ANGEL ™: avatar

by John Passarella

  Carelessly weaving his way between tables, Dink scooped another worm out of the white take-out carton and dropped it down among his tentacles. When he reached the table beside the pinball machine, he plopped down, still not taking his eyes off the worms in his carton. He pulled back the hood of his cloak, revealing wide, floppy gray ears. As Doyle and Angel took seats on either side of him, Dink said, “Whatcha get me, Doyle? Looks like a half dozen.”

  “Special of the day,” Doyle said. “Buy six, get one free.”

  “You’re a prince,” Dink said, plucking another worm out of the carton. He looked at Angel with the worm twined between his fingers. “I’d share, but live worms seem to be an acquired taste.”

  “Definitely,” Angel said. A taste I have no intention of acquiring.

  “Angel’s got some pictures for you to look at, Dink.”

  “First my drink,” Dink said. “A vodka and grape juice. Goes great with worms.”

  “And me without a clue,” Doyle said, shaking his head.

  While Doyle went for the drink, Angel took a manila envelope out of his inside coat pocket and slid out the picture of the murder victim. He placed it on the table. “What can you tell me about this?”

  Before he examined the photo, Dink chomped the worm in half. He waved the other half over the picture of the shed human skin, dribbling worm guts on it. “Ooh, that’s totally disgusting.”

  Angel rolled his eyes. I couldn’t agree more.

  Doyle returned to his seat with a large glass. “One vodka grape.”

  Dink dipped his mouth tentacles into the glass and produced a horrendous slurping noise while emptying half the glass. Most of the bar’s patrons looked his way before shaking their heads.

  “Enough stalling, Dink,” Doyle whispered irritably.

  “Okay, okay,” Dink said. “Let’s have another look.” He flicked away the worm guts and shook his head. He let out a heavy sigh, fluttering all his mouth tentacles at once. He glanced from Doyle to Angel. “Is this what I think it is? An empty human skin?” Angel nodded. “I thought those stories were just rumors,” Dink explained. “If you want me to give this up, I’ll need some walking-around money. Fifty bucks. No less.”

  “Angel saved your sorry hide,” Doyle said. “We fill your belly with worms and this is the thanks we get?”

  “Fifty, or I ain’t saying a word.”

  “Twenty,” Angel said in a voice that brooked no compromise.

  Dink gulped. “Twenty works.”

  “Let’s have it,” Angel said.

  “I’ll tell you,” Dink replied. “But you ain’t gonna like it.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Willem 94 drove the panel truck the Vishrak cult rented. Vincent 74 sat in the middle. And the Omni leaned against the passenger-side door, hands steepled, chanting softly, the whites of his eyes showing. The sorcerer was employing magic to locate the demon named Yunk’sh, while the rest of the cult waited in the back of the truck, sitting in the darkness on three long wooden picnic benches bolted to a slab of plywood.

  Willem was afraid to ask Vincent how the Omni’s magic worked, especially after the Albert 97 incident. Vincent had taken Albert’s own baseball bat and smashed his skull with it. Then he’d ordered several cult members to dump the body into the church basement. At least Albert, the poor bastard, was dead before the rats started gnawing on him. “Let this be a lesson,” Vincent had told them afterward. “We must avoid all distractions and stay focused on binding Yunk’sh.”

  As the Omni had explained to them before they piled into the truck, “The demon must take physical form, substance borrowed from his human servant, to absorb each victim. Now that we have completed the naming ritual, I will be able to sense his presence during these manifestations.”

  So they cruised through the streets of L.A. waiting for some sign of the demon. And Willem, as instructed, was careful to obey all traffic laws.

  The Twilight Club in Culver City was a split-level nightclub with a large bar island surrounded by booths on the lower level and a parquet dance floor ringed by small round tables on the upper level. An exterior wooden staircase led up to a U-shaped rooftop deck. Most of the Twilight Club’s business came from the twenty-something, after work, happy hour crowd, who enjoyed the mix of dancing, drinking, and socializing. In the last seven years, the club had changed ownership three times and its name five times, trying to find just the right combination of music, mood, and menu to make it successful.

