Angel of Death

by J. Robert King

  The impact has the sound of a plastic toy being crunched.

  Then it is done. That quickly, the car is stopped. The man sits, dazed, scraped, bruised, but otherwise untouched. The oblivious semi roars onward. In the empty windshield space, the next vehicles slow. Emergency lights begin flashing like mournful fireflies. January bites cold against the man’s hot red belly. The rumble of traffic slows, like the sudden reverent hush that comes to a crowd when something has gone terribly wrong. He has often thought that a fatal accident should stop traffic: human death should never occur conveniently or unobtrusively. A man after my own heart.

  “That was… close,” he says hoarsely, realizing only then that he has screamed his throat raw. He turns to his bride and sees only the sheared away edge of the car and the cracked piling that now brushes his right arm. He blinks, uncomprehending at first, and looks into the back seat, as if she will be sitting there. Gone. Folded away in metal and plastic. He turns forward again and watches the cars and their firefly lights. One of his mantis hands lifts to the horn and honks it twice, a bleating sound. He begins to pick glass out of his body, tossing the bloody fragments out onto what is left of the hood.

  They aren’t enough to kill him, he knows. Nor is the shoulder dislocation, already swelling beneath a strained strap. Nor is the bleeding band of his forehead where it crunched against the steering wheel.

  But he will die tonight. He is not strong enough to survive this.

  The planet has been destroyed, and the asteroid flies free again, pelting toward a sun that waits, fiery and voracious, ten or twelve hours ahead.

  (I would not have done it the other way. The bride would not have committed suicide. Even had she tried, her own elemental flesh could not slay itself. She was life.)

  He, on the other hand, is treated, counseled, and given a room at the University of Chicago Hospital. Despite his sore shoulder, the tree climber makes his way down from a third story window to the ground, walks along the South Side, is mugged and beaten when it turns out he has no money, continues to the Skyway, and leaps, tattered and bleeding, from a viaduct to land before a semi.

  As I say, he was a man after my own heart. Not so long ago, there was a madman who talked to God. (Any mortal who hears the true voice of God goes mad, just as any mortal who sees God is slain by the sight.) This man truly spoke to God and was truly mad.

  Divine madness allowed him to rise to power over his small, oppressed nation, brought to its knees by a series of hardships caused by the old regime. The madman wanted more land, better land. But the land he wanted was full of people already – lesser people, slave races. They needed to die. God agreed. God told him to kill every man, woman, and child of the lesser races. Genocide, purification of the land for the divine, master race.

  And the madman succeeded. In a ferocious rush, the tiny country took on the world. City after city fell. The madman’s soldiers rounded up the lesser races, and according to God’s will, slew them and buried them in vast mass graves, or burned their bodies away to ash and bones.

  Do not be surprised by this. God has not only the right but the obligation to decide when everyone will die. Whether God decides that ten thousand should be slain all in one day, or over the course of fifty years, God decides when they will die. Assuredly, he slays them, and sometimes in their multitude, like a man mowing grass or spraying for termites.

  Yes, I assure the quality of individual deaths, and the tool of my work is sometimes a madman like Keith McFarland. It is not merely my right to slay via such mortals as he, but my solemn obligation to do so. Just as I have been assigned by God to oversee the deaths of individuals in their thousands – sleeping, driving, working, eating – so the mad dictator was assigned by God to slay men and women and children in their hundreds of thousands. Either God could not stop these mass executions, or he would not stop them. A God who could not stop them is not God. A God who would not stop them has ordained them.

  Either there is no God, or the mad genocidal dictator was God’s servant.

  “So Joshua took all that land, the hills, and all the south country, and all the land of Goshen, and the valley, and the plain, and the mountain of Israel, and the valley of the same; even from the mount Halak, that goeth up to Seir, even unto Baal-gad in the valley of Lebanon under mount Hermon: and all their kings he took, and smote them, and slew them. Joshua made war a long time with all those kings. There was not a city that made peace with the children of Israel, save the Hivites, the inhabitants of Gibeon: all other they took in battle. For it was of the LORD to harden their hearts, that they should come against Israel in battle, that he might destroy them utterly, and that they might have no favor, but that he might destroy them, as the LORD commanded Moses.”

