Redemption

by Mel Odom

  “Cut her loose!” Darius roared as he took Fancy’s helm. “Get that damned ship cut loose quick, or she’s gonna drag us down with her!”

  The axes fell awkwardly, but the lines were slashed with basso sproings caused by the wet hawser ropes.

  Angelus felt numb as he watched the broken-armed figure on board Handsome Jack struggling weakly to get to her feet. He still hungered for her, wanted to finish what he’d started.

  Lightning carved the heavens, and thunder cannonaded around them as the final grappling lines were cut. Handsome Jack rolled over, sinking quickly beneath the waves. Darius got Fancy under way after a fierce struggle to get the sails back into play and escape the undertow created by Handsome Jack’s sinking.

  Angelus watched as the sea drank the ship down. Even over the rolling thunder he was somehow able to hear a woman’s chanting voice. Even through the darkened distance, he knew her eyes were on him, hating him with everything she had left. He smiled at that thought, knowing she was taking it with her to the grave.

  Then Handsome Jack gave a final lurch, rolled over, and passed beneath the waves.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Whitney Tyler: Where did she come from and how did she get the lead in today’s hottest show on television?” Cordelia asked.

  Doyle glanced at Cordelia as he opened the door to the main office at Angel Investigations. “Well, I’ve got to admit, you’ve got me there.” He checked the hallway out of habit.

  Even in the short time they’d been there, he’d learned there was no telling who’d show up at Angel’s door. As surely as Angel was driven to help those who needed help, those who needed help were driven to seek him out. It tended to be one big, vicious circle, and sometimes the lines blurred.

  The hallway was, thankfully, empty.

  Cordelia peered intently into the plate-glass window to the left of the door where closed venetian blinds prevented a view into the office.

  Doyle put a foot against the door, bracing it so it wouldn’t open without going through his foot. Of course, that is possible. He peered into the window as well. He couldn’t see through the Venetian blinds. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Do you see something?”

  Cordelia looked at him perplexedly and lowered her voice as well. “Why are you whispering?”

  “Well, if you saw something in the office,” Doyle explained, still whispering, “I didn’t want to warn it. Or him. Or her. Or them.” Get a grip, Doyle. One of the awkward byproducts of having a vision was suffering from a hyperactive imagination for a few hours afterward.

  “You saw something in the office?” Cordelia took a step back.

  “No,” Doyle explained patiently, “I thought you saw something in the window.”

  “I did.” Cordelia touched her hair. “I got my hair cut and styled yesterday.”

  Doyle nodded. “I thought I noticed it looked a little —” He hesitated, waiting for the lead he needed.

  “Short.” Cordelia grimaced and patted her hair into place. “You noticed it, too.”

  Actually, Doyle hadn’t noticed. There’s gotta be a book somewhere, he lamented. When to notice, when not to notice, what to notice, how to properly say what you did or did not notice about a woman’s hair. But he nodded. “I thought that a little shorter looked —”

  “Short.” Cordelia’s nostrils flared a little as she peered back into the window and did the fluff thing to her hair with her fingers.

  “Ah,” Doyle said, “fuming.”

  “What?”

  Doyle put outraged steel in his voice. “I said, damnit, if you can’t trust your stylist, who can you trust?” He opened the office door and went in.

  “She knew I was trying out for the Tarantino thing.” Cordy followed him inside.

  Doyle flipped on the lights and chased the shadows that habitually formed in the office. Secondhand furniture held down the carpet, strategically covering the worst of the stains.

  “Coffee?” Cordelia asked as she sat at the desk in front of the computer and brought it up.

  “Sure.” Doyle dropped into a nearby chair.

  Cordelia pointed without looking. “The pot’s over there.”

  Doyle looked at the machine. “Oh, yeah, right. What was I thinking?” He got up and started to punch the button.

  “That’s the third time for the first filter,” Cordelia said. “Keep the grounds but get a fresh filter. Only use half the water to get the coffee up to strength.”

