The King of Swords

by Nick Stone

  After Perabo’s arraignment, Max broke into Bradley’s apartment in Opa Locka. He found pictures of Bradley in full Second World War US Marine uniform. In all of them he was holding the carbine. Max didn’t find the gun or the uniform, but he did discover a pile of Disney lunchboxes filled with Polaroids of naked blonde girls. Among them were pictures of Norma and Charlotte. And he found the boots. He scraped some dirt off the sole and had it analysed; it matched the dirt from the bushes.

  He tracked down the car dealer who’d sold the blue Eldorado spotted leaving the scene. He identified Bradley as the buyer from a mugshot.

  Max told Eldon. Eldon told him to do what he felt had to be done, only he couldn’t bring Bradley in because of Perabo. Max was confused. So Eldon told him about all the people he’d taken down ‘off the books’ because it was the right thing to do and the world was better off without them, but there hadn’t been enough physical or corroborative evidence to get a conviction. Then he told Max that if he chose that course he was on his own as far as MTF was concerned. This was an extra-curricular kill and all on him.

  Max bought a second-hand Browning BDA 380 and filed off the serial number. Wearing thick surgical gloves, he loaded the magazine with thirteen hollow-point shells and slipped one in the chamber.

  Two nights later he broke into Bradley’s home, gagged and blindfolded him and put him in the trunk of his car and drove him out to a clearing near Lake Surprise. It was part fresh, part saltwater and home to crocs and gators alike.

  Bradley had got on his knees, looked Max in the eye and started crying. He’d said he was sorry, over and over again. He said he wasn’t a bad guy, he just needed help. He said he was no different to faggots and people who fucked animals. He said he had a medical condition.

  And when it came down to it, Max found he couldn’t do it. Not like that, not in cold blood. He lowered his gun. It could all end peacefully. He’d tell Bradley to get out of Florida immediately and stay gone.

  But before he could speak, Bradley began to cough and splutter. Then suddenly he’d stood up. Max told him to get the fuck back down on his knees. Bradley wasn’t listening. Bradley was coming at him fast. Max raised his gun. Bradley reached for his waistband. Instinct overruled sense. Max shot him twice in the head and Bradley fell backwards.

  When he checked Bradley’s pants he found what he’d been reaching for–his asthma inhaler. He’d been having an attack.

  He wiped the Browning down and tossed it off the Rickenbacker Causeway into the ocean. A while later he pulled over to puke.

  Then he’d gone to a club on Washington Avenue for a drink. A fat woman in a silver sequinned blouse and gold satin pants called Harriett asked him if she could join him. He realized she was his alibi if there was any comeback; he was thinking like a murderer and wanted to be sick again. He said sure, sit yourself down, my name’s Max Mingus, and I’m a cop. Evenin’ officer, she’d giggled. They’d danced a while and then he’d taken her home and tried to get her so drunk she’d pass out. But she could handle her liquor, so he’d had to fuck her. He’d kept his eyes closed through most of it and thought of Pam Grier. He’d asked her what his name was. She’d called him Daddy or Danny or something in-between.

  The next morning she couldn’t remember his name at all, no matter how many times he told her. She didn’t believe he was a cop either. In fact, she really didn’t want to know him. She insisted she’d never done anything of the sort before. She was happily married, she said, with a son called Max.

  No one missed Tanner Bradley, at least not after they found the pictures in his house and discovered his past. The headteacher at St Alban’s resigned, as did the head of personnel who should have checked his references.

  Max never forgot him. Not his face, not the way he’d looked, not the way his body had shaken when he cried, not the way he’d pissed his pants as he begged for his life, for forgiveness, for understanding, for a cure for the way he was. The memory had diminished a little over the years, but the colours were still fresh. It didn’t matter that what he’d done might have been right to a lot of people; to him it had felt wrong. He’d crossed a line then for sure. Again. Another one.

  Up on the roof, the morning after he’d done it, Eldon had given him a simple piece of advice: ‘Never kill someone who’s looking you in the eye, ’cause you’re the last thing they see and the first thing they take away with ’em. Always turn ’em around. Shoot ’em in the back. You’ll sleep sweet that way.’

