The King of Swords

by Nick Stone

  ‘No.’

  ‘They been processed?’

  ‘Two have. We can’t X-ray the other one ’cause she’s pregnant. We’re lettin’ her sit and shit.’

  ‘OK. Can you get her in an interview room? I’m coming over.’

  ‘This on or off the books?’ Pete asked, in case he needed to get an interpreter to sit in with them. Otherwise he’d translate himself.

  ‘Off,’ Max replied.

  ‘I’m on it,’ Pete said.

  17

  Joe sipped the cup of coffee he’d poured himself ten minutes ago and had only just remembered. It was now tepid and tasted like caffeinated dishwater. He was waiting for Max to come back from the Well, his mind doing bitter laps as it churned over the events of the morning.

  He knew for sure now Sixdeep was going to get rid of him. And knowing the way Sixdeep’s mind worked, it wouldn’t look like he’d been fired at all. He’d get a desk job in a departmental backwater like Archives, Complaints, Traffic, or maybe even Public Relations, which would mean no recognition and slow death by stalled career. The only people he knew who worked desk jobs were women, former cops who didn’t want to retire, the disabled and people who didn’t want to be cops at all but liked the uniform. Once you were behind a desk it was next to impossible to get back on the street. You were deemed soft and out of step. It had happened to three MTF detectives before, the ones who’d fallen foul of Sixdeep, who hadn’t toed the line and gone along with his way of doing things–Meredith, Allen and Gonzalez. Meredith had been made deputy head of police kennels. He had a well-known allergy to dogs. He quit the force on medical grounds a month later.

  It would play out something like this: they–that was him and Max, but mostly Max–would ‘crack’ Moyez. Which meant they’d patsy-out the case on some evil scumbags every jury in the world would just want to find guilty and that would be it–case closed, radioactive headlines, another positive notch on the stats board and Sixdeep looking better than ever, the Saviour of Miami or some crap like that. And while the real perps got away clean, they–Max and Joe, but mostly Max again, because he was more photogenic and, let’s face it, white–would get fêted as heroes; medals would be pinned on their chests and they’d appear on a few local talkshows. They’d be flavour of the week, All-American Heroes, the Good Guys. Then, when it had all died down, Sixdeep would call Joe into his office. His next boss would be sat in one of the two chairs facing his desk. Sixdeep would say congratulations he’d got a promotion. New bossman would then stand up and clap him on the back and shake his hand and say, ‘Welcome to the team! Good to have you on board!’ If he refused to go Sixdeep would tell him it was his way or the highway, and nothing in-between.

  Christ, he hated him!

  But there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. OK, there was. He didn’t have to stay and take it. He could quit and go into another line of work. But what would he do? Drive a truck? Security? Run a bar? Bullshit! He didn’t want to do that. He wanted to stay a cop–and a Detective too. He was good at what he did. Damn good. A lot better than any of these motherfuckers gave him credit for–except Max. Max was his biggest fan, his staunchest supporter. He’d never taken solo credit for anything. It had always been the two of them.

  Joe remembered the day he’d first met Sixdeep. He was in the locker room, getting dressed and waiting to meet his new partner when he heard all conversation stop and saw everyone around him suddenly get busy doing something. Sixdeep had walked in. He was head of Robbery and Homicide at the time, but already a long-established legend. Joe had never met him, just seen his picture in newspaper reports. It was two weeks to the day after Joe had buried his partner Rudi Saunders, shot dead while they were making a routine stop.

  ‘Joe Liston? Eldon Burns. Sorry for your loss.’ He held his hand out. ‘I lost my partner too. Four guys turned him into a teabag for kicks. It’s a tough break, but life has to go on and we’ve got a job to do. Here’s someone I want you to meet. Came top in his class in the academy. Joe Liston meet Max Mingus, your new partner.’

  Max had been so green that day, a scared and embarrassed look on his face, standing next to Sixdeep in his new, fresh-out-of-the-plastic uniform, his shiny shoes and his left-parted regulation-cut hair. Still made Joe laugh when he recalled the image and juxtaposed it with the way Max was now, a decade older and wearing every second of it.

