Desolate Angel

by Chaz McGee

  Maggie lay sprawled on the floor, fighting her way back to consciousness, unaware of who her savior had been. Me? I was overcome at what I saw. At first, I did not recognize the figure rushing toward her from the entranceway, gun in hand, panting from his journey up the hill. My mind refused to process that it was him. But as he drew closer, my mind acknowledged what I was seeing at last. I put together the overweight body, disheveled clothes, sweating face, ginger hair, the smell of stale liquor: Danny.

  My old partner, Danny, was a hero.

  “Oh, my god,” he said, sinking to his knees. “Are you okay? Maggie? Are you okay?” He held Maggie in his arms, propping her up gently as he shook her and probed for a pulse.

  And in that second, I realized that, though Danny feared Maggie for some unknown reason I could not understand, he also loved her as I did. Some long-forgotten, long-dormant place inside him, still lit by hope, actually longed for her. I felt pity toward him for the all-too-human disappointment that awaited him. But I felt gratitude toward him, too. He had done what I had been unable to do—he had saved her.

  I stepped out of the shadows, wanting to be with them both, to be a part of what they shared. But Danny made a sound so primal and terrified, it did not even sound human. He stared at me and started to tremble all over. His gun clattered to the dirt.

  Danny could see me.

  “It’s okay,” I said, stretching my arms out. “It’s just me, buddy. Your old partner.”

  I don’t think he could hear me.

  He started to mumble and backed away from me. He fell, clawed at the dirt floor, and scrambled to his feet, then ran to the cave’s only exit.

  “I’m sorry,” he called back to me, his face flushed scarlet. “I’m sorry, Fahey. I’m sorry. For god’s sake, I’m sorry.”

  “Wait!” I called to him, reaching out a hand, but he only fled out the door.

  I followed, trying to make him understand that I was not going to hurt him. That I was grateful to him for saving Maggie’s life.

  “Bonaventura!” I called after him, but Danny only ran faster, pushing his aging body in his panic, crashing through bushes and shrubs and brambles, shredding the skin on his arms and face, falling and scrambling back to his feet, hurtling himself forward again, looking back over his shoulder then, seeing me still there, gasping in panic as he pushed himself even harder.

  “Danny!” I yelled. “Stop! I just want to help. I know I can help you. Let me.”

  Danny reached the rocks marking the end of the paved hiking path and scrambled on top of one of the boulders. His breath was coming in ragged gasps and I knew his heart could not take much more strain. I could feel his pulse pounding, a miniature jackhammer racing toward implosion.

  “Leave me alone,” Danny screamed as he clawed his way up the rocks, scrambling from boulder to boulder, going ever higher. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Just leave me alone. For god’s sake, I’m sorry.”

  He reached the top of the hill. There was nowhere to go. The pinnacle ended in a steep cliff that fell off in a great slash of stone ending far below. He inched out to the edge of the cliff and stared down at the abandoned quarry a quarter mile beneath him. He was panting and his chest heaved up and down. Sweat poured over his face.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” I pleaded as I reached the cliff and stepped toward him.

  Danny turned to face me, his eyes filling with tears. His hands were shaking with fear. “I didn’t mean to,” he told me. “I panicked. I didn’t think it through. I just panicked. I wanted to take it all back the moment it was done.”

  “I just want to thank you for helping Maggie,” I tried to tell him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, his eyes locked on mine, and I knew he wasn’t just talking to me. He was talking to everyone he had ever known, everyone who had loved him and been disappointed, everyone he had failed during his life.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered a final time as he leaned back into space and began to fall.

  “Danny,” I called out as I threw myself over the cliff after him. He was falling calmly, not thrashing, his arms perfectly still, as if he had made up his mind and was now determined to disappear, to sink as surely as a rock plummeting to a lake bottom.

  I would not let him go alone.

  I fell with him and time seemed to stop, losing its relevance. I entered Danny’s thoughts and became part of his memories, accessing his final recollection.

