by Chaz McGee
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Epilogue
The big push . . .
I had to move now. The box sat on the counter. It didn’t weigh more than a couple pounds, but I had never moved a physical object in my present state before. I didn’t even know if I could.
I stationed myself at the counter, reached over, and pushed. The box did not move. I could feel it, the cardboard had substance, but my pushing produced no resistance.
I thought of all I had failed to do in my life, all I had not even tried to do. I thought of Alissa, wandering the earth, appearing to me. I thought of the young girl dumped in the weeds. I was one of them. I was connected still, I told myself, or I would not be here.
The box moved. It slid over the edge of the counter and tumbled to the floor. Bags of evidence spilled onto the tile. And, instantly, I was overcome with a wave of acute pain. Every fiber of my being throbbed with an agony so intense that it brought me to my knees.
I had violated the boundaries of my world. And I would pay the price . . .
Praise for DESOLATE ANGEL
“I do not want Kevin Fahey to rest in peace. I want him to hang around until he’s solved every one of the cases he bungled when he was a live detective. Happily, there are enough of those to let me look forward to many more hours of reading pleasure.”—Margaret Maron
“[A]n utterly captivating story about redemption and second chances. Chaz McGee has an irresistibly rueful, melancholy voice that invites readers to remember that we all make mistakes—and we all deserve a shot a redemption.”
—Laura Lippman
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
DESOLATE ANGEL
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / July 2009
Copyright © 2009 by Katy Munger.
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eISBN : 978-1-101-08203-4
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They say some men die and go to Heaven,
while others are doomed to Hell.
But for me, death was an awful lot like life:
I went absolutely nowhere.
Prologue
A man lies dying on the grime-encrusted floor of an abandoned house on the banks of the Delaware. The air is heavy with the stench of human detritus and the whiskey sweat of fear. The man knows that he is dying, but after the first hot shock of bullet burrowing through flesh, he feels no pain. Instead, he feels the world falling away. Every ache he has ever felt, every regret he has ever ignored, every sorrow he has ever mourned—they evaporate into the ether. He does not care. He does not care about the man sprawled dead at his feet or the heavyset man breathing bourbon in his face. He does not even think of the wife and sons he will leave behind, nor of the badge that presses against his chest, inches from the bullet’s entry wound.
Instead, he stares at the ankles of the man bending over him, seeing every thread of a frayed pants hem that has been, improbably, stapled back into place. He memorizes every crease in the worn leather shoe beneath it.
A crack has opened up in the shoe between leather and sole. It fascinates him, that tiny gap of darkness. It beckons him like an invitation. He stares at the sliver of darkness and thinks of one thing only, his death, like his life, defined by the same single, unanswerable question. He thinks, How did it come to this?
Chapter 1
I never recognized my wife’s beauty when I was alive. Distracted by shining eyes and an all-forgiving smile, I married her and stayed married to her for twenty-three years, never noticing when the shining eyes and forgiving smile faded, casualties of the burdens that came with loving me. But not once, in all the years of sharing the very air we breathed, did I recognize her true beauty.
I had to die before I saw it. I had to die before I realized how her stubborn love for me, and her infinite love for our sons, made her splendid beyond human comprehension.
I can see it now—and so much more. I can see the light that surrounds her when she holds our boys in her arms. I can see how the world surrenders before her when she shares that love with others. I have watched her stop to talk to the old man who lives alone next door and seen him smile to himself as he shuffles away afterward, his day brightened by more than memories. I have watched her eyes linger on strangers in the store where she works, noting their slumped shoulders and grim faces. And I have seen h
er smile at them from across a room crowded with racks of clothes—her smile instantly easing the weight of their unknown disappointments.
It is astonishing to me now that she stayed with me and loved me all those years. She deserved better. Through no fault of her own, I came to see her love as a burden, rather than a gift, and drank to forget that she loved me. When that did not drive her away, I sought out women willing to drink beside me in hopes of forgetting their own failures. I destroyed everything Connie had ever loved about me—and I don’t why. And yet she loved me still.
