The King of Swords (max mingus) Read Online Free PDF

head. The crown was in the shape of a castle turret and studded with brilliant red rubies. In his left hand he held a blood-flecked gold sword, blade plunged into the ground; in his right fist a thick chain was wrapped tightly around his knuckles. The chain was fitted to a black mastiff who lay at his right side, head raised, teeth half bared, paws out in front. The dog's eyes were bright red and it had a forked tongue, to go with its mean, bad-tempered expression on their faces, an anger caught midway to eruption. Despite where it had been and what it had been through, and the fact that it was in pieces, the card seemed very much alive. She found herself staring at it, enraptured by its terrible beauty, unable to pull herself away. This was like no other card she'd ever seen. The man on the throne had no face. In its stead was the blank, plain white outline of a head. It seemed like it might have been a printing error, given the richness of the detail, but the more she studied it, the more she felt the design was intentional.
    'You know tarot?' Javier said behind her.
    'What?' She turned around, then laughed. 'No. I don't believe in that kind of stuff.'
    'The King of Swords,' Javier explained, looking down at the foot of the mortuary slab. 'The card represents a man of great power and influence, an aggressive man also. It can mean a valuable ally or a fearsome enemy, depending on where and how it turns up in the reading.'
    'Is that right?' Gemma said. 'So what does it mean when it turns up in someone's stomach?'

4
    ' Preval Lacour,' Max read off a photostatted report as Joe drove. 'Forty-four years old. Haitian. Became a US citizen in 1976. Taxpayer, registered Republican, churchgoer, married, four kids. Good credit score, home owner, modest Amex debt. Recently became the proud owner-with his business partner, Guy Martin-of a lot of real estate in Lemon City. He was plannin' to redevelop it. No priors, no record, no nothing. I don't get it.' He looked at Joe over the pages. 'Here's a guy well on his way to getting his piece of the American Dream. No history of mental illness, or violence. No drugs or alcohol in his system. How and why the fuck did it all go so wrong?'
    'People go crazy, Max,' Joe said. 'Sometimes somethin' just slips. You know how it is. We see it all the time.'
    'I'd say somethin' more than just "slipped" with this guy.' Max continued reading from the report. 'He killed his business partner and secretary. Why? These were childhood friends, godfathers to each other's kids, never known to have had a serious quarrel, business was on the up.' Max turned the page. 'Then he puts the bodies in his trunk and drives over to Fort Lauderdale and kills Alvaro and Frida Cuesta. Then he drives over to Primate Park, breaks in and chokes to death on his own vomit-all in seventy-two hours.
    'The other people he killed, the Cuestas: they were his main business rivals. They went head to head over the Lemon City project. But the Cuestas lost out. Why kill 'em? And there was a third guy in the running too-Sam Ismael, Haitian, Lemon City local, runs a voodoo store. He was the lucky one. He was out of town the day Lacour went on the rampage, otherwise he might've been murdered too. The whole thing's insane. Don't make sense.'
    'Sometimes it just never does.' Joe sighed.
    They were on US1, driving towards Kendall. It had been two weeks since they'd found Preval Lacour's body in Primate Park. The incident had made the national news, thanks to the hundreds of monkeys which had escaped from the zoo and run riot all over Miami and beyond.
    Lacour's fingerprints had been taken at the morgue and run through the computer. Five days later the machine had matched them to the murders of Guy Martin and Theresa Morales in a Hialeah motel and to the Cuestas in Fort Lauderdale. Lacour's car-a black Mercedes sedan-had been spotted speeding away from the scene. A witness had taken down the number plate and phoned it in.
    Lacour had dumped the