  Not a sparrow falls from heaven without your Father knowing it. God knows of every death, and approves of every death. Men who play God are murderers and mad dictators, but men who truly hear God can do the same things and be holy prophets. Ask the extremists. They still understand the idea of holy war. When Keith McFarland kills, he is a monster. When I kill, I am an angel of the Lord.

  Joshua could not have slain his tens of thousands, Napoleon his hundreds of thousands, Hitler his millions, and Stalin his tens of millions if God had not willed it so. Mad and murderous they may be, but these folk are servants of God.

  And people get so upset over Manson, who never killed a soul, or Keith McFarland, who hasn’t even gotten into triple digits. The difference is that they do not really hear the voice of God.

  One last fling for Keith? Why not? He has time to kill, and I have people.

  They call him Mister Strange. He is tall, stoop-shouldered, and heavy, with kinky blond hair standing from his head and a gap-toothed, idiot grin beneath his wirerim glasses. He is a garbage man in Griffith, Indiana. The loping ape has few friends, one sister, and no car. A graduate of Griffith Junior High, he landed his first and only job after the death of his father. He has hauled the garbage of Griffith for twenty-four years now and is known mostly as a harmless idiot.

  When he was twenty-seven, the garbage man unadvisedly flirted with junior high girls who passed him on the way to school. He was convicted of child molestation, though he had never touched anyone except himself. After six months of good behavior, he was released. He still bears the label pedophile – and the title Mister Strange. The people of Griffith watch him closely. They call the police on him as regularly as they call animal control on stray dogs.

  Mister Strange is not a pedophile, though he is, indeed, strange. His true name is Ed Bolenski. It is time for the thirtynine year-old garbage man to die, and I think it would be fitting for Keith McFarland to do the honors. This snowy February evening, Ed sits in the InnTown Tap. The air is filled with smoke, crowd noise, a basketball game, and the inarticulate thumps of an old jukebox. Despite bad windows, the bar is warm and friendly.

  Mister Strange always eats his dinner here. The door to his apartment goes up from the bar, not fifteen feet of greasy paneling away. A key to the tavern rests idly in his pants pocket. The buffalo wings make his fingers red and gritty. Crumpled napkins form a chaparral around his wings basket. Bones lie beside dripping, steaming meat. He bites into a wing and works skin and gristle free, swallowing the negligible flesh that had been strung along the bone.

  You die tonight, Mister Strange.

  They taste good. Real good. After this is the Wheel. Don’t worry about the time. That’s bar time. Time for drunks. Your time is twenty minutes behind. Drunks live twenty minutes ahead.

  You sit. A belch is knocking. You straighten. Up it comes. Tastes good. More room for more. The people are loud tonight.

  A little man sits there. He is at the table that has the busted leg. The folded napkins under one side aren’t under it. They’re kicked out near the ladies room. They get kicked out all the time. Charlie’s cheap for not fixing it. The little man eats. The table leans toward his burger. He picks up his drink. The table sways away.

  “How y
ou doing?” you say.

  He nods. That means okay. He’s doing okay. You’re doing okay, too.

  “You like the Wheel?”

  He nods. That means, yeah. He likes the Wheel.

  “You good at the Wheel?”

  He nods. Bet he’s not as good as you.

  “Bet you’re not as good as me.”

  He nods. The bet’s on.

  “Don’t mind the time. That’s bar time.” You suck the meat from the last two wings. Tastes good. You crunch a little on the wing tips and feel whatever that is – bone or feather or whatever – crunch under the coating. The holder is out of napkins. You use the old ones. You put them in your wings basket. Tastes good.

  “Come on. We’ll see.”

  He nods. You stand. Maybe he’d not nod if he saw how really big you are. You are really big. Too late, now. The bet’s on. He gives up his burger, halfway through. Some guys would ask for the rest. You don’t.

  “Come on. I live upstairs.”

  He nods. He’s really small. Maybe he’ll be good at the Wheel. Maybe not.