I know that now, and so much more, for now that I am dead, I have little to do except ponder what I have lost. What else do you do when you realize, too late, that you once had all you ever needed but refused to see it. What do you do? You try to hold on to what you have already lost. You chase the vapors of what you once had.
I sometimes linger behind the kitchen door, unseen by the living, waiting for my sons to burst in after school. Their hair stands up wildly from the cold, dry air and I savor the flash in their eyes as they realize they have a few hours of freedom before homework must begin. I watch as they push, joke, and torment one another. My sons. They are strength, hope, fear, hatred, love, and mayhem. Thanks to Connie, they are all I failed to be.
I spy, unnoticed, as my wife enters the kitchen and enfolds my sons in her arms. I long to feel the life that radiates from them, marked only by me.
All I can do is watch. I can no longer feel the warmth of flesh or caress the powdery silk of a child’s skin or smell the inexpressible sweetness of their bodies. I can see. I can hear. I can bear witness to what I have lost. That is all.
I do not know why I ended up here, no longer of this earth, yet somehow bound to it. I am a solitary wanderer, forced to face a bitter truth: great love abides in the house that once was my home, but I am no longer a part of it.
In truth, I never was.
I have been dead for six months now and my passing has caused barely a ripple in their lives. Connie continues to work each morning at the department store; the boys continue to rush home from school to her embrace. I have seen them come together each evening now, time and again, without glimpsing an acknowledgment that I was ever there.
Perhaps I never really was.
It is this evidence of my failure that causes me to ponder my other regrets. You see, I failed others, too—and not just the victims, whose morgue photographs left a never-ending trail of human catastrophe winding through my unsolved files. I failed those they left behind as well. I think of them often, the surviving loved ones who came to me, seeking justice, and left with little more than despair. For, all too often, I used their tragedies to satisfy my craven need to fail, turning their calamities into excuses to drink away the hours, hoping to find that lost place where, at last, I could let myself care too little. I stared the other way when confronted by their misery, unable to meet their eyes. Eventually, I even avoided my own eyes in the mirror and grew too ashamed to ever look back on the overwhelming condemnation of my failures.
Now, looking back is all I have.
I am a ghost haunted by my regrets, doomed to walk through a world that is neither here nor there, tasting my fate in my solitude, seeking a redemption I fear will never come.
My name was Kevin Fahey. I do not know what to call myself now.
I walk among the living, unseen and unheard, unsure if my continuing existence is evidence of Hell—or if I have somehow scraped my way into Purgatory. If so, if this is Purgatory, it is by the mercy of a forgiving universe, and through no effort of my own, that I am here.
I have tried to transcend my boundaries, but my translucent prison holds firm. I have stood at my wife’s side as she lies in bed at night, murmuring to her of our time together before my surrender to eighty-proof despair, hoping to make myself heard. Hoping to make myself, at the very least, a memory.
It has all been in vain. I can feel no indication that Connie cares to remember what her life was like when I was in it. In fact, I can see no sign that anyone in my former world knows I am still here. I can perform wild fandangos across busy streets and cars don’t even slow to avoid me. I can walk the sidewalks for hours, shout at the top of my lungs, jump up and down, waving my hands in faces: no one ever sees me. All I have earned for my desperate labors is the occasional quizzical look on a face, as fleeting as a twitch, or a sudden turn of the head, as if someone has glimpsed me out of the corner of an eye, only to lose me under full scrutiny.
Except once, just once, when a young boy saw me. That single incident gives me hope that I will not be alone forever. That hope keeps me wandering.
It happened two months after my death, when my ere mitic existence was bitterly new. I was standing at the edge of a playground, watching my boys swing up against the brilliant blue of a cloudless June sky. They’d hang at the crest of their arc for a single, glorious second before dropping back to earth in a stomach-churning swoosh. The purity of their joy entranced me. I was transfixed—and so accustomed to being the watcher that it took me a moment to realize that I was being watched. It was not until an odd heat overcame me that I realized my solitude had been penetrated. I looked down to find a small boy staring up at me, his eyes drawn to the gold badge pinned to my lapel.
