus asked his partner, Joe Liston, as they pulled up outside the entrance to Primate Park in Joe's green '75 Buick convertible.

'No one,' Joe replied.

'So what we doin' here?'

'Our J-O-B,' Joe said. They'd been driving to Miami Task Force headquarters when the dispatcher's call had come through. Primate Park was on the way. Max hadn't heard any of it because he'd been fast asleep, face pancaked against the window. Joe had filled him in along the way. 'We'll just keep the turf warm till the right people show up. What've we gotta rush off to? Three feet of paperwork and a bad hangover? You in some kind of hurry to get to that?'

'Good point,' Max replied. The pair were feeling the election-night drinks they'd had at the Evening Coconut the night before. The Coco — as they called it — was a downtown bar close not only to their HQ but in the heart of the Miami business community. Plainclothes cops interfaced with the after hours white-collar crowd who worked in the nearby banks, law firms, publishers, ad agencies and real estate brokers. They'd buy cops drinks and plug them for war stories, listening awed and wide-eyed like deranged children to tales of shoot-outs, serial killers and gruesome mutilations.

Many an affair had started there, overworked, stressed-out execs with no lives outside their careers, finding soul mates in overworked, stressed-out cops with no lives outside their jobs — or vocations, as some called their work, because the money wasn't shit for the risks they took. And

the bar was also great for picking up extra employment, anything from basic building security to consultancy to private investigations. Max and Joe didn't go there that often, and when they did it was strictly to drink. They didn't like talking about their jobs with strangers and therefore, between them, emanated such hostility that civilians stayed well away.

The cheers when Reagan's victory was announced on the bar's four TVs had been as deafening as the chorus of insults and boos hurled at the screens when Carter had appeared, conceding defeat with tears in his eyes. Joe had felt deeply uneasy. A lifelong registered Democrat, he'd liked and admired Jimmy Carter. He'd considered him honest and decent, and, above all, a man of principle. But every other cop in town hated Carter because of the Mariel Boatlift fiasco. Thanks to him, they said, being a cop in Miami now was a nightmare.

From 15 April until 31 October, Fidel Castro had expelled 125,000 people from Cuba to the US in flotillas of leaking boats. Although many of the refugees were dissidents with their families, Castro took the opportunity to — in his words — 'flush Cuba's toilets on America'. He'd emptied his country's streets of all winos, beggars, prostitutes and cripples, purged its prisons and mental hospitals of their most vicious and violent inmates and sent them over as well. In those six months, crime in Miami had rocketed.

I lomicides, armed robberies, home invasions and rapes were all way up and the cops couldn't handle it. Already understaffed and underfunded, they'd been caught completely off-guard. They'd never come face to face with this new breed of criminal — Third World poor, First World envious; nothing to lose, everything to gain; violence coming to them without thought or remorse.

Then, to make matters much worse, on 17 May Miami had been torn apart by the worst race riot since Watts. The

previous December Arthur McDuffie, an unarmed black man who'd been doing stunts on his motorcycle in the early hours of the morning, had been beaten into a coma by four white officers after a high-speed chase. The officers had tried to cover up the beating by claiming it was an accident.

McDuffie later died from his injuries and the officers went on trial. Despite fairly conclusive evidence of their guilt, they were acquitted by an all-white jury. The city had exploded, as its black community had decided to vent an anger stoked by years of resentment against police harassment and injustice.

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, pen-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 gau2e, 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 beedes, 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 restiess. 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, t hey 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

M 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.

Max got up and began to walk towards the jungle, looking down the whole time. He traced the trail of flattened grass all the way back to the forty-foot-high wire fence. There was a sign on it, a big stark banner warning of electrocution.

It was the same kind of fence they had in maximum security prisons, only theirs hummed with lethal current. This one was quiet. Which meant it wasn't working.

He reached the beginning of the trail. It ended at the gate.

He tried it. It was open.

Something on the grass to his right caught his eye. He

turned around and found himself looking at a row of eight monkeys sitting on their haunches, staring right at him. They were beige, apart from their arms, shoulders and heads, which were light grey. Their faces were also grey, except for the area around their eyes and nose, which was a hori2ontal figure of eight in white, like the Lone Ranger mask, while their eyes and mouths were surrounded in black borders.

How long had they been there? Had they dragged the body over? He couldn't exactly ask them.

Suddenly he heard heavy footfalls from behind the fence.

Two large, ginger-haired monkeys with long flabby chins were leaning over a log, glaring at him like two badass desperadoes in a saloon bar, waiting to be served. How long before they came through?

Max hurriedly returned to the body. More people had arrived — two more uniforms, medics, the forensics team and a guy who seemed to have come straight off a yacht, if his clothes were anything to go by: white duck pants, espadrilles, a blue blazer and a red cravat. He was talking to Joe.

Max beckoned his partner over.

'Our guy died in there.' He motioned to the jungle. 'Musta stunk the place out so bad the monkeys dragged him out.

Forensics'll have to go in.'

'Even if there isn't another crime in the city for a whole month, we still don't have the manpower to cover an area that big.'

'I know, Joe, but it's not our problem once the local dicks get here. Any word on when that'll be?'

Joe was about to answer when the man in the blazer got between them.

'Are you in charge here?' he asked Max.

'Who are you?' Max looked at him like he was a piece of shit who'd grown legs and a mouth. He had round rimless glasses and reddish blond hair, thinning to a threadbare strip in front, like a short length of moth-eaten carpet.

'Ethan Moss, director.' He held out his hand. Max ignored it. 'How long will you be?'

'However long it takes,' Max said.

'How about an estimate?'

'Forensics have to do their job.' Max nodded to the team working over the body, while uniforms were planting metal rods in the ground and cordoning off the area with black and yellow tape. 'If this turns out to be a homicide, the whole place could be shut down for weeks.'

'Weeks?' Moss went pale, then looked at his watch. ŚYou've got two hours at the most. We've got VIPs coming.'

'Not today you haven't, sir.' Max kept the officious side of polite. 'This is a crime scene. You can't open for business until we're through.'

You don't understand, Detective. Time is money.' Moss was panicking. 'We're expecting a Japanese film crew.

They're shooting a commercial.'

'Sir, it's outta my hands,' Max said. 'We're just following procedure.'

'But, you don't understand, Detective. They've come all the way from Tokyo. It took months of negotiation.'

'I'm really sorry about that, sir, but you've got a dead body here. A crime may have been committed. This is a police investigation. That supersedes everything else. OK?'

Max spoke slowly, feeling a little sorrier for the guy because he looked like his balls were on the line, his feet stuck in cement and he'd just heard the express train whistle. 'Can't you film someplace else?'

'No. It has to be here. It's in the contract. Bruce in his natural environment.' Moss turned to look towards the jungle.

'Bruce? Who's Bruce?' Max asked.

You mean you haven't heard of him? Bruce — our gorilla?'

You got a gorilla . . . called Bruce?' Max smiled, looking

over at Joe, who'd heard and was mouthing 'fuck you' at him.

'Yes. That's right. What's so funny?' Moss snapped.

'Oh, nothing - private joke,' Max replied. 'So what's Bruce do that's got the Japs interested? He sing?' He looked at Joe again and winked.

'No. He smokes.'

“Smokes?

'Yes — smokes.'

'Like what — cigarettes?' Max was incredulous.

'Yes, Detective, cigarettes, cigars. He smokes,' Moss answered. 'I can tell you don't watch TV. Bruce has been all over the news.'

'For smoking?'

'That's right,' Moss said, 'and the Sendai cigarette company has paid us a lot of money to use Bruce in their ad campaign.'

'Jesus!' Max shook his head, shocked and incredulous at human cruelty. He smoked himself, but it was an informed decision — albeit a stupid one he was starting to regret. The animal didn't have a choice.

'Look — Detective Mingus,' Moss took another tack, dropping his voice a few notches and drawing closer to Max, who knew what was coming, 'couldn't we make some sort of, er, arrangement. I'm in a spot here '

He didn't get much further because he was interrupted by a loud commotion to their right.

A uniformed cop, who'd been putting up a cordon around the scene had just fallen flat on his face. He was shouting and swearing and yelling for somebody to come and help him. His legs were tied together with the same tape he'd been using to close off the space around the body. What at first looked like a stupid prank on the part of a colleague, became a matter of public hilarity when one of the beige monkeys Max had seen jumped on the cop's back and

started bouncing up and down, clapping its paws, grinning and squawking like a manic bird. The officer tried to knock it off, first with his left hand, then his right, but the monkey deftly leapt over the swiping hands, causing the zoo staff watching from the tunnel to cheer. This pissed the cop off.

Furiously, he pulled himself to his feet, most likely thinking he'd rid himself of the animal that way. But the monkey wrapped its tail tight around the officer's forehead and clung to him while he hopped around screaming for help.

Moss went over, but the monkey saw him coming and scampered away across the grass. Moss took out a penknife and cut through the plastic tape around the cop's ankles. Once free, the cop got back up and ran off after the monkey.

Suddenly there was a gunshot.

The police automatically hit the deck, everyone else panicked; a few screamed. The sounds of the jungle suddenly died.

At first Max thought the officer had shot the monkey, but then he heard agonized sobbing and moaning and saw that the cop was on the ground, clutching his left leg below the knee. A few metres away, the monkey was sitting on its haunches, nearly motionless and completely subdued, staring at them all. The animal was evenly spattered, head to foot, in red. Standing in a row behind it, were the other monkeys. The blood-soaked monkey turned and joined the others.

Max got up and raced over to the officer. As he drew closer, he noticed the monkeys were doing a kind of Mexican wave.

Blood was pouring out of the officer's leg, running over his hands.

'What happened?' Max asked.

T just got fuckin' shotY the cop gasped.

'You got shot?'

The officer's holster was empty. Max looked for the gun, but couldn't see it anywhere.

Then he realized what the monkeys were really doing.

They had the gun — a black .44 Smith & Wesson Special service revolver — and they were tossing it to each other, underarm, down the line, like a football; passing and catching.

Behind him, everyone was up on their feet. Joe and a paramedic were running over.

Max heard the unmistakable sound of a hammer being cocked. He turned and saw the gun bouncing down the line of fur and grinning teeth, primed to fire. Without looking away, he held up his hand and motioned for Joe and the medic to get down. Joe shouted the command over to the others, who all hit the deck.

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 deafc-ningly loud they drowned out the sound of the gun going off. Max saw the flash and the smoke and threw himself to I he 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.

3

I 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 liacharach 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 us 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 200'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 predominandy 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. Shordy 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.

She looked at the nose and saw a puncture mark on either side, right through the middle, very slightly encrusted with dried blood; on the underside of the nostrils was a small horizontal cut, the same width as the marks on the lips.

Nose sewn up too. The object used to make the hole had been thick and long, a needle, she estimated, with an eye wide enough to hold something with the density of a guitar or violin string, which was what she thought had been used to fasten the mouth and nose. She'd seen this before a couple of times, but she couldn't remember the specifics.

Once here, once in New York; some kind of black magic ritual. She made a note to cross-reference it on the computer if she had the time and that was a big if.

'Are we going to look inside the head?' Javier asked. She usually left that to him.

'Depends what the insides tell us.'

'The Look of Love' began to play as she made the T-incision from shoulders to mid-chest and all the way down to the pubis. It was around about now that the dieners would start dropping.

She opened up the body and inspected its insides. It was a predictable sight, looking a lot like a butcher's shop might

two weeks after the owners had suddenly closed it up and abandoned it with all the contents inside. The organs hadn't just changed colour — reds and maroons had turned shades of grey-blue — they'd started losing their shape too, becoming viscous, and some had been disconnected from the main framework and shifted position because hungry insects had eaten through the cabling. Surprisingly Ralph and Martin had hung on in there. Ralph even looked like he was enjoying himself.

Gemma took a large syringe and extracted blood and fluid from the heart, lungs, bladder and pancreas. Then she spiked the stomach and started filling the syringe barrel with a sample of its contents - a green liquid, the colour of spinach water - but then something solid got sucked up by the needle and blocked it.

After they'd removed and weighed the organs one by one, she sliced open the stomach and emptied its contents into a glass container — more green liquid came out, murky at first, then clearing as a gritty white sediment with the consistency of sand floated to the bottom of the receptacle, followed by small shiny dark scraps of something that could have been plastic.

She noticed the stomach wasn't quite empty; there was something that hadn't come out. She opened it up a little more and saw a pale, sticky greyish ball of matter stuck to the lining. It reminded her of a shrunken golf ball. When she held it up to the light she saw it wasn't a single object, but small overlapping squares compacted into a ball.

Using tweezers she tugged and pulled at the ball until she'd managed to prise loose one of the squares. It was about a third of an inch long, made of cardboard, printed on both sides, miraculously intact despite the digestive process. One side was black, the other was multicoloured — reds, yellows, oranges, blues — but she couldn't make out the design.

She unpicked the rest of the bundle, laying out the squares one by one at the end of the slab, until she found herself staring at a jigsaw.

She spent the next hour piecing it together. Fifteen minutes in, she began to recognize the thing she was assembling.

The image she had before her was familiar, but the design differed in many ways. The drawing was more sophisticated, more detailed, the colours richer and more vibrant — what there was of it, because it wasn't complete. At least a quarter was missing. She guessed where she'd find it.

'Javier, open up his throat,' she said.

The victim had choked to death on the remaining cardboard squares.

When Javier had finished and handed her nine missing pieces, she completed the jigsaw.