  Which is exactly what he did when he shot the next two child killers he’d discovered but hadn’t been able to move on officially because the Turd Fairy had spotted another opportunity to make capital out of atrocity.

  ‘So, how did you know?’ Max asked, when he’d finished talking.

  ‘I’m a detective. It’s what I do,’ said Joe. ‘But you gotta be careful now, ’cause there’s a real clear pattern forming. Child killers and rapists ending up dead in the middle of nowhere, close-formation double-tap entry wounds to the head, nine millimetre hollow-point shells fired at point-blank range from an automatic–speed shootin’–your speciality. Guns different both times, but the victims and MO are identical. Points to a cop on a spree.’

  ‘There’s nothin’ tyin’ me into any of this.’

  ‘I know,’ Joe said. ‘But sooner or later, someone somewhere will be asking questions.’

  ‘So what are you sayin?’ Max lit another Marlboro. He’d smoked so many today they were burning his throat.

  ‘Stop before you get caught. Stop now.’ Joe looked Max in the eye and held his gaze. ‘Think about it. Is killing those scumbags worth destroying your life for? They catch you they’ll give you life. And you know what happens to ex-cops in prison, Max. Eldon’s filled your head up with his good ole boy, Wild West vigilante bullshit. I’ve heard all his campfire stories, how he used to bring people in tied to the back of his Crown Victoria. Times are way different now, man. You can’t be takin’ people out to the Glades and cappin’ ’em. Doesn’t matter what they’ve done. We’re the police, Max. We uphold the law. We don’t break it.’

  Max knew Joe was right, that what he’d done was indefensible, but then what about the people he’d killed? Thanks to Eldon and the Turd Fairy, he’d had to let proven child abusers go free, unpunished, and–inevitably–emboldened by their success at evading the law, primed to strike again. And they always struck again. And again, until they got caught or killed. Knowingly letting one of them off the hook to walk the streets wasn’t something he was sure he could live with. Killing them was a different matter. He was protecting the public. Doing his job.

  ‘Now I want you to see this.’ Joe placed the NYPD file he’d brought with him on the table.

  Max looked. He was glad he hadn’t eaten much because his stomach contracted hard, like he’d taken a right hook to the gut. Then he couldn’t look any more, so he read. He came to the list of recovered evidence. He saw something familiar.

  Joe was holding it up–the red and white striped candy wrapper they’d found at the Lacour family home–sealed in a glassine evidence bag.

  ‘You were right: Preval Lacour did have help,’ Joe said. ‘Drugs plus property equals money laundering equals a highly organized gang. And don’t start running Eldon’s case past me neither. We both know it’s bullshit.’

  ‘So what d’you wanna do?’

  ‘This is gonna be my last case as a real cop. After that I’m window dressing. I don’t want it to be some bullshit frame-up. I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror and know I did my best at all times, that I did what I swore to do.’

  ‘You wanna take these guys down?’

  ‘No.’ Joe shook his head. ‘I want to bring them in, through the front door, cuffs on their wrists. I want to see them get booked, tried and executed. I want to see them punished, not by us, but by the law. Will you help me?’

  ‘If we do this–’

  ‘There’s no ‘if’ about it. You’re either with me on this or I’ll tak
e my chances alone.’

  ‘What about Eldon? The Moyez case?’

  ‘We’ll work his phoney shit too,’ Joe said, ‘and we’ll go after the real perps.’

  ‘Say we bring ’em in, it’ll throw out the Moyez case.’

  ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, all I need to know is whether you’re with me.’

  ‘I’m with you,’ Max said without hesitation, but inside he was worried as hell. He was backing Joe over Eldon. In other words, he was going up against Eldon. And no one did that–especially not one of his own. They’d have to work the case in secret, make sure no one found out. And they’d have to work it quick too, crack it and bring it in before Moyez was wrapped up. It was impossible. Maybe that’s what he was counting on.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ Joe looked him in the eye, reading him. ‘I’ll understand if you don’t want to do it.’

  ‘I am sure,’ Max said, holding out his hand. ‘We’re partners, remember?’

  ‘Then it’s done.’ Joe smiled and they shook hands across the table.

  God help us, Max thought, for we know not what the fuck we’re getting into.

