In the Details

by H. Claire Taylor

  She blinked. The generosity amid such catastrophe should have been a beacon of hope for her, but she knew better. “That’s a lot of trouble to go to for me. It’s probably five and a half hours each way.”

  “Sure, if you’re going the speed limit. But I figure we’ll be going quite a bit over, and I just started my shift, so I can be back before it ends.”

  Her mental energy depleted, she didn’t have anything left for this game. “What’s the catch?”

  “No catch, ma’am. You’re stranded on the side of the road, and it’s my job to keep folks safe on this great state’s highways. Also, you’re God’s daughter, and I’m an angel. If I don’t follow this little voice inside telling me to help you, I think I might start, I don’t know, vomiting? I don’t really want to test it out.”

  “Oh.” The last bit seemed highly unprofessional, but she decided to overlook it. “How do I know you’re a good angel?” she asked. “Forgive me, Officer…”

  “Trooper.”

  “Trooper …?”

  “Michaels.”

  “Trooper Michaels.”

  “You can call me Gabriel.”

  “Gabriel Michaels?” Oh, for shit’s sake. She felt silly finishing the question now, but went ahead with it, “The reason I’m here, stranded on the side of the road with my phone dead, is because a not-good angel screwed me. Not literally. Figuratively. So just because you’re an angel doesn’t mean I can trust you.”

  He squinted at her. “An angel screwed you over? That doesn’t make sense. There’s only one angel I can think of who would leave you in this kind of situation, and he’s—”

  “She’s. She is the Devil. I’m aware … now.”

  “Why don’t you ask your Father, then? He’ll vouch for me.”

  “I would, but he rarely helps me out like that. For some reason he thinks it’s best if—”

  FOR GLORY’S SAKE, TAKE THE BLESSED RIDE, YOU HOLY IDIOT.

  She snapped her mouth shut. If she didn’t know any better, she might think God had actually intervened by sending this guy.

  She grabbed her bag off the seat next to her. “Okay, Gabriel, we’re good to go.”

  Riding in the front seat of Trooper Michaels’ Crown Victoria was so far outside of how she could have imagined her drive back to Austin that it was almost enough to make her never bother imagining anything ever again. What was the point when she could end up being so far off? Waste of energy, really.

  Gabriel had the right kind of charger for her phone plugged into his dashboard computer, and he was more than happy to let her use it. As the notifications began flooding in again, she turned her phone to silent.

  “You feel much like talking?” asked Gabriel as they whizzed down the highway.

  “Not much to talk about. I just spent the last five days at a women’s leadership retreat only to find out everything I’ve worked for has been stolen from me by the Devil.”

  Gabriel was silent for a minute, then he said, “To be clear, you said there wasn’t much to talk about?”

  A voice came through the radio, speaking in code Jessica didn’t understand, and Gabriel reached forward and turned the volume nearly all the way down.

  “I did. But maybe what I meant was that there was too much to talk about.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I understand that. I used to be El Paso PD. Too much to talk about in that job, so I switched to this one. Much less to talk about.”

  She thought about Officer McBride, and a long-forming question surfaced. “Do you work with a lot of angels?”

  He nodded. “Oh yeah. Law enforcement is full of them. But it also has plenty of plain humans who want to do good. And I’ve encountered the occasional demon in the department.”

  She jerked her head around. “What? You work with demons?”

  “Not if I can help it. But usually I don’t have control over the fact. They find ways to work under humans who wouldn’t believe they were demons, even if I or other angels pointed it out. If we’re lucky, there’s an angel higher up who finds a reason to fire the bad ones, but that’s not always possible.” He sighed. “Just part of power, I guess. People come to this line of work for all kinds of reasons. Mostly, they’re good ones.”

  “When did you realize you were an angel?”

  “When I figured out I wasn’t gay,” he said. “I think I was eighteen.”

  “Don’t fully understand that, if I’m being honest.”

