The Devil Gave Them Black Wings

by Lee Thompson

  And she also figured that Clint’s father, not to mention a detective or two, would more than likely track Jacob down and take him into one of those small concrete rooms with a faux-mirrored window, and they’d ask him things, personal things, like if he enjoyed the flesh of little girls…

  At home, in her bed, she stretched out, and draped her left arm over her eyes. The darkness was sometimes a comfort. She thought, Is he capable of doing what they’re going to question him about?

  She didn’t think so. Jacob had seemed sad, which had prompted her to want to connect with him. But she couldn’t see Jacob taking a child. No. He couldn’t have. Sickos took children. Cruel men. And she knew what they did with them, since she loved watching crime dramas and she loved reading, and she thought again, No. He’s not the one, but they’re going to try to crucify him until they find the true culprit, or until they can make it stick and punish him.

  Only Richard had told her—hadn’t he?—that everyone in the park belonged there.

  She sighed. She always left her curtains open and the day’s light made her room warm, even this late in the evening and this late in the year.

  At eight p.m., an hour before sunset, Nina had fallen asleep for a short duration, and she had been dreaming of a small black girl in a fruit cellar, the girl’s face like smoke, her limbs bound on a dirty mattress…

  When someone rang the doorbell it tore her from the dream, which she was grateful for, yet she considered not answering. Her mom didn’t like her doing that when her or Rick weren’t there, anyway. But whoever was outside rang the bell twice more. She said, “God, chill out,” and climbed from bed, her limbs like water as she stumbled from her room.

  In the hall she told whoever rang to hold on a freaking minute.

  She figured it might be Clint, coming to make amends in hopes that he hadn’t blown his chances of winning her virginity; or she thought it might be Clint’s father who would force his way inside and make her tell him everything she knew about Jacob in hopes of finding him. She knew it wouldn’t be easy for the police to track a man who didn’t report to work, and who lived a rootless life; no phone, no credit cards, no bills. How were you supposed to find guys like that?

  But when she pulled the door open—her shoulders slumped and her face still partially numb from her arm laying against it when she’d been in bed—she looked up into the blank expression of a very, very big man. He had the build of a bodybuilder and was nearly as tall as the entryway. He wore a dark suit, a white dress shirt, a blood-red tie. His hands and face were darkly tanned, his teeth very white, yet his smile predatory.

  She closed the door a foot, and peeked through the gap. “Yes?”

  He held out an eight-by-ten photograph, waist high. He said, in a deep, deep baritone, “You seen this guy?”

  His voice had a northern accent, thick and woody, as hard and blunt as concrete. He held a photograph of Jacob and a beautiful young brunette. Nina studied it for a moment. The photograph looked genuine, not doctored. She looked back into that emotionless cinderblock face and said, “Are you with the FBI?”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “No. What about the woman? Who is she? His wife?”

  “I think you’re lying to me.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you. Go away?”

  “Tell me the truth,” he said. “When did you see him?”

  “I told you I didn’t see him, are you deaf?”

  A splotch of red blossomed at his throat.

  She thought, Stop, don’t make this guy mad or he might…

  “I’m a friend of his. If you point me in the direction of where you saw him, we can reconnect, right? He needs somebody right now. He’s in a bad way.” He watched the expression change on her face as she recalled thinking that same thing when she’d first seen Jacob.

  The man smiled and placed a hand on the edge of the door, just above her hand.

  She said, her voice shaking, “Remove your hand, right now.”

  She tried her best to stare him in the eye, but couldn’t hold his gaze for more than a few seconds.

  “Where did you see him?” He smiled, if a person could call it that, and leaned forward. “Was it around here? In the park over there? Down the street?”

  “I think you should leave,” she said, her bladder suddenly feeling very full. “I don’t know who you are but you’re not here to help anyone, and you’re not FBI.”

  “Was he around here today?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “My name?”

