The Black Angel

by John Connolly

  Larry Crane found some long matches in a drawer, and lit his cigarette. He was watching the empty birdbath in the backyard when he heard the sound of footsteps descending the stairs.

  “In here,” he called.

  Hall came into the kitchen.

  “I don’t remember inviting you inside,” he said.

  “Needed a light for my smoke,” said Crane. “You got that paper?”

  “No,” said Hall.

  “You listen here,” said Crane, then stopped as Hall stepped toward him. Now the two old men were face-to-face, Crane with his back against the sink, Hall before him.

  “No,” said Hall. “You listen. I’m sick of you. You’ve been like a bad debt my whole life, a bad debt that I can never pay off. It ends here, today.”

  Crane blew a stream of smoke into Hall’s face.

  “You’re forgettin somethin, boy. I know what you did back there outside that church. I saw you do it. I go down, and I’ll take you with me, you mark me.”

  He leaned in close to Hall. His breath smelled foul as he spoke: “It’s over when I say it’s over.”

  Crane’s eyes suddenly bulged in their sockets. His mouth opened in a great oval of shock, the last of the cigarette smoke shooting forth through the gap, accompanied by a spray of spittle that struck Hall on the side of the face. Hall’s left hand extended in a familiar movement, closing Crane’s mouth, while his right forced the blade of the SS dagger up under Crane’s breastbone.

  Hall knew what he was doing. After all, he’d done it before. Larry Crane’s body sagged against him, and he smelled the old man’s innards as he lost control of himself.

  “Say it, Larry,” whispered Hall. “Say it’s over now.”

  There was blood, but less than Hall had expected. It didn’t take him long to clean it up. He drove the Volvo around the back of his house, then wrapped Crane’s body in plastic sheeting from the garage, left over from the last round of renovations on the house. When he was certain that Crane was wrapped up tight, he placed him, with a little trouble, in the trunk of the car, then went for a ride into the swamps.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Tucson airport was undergoing renovation, and a temporary tunnel led from the baggage claim to the car rental counters. The two men were given a Camry, which caused the smaller of the pair to complain bitterly as they made their way into the garage.

  “Maybe if you lost some of that weight off your ass, then you wouldn’t find it so damn pokey,” said Louis. “I got a foot on you, and I can fit into a Camry.”

  Angel stopped.

  “You think I’m fat?”

  “Gettin there.”

  “You never said nothing about it before.”

  “The hell you mean, I never said nothing? I been telling you ever since I met you that your problem is you got a sweet tooth. You need to go on that Atkins shit.”

  “I’d starve.”

  “I think you are missing the point. Folks in Africa starve. You go on a diet, you be like a squirrel. You just need to nap, let your body burn off what’s already there.”

  Angel tried to give the flesh on his waist a discreet squeeze.

  “How much can I squeeze and still be healthy?”

  “They say an inch, like on the TV.”

  Angel looked at what he had clenched in his hand.

  “Is that across, or up?”

  “Man, you even have to ask and you in trouble.”

  For the first time in many days, Angel allowed himself a smile, albeit a small one, and very short-lived. Since Martha’s appearance at the house, Louis had barely eaten or slept. Angel would awake in the darkness to find their shared bed empty, the pillows and sheets long cold on his partner’s side. On the first night, when they had brought Martha back to the city and transferred her to her new lodgings, he had padded softly to the bedroom door and watched in silence as Louis sat at a window, staring out over the city, scrutinizing every passing face in the hope that he might find Alice’s among them. Guilt emanated from his pores, so that the room seemed almost to smell of something bitter and old. Angel knew all about Alice. He had accompanied his partner on his searches for her, initially along Eighth Avenue, when they first learned that she had arrived in the city, and later at the Point, when Giuliani’s reforms really started to bite and Vice Enforcement began hitting the streets of Manhattan on a regular basis, NYPD “ghosts” mingling with the crowds below Forty-fourth, and monitoring teams waiting to pounce from unmarked vans. The Point was a little easier in the beginning: out of sight, out of mind, that was the Giuliani mantra. Once the tourists and conventioneers in Manhattan weren’t tripping over too many teenage hookers if they accidentally—or purposely—strayed from Times Square, then everything was better than it was before. Over at Hunts Point, the Ninetieth Precinct only had the manpower to operate a ten-person special operation maybe once a month, usually targeted at the men who patronized and involving just one undercover female officer. True, there were occasional sweeps, but those were relatively infrequent in the beginning until “zero tolerance” began to hit hard, the cops creating a virtual ticker-tape parade of summonses, which almost inevitably led to arrests, since the homeless and drug-addicted who formed the bulk of the city’s street prostitutes could not afford to pay their fines, and that was a ninety-day stint in Rikers right there. The almost continual harassment of the prostitutes by the cops forced the women to “stagger” their beats in order to avoid being seen in the same spot two nights running. It also forced them to frequent increasingly isolated places with the johns, which left them open to rape, abduction, and murder.

