Destroying Angel

by Richard Paul Russo

  Sookie turned and ran. Through the door, along the short passage, into the basement. She tripped over the hatch, sprawled on the floor, scrambled to her feet. She pushed her way through the screen and into daylight, started up the steps. The board. She came back down, started to push through the screen when she felt a breath of hot air wash across her from within, heard the scraping of metal on stone. She pulled back out and ran up the steps to street level.

  On the sidewalk, Sookie stopped to catch her breath. She scanned the street, searching for the thrashers, but didn’t see any—only cars, bikes, pedestrians. She looked down at the broken vent screen and watched, waiting for something to appear. Nothing did. She lit a cigarette, turned away, and started down the street.

  SIX

  TANNER’S FOOTSTEPS ECHOED off concrete in the police garage, then were drowned out by the roar of an engine, tires squealing, and finally the crash of metal against cement and the shattering of glass.

  “God damnit!” someone shouted from inside the office in the far corner. “Is Walliser drunk again?” Tanner recognized Lucy Chen’s voice. Somebody else inside the lighted room laughed—Vince Patricks, probably. On the other side of the garage, a car door opened, slammed shut.

  Tanner approached the small office, and soon the awful stink of Lucy Chen’s boiling tea overwhelmed the smells of gasoline and smoke. He stopped in the doorway and looked inside.

  Lucy was sitting at her desk, head bent over a pot, breathing in the fumes of the boiling tea. Behind her, at the other desk, Vince Patricks leaned back in his chair, feet propped on the drawer handles. Wall space not filled with locked key cabinets was covered with magazine and newspaper photos taped over one another like a collage—Vince’s perpetual project. The photos were all of old men and women wearing idiotic expressions. Vince taped up his photos, Lucy brewed her tea. They both figured it was a fair arrangement.

  Tanner said hello, and Vince nodded, smiling. Lucy looked up.

  “Want some tea?”

  Vince laughed and Tanner shook his head. Lucy scowled at them, then poured herself a cup of the vile stuff; bits of slimy black herbs slopped into the cup along with the thick, dark liquid. She put the pot back on the burner and adjusted the heat.

  “Hey, Tanner,” Vince said. “Want in on the body pool? Only ten bucks a shot. Day the next bodies are found, which shift, how many, and which body of water. Sex of the victims as a tiebreaker.”

  “You’re a fucking pervert,” Lucy said.

  Vince grinned at her, then raised an eyebrow at Tanner.

  “No, thanks,” Tanner said. “I never win.”

  “You talk to Carlucci?” Lucy asked.

  Tanner nodded. “Yesterday.”

  “Get what you want from him?”

  Tanner shrugged, didn’t say anything.

  “Lucy gets what she wants from him,” Vince said.

  Ignoring him, Lucy got up, unlocked one of the key cabinets, and removed a set of keys. She tossed it to Tanner. “Seventeen- A,” she said. “And Tanner?”

  “Yeah?” He knew what was coming, part of Lucy’s ritual.

  “Bring it back with a full tank.”

  “Sure, Lucy. Thanks.” He pocketed the keys and headed toward the back of the garage.

  Inside the office, Vince said something Tanner couldn’t make out, and started laughing again. “Fuck you,” Lucy said, followed by more of Vince’s laughter. Tanner smiled to himself. A team. Some things really didn’t ever seem to change.

  O O O O

  Tanner drove the police van through the pelting rain. Paul sat beside him with his head against the window, eyes half-closed. The van bounced over the cracked highway, swerved around potholes. Tanner kept the speed down, unwilling to risk going more than forty. They were halfway between San Francisco and San Jose on U.S. 101, the back of the van loaded with pharmaceuticals.

  Tanner turned on the radio and tuned in to a talk show.

  “... should put more slugs to work on it, you know, cart in a few from other cities or someplace. We’ve got to stop this maniac and fry him before he kills more people. ”

  “You really think that would make a difference, William? They’ve had slugs on this since the killings began. ”

  “Yeah, what, two or three of them? I say get a whole hunch, fifteen or twenty, stick ’em together in a big room, and pump ’em full of that brain juice. It’s worth a shot.”