It was a tarot card depicting a man sitting on a throne with a golden crown on his head. The crown was in the shape of a castle turret and studded with brilliant red rubies.

In his left hand he held a blood-flecked gold sword, blade plunged into the ground; in his right fist a thick chain was wrapped tightly around his knuckles. The chain was fitted to a black mastiff who lay at his right side, head raised, teeth half bared, paws out in front. The dog's eyes were bright red and it had a forked tongue, to go with its mean, bad tempered expression on their faces, an anger caught midway to eruption. Despite where it had been and what it had been through, and the fact that it was in pieces, the card seemed very much alive. She found herself staring at it, enraptured by its terrible beauty, unable to pull herself away. This was like no other card she'd ever seen. The man on the throne had no face. In its stead was the blank, plain white outline of a head. It seemed like it might have been a printing error, given the richness of the detail, but the more she studied it, the more she felt the design was intentional.

'You know tarot?' Javier said behind her.

'What?' She turned around, then laughed. 'No. I don't believe in that kind of stuff.'

'The King of Swords,' Javier explained, looking down at the foot of the mortuary slab. 'The card represents a man of great power and influence, an aggressive man also. It can mean a valuable ally or a fearsome enemy, depending on where and how it turns up in the reading.'

'Is that right?' Gemma said. 'So what does it mean when it turns up in someone's stomach?'

4

'Preval Lacour,' Max read off a photostatted report as Joe drove. 'Forty-four years old. Haitian. Became a US citizen in 1976. Taxpayer, registered Republican, churchgoer, married, four kids. Good credit score, home owner, modest Amex debt. Recently became the proud owner — with his business partner, Guy Martin — of a lot of real estate in Lemon City.

He was plannin' to redevelop it. No priors, no record, no nothing. I don't get it.' He looked at Joe over the pages.

'Here's a guy well on his way to getting his piece of the American Dream. No history of mental illness, or violence.

No drugs or alcohol in his system. How and why the fuck did it all go so wrong?'

'People go crazy, Max,' Joe said. 'Sometimes somethin'

just slips. You know how it is. We see it all the time.'

'I'd say somethin' more than just “slipped” with this guy.' Max continued reading from the report. 'He killed his business partner and secretary. Why? These were childhood friends, godfathers to each other's kids, never known to have had a serious quarrel, business was on the up.' Max turned the page. 'Then he puts the bodies in his trunk and drives over to Fort Lauderdale and kills Alvaro and Frida Cuesta. Then he drives over to Primate Park, breaks in and chokes to death on his own vomit — all in seventy-two hours.

'The other people he killed, the Cuestas: they were his main business rivals. They went head to head over the Lemon City project. But the Cuestas lost out. Why kill 'em?

And there was a third guy in the running too — Sam Ismael, Haitian, Lemon City local, runs a voodoo store. He was the lucky one. He was out of town the day Lacour went on the

rampage, otherwise he might've been murdered too. The whole thing's insane. Don't make sense.'

'Sometimes it just never does.' Joe sighed.

They were on USi, driving towards Kendall. It had been two weeks since they'd found Preval Lacour's body in Primate Park. The incident had made the national news, thanks to the hundreds of monkeys which had escaped from the zoo and run riot all over Miami and beyond.

Lacour's fingerprints had been taken at the morgue and run through the computer. Five days later the machine had matched them to the murders of Guy Martin and Theresa Morales in a Hialeah motel and to the Cuestas in Fort Lauderdale. Lacour's car — a black Mercedes saloon — had been spotted speeding away from the scene. A witness had taken down the number plate and phoned it in.

Lacour had dumped the Mercedes in a car park in North Miami Beach, where it had stayed until the weekend before the Primate Park discovery. A caretaker had noticed a horrific smell coming from the car and called the police who had found the decomposing bodies of Lacour's business partner and secretary.

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 midair 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 beedes 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 Prevail'. 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.

Max picked up a spent shell casing from its chalked circle, numbered with a marker on the floor and compared it to a blown-up photograph of one of the casings found at the

MartinMorales murder scene. Same strike marks on the end.

'Six bodies. Twelve shots fired — at least,' Max said, holding up a glassine evidence bag with a fragment of the shell that had been dug out of the windowsill. As with his previous two murders, Preval had used hollow-points on his family — bullets with quartered tips, which fragmented on impact, flying off at four different angles, causing maximum damage. Back in patrol Max had known a cop who'd been shot in the kneecap with a hollow-point. It had blown his lower leg clean off. 'Someone musta heard something'

'These houses are too far apart.'

'He killed his whole family, Joe, with a .38. That's a lotta noise.'

'Then there's the time of day this happened. Late enough and everyone woulda been sleepin'. Dunno 'bout you, but when I sleep, man, I sleep. I'm La2arus. Take Jesus himself to rouse me.' Joe looked out of the window at the activity in the driveway — paramedics with stretchers, uniformed cops keeping back a news crew, curious neighbours.

“What about the guard? What they pay him for?'

'Keep the bad guys out,' Joe said.

Lacour had been as systematic as he'd been merciless.

He'd killed them anti-clockwise, beginning with the old woman in the black and green dress to his left nearest the door. She'd been sat at the end of the table. He'd shot her twice in the forehead, once from a distance and then the second time from very close up, the muzzle practically touching the skin. Then he'd turned on his two teenage sons, sitting side by side in the middle, their backs to the window. The first — and oldest — had tried to shield his brother and had been shot first in the shoulder, and then executed like the woman he'd been sitting close to. His brother had been grazed in the neck by the bullet fragment Max had found embedded in the windowsill. He'd crawled

under the table Max guessed, following the small morse code of bloodstains on the floor. The old man in the wheelchair had then tried to protect him by swinging one of his two thick walking sticks at the gunman. Lacour had shot at the man mid-swing and blown his stick apart. There were splinters and slivers of wood buried in the old man's face, as well as part of a bullet which had entered his head through his eye. He'd then been shot one more time for good measure, before his murderer had dispatched the boy on the floor. Most of the corpses still had the gold cardboard party hats they'd been wearing at the time of their deaths stuck to their ruptured heads.

Apart from the turntable and Max and Joe's whispering, it was utterly quiet in the room. Five forensics staff were working on the scene, scraping, bagging, stoppering glass tubes, lifting prints, lifting hair, lifting lips to look at teeth, lifting hands and legs, lifting bodies to one side, left and right. They measured holes in the wall, distances between bodies, sizes of entry and exit wounds, range of spatter.

Everyone worked efficiently and precisely, but also very quickly and without pause, as if they couldn't wait to get away.

The hister beetles were moving freely and unimpeded throughout the room. Once inside the house they'd branched out into two trains, one making for the stairs, the other going into the living room. There, a few feet into the room, they'd forked again, four subdivisions taking a body apiece. They crawled up fingers and feet, shoulders and necks and disappeared under hems and collars, up sleeves, through rips and tears in fabric. Meanwhile, from each corpse, a separate string of beetles exited from another aperture and made its way back across the living room, gradually linking up with other departing bug lines to form a pulsing shiny green caravan out of the house and back to the earth it had come from. From up where Max was

standing, the bugs seemed like a network of veins, pumping in and out of the earth, a conduit straight to its deep dark heart. He thought for a moment how he too would one day be reduced to a lump of rotting, seeping meat and this troubled him enough to think of insisting on being cremated.

Fuck the headstone.

'I don't get this one, Joe. This — this family, this house, this kinda life - this is something you kill for.”

'That's the second thing I hate about this job.' Joe nodded. 'Shit you never get to understand 'cause the perp took all the answers to hell with him.'

'What's the first?'

'The ones that get away, the ones you never catch, the ones that are still out there, lookin' for the next kill, the invisible monsters.'

'Well, it's like you once told me back in patrol, Joe . . .'

'Way it is, partner. Do your best and learn to live with it, 'cause it'll always be a lot worse tomorrow Joe finished the sentence Max liked to quote back to him, and to every pale-faced rookie who came up to him and asked him for advice after they'd found out what being a cop was really about. Joe hadn't learned those words off anyone. They'd just come to him, the effordess way wisdom does to someone who's had to struggle for everything in his life from the day he was born.

They looked around some more. There was a drinks trolley near the stereo system. On it stood a large punch bowl, part-filled with thick, sticky bright pink syrup. The top was completely covered with a crust of drowned blowflies.

They looked over the eight-foot-long dining table and its white cloth and full dinner service — fine heavy silver cudery and china crockery, immaculately laid out with small ivory winged rests for the knives, silver rings for the napkins and three different-si2ed crystal glasses at each place setting. In the middle of the table were uncorked bottles of red wine,

3ť a magnum of champagne and, either side of them half-empty jugs of water. A large framed colour photograph stood near the bottles: Lacour to the left, Guy Martin to the right and the mayor of Miami in the middle, beaming. There were thin lines and spots of dried blood all over the table - impact spray from the bullets.

'He killed his own first,' Max said. 'Then he went after the others.'

The two detectives looked at each for a brief moment, one seeing the other's horror and revulsion and the thought that informed the looks: just when you figured you'd seen it all — the very worst thing man could do to his fellow man — something that little bit more horrific came shimmering down the pipe, a big bloody grin on its face. They left the room.

A black, open-toed high-heeled shoe stood upright at the foot of the stairs. It had a diamante pattern of creeping ivy around the heel and diamante laurels around the toe opening.

It was surrounded by a chalk mark. There were two more bodies on the hallway stairs, one on top of the other, lying in a wide pool of dried blood, which had soaked the boards and dripped off the side of the steps onto the ground below, some catching on the wall. A woman, shot in the back and then behind her ear, was lying face down on top of a little girl, no more than seven or eight, executed in the same way as the others. The mother had been trying to protect her daughter. Her long black hair partly covered her daughter's face. The beetles were busily working their way through them both.

Lacour's study was next to the living room — a large mahogany desk faced the door as they came in, behind it a plush leather reclining chair and lampstand. On one wall hung a crude painting of giraffes in a dense forest, while on another was a large posed family photograph in a gilt frame.

All the victims were there. Lacour was in the middle of the

second row, his hands on the shoulders of his two teenage sons, beaming proudly. His wife sat in front — a good looking, if slightly plump dark-skinned woman smiling an unforced, good-natured smile. Next to her was the old man in the wheelchair. Max guessed, from the strong resemblance, that he was Lacour's father. He was holding a baby in his lap. To his left, was his wife. Lacour's young daughter was sitting up on the floor between them.

'No sign of the baby?' Max asked Joe.

'No,' Joe said. 'Maybe someone was lookin' after it while they partied.'

'I don't think so. This was a family party. Just them celebrating the Lemon City deal. The baby would've been there too.'

'So what do you think? He took it with him?'

'Perhaps,' Max said.

Joe walked away to check out the rest of the study. Max continued examining the faces in the portrait. They wouldn't hold the slightest clue as to what had happened and why, but he wanted to imagine them alive, going about their day-to-day business, what their voices sounded like ringing around the house, what their habits were, what united and separated them. He'd always done this, humanized the dead, summoned their ghosts and listened in on them. Thinking about them as people instead of statistics helped keep him focused on the job and what it was really about. A lot of cops working homicide became so jaded and indifferent, so numb inside, that death was a numbers game to them — one they were resigned to losing before they'd even started playing. They forgot they were dealing with people just like them, people whose lives had been cut short before their time. Yet, looking at the Lacours, Max felt for the first time a sadness and something collapsing within himself, a support giving way and an ideal crashing to the ground: if this is what people were doing to each other now, turning in on

I

themselves and those closest to them, there was no hope any more. And if there was no hope, there was no point in being a cop.

'Max,' Joe called out, 'come see this.'

Joe was standing by the windowsill, holding up one of a row of photographs he'd picked up from there. It showed Lacour standing on a stretch of grass with his sons and daughter. They were all holding hands with chimps dressed in shorts and Primate Park T-shirts. When they looked closer they saw the picture had been taken at roughly the same spot on the grass verge where they'd found Lacour's body.

'Looks recent,' Joe said. 'Maybe that's why he went back there.'

'Who knows?' Max sighed. 'Who'll ever know?'

Max noticed the evidence bag Joe was holding.

'What've you got?'

'Found it in the parents' bedroom.' He handed Max the envelope. 'Smells of almonds.'

It was a small red and white striped candy wrapper.

'Where d'you find it?'

'Under the cot.'

'Babies don't eat candy.' Max gave him the bag. 'And this house is clean and tidy, orderly. My guess is, when they run prints on that wrapper they ain't gonna find any, 'cause the person who dropped it was wearin' gloves. But if they do get something, it won't belong to any of these people.'

'So you're sayin'. . . ?'

'Yeah,' Max nodded grimly, 'Lacour didn't do this on his own. He had help.'

PART TWO

April-May 1981 'Man. I dunno why you keep on lettin' freaks like that out, 'cause y'all know they gonna do it again - sure as man followed monkey,' Drake murmured, passing Max Mingus a book of matches over his shoulder. They were from a motel called the Alligator Moon in Immokalee, a small town right in the middle of the Everglades.

Max memorized the address as he lit a Marlboro, and then gave the matches back without turning his head. He now had the information he needed: the child-killer Dean Waychek's whereabouts, his hiding place, the rock he'd crawled under as soon as he'd come out of prison.

Drake and Max had been doing business like this for most of the ten years Max had been a cop. Drake was by far and away the best snitch he had. The guy was plugged into the Miami criminal mainframe like no one else. He knew everything there was to know and everyone who was doing it.

