Angel of Darkness

by Charles de Lint

  “You don’t talk about a man’s wife that way.”

  “So sue me.”

  Walt started to frown, but then he saw that Ted was only ragging him. “And get what?” he asked. “You’ve got nothing worth suing you for.”

  “Tout-chay,” Ted replied, mangling the expression he’d heard on some late show.

  He was a thin little weasel of a guy, black hair slicked back, skin pockmarked from a bad case of acne he’d had as a kid. But he was a stand-up kind of a guy, Walt thought. No question. You wanted a guy you could trust at your back, then Teddy Rimmer was your man.

  “So whatcha gonna do with her?” Ted wanted to know.

  “I’m thinking about it. First thing is, I want to know all the people that’ve been helping her out—just so’s I can have a little talk with them and convince them that maybe it wouldn’t be such a good thing to do if she fucks off on me again.”

  “And then?” Ted asked when Walt fell silent.

  “Then I’m going to bring old Beth home and teach her all about pain.”

  “If you need any, you know, help—”

  “We’re talking about my fucking wife, Teddy!”

  “Hey, hey—relax, buddy. I’m just talking about these stiffs you wanna mess up a little.”

  “I’ll let you know.” Walt took a swig of his beer. “Thanks for the offer, though.”

  “No problem.”

  Walt looked back at the screen. “Aw, shit. I missed the part where the guy shoots his load. You want to rewind that thing?”

  He got up to get them each another beer while Ted fiddled with the machine. Tonight was celebration time. He’d finally tracked down the long lost tramp. He wasn’t even going to go in to work tomorrow. He was going to be too busy with a different kind of job for the next few days.

  14

  HARDASS BOUCHER CAUGHT a call from Dispatch—patched through to the inspector’s car in front of the Baker residence—and met his partner, Jimmy Glover, at the scene of a Mac’s Milk that had just been held up. Afterward he sat back at his desk, trying to get his paperwork up-to-date, but he couldn’t concentrate on his work. He kept thinking of what he’d seen in Baker’s basement.

  Not the bodies. They’d been in bad-news shape, no question about it, but he’d seen worse.

  No, he was thinking about those hallucinatory flashes that had hit him from out of nowhere. And about the weird feeling of being afraid. Christ, he couldn’t have turned into a wimp all of a sudden, so what the hell was going on?

  Even stranger was the roll call that had chosen tonight to go marching through his head, a parade of faces he didn’t particularly want to remember.

  The rape victim he’d felt up in the cruiser while they were waiting for the ambulance to arrive.

  The teenage hooker he’d forced to sixty-nine him in a Harvey’s restaurant; she under the table, head between his legs, he and his partner just shooting the breeze over a coffee while she did her mouth magic.

  The drug dealer whom, when he found out she was a Lesbian, he let some of the boys gang-bang for a night, because it was either that or he was turning her in.

  And others . . .

  All too many others. . .

  Each clamoring for his attention. Each pointing a finger at him and saying, “You fucked us up. Now it’s your turn, Hardass. Now it’s coming for you.”

  Coming for him.

  He could feel it. Something. In that haunted wasteland. Riding that weird music he’d heard. Waiting for him out in the night beyond the station’s walls. Right now.

  Something.

  Didn’t matter that he knew it was all just bullshit. That it had been just a flash of never-was, brought on by inhaling some bad fumes.

  In his gut he knew it was real—whatever it was.

  And it was out there.

  Somewhere.

  Waiting for him.

  TWO

  1

  THE PHONE WOKE him. He didn’t pick it up until the fifth ring.

  “Jack?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s Anna.”

  “I know. I kind of recognized your voice.”

  “Why’d you leave so early?”

  “I needed a little time on my own. Just to think things through a bit.”

  (What do you do when you think you’re losing it, sis?)

  “Have you called the girl’s parents yet?”

  “No. I want to tell them in person . . .”

  (I want to look in their eyes and have them tell me they didn’t drive their kid out onto the street.)