  “And how about you, William? Do you have any ideas about who the killer is or why he’s doing it?”

  “Sure, I’ve got ideas, and I’m working on them. When I have them worked out better I’ll go to the police, but I need to keep them to myself for now. ”

  “Okay, William, I understand, and thanks for the call. We’re going to take a short break here, but when we come back we want to hear what you think about the return of the Chain Killer, especially if you have any ideas about who it is. ”

  Bouncy music came on, then crashing sounds, and a voiceover talking about Charm Magnets. Paul turned down the volume so it was barely audible, and said, “How can you stand to listen to that?”

  “The radio?”

  “Talk shows.”

  “I learn some things from them. About people.”

  “They depress me.”

  “Most of what I learn about people is depressing.”

  Paul nodded, but didn’t say any more. He sighed and turned the volume back up.

  “... name’s Silo. ”

  “All right, Silo, what’s on your mind?”

  “The cops are just giving us bull SCREEE! about these killings. ”

  “All right, Silo, you’re going to have to watch your language there. This is radio. We’re in modern times here, but not that modern. So, what, you think the police are witholding information?”

  “They’re not telling us everything the killer does to ’em, to the bodies. I know. After he kills ’em he SCREES! ’em in the SCREE! and then he... ”

  “O-kay, so much for Mr. Silo. Remember, folks, keep it clean or I’ll have to cut you off, too. All right, Milpitas, you’re on the air. ”

  “Hello? Hello?”

  “Hello, this is Mike on the mike, you ’re on the air, Milpitas. What’s your name?”

  “Meronia. ”

  “All right, Meronia, what’s on your mind?”

  Paul reached forward and switched off the radio. “Listen to it some other time,” he said. He put his head back against the glass and closed his eyes.

  O O O O

  The rain had stopped by the time they pulled into the Emergency entrance of Valley Medical Center. Tanner hit the horn, and a minute later Valerie, in her hospital whites, came through the double doors. Paul opened his door and Valerie squeezed in behind his seat, then crouched on the floor between them. Tanner pulled out of the drive and swung around toward the rear of the hospital.

  “It’s been a long time since you’ve had anything for us,” Valerie said.

  “I get what I can when I can.”

  “I realize that. I was just saying.”

  He drove along a narrow, looping roadway and stopped beside the laundry annex. He turned on the van’s overhead interior light, rolled back the wire barrier, then he and Valerie crawled into the small open space between the seats and the stacks of cartons.

  Valerie whistled, gazing over all the boxes and crates. “You got some shipment this time. How much is ours?”

  Tanner touched a stack. All the cartons in the van were labeled AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS. “Here’s a list.” He handed her a folded sheet of paper.

  Valerie spread the paper and read it by the overhead light. She whistled again. “Beta-endoscane. Nobody but the richest of the private hospitals are even getting a crack at this stuff.” She continued reading, nodding once in a while, then refolded the paper and tucked it into the upper pocket of her hospital coat. From a larger, lower pocket, she removed a roll of bills and handed it to Tanner.

  Twenties. He unclipped the roll and started counting.


  “I know it’s not even close to black market, but it’s all we can come up with for now.”

  Tanner finished counting, then, trying to keep the disappointment out of his voice, said, “That doesn’t matter. This is fine.” A week ago it would have been fine—enough to pay the rent, buy food, and work on the next shipment. Now, though, he had a feeling he was going to have extra expenses. A lot of them. He was going to have to sell more of what remained in the van.

  Paul stayed with the van as Valerie and Tanner unloaded through the side door. They carried the cartons into the annex, through storage rooms filled with linens, the warm and damp laundry room, and along a connecting corridor that led down into the hospital basement, where they stacked the cartons in an unmarked closet. Tanner knew the procedure by now: Valerie and the other doctors would work out a distribution plan later that day, trying to keep the shipment itself quiet.