  Doyle searched the cabinet and made the substitution. Coffee was another thing the Angel Investigations team made stretch during the lean times. When the water was trickling through, he returned to his seat.

  Quietly he watched Cordelia’s assault on the computer. She’d gotten much better at accessing information over the Internet since she’d started working for Angel. But no matter what, he’d found he could stare at Cordelia Chase for hours and be happy about it. He just couldn’t quite figure out a way to tell her that. Facing hellbeasts was easier than thinking about dealing with a rejection from Cordelia.

  “What are you looking at?” Cordelia asked.

  Looking at Cordelia is good, Doyle thought, but getting caught looking totally blows. “I didn’t want to interrupt you.”

  “You’re not.”

  “I was curious about the Whitney Tyler reference you made earlier.”

  “I was just thinking that researching how Whitney got on Dark Midnight might help me better pitch my own series proposal. And since you had the vision about her, I knew we’d have to research her.”

  Doyle nodded. “Sounds like a plan.” Now that the coffee had been made, he got up and filled two cups. He placed Cordelia’s cup beside her. “So how do you think she got the part?”

  “Casting couch,” Cordelia responded. “Definitely. Oh, the Enquirer and the Star may not have gotten the goods on exactly who and what yet, but they will.”

  “You feel very strongly about that, do you?”

  “And how else do you think someone would get to the number-one-rated show this television season? Get real.”

  Doyle scratched the back of his neck. “Actually, I still kind of like the idea that everybody with talent gets a break when the time comes. Call me old-fashioned if you want.”

  “If that was true, I’d have my own series by now, too. What talented person is more deserving of a break — and a starring vehicle role, I might add — than me?” Cordelia gave him a bright, winning smile.

  “I’m not going to argue that,” Doyle said earnestly.

  “So how do you think she got the role?”

  Doyle shrugged, wondering how to give a straight answer that he knew Cordelia wasn’t going to like. “Maybe the producers saw Whitney in something else, decided she’d make a great vampire radio shock jock.”

  “No way,” Cordelia said. “Not for a number-one show.”

  “Maybe at first they didn’t have the number-one-show angle figured.”

  “Please. How can you not figure a number-one show?”

  Doyle sighed. “Right.”

  “And what kind of production do you think the show’s sponsors would have seen her in to make them say, ‘That girl, that’s the girl we want.’ Oh, please, that’s so very fairy tale.”

  “I don’t know,” Doyle replied, feeling more than a little defensive. What was it about Cordelia that kept him hanging around like a moth drawn to a flame? He looked at her again, didn’t get caught and therefore felt pretty good about his already improved surveillance techniques, and remembered what the attraction was. Well, part of it anyway. He’d still never met anyone who thought like Cordelia Chase. He shook his head. “Man, that just rips away a lot of fantasies.”

  “You’re a big boy with a life that’s kind of going nowhere fast. You’ll create more fantasies.”

  “Ouch.” Doyle peered over Cordelia’s shoulder at the images of Whitney on the Dark Midnight set. “What have we got here?”

  “One of the official Whitney fan club websites
.” Cordelia moved the cursor around the various thumbnails of pictures.

  “Any information on Whitney pre-Dark Midnight?” Doyle stood up and moved behind her, peering in more closely. The visions he had were seldom self-explanatory.

  “I’m going there now.” The computer monitor image shivered, exploding into thousands of colorful pixels like a July Fourth fireworks display.

  When the new images sprang up, Doyle felt cold cat’s claws creeping up his spine, touching that inhuman side of himself he kept pressed back into a distant corner of his mind when he could.

  One of the pictures on the new page showed Whitney dressed in breeches and a blouse and holding a sword. The half-demon’s memory shorted into overload for a moment, overlaying the computer picture with the vision image he’d had at Wally’s. This was obviously what he’d been shown.

  “What’s wrong?” Cordelia asked.

  Doyle shrugged. “Well, she looks a lot like the young woman in my vision. But not exactly.”

  “Does it have to be exact?”

  “No,” Doyle replied. “You just kind of see what’s there and have to figure out the rest. But this is close.”