Max would tell him what he needed and Drake would call him back with a time and place to meet - always breakfast at a diner, usually one that had just opened up because, Drake reasoned, the food was more likely to be better in a new joint, as they'd be making an extra effort to attract repeat custom. The two would sit back-to-back in adjoining booths and whisper to each other out of the corner of their mouths.

Today they were in a place called Al & Shirley's, off 5 th Street in Miami Beach. Max remembered the building well.

It had once been a photographer's studio. The owner had taken some shots of Muhammad Ali shortly after he'd won

the heavyweight title for the first time. He'd blown up one of the photos to lifesize — Ali in his white shorts, championship belt around his waist, throwing a jab, exuberant expression on his face — and proudly exhibited it in the window, only for someone to smash the glass and steal the picture. Max and Joe had caught the thief a couple of weeks later when they'd seen him standing outside a school Ali had just opened, with the six-foot-plus-sized blow-up at his side, waiting for an autograph. The incident made the front page of the next day's Miami Herald. The accompanying photograph was a surreal sight: Joe hauling the thief away in cuffs, Max walking just behind them, carrying the Ali blow-up under his arm; while standing very clearly in the background, unbeknown to all, the real Muhammad Ali and his entourage were watching the spectacle and laughing.

Max looked through the same window and took in the desolate view of the near empty forecourt beyond, its entrance flanked by two tall but frail-looking palm trees, with weak trunks and drooping, dried-out leaves. His brown 1979 Camaro was parked in-between a white Ford pickup and a gleaming dark blue Mercedes coupe he guessed was Drake's. It had been there when he'd arrived. The sky above was thick with ash- and sour-milk-coloured clouds which broke the sunlight down to a feeble glow full of shadows.

The air was dead and still. Everything was on pause, waiting on the heavens to make up their mind.

Inside were two rows of booths starting from near the entrance and ending at a glossy mural of Old Glory which filled up the back wall, shot-up and dirt-caked, but billowing defiantly — American pride and endurance at its most fundamental.

The cop and his snitch were in the last two booths at the end, to the left, away from the window, Max facing the door as he always invariably sat, even off-duty. He liked to know

what was behind him and what was ahead of him as best he could.

The place was nearly empty, which wasn't surprising, given the time — just shy of 9.30 a.m. — but it felt like this was as busy as it was going to get today.

Max listened to Drake eat, the sounds of his chewing recalling a platoon trampling in time across dry undergrowth.

Although Drake had once claimed to eat only breakfast, Max wondered where on his six foot three, raggedy-ass bird-leg frame he put all the calories he was wolfing down - a greasy pile of crispy bacon, sausages, ham, hamburger, beans, hash browns, grilled tomatoes, four eggs fried two different ways and toast; so much food, they'd had to serve it up on two plates, one for the meat alone.

Drake dealt coke, poppers, pills and grass to an upmarket clientele of interstate jetsetters, white-collar lost weekenders, college kids with more bucks than brains and Miami's burgeoning gay community. Max helped him by regularly busting his competition and keeping him off the police radar.

He also occasionally kicked some of the coke he seized in the line of duty back to him. He didn't feel too good about the last part, but that was the way it was in Miami right now. The town ran on coke and coke ran the town. For every three kilos seized, one would make the papers and two would make it back on the street.

'Ain't no cure for that kinda evil thing,' Drake continued.

'Ain't no jail bad enough, ain't no religion good enough, ain't no shrink shrunk enough to undo that. Only a bullet can cure that'

Drake was getting worked up, like he always did whenever Max asked him about child abusers and child killers. He hated their kind with such intensity that Max often wondered if he hadn't himself been molested when he was a boy, but it wasn't the kind of thing you ever asked a street-forged hoodlum like Drake — not that he'd ever tell anyway, because

it'd make him look how he couldn't afford to be seen: weak, a victim, a sissy. If he got a rep like that it'd be bad for business. He'd have armies of rivals on his tail, and there'd be nothing Max could do to save him.

'I hear you,' Max said, barely moving his lips, 'but you know how it is. It's the law.'

'Then the law's all fucked up. Shit needs changin'. You get mo' time for peddlin' reefer than you do rapin' some lil'

girl'

'I hear that too.'

'Yeah?' Drake leant back a little so his mouth was closer to Max's ear. 'You hear so good, why you still a cop?'

'Same reason I had when I joined: I thought — and still do think — I can make a difference. Even if it's a small one no one notices. Somewhere, to someone, what I do counts.

For better or worse depends on the someone. And that's why I'm still here, meetin' you for breakfast,' Max answered.

ŚYou believe in Santa Claus too?' Drake chuckled and Max could almost hear him flashing his smile, that same sardonic, knowing, each-day-as-it-comes-and-fuck-tomorrow nonchalant expression that had landed him more pussy than he could handle and a bullet in the leg from a husband he'd cuckolded.

Max shook his head and grunted negatively. The mention of Christmas saddened him. He'd driven to Key West with his girlfriend Renee on Christmas Eve, for a make-up or break-up vacation. They'd broken up before they got there, midway down the Seven Mile Bridge. An argument about the faulty passenger window had escalated into one about the faults in their relationship. They'd both said things they shouldn't have, but meant anyway. She'd got out at Mallory Square with her bags and tears streaming down her face, and boarded the bus back to Miami. Max had returned home, where he'd drunk until he'd passed out. The next day he'd called Joe, who'd come over with a crate of beer, a

bottle of bourbon and a bag of reefer. They'd sat on the beach and got palooka'd. Max had spent the rest of his vacation that way, and was still finding his way out of that zone, slowly.

The radio was on low and playing Beatles songs back to back, non-stop, still mourning John Lennon, shot dead in New York the previous December. You couldn't escape the programmed grief on the airwaves right after it had happened.

Even black stations had played soul, funk and disco versions of Beades tunes, and whenever Max had turned to talk radio for relief, all he'd heard were people arguing away about the murder and what it all meant and how it was probably a CIA-organized hit. It had driven him nuts. Some psycho misfit with a gun and a grudge plugged innocent family men on the street all the time in Miami and barely anyone noticed or even cared. Even Reagan getting shot just last month hadn't quelled Beademournia.

The waitress came over with the coffee pot. Max hadn't touched his. His stomach was burning again — booze-binge acid — and his medicine cabinet at home was fresh out of Pepto-Bismol.

'You no like cafe?' she asked him. Her name tag said Corrina and she was cute as hell — bright brown eyes, almond-shaped face, tan skin, flawless complexion, beestung lips. She could have passed for twenty-one, but Max suspected she was much younger.

'I forgot to drink it.' Max smiled.

You want new cup?'

'Sure,' Max said.

She was about to turn and head back when Drake reached out and stopped her with a quick but gentle hand on her arm.

'Any for me?' Drake asked, holding out his empty coffee cup, bright dental beam right behind it.

She apologized with a giggle, gave him a refill, and then hurried back towards the counter.

'She ivaaay too fine. Kinda waitress you wanna order from juss to watch walk across the room, but,' Drake said, leaning over and watching her go down the aisle, 'thass's a whole heap o' trouble on two legs, right there.'

'How so?' Max asked.

'Don't wanna be goin' mad over no pussy when you makin' moves on the street. Gotta keep yo' mind on yo'

game, and keep that game tight. Fine bitch like dat? Turnin'

every nigga, spic and cracker head in dis town? Fo' you know it that pussy be havin' a entoorage, an' you gotta be swattin' 'em away full time, so you got no time to be makin'

money, dig? Pussy like dat he worse fo' a nigga than dope.'

'So you only date ugly women, is that it?' Max said.

'They ain't ugly, 'zactly - they mo' . . . You know them hey-good-lookins always turn up wit plain Jane as a best friend, make deyselves look better? Plain Jane be the one I be flyin'. Most o' tha time she be so got-damn grateful to even have herself a man she do anythang fo' a nigga — cook,Ś clean, wash yo' back — every damn thang. An' most of 'em fuck real good too. Them good-lookin', straight-offa-cover of-a-magazine bitches? They ain't never gonna do that 'cause they think they too good.“

ŚWhatever floats your boat, Drake,' Max said. He did exactly the same thing in clubs, but he didn't want to start comparing scoring technique with his snitch. You had to keep a professional distance. The, I like to have something nice to look forward to when I wake up in the morning.'

'I work anti-clockwise,' Drake said.

Max chuckled and pulled out a Marlboro. He lit it and took a deep drag, tasting lighter fuel mixed with the tobacco.

He thought about Dean Waychek.

Dean Waychek had killed Billy Ray Swan, aged four.

Dean Waychek hadn't gone to trial because his lawyer had managed to convince the grand jury that his confession had been obtained under 'duress'. He'd produced photo 5°1 graphs of Waychek's bruised torso and an X-ray of his broken nose. Max had claimed that Waychek had taken a dive out of their car. Joe had backed him up. It wasn't enough. Apparently there should have been more broken or fractured bones. Max wished he'd been able to beat him up a lot more. Joe wished he hadn't pulled him off, saying, 'You don't want to kill him.'

He hadn't then. He did now, but not by his own hand.

Not this time. He'd do something else with the information Drake had given him.

After Waycheck had walked, Max'd finally come to the conclusion that he didn't want children of his own. They would bring him no pleasure, only dread: he'd seen what people could do to them, and he knew he'd be such an overprotective parent he'd make their lives a misery. So he'd had a vasectomy at the end of January. He hadn't told anyone about it. He'd just booked himself in and had his tubes snipped. The procedure, the surgeon had informed him, was completely reversible. But the things he'd witnessed and the effect they'd had on him were not.

A few moments later Drake said goodbye and stood up.

He was dressed head to foot like a tennis player - white shoes, socks, shorts and a polo shirt. He even had two blue-finished metal rackets with him. It was always a different look with him.

Max watched him leave and was surprised he didn't get into the Mercedes, but instead walked out of the forecourt altogether, turned left and continued down the road.

Max finished his cigarette and went over to the counter to pay.

The brown-skinned man in the emerald-green suit and shiny shoes he'd noticed come in half an hour ago was still there, perched on his counter stool like a ravenous crow.

He had brilliantined wavy hair and wore a thin gold bracelet on his right wrist. He was holding Corrina's hand close to

5'

his mouth, poised to kiss it. She was blushing and looking at him through wide, sparkling eyes. She was smitten. Was he her boyfriend? It didn't seem so. He looked a lot older, early thirties.

Max reached the counter and pulled out his wallet.

Corrina didn't notice him until the man nodded Max's way and straightened himself up. She apologized, took the check down from a hook near the register and handed it to him.

But something was nagging at him, stopping him in his tracks. The guy was all wrong.

None of your business, he told himself. Pay and go.

Max had the right change, but he handed Corrina a twenty so he could stick around a little longer, check the guy out some more. Wouldn't hurt.

The guy watched Corrina's back as she turned. Max followed his stare to her ass, watched as he licked his bottom lip and mumbled something to himself.

The guy wasn't her boyfriend.

Max broke him down: the suit and shirt were real expensive, the sort that spoke money to burn. No one dressed like that to go to work, and most people couldn't afford those kind of clothes.

He checked the shoes. Black and green gator loafers, gold band across the middle - $500 a pair.

Drug dealers didn't dress like that in the day time.

But pimps did.

The guy sensed he was being observed because he turned his head and looked straight at Max. They locked eyes. The pimp had sharp green eyes, which matched his suit and probably explained why he'd chosen it. He had a smattering of freckles across his nose. Hispanic with a black bias.

Handsome motherfucker, but with a very hard edge to him.

He frowned aggressively at Max and stiffened his posture.

A challenge moved to his lips and his eyes narrowed. Then

he caught sight of Max's gun on his belt under his jacket, read the situation and turned away in one almost interchangeable motion.

Max told Corrina to keep the change and walked out.

Hot bitch, thought Carmine Desamours as he watched Corrina bend over to pick up the spoon she'd just dropped.

'You a dancer, baby? Es usted bailariri? he whispered to her, taking in the shapeliness of her ankles, the smooth, almost mannish musculature of her calves and the width and firmness of her thighs. She was two or three inches over five feet tall — the kind of size most men would want to protect. Protect and fuck: the perfect combination in a woman. He could almost see the money he'd make off her sweet ass.

'No,' she said, turning her head round and smiling at him over her shoulder, a strand of hair falling down past her cheek. He swore right then she was the best little thing he'd seen in at least six months — a straight up Diamond with Heart potential.

'Coulda fooled me.' He smiled, still keeping his voice low so he wouldn't wake the old codger sitting snoozing at the end of the counter by the kitchen door — Al, the manager.

He could see Shirley back in the kitchen smoking a cigarette, listening to a Beatles song on the radio, lost in her memories.

They'd had their grand opening on the Monday John Lennon got shot, 8 December, last year. He and his friend Sam had been their first paying customers, coming in after gator hunting out in the Glades. That was when he'd first clapped eyes on Corrina.

The diner was close to deserted as usual. He counted four other people. In the window booth near the entrance, a woman with short grey hair and a bright yellow T-shirt, nibbled on a bagel, while the man opposite her was shovel ling scrambled eggs and toast into his face and talking at the same time, spraying his plate with debris. Right at the very back were two other customers — a black man dressed up like Arthur Ashe, and a broad-shouldered white guy in a leather jacket, despite the stifling humidity outdoors.

After she'd served him the first time, Corrina had come back and told Carmine the white guy stank so bad she wanted to heave. He'd sprayed the inside of her wrists with the little bottle of French aftershave he always carried around with him, telling her it would ward off any evil stench. He'd held her hands and blown the perfume dry on her skin, looking her straight in the eyes as the alcohol evaporated.