  Valerie made sure the closet was securely locked and bolted, then they swung by the doctors’ lounge, picked up three cups of coffee, and returned to the van. Tanner gave a cup to Paul, then he and Valerie sat together on folding chairs just inside the annex.

  “So how have you been?” Tanner asked.

  “Oh, I’ve been fine. Still spending too much time at the hospital, but that’s nothing new.”

  “No.” He smiled. “And Connie?”

  Valerie smiled back, shaking her head. “She’s sixteen, and she’s a pain in the ass sometimes. But she’s a good kid at heart.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “She asks about you,” Valerie said. “How you’re doing, if I’ve seen you. She really cares about you, Louis. She never asks about her father.” She put a hand on his knee. “She’d love it if you were to come by and see her sometime, take her to a movie or something.” She paused. “She doesn’t understand why you and I aren’t still together.”

  Who did? Tanner thought. But he didn’t say anything. Neither of them did for several minutes, sipping at their coffee. The sun came in through the window, lighting up dust particles in the air, fluttering motes of bright silver. Someone had once told him that dust was primarily made up of the skeletons or shells of microscopic creatures. Dust mites.

  “So,” Valerie finally said. “It’s starting again in the city.”

  Tanner looked at her, confused for a moment. Then he realized what she was talking about, and nodded. “Looks that way.”

  “How are the nightmares?”

  Tanner shrugged. “They’d stopped.”

  He thought she would say more about it, ask something else, but she didn’t. He finished the coffee and stood.

  “I need to go.”

  She walked back to the van with him, kissed him lightly before he got in. “Take care of yourself, Louis.”

  “You, too.”

  “Good-bye, Paul.” She waved.

  “Bye, Valerie.”

  “Thanks again,” she said to Tanner.

  Tanner nodded and started the engine, then slowly pulled away.

  “You made a serious mistake,” Paul said, “when you stopped seeing Valerie.”

  “Christ, don’t start.”

  Paul shrugged, then said, “Back to the city?”

  “No. Make some phone calls, another couple of stops, sell some more of this stuff.”

  “You’re going to sell more?”

  “Yeah. I’m getting greedy. Just call me Uriah from now on. And help me find a pay phone that works.” He drove on without saying any more.

  SEVEN

  THEIR LAST STOP before Paul’s clinic was the free clinic in the Golden Gate Park squatter zone. The police markings on the van served as an unofficial pass, getting barriers moved and chains retracted so they could access restricted roads. Tanner drove slowly along the road fronting the Academy of Sciences, the stone walls of the buildings glistening from a recent bleaching. Schoolchildren in uniforms walked in tight formation, or clustered in well-defined groups on the steps in front of the building. Across the concourse of leafless trees, next to the manicured grounds of the Japanese Tea Gardens, the remains of the De Young Museum were covered with flowering vines.

  They had to go through one more barrier, then Tanner swung the van around and behind the De Young ruins and stopped at the edge of the squatter zone—drab tents patched with faded swatches of colored fabric, shanties built of warped plywood and irregular sheets of metal or plastic, lean-tos erected over slabs of concrete. The zone filled a large meadow and sent out dozens of tentacles into the least dense sections of the surrounding woods, the trees and brush cut down to make more space for tents and shanties and to provide firewood. Mud-slick paths wound among the dwellings, the paths crowded with adults and children and animals.

  The medical clinic was housed in an abandoned park maintenance building. A long line of people stretched from the clinic, snaking past the van. Seeing the police van, the people shifted and turned to one another, whispering and gesturing, though they didn’t leave.

  “They must have something special going on,” Paul said. “Line that long. Inoculations, maybe.”

  “Maybe I should stay with the van,” Tanner said.

  Paul gave a short, hard laugh. “One of us better.”