  “Well, this is off-Broadway. Shakespeare. The guy who’s made a comeback with a few movies lately.” Cordelia scrolled through the information available. “Whitney’s supposed to be twenty-seven years old. Well, you can bet that’s off by five or ten years. With a good makeup guy in this business you can get away with murder.”

  “It looks like someone got away with murder.” Doyle pointed to the small inset picture in the lower left corner that caught his attention. A big banner read MURDERERS STILL AT LARGE. “Tobin Calhoun. Remember him?”

  “Oh, yeah. His murder two years ago made all the Hollywood gossip columns and the major news shows. For about a month. They called it a tragedy, a true star about to be born, then everybody moved on to the next murder and scandal. The movie Calhoun was working on when he got killed just got released last summer. Redline Heat, the stock-car racing movie the producers thought would turn him into another Tom Cruise. That so wouldn’t have happened. The movie totally tanked at the box office.”

  “As I remember,” Doyle said, “Calhoun was kind of busy being dead at the time. He didn’t make the usual pre-movie open barrage of Leno, Letterman, Oprah. I’d think it would be hard to draw an audience.”

  “We’re talking Hollywood and the real world here,” Cordelia objected. “If Calhoun had gotten to be a real big box-office draw, he’d have been missed more. Or longer, depending on how you want to judge that. By the fans, by the producers, etcetera. When it comes to fame, he made it bigger as a murder victim. There are probably still moviegoers out there who are wondering when Calhoun’s going to come out with his next movie.”

  That’s scary, Doyle realized, and probably true. “See if you can bring up the story. How was he tied in with Whitney Tyler?”

  Cordelia tapped the keyboard. The inset picture exploded across the monitor and lines of text quickly scrolled onto the screen. “Says here she was dating him. It wasn’t anything serious, though. Hmmmm. Maybe we want to check into that. Whitney had a small part in the movie. Calhoun’s girlfriend or sister or something.” She frowned. “That’s really strange, but I don’t remember much about her.”

  “Maybe she wasn’t covered in the news very much.”

  “She must have had a terrible agent,” Cordelia said. “You just can’t buy that kind of publicity.”

  Doyle read for himself. He didn’t have Cordelia’s interest in the entertainment field, and his last two years before getting the assignment by the Powers That Be had been kind of self-involved.

  According to the story, Calhoun had been waiting for Whitney Tyler down in the lobby of the apartment building where she lived. Gossip — at least on this particular website — had it that their on-screen romance had heated up to the real thing during the filming of the movie. At the time of the murder, the cast and crew were currently finishing up the post-production shooting, working in bits and pieces of scenes written in by the script doctors hired to salvage the movie.

  In broad daylight, with security in the building, an assailant or assailants had abducted Calhoun, taken him to a third-story glass-enclosed passage to the building across one of the two streets the apartment building faced, and beat him to death. After nearly every bone in Calhoun’s body had been broken, the killer or killers had smashed the glass out and hung the corpse out over the street.

  No one had seen anything.

  “Maybe we should find out a little more information about the murder,” Doyle suggested.

  “Halt!”

  Ignoring the shouted command from the police officer running from the far end of the alley, Angel grabbed the fence bisecting the alley and scrambled up. Bullets struck sparks from the chain-links and started a medley of ringing clanks. At the top of the fence he avoided the barbed wire and leaped to the second-story window ledge the vampire he pursued had gone through.

  Angel dived into the room and rolled to his feet. Glass crunched underfoot. He peered around the empty bedroom, glad that no one was there. He’d known it would be unoccupied because the vampire he was chasing wouldn’t have been able to enter if it had been someone’s home.

  The vampire hadn’t hesitated at the front door. It hung in tatters in the doorframe, shards scattered before it out into the narrow hallway.

  Angel coiled the grappling-hook chain around his arm as he passed through the doorway. A few of the doors along the passageway were open, and frightened faces peered out.

  “Police,” Angel said, pulling his coat aside to reveal his belt buckle like there was a badge there as well. The move had been choreographed by countless movies, and most people thought they saw the badge there. “I’m after the man that came through here.”