  He’d known what it had all meant: Sixdeep was making him responsible for Max. At the time, Joe had a great record on Patrol. He’d made an over the average number of arrests and every one of them had resulted in a conviction because he was thorough and meticulous about detail and procedure. He didn’t cut corners. He interviewed every witness and wrote down everything they said (he’d aced the departmental shorthand course). Sixdeep wanted Max to learn everything he could from him and then move on to bigger and better things. Max was the chosen one, the heir.

  Sometimes Joe wished he and Max hadn’t become friends, that Max had simply moved on after his time was up. That way Joe would’ve stayed in Patrol and eventually made sergeant. Oh, it was a tough job, the hardest. You were a soldier, right there on the front line, street level with the criminals, the one most likely to take a bullet. But there were no politics inside your car. It was you and the guy you rode with. You made it work.

  Joe looked around his office–one huge, strip-lit, open-plan space of pale green carpet tiles and off-white walls, soundproofed to keep the noise of forty overworked, over-caffeinated, stressed-out detectives from leaking upstairs into the meeting rooms or downstairs into Files and Records. Today it was a third full, but its unmistakable polyrhythm was present and correct, like several very familiar tunes being played at the same time, over and over at low volume–shouting, swearing, singing, conversations, phones ringing, phones being talked into, phones being slammed down, all underpinned and locked in by the stop-start metallic babble of various proficiencies of typing. The office was windowless and the lights were always on, 24/7, 365 days a year, so the only way you could tell whether it was day or night in there was by checking who was in the office against the shift roster. It was air conditioned to the point of making you shiver, and completely smoke free. If you wanted a cigarette you took the elevator two flights down and went and stood out on the balcony.

  They were nominally managed by Captain Gabriel Ortiz and his two Lieutenants, Jed Powers and Lou Barlia. Ortiz was in his late fifties, celebrating his thirtieth wedding anniversary and looking forward to becoming a grandfather for the second time. He was short and stocky, with meaty hands, a barrel chest, gold-rimmed specs and jet-black hair that was badly dyed because he missed the greys at his nape. He always had his head buried in and behind a huge pile of papers. His main responsibility was triple checking all the reports and then signing them off. Powers and Barlia ran the Detectives through their oral witness statements and rehearsed them for shooting boards, IA hearings and court appearances. Every angle was covered, scenarios were improvised, scripted and learnt so the stories, when they came to be delivered for the record, were without contradiction. They even worked on the tone. It was like being forced to take a lead role in a play. Once, when there was a majority black jury that needed to be swayed, Joe had been told to mangle his syntax to make his speech more ‘ethnic’. He found it offensive as hell, but they got the conviction they wanted so it was deemed to have worked.

  Joe and Max sat at the back, in the furthest right-hand corner. Their territory was marked out by a giant blow-up of Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run album sleeve which took up half the wall behind their desks. It had been MTF’s gift to Joe on his birthday last year.

  Joe loved Bruce. He’d first heard him in October 1973: his second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, was playing in a bar he’d gone drinking in after breaking up with his then girlfriend, a waitress called Bernadette. They hadn’t been together long, three weeks and a couple of days, so the split wasn’t too hard to take, and, truth be told, he was quietly
relieved to be rid of her because he didn’t think she was right in the head. That night she’d told him she was becoming a Buddhist and that his being a cop was all wrong for her karma. He’d nodded, wished her all the best and gone for a beer. As he was getting through his first bottle a documentary on world religions had come on the TV–focus: Buddhism. Ten minutes were devoted to the famous case of the Saigon monk who, in 1963, had soaked himself in gasoline and set himself on fire in protest at the government’s anti-Buddhist policies. The image of the burning monk had come on at the very moment Joe heard the words to the song that was playing on the jukebox–4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)–Bruce singing about how a waitress he’d been seeing wouldn’t set herself on fire for him. Joe had laughed out loud. He’d been a Bruce fan from that moment on and never looked back.

  Theresa came over with a FedEx package addressed to him and Max.

  It was a copy of the Nora Wong file, from the NYPD.

  Joe opened it. A stack of photographs slipped out and splashed across his desk with a wet plop. Glossies. The photographer was the conscientious kind: he or she had taken two of everything.