“Is that real?” he asked. He was a pale child, sickly-looking, with deep shadows stretching like purple half-moons beneath weary eyes. His hair stuck up in odd clumps about a partially bald head. His legs were dusted with sand.
“Sure.” I knelt so he could get a better look. “I’m a detective.”
“Can I touch it?” he asked, his fingers inching toward my badge.
“Go ahead.”
Had he also passed to the other side? He was, undeniably, close. I could see it in his pallid eyes.
No. The boy was alive. His mother rounded the corner of a nearby storage shed and grabbed one of his hands. “Talking to trees?” she asked, shaking her head in exasperation as she dragged him away.
The boy stared after me, his face clouding over with a resigned recognition, as if he had realized what I must be—and understood that he, too, existed along the edge of two worlds. I waved my farewell, overcome with pity for what his future held, hoping that his mother’s fierce love could somehow save him from the loneliness of an existence like mine.
I never ran into the boy again, though I looked for him often among the faces of the children I passed. I felt such overwhelming love for him and I clung to this shred of humanity. Once I stood an entire week’s worth of afternoons by the playground sandbox, hoping to see my little friend again. But it was not to be. I do not know what happened to him. But he taught me the two things I have learned so far in my desolate wanderings: I am not the same man I was when I was alive, I have changed for the better, and that there may be some among the living who can, indeed, see me. They are my proof that I still exist and still have a chance at salvation. I just have to find them.
Those are the ones I seek.
This knowledge has kept me searching through the hallways of my former life, hoping to find a way back to the world of the living, a door to redemption or even just a passageway to what lies beyond.
Indeed, finding a way out of my solitary prison was my sole purpose for months upon months—until she came to me.
Chapter 2
The evening was cold, at least to the living. I was standing in my yard at dusk, watching my boys leap into piles of autumn leaves. Their squeals filled the air with a contagious glee that went unnoticed by neighbors who were carting groceries, parking cars, and flicking lights on in their houses as a talisman against the coming darkness. No matter. I was there and I understood: the abandonment of their laughter was exquisite, as integral to the universe as church bells pealing across a meadow. No one heard it but me.
I was too distracted by my private joy to notice the girl at first. She appeared as little more than a glimpse of white in the dusk that was gathering behind the house next door. She emerged from the shado
ws as a young woman clad in a yellow sundress too flimsy for the cold October air. She came straight at me and I had not yet absorbed the shock of being seen when she raised a palm, as if ordering me to stay put, then moved forward with a languid grace as flowing as a brook over boulders.
Who was she and how did she know me? How was she able to see me? I felt the world shift beneath my feet, as if vast tectonic plates had clicked into place. A wild hope rose in me—had I, at last, found someone else among the living who could see me? Or, and my hope faded at the thought, had I found someone just like me?
She drew closer. I saw that she was barefoot, though the grass was touched with frost. Sure, the cold didn’t bother me. But I was dead. Her feet had to be numb. Unless she was like me.
She kept moving forward, each step as ethereally precise as a ballerina’s. She looked so frail I feared she might evaporate into a thousand wisps of smoke and be gone to me forever. She made no sound, and as her face came into view, I saw that she had been badly maimed, her beauty horribly marred by violence. Bruises bloomed in ugly purple splotches across her face and shoulders, both of her eyes were blackened, and a trickle of blood ran from a corner of her mouth. Her yellow sundress was torn and drooped from her shoulders, yet she made no effort to rearrange it. Slowly, inexorably, she stepped closer until she stood only inches from me.
She stared into my eyes and I felt a darkness rise within me. It was an internal river so black and so deep and so terrible it threatened to flood my very soul with overwhelming hopelessness.
Somehow it came from her.
I was stunned at her closeness after so many months of solitude. Her eyes were unreadable, lost among the bruises. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out. She turned her head to look up at the sky—and that was when I saw the scar: a half-moon-shaped sliver of white at the corner of her right eye.