  “. . . but I’ve got to talk to Ned first.”

  “He hasn’t called me yet.”

  “He’s probably busy, Anna. You’ll be hearing from him.”

  “You sound so distant.”

  (That’s because I’m on another fucking planet.)

  “Must be the connection.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay, Jack?”

  “I’m not exactly okay, but I’m working on it.”

  “It wasn’t your fault—what happened, I mean.”

  “I know.”

  (It’s never anybody’s fault, is it?)

  There was a moment’s pause.

  “I love you, Jack.”

  “I know you do. It’s what keeps me going sometimes.”

  “Just don’t close me out of your life.”

  There was a soft click, then the hum of a dial tone. He nestled the receiver into its cradle and stared up at the wall of his bedroom. He was a little surprised to find himself still at home. In his own bed.

  But then, he hadn’t dreamed.

  After that first one.

  Not that he could remember.

  He turned his head. Beside the phone and his digital alarm clock—it had come free with a half-year’s subscription to Newsweek—was a small Fimo clay sculpture of Anna. A self-portrait. A present on his last birthday.

  “I love you too,” he said softly.

  Then he got up and started his day.

  2

  POLICE WORK.

  Ninety-nine percent of it was routine, and every cop bitched about it. The paperwork. The calls. Maybe it’d be a domestic, or a gas bar getting hit. A B&E. They still all ran together. The faces changed but the complainants and perps all looked the same after a while. The cases all ran together. Making for more paperwork. More of the same routine.

  You did your job. Maybe you’d work out in the gym or the weight room on the other side of the floor after your shift was over. Pump a few. Or see who was on break in Fuzzie’s. Maybe you’d head over to the Delco Building and shoot a little pool with a couple of the other guys, grab a couple of beers in Russell’s. Maybe a lot of beers. Shoot the shit. Finish the late shift, pick up the early. Try to adjust. Shoot off a few rounds in the gun room and pretend the paper target you were filling full of holes was the same perp some candy-assed judge had let off on a technicality the week before.

  Routine.

  But no matter how much you bitched, you didn’t want to get wired into a freak show. Times like this, Ned thought, all you wanted was that routine back again.

  They’d finished up at Baker’s house around three-thirty, though the ID unit was still going through the place when he and Ernie left. They had an appointment with the coroner at the General for the autopsy. Funny thing about the hospital. The same horror-show corpses you wanted to puke over at the scene of the crime didn’t look half so bad lying on a shiny metal table under the bright lights. It was like they weren’t human anymore—not the bodies of dead people. Just bodies on a table. And you stood by while the coroner did his bit. It wasn’t the same as when you found them. Then you knew, these were people you were looking at. Dead people. Who’d died hard.

  The girl had been a long time dying. The coroner just confirmed what they’d all already known from seeing that little meat factory in Baker’s basement. The tubes going into her had been feeding crap into her system to keep her aware. To fire up her nerves so that sh
e felt every little thing the sick bastard did to her. There was no fading away for her. She’d had to take it all, on her own, with no one to turn to but the freak who was peeling back her skin, inch by fucking inch.

  The coroner read off a list of the shit Baker had been feeding her when the sample slides came back from the lab, but the medical terms just went over Ned’s head.

  Nobody could come up with an explanation of what had taken Baker down. It was Baker—they were sure of that much. His prints were on file from when he’d done some government work and needed security clearance. Research into noise pollution—wasn’t that a kicker?

  At his desk in the squad room, making out his report, Ned found himself sitting back and staring at the wall, his fists clenched, just wanting to hit somebody. Trouble was, some-body’d already done the job on the only likely candidate. And now it was up to him and Ernie to track down who did him in. What they should do, when they found this guy, was pin a fucking medal on him. No question about it. There ought to be a special award for people who took down slime like Baker. Ned wondered if he should bring it up at the next Police Association meeting.

  Routine.

