The stick man working the table pushed the dice toward a new player, and the dealer on our end of the table leaned forward to collect chips and pay off winners. When she got close enough, I switched into her head. Again, Kiko followed.
The dealer had been working in the city for only six months, but she’d worked at infernal casinos in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, she didn’t know anything about the casino’s main owner.
The boxman in charge of the table, a devil, whispered in her ear that he liked her new hairdo, but she wasn’t interested in dating one of her bosses. Before he moved away, I merged into his mind.
He’d been there ten years, and he’d visited the tower twice. Neither time was a happy occasion. He’d been blindfolded and taken to visit Caligula’s lieutenant, the goblin named Gordo, and he’d checked the devil’s mind for dishonesty. He hadn’t found any, so the boxman had lived to work another day.
One by one, I made my way through all the employees on the gaming floor. Most had seen Caligula at least once, but only a few had visited the tower. In every case, they had no idea where it was located.
I wasn’t making much progress, and I tamped down my annoyance. Even top hitters in baseball only batted .400.
In an effort to change my luck, I switched to checking out customers. Out of the first dozen, none had met Caligula or the casino manager. Then, while I was rummaging through a djinn’s memories, someone screamed nearby.
She started and turned to look. A hellhound had sunk his teeth into a satyr’s leg and was pulling him off a stool at a blackjack table. The beast ripped open his left thigh with those massive jaws. The victim tried to crawl away, but it was no use. The hellhound shook his head, tearing out massive chunks of flesh. The satyr’s shrieks increased in loudness and pitch.
Nobody made a move to help him or to call the dog off. Blood sprayed across the marble floor. The victim moved into a fetal position, but it did no good. The black hound chomped on the back of the satyr’s neck until he went limp.
That was disgusting enough, but then the dog fed on the carcass, first ripping open his stomach. A couple of the other hellhounds came sniffing around, but a deep growl from the feeding mutt kept the others at a distance.
Slowly, players turned back to their games, and the staff acted as if nothing had happened. Despite my churning stomach, I kept digging for information from one customer after another. Just another day on the job.
Chapter 11
Sunday, August 13th
SOMETIME DURING THE wee hours of the morning—the casino had no clocks—I came across a ghoul who was planning to visit Caligula. I couldn’t believe my luck. This guy was an investment banker who’d flown from New York for the meeting. He’d worked with the sorcerer on the financing for this casino, and he wanted to pitch a new investment with a high-tech company in Austin.
He was scheduled to meet Caligula at six a.m., and the ghoul had visited the casino to pass the time before his presentation. I checked his mind, but he had no idea where the tower was either. Someone was going to send a limousine to collect him at the casino.
Woohoo! This seemed like the break Kiko and I were looking for. All we had to do was follow the ghoul in his limo.
I was desperate to get outside so I could transmit a message to Honah. It would be too dangerous inside with the casino boss up above somewhere.
The problem was, nobody seemed eager to leave. They were having too much fun losing a boatload of money. I’ll never understand gamblers.
But when the staff turned over at four a.m., Kiko and I merged with one of the blackjack dealers before she left the gaming floor. She was a water nymph who just moved to the city from Greece.
The nymph walked into the employee locker room with everyone else getting off their shift. She changed clothes from her skimpy uniform into something a lot warmer. Even though it was August, the staff coming in had warned her it was cold and windy outside. The fog made it feel like wintertime.
She waited for three of her friends, so they could all drive together back to their apartment. Kiko and I just had to be patient.
A few minutes later, the four women stepped out the back of the building into the staff parking lot. Kiko and I switched to pure spirits before they got in their car and drove off. We waited until no sentient beings remained nearby and changed into our human forms.
It had seemed to take forever to get out of there, but we were finally free. She and I hurried a block away to be sure we wouldn’t be discovered, and I sent a message to Honah summarizing what I’d learned.
Within seconds, he said, Excellent work, Gabriel. You and Kiko should remain there, hiding somewhere that allows you to monitor the front entrance. I will send four more guardians to join you for the journey to the tower.
Finally, we were getting somewhere. My whole body tingled with excitement. My partner and I approached the building in the front and remained hidden behind a large SUV. The two werewolves remained on the front porch talking.
Our team of other angels showed up quickly, and two of them moved back to the alley to make sure the limo didn’t pick up the investment banker at the employee entrance.
As we waited, a few demons came and went from the casino. That didn’t surprise me. The place was open day and night, three hundred sixty-five days a year. Then the investment banker ghoul strolled down the front steps. I checked my phone. It was only five a.m. There was no way it would take an hour at this time of the morning for him to get anywhere in the city.
A cab pulled up, not a limo. “Something's wrong,” I whispered.
All six of us flew overhead as the cab drove to a fancy hotel. I landed in the dark behind the cab and took a human form. Then I approached the ghoul from behind, close enough to enter his mind.
One of Caligula’s flunkies had called. The meeting had to be postponed for a day. The investment banker was going to sleep through the day and see a few tourist sights after dark.
All the excitement I’d felt for the last hour or so flowed out of me to be replaced by a sudden tiredness. I’d failed again.