  Paul got out of the van and walked toward the clinic. The people in line tensed, staring at him as he walked toward the building. Tanner sat behind the wheel, the heat building up inside the van despite the open windows. But he did not feel like moving. The people in line stopped staring at the van, but they did not seem to relax much. They looked like they had been in line a long time, and many of them tried to get off their feet without sitting in the mud, which wasn’t easy. Most of them looked ill as well as exhausted.

  Tanner glanced over the treetops and could just see the top of the hill rising from the island in the middle of Stowe Lake. It had been a long time since he had been on that hill, and he wondered if he was going to have to do something similar again. He hoped to Christ he wouldn’t, but he did not have a good feeling about it.

  A few minutes later Paul returned to the van with Patricia Miranda, one of the clinic’s volunteer med techs. Tanner had met her two or three times before, and she shook his hand with a smile.

  “This van.” She shook her head, then turned to the people in line. “They are not police,” she said, loud but calm. “They have medical supplies for the clinic.” Then she repeated it in Spanish. The people in line visibly relaxed, though their wariness did not disappear altogether.

  “What’s going on?” Tanner asked. “Fever inoculations?”

  “No,” Patricia said. “Wish it was, though it’s probably too late for most of them. No, we managed to get several thousand sets of nose filters. A lot of the people here had enough money once to get plugs implanted, but most haven’t had a filter change in years, so we’re trying to do them all.”

  Tanner sniffed, twitching his nose at the thought. He was due soon himself. He looked up at the hazy sky, thinking about the crap that got into his lungs even with the filters.

  “Tanner, Patricia wants me to help out here for a while,” Paul said. “You want to just go on without me? I’ll give you the keys to the clinic and you can just drop the stuff.”

  “How long you think you’ll be?”

  “An hour, hour and a half tops. I’ve got my own shift at the hospital tonight.”

  “I’ll wait. There’s something I want to do, if it’ll be all right to leave the van awhile.”

  Patricia nodded. “It’d probably be fine, but I’ll get a couple of people to watch it.”

  They unloaded cartons, leaving only Paul’s share in the back of the van. Then Tanner locked the van, and Paul and Patricia went into the clinic.

  Tanner walked through the heart of the squatter zone, along the slick, muddy paths. Most of the tents were makeshift, heavily patched, the walls sacrificed for the roofs; the shanties were not much more solid than the tents, providing shelter from the rain but little privacy. Clothes on people were as patched a
nd tom as the tents, often revealing unhealed wounds and large streaks of fever rash. As he walked along, half-naked kids came up to him and begged, hands held out. But they were listless and halfhearted, as if they recognized that anyone walking among them would have little or nothing to give away.

  Smelling smoke and roasting meat, Tanner came to a large open area between two groups of shacks. A fire pit had been dug in the center of the clearing, and a wide, blazing fire burned within it. Above the fire, on crudely made roasting spits, were several small, unrecognizable animals (raccoons? dogs?), and one much larger, headless beast that Tanner was pretty sure was a horse. Fifteen or twenty men and women stood around the roasting animals, talking and drinking from unlabeled bottles.

  He worked his way through the shanties and tents, feeling more and more closed in by them as he went. Eventually the zone ended and he reached the denser foliage of the woods. Tanner pressed on, the way slightly uphill now, and a few minutes later emerged from the trees. He crossed a narrow strip of broken pavement and stopped on the bank of Stowe Lake.

  Tanner stood at the water’s edge and looked across to the island that filled so much of the lake. The island was a heavily wooded hill, its peak the highest point in the park. At the top, there were views of the entire park and close to half the city.

  Also at the top was a small, muck-filled reservoir that had once held two naked, chained bodies.

  Tanner looked up at the top of the hill, remembering. He had been alone that day, too, and it was alone in the muggy afternoon heat that he had pulled the two dead women from the water, naked but covered with green and brown muck. Chained together at the wrists and ankles, face to face, as if embraced like lovers.

  He walked along the edge of the lake for a few minutes, then crossed one of the bridges to the island. He stopped at the foot of the long trail that curved around the island and up to the top of the hill. Tanner did not know why he was doing this, but he knew he would not go back until he did. He started up the trail.