  A large man in a white T-shirt and Bettie Page Jungle Girl boxers pointed to the left, indicating the door at the end of the hallway.

  “Thanks,” Angel said. He ran, hoping to catch the fleeing vampire before he got away or the police managed to secure the area and make escaping almost impossible.

  The door opened into a dimly lit stairwell.

  Angel peered down, listening intently. He heard people’s hoarse, fearful whispers, the whine of police sirens coming from out on the street, and the low-key hum of television programs. Somewhere above, someone was playing John Lee Hooker blues.

  And the pounding of fleeing feet came from above, not below.

  Angel ran up the stairs, ricocheting off the walls as he strove to go faster. He peered up the center of the stairwell and spotted the vampire peering back down at him two stair flights above.

  “They’re going to catch us both,” the vampire said. “If we split up, we have a better chance.”

  Angel kept moving, not bothering to reply. Too many people had died because of the three vampires.

  Cursing, another floor closer now, the vampire started running again.

  At the sixth-floor landing, the stairwell ended facing a final row of apartments. When Angel stepped through the door, the vampire was nowhere in sight.

  Moving more cautiously, aware that his prey could move almost soundlessly, Angel moved to the first door on the left. He didn’t have to knock to feel the sanctuary of the home someone had made inside. If he couldn’t pass the threshold, neither could the guy he was looking for.

  He continued, starting to move more quickly because every room was occupied. It appeared more certain the vampire had already exited the floor through the rooftop access at the other end of the passageway.

  Angel put his hand on the handle to the rooftop access door. The scuff of a foot across the carpet was slight, but it saved his life. He ducked and the vampire swung a fire ax into the door, shattering it with a loud crash.

  Down the hallway, a door swung open. “What the hell is going on?” a man’s voice demanded.

  Angel rose, but the vampire was waiting. The ax handle caught Angel under the chin and k
nocked him onto his back several feet away. Slightly dazed, he watched as the vampire deliberated between trying to kill him or escaping.

  Discretion was obviously the better choice of valor at the moment. The vampire turned and fled up the tight, spiral metal staircase leading to the rooftop.

  Angel lunged to his feet and followed. He rounded the spiral staircase, and for a moment it felt as if he were back on Handsome Jack’s pitching deck in the stormy sea more than two hundred years ago. He remembered the predatory lust that had fired him as he’d pursued the young swordswoman.

  Guilt hammered him, but he clung to it, using it to drive himself harder. He couldn’t turn back the clock and save the swordswoman no matter how hard he tried. But once he put this vampire down, he’d be another step closer to the redemption he so desperately sought.

  He pushed up at the rooftop access door and went through. Light hovered around the edges of the roof from the streetlights below. Footsteps crunched on the tar-and-gravel roof as sirens echoed up from below. Red and blue lights flashed against the nearby buildings. Frantic voices called out to one another.

  Angel shook the chain loose from his arm as he ran, gathering the links up in loops like a cowboy with a lasso. He dropped the sword he still carried.

  The vampire raced across the rooftop, weaving around the HVAC units that squatted there like fat, gray mechanical toads humming with the sound of worn bearings.

  Taking the end of the chain with the grappling hook, Angel ran after the vampire, closing the distance with longer strides. He spun the grappling hook over his head, distracted by the sudden spotlight that descended over him a second before the sound of the helicopter’s rotors reached his ears.

  “This is the LAPD,” a stern voice announced over an onboard PA system. “You are under arrest. Lie down on your stomach with your hands behind your head.”

  The vampire never slowed as he reached the rooftop’s edge. He put one foot on the edge and leaped into the air, aiming for the building on the other side of the street.

  Angel knew he could make the leap as well, but he couldn’t let the chase go on that long. Already the police helicopter was close enough to buffet him with strong winds. He took a stake from his coat pocket and jammed it between the three bent rods that made up the grappling hook so that it stuck out. Then he threw the grappling hook as hard as he could, hoping for some kind of accuracy.