  The stairs squeak. You know when anybody’s coming up because the stairs squeak. He’s coming up. He’s going to challenge you to the Wheel. He’s going to lose. There’s a little landing. To open the bathroom door, you have to step off the landing. It’s that little. Your door goes in, not out. You keep your deadbolt on. That’s a good name. Deadbolt. Stops them dead. You swing the door open. Home. The room is big. The window at the other end is big. You watch the cars there. That big gold chair is from Grandma’s. She’s dead. You flick on the tube. Color. Better than the old one. The couch is in front of it. Your cat is in the corner, brown and yellow like the couch cover. Lots of the stuff is from the curb. You don’t take stuff from the dump.

  “You want something?” He nods. His hair looks uneven and greasy. He’s got acne. He looked better in the tavern. “The kitchen is there.” It is. The Formica table and the hot plate and the fridge are there. He sits down on the couch.

  The music starts. Cartoons of Pat Sajak and Vanna White soar into your lives.

  You get a root beer. You move the cat and the Snickers wrapper and sit next to him. Everything looks clean on the stage. The skin is a little green. The people are too thin and bend in the middle. What do you want for free?

  “What do you want for free? It’s color.”

  He nods.

  “You don’t talk much.”

  He nods. That is almost funny.

  They have the first puzzle. Three-word title. Blank blank blank blank blank blank, blank blank blank, blank blank blank blank blank. The fat woman guesses R, and there are twothree. Blank blank R blank blank R, blank blank blank, blank R blank blank blank.

  “You know it?”

  He nods.

  “Yeah.”

  One T. Blank blank R blank blank R, blank blank blank, blank R blank T blank.

  “If you know it, what is it?”

  “M-M-Murder She Wr-Wrote.”

  It doesn’t fit… it does fit! You look at him and see his gun and then there is hot fire and then nothing. It was fitting: the garbage man was slain on a couch from the dump (no matter what he told others, he had taken many of his furnishings from the dump) by a piece of white trash. Even Keith, not noted for his cleanliness, took the head and hands into the bathroom to wash them before he used them. He felt so comfortable in the dingy place that he stayed the night, never changing the channel or turning off the TV. He let himself out during the wee hours, walking beneath the ceiling tiles stained red from the leaking blood. Keith did all that on his own. I figured I’d let the artist work. Still, I made sure he signed my name to the masterpiece. He’d forgotten the last two times. This time he complied, writing on the belly of the body, using Mister Strange’s own bloody finger as a pen: Samael 5:2:356. You see, I wanted Detective Leland to show up. I wanted to see her at the crime scene.

  Unlike Keith, I didn’t leave. Time for me doesn’t matter. I would wait until she came. I knew she would come. She was smart enough to use the NCIC. I could play catch-up on deaths once I had met her and found out what she was like.

  I didn’t have to wait long. The Griffith cops were all over the place by noon that day, when the bar opened. I met a very fine fellow, a Sergeant Michaels, shift commander. I didn’t so much meet him, actually, but became him, implanted him in the memory of the rest of the department. I became the sergeant and sent for Leland.

  She arrived that night. It was nice to talk with her.

  SIX

  Detective Leland ducked under the police line and walked slowly into the chilly Inn-Town Tap. A forest of tables and chairs stood derelict around her. She felt cold in the dark place despite the suit jacket she wore. Suit jacket, white shirt, and loosened tie – her uniform ever since she had taken over McHenry’s post as detective. No longer would she patrol. For the rest of her career, she would keep irregular hours and unwholesome company – though the cop who waited at the far end of the room seemed wholesome enough.

  “He lives up here,” said Sergeant Michaels of the Griffith Police. “I mean, lived.” He blushed handsomely. The sergeant was tall, lean, and young, his eyes bright like a pair of new dimes. He had black hair and a supermodel’s body, but he moved like a kid at his first dance – awkward and unaware how beautiful he was. This work is getting to me, thought Leland. Michaels gestured up the dimly lit stairway, his breath ghosting between warped panels of pressboard. “The scene’s in okay shape but not exactly pristine.”