  To escape the throbbing pulse of the dance music inside the club, Hank Stepanski—one of three regular Twilight Club bartenders and just about the last person to see Mike McBain, victim number six, alive—took a cigarette break and led Angel outside. They stood out of the way, under the exterior staircase. Hank lit an unfiltered cigarette, took a long drag, and shook his head. “The weirdest thing, Mr. Angel,” he said as he exhaled. Angel had tried to get the bartender to call him Angel, but it hadn’t stuck. “I could’ve sworn it was Suzette with him.”

  “Suzette?”

  “I see a helluva lot of faces come through here,” he said. “Mostly they blur together. But the regulars and the big tippers start to stand out.”

  “Which was Suzette?”

  “A knockout,” Hank said, flashing a wolfish grin. “A regular knockout.” He chuckled at his pun. “Always dressed to kill. Slinky, flashing a lot of skin. Real looker. Comes in on Friday and Saturday nights hoping to be discovered. See, the Sony lot ain’t too far from here. She probably figured the star makers might drift this way after hours.”

  “What was unusual about her that night? McBain not her type?”

  “He was waiting for her at the bar,” Hank replied. He’d worked his cigarette about halfway down, and Angel guessed that when the cigarette was done, the interview would be over. “Seemed to recognize each other.”

  “She normally came in alone?”

  “Always,” Hank said. “And usually danced by herself too, with this dreamy look on her face. Sometimes you just had to stare. Though I don’t think she minded. That was probably the whole idea of the one-woman shows. Oh, she’d talk to people casually, trying to get a read on the room, scoping for players. But this was different, like she had an appointment to meet this guy.”

  “Maybe she thought he was a player,” Angel suggested.

  Hank took another drag. “Could be. But it turns out, from what I read in the paper, the poor jerk was just a working stiff.”

  “What happened after she met McBain?”

  Hank examined his cigarette. “Butch is gonna kill me if I don’t get in there pronto.”

  “Just a few more minutes.”

  Hank nodded. “Sure. But I better get to the weird stuff. I know Suzette. Not personally, but to see her, right? Well, here she sits down right in front of me at the bar and I don’t know it’s her.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  Hank paused as two boisterous couples thundered up the stairs overhead. “Because it don’t make sense, at least not to me. She’s halfway done with her margarita—a drink Suzette never orders, mind you—and I nearly drop the mug I’m wiping. Because it’s Suzette. Bang! Like she appeared right in front of me. The clothes are a bit tame by Suzette’s standards, but how could I miss her right there? Before I know it, she and McBain walk out arm in arm.”

  “Were you busy that night?”

  “The usual.” He flashed his easy grin again. “You gotta understand, Mr. Angel, this lady is a featured attraction in many of my best recurring dreams. You want weirder? Five minutes after she walks out with this McBain guy, she walks back in again.”

  “She dumped him?”

  “In five minutes?”

  “It’s been known to happen.”

  “Well, in five minutes she not only dumped a guy, she also managed to change her outfit. She comes in wearing this white body stocking thing with strategic peepholes all over. Now that was a Suzette-type outfit.” Hank dropped the cigarette butt and ground it out with his
boot heel. “First thing, she comes up to me, leans over the bar, and says, ‘Hank, I need a drink to loosen up.’ So I ask her if she wants another margarita. Guess what? Suzette hasn’t the first clue what I’m talking about. Thinks I’m nuts. Well, I’ll tell you what, Mr. Angel, maybe I am nuts at that.”

  According to the hostess at the Captain’s Table, Jill Gonczi’s date was the hot male stripper who had danced at her best friend’s bachelorette party the previous weekend. “It was either him or a dead ringer,” the hostess told Angel. “His name was Aaron. Do you think they use their real names?” She went on to explain that she’d told the police the same information, along with the name of the stripper’s employer, Steel Studs of America. Sounded like a union slogan.

  Janis Howe, the twenty-two-year-old waitress who had served drinks to Jill and her date, had a different story. As she talked to Angel in the employee lounge, she had the nervous habit of stroking her blond ponytail. She wore black pants and a white cotton blouse with narrow red stripes. The stripes were actually embroidered lobsters, crabs, and fish in a repeating pattern. “He was my boyfriend.”