When I reported the unhappy news to Honah, he didn’t complain. Instead, he told one of the guardian angels to hang out in the lobby, moving from person to person to stay inconspicuous while he waited for the ghoul to emerge again. The rest of our team was ordered back to headquarters, except for me.
Because it was almost sunrise in Colorado, the boss sent me to the ranch to lick my psychological wounds in private.
-o-o-o-
ALL MORNING, I sheered sheep in the barn and listened to NPR. At noon, in the top of the hour news summary, the announcer said, “Avenger has struck again. The treasurer for a private college in the Bay Area admitted on camera he’d embezzled money and was executed on the spot. He is survived by a wife and three children.”
Guilt flooded through me. If we’d only made the connection to Caligula faster, the latest victim might’ve lived to spend years in prison instead of reincarnating and leaving his family behind to fend for themselves. Even although I knew we’d done all we could to follow the New York ghoul, I carried some of that guilt as I finished up my work.
When I reached the house to make Ellen’s lunch, I found her tired and cranky, worse than earlier in the morning. While I made her two grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, she stared zombielike at the opposite wall in the dining room. She didn’t watch much news, and as best I could tell without invading her mind, she hadn’t heard about the vigilante killings. Her peace of mind meant everything to me, so I didn’t say a word about the atrocities either.
Instead, we talked about the crashing price for cashmere wool, thanks to foreign competition. Her income was dropping just as the baby expenses were rising. She’d burned through most of the death benefits she’d received from the Army, and so her finances were tight. I made a note to myself to ask Cleo or Inga whether angels could earn money somehow.
After lunch, she took a nap in the recliner. I snuck
upstairs and connected to CNN on the computer. Sure enough, they replayed the video of the latest murder, and I downloaded it. This time, the shooting had occurred in broad daylight, but still on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Honah had no doubt already sent out teams of angels to find the assassination site, and I wondered where it would be this time.
For the moment, though, I focused on learning whatever I could from the video. At the same time, I listened to the TV commentators while I ran the video forward in slow motion. All I noticed was that Caligula dressed as Avenger looked like he loved killing people. His grin sent a chill through me.
This time, the commentators were much harsher toward Avenger. After the previous killings, many of the TV’s so-called experts had sided with the vast majority of the public. They’d claimed the killings were justified.
Not so this time. Embezzlement was definitely a crime, but not a violent one. As far as the researchers at CNN could tell, nobody had ever been executed in the US for embezzlement, even long ago when the death penalty had been universally accepted. At least, it seemed, the public was coming to their senses again.
My sister stayed asleep downstairs, so I replayed the latest video at full speed. For some reason, this one felt more vicious than the others. At least in the first two killings, the victims had truly committed murder. The Old Testament was clear, murder should be punished by death. An eye for an eye, et cetera.
This time, though, the vigilante had gone way too far. And as I watched the poor embezzler’s confession, I felt sick to my stomach.
Avenger asked, “Why did you steal the money?”
With a trembling voice—the guy had to know he was about to die—said, “My mother needed a new kidney. She only had weeks to live, but she’s way down on the donors list. I could get her a good kidney on the black market for a hundred grand, and I figured I could pay off the loan before anybody noticed.”
“It wasn’t a loan,” Avenger said. “You stole that money and betrayed the trust your university placed in you.”
That was certainly true, but he didn’t deserve to be slaughtered in cold blood. Avenger was highlighting one of the main reasons we had such a complicated justice system. Highly trained judges determined the right sentences, not some demon with a messiah complex.
Then Avenger said, “You manipulated the legal system to avoid responsibility, didn’t you?”
“No!” the man said. “My lawyer was working out a deal for me to plead guilty with the prosecutors. They’re so busy. I was willing to pay a fine and go to jail. My mom got her kidney, and that’s what mattered. I told them I’d accept full responsibility for my mistake.”
The embezzler put his hands together and pled for his life. Tears streamed down his cheeks. The camera zoomed down on the man’s face, and a shot rang out. For an instant, we saw his head jerked back violently. Then he fell into the abyss.
As in the first snuff film, it ended with Avenger singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
As a cop, I’d seen my share of vicious crimes, but this clean head shot upset me more than most of the gruesome killings I’d witnessed. Something about how pitiless Caligula was horrified me. He could find an excuse to execute anyone. I had to find him and stop the carnage.
Ellen called out to me from below. She didn’t climb stairs anymore if she had to. I encrypted the file with the video and closed it. Then I dashed downstairs.
It turned out, there was no need to hurry. She was just stuck in the recliner, couldn’t sit up. I helped her and got a good look at her red face. She gave me a crooked smile, as though embarrassed by her weakness. I saw the most beautiful butterball on earth. In the span of five minutes, I’d seen the worst this world had to offer and the best. I couldn’t rest until I’d stopped the worst and protected the best.
-o-o-o-
HOURS LATER, HONAH pulled me back to San Francisco. I’d spent a considerable time trying to figure out what Caligula’s real motive was for the latest killing. The best I could come up with was he loved to destroy, but if that were the case, why publicize it. The public reaction had changed overnight from support to condemnation. What if Caligula hadn’t expected that? Would he stop? Demons were probably as out of touch with regard to human feelings as angels were, maybe worse.