  Detective Leland nodded. “They’ve sifted through it all?”

  “Yeah, but they were careful,” said Michaels as he started up the stairs. He was supposed to be the shift manager from eleven to six but had gotten guard duty at the crime scene when his substitute patrolman and another officer were out sick. “They’ve taken away the body, of course, even in this weather. But aside from samples, nothing else’s been moved. They even wore surgical booties and hair nets.” His hand waved vaguely above his head. “You’ll see.”

  She followed him up the stairs. A single yellow light flickered squalidly overhead, as though a white bulb would have attracted bugs. Leland’s shadow pressed up against the sergeant as he gained the landing. The bathroom door was painted with darkness. He fitted the key to the deadbolt and leaned against the battle-scarred door. “No one downstairs heard the gunshot. Too much noise. An old jukebox, you know. They say the killer lagged around all night.”

  “Gunshot?” Leland asked, surprised. Her eyes moved from his sinewy shoulder up to his face. “The police report didn’t say so, or the coroner’s, either.”

  Michaels’s eyes looked gold in the yellow light. “I guess that’s just a personal theory. Blood-spatter analysis indicates a gunshot wound to the head, but there’s so much blood – and no head. He had to chop a while to get the head off. Hard to say what happened. I figured maybe he killed him some other way, first. And…”

  “And you read that he used a gun in the other cases, the ones I’ve been investigating?” she provided.

  “I’m the one who told the lieutenant to call you,” he replied a little sheepishly. Yes, handsome, almost statuesque, though boyish. “I know, I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions about the gun.”

  She laughed a little. “Jumped the gun. That was almost a pun.”

  He nodded, accepting the moment of grace. He’d make a good assistant detective, she found herself thinking. I wonder if this flatlander would give up Indiana to become a cheesehead.

  Without another word, Sergeant Michaels pushed open the door. His gray-jacketed shoulders cleared the frame, and Leland gazed at the room beyond. At first, it appeared to be ransacked – clothes and garbage strewn across the floor, video cases fallen from shelves and cracked open like black eggs – but the debris didn’t have the rankled look of violent action. The room had eroded over weeks and months. Still, the blood was fresh. On the threadbare couch, it formed a puddle in the shape of a large body, slumped in front of the TV. The
linoleum floor held a wide, full puddle of the stuff, slowly evaporating or dripping away into the bar below. Rust-red smudges covered just about everything else – table, refrigerator, hot plate, American cheese wrappers, dresser, bed, TV stand and trays, doorknob, coat hangers.

  “It’s my guy, all right,” Leland said. The sergeant looked a bit peaked as he drew the crime scene photos from a manila envelope. “You know him?”

  “No,” she said. “I just feel like I do. Study the artwork, and you come to know the artist.”

  He paused before handing her the photos – color shots. She was glad. Blood always looked like ink on black-and-white film. “You call this artwork?”

  “Yes,” she said, taking the photos. Her hand casually touched his. It was warm and strong, reassuring: human in all this inhumanity.

  Donna, what are you doing? These late nights and long drives must be getting to you.

  In a matter-of-fact voice, she said, “They’re artwork as far as the killer is concerned. Erotica. Look, here –

  the smudges on the card table – those are from the victim’s hands, not the killer’s. He was using the victim’s hands to get out the cheese. He probably also used them to masturbate.” Leland felt suddenly awkward, and she did what she always did – launched into theory.

  “Maybe he used them to pull down the bed sheets, even to turn on this touch lamp, here beside the TV. Whether or not the killer knows it, that’s symbolic for his own lack of power. He feels completely disenfranchised, powerless to act, until he murders, and then for a while he has taken someone else’s power – his hands – and uses them for his own ends.”

  The sergeant nodded. “And what about the head? I thought when somebody cut off the hands and head, it was to hide the person’s identity.”

  “Yes, usually, but if you want the identity to remain secret, you don’t kill someone in his own apartment. It might have started as a useful MO, but since then it has taken on ritual significance. Taking someone else’s head is taking his personality, mind, and soul. The killer probably feels he needs a new head. A new soul.”