  20

  Eva Desamours laced together her long, bony fingers and bent them back until she heard them crack twice and then pop in all three joints. She smiled slightly as she felt the warm effervescent current of released tension bubbling and fizzing back and forth under her skin, enervating her nerves and priming her senses.

  Opposite her at the round table she sensed Solomon Boukman wince in the darkness. She knew he hated her doing it, but he should have learnt long ago to live with it; it was the last of the rituals she performed before she read anyone’s cards–and she’d been reading his for over twenty years, since he was her apprentice in Haiti.

  First she’d shower, soap herself clean and then she’d bathe. She’d scatter a mixture of herbs, flowers and shaved roots at the bottom of the bath tub–mint leaves to clear all paths, belladonna flowers to free the self from the body, mandrake root for the courage to step through any door, vervain for protection against corruption, High John the Conqueror root for the strength of thirty, goldenseal to open the eyes and a mixture of lavender oil and holy water to bind all these powers together. She’d run the bath hot to better free the mixture’s essence. Then she’d step into the tub, lie back, close her eyes and let the powers seep into her as she watched the beautiful fish in the aquarium.

  After an hour she’d towel herself dry and, naked, walk upstairs and go into the room where she kept her cards.

  The room was small and sparse, with dull brown unpainted plastered walls and smooth bare unvarnished floorboards. A wide circle of stolen church altar candles studded with fragments of vulture bones, standing on black-painted iron saucers, and the small crude wooden cupboard where she stored her two decks of cards in specially designed black velvet envelopes were the only furniture. There was no light in the room whatsoever. She’d had the window bricked up when she’d bought the place.

  Although she couldn’t see anything once she’d entered the room, she’d placed the cupboard sixteen paces to the left of the door. She’d retrieve her tarot cards, make a half turn on her heels and then walk thirteen steps until she was at the edge of the candle circle. She’d step inside and grope around the floor until she found the matches. She’d light the candles anti-clockwise and squat down on her haunches, watching while the room assumed the dull purplish tone of a healing bruise as the oily orange glow coming from the floor combined with the wall’s hidden pigmentation.

  Then she took the cards out of their envelope, cut them, shu?ed them thoroughly, cut them again, and then dealt them anti-clockwise in a circle, face down.

  She squatted in the middle of the circle, took a deep breath and began to speak, in reverse, the names of the clients she would read for that day.

  Sometimes it took minutes, sometimes an hour. There are no clocks in the afterlife, only time and the dead aren’t bound by appointments.

  The cards changed. They came alive. The designs transformed from crude etchings to beautiful visions, as their dull colours grew brighter and fuller and far more vivid than they were in the cold light of day or to the untrained, uninitiated eye. The crimson borders of the de Villeneuve cards thickened and liquefied, as the golden suns they enclosed glowed with a deep rich light, becoming skull-faced ingots mounted on a hellish necklace.

  It was then they came, those who watched over her clients: their guides, their counselling voices, the sources of all their instincts and feelings, those who forewarned them in dreams and premonitions, those who pointed to uncanny parallels in events commonly known as fate and sometimes dismissed as coincidence.

  To Eva–as to all clairvoyants and mediums–the spirits were human in appearance, assuming a shape she could recognize and relate to. They looked not as they had in death, but as her clients would remember them best, right down to the clothes they wore and the things they brought with them to jog their charges’ memories. They came singly mostly, but pairs were fairly common, and once in a while she had to cater for groups of up to seven if a person was particularly loved. The spirits had two things in common–they all looked happy, verging on euphoric, and they told her their names and who they’d come to talk to. They stood in front of her, outside the circle of candles and waited to be summoned in.

  The bad spirits came too. They always did, right behind the good, shadowing them, just to mess with the natural order of things, to wreak havoc on an innocent life, destroy it if they could. They always tried to fool her into letting them in too, but she’d long ago learnt to spot the things they couldn’t quite fake–the glint in their eyes, the vulpine hint in their smiles, sometimes the things they carried or didn’t. She would firmly but politely refuse them entry and tell them to go back to where they belonged.