  Jesus, Ned thought. Give me routine over this any day.

  Because the real trouble was—never mind Baker and his sicko games—the real kicker was Ned wasn’t so sure that he was playing with a full deck himself anymore. He kept seeing shit. . . .

  “How’s it going, Ned?”

  Ned started. For one moment the squad room blurred, and those dead lands were rolling in—

  (keep the fuck away from me!)

  —then he focused on Ernie, pulling up a chair to his desk.

  “You okay?” Grier asked. He shook out a cigarette and lit it with a bright orange Bic lighter—one of the new, smaller models.

  “Feeling a little punchy, that’s all,” Ned said. It was going on thirty hours since he’d first gotten out of bed yesterday morning. “It’s been a long shift.”

  “And it just keeps getting longer.” Grier paused to take a drag off his smoke. He’d had the bandage on his hand replaced. There was no telltale trace of blood on this one. “We’ve got a meeting in the briefing room in fifteen minutes,” he added.

  “Wonderful.”

  Grier sat and smoked for a few moments. Ned could tell he had something on his mind, but he knew from experience that he’d hear it quicker if he just waited Ernie out.

  “Let me ask you something, Ned,” Grier said finally. “Have I got B.O. or something?”

  Ned blinked. “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, I get this feeling that no one wants to be around me this morning—like people are avoiding me. So I was wondering, maybe I need a new deodorant.”

  “What you need is a shave.”

  Grier rubbed the stubble on his cheek. “I’m going for that Miami Vice look—what do you think?”

  “Well,” Ned said, pretending to consider it. “If you get yourself a nice baggy white suit and shades and stop wearing socks . . .”

  “How do you suppose Crockett keeps those pants of his clean, crawling around in the dirt looking for evidence? Christ, all he’s got to do is sit in one of our squad cars and it’s game over for those cotton whites.”

  “That’s the beauty of TV, Ernie. You get to look a little rough, but you never have to get dirty doing it. They just keep changing your clothes in between scenes.”

  Grier lit another cigarette. “I was serious, though, Ned. About this feeling I’ve got. Maybe I’m getting a bug—I don’t know. You feel weird around me?”

  “No weirder than usual,” Ned began, but then he thought about something.

  Going up to Fuzzie’s for a coffee an hour or so ago. Thinking about sitting down at a table with a couple of the guys and taking a little break, shooting the shit for the ten minutes it’d take him to drink it down. But he’d felt a coldness in the cafeteria—like he didn’t know anybody, even though they were all guys he saw every day—so he’d come back down to the squad room to work on his report while he drank it instead.

  He hadn’t really given it much thought, because coming down the stairs, he’d had another one of those flashes. . . .

  Flicker.

  The stairs were gone. And he was back there. In that place. The dead plains stretching for as far as he could see.

  Flicker.

  And it was gone again.

  But he wasn’t going crazy.

  Jack had seen it too.

  And unless they were both losing it. . .

  “Back there in Baker’s basement,” he said, looking at Grier, “when you cut your hand. What did you see?”

  “See?”

  “Something made you stumble, Ernie, and it wasn’t just looking at that kid.”

  “I . . . well, it was fumes—right?”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Except they tested the air and there wasn’t anything there, was there? No fumes. Nothing.”

  “That’s what the machines said.”

  “Unless maybe it drifted away before they got things set up . . . ?”

  “What did you see, Ernie?”

  Grier stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. He looked down at the butt as he spoke, watching the smoke curl up from its end, not looking at his partner.

  “It was like—just for a moment, Ned—it was like the room wasn’t there anymore. It was like I was standing out on . . . I don’t know, the prairies, except everything was dead. There was nothing growing. Nothing alive. It was just this flash—there and gone—but even after I cut myself I felt like it was still sitting there inside me. That place. Waiting for me, maybe.”

  Finally he looked up at Ned. “I really think I’m getting a bug, Ned. I was talking to Bernie just before I went on shift yesterday, and he says there’s this flu going around.”