  “Your boyfriend?”

  “Brian, my ex-boyfriend,” she elaborated with a slightly embarrassed smile. She spun a little silver ring on her right ring finger. “He gave me this ring. I still haven’t taken it off. He never asked for it back, so . . .” She shrugged. “We both go to UCLA, so I still see him around sometimes. When I walked up to the table, I thought for sure it was him. I even dropped the menus on the floor.”

  “You recognized him, but he didn’t recognize you?”

  “He smiled, but it was a polite smile, like I was a complete stranger. I really thought he was pretending not to know me. They left money for the drinks, but walked out without ordering.” She shrugged. “Guess I made him uncomfortable.”

  “You’re sure it was him?”

  “At the time, I really thought so,” Janis said. “Now . . . I don’t know. He seemed not to know me at all. And Brian would never kill anyone.”

  “But you gave his name to the police?”

  She looked down for a moment, then back up at Angel. “I just told them he looked like my boyfriend.” She rolled her eyes at her mistake. “I mean ex-boyfriend.”

  “Did the police question him?”

  She nodded. “He was in a stage production at the college that night. Lots of witnesses. Guess it was just one of those freaky coincidences.”

  “I don’t suppose your ex ever worked for Steel Studs of America?”

  Janis laughed. “You’ve been talking to Nancy, the hostess.” Angel nodded. “She described that stripper guy to me—Aaron?—and he looks nothing like Brian. Believe me, my Brian is a sweet, average guy. But nobody would mistake him for a Chippendale.”

  Angel had to be sure. “Sounds like you miss him.”

  She nodded briskly, dabbed at a tear in the corner of her eye. “Little bit.” Her voice was tight with emotion. “He’s a senior, already has a job lined up back home in Philadelphia, and doesn’t want to be involved in a long-distance relationship. Said it was better to break up now, before graduation. Easier on both of us, he said.”

  Angel squeezed her hand and thanked her for talking to him.

  Cordelia had called for reinforcements. The thousand-page books promising to make Web design easy had only made it easier for her to exhaust her supply of extra-strength Excedrin. The whole Web design project was turning out to be more involved than the do-it-yourself guides had led her to believe. Designing a site that would actually dazzle people and lead them to Angel’s office involved a soup-to-nuts approach. She could write the text, but creating graphics and programming were the type of Willow Rosenberg zones into which Cordelia dared not tread. Instead she called Willow for advice and got the names of some local sites offering Web design services at a price Angel Investigations could afford. Cheap.

  When Arnold Pipich agreed to do the work with video games as compensation, Cordelia decided she’d found her man—except that her man turned out to be fifteen years old and video games turned out to be more expensive than she had imagined.

  “Fifty, sixty dollars apiece, easy,” Doyle had informed her.

  “Fifty dollars is a lot of quarters,” Cordelia said. “I guess Visa and MasterCard are big at the arcades now.”

  “You buy the games for your home,” Doyle had explained. “Play them on a TV.”

  Cordelia had stared at him. “Why?”

  “It’s supposed to be fun.”

  Now Arnold Pipich was standing beside her chair, leaning over her desk, staring at her work in progress on the computer monitor. He was pudgy, wearing a green shirt printed with a circuit board pattern over baggy jeans. His dark hair looked as if it hadn’t been washed or combed in at least a week, and he wore eyeglasses with distressingly thick lenses. “Kinda pathetic,” he commented.

  “That’s why you’re here, kid,” Cordelia replied angrily. “The books lie. The wizards suck big-time.”

  “I’ll start from scratch. Should be a piece of cake.”

  “Really?” Cordelia asked, considering. “So that would make it a one-video-game piece of cake?”

  “I’m thinking three.”

  “Two,” Cordelia countered. “And that’s final.”

  Behind the thick glasses, one of Arnold’s highly magnified eyes winked suggestively. “Maybe we could work something out with just two games.”