He'd watched her olive skin blush purple as that little bit more of her gave in to him.

'Stinky Man no drink iss cafe,' Corrina said as she put together a clean cup and saucer, and added the spoon she'd picked up off the floor.

Ś'Maybe he was so loaded he mistook this place for a bar,'

Carmine said.

Corrina laughed and walked over to the end of the diner with the coffee pot in one hand, the crockery in the other.

He checked her figure out some more as she walked down the aisle. Unlike most white girls, she had real ass, high, round and firm like a black woman's. Nothing a man liked more than an ass like that: the better the cushion, the better the pushin'.

First he'd change her name to something commonplace, forgettable and untraceable. Next, Sam would break her in and break her down. He'd teach her to do absolutely everything she was asked to do and never say no. And when she was good and ready, he'd put her to work.

The way he saw things was very simple. In his world all women were potential hos. He rated them by looks and earning potential and categorized them by playing card suits. Tn order of superiority: Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs and

Spades. No royalty, no faces and strictly no jokers — just numbers.

Corrina's starter Games would be with rich old white tricks who had boats named after the trophy wives they'd lost their houses to the year before and crushes on their teenage daughter's best friends. They'd treat her real nice and gentle, purr all poetic and gaga through their drool and their dentures. The sex would be undemanding but uncomfortable, what with having to pretend she was getting the monster fuck of her young life under all that soft wheezing blubber. She'd learn to work them like cash registers.

She'd call them 'Big Daddy' and nickname their temperamental peckers 'Tonto' or 'Hot Rod' or 'Big Rocket' or sumsuchshit. She'd learn to feign love and attentiveness and interest, and in the process she'd grow a hard heart.

Then she'd move on to her rightful place, the escort circuit — aka the Diamond Trail. Her tricks would be younger high rollers, the ones who rented girls out for the weekend.

Starting price for a Diamond was $850 per day for a basic weekend rate, an extra $250 per day on holidays. The prices were for the girls only and excluded accommodation and transport. Carmine insisted his Cards travel and stay first class all the way, unless the trick was renting a villa or sumsuchshit, but if they could afford to do that then most likely they could afford to upgrade their Card to a Heart as well.

Hearts started at $2,000 a day, and they were worth it.

They were perfect in every way, like God had designed them from a wet dream - faces out oiElle and Cosmopolitan, bodies out of Playboy and Penthouse. Corrina was almost there, but not quite. Her face had a touch too much wetback about it, mostly around her mouth, which sagged slightly at the bottom when she spoke, showing too much lower gum and betraying the barrio paddling in her gene pool. He could see that side of her becoming more prominent in her looks as

time went on, because one thing about the life he was about to lead her into was that it always brought out a bitch's true nature, no matter how much make-up and affectation she buried it under.

All things working out as intended, he'd keep her in play until her looks peaked. She'd already told him she'd lied about her age to get this dogshit job. She was really seventeen, not twenty-one. That didn't matter. With the right clothes and make-up, she could easily pass for twenty. And at the age she was now, provided she kept herself in good shape, avoided drink and drugs and didn't eat too much, she could be a cash cow for at least seven or eight years.

When they were done Diamonds either left the Game outright and split back to the shitholes they'd run away from, or else they carried on. He busted the lingerers down to Clubs and made them work the hotels and uptown bars.

The money wasn't as good, the risks were higher and they had to turn twice the number of tricks they had before, but it was still way better than being the next suit down — Spades — and working the street, or else — the worst option of all — getting some kind of regular nine to five. He'd known a few who'd tried just that. 'Going straight,' they'd called it. Yeah, right. Within months they'd all gone straight back to him.

No point in selling your soul if you don't get the right price.

It wouldn't all be smooth sailing with Corrina. He took that for granted. In his business, there were ten shitstorms to every sunny day. Any number of things could go badly wrong every time a Card went out on the Game - cops, pregnancy, VD and violence. Carmine would have the Diamond and Heart tricks checked out first to make sure they weren't pigs or feebs, and then he'd find out how much they could afford to pay and how much they had to lose.

He used a PI called Clyde Beeson to do the background checks. Beeson was expensive, but he was as quick as he

was thorough. It usually took him under a week to find out everything and anything about a person.

Of course, there was just no predicting people, especially the rich. Some tricks turned nasty and liked to knock a bitch about, just for the hell of it, 'cause they could. Most of the time the damage was nothing too serious — a split lip or a black eye, but occasionally they'd overstep the mark and fuck their looks up good. His operation didn't skip more than a beat or two because he'd recycle the Card back as a Club or, if they were fucked-up beyond what a reasonably priced surgeon could fix, he'd use them as Spades. In truth, that was a pretty extreme scenario and had happened only twice in the seven years he'd been running his Deck.

A hot Creole Card called Hortensia had gone out to the Caymans with a Wall Street type for the weekend and didn't come back when she was supposed to. The guy rang Carmine up and said the bitch had freaked out on him and gone AWOL that morning. Carmine sent Beeson out to look for her. He found her thirty-seven hours later, back in Miami, holed up in a shitty hotel, a loaded gun in one hand, a bottle of sleeping pills in the other, trying to decide which way out she wanted to go. Looking back and seeing the state of her now, Carmine didn't know why the bitch hadn't just gone ahead and pulled the fucking trigger. He would've done. Mr Wall Street had given her a shot which had put her to sleep while he'd tattooed the whole of the bitch's beautiful face so she looked like someone out of Kiss. Although Carmine had wanted to cut Hortensia loose, she'd begged to be kept in the Deck. Good thing he'd agreed to it too, because now she had a small but loyal clientele of weirdo freaks who went in for her kind of looks. Then there was Valerie, a Diamond who'd been jumped outside a hotel and pack raped by a bunch of jocks in the back of a van. When they were through, they'd thrown her out at seventy miles an hour on the freeway. She survived but looked like the

5ť I Elephant Man's twin sister. Carmine couldn't think of anyone who'd want to fuck that, but men never stopped surprising him. Like Hortensia, Valerie had her paying devotees.

'Su perfume es bueno' Corrina said as she came back from serving Stinkyman, sniffing her wrist and beaming that smile at him. He thought it her worst feature. It made her look simple and stupid. He'd make her drop it.

'Solamente el major,' Carmine replied. It often baffled him how dumb a lot of these bitches were, believing any old shit they were told as long as the teller looked the part.

Corrina was a case in point. She thought he was a photographer from New Orleans called Louis De Ville. That's what it said on the business card he'd given her. It was a classy-looking thing — thick textured cream card with his name embossed in metallic emerald-green capitals. His profession, address and number were printed in smaller lettering below. The number and address were for a downtown office block. The office was empty but for three phones and three answering machines, each corresponding to one of his chosen identities. He had a specific profession and business card to match a target Card's dreams. They all wanted to be at least one of the impossible trinity — actress, singer or model - in that order. Accordingly, he'd pose as a talent scout, an agent or a photographer; never too big a cheese, like a director or producer, because that came over as too good to be true and even the dumbass ones'd get suspicious.

He'd already broken the ice with Corrina. He'd taken her out twice, walked her home twice. The last time he'd kissed her goodnight on the doorstep of the shithole house she rented a room in. He knew she wasn't a virgin from the way she kissed. She'd stuck her tongue in his mouth. He could have gone further with her then, but he hadn't fucked a target since the first month of his first year on the job. That had been a mistake. The intimacy had messed with his head, made it harder for him to get nasty with the bitch when

she'd got out of line. He'd shared something with her, something fragile and unguarded, something that was all his and she'd tried to turn it on him. She hadn't got far, but since then he'd vowed never to let one of those bitches get close to him again. He left all that to Sam.

Corrina was going to meet Sam tonight, although she didn't know it yet.

Carmine checked his watch. It had gone i o a.m.

The brother in the tennis-player costume settled his bill and left. He looked like he belonged in the Village People in that get-up. Carmine followed him out the door with his eyes, the slow walk across the forecourt, the way he stopped to check out his fine Mercedes coupe and then looked back at the diner to see if he could spot its owner, probably correctly guessing that it belonged to the fly-looking, green eyed brother he'd seen as he'd left. Carmine thought the brother might be getting into the dirty-brown Camaro parked nearby, but it wasn't the right kind of ride for him.I He figured him as a classier type, a Porsche or Ferrari manŚ — if he had the bread._ A few minutes later the white guy in the leather jacketŚ came up to the counter to pay his bill. Close-up he lookedh a bit of a mess. His face was pale, unshaven, sweaty and bad tempered; there were bags under his bloodshot blue eyes.

Carmine could feel him scrutinizing him from the side, taking in his fine suit and shoes. It was an intense looking over too, the kind a guy wanting to start a fight might give you to get you riled up enough to ask him what was up.

The man gave Corrina a twenty and drew a bit closer to Carmine.

The motherfucker stank like he'd fucked a skunk in a distillery: shitty bad breath, booze, cigarettes and stale sweat.

The guy's stare stayed on him until he started to feel small, like he was being looked at under a microscope.

What's with this guy? thought Carmine. Is he a pissed off redneck?

Carmine put his game face on and turned to Stinkyman and looked him straight in his squinty eyes.

Stinkyman met his glare full-on and threw it back at him.

Scary ass motherfucker! thought Carmine, but he didn't let it show. Bitch! Give this peckerwood his fucken' change so's he can be outta my damn face!

Then he saw something glinting under the guy's jacket.

He broke the stare and followed the light to a pair of cuffs and the piece Stinkyman was wearing on his hip.

Shit — a cop!

Carmine felt like a pussy but he turned away, none-of my-business, look-the-other-way, you-just-carry-on-and-act like-I-ain't-here style. He thought about having to explain the switchblade and the roll of cash in his pockets. He thought about the cigar tube full of the beans he'd picked up from Sam's for his mother.

He'd never been in trouble with the police his whole life.

He ran his business real careful and, besides, the SNBC saw to it that the right palms were greased.

The cop was still staring at him. Corrina barely had any bills in the register so she was counting out his change in quarters. He could almost feel the guy knew what he was, like he could look into his skull and read all his thoughts, see all his plans.

Bullshit, he told himself. Cops ain't psychic. They just get lucky.

Corrina was turning to give the cop his change when he told her to keep it and abruptly walked out of the diner.

“Comemierdar she hissed, and dumped the quarters back in the drawer and hit the no sale button.

'He ain't that bad,' Carmine said. 'He gave you money for nothing.'

'Den him grande comemierda,' Corrina said, holding out her hands wide apart.

You'll go far, thought Carmine.

Ten minutes later Carmine walked out of the diner and headed for his car.

He was real proud of his dark blue Mercedes coupe convertible with its beige leather interior and gunmetal blue rims. Driving it was pure pleasure, gliding through the streets in his own unassailable, aerodynamic little world, top down, radio on, volume up.

He took his car keys out of his pocket and smiled. The morning had been a success. Now, if the bitch was waiting for him where he'd told her tonight, he'd be made. After he was done with her, he'd take a drive around Coconut Grove and reconnoitre for some more targets. That was his favourite part of the job; the one which only he could do. Any motherfucker could be a pimp - nigger, spic, peckerwood, nip, slope, it didn't matter. But no man had his special talent, his magic eye for Card-spotting. God hadn't given him much, but he'd given him that.

His right leg suddenly smacked into something he hadn't noticed, something hard and solid. He fell flat on his face and his car keys shot out of his hand. He started to push himself up when something heavy landed on the middle of his back, and pinned him down on the ground.

'Hands out, palms flat, spread your fingers,' a voice above him said. The man smelled of dead booze and fresh cigarettes.

The cop frisked him and tossed his pockets. Out clattered his gold lighter, switchblade, bankroll, his small bottle of aftershave, his wallet and the grey cigar tube. The cop picked up everything except the aftershave and lighter.

Shit! Not the tube!

'Get up!'

Carmine did as he was told and came face to face with those mean, blue, booze-boiled eyes again. The cop was shorter than him but much broader and way stronger looking.

'Louis De Ville, photographer . . . Jack Duval, agent . . .

Harold Bernini, talent scout. . .' The cop read aloud from the small set of business cards he'd found in Carmine's wallet, flicking each at his face when he was done. 'Who the fuck are you? What's your name?'

'Louis De Ville,' Carmine answered.

'That so?' The cop looked at him angrily. 'Where you from Lou-wee}'

'Around here?'

'Not with that accent,' the cop said. 'What is that? Haitian?

You Haitian?'

'No,' Carmine lied. 'I'm from New Orleans.'

'I know New Orleans. Which part?'

'French Quarter,' Carmine lied again. 'Left a long time ago though.'

'But your accent never went there.' The cop snorted. 'I say you're Haitian. What d'you want with that girl in there?'

'What would you want with a fine bitch like that?' Carmine smiled, trying to get some man to man empathy going, but deeply regretted it when, out of nowhere, the cop slammed his fist into his solar plexus. Pain exploded all the way to Carmine's spine and up into his chest. He fell to one knee with a sharp cry and clutched his gut hard as the punch reverberated all the way up to the base of his skull. Then he retched hot orange juice all over his $850 suit.

'You're a pimp and you're recruiting her.'

'Fuck you!' Carmine spat. 'I ain't no pimp, you racist redneck pig motherfucker!'

The cop squatted down next to him and shook the grey cigar tube.

'What's in here, Willie Dynamite? Drugs?'

6 'No - seeds.'

'Seeds? The cop unscrewed the tube.

ŚYeah — seeds. Like what you plant in the ground and watch grow motherfucker.'