  It was into this sucking hole that Alice was descending, and their interventions counted for nothing. In fact, Angel could see that the woman sometimes seemed almost to take a strange pleasure in taunting Louis with her immersion in the life, even as it inexorably led to her degradation and, ultimately, to her death. In the end, all Louis could do was make sure that whatever pimp was feeding off her knew the consequences if anything happened to her, and paid her fines to ensure that she didn’t do jail time. Finally, he could no longer bring himself to witness her decay, and it was perhaps unsurprising that she slipped through the net when Free Billy died, and came instead under the control of G-Mack.

  And so Angel watched him that first night, not speaking for some time, until at last he said: “You tried.”

  “Not hard enough.”

  “She may still be out there, somewhere.”

  Louis gave a barely perceptible shake of his head.

  “No. She’s gone. I can feel it.”

  “Listen to—”

  “Go back to bed.”

  And he did, because there was nothing more that could be said. There was no point in trying to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, that people made their own choices, that you couldn’t save someone who didn’t want to be saved, didn’t matter how hard you tried. Louis would not, or could not, believe those things. This was his guilt, and Alice’s path was not entirely of her own choosing. The actions of others had set her upon it, and his were among them.

  But there was more that Angel could not have guessed at, small, private moments between Louis and Alice that perhaps only Martha might have understood, for they found an echo in the phone calls and the occasional cards that she herself received. Louis could remember Alice as a child, how she would play at his feet or fall asleep curled up beside him, bathed in the glow of their first TV. She cried when he left home, although she was barely old enough to comprehend what was happening, and in the years that followed, as his visits grew fewer and fewer, she was always the first to greet him. Slowly, she recognized the changes that were coming over him, as the boy who had killed her father, believing him guilty of the murder of his own mother, matured into a man capable of taking the lives of others without exploring questions of innocence or guilt. Alice could not have put a name to these changes, or have precisely explained the nature of Louis’s ongoing metamorphosis, but the coldness that was spread
ing through him touched something inside of her, and half-formed suspicions and fears about her father’s death were given body and substance. Louis saw what was happening, and determined to put some distance between himself and his family, a decision made easier by the nature of his business and his reluctance to put those whom he loved at risk of reprisal. All of these tensions came to a head on the day that Louis left his childhood home for the last time, when Alice came to him as he sat in the shade of a cottonwood tree, the sun slowly setting behind him, his shadow spreading like dark blood across the short grass. By then, she was approaching her teenage years, although she looked older than she was, and her body was maturing more quickly than the bodies of her peers.

  “Momma says you’re leaving today,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “The way she said it, it’s like you ain’t ever coming back.”

  “Things change. People change. This ain’t no place for me now.”

  She pursed her lips, then raised her hand to her brow, shielding her eyes as she stared into the redness of the sun.

  “I seen the way people look at you.”

  “What way is that?”

  “Like they’s scared of you. Even Momma, she looks like that, sometimes.”

  “She’s got no call to be scared of me. You neither.”

  “Why are they scared?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I heard stories.”

  Louis stood and tried to pass her by, but she blocked his way, her hands splayed against his midriff.

  “No,” she said. “You tell me. You tell me that the stories ain’t true.”

  “I got no time for stories.”

  He gripped her wrists and turned her, slipping by her and heading toward the house.

  “They say my daddy was a bad man. They say he got what he deserved.”

  She was shouting now. He heard her running after him, but he did not look back.

  “They say you know what happened to him. Tell me! Tell me!”

  And she struck him from behind with such force that he stumbled and fell to his knees. He tried to rise, and she slapped him. He saw that she was weeping.

  “Tell me,” she said again, but this time her voice was soft, barely a whisper. “Tell me that it isn’t true.”

  But he could not answer her, and he walked away and left them all. Only once, in the years of her descent, did Alice again bring up the subject of her father. It was fourteen months before her disappearance, when Louis still believed that she might yet be saved. She called him from the private clinic in Phoenicia, in the midst of the Catskills, and he drove up to see her that afternoon. He had placed her there after Jackie O called him and told him that Alice was with him, that a john had hurt her badly, and she had nearly overdosed in an effort to dull the pain. She was bruised and bleeding, her eyes slivers of white beneath heavy lids, her mouth agape. Louis took her to Phoenicia the following morning, once she was straight enough to understand what was happening. The beating had shocked her, and she appeared more willing than ever before to consider intervention. She spent six weeks isolated in Phoenicia, then the call came.

  Louis found her in the main garden, sitting on a stone bench. She had lost a little weight, and looked tired and drawn, but there was a new light in her eyes, a tiny, flickering thing that he had not seen in a long time. The slightest wind could blow it out, but it was there, for the moment. They walked together, the chill mountain air making her shiver slightly even though she was wearing a thick padded jacket. He offered her his coat, and she took it, wrapping it around her like a blanket.