  Torture was commonplace in Miami these days, but Joe had never seen anything like this. It looked like a pack of ravenous killer dogs had been let loose on the victims. They’d suffered all the way to death’s door, their expressions frozen in extremes of agony. Blood everywhere. A twisted carnage of rape and then disfigurement; flesh ripped from faces clean through to muscle and bone, exposing the head’s inner workings, reminding him of vandalized billboards with strips of one poster torn off and showing part of the one underneath and the one underneath that. The woman had been scalped. And they hadn’t spared the children–if anything they’d got it worse.

  Sickness gripped and squeezed and twisted his stomach. He gasped as the breath went out of him and the vomit reflex constricted his throat. Sweat prickled his brow. He stood up, his legs weak, hollow, trembling. He went to the bathroom. He tried, but couldn’t puke. Nothing came out. He splashed water on his face and breathed deeply. His hands were trembling.

  Back in the office he took Max’s pint of Wild Turkey out of his bottom drawer and had a long swig.

  Then he grouped the pictures together and turned them over.

  He read the reports. The bitemarks were human. The assailant had worn dentures modelled on piranha jaws. There were also high concentrations of sugar in the wounds, indicating the assailant had eaten large amounts of candy directly before each of his attacks.

  Then he looked through the list of recovered evidence and something caught his eye. Something familiar. He cross-referenced it with a photograph.

  ‘Jesus!’

  He picked up the phone.

  18

  ‘Is this your first child?’ Max asked Marisela Cruz. They were sitting at a wooden table in one of the interview rooms in the two-floor detention building, behind the hangars. There was a small square window through which they could see the stars and stripes fluttering on a nearby flagpole and beyond it planes taking off against a clear blue sky.

  ‘Es este su primer bebé?’ Pete translated. He was sat beside her, speaking low and tenderly, father to young daughter, a safe haven between her and the blue-eyed, mean-faced gringo cop opposite.

  ‘Si.’ She nodded. Marisela was very pale and very, very scared. She had long, lank black hair that went with the shadows under her dark brown eyes, bloodshot from crying and sleeplessness. She was dressed in faded blue jeans, a thin grey sweatshirt and flip flops. She had the acrid pine stench of prison soap on her. With make-up on she’d looked like a perfume model in her mugshots, dressed as she had been in a pinstriped business suit and blouse, a little too perfect according to the customs officer who’d pulled her over.

  In the middle of the table was a small pyramid of twenty-one latex balloons filled with cocaine recovered from her guts. It amounted to over half a kilo, pure and uncut. They’d fed her laxatives in her dinner and water, just like those who’d paid her to transport the drugs would have done. Only low-level players used mules. The big timers were bringing it in by the boat and plane load.

  ‘You’re in a lot of trouble, Marisela.’

  ‘Usted está en muchos de apuro.’

  She met Max’s eye and quickly looked at Pete. ‘Sé. “How old are you?’

  ‘¿Cuántos aos tiene?’

  ‘Tengo veinte aos.’

  ‘Says she’s twenny.’

  That’s what it said on her forged Argentinian passport. Max gave her his full-beam I-don’t-believe-you stare.

  ‘No mienta. Hará cosas peores,’ urged Pete. Don’t lie. It’ll make things worse.

  ‘Diecisiete.’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘How old is your mother?’

  ‘¿Cuántos aos tiene su madre.’

  ‘¿Mi madre?’

  ‘Si, your madre. How old is she?’

  ‘Treinta dos.’

  ‘Thirty-two.’

  ‘Look at me, Marisela,’ Max said, taking the girl by the chin and holding her head until they locked eyes. ‘You’ll go to prison for thirty years. You’ll be older than your mother is now when you get out. Your baby will be born in prison and taken away from you. You won’t see your child again. By the time you get out it’ll be an adult. And who wants to know a mother who’s been to prison for smuggling drugs?’

  She talked to Pete. She grabbed his hands and held them tight. She told him she’d been put up to this by her boyfriend, Miguel. He lived in Miami. He’d given her money and some nice clothes. He’d told her she’d get a lot more on delivery. She said she was sorry. Over and over again, that she didn’t know what she was doing, that if she knew what was in the balloons she would’ve said no. Max could almost have believed her if he was hearing this for the first time instead of the millionth. Her words dissolved into pleas and sobs. He waited until she’d finished, giving her a hard impassive look that let her know none of what she said or did would make any difference.