The cop shook out the smooth beans into his palm. They were dark brown and shiny, like giant kidney beans dipped in thick chocolate.

“What you growin'?'

'They ain't for me, they're for my mother.'

'What? You got one?' the cop said, looking at the seeds once more and putting them back in the tube.

'Very funny,' Carmine replied. 'Look. We can do us a deal here, man. You gimme back the tube and the rest of my shit and let me get on outta here; you can keep the money.'

The cop looked at him and right then Carmine flinched because he swore the thunderous look the cop gave him was a prelude to another punch.

'I could bust you right here and now for attemptin' to bribe a police officer,' the cop said. 'What's your name? Tell me the truth or I'll take you in.'

'I ain't got to tell you nothin 'cause I ain't done nothin', 'cept in your imagination. Y'all bent out of shape 'cause you see a black man drivin' a nice car, wearin' nice clothes and gettin' hisself some fine-ass pussy,' Carmine said angrily.

You got me all wrong. I ain't got nothin' against black folk. Quite the contrary,' the cop said. 'I just hate pieces of shit like you. See, only exist because you exist. My role in life is to make your life constant fuckin' hell, and your role in life is to suffer or die - preferably the latter after a lot of the former.' The cop picked up Carmine's car keys. 'On your feet.'

Carmine got up and almost fell over. The pain in his gut was so intense he had to look to make sure he wasn't bleeding. He was sure the bastard had fucked him up inside.

The cop made him get in the car and cuffed his hands to the steering wheel.

He popped the trunk and rummaged inside. He didn't find anything besides cleaning products, cloths, a jack and a spare tyre. He looked in the glove compartment and found his licence and registration.

'Carmine Des-a-moures,' the cop read out. 'Kind of name's that?'

'It's a name. What's yours?'

'None of your business.'

'Suits you.'

The cop studied the licence for a long moment, probably trying to see if it was fake or not. It was the real deal, but the cop didn't look convinced. He tossed it into the car and uncuffed Carmine.

'Remember me and remember this: I am going to be in your shit for the duration. I catch you tryin' to recruit girls again I'll bust you for real, and I'll see to it you share a cell with some redneck ass bandido who turns you out so much you'll shit a whole watermelon with a smile on your face,'

he said, tossing Carmine his wallet, lighter and aftershave bottle. 'Now0.' He stabbed his finger towards the exit.

'What about my seeds, man? You don't need 'em,'

Carmine pleaded.

'Which part of “go” did you miss, shitstick?'

'Motherfucker!' Carmine spat as he started up the car.

Max found a payphone on 5 th Street and called Striker Swan.

Striker was Billy Ray Swan's uncle. He'd done ten years for armed robbery. He'd been a serious badass before he'd gone away. He'd met his match behind bars and the experience had changed him from the inside out. He'd been rehabilitated of his worst excesses but he still wasn't doing straight time, making his living mostly running hot cars in and out of the state, yet the violence he'd been notorious for in his youth never re-entered the frame.

He'd loved his little nephew more than he'd loved anyone in his whole life — except, perhaps, for his sister-in-law Rachel on that one hot night when Billy Ray was conceived, or so people said. The two did look more than a little alike, even though that could just have been the Swan family genes.

Whatever the reality, Striker had been the most broken up by the kid's murder.

Swan answered the phone at the fifth ring. Max spoke to him through a handkerchief over the receiver and in the only accent he could make fly —Jimmy Canetjiouya.

'Striker?'

'Yeah,' Striker answered in a yawn. 'Who's this?'

'Never mind that. I got me a message to give you. Dean Waychek, guy that killed lil' Billy Ray? Wanna know where you can find him?'

Max didn't wait to hear the answer. He told him.

Max had met Swan once, very briefly, outside the police station, the day Waychek had been freed. Max had apologized to him. Striker — six feet two of white-trash muscle,

I tattoos and freckles - had given Max the briefest of nods and the faintest of smiles, as if to say, “You're a pig, so I hate you, but you're OK.'

Striker didn't say a word on the phone. He didn't even reply when Max asked him if he'd got the name of the motel.

But Max knew he'd got it all right.

Max hung up and got back in his car.

As he drove away he thought of Dean Waychek, remembered his smugness in the interrogation room, the way he'd been so sure he was going to get away with it.

'Adios, motherfucker,' Max said.

Carmine would never admit it to anyone, but he was scared of thunder. He didn't have a big quake-in-your-boots phobia, yet whenever the skies rumbled he'd get a sense of real and imminent danger, of something about to go very wrong in his life. He'd have to get out of the way, find a building to shelter in until it was over. He didn't like people seeing him afraid, especially not his Cards, current or prospective, and most of all he didn't like nobody knowing about the twitch he got in his upper left cheek, a spasm so strong and violent it jerked his face halfway up his skull, closing his eye and opening up the side of his mouth to show the world his teeth. He was getting it now, listening to the storm raging outside, through the walls of the bathroom, over the sound of the tap filling up the tub. He slapped himself hard to make it stop. As usual, it didn't.

He looked around the vast bathroom — spotless white tiles covered the floor and walls; the large basin, bidet, toilet, deep bathtub and separate shower area were all gleaming, while all the fixtures, down to the pipes, were gold plated.

There were white scales and a mirror by the door. But the highlight was the turquoise aquarium that ran almost the entire breadth and half the height of the wall opposite the tub. It was filled with a multitude of beautiful fish which glided, wriggled, hung or hovered across various tiers in the tank, some close enough to the surface to grab, others occupying the middle and showing off their colours, while a few avoided the limelight altogether and hid out in the rocks and vegetation below. They, Carmine decided, were the schemers and scavengers, the ones with the agendas, the

plotters, the ones he related to the most. Sometimes, when the bathroom was dark, and the light, shadow and current in the tank came together in the right way to create a gentle, billowing effect that ran from one end of the glass to the other and back again, the aquarium resembled a magical bejewelled tapestry floating in mid-air.

When he was growing up in Haiti, his father had told him that thunder was the sound of the gates of heaven opening up so the angels could come down and kill the world's sinners. All the flashes and bolts of lightning were their swords, cutting the heads off the evil ones, and the rain that came afterwards was to wash their bodies away into the sea.

If he was good, his dad had told him, he'd never have to be afraid of thunder, ever.

Back then they'd all lived in a two-bedroom house overlooking the Carrefour slum in Port-au-Prince. They hadn't been rich but they hadn't been as badly off as their near neighbours who never had enough to eat and walked around in rags. Carmine's mother was a mambo, a voodoo priestess: she cast spells, read fortunes, talked to the spirits of the dead and practised abortion. She had quite a clientele, ranging from the poor-as-dirt country folk who walked ten days to see her, to senior government ministers and society women who'd come to the house in chauffeur-driven cars.

She was rumoured to have briefly cured one of Papa Doc's daughters of lesbianism and another of myopia. Carmine had been her hound — her assistant — as soon as he could walk. He'd helped her pick the herbs and prepare the animals she used for her potions, sat in the same room when she told people their fates with tarot cards, and, when he was old enough to know his way around town, he'd delivered messages from his mother's lips to the ears of her clients.

His mother didn't like talking about his dad. Depending on what kind of mood she was in, she would head off the subject when she sensed it coming up and turn the

6c; conversation in another direction, or she'd clam up altogether and shake her head threateningly, or else she'd get out and out aggressive. The closest she ever came to talking about his dad was when she'd tell him that he looked)ust like him, and that he was just like him, only even more of a loser. And she only ever said that when she got what he had dubbed the ShitFits — terrifyingly intense rages she flew into once in a while.

Carmine's memories of his dad were few but mostly very fond. He remembered him as tall and handsome, always in a black suit and fedora, despite the heat. He was around the house a lot more than his mom: he used to sit outside smoking cigarettes — Comme II Faut, the Haitian brand — and either reading the Bible or a tattered brochure about holidays to America. He talked about how one day they'd go there together, just the two of them, father and son; maybe they'd even stay for good, not come back ever. He made Carmine promise not to tell his mom, just like he made Carmine promise to keep another secret from her too.

His mom would often travel to see her most important clients. She'd be gone for days, even weeks. When that happened all kinds of women would come by the house to see his father, mostly at night, but once in a while in the day too. They always woke Carmine up with the noise they made in the bedroom. He never complained. In fact it made him laugh. He remembered there being many different women at first, then it became just the one, his favourite. She was called Lucita. She was light brown and green eyed like his daddy, with the same soft curly hair too, only hers was longer and fell past her shoulders when she let it down. Her and his daddy spoke in Spanish as opposed to the Kreyol he usually spoke to everyone else. She always brought Carmine candy, stroked his face and asked him how he was doing.

She smelled great too, like marshmallows and French soap.

She was his first love.

7° The only memory he had of his mother and dad together was when they fought over him. She'd been the disciplinarian in the house, the one who made the rules and beat him for disobeying. She had a thin stick with flayed ends and dried buds growing out of the side. If he disobeyed her or talked back she'd beat him with it across the knuckles, which hurt like a bitch, or across the ass and the backs of his legs. At least that was the idea, but whenever she got it in her mind to beat him, a ShitFit wasn't far behind and when it overwhelmed her she'd switch from the stick to her fists and feet. One day she'd started beating him because he'd forgotten to run an errand. For the first time ever his dad intervened. He came into the room, wrapped his arms around her, picked her up and carried her, kicking and screaming, into the bedroom. Carmine heard them shouting — well, more his mother — for what seemed like for ever.

She'd screamed at his dad that she hated him, that Carmine was just like him, that he could get out of her house and take his son with him. So his dad had done just that. The two of them had walked out of the house and gone into Port-au-Prince. There his dad took him to Lucita's house.

He didn't know how long he stayed there — it seemed a long time, maybe a month — but he was happier than he'd ever been at home with his mother. In fact, looking back, it was the happiest time of his life. His father and Lucita took him out to the beach, to the Dominican Republic, to carnival.

He started playing with other kids his own age which his mother had forbidden him from doing. He never got beaten.

And Lucita used to sing him to sleep some nights, in words he couldn't understand but loved anyway.

It all ended very suddenly one afternoon when a group of armed men came to the house in a long black car. They'd knocked on the door, yelling for his dad to come out or else they'd burn it down. His dad had gone to the door and they'd grabbed him and dragged him into the middle of the

7'

street where they'd forced him to lie face down on the ground. One man put his foot on his dad's head, while another patted him back down and then drew an X on his shirt in red pen and shot him in the spot. Carmine had run out of the house screaming. He'd tried to grab his dad's arms to pick him up off the ground, but he was convulsing, arms and legs slapping at the asphalt like an epileptic swimmer's as foamy blood pumped out from under him. Carmine remembered how his dad had tried to say something, but couldn't get any words out because of the blood filling up his mouth. As Carmine became schooled in the ways of the street and learned about guns, he discovered that one of the most painful places to get shot is through the heart because, in its final panicked moments the brain diverts the blood flow to the open wound to close and heal it, causing brief but absolute agony for the dying victim. His father's convulsions stopped, until the only sign he was still alive was a twitch in the left side of his face, a violent tugging which Carmine had thought at the time was an invisible angel, trying one last time to pull his dad up on his feet before it was too late.

The men bundled Carmine into their car and drove off.

On the way a storm broke. There was nothing like those Haitian storms. They sounded like all the wars in heaven had broken out on earth; lightning lashed at the landscape and thunder roared and boomed, followed by a deluge of rain. His father's killers had pulled over and stopped until it passed. Carmine had looked out of the window, trying to see if the rain would carry his dad's body into the sea. He saw nothing. He concluded his dad had been a good person.

They drove him to his mother's house. She was waiting for him at the doorway and led him to the bathroom. There was a large round grey metal tub in the middle. It was filled with hot water doused with Dettol. She'd never washed him before, it had always been his dad. Carmine's clothes were covered in blood and when she asked him to take them off

72

1 he told her he wanted to keep them on. His mother produced her stick and said, 'Do as I say because there's no one else here for you now. It's just me and you for as long as I say so. Now, take off your clothes and get in the bath.'

And so, reading he had no choice but to surrender for the time being, he did as he was told without further protest or hint of complaint. That was the beginning of their relationship, which had then evolved into one of tyrant and subject, mistress and slave, one growing ever more powerful as the other grew slowly weaker and more insignificant. Or so he let it appear.

They left Haiti for Miami when he was about eight or nine. Memories of his father moved to the back of his mind, to a place he retreated to when things with his mother got real bad. He replayed them there and thought of what might have been and how different his life could have turned out if those men hadn't come and killed his dad; men he knew his mother had sent. He created a fantasy world, a padded panic room he could run to when the humiliation of the real one and the reality of his place in it got too much. In that world he was with his father and Lucita. He himself was still six years old, with everything in front of him and everything to live for. He often thought about Lucita and wondered what had happened to her. He couldn't remember if she'd been there in the road with his father, or if she'd stayed in the house. Had the men killed her too?

It had long bothered him, the not knowing — not just about her, but about his father too. He didn't know where he was from originally, what he'd done before he'd met his mother. He didn't even know his name. His mother kept all that from him.

He sliced his fingers through the water in the metal tub.

It was boiling hot and reeked of Dettol, that safe but sour plastic stench he associated with his father's murder. Just like he associated the tub with that day. The tub had come

with them from Haiti - the sides dented, the handles and bolts rusted, a film of lime scale dried into the dull metal, the inside encrusted with greeny-grey grime. It had once been big enough for him to drown in — she'd tried once, when he still talked back — but now it was too small for him to do more than half crouch.