  “Yes,” she said, trying to push the door closed more but he held it tightly and she couldn’t budge it. “It’s impolite to talk to someone this long without introducing yourself.”

  He chuckled and said, “You got spunk, kid.”

  Then he turned away from her as Rick pulled his pickup into the driveway. It was an older model Ford with a rack for rakes, and weedeaters and backpack blowers filled the box. He got out of his truck, his skin baked red the way it always was this time of year, after toiling away in the summer sun. He tipped the baseball cap back on his head and looked at the man standing on the porch. Nina had never been happier to see her stepfather, who she’d never thought of as a bad man, just a boring one, and she tried to signal with her eyes how uncomfortable the large man was making her.

  Rick said, “Can I help you, buddy?”

  The big man came off the steps in a bound and held the photograph out. Nina turned back into the hall and grabbed the cordless phone in case she needed to dial nine-one-one, and she carried the phone outside, her thumb hovering over the buttons.

  “You seen this fella?”

  Rick looked at the photograph he held out, then back up at the stranger, at how he was dressed, at the lack of moral light in those deep-set eyes. He said, “Who’s asking?”

  “I see where she gets it,” the man said, hiking his thumb at Nina. She flinched as if he was poking at her with a knife, which he noticed, and which made him smile again.

  He turned back to Rick and stuck his hand out and said, “I’m Victor. I’m a friend of this man here in the photograph. His name’s Jacob. The woman is Santana. She died when the towers fell. She was in the top of one of them and got to ride it down to earth.” He stroked a finger over the line of the woman’s jaw in the photograph as if she meant something to him. He said, “After it happened Jacob ran away. People are worried about him.”

  “What people would that be?”

  She said, “Why do you think he’d come down here if he’s from New York?”

  “This girl is not afraid of asking questions, you know that?”

  “We can’t help you, buddy,” Rick said. “Never saw him, and like Nina said, why would he come down here?”

  “I don’t know,” Victor said, looking genuinely perplexed. Then he shrugged, bent the photograph in half and then half again and slid it inside a pocket of his jacket. “But I’ve got records showing he recently used his debit card at a convenience store not three blocks from here. I’ll be around since I think you and your little girl are bullshitting me, but for now, you all take care.”

  He walked across the road and toward the gazebo. Nina wondered if Jacob had left anything behind that he might discover. She studied his wide back and said to Rick, “I thought he was FBI or something at first.”

  He glanced across the street as Victor remounted the three gazebo steps and his form darkened in the shade beneath the canopy. He waved at them but neither Nina nor Rick waved back. Her stepdad said, “That guy isn’t any kind of law enforcement. Maybe a mob man.” He glanced at her. “Stay away from the guy he’s looking for if you see him again. We don’t want his trouble to become our trouble, you hear me? Whatever they’ve got going on is none of our business.”

  “He knew we were lying to him,” she said, afraid to finish her thought, which was… and he’s going to hang around here. And he doesn’t look like someone who handles things in a civil manner.

  “Head on i
n the house and grab me a beer.”

  “He’s watching us.”

  “If he’s hunting trouble…” he said, but didn’t finish. He was tough for your average guy, but only in the way a drunken brawler is tough. And both of them knew that as big as the man across the street was, he would probably just pull a pistol from beneath his coat and plant a bullet in Rick’s forehead if they got into a scuffle. She thought her stepfather was right. Victor was in the mafia, and as scary as it was to consider the possibility, she found it very exciting and it peaked her curiosity about Jacob all the more.

  “I think we should call the cops,” she said. “They could run his name, or something.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt. Give me the phone and go grab that beer.”

  She did both. Then she sat on the steps and waited with her stepfather until a cruiser pulled up in front of their house. The officer was a woman, blonde, petite, the pistol on her hip bigger than her hands. She looked from them to the gazebo where Victor sat. She said, “Y’all the Kunis family?”

  Rick nodded.

  She said, “That man in the park threaten, Y’all?”

