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.