  “Arnold! That’s my knee, not the keyboard!” She slapped his hand away from her bare knee, wishing she’d worn jeans to work.

  “How about this? I give you a killer site, state-of-the-art scripting and graphics and all I ask in return is one game and a date . . . someplace where my friends can see us.”

  “Sorry, kid. Geek chic doesn’t work on me.”

  “Ouch,” Arnold said. “Two games it is.”

  Cordelia looked up as Doyle stepped into the reception area. “Doyle, this is Arnold. He’ll be designing our Web site. As soon as he stops hitting on me.”

  “Am I interrupting something?” Doyle asked.

  “Just a case of juvenile sexual harassment.”

  “Keep your hands off the lad, Cordelia,” Doyle joked. “Try to fondle someone closer to your own age. Like me, for instance.” When Cordelia refused to take the bait, Doyle said, “So we’re on the video-game payment plan, then. So much for your fancy wizards.”

  “Well, he’s a wizard or a hacker or something. Aren’t you, Arnold?”

  “I’m whatever you need, baby.”

  “Get over yourself, hacker boy,” Cordelia said. She handed him a ballpoint pen and a steno pad. “Take notes so you get this right the first time.”

  “You might want to wrap this up, Cordelia,” Doyle said. “Angel’s coming.”

  Before she could reply, Angel stepped through the door. He frowned. “Who’s this?”

  “This is Arnold,” Cordelia answered.

  “Arnold would be . . . a client?”

  “A contractor.”

  “Little young for a contractor.”

  “Apparently younger is better,” Doyle observed.

  “For computers,” Cordelia amended. “He’s helping with our computer.”

  “It’s broken?”

  “Not exactly,” Cordelia said, grimacing. She sighed. “Okay, I decided we need a Web page.”

  “We do?”

  Cordelia explained her idea of attracting business over the Internet through a Web presence. “And I thought we could have a subscription for information on that special interest database stuff we collect.”

  Angel shook his head. “I don’t know about this, Cordelia.”

  “Just give me a chance,” Cordelia said quickly, before the ax could fall on her project. “One month. Once you see all the clients coming through that door, you’ll want to give me a big fat raise.”

  “Make it two weeks.”

  “You won’t regret it,” she replied, flashing a broad smile.

  Angel was begi
nning to regret it already. “Cordelia, you need to hear this. Will you be long with Arnold here?”

  “Grab a coffee,” Cordelia said. “Give me two minutes.”

  Five minutes later, Cordelia joined Doyle in Angel’s office. She sat down beside Doyle and asked, “So this Dink guy panned out?”

  “Worth every worm,” Doyle said.

  Angel began. “We believe the murders are the work of a Vishrak demon with the power to use glamour to seduce its prey.”

  “That’s not what you told Kate,” Cordelia said.

  Angel cleared his throat. “Kate’s taking the cult angle.”

  “Cult?” Cordelia said, looking between them.

  “There’s a cult all right,” Doyle explained. “But that comes later.”

  “So how is this demon glamorous? Usually they’re just icky.”

  Doyle frowned. “The glamour is the demon’s ability to make you see what you want to see.”

  “An illusion?”

  “More than that,” Angel said. “This is real magic, not simply sleight of hand. Think of it as . . . as empathic pheromones.”

  “Pheromones?” Cordelia asked. “Flashback to biology class. You mean chemicals? Sexual attractants? Drugs?”

  Doyle answered. “Basically, but with supernatural magic instead of drugs. We’re talkin’ about pure evil here.”

  Angel continued. “The victims and, more recently, the eyewitnesses are seeing someone who is attractive to them. And the effect seems to be getting stronger. I talked to the bartender who last saw Mike McBain, victim number six.” Angel explained how the bartender saw the woman with McBain transform almost before his eyes. “But the witnesses who last saw Jill Gonczi never talked about a gradual or sudden change. They immediately saw someone they were attracted to or had recently fantasized about. That means the demon’s full powers are almost restored. It has nearly finished its cycle.”

  “Cycle?” Cordelia asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “The demon was improperly slain,” Doyle explained.

  “Improperly slain? Isn’t that like being a little bit pregnant?”