She always made him take his baths too hot, deliberately, so the water would scald him and the metal would heat up and burn his feet. She'd had a special tap and boiler installed, just for him to fill his tub. He was forbidden from using the main tub. That was for her alone. Normally she'd shower, but whenever she was seeing her lover, she'd have a bath and it would be a real occasion. She'd be in there at least two hours. She'd put candles at the end of her tub and sweet-scented oils in the water; she'd turn off the lights and play tapes of the sea washing up on the beach.

He heard the familiar sound of his mother coming down the stairs, the clippety-ro, dippcty-cop trotting pony rhythm of her feet on the boards, followed by the sound of the two gold lockets she wore around her neck bumping together with a sbhbh-put, shbbb-put as she approached the door.

Thankfully the thunder had stopped a while ago and with it his twitch, so he had no problem putting on his game face - the game being that of the dutiful, loving and admiring twenty-nine-year-old son, happy to see his mother who was coming to give him his bath.

She entered quickly, all 4 feet 9 inches of her, opening and closing the door so fast he could've sworn she'd walked right through it like a ghost. No smile, no nod, no hello, as usual.

Eva Desamours was more striking than she was beautiful.

Her skin was dark and rich, unlined and unmarked, bar a single pockmark beneath her left eye; her forehead was wide, her cheekbones high and prominent, while the lower half of her face tapered down acutely to a pointed, well-defined

chin, accentuating her prominent downturned mouth whose full lips — dark brown with a hint of purple — for ever reminded Carmine of a drying grape whenever she pursed them. He never looked her in the eye because he was scared to. Marginally slanted and unblinking, cold, near motionless and very very black, her eyes fixed on the world with a merciless detachment, as if she already knew its fate and didn't care to change it. She was also completely bald whether naturally or by choice, Carmine had neither plucked up the courage to ask nor been able to work out. She wore an array of wigs styled in a straight black bob that fitted her so well they looked like her real hair.

Eva had a man. They'd been together for as long as he could remember. It was a casual relationship. Either he'd come visit once or twice a month, or she would disappear on long weekends. Carmine had never met him nor seen him nor heard his voice. Nor did he know his name. Eva just called him imon type' — her guy. He'd sometimes heard the two of them going at it - loud, raucous and rapturous, her cries duetting with his bull-like snorts and gasps to the accompaniment of quaking floorboards.

'Take your clothes off and get in your bath. I haven't got long,' she snapped. They spoke English to each other and had done ever since they'd come to Miami, twenty years ago. Carmine had learnt his English from the black kids in his neighbourhood, and he'd picked up Spanish from the Cuban kids he'd hung out with. He was often mistaken for Cuban, something he never corrected because to admit to being Haitian in Miami was tantamount to tattooing 'loser'

on your forehead.

He took off his robe and hung it on the hooks by the towel rack. He felt his skin rise in goosebumps even though the bathroom was warm. Sometimes she came straight out and told him what was bugging her but usually she liked to wait, hold on to it, let it brew and ferment and build some

more in her head, circling him all the while before getting to the point. It was always worse when she prolonged it because he could always sense her fury, always knew what was coming. He could virtually see the rage massing behind her brow, those dark and very deadly legions of anger she had total command over, which she could unleash or withdraw at the drop of a hat.

Wait,' she said as he was about to step into the water.

'Turn around.' He did as she asked. He'd never been ashamed of standing naked before her. She'd seen him naked every day of his life since the day of his father's murder.

'What's that?' She was pointing at the cauliflower-shaped bruise in the middle of his abdomen.

'Someone hit me,' Carmine said.

'Who?'

'A cop.'

'Why?'

'I don't know,' Carmine said. He hadn't told her about the waitress. She'd been intended for the other Deck he was building, the one his mother didn't know about.

'Did you provoke him?'

'Of course not.'

'Where did this happen?'

'Out near Coconut Grove.'

Were you working?'

'Yeah.'

'Did he see you working?'

'No. It wasn't like that.'

'And his name? What is his name?'

'He didn't tell me that.” Carmine chuckled at the stupidity of the question. She gave him one of her fierce black-eyed looks, the kind that could cut through walls.

'Was he in uniform?'

'Plainclothes.'

She came up close to him and touched the heart of the

76

J bruise. It smarted and he caught his breath as memories of the pain echoed back through his body. Sam had given him an ice pack for it at the shop, but it hadn't helped much.

'Did he take the seeds?'

'No. I've put them in the kitchen.' Luckily for him Sam had ordered plenty of extra calabar beans. Failure to bring them back would have provoked the ShitFit to end all ShitFits, because it would have meant they couldn't go through with tomorrow night's ceremony.

She put her nose close to the bruise and breathed in deep and long through flared nostrils. Eyes closed, she held her breath and tilted back her head and rocked it gently from side to side, moving her mouth like she was tasting what she'd inhaled. Then her face turned sour and she opened her eyes and breathed out.

'This cop drinks,' she said. 'He will be a problem to us.

A big problem.'

'How?' he asked.

'I don't know yet,' she said. 'Now get in the bath.'

She'd washed him every evening at 6 p.m. sharp since the day of his father's murder. He knew it was way wrong, that it shouldn't be happening at his age, but who was he to stop her, to protest or even complain? He'd tried to, in his late teens, but she'd said that because she was his mother she had a right to wash him, even when they were both old. For most of his life he'd gone along with whatever she'd said and done, whatever she'd asked of him without question, not because he'd wanted to but because it was the easiest way. The alternative didn't bear contemplating. A long long time ago he'd tried his hand at rebellion and the consequences had been disproportionately severe.

The water was cooking him, as always, but he was used to it now. Just like he was used to the hard scrubbing brush she cleaned him with. Years ago, when she'd first bought the brush, the bristles had been fairly soft, but two decades

of calcified soap had turned them into mini stalagmites which tore hairline strips out of his skin, especially around the bonier parts of his body. His back and chest were covered with a latticework of fine interwoven pale scars, which, when they caught the light, made his upper body seem enveloped in a wet gossamer web, like he was a spider's prey.

She soaped the brush with Dettol soap and scrubbed his neck, shoulders, arms and upper back first. Then he stood up and she handed him the soap so he could wash his cock, balls and ass with his hands, the only concession to self-administered hygiene she'd permitted him in the past ten years, after allowing him to wash his face and brush his teeth. They didn't talk at all. The bathroom filled with the sound of the bristles' shallow scrapings on his skin, almost the noise of a saw inching through a plank of wood, accompanied by her two lockets, the shhhh-iput of the lockets clapping together under her blouse, keeping time with her motions and the swing of her heavy pendulous breasts. The bristles dislodged scabs from still tender healing skin and bit deep into old wounds. He stared hard at the aquarium, disassociating his mind from the sparks of pain flying through his nerves. He concentrated on a group of half a dozen oranda goldfish swimming in the middle of the tank.

They were graceful fish, like amphibian roosters with their feathery dorsal fins and bushy tails, and traffic-signal-red heads and the metallic orangey-blue of their bodies. He watched them move in single file, equidistant one from the other, simple and perfect. And then, as he stood up, he noticed a flutter at the end of the line as the last oranda collided with the one in front. That goldfish dropped down an inch allowing the last one to take its place in the chain. It hovered without moving for a moment, seemingly confused, before swimming upwards and rejoining the line. It never recovered its pace. It perpetually lagged behind, only follow ing the group in quick spurts, where it would catch up and briefly regain formation before dropping out. When Carmine looked harder at the oranda he thought he noticed an off-coloured patch on its side, a small dull grey mark close to its dorsal fin. But it was gone before he could see for sure.

She washed his feet and legs last, and then he stepped out of the water and onto the floor. Later he'd have to empty the tub, clean and disinfect it and then dry it before carrying it downstairs to the basement where he lived.

After washing him, his mother dried him vigorously top to toe with a white towel, except for the parts he'd washed himself, which he did once she'd finished with him.

'The ceremony's for tonight,' she said.

'But it's Friday.“

'It's happening after midnight.'

iAfter midnight. . .' Carmine knew that meant it would be a sacrifice as opposed to a simple execution — which meant this would be a Saturday Night Barons Club and he'd have to attend in full dress. 'Who is it?' But he knew before she told him.

'Jean Assad. You know how Solomon feels about thieves and drug addicts in the organization.' She fixed him with one of her immobile, cut-through-anything looks. Carmine met her stare but, as usual, found he couldn't hold it and looked away at the gleaming white bidet. He'd known Jean Assad in Haiti and they'd been on good if distant terms in Miami. Jean had been on the run for six months.

'Where'd they find him?'

'In Canada,' she said. iUimbecile. Thought he could escape us.'

The cigar tube of calabar beans was waiting for her in the middle of the kitchen table. The tube reeked of Carmine's fear, a thin metallic smell of old coins and vinegar that came from him whenever he'd done something wrong. It was so strong she could smell it from the doorway. Eva wondered if he hadn't momentarily lost the tube on his way over. It would be just like him. Clumsy.

Eva went to the cupboards under the sink and pulled out one of the brand new, white plastic chopping boards she used for her potions. She then took out a scalpel and a mortar and pestle, also all new, and brought them over to the table. She opened the tube and emptied the contents on the board — oval shaped like American footballs with the ends filed down, their shiny maroon-brown skins the colour of eggplant crossed with chocolate, hard on the outside, deadly on the in, eight like she'd asked for. She put seven back in the tube and closed it.

After she was done making the potion she'd incinerate everything to make sure it wouldn't end up getting mixed with food. The beans were poisonous. It took just half a bean to kill a man. She'd once fed one to someone in a fresh salad and watched him croak. It hadn't been pretty. First he'd salivated uncontrollably, spit bubbling out of his mouth like he'd swallowed a stream, then his eyes and sweat glands had opened up, as the poison had gone into his veins and arteries, gradually constricting them as it flowed, closing down his blood flow and slowing down his heart, beat by beat, until all the life in him was throttled from within. It was said, by people who'd seen someone die of calabar

1

poisoning, that once the poison started closing down the inner circuits, they had heard the flapping of wings. The closer to death the louder the flapping became until the final five minutes, when their faces froze completely and the only movement came from their eyes, which were still fully conscious. Many said they looked upwards, high above them, in mid-space, and their eyes were utterly terrified. Her victim had got that look too.

She went over to the refrigerator and took out a black clay bottle of holy water and poured it into a metal stewpot, which she then set on the gas hob and lit. As the water began to heat, she quartered the bean, put it into the pestle and ground it to a sticky paste, which was then put to one side of the table.

She went back to the cupboard under the sink and took out a packet of handmade, specially designed Charles de Villeneuve tarot cards, imported from Switzerland. They were the only ones she ever used. The packet was brand new. The cards came in an elegant dark brown wooden box which contained the cards in a drawer lined with purple baize, which never failed to remind her of a huge matchbox merged with a coffin. The cards were wrapped in a black velvet drawstring bag, closed at the side with a red wax seal bearing the company's insignia, this time reminding her of the Smith & Wesson logo on the grip of her .38. The cards were thick, high-quality cardboard.

The backs were mostly black with a deep crimson border and a small, almost cartoonish image of the sun, rendered, in gold leaf, as a round, slightly cross-eyed face set in the middle of sprouting rays. Without turning them over, she fanned the pack out on the table and counted anticlockwise from the beginning. The manufacturer always packed the cards in the same order. Minor Arcana last, in suits — first Cups, then Coins, then Swords, then Wands.

Fourteen cards in each suit, face cards first, then the

numbers: King to Ace. She found the card, turned it over and smiled.

The King of Swords.

Depending on the reading she was giving, the King of Swords could either be a powerful and influential ally and friend or a fearsome enemy, one who would stop at nothing and use force if he had to.

The thing she loved second about the de Villeneuve cards - apart from their magical powers which, if the person using them had the right amount of faith, could turn them into periscopes into the future — was their rich and vibrant colours. They reminded her of the voodoo paintings she'd grown up with in Haiti.

She put the card on the chopping board, then gathered up the rest and put them in a black refuse bag. She took the scalpel and sliced the card lengthwise into six strips. She then sliced each strip a dozen times, so she had something close to confetti. She added the card to the pestle and mixed it in with the ground calabar beans, before scraping the contents out into the now boiling water.

Once complete, the potion would have to settle and cool for a few hours before being fed to its recipient.

Eva was about to begin to speak her spell when she heard Carmine lumber past the door with the tub on his back, heading for the basement where he lived, out of sight and sound. He made as little noise as possible, like he always had, the little creep; even at his age he was still as terrified of her as he had been when he'd been a little boy - terrified of little old her, fifty-four years old, under five feet tall without her lifts and ninety-eight pounds soaking wet. Pathetic.

Carmine went to the basement and put the tub down on the floor. There were no windows in there and it was pitch black without the light, but that was always comforting to

him after the harsh, sterile whiteness of the bathroom. He took off his dressing gown and threw it where the leather armchair was ready to receive it. He knew every inch of the room so well he could find the smallest things in the dark.

It was a trick Solomon Boukman had taught him, back when they'd been as close as brothers, before the organization had grown into the multi-tentacled monster it was now and he'd evolved with it and in the process grown cold and distant, even with those he'd come up with, those who knew him best and would do anything for him.

Still, standing there naked, back in his world, Carmine couldn't help but smile a little at his cleverness and cunning.

He may be pathetic in his mother's eyes, but he was fooling her this time, and fooling her good. Every tyrant must fall.

She was no exception. And her fall would be mighty, all the way back to hell.

