King of Swords

'I was getting to that,' Raquel said. 'We found traces of atropine in the shooter's bladder. Atropine's an alkaloid derived from belladonna — deadly nightshade. It counteracts the effects of physostigmine. But, as it was in the bladder, I think he got the antidote some time before he stepped into that courtroom.'

'How long before?'

'Atropine takes a while for the body to completely eliminate.

Again, it depends on the person. Three to six weeks.'

Max understood what had happened. After his trial run of murders in Overtown, Assad had been given atropine to keep him alive for the main event.

'I'll tell you this,' Raquel said. 'The levels of physostigmine in the shooter's liver were so high, he was basically a dead man walking before a bullet ever hit him.'

'Solomon? That all you got?' Trish Estevez asked Joe.

'Yeah. That's all I got. Sorry.'

'Don't apologize to me. You're the one who's gonna have to do the work.'

Trish was the Miami PD's computer database manager.

She'd started out in dispatch in 1967 and then taken computer classes in the evening and gone on to become an expert in the things before they were introduced into the department in 1971, when next to no one knew how to use them. Now she had two people working for her, who she'd trained from scratch. They were transferring all the paper records to floppy disc, an arduous process which would have been easier with more manpower and machines, but the budget was minimal. The dot-matrix printer made up the heart of the computer room. It was about as long and as wide as an upright piano, and stood on two tables which had been pushed together to support it. Trish sat at a desk at the end of the room, watching over her people working at their Compaq machines, each at a desk on either side of the room, near the door, their backs to each other; their lingers hitting the keyboards the only sound. The machines they were working on — VDUs which looked like small portable black and white TVs — couldn't help but remind Joe of something archaic, like the set in his parents' house he and his brothers used to put red or blue strips of plastic over to pretend it was colour, or the small set he'd had in the first apartment he'd lived in when he'd left home.

'Gonna be a big old list. First name, family name, middle name, street name, nickname.' Trish's parents had immigrated

from Ireland to Boston when she was seven, and a broad brogue still held fast to her accent.

'I'll start off with first names.'

Wise choice,' she said and spun her chair to face the grey wall-to-wall cabinet behind her, where rows of 5 % and 3 V2 inch floppy discs were lined up in alphabetical order. The former were housed in cardboard sleeves which made Joe think of the old 10-inch 78s his granddad used to play.

She took out seven of the bigger discs and fed them into the computer on her desk. The machine purred and made an accelerated clicking sound before a menu came up on the screen. She hit a few keys.

'Seven hundred and fifty-three entries under first name Solomon,' she said.

'How up to date are they?'

'Last entry was in November.'

'That'll do,'said Joe.

'Come back around four for the paper.'

'Thanks.'

'You guys could make my life a lot easier if you knew how to use one of these.'

'Then you'd be out of work,'Joe said.

'That's why man invented machines.' Trish smiled.

In the library, Max went through a botany book until he found what he was looking for: Calabar bean — seed of Physostigma venenosum, a climbing leguminous plant found in West Africa. The seed is half an inch in diameter and of a dark brown colour.

The short piece went on to describe the bean's toxic and medicinal properties, as well as its use in witchcraft.

He turned the page and found a colour photograph of the bean. He recognized it from somewhere. The next photograph down was of the plant it grew from. Green leaves and deep pink-coloured flowers.

Green, he thought. A green suit, matching green eyes.

He looked at the bean again.

And it came back to him: the pimp he'd beaten up outside Al & Shirley's diner on 5 th Street, the stuff he'd confiscated and put in his Mustang.

'Sbitr

He found the silver cigar tube at the back of the glove compartment. He opened it and shook out the contents into his hand. Five calabar beans.

38

When Joe took off Pip Frino's blindfold and he saw he wasn't in a police station like he expected to be, but in a room with boarded windows, faded, damp-stained yellow wallpaper and ripped flowery lino on the floor, he looked worried.

'What is this place? Where am I?'

'Purgatory,' Max said, 'limboland.'

Max and Joe were sitting opposite him at a wooden table with a one kilo bag of 93 per cent pure Medellin cartel cocaine in between them.

'What am I doin' here? Frino spoke in a rough, growly voice and a heavy Australian accent which gave it gravitas.

He was short and thickset, with medium-length lank blond hair and a full beard. The whiteness of his teeth was accentuated by the golden tan of someone who worked outdoors.