  “I drew a picture for you,” she said, after they had made a circuit of the grounds, talking of the clinic and the other patients she had encountered.

  “I didn’t know you liked to draw,” said Louis.

  “I never had the chance before. They told me it might help me. A lady comes in every day for an hour, more if she thinks you’re making progress, and she can spare the time. She says I have talent, but I don’t believe so.”

  She reached into the pocket of her jacket and withdrew a sheet of white paper, folded to a quarter of its size. He opened it.

  “It’s our house,” she said, as though fearful that her work was too poor to enable him to guess its subject matter.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said, and it was. She had depicted the house as though seen through a mist, using chalks to dull the lines. A faint, warm light shone through the windows, and the door was slightly ajar. The foxgloves and dayflowers in the garden were smudges of pink and blue, the trilliums tiny stars of green and red. The forest beyond was a wash of tall brown trunks, like the masts of ships descending into a sea of green ferns.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “I called Momma,” she said. “They said it was okay to call people, now that I’d been here for a time. I told her I was doing fine, but that ain’t true. It’s hard, you know?”

  She examined his face, her lips slightly pursed, and he was suddenly reminded of the girl who had confronted him beneath the cottonwood.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. I think maybe whatever you did, before I was born, you did out of love.”

  “I’m sorry too,” he replied.

  She smiled, and for the first time since she was a young girl, she kissed him on the cheek.

  “Good-bye,” she said. She began to shrug off his coat, but he stopped her.

  “You keep it,” he said. “It’s cold up here.”

  She drew the coat around her, then headed back into the clinic. He saw an orderly search the coat for contraband, then return it to her. She looked back at him, waved, then was gone.

  He did not know what happened subsequently. There were rumors of an argument with a fellow patient, and a painful, troubled session with one of the resident therapists. Whatever occurred, the next call he received from Phoenicia was to tell him that Alice was gone. He searched for her on the streets, but when she emerged after three weeks from whatever dark corner she had been inhabiting, that tiny light had been extinguished forever, and all he had left was a picture of a house that appeared to be fading even as he looked at it, and the memory of a last kiss from one who was, in her way, bonded more closely to him than any other in this world.

  Now, for the first time since Martha’s appearance and the discovery of the remains in Williamsburg, Louis seemed energized. Angel knew what it meant. Someone was about to suffer for what had been done to Alice, and Angel didn’t care once it brought his partner some release.

  They arrived at their rental.

  “I hate these cars,” said Angel.

  “Yeah, so you said already.”

  “I’m just offended that she’d even think we looked like the kind of guys who’d drive a Camry.”

  They placed their bags on the ground and watched as a man in rental livery approached them. He had a small titanium case in his hand.

  “You forgot one of your bags,” he said.

  “Thanks,” said Louis.

  “No problem. Car okay?”

  “My friend here doesn’t like it.”

  The guy knelt, removed a penknife from his pocket, and carefully inserted the blade into the right front tire. He twisted the knife, removed it, and watched with satisfaction as the tire started to deflate.

  “So go get something else,” he said, then walked out of the garage and into a waiting white SUV, which immediately drove away.

  “I guess he doesn’t really work for a rental company,” said Angel.

  “You should be a detective.”

  “Doesn’t pay enough. I’ll go get us a decent car.”

  Angel returned minutes later with the key to a red Mercury. Louis took the baggage and walked to the car, then popped the trunk. He glanced around before opening the titanium case. Two Glock nines were revealed, alongside eight spare clips bound with rubber bands into four sets of two. They wouldn’t need any more than that, unless they decided to declare war on Mexico. He slipped the guns i
nto the outer pockets of his coat and added the clips, then closed the trunk. He got in the car and found “Shiver” playing on an indie station. Louis liked Howe Gelb. It was good to support the local boys. He passed one of the Glocks and two of the spare clips to Angel. Both men checked the guns, then, once they were satisfied, put them away.

  “You know where we’re going?” said Angel.

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Great. I hate reading maps.”

  He reached for the radio dial.

  “Don’t touch that dial, man, I’m warning you.”

  “Boring.”

  “Leave it.”

  Angel sighed. They emerged from the gloom of the garage into the greater darkness outside. The sky was dusted with stars, and a little cool desert air flowed through the vents, refreshing the men.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Angel.

  “I guess.”

  The smaller man took in the vista for a few seconds more, then said: “You think we could stop for doughnuts?”

  It was late, and I was back at Cortlandt Alley, the taste of the Thai food still lingering in my mouth. I could hear laughter over on Lafayette as people smoked and flirted outside one of the local bars. The window of Ancient & Classic Inc. was illuminated, the men inside carefully positioning a new delivery of furniture and ornaments.

  A sign warned of a hollow sidewalk, and I thought that I could almost hear my footsteps echoing through the layers beneath my feet.

  I made my way to Neddo’s doorway. This time, he didn’t bother with the chain once I’d told him who I was. He led me into the same back office and offered me some tea.