  “I saw it, too, Ernie.”

  It took a moment for his words to register. “You saw . . . ?”

  “That place, Ernie. I saw it too. A couple of times. And Jack saw it when I was talking to him in the cruiser.”

  “What the fuck’s going on, Ned?”

  “I don’t know. But you know what I’m going to do? I think I’ll track some of the other guys who were there last night— the uniforms who got there first. Talk to them.”

  “They’re going to think you’re ready to eat your gun, Ned.”

  “Not if they saw it too.”

  Grier nodded slowly. “The guy on the porch—Coffey. He was really spooked.”

  “And Dwyer.”

  “Hardass went down too,” Grier added. “Went down once and came up fast—at least that’s what Dwyer told me—and he didn’t go back down again.”

  “Not like him,” Ned said.

  “Yeah,” Grier agreed glumly.

  Duchaine from Arson stuck his head in the squad room, ending further speculation. “You guys waiting for a written invitation or what?”

  Ned recovered first. “Just wanted to see your pretty face, Lou—to see how bad you missed us.”

  Duchaine gave him the finger with a grin. Grabbing their report files, they followed him down the hall to the briefing room. There was a definite chill in the air. They both felt it.

  3

  BETH WAS UP early after a restless night. She lay awake for a long while, waiting to hear some sound from downstairs to let her know that Jack was up. Finally she washed, put on a pair of light blue cotton trousers and a dark blue cotton-knit sweater, and went down only to find Jack gone. All that remained of his presence was the unmade bed on the couch and his jacket, which was slung over the back of the fat easy chair by the window. She put on a pot of coffee and folded up the bedding on the couch while she waited for the coffee. By the time she was on her second cup Anna had come down, ready for work in an old Kate Bush “Lionheart Tour” sweatshirt and a pair of faded jeans.

  “Morning,” Anna said brightly. “Where’s Jack?”

  “He was already gone when I got up.”

&nbs
p; Anna showed no signs of either the late night or the at least one too many beers she’d had the night before. But then she never did. Sometimes Beth wondered if she ever slept at all.

  “Cathy must have scared him off,” Anna decided.

  “I suppose.”

  “Or maybe it was you.”

  Beth blushed and started to protest.

  “Just kidding.” Anna helped herself to the coffee and sat down at the kitchen table with Beth. She pulled the phone closer. “I’d better give him a call. He didn’t seem to be in very good shape yesterday.”

  Beth listened to Anna’s side of the conversation when the connection was made and wondered why the world had to be the way it was, things going wrong far more often than going right.

  “So how’d you sleep last night?” Anna asked as she cradled the receiver.

  “Not very well. I couldn’t stop dreaming.”

  Concern rose in Anna’s eyes. “Were they . . . ?”

  She didn’t have to finish. They’d discussed it only once, but after that they never put it into words again. Never talked about—

  (that dark place)

  —what had happened the last time Walt had dragged her home. Locking her in the basement, the windows hammered shut, the door going up to the kitchen locked. Walt had the only key. He let her out to cook and clean. Under his supervision. She used a pail for a toilet that she was only allowed to empty upstairs once a day. She slept down there, on an old mattress. The same mattress on which he fucked her. When he could get it up. He had to hit her to get it up. Because it was her fault that it wouldn’t get hard. But once he got it up . . . his grip painful on her bruised skin, each lunging thrust of his hips an agony.

  She was there for weeks—

  (in that dark place filled with pain)

  —in the dark. And the damp. Nursing her bruises like a hurt animal.

  “Beth . . . ?”

  She looked up, eyes bright with unshed tears.

  “I’m sorry,” Anna said. “I didn’t mean to bring it all up again. Shit. What a way for me to start your day.”

  “It. . . it’s not your fault, Anna. Besides, Dr. Hansen says I’m not supposed to hide it. . . what happened. . . . I’m not supposed to hide it from myself. I’ve got to learn to face it.”