IO

Jean Assad opened his eyes and immediately wished he hadn't. He'd woken up in the heart of the abattoir, with mere moments left to live. He prayed - no begged — that Solomon would show him mercy and do him quick; that he'd forget all about the bad stuff that had brought him down here and remember the good: their long history together, the way he'd been there with him from the start, always loyal and dependable, always a believer. Yet one look at them all, the diadem of bleak accusatory eyes bearing down on him through the death's head paint, and he knew it wasn't to be.

He was going out the bad way.

He'd heard rumours about this place, about the things that went on down here, but he'd never believed any of them, ever. He was as superstitious as any Haitian, but he hadn't bought into those stories people came out with about the circle of twelve giant Baron Samedis and the man sat in the middle and what happened to him.

was all true. So far.

He couldn't move at all, not a muscle, except for his eyes. The rest of him was frozen, locked down, paused between heartbeats. His body felt unbelievably heavy, bones made of mercury-filled lead, propping up skin weighted down with cannon balls. He couldn't open his mouth. His lips and jaw wouldn't part. So he was breathing through his nose, and that with great difficulty, the air having to scrape its way through tightly blocked nostrils, barely making it into his lungs. And then there was a great painful, immovable mass at the bottom of his stomach, like he'd eaten a huge meal his digestive juices just couldn't break down; it was

hanging around in his gut, going nowhere, slowly festering.

He looked up and all around him, as far as he could. He met twelve pairs of eyes looking down with interchangeable hatred and contempt. He couldn't tell old friends from lifelong foes, but he was sure they were both there, side by side — that's what he'd heard happened. Their faces were completely unrecognizable under the make-up — half pancake-white from forehead to upper lip, then black from there to the lower neck, taking in the mouth, ears, nose and around the eyes. They were dressed identically too, in top hats, tailcoats, pinstriped grey trousers, white ruffled shirts, black gloves. He couldn't understand how come they were so tall — at least twelve or fifteen feet high. Or was it just the way he was sat, or the state of mind he was in, or something they'd given him to mess with his head?

How long had he been here? The last thing he remembered was waking up in bed in Montreal, blinding flashlight in his eyes, gun to his temple, man's voice: 'Get up! You gots places to be.'

He knew they'd find him eventually. He'd known that when he'd gone on the run, the realization that it didn't matter how far he got, how deep down he hid, sooner or later he'd be caught, sooner or later he'd be made to pay for what he'd done. Still, he'd been real careful at first, moving around a lot, never staying in one place longer than two days, avoiding the ghettos, avoiding all Haitians and Dominicans, staying out of small towns, but what was it he'd heard said time and time again? 'When Solomon Boukman is after you, the world becomes a small place with glass walls.' He might have stayed on the run longer if it hadn't been for his habit. Smack: needle not foil. That had narrowed down their search. The only way a junkie can stay underground is if he's got a big enough stash, or else if he kicks. He hadn't done either. A junkie's got to go out to cop. They'd just pulled on that chain around his arm and reeled him in.

Who'd sold him out? The dealer he'd copped his last dose from? That shit had been suspiciously good, so good he'd got a rush just holding the loaded syringe. Before he'd gone under his last thoughts had been paranoid ones. Montreal wasn't famed for the quality of its smack. The stuff he'd been shooting up until then had been a modest stone, enough to get him under the surface but nowhere near the quality of the dope he'd boosted in Miami. That had sent him all the way down to the warm silk cocoon where time stopped and nothing mattered and he was free of everything. Same as his final hit had done. Right before he'd nodded out, he'd wondered if Solomon hadn't finally found him, if his people weren't going to come through the door the moment he'd slipped away from himself, but then the smack had melted his every worry away like hot coffee dissolves sugar cubes. And then they had come for him. Just like he'd thought. And here he was now, waiting to meet the King of Swords, waiting to die.

A bright light was trained on him from behind, illuminating his immediate surroundings: a cold grey cement floor with reddish brown markings painted thickly on it - a cross to the left, a star to the right, a long vertical line dividing them. It was a giant veve, a voodoo symbol used, in part, to invoke gods and spirits in ceremonies. Usually a veve was drawn in flour, sand or cornmeal, but this one had been painted in what looked like blood. Beyond that stood the barons, facing him. His feet were in a metal fire bucket, filled with water. His hands were resting on his thighs, palms down.

He saw that he was completely naked and that his arms, legs and what he could see of his chest were completely hairless and oddly shiny. Then he noticed that there were no bindings of any kind on him. He was technically free to stand up.

He felt ashamed of his nakedness and wanted to cover

up, but he couldn't move his hands that short distance to his crotch. Then he tried to take his feet out of the bucket, but they stayed where they were, without even a suggestion of motion about them. Then he attempted to lift his arms.

Nothing happened. He tried again. He heard the command come down from his brain, clearly, urgendy and in his own voice, but it had no effect; his authority disappeared into cold meat and bone. His arms and legs stayed exactly where they were. He couldn't feel a single damn thing. He wasn't even getting the cold shakes from smack withdrawal. It was as if his being had become completely disconnected from his body and was now imprisoned in it; only death would release it.

Jean Assad, you poor motherfucker, thought Carmine, looking down at him on the chair, a born again baby; skin greased up and gleaming, frozen out of his body by the potion, his lips sewn tight together, his nose part-stitched so he could still get some air, still alive enough for Solomon to come and snatch his soul. Assad was sat in the middle of the sacrificial veve — the symbol drawn in his own blood.

Jean le Chat, they'd called him in Haiti - the Catman, for short. Back then he'd made his living stealing cats and kittens, black ones in particular, to sell to the hougans and mambos to use in their fortune telling. The most popular and reliable method was for the priest or priestess to kill the cat and leave its body on a grave for the night. The next morning they would fry and eat the animal's guts with squill and galanga root, and then they'd see into the future.

That was how the Catman had met Carmine's mother.

He used to come round to the house in Haiti with a thick, wriggling burlap sack on his back, his hands and face always scratched and bleeding. His mother would choose a cat, usually the wildest and most vicious, the ones who went for her with tooth and claw, the ones with strongest spirits

who'd take a good while to kill. Carmine remembered Jean's gap-toothed grin, the way he didn't say much, just smiled, and his unusually soft hair. It was said he was the bastard son of one of the wealthy Syrians his mother had worked for as a maid — hence his family name. Ask him about it and he'd shrug his shoulders and say he really didn't know and he cared even less. He was who he was, he said, and that was the best he could do. Who knew where names came from?

On Eva Desamour's advice, Solomon had brought Jean Assad into his enterprise, a year or so after it got started. He did petty minor-league stuff— shoplifting and housebreaking mostly. He was good at it, but he'd never be better than his limitations. He had neither the ambition nor the balls or brains to progress to new, more complex areas, so he stayed strictly bottom rung, doing exactly as he was told, without question; a dependable soldier - as long as you didn't expect too much. When Solomon expanded into drugs and had to divide his enterprise into sub-sections, he got Jean to be a driver for one of his call-out dealers, the ones who sold to the wealthy, upwardly mobile crowd. Jean loved the job, loved the driving around in the air-conditioned Cadillacs he kept real clean inside and out, loved wearing a nice suit like he was somebody special. He thought he'd been promoted.

He used to tell people he was starting to feel American.

Then he'd killed Tamsin Zengeni, the dealer he worked for. He beat her to death with a tyre jack and stole her smack stash.

No one understood it at first. No one had known the Catman used drugs, let alone that he was a junkie. Solomon had started digging. He found out that Assad had been buying heroin from one of Solomon's other dealers, a guy who worked in the Broward County division called Ricky Maussa. There were strict rules about drug use in the organization.

Solomon had executed Maussa and his entire crew

I

in the same way he was going to execute Jean. Carmine remembered the ceremonies. Maussa and his crew had been made to watch as one by one Solomon killed them, starting with the most recent recruit and moving upwards. Maussa had pleaded his innocence, that he hadn't known Assad's identity, but that in itself was no excuse. All Solomon's dealers had to be sure their customers weren't narcs, stoolies, rival gang members or one of their own.

Carmine found it impossible to hate Jean Assad. Jean had always been cool with him. He'd intervened more than once when his mother had been beating up on him. He wasn't scared of her like everyone else was. He'd even told her she was taking it too far.

Carmine cast a sweeping gaze about the room. The eleven other barons were stood around the figure they towered above, motionless on their stilts, expressions of sealed-in impassivity. As usual he couldn't recognize anyone he knew under all the make-up, and he was sure it was the same for everyone else. They all looked identical. They were the same height - thirteen feet tall - and, thanks to padding and clever tailoring, the same shape. Even their hands, encased in black gloves, were equal in length and width.

When the ceremony was over, they'd all walk out and go off into individual cubicles. They weren't allowed to talk until they were well outside the building, back to being gangster civilians. Those were the rules. Break them and you ended up here, in the middle of the circle. It had happened once before, a long while ago, never since.

There were people watching from a long balcony off to the left; a small select crowd, mostly new recruits, children as young as ten, and a lot of the newly arrived island immigrants, fresh off the boat; Haitians, obviously, but Cubans, Dominicans, Jamaicans, Bajans, people who'd talk about what they'd seen, evolve the myth. This was mostly for their benefit. Get them young, dumb or impressionable, tell

them the myth, show them some magic, get them to spread the word, exaggerated and distorted so no two versions matched, even though they meant precisely the same thing.

This was the key to Solomon's power, making people think he was more than just flesh and blood like them, making them believe that he was other, a demon — Baron Samedi, voodoo god of death, reborn as a Miami gang leader.

Here was the popular misconception about Solomon Boukman's organization, that it was actually called the Saturday Night Barons Club or SNBC for short. It wasn't. That was the name of the ceremony.

The organization itself didn't have a name. It never had.

This was deliberate. A gang with a name is an immediate target, a recognizable entity, just begging to be shut down.

If you don't know your enemy's name, how can you find him? Solomon had wanted to differentiate it as much as possible from American gangs, which cops and rivals were used to dealing with and approached in the same way. As for a structure, it didn't really have one. It was Solomon and a few key allies, most of whom didn't know each other.

People were never sure who was working for Solomon Boukman and who wasn't.

The drums began — one beat, three seconds apart — a deep echoey sound like that of a heavy load hitting the bottom of a long deep dry well. At the beginning they hadn't had any accompaniment, then they'd used tapes of authentic voodoo drummers recorded in the Haitian mountains, and now Solomon had flown the drummers over and set them up in Miami. When they weren't playing the ceremonies they worked the club circuit from New York to New Orleans.

At the twelfth beat the barons linked hands with a flutter and slap of leather on leather. Then the light behind the Catman went out. For a moment they stood linked together

I

in complete darkness. Carmine could feel the nervous pulse of the guy to his left; he heard him swallow and breathe a little harder through his nose. It was probably his first time here.

When the drum was struck for the thirteenth time a dark but powerful purple light gradually came on, bathing the circle in its rich, almost liquid glow.

At the fifteenth drum beat the barons began to move, slowly, anti-clockwise, one step at a time, one step per drum beat.

Christ! Jean thought. He's coming.

The giant figures were moving around him, turning slowly but deliberately like the mechanism of some ghastly machine; a complex lock gradually opening, unlocking horror.

He was scared now, real scared; scareder than he'd ever been — absolutely and utterly terrified.

He knew what was about to happen, those things he hadn't believed before — slicing your neck, drinking your blood while you were still alive, draining your life out of you before your very eyes. Then they'd take his soul.

The drum was beating faster. He could feel it in his stomach, stirring the contents, making them jump, making them come to life. He suddenly felt like he'd swallowed a sack of live toads, and they were hopping around inside him, jumping at his stomach, trying to get out. It was hurting him real bad, not nausea, but pain like he'd been punched by a cast-iron fist.

The drum got faster. Another joined in, slipped in behind it, a snare, building up a rhythm. The barons were moving in time, picking up speed. They were starting to blur, the whites into blacks, losing their shape. He tried to focus on one and follow him, but he couldn't move his head. He I ried closing his eyes but he couldn't do that either. He tried looking away, but even that wasn't an option.

9'

Jean knew he couldn't win. He knew it was over, that he was finished.

They were now spinning so fast they'd become an indistinct grey mass, but the purple light they were bathed in was hitting their waistcoat chains and belt buckles, and these were spitting out weird bright red, blue, green, yellow and orange reflections in the shape of deadly bats.

He was getting dozy. He felt part of himself fading away, slipping under, not even bothering to put up a struggle.

His stomach was killing him. He felt like he'd swallowed a live hungry rodent, scratching and clawing and biting him for all it was worth.

As they turned they began to chant:

Vin Baron Baron I'ap vini icit, Vin Baron Baron I'ap vini icit, Vin Baron Baron vini icit, Vin Baron Baron I'ap vini icit

The lights were dazzling him now, burning his eyes like pepper spray. He felt tears running out of them.

The chanting went on as they spun around him:

SSSSO-LO-AfOiV SSSSO-LO-ifOTV SSSSO-LO-AT07V SSSSO-LO-AfOAA

There were more drums now, a whole battery of them, pounding, hurting his head, killing his stomach.

The chant had been picked up by others he couldn't see, getting louder.

SSSSO-LO-AfOAA SSSSO-LO-AfOiV

Worked every time, thought Carmine, the chant. It had nothing whatsoever to do with Solomon, didn't even mention his name, but as they turned, the words ran one into the other and produced a new word people thought they recognized and chimed in with. The onlookers got swept up in the moment and began to repeat it.

The barons were now spinning so fast the colours had leached out into a thick dirty white cloud, while the reflections had blended into one another forming a thick crimson band around the middle of the circle.