  ‘Marisela, there’s a simple solution to your problems,’ he said. She wiped her eyes and nose with her hands. ‘If you do exactly as I say, you can have your baby here, and then afterwards you can go home, back to Colombia. Would you like that?’

  ‘Si.’

  Then she grabbed Max’s right hand with both of hers and squeezed them tight and went into a quickfire monologue, crying the whole while she spoke. ‘Same shit,’ Pete said when Max looked to him for a translation.

  ‘OK. OK. I know you’re sorry and I believe you.’ Max quieted her and turned on his soothing voice, ‘You are going to help us catch the man who brought you and others like you into our country with drugs.’

  ‘Miguel?’ she asked.

  ‘Not, Miguel, no. The man he works for. The man who paid him to recruit you.’

  ‘No le conozco.’ She looked lost. I don’t know him.

  ‘You will,’ Max said. ‘Don’t worry. It’ll all make sense.’

  After Max had explained to her that she would be moved to a safehouse the next morning, a guard came and escorted her out of the room and back to the cramped hot cell she was sharing with six other girls, mules like her.

  Max and Pete lit cigarettes.

  ‘You know, they’ll probably kill her family in Colombia if she testifies.’ Pete blew out a stream of smoke.

  ‘We’ll keep her anonymous.’

  ‘Not for long. Money talks. And those narcotrafficantes have got a lot of it. Plus they got long arms. Reach anyone anywhere.’

  ‘This is an MTF operation, Pete.’

  ‘You guys…’ Pete smiled and shook his head.

  ‘There’ll be a place in heaven for you for this, for sure.’

  ‘Or hell. Right next to you and Eldon.’

  ‘Have some faith in the system, will ya?’

  ‘That’s just it, Max. I do.’

  Max drove out to the 7th Avenue gym to see Eldon, who’d gone there for a workout.

  Post-McDuffie, the area was fast turning
into a ghost town. The money was fleeing and with it the life and soul of the neighbourhood: half the stores had either been burnt down or were boarded up with ‘CLOSED–FUCK YOU & THANKS A LOT’ painted across their fronts in white. The ones that were open weren’t doing much business because there was next to no one around on the wide streets. The few people he passed were either drunks and junkies weaving across the sidewalk in slow stumbles, teetering on the verge of collapse, or else locals moving at jogging speed, heads down, shoulders tensed, as if trying to get home before a coming storm. Traffic was sparse.

  Max parked his brown Camaro next to the only cars on the lot–Eldon’s Oldsmobile and Abe Watson’s brand new Chevy Monte Carlo.

  He walked into the gym, and, as usual, the feel of the place in mid-training session electrifed his senses and took him right back to his teens, when he used to push hurriedly through the same door, duffel bag in hand, heart full of ambition and a head full of dreams.

  Unlike most boxing gyms, which tended to be cramped and close to decrepit, 7th Avenue was cavernous, with a high, vaulted ceiling fitted with powerful fans to keep a chill breeze wafting through the building at all times. It made no difference whatsoever to the smell that greeted everyone when they came in–a heady blast of fresh and stale sweat, dry blood, liniment, rubbing alcohol, rubber, antiseptic and new and old leather, bound together by an atmosphere of intense concentration and calibrated violence.

  Max crossed the floor and headed towards the match-sized ring in the middle of the gym where Abe was putting Eldon through his paces. Eldon was in a faded yellow T-shirt, sweatpants and boxing boots. He was working on the pads, firing jabs, hooks, uppercuts and crosses into Abe’s hands. He was slow, compared to everyone else in the room, but he could still move and his punches were powerful and accurate, the force of each making Abe shudder all the way down to his toes. Abe never lost his balance or composure, just calmly switched the gloves around, called out a punch or a combination. Eldon was red-faced, soaked in sweat, his hair plastered across his forehead, breathing hard. When caught out he’d mumble or curse under his breath and fire a harder shot than was necessary into the mitt, prompting Abe to congratulate him on hitting like a man.