  Rick said, “His presence is threatening, yes.”

  The officer looked back at the gazebo as Victor stood and moved toward the steps.

  Nina whispered, “She’s going to call for back up.”

  “Can’t say I blame her.”

  But she didn’t call for anyone. She squared her shoulders and walked across the lawn toward the gazebo, her right arm hitched a little higher than normal to remove her pistol if she needed it. She waved him down and made him come to her and then held her hand up and said, “Whoa there, big boy,” when he was ten feet from her.

  He took an additional step and was nearly within kicking distance of her.

  Nina and Rick heard her say, “What’s your business here, sir?”

  “Just enjoying the beautiful weather,” he said. “Is that against the law?”

  “Let me see your identification.” She placed her right hand on her pistol. A minute passed and she extended her left arm, and said, “Today, junior.”

  He tilted his head and squinted at her. “Are you serious?”

  “Do I look like I’m joking?”

  “I can’t tell.” He took another step closer to her.

  The cop drew her pistol as she took a step back. Her whole body grew rigid.

  “Relax, lady. Your gun goes off and you shoot an unarmed man he might sue you. Chill out. I’m not here to hurt anybody or I would have snapped your neck the moment you approached me with that attitude. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?”

  She spoke into her shoulder mike and requested another cruiser, giving his description and her location.

  He said, “I’m just looking for an old friend.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Jacob.”

  “No last name?”

  “It’s none of your business,” he said, smiling a little, his lips like putty. He licked them. “Why don’t you chill out? Take my advice. People say I give good advice.”

  “Hand me your identification, sir,” she said. “Right now.”

  Rick stood up next to Nina and drank the rest of his beer. He didn’t own a gun so he went to his truck and removed an Estwing hammer from under the driver’s seat.

  He said, “Stay here, Nina.”

  “You shouldn’t go over there,” she said. “Another car is coming.”

  Rick looked from her to the street. Another cruiser was working its way down the road, a quarter mile off, but covering ground quickly. He moved over to the mailbox and pointed across the road as it pulled up. A tall, thick cop with dishwater blonde hair cropped close to his head got out. He waved at Nina and put on his sunglasses even though it was only a half hour until dusk. Nina said, “You better get over there, Mr. Friendly.”

  She nodded toward the gazebo. Friendly told Rick to stay where he was.

  They heard him say, as he drew nearer the female officer and Victor, “My, you’re a big sonofabitch, aren’t you?”

  Victor said, “I don’t understand why you’re harassing me.”

  “Because you don’t do anything you’re told,” the female officer said.

  Friendly said, “He give you his identification?”

  “No.”

  Friendly said, “Hand it over, boy.”

  “Boy?”

  “You heard me, hand it over.”

  Victor smiled but didn’t move.

  Nina held her breath.

  Rick’s fingers tightened around the hammer. He said, “Go inside the house.”

  Nina shook her head. He’d have to carry her into the house to make her move.

  Across the road, Friendly stepped cautiously up to Victor. Friendly was as tall and toned, but he appeared scrawny in the width and thickness of his shoulders and chest in contrast to Victor. Friendly said, “Put your hands on the gazebo rail there.”

  “No.”

  The female cop spoke quietly into her shoulder mike. Victor looked over Officer Friendly’s shoulder and said, “She calling more of you guys? For what?”

  “We don’t want to hurt you.”

  “That’s real considerate of you.”

  “But I am not telling you again. Either produce some identification or you’re taking a ride with us until we figure out who you are and what you’re doing here. You take the ride and you might be spending the night before we remember to run your name.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. You can’t harass someone like this. Is it because I’m big, or because I’m ugly? Or is it because you folks down here don’t like people asking questions?”

  “Well,” Friendly said, drawing his nightstick.

  “Don’t touch me,” Victor warned him. “You don’t have any right to, and you can’t blame me if I defend myself.”

