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: 978-0718-149222 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.