The chant was growing ever louder and the pain in his stomach was intensifying, like he had a boxer in there, flailing away. He wanted to cry out, but he couldn't move his mouth.

And then Solomon appeared. He rose up slowly from out of the ground, a swirling red and orange light shining beneath him, like flames. He was dressed as the barons were, except all in white, right down to the make-up on his face.

Solomon crossed his arms over his abdomen and drew two long swords from under his coat. The blades caught the light and threw it into Jean's eyes, sharp and white and hot.

Solomon began whirling and twirling the blades through the air, slicing through the purple darkness.

Jean followed their deadly progress, feeling like someone getting sucked towards a spinning fan, dragged towards his death, their pull obliterating his resistance.

His terror had flatlined into panicked resignation. He hoped for the best he could. That he'd go out quick and clean. No pain.

But something else was happening to him too. Inside.

The pains in his stomach were gone. He couldn't feel a thing.

And then he was drawn back to the man who'd come to kill him. He'd crossed the blades into an X and was drawing nearer. The light from the cross filled his eyes, warming them with its heat, blotting out his vision, until finally it was all he could see — pure white light.

His hearing faded. He could hear absolutely nothing.

He couldn't speak. He couldn't taste. He couldn't smell.

He couldn't touch. He couldn't see.

He wasn't sure he was still breathing.

Was this it? Was this death?

Although it was difficult for him to move, chant and pay attention to what was going on, Carmine caught a glimpse of Solomon rising out of the ground and heard the excited gasps and screams of the simple-minded idiots watching from the balcony. They didn't realize this was an act, exactly like the circus or a pantomime.

He saw flashes of Solomon doing his dance, twirling his two lethal razor-sharp blades through the air like propellers, slicing, coming closer and closer to Jean Assad, as he sat there facing death without being able to so much as blink or scream.

The drums rose and rose to a booming crescendo of roaring cannon strapped to the back of a herd of stampeding bulls, before suddenly and quite abruptiy dying back down to the same single, solitary heavy beat that had started the ceremony. The barons slowed their movements down one beat at a time, until, by the tenth, they were walking in step with the drummer.

At the twelfth beat Solomon swiftly raised and backhanded his swords across the middle of Assad's exposed throat, leaving a thin, dark, almost black line. By the fourteenth beat blood had geysered out of the veins and arteries, heavy jets and fine fountains, coating Solomon's painted face and white clothes.

Solomon then covered himself and the body with his cloak. Both were lowered down into the ground, prompting more screaming and shouting from the balcony.

Then the lights went out and the abattoir was plunged into darkness.

II

Carmine drove out to Miami Shores. There was a potential Heart working a bar off Park Drive which was popular with the rich old men who were members of the nearby country club. They'd go there after playing a few holes of golf.

Carmine didn't understand golf. It wasn't a sport to him but a status thing white folks did once they hit a certain age or income bracket or both. Hitting a ball around and taking a leisurely stroll to where it had landed so you could hit it again — what was the whole damn point of that?

He drove down a pitch-black street where the lights were busted and all the houses were derelict and boarded up.

Some had been demolished and were just piles of rubble surrounded by wire fencing. Desolate palm trees tilted over the road like drunks, their trunks hacked, drilled and graffitied, their leaves droopy and dirt-coated. He turned into another street where all the buildings had been levelled.

The road was coated with thick dust. It reminded him of a picture he'd seen of Hiroshima after the bomb had hit it, nothing standing. All over Miami construction companies were blowing up or knocking down old buildings and then just leaving the mess right there instead of clearing it up and reconstructing.

Suddenly a car pulled out in front of him and he hit the brakes. He wasn't wearing his belt so the jolt threw him hard against the steering wheel and he smacked his forehead on the windshield.

'Motherfucker!' he yelled and punched the horn. The offending car drove off regardless.

“You still drive like an idiot,' a familiar voice said behind

him. He turned around and saw the faint outline of someone in the back seat.

'Solomon!' Carmine hadn't noticed anyone when he'd got in the car after the ceremony, nor the whole time he'd been driving. 'How did you — how long you bin in here?'

'I get around,' he said. 'Keep driving.'

Carmine set off down the road.

'Put on your seatbelt,' Solomon said, his voice still the same, a clear, forced whisper, his words hollowed out and filled with silence.

Carmine plugged in the belt. He felt his boss's stare bouncing back at him from the rearview mirror, even though he couldn't see his eyes, let alone his face.

'Keep your eyes on the road. Concentrate,' Solomon said.

Where we goin'?'

'Wherever you are.'

'I'm workin'. Got a possible Heart lined up.'

'A Heart? That's good. We need more of the high-class ones, less of the low,' Solomon replied.

'I hear that,' Carmine said. 'I'm doin' my best out here, you know?'

'Your best at what?' Solomon asked.

'My best at what I do, Solomon,' Carmine answered, mouth drying, a little tremor in his voice. He hoped Solomon hadn't found out about his and Sam's side project. They'd been so damned careful.

'How's your mother?'

'She's good.' Carmine searched the mirror quickly, but all he saw was a silhouette. He hadn't been face to face with Solomon in five or six years at least. They always met like this, in dark or shadowy places when Carmine least expected it and not often. Carmine had heard that Solomon had had extensive facial reconstruction, that he'd bleached his skin close to white and wore his hair straight and long, that he was so unrecognizable you could pass him on the street

without knowing who he was, and that he used doubles and soundalikes to fool his enemies. Carmine wasn't really sure he wasn't talking to an impersonator right now.

'Send her my regards.'

'I will.'

'Take a left here.'

He turned onto North East ioist Street and drove on for a short while.

'Pull over after the Cordoba there.'

Carmine parked in front of a black Chrysler. The road was empty.

'I heard about that cop who assaulted you. We're looking into it.'

'It's no big deal,' Carmine spoke to the mirror. A sliver of stray light coming from the street had fallen across Solomon's mouth. It was bullshit what they'd said about him bleaching his skin; he'd probably started the rumour himself.

He was into that - 'misinformation' he called it.

'It is a big deal.' Solomon smiled.

And then Solomon licked his lower lip and Carmine saw what had always freaked people out. It wasn't something Solomon let everyone and anyone see, but it was the one thing about him that left the deepest impression, usually to the detriment of his other features. People who'd seen him went on and on about his eyes, their luminous quality, the way they looked through you, the way they saw your secrets, but none of them had ever seen Solomon Boukman's tongue. It was forked, split in two from the middle out, with its tips splayed and pointed and curved slightly downward, like two small pink talons. Carmine remembered when his mother had done that to him, sliced the thing down the middle on a butcher board with a knife. Solomon hadn't even flinched.

'You take care now, Carmine.'

'You too, Solomon.'

Solomon opened the door quietly and slid out of the car

and made his way towards the Cordoba. As he walked he was slowly absorbed by the darkness, before disappearing into it completely.

12

'Hey, no smokin' in the car. New ride, new rules,' Joe said as Max put his fourth Marlboro of the morning to his mouth. It was just after 8 a.m. They were driving to work in Joe's new car, a chocolate-brown '79 Lincoln Continental with a V8 engine, chrome wheels, fine beige leather seats, wood appliques in the cabin and two pine-tree air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror. He'd won it a week ago in the SAW — Slain and Wounded — auction, where money was raised for the families of dead or disabled cops by selling the seized and confiscated property of criminals who'd been sent away for more than twenty years. And, as had been the custom since the auctions had started, a symbolic $100 donation was also made to the family of the first Miami Beach cop to be killed in the line of duty — David Cecil Bearden - shot dead by car thieves on 20 March 1928, at the age of twenty-four. The Continental only had 160 miles on the clock. It had briefly been used by a mid-level dope courier who was starting a seventy-eight-year stretch at Union Correctional.

'Smell gets in the upholstery, it don't come out. It'll bring the price down, time comes to sell,' Joe explained. They were on North East 2nd Avenue, stalled in a tailback caused by an earlier collision between a cement truck and a Winnebago. The truck had come off worst.

'I'll open the window,' Max said.

'The hell you will, Mingus. You're in my ride, you respect my rules. No fumar en autoj Joe practised the Spanish he'd been learning off tapes for the best part of six months.

Word was Miami PD brass were talking about setting up a

I

fast-track promotion scheme where preference would be given to Spanish speakers, so Joe thought it best to get a head start. Besides, Spanish was most of what you heard on the streets nowadays. People could plot any old shit they wanted to if you couldn't understand what they were saying.

Max had followed his partner's lead and bought a set of Berlitz tapes and books, but he hadn't as yet taken them out of the packaging. Why the hell should he learn a foreign language to talk to people in his own country? He'd pick up the basics as he went along, same as he did with street slang.

'There's worse outside, Joe. Pollution, exhaust, bird shit.

That'll depreciate your car faster than any damn cigarettes.'

Max grumpily put his smoke back in the pack. He'd showered, shaved and ironed his clothes but he still looked and felt like a wreck. Before he'd left his home he'd swallowed a mouthful of Pepto-Bismol to douse the burn in his stomach, but it was still smouldering. The doctor told him he didn't have an ulcer, just an acid build up caused by a cocktail of job pressures, booze, coffee and not eating a balanced diet at the right times of day. And he badly needed a damn drink. And a cigarette. 'Next thing, you're gonna tell me is they're bad for me.'

'They are bad for you.'

ŚYou smoke cigars.'

'Not any more.'

You quit?'

'Uh-huh,' Joe said smugly.

'No wonder you're actin' like such an asshole.'

Joe laughed.

“You should think 'bout quittin', Max. For real'

'Think about it all the time. For real,' Max said gloomily.

And he had. After the first cigarette of the day, he didn't like smoking. The next nineteen to thirty were all reflex and habit, things to do with his hands, things to relieve stress,

IOI things to help him think, things to do for the sake of something to do — the necessity of addiction. But that initial cigarette - the curtain raiser - was still one of the best three or four experiences he'd had outside of sex, his job and the boxing ring.

It had all the makings of turning into another nice spring day in Miami. The sky was a limpid clean blue, the sun was bright without being intrusive and there was a good but not forceful breeze cutting through the column of palm trees at the side of the road. January through to May were the best times to be in town, climatewise - warm but never hot, humidity low, rainstorms likely to last hours rather than days like they did in the summer.

The traffic was moving at a slow, loud, angry, crawl.

Midtown to downtown, the cars were bumper to bumper, horns were being tooted, people were leaning out of their windows or standing up shouting and cursing, yelling, screaming. At least they hadn't started shooting each other, like they did in LA, but that couldn't be far off.

“You hear from Renee?' Joe asked.

'No.'

wers and Valentin came back in.

'What are you doin' here, Lieutenant?' Max asked.

21?

'Been a change of plans. We ain't takin' him in.'

'What? Says who?'

'You know who,' Powers said. 'You two get over here.'

He beckoned.

'Hey! I want some compensation for that door, putaV Grossfeld shouted out and started coming forward.

'Shut up you! And back up where you were!' Powers barked, stopping Grossfeld in his tracks. He retreated to the wet patch he'd previously occupied.

As Max and Joe were approaching Powers, Valentin stepped past them and shot Grossfeld twice in the chest.

His back blasted out and splashed thick crimson treacle on the wall. Grossfeld fell face down on the floor.

'WHAT THE FUCK?!' Max yelled.

Valentin walked over to the body, holstering his piece.

He took a silver . 3 8 out of his waistband.

Powers motioned for Max and Joe to step outside.

'OK, you two saw it. You came in and took fire. Valentin popped him. Simple.'

They heard a single shot go off in the house.

'When was this decided?' Max asked. He was shaking with shock and anger. Joe was ashen and silent.

Valentin came out.

'All clear,' he said.

Lights were going on in the neighbouring houses, doors were opening, people were starting to come out on the street. The monotonous chirping of crickets was giving way to the wail of sirens.

'Eldon'U explain everything once we get through the debrief,' Powers said, then looked at Joe. 'You OK, Listen?'

'What do you think?' Joe growled low.

Powers gave him a long hard look, then stared at Max.

You two best go help control the spectators.'

'Did you know that before he got busted the first time, Octavio Grossfeld was top of his class at Miami University?

His parents were dirt poor farmers. He was a scholarship kid. Got through on his own brains and merit,' Eldon said to Max.

They were up on the roof. It had gone 2 p.m. The sky was thickening to thunderstorm black, sunlight only breaking through in patches. There was no breeze at all. The heat hugged them close, tight and humid. Below there'd been an accident on Flagler, and traffic was backed up halfway down the road.

Max had just been through his witness report — taped and written. He'd repeated what he'd been told to say: he and Joe had gone in first, with Brennan and Valentin behind them. Grossfeld had come out and shot once in their direction. Valentin had returned fire twice, hitting Grossfeld in the chest at point-blank range. It was self-defence; a good call which had saved their lives; exemplary police work.

Then he'd had to type up two reports because Joe was too messed up to concentrate. It had taken him five attempts before he'd got it right.

'And that's why he had to go,' Eldon continued. ' 'Cause there ain't nothin' worse for a cop than an intelligent criminal.

He'd've caused us all kindsa problems when he came down ofFa his bong cloud. Happened before with his kind.

This way's better. We can pin what we want on him and make it stick. Dead men tell no tales and all that.

'Look, I'm sorry I didn't warn you about it, but I wanted you goin' in there with a clear head. Mind on the job,' Eldon said.

Max didn't know what was pissing him off more — what he'd just witnessed, or the fact that Eldon was so fucking matter of fact and even jovial about it.

'How's Liston?'