  “You resist and she’ll shoot you,” Friendly said, tapping the nightstick off his thigh. “Turn around, be a good boy, and this will all be over quick.”

  He poked the nightstick into Victor’s chest, but the big man side stepped, turned his body so the baton slid across the thick plate of muscle over his sternum. He chopped Friendly in the throat with his left hand and jerked the nightstick away from him as he choked and fell.

  The female officer was in the process of raising her pistol when Victor whipped the nightstick backhanded, the sound like a stick snapping loud in the air as it hit her in the teeth.

  She dropped her pistol and stumbled back, pressing her wrist to her face, her uniform’s sleeve quickly saturated with blood. She fell to one knee, shaking her head, trying to get her bearings.

  Victor snatched Friendly’s pistol from his holster and stuck it into his front pocket, and then grabbed the female officer’s automatic from the grass and put that inside his coat. He grabbed the woman by her ankle and drug her over to where Friendly was still gagging, pulled the cuffs from her belt and latched their left wrists together so once they were able to stand they’d be facing opposite directions.

  He pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket, flicked his wrist to open it, and wiped down the handcuff, then the baton, and holding the baton in the fabric threw it off into the shrubs next to the gazebo’s steps.

  He said to both of them, “Don’t bully people, all right? It’s not nice.”

  He squinted as he looked at the sun setting, and then looked back toward the house. He waved again to Nina and Rick, towering over the two wounded officers, and called out, “I didn’t ask them to provoke me, you two saw that. Back me up when they ask you for a statement.”

  Then he walked across the park and disappeared between two houses just as dusk settled in and sirens sounded in the distance.

  Rick said, “Shit.”

  Nina said softly, “No kidding.”

  3

  Richard wasn’t a drinking man and he’d never tried any drugs, but he wished he had something to take the edge off. He fretted in the garage but he could hear Loretta tog
gle from weeping to talking on the phone for the last two hours. He didn’t want to think about where Robin might be or what might be happening to her. But he wasn’t a fool, and he wasn’t naïve. And he knew that his wife wasn’t either, although she was reaching everyone she could through their landline in search of encouragement that their baby would be okay and returned to them whole and unblemished.

  He couldn’t think about it too deeply or his imagination would run away with him and he’d remember things he’d heard, stories, movies, crime television shows like the one by John Walsh, and then he’d be crying too. In anger. In fear. In struggling with the fact that all it took was less than one minute for their lives to turn upside down and inside out.

  He thought he might need to call a few of his closest friends back. When they’d heard the news they’d tried to reach him but he hadn’t felt ready to talk to anyone, not even Loretta, it was shock he told himself, the nightmare come true of holding your little girl in your arms and watching her laugh one moment and then having no idea who took her, or to where, or if you’d ever get her back.

  But if he called Ted and Ramsey, they’d put everything aside to help him search the streets for any sign of her, they’d knock on every door and ask questions, and maybe they’d do something the cops couldn’t do because they were limited by their work hours and their policies and their investment in finding Robin was nowhere as great. He had seen the looks on some of their faces and he hadn’t been able to tell Loretta what it’d felt like, seeing these uniformed men stare at you with pity because they know that everything from this moment forward was probably only wishful thinking. He couldn’t accept that so quickly. But he knew he’d have to in time, a week, a month, a year from now, when Robin’s room was unlived in for all those days.

  When he listened to his wife on the phone he could almost hear their daughter calling for her attention in the kitchen, wanting to show Loretta something she’d drawn in her bedroom. Their daughter had talent.

  He had a secret passion of his own that only his wife and a couple of his closest friends knew about. His daughter had loved listening to him play his guitar, and he’d done it for her nearly every day, sometimes even when he was so beat he barely had the energy to take a shower or watch television. So he sat out there with his Gibson Songbird and plucked melodies that hung in the air, which shimmered in front of him through his tears, and he hummed along, tenderly, quietly, thinking that if he did it with enough soul Robin might hear him and come home.