  What unfolded was as real as it had been the first time around: I could feel the chill of a wintry row house along the banks of the Delaware, hear the scuttling of rats in the corners, smell the urine, see the discarded candy wrappers and other refuse. I could see the wide eyes of the drug dealer staring at us in the dim light of a fading day. I could smell his fear. He held a gun in his hand and he was pointing it first at Danny and then at me. Danny was pointing a gun back at him. I was standing a few feet away from them both, looking at one and then the other, confused.

  “You take me down and you go down with me,” the dealer said to Danny. “I know who you are. I know your partner. You can’t touch me. Touch me and you pay the price.”

  I made a sound of surprise, and that got his attention. As the dealer turned his head toward me, Danny shot him right through the heart and fired again, hitting the man in his forehead as he dropped to the floor. I stared at Danny in horror, then looked down at the dealer.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  The gun had slid out of the dealer’s hand and Danny walked over to it. He picked it up, looked at it for a moment, then turned and stared at me, puzzled, as if he had never seen me before.

  “Danny?” I asked as he raised the dealer’s gun, took aim—and shot.

  I fell to the floor, wounded in my right shoulder, and Danny squeezed the trigger again. This time, it was a shot straight through the heart. He walked over to my body and stared down at me, betraying no emotion, then leaned over until he was inches from my face. He said my name just once: “Fahey?” Satisfied that I was dead, he wiped the gun he still held with a handkerchief, then knelt down and placed the gun back in the drug dealer’s hand. He aimed toward me and took yet another shot, hitting the wall behind where I had been standing, leaving residue on the dead drug dealer and his clothing.

  Danny stood up, rubbed the small of his back as if it was aching, then looked around the room, thinking. He walked over and swapped out his weapon for mine. He took the gun he’d used to shoot the dealer and laid it next to me, then took my own from my ankle holster and pocketed it. No one would know. We’d been together too long. And we were using unsanctioned weapons to begin with, smaller revolvers that were easier to conceal and, as Danny often said, easier to aim.

  He’d proved it that day.

  He knelt by my body, checked my pulse once again, and found nothing. Only then did he pull a cell phone from his pocket and make the call. “Officer down,” he shouted into the phone. “A bust went bad. Fahey is down.”

  Down. Yes, I was down—and then down some more. The memory of my last few minutes alive faded and Danny and I were falling again, falling into space, the rocks below rushing up at us, Danny’s eyes locked on mine, his terror emanating from him in palpable waves.

  “It’s okay. I forgive you. And it’s not so bad being dead,” I tried to tell him, but time had started again and we had reached the bottom. For me, it was nothing. I was simply there, on the ground, looking down at Danny. For Danny, it was the end. He lay shattered before me, his body broken by the jagged rocks at the base of the cliff, his skull shattered by the impact.

  My old friend. My partner. My killer.

  He was gone. I had glimpsed the defining moment of his life or, perhaps, more accurately, the defining moment of his death: my own grim passing.

  This was what Danny had been concealing from Maggie. This was what Danny had been afraid she might find. That was what had caused him to follow Maggie, to watch her to see what she discovered, to try to find out what she knew about h
is role in my death and his role in whatever dark partnership had led to my killing. He’d had nothing to do with Hayes except a need to stop Maggie from searching, to stop her and others from looking into our cases and noticing how many Danny had sabotaged.

  I’d never known, never even suspected, never been sober enough to notice that my partner was not only unkempt, incompetent, and uncaring—he was also a dirty cop. The one thing I had prided myself on not being.

  It had cost me my life.

  I sat on a boulder near Danny’s body, waiting for something to happen, contemplating the sorry mess I’d made of my life, wondering if it would be the same in my death.

  I’d just driven a man to kill himself, and even if he’d been driven by his own guilt more than anything else, that did not erase my participation in it.

  Yet, had Danny deserved to keep on living? It wasn’t as if he treated life with any respect, most especially not his own. It was better for him to have died moments after saving Maggie’s life. He had taken my life, but he had saved hers. I’d be willing to trade my life for Maggie’s in the great karmic stock exchange of the universe. I’d gladly pay that price. The world was better off without me, and it was most certainly better with her in it. If Danny had been an instrument of that balance, so be it. Redemption never came cheap.

