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 feted 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 amp; 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.