At the San Francisco headquarters, I found myself sitting in an overstuffed chair across from the chief. His face was impassive, as usual.
“I see from your mind that you are as confused as I am,” he said. “There doesn’t appear to be any consistent reasoning behind Caligula’s vigilante murders.”
I would’ve liked him to explain it all to me, but it was comforting to see that he hadn’t figured it out any better than I. “What does Jack think?”
“He’s just as puzzled as the rest of us. We have to find this sorcerer before he slaughters any more humans. Panic is definitely rising among the populace nationwide. They realize almost anyone could be his next target.”
I nodded. “He seems to be crazy, filled with bloodlust. What if we forced him out into the open? We could shut down his casino, for example. That would piss him off. Maybe he would divert his attention to us.”
Honah remained still for a moment then shook his head. “I suspect that a full-frontal attack on him would encourage him to kill more. He has to realize we’re making some effort to find him, but it’s best we keep our efforts secret for as long as possible.”
I couldn’t disagree, but I had no great ideas about how to find the monster in our midst. “Have you been able to find the latest killing site? Searching the others hasn’t proved to be much help, but we need to exhaust every possibility.”
“Yes.” He patted the arms of his chair as though enjoying a little success. “Because the video was recorded in the daytime, it was particularly easy to find the latest location. Inga discovered it, actually. I’ll send you there.”
I hardly had time to wave goodbye before I was surrounded by blackness again. It seemed like only seconds before I stood on a dirt road surrounded by fog. A few feet away, Inga was talking with two people I didn’t know, presumably other angels. When she spotted me, she ran up and gave me a hug. That was a welcome bit of goodwill on such a depressing day.
“Too bad you couldn’t get here earlier,” she said. “It was bright and sunny an hour ago.”
She introduced me to the two other guardian angels. They’d come to secure the site, and once I’d arrived, they could leave. Four was a crowd anyway.
“It’s great to see you,” I said. “Cleo must’ve told you about my mess-up at the demons’ bar.”
Inga grinned mischievously. “She claimed it was all her fault. It happens to all of us from time to time. You can’t keep going into harm’s way without running into some trouble. How’s your arm?”
I moved it up and down to show her. “Good as new. Thanks for asking.”
She stared at me expectantly, but I didn’t know what to say as a friend. So, I switched to business. “Where the hell are we?”
She took me by the hand and led me a few dozen steps to where I could see a Dead End sign on a fence. “We’re about five miles north of a small harbor town called Jenner. The Coast Highway is a few hundred yards behind us. We’re up high, five hundred feet above the Pacific.”
“Where did the killing occur?”
She leapt over a four-foot-high barbed wire fence. I did the same. A human would have had trouble with that maneuver, but we were much stronger. Then we walked out to the end of a mostly-flat rocky outcropping. I recognized that spot from the video.
Although I carefully examined the scene of the crime, I didn’t find any shell casings or other evidence of the killing, other than trampled grass. Closer to the edge, there was no sign of blood. “Did you find the body?”
She grimaced. “Most of it. The remains didn’t make it to the water this time. I found a badly damaged corpse about four hundred feet below us. It had landed on a large patch of dead brush
that ended its fall. Most of the skin has been torn away, so it’s hard to tell it was a human.”
Long falls were brutal, and that was probably why the sorcerer had picked this place. The embezzler’s pleading face flashed into my mind. A mixture of emotions I couldn’t pinpoint flooded through me as I imagined his body tumbling down this cliff.
We changed into birds and flew back and forth along the hillside, dropping slowly with each pass. At a number of spots, I noticed where the body had made contact with the hillside, leaving a series of bloody impact points down until we reached the corpse itself. The face was unrecognizable, but there couldn’t be that many fresh bodies in the area. I had no doubt Inga had found the right person because I’d recognized the top of the slope from the video.
There was no room for a human to stand upright next to the bushes, so I remained as a falcon and examined the area. The dead man’s shirt was gone completely, but scraps of his brown corduroy pants remained attached to his torso. His pockets were torn and empty.
We continued scanning the hillside below the body, but didn’t find anything. Then we returned to the rocky outcropping and changed back into human form. I systematically scanned the road leading back to the highway, and I could see where some vehicle had parked. I took a photograph of a tire print eight inches wide, but most of the prints were too smeared to be useful.
While we were wandering around together, I thought to ask her about how angels could make money.
She shook her head. “You can share your time with close relatives like Ellen and her daughter, but no side jobs. You’re not supposed to be part of the mortal world anymore, but Honah understands you need to transition without harming your family. The best you can do is to work harder on the ranch so it’s more profitable.”
I was still mulling over ways to do that when Inga whispered, “We have company, Gabe.”
I looked up to see a tall gangly man with white hair approaching us. The scowl on his face told me he wasn’t happy.
“What the bloody hell are you doin’?” He had a strong British accent. “This is private property. The second time today.”
Infernal Justice (Angels at the Edge Book 2) Page 11