  “I grew up in a small border town. Very religious. There was this boy, Jamie, who had this glow around him all the time. No one else saw it, but I did. I figured that meant I was in love with him—I didn’t know much about gays at the time. And then I found out that he saw the glow around me. We didn’t know it was just run-of-the-mill angel auras, so we thought we were destined to be together. Then we tried it and … nah. Pass. Just not for me. I read online a few months later that seeing auras was an angelic ability. Followed that rabbit hole all the way down. There’s even a subreddit for that now.”

  “There are gay angels, you know.”

  He nodded quickly. “Oh, I know. Like I said, the subreddit. There are all kinds of angels according to that.”

  “And only one is evil?”

  He snuck a glance at her, but she couldn’t make out his eyes through his large sunglasses. “Yeah. You want to tell me about her? Promise I won’t put it online.”

  “You can if you want. I don’t care anymore.” And then Jessica, figuring they had a bit of time still, launched into the story of her long-time relationship with Dolores Thomas, pausing every so often to interject an “Oh shit,” or “that makes more sense now,” or “I’m such an idiot.”

  They stopped only once on their way back to the capital city, and that was to get Jessica a double bacon cheeseburger, fries, and an ice cream cone.

  Trooper Michaels’ business card remained clutched in Jessica’s hand as she watched his cruiser’s taillights disappear around a corner three blocks down. She didn’t want to turn around yet. She’d glimpsed the storefront from the passenger’s seat and had cast her eyes away when she felt the dagger of regret pierce her left lung.

  Tucking his card into her pants pocket, she clenched her teeth and forced herself to face the bakery, the front lit only by a nearby streetlamp. The lights were off inside, and the sign was flipped to closed. Even though she’d done that herself days before, it felt like an intentional detail to mock her.

  Would Dolores continue to let Jessica work at the bakery?

  More importantly, would Jessica be able to stand working at the bakery if it was owned by the Devil?

  Not a chance in hell.

  She’d get her laptop, a few other personal items she kept in the kitchen, and her stuffed giraffe, and then she would leave It is Risen behind and … what? Start another bakery? There was no way. She had nothing to do now. She was just an unemployed messiah, and there was little more pathetic and detestable than that.

  After digging her keys out of the bottom of her bag, she stuck the appropriate one into the lock.

  It wouldn’t even go in all the way.

  “Oh, you’re fucking kidding me.”

  But, no, this made sense. Of course, that didn’t mean she wasn’t livid. Changing the locks was pouring salt directly into the wound then rubbing it around, really grinding it in there. Did Dolores think Jessica would come back and set fire to the place, burn it to the ground so no one could have it? Even at her most vengeful, Jessica couldn’t imagine doing that to the place she’d built.

  Maybe the Devil hadn’t changed the locks on the back door. It was unlikely, but worth a shot. What else did she have to do for the rest of her miserable existence?

  She left her suitcase on the sidewalk and hurried around to the back. But when her key refused to do its sole job once again, and that tiny thread of hope was ripped away from her, her head began to pound. Nausea welled up in her core, a heady mixture of self-loathing, contempt, and futility. And then, wait, she felt something else.
Something coming not in a small waves, but in one single tsunami of holy fury, only meters out from shore …

  The bitch had locked her out of her own business! The laptop was hers! Asha was hers! That evil bitch had taken things too far.

  She wiggled her fingers to try to diffuse the swell of power building in her core as she stomped around toward the front to grab her suitcase and call her mother for a ride home. Destinee’s own prolific rage was the only thing Jessica wanted around her right now. Sure, that meant eating quite a bit of crow over the coming days and months when it came to admitting Dolores was as bad as Destinee had always thought, but she knew her mother would wait until the anger wasn’t so fresh before saying I told you so.

  Thou shalt not smite … thou shalt not smite …

  The dumpster was looking mighty tempting just then, and while she wasn’t keen on burning the bakery to the ground, she wouldn’t be opposed to covering it in exploded trash. Before she could decide that, yes, it was a go with smiting the dumpster, Jessica rounded the corner and froze in her tracks. Her suitcase was open and someone was rifling through it. No, not just someone.