  I was still sitting on the boulder, staring at Danny’s broken body, contemplating the great mysteries of life and death, when a small black nose appeared in my line of vision. The little terrier had made his way down the hill. Ever the tracker, ever the troublemaker, he now sat, staring enthusiastically at me, his tongue lolling from his mouth after his run, tail thumping the ground happily in goodwill.

  “Now you want to be friends?” I asked the dog. “Now?”

  I wanted to laugh. It was all too perfect: Terror. Joy. Sadness. Happiness. Luck. Happenstance. Rivalries. Friendship. Love. Hate. All wrapped together in one big crazy set of coincidences people called “life.”

  And, somehow, it all made sense.

  Above me, around me, moving toward me, came loud voices followed by men and women in uniform, people shouting orders, people hurrying up the old road that snaked through the abandoned quarry, bodies crashing through the bushes toward where I sat, calling out to each other.

  All evidence of life, this life, all evidence I had been left behind again.

  I was not of the living and I was not of the dead. I was alone.

  Even the little dog had left me, his attention captured by something in the darkness, just beyond my reach. He was barking furiously.

  “Oh, my god,” an officer cried out, her tone catching the attention of everyone who had gathered around Danny. “Oh, my god. Look over there.”

  Her flashlight illuminated the little dog against a grotesque tableau, the little beast overcome by the smell of an open graveyard created by Alan Hayes—the heaped remains of bodies thrown from the cliff overhead, tossed over the edge to spiral down and smash against the rocks below, joining the victims who had preceded them in death, hidden by rocks from the eyes of the living to decay unnoticed, to dry and be stripped away to bone by the sun and the wind and the passing of time and the gnawings of the creatures that moved in the darkness around me.

  As if in slow motion, the assembled response team moved as one toward the scattered heap of skeletons that had tumbled to the bottom of the quarry a few yards from where Danny lay, shining their flashlights on what was little more than piles of bones and scraps of flesh, now dried and desiccated.

  “How many?” a deep voice demanded.

  “At least four,” the first officer guessed, her voice quavering. “Maybe more. It’s hard to tell in this light.”

  “Someone better call Gonzales,” a colleague mumbled. “And it’s not going to be me.”

  I stared at the pile of human bones, discarded by Hayes, and thought of Vicky Meeks and what might have happened had she ended up with the others. No one would have known. No one would ever have suspected. Hayes would still be out there, still taking them, still torturing them, then throwing them out like garbage—if not for an old man and his dog taking a walk along the hill, surprising him one night before he could dump Vicky Meeks, forcing him to leave her in a meadow and run.

  Life was like that, I realized, it could change direction in the touch of an instant. It could fail or succeed, meander or stay the course, all depending on the most mundane of consequences, the most casual of meetings, a shrug, a look, a misunderstood comment.

  “Is that Bonaventura?” a newcomer asked the others, his flashlight playing over what was left of Danny.

  “Yeah,” someone said. “He jumped.”

  “Why?” the newcomer asked.

  “Who knows?” someone answered. “Knowing him, the question is more like ‘why not?’ He was a mess. He checked out a long time ago.”

  “Stop it,” the woman who had discovered the pile of broken bodies near Danny ordered. “Show him some respect. If not for him, we would never have found them.”

  She played her flashlight over the grisly landscape, her face wet with tears. “Now they can rest in peace.”

  Chapter 38

  My new four-legged friend and I made our way back up to the top of the hill, where Maggie stood at the end of the path, shooing away hovering EMS technicians as she explained to Gonzales what had happened in the cave.

  The little dog earned my everlasting love by lifting a leg and relieving himself not three inches from Gonzales’s loafers. The commander was too engrossed with Maggie’s story to notice but I gave the terrier a big thumbs-up.

  “I guess he’d been following me, sir,” Maggie was saying. “He’d been MIA for a couple of days and I thought he was on a bender, but then he came through that door, gun drawn, and I don’t remember anything else. When I came to, Hayes was dead and Bonaventura was gone. He had to have shot him. It wasn’t me and no one else was there.”

