The King of Swords

by Nick Stone

  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.

  2

  ‘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. Homicides, armed robberies, home invasions and rapes were all way up and the cops couldn’t handle it. Already under-staffed 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 loo
ked like he’d slept in his car, if at all. His clothes–black chinos, grey sports coat, open-necked white shirt–were crumpled and hung off him like they wanted to be on someone else; he was unshaven and his close-cropped dark brown hair needed a good combing. He was squat, solid and broad, with big shoulders and little to no neck separating them from his head. He was a good-looking guy–behind the stubble and the bloodshot blue eyes–but there was an air of unpleasantness about him, a sense of a tightly coiled meanness just waiting to spring and sting. She was sure he was the kind of cop who beat the crap out of suspects and gave his girlfriend–he had no wedding ring–hell at home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  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 horizontal 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.’
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  ‘Weeks?’ Moss went pale, then looked at his watch. ‘You’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.