  First, she recognized that hat. That stupid Houston Texans hat! Her gaze flickered to the front door where a letter was taped. It hadn’t been there just a moment before. “Hey!”

  The man looked up, a pair of her unused underwear in his hand, and for a moment, neither moved. Her mouth fell open when she saw the weak chin, penis nose, and watery eyes that were fully dilated. “You sick fuck,” she muttered, marching toward him. “You sick fucking fuck. Drop my panties, Donald!”

  “You remembered my name,” he moaned. “I knew you felt what I did. You just needed prodding.”

  She was only ten yards away now, closing in. “Thou shalt drop my goddamn panties!”

  Still, he didn’t do as she said, and, channeling her mother, she reared back, and socked him right in his punchable face. His head snapped back, and she realized two things instantly:

  Punching someone hurt one’s hand quite a lot.

  And punching someone didn’t diffuse her indignation, but only fanned the flames.

  Holding his nose, he stared up at her wide eyed, but for some strange reason, it didn’t look quite like fear. “Yes, my queen! Put up a fight! I lust for the struggle.” His hands dropped from his nose as a trickle of blood ran down his cupid’s bow. She felt no regret. This contemptible worm had tried to control her for months, and he’d been watching her at work for even longer, the whole time thinking that she somehow belonged to him, that he deserved to own her and he’d get his way whether she wanted it or not.

  When his right hand went for his pants, she didn’t wait to see where this freak show was headed. She couldn’t have waited even if she’d wanted to. The wrath flowed through her in a flash, a wave of satisfaction crashing against her mind more so than it had for the grackle, the watermelons, the fire hydrant, the juniper tree …

  He exploded like a tomato dropped from a skyscraper, sending minute splinters of bone and the finest spray of blood and tissue in all directions.

  HOLY MOTHER OF JESSICA!

  Her breath caught in her chest, pinned there like it’d sprung a bear trap. The world around her was silent except for her heartbeat in her ears.

  She blinked away the blood from her eyes, but her hands were too coated to rub anything away from the rest of her face. She gaped at the indentation in the sidewalk where her stalker had just stood, and the word that repeated itself over and over in her head was simply, Whoops.

  Something gooey and with a bit of bulk to it slid from her hair down onto her shoulder.

  Her stalker was gone. She had …

  Had anyone …?

  She managed to move again just to search the street for any openmouthed witnesses. She saw none, but did that matter?

  She’d finally crossed a line. A big one. And all she felt was … nothing.

  Maybe it was shock, or maybe it was a case of stepping in dog shit while you were already knee deep in sewage.

  Blood and guts dripped down the front windows of It is Risen, soaking the last letter her stalker would ever leave her.

  A car passed by but didn’t slow, and she wiped her right hand off on the back of her jeans, which had been spared the gore, and carefully pulled out her cell phone from her pocket.

  She lowered herself to the cement of the sidewalk and calmly called 911.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  “It’s not usually my job to doubt a voluntary confession,” said Officer McBride half an hour later, “but I feel like I’m missing something here.”

  Jessica leaned against the trunk of the police cruiser, arms folded cross her chest as she stared down the road, wondering how law enforcement became such a big part of her life.

  Cars crept by, drivers alerted to something interesting by the flashing red and blue lights and rewarded when they saw a woman covered head to toe in blood and a storefront looking no less drippy.

  “I smote him,” Jessica explained. “It was the stalker. You can check the footage, if you can get inside. I can’t because the biggest asshole in creation changed the locks. Anyway, he reached for his pants and I smote him.”

  "Yeaaah," said Officer McBride slowly, tapping her pen to her pad. “I think that’s the part that’s hanging me up. When you say you smote him, what exactly are we talking about? A … bomb?” She glanced over her shoulder at the scene, where homicide detectives were busy laying down evidence markers.

  “Not a bomb. Smiting, like in the Bible. I can smite things. Just aim my anger at them and poof, obliterated. Like I said, it should be on the security footage. It’s not pretty, though. I can tell you that.”

  “Right.”

  Jessica snuck a peek at the notepad where Officer McBride wrote the word smote in quotation marks.