  Gonzales heard the doubt in her voice. “You sure?”

  She shrugged. “All I saw was Hayes, Bonaventura, and the old man. Or at least, the old man’s body.”

  “He’s going to be okay,” Gonzales told her. “The old man is going to be okay.”

  “That’s a miracle in itself,” Maggie said.

  “Lots of miracles tonight,” Gonzales agreed. It was an uncharacteristic thing for him to say. Maggie noticed.

  “What’s that mean, sir?”

  “Nothing, Gunn.” Gonzales hesitated. “Look, I’m just going to tell you straight up—Bonaventura is dead.”

  Maggie was stunned. “What?”

  “It looks like he threw himself off the bluff after shooting Hayes.”

  She stared at Gonzales. “Sir, that makes no sense.”

  “Not to you, it doesn’t,” Gonzales said gently. “But to Danny, it did.”

  “And you know why,” Maggie guessed.

  Gonzales patted her on the back and waved the waiting EMS techs over despite Maggie’s protests that she was fine. “Let it be,” he said to her. “Bonaventura died in the line of duty. That’s all the public needs to know.”

  “I don’t get it,” Maggie said.

  “You stopped a killer today, Gunn,” Gonzales explained. “They’ve found the remains of at least four more victims in the quarry. You made the department look good again. Bobby Daniels sees you as his new best friend. And who knows how many cases you’ve closed for other departments? You’ve done an outstanding job. Take the rewards and let the rest go. That’s my advice.”

  “What rewards?” Maggie asked suspiciously. My heart swelled with pride: my girl was not big on payoffs.

  “You tell me,” Gonzales offered. “What do you want? A promotion? New assignment? Want to head up a special squad?”

  Maggie said nothing.

  “Think about it,” Gonzales suggested smoothly. “Get back to me on it.”

  The little terrier had been ignored long enough. He sat on Maggie’s foot and barked twice. The two cops stared down at him.

&
nbsp; “It’s the old man’s dog,” Maggie said. “It led me to the cave.”

  “Is that right?” Gonzales said in an unctuous voice as visions of press-friendly canine award ceremonies danced in his head. “I think someone deserves a medal.” He tried to pet the little terrier, but the dog growled and Gonzales snatched his hand away.

  Maggie laughed. “I’ll take him, sir. I’ll make sure the old man gets his dog back. Something tells me this little fellow has been through enough. Let’s spare him animal control.” When she bent down, instead of growling, the little dog leapt into her arms, and Maggie took off down the hill, pursued by irritated medical personnel still trying to get a look at her.

  Gonzales watched her go, clearly irked that she had one-upped him, even if it was with a lowly dog. The little dog’s tail wagged wildly back and forth as Maggie carried him down the path: the terrier was enjoying the royal treatment.

  She met Morty halfway down the hill. The old beat cop was running up the incline, his face flushed deep red. “Maggie! Your father’s going to kill me. What have you done now?”

  “It’s okay,” Maggie told him. “I’m fine. Hayes is dead.”

  “Good. Come on,” Morty said firmly. “I told your father I’d bring you by in person so he could see for himself that you’re okay. He’s gotten calls from so many people giving him conflicting information that he’s not going to calm down until he sees you in person.”

  “That’s cool.” Maggie lifted the little dog aloft. “I’ve got a little fellow for him to babysit for a few days. But you’re going to have to bring him to Dad for me. I need to stop off somewhere else first.”

  Morty stared at the dog. They sized each other up. “He looks like trouble,” Morty said, but his voice was friendly and the terrier wagged his tail in reply.

  “He is trouble.” Maggie laughed. “But you and I both know that Dad loves troublemakers.”

  “That he does,” Morty agreed.

  Morty drove off with the dog, who was happy to throw his lot in with his new friend. I threw my lot in with Maggie. I was pretty sure I knew where she was headed and within minutes my guess was confirmed—the facade of the hospital loomed skyward before us, as stark and forbidding as a monolith built to appease the gods. Most windows were dark, but the lights above the emergency room were shining bright in the night like a beacon.