ELEVEN

The house was located on the city’s eastern fringes, not far from Tocumen International Airport. There was a real sense of loneliness and neglect about it; like most of the other homes in this particular neighbourhood, it was deteriorating rapidly and right on the verge of collapse. Shutters dangled from shattered windows, the front picket fence was left broken and peeling, and the front lawn was mostly dirt, littered only by the odd clump of dried, dead grass.

The inside of the house was no better. The walls were stained a filthy yellow tinge, and a musky, stale odour seemed to permanently hang in the air. The bookshelves and cupboards were all bare, their contents strewn messily about across the dated, brown carpet floor.

The two corpses lying inside the front doorway only made the mess even worse. Their eyes were wide and vacant, their dark-skinned bodies shredded by buckshot, and the Uzi submachine guns were still smoking in their dead hands. Three more blood-soaked bodies were also scattered around the main living room, and a fourth was lying skewered on the kitchen bench with over a dozen knives of various sizes sticking through him.

Just half an hour earlier the house had been the site of a complete massacre.

But not everyone who resided at the house was dead. The owner of the residence, a bull of a man of Jamaican blood who was named Marty Marley, was still hanging on, albeit only very barely. He was tied by his ankles from a rope running down from around his ceiling fan in his own bedroom, his hands bound in cable behind his back. He had been stripped of all his clothing and his exposed body was a bruised and battered mess. His wide blue eyes had long been glazed over in a vacant, semi-conscious stare.

For years Marty had led his gang of Jamaican gangsters in Panama City, staking claim to just under one tenth of the city’s very lucrative cocaine trade. Even with the union of the two most powerful organisations, the Paravinchis and Kojimas, in an effort to take complete control, the Jamaicans had held on stubbornly to their share of the market. Their tactics were simple; scare the competition. They spilt blood far more than was ever really necessary. Their intimidation factor had been their greatest asset, and they used it wisely. They had been often known to skin their victims alive. Either that, or go to work on them with a machete for hours and then mail their remains to their friends and colleagues in small pieces.

But all of Marley’s rather cunning intimidation tactics were of little help to him now; given his current predicament, it could be said the tables had well-and-truly been turned.

Marley looked around the room at his five captors. All five of them were wearing long, pale trench coats, and two of them were armed with military-issue 12 gauge shotguns. Their faces, like his own, were black as tar. Four of them had long dreadlocks coiling down from their scalps like snakes; one’s were dyed blond, the others all black. And the final captor, who was holding a splintered baseball bat covered in Marley’s blood, had a cleanly shaven head and a wreath of what appeared to be barbed wire wrapped around his cranium, like some sort of sadistic creature straight out of hell; the deranged expression on his face seemed to be permanent.

“You know we don’t be taking kindly to silence, Marley-boy.” The man with the blond dreadlocks took a step towards Marley with a curved knife in his hand. Kirby Kosta. He spoke in a heavy accent that was much similar to his own “You should not have been so stubborn; it would have been better for you, I think. Yes, much better.”

Another one of the dreadlocked demons stepped forward behind him. This one was holding a small porcelain bowl and brush in hands, which he handed over to Kosta. From his dangling position Marley could clearly see that the bowl was filled with his own blood, which the demons just spent the past half-hour beating out from him like candy from a piñata.

“What the fuck more do you want from me?” Marley moaned, his voice barely a whisper. “You’ve already killed all my men!”

“Yes, and I’m sorry for all that nasty business, Marley-boy, I really am.” The blond dreadlock carefully began applying the blood to Marley’s torso with the paint brush.

“What you doing? Why you painting me up like a fucking canvas, dog?”

“You come from a land very much like our own. You should know Voodoo.”

“Fuck you, Haitian pussies!”

“Baron Samedi be waiting for you now on the other side; when he sees these marks on you, he be knowing that your soul belongs to him for the rest of eternity.” Kirby Kosta’s face lit up in a depraved smile. “Now, Marley-boy, it be time for you to kiss your arse goodnight!”

***

A little over twenty minutes later the five Haitians killers finally emerged from Marley’s house with Kirby Kosta carrying a briefcase in his bloodstained hands. They walked across the street, howling in excitement, and climbed inside the yellow BMW convertible that was parked waiting for them.

Once they were all in, Kosta opened up his briefcase. Inside of it were four sealed plastic pouches of white powder. He tore open a pouch and sampled it on the end of his pinkie finger.

“Mmm,” he groaned, “now that’s some damn good shit! We’re gonna get high as kites before our hit tonight!”

The others all started hollering and cheering

A second later the driver gunned the ignition and the car shot off down the street.

...

No sooner had the convertible disappeared from view when an unmarked Holden sedan edged slowly up to the curb out front of the Marley home.

Behind the wheel, Detective Randy turned across to his partner. “Alright Jax, let’s get to work quick, before the boys in uniform show up.”

They both got out and walked inside, carefully stepping over the two Jamaican corpses lying in the entranceway. While Randy remained on lookout at the front door, Jackson carried out a room-by-room sweep of the residence.

Detective Davis Randy looked out across the street at the run-down neighbourhood. It reminded him of his childhood home, back in the outer suburbs of Western Sydney, Australia. Randy had been born into a poor family, given next to nothing all his life. Whatever he did get his hands on he had had to earn the hard way. Kindness had never been given to him by anyone, and so he had never returned it. His upbringing had turned him into a man who cared about nothing but himself. For Randy, his badge and gun carried no moral obligations; they were merely tools that gave him the power to take away whatever he wanted from those less fortunate. His initial run-ins with the law had been on its opposing side, dabbling briefly in everything from drugs and prostitution to contract killings. But from such experiences he had learned it was far easier and more profitable to play both sides.

Elsewhere in the house, Detective Jackson had just come across the corpse of Marty Marley. The big Jamaican was still dangling lifelessly from the ceiling fan up in the main bedroom. The man’s heart had been cut right out from his chest, and dried blood was weeping from the hole.

Despite the god-awful scene in front of him, Detective Jackson actually managed to smile. At times like this, he realised just how much he loved his job. There was something exhilarating about upholding the law but then choosing to bend and break it whenever it benefitted him. Such things were not possible back in America, which is why he had initially been drawn to this corrupt cesspool of a nation to ply his trade. All the better when he had been paired up with such a similarly-minded partner in Randy. It seemed great minds really did think alike.

“All clear,” Jackson called out to his partner. “Marley is strung up in the main bedroom. Looks like the crack-head died of a broken heart.”

Already being intimately familiar with the Haitian gang’s ritualistic-style murders, Randy chuckled at his partner’s joke. “Good. Now we just have to make sure that the Haitians didn’t leave anything behind that can be traced back to us, or Lacroix.” He turned serious again. “I’ll give El Maestro a call; no doubt he’ll be want to make sure everything went down smoothly.”