  Yet occasionally the bad spirits got in. It was inevitable. They had genuine business with her clients, debts that needed collecting, earthly transgressions avenging. These ones she had to let in. That was the deal. Some people just had to be stopped before they went on destroying the natural order of things. Balance had to be restored, wrongs done to reach right.

  And some bad spirits tricked her. That was inevitable too. They’d been great liars in life, who’d just gone on getting better and better now that time was no obstacle and the prospects were limitless. They were good at acting good.

  Solomon Boukman always had his guardian come visit, the one he took his name from, the great one, who’d started it all.

  Boukman was the slave turned voodoo priest turned rebel leader who in 1791 started the slave uprising that set Haiti free. The French colonial ladies knew about his extraordinary powers of foresight and used to ask him to read their fortunes in their palms. He didn’t need to look. He knew they would die savage and bloody deaths. At night, in the slave quarters, he’d prophesy the overthrow of the French colonial masters and the imprisonment of the ‘dwarf who led them’. They said he saw his own death, his head paraded around on a spike for all to see. They said this was what led him to start the uprising that would become a revolution. They said this was what drove him to savagery. He spared no white man, woman or child. He killed them all. He’d rape wives in front of their husbands and then kill their children before he killed them. He was without mercy or compassion.

  When he came to talk to Solomon, he came naked, but for a shackle around his ankle, a bloody machete in his hand and white face paint in the shape of a skull. Even though he could do nothing to Eva, she was always a little scared of him.

  Nearly all fortunes tellers are fakes and most of the real ones lie. If something bad’s coming your way, they’ll be the first to know and you the last. They’ll snow you under with platitudes and upbeat clichés, tell you everything’s going to be all right–anything but the truth.

  Eva Desamours was an exception to the rule. She prided herself on always telling the truth, no matter how much it hurt.

  She had two
kinds of clients–winners and losers, or, the way she saw it, those with futures and those without. She couldn’t do anything for the latter, except take their money and look at them pityingly. Their lives weren’t just in the toilet but spiralling away down the pipes–the chronically ill, the unemployable, the heartbroken, the all-round desperate. What she told them was rarely pretty. She knew she could have made things easier by sugaring the pill, but what was the use in that? You always got to the poison. She considered people natural optimists, and therefore congenitally dumb: they only ever believed what they wanted to believe, even if the contrary was staring them in the face and shaking them by the hand.

  The people with futures she treated differently. After all, there was more to play with and more she could use. They were as vulnerable as their negative counterparts, sharing almost identical needs, desires and aspirations, yet they had more going for them. They had important careers, money, influence and contacts. For them the answer was never, ‘No, it isn’t going to happen’, but, ‘Yes, anything’s possible–depending on how much you really want it.’

  Their replies were invariably the same: ‘More than anything.’ As was hers: ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  Eva Desamours was more than just a fortune teller; she was a fixer. If she saw that what they desired wasn’t coming for them, she could arrange it so it did. She couldn’t change the future–that was completely beyond her powers–but she could delay it for a short spell, distract it so it missed its stop. And while it was finding its way back, she moved things around, so destinies became misplaced: the lonely career woman suddenly started dating the work colleague she’d secretly loved for a year; the married father of three got it on with a waitress he’d lusted after; a business man got a career-making deal; an ambitious employee an unexpected promotion; a couple drowning in debt got a windfall. What she never told them was that in order to do good for them, she dealt with powerful bad spirits–conmen, thieves, fraudsters, murderers; the clever, gifted ones who’d evaded capture in mortal life–and that their moment of bliss came with a hefty price tag. The work colleague turned out to be a hitter, the waitress a herpes carrier, that glorious business deal would lead to its maker’s downfall, the glamorous job would be utter hell, and the windfall would come from an insurance payout when one of the couple died in a horrific accident and the other was crippled for life. It was wrong for the uninitiated to mess with the future: the punishment for undeserved happiness was roughly three times its equal in misery. Yet payback didn’t happen immediately, and it was in that honeymoon period that Eva capitalized on the goodwill to sort out some business for the SNBC. As she never charged for fixing futures, she accepted favours from her business contacts in kind–setting up offshore accounts, shell companies, helping to broker real-estate deals and buying up businesses to launder the organization’s huge amounts of drug money.