  “So, you’re claiming you murdered someone by smiting him, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  McBride tucked the notepad into her breast pocket and stuck the pen beside it. “Murder is obviously a big deal. But I’m not sure exactly what to charge you with. I reckon the courts will have a hard time with it, too. Smiting could be manslaughter, or it could be first degree. You sure you want to confess to this? He was …” she paused before mumbling, "kind of a scum bag.” She quickly checked to make sure the other law enforcement on scene hadn’t heard her.

  “Maybe they’ll let me off without the death penalty then,” Jessica said.

  McBride sighed. “You don’t have to worry about that. To be honest, you’ll probably be let off on self-defense. He was going for his pants! He could have been going for a knife or a gun.”

  “I think he was going for his dick,” Jessica said honestly.

  “Ah. But you know as well as I do that can be used as a weapon. It’ll still be a pain in the ass to deal with the legal system, though. Could take up the next two years of your life.”

  Jessica picked at some dried blood on her arm. “That’s fine. I don’t have anything else to do.”

  “You being sarcastic?”

  “Nope.”

  Jessica explained the events leading up to the murder, and McBride listened patiently.

  When she was finished, the officer said, “That’s some crap, right there. And now I get why you can’t go inside. Stay here.”

  McBride spoke briefly with the homicide detectives, then disappeared around the side of the building. One of the detectives kept a casual eye on Jessica as she remained against the trunk. She tried to make it clear she wasn’t going anywhere. If she was going to run, she would have done it an hour ago, before she called in her own crime.

  The lights inside It is Risen flicked on, and McBride emerged in the cafe and unlocked the front door, pushing it open and hollering out. “Why don’t we get that footage now?”

  After a stop by the bathrooms to clean off her hands, Jessica logged into her laptop and pulled up the footage.

  It was even grosser the second time around.

&n
bsp; “I’ll be damned,” said McBride. Then she pulled her eyes from the screen and said to Jessica, “Ms. McCloud, I don’t even know if I can arrest you in good conscience.”

  “What?”

  She gestured back toward the screen. “I’ll run this by homicide, but look at it! You don’t shoot him. You’re three feet away from him and you just point at him then he explodes. Unless the law is going to arrest you on suspicion of superpowers, I’m pretty sure we don’t have a case.”

  “But … you have to. I promise you, I murdered him. I—”

  “Smote him. I heard you the first dozen times.” The look the officer gave her hinted that if Jessica did end up locked away, it would be in a facility with white, padded walls. “Tell you what. Gather up what you need from this place, and I’ll grab Detective Langley. We’ll see what he has to say about this.”

  They really weren’t going to arrest her? Shit! What more did a girl have to do to be locked away for murder?

  The fact that McBride had kicked the back door off its hinges was a small consolation to this complete mess. Dolores would have to pay to get it fixed now. And suddenly, the idea of wrecking the place didn’t seem so unthinkable.

  But first, she needed to gather her things.

  Just as she grabbed Asha from the front counter, careful not to transfer blood onto the stuffed animal, McBride called her back into the kitchen. Detective Langley, a petit man with a boyish face and salt-and-pepper hair, scrunched up his nose as he leaned over the laptop. Jessica guided him through the video again. “There he is taping the letter to the door, and then he opens the suitcase. And there I am. I see him, we exchange words, and … I punch him in the face—that should at least be assault—then he goes for his pants and I”—she let the footage roll—“smite him.”

  “Can you zoom in on that?” Langley asked, and Jessica was happy to comply. “Yeah, see?” he said. “You’re not touching him, and there’s no indication of you possessing a weapon. Besides, the only thing that could cause so much damage would be a bomb, but something of that power would have undoubtedly injured you, too, but you don’t show any signs of injury. No shrapnel, and I’m pretty sure once we run this by ballistics, they’re going to come up empty-handed, too.” He straightened and stared up at Jessica’s face. “Miss, I’m just not sure what to say. The man is dead, and even as I see it happen, I can’t explain a cause. I’m afraid—”