If Angels Fall

by Rick Mofina

  Pender double-parked his cruiser on University at a sliver of a store front called Dempsey’s Hobby & Crafts. His head came within inches of the transom when he and Reed entered. The bald, potbellied, old man who ran the place was on the telephone.

  “Yeah, Saturday’s good. Sure--” he noticed Pender and Reed. “I told you, it’s fine with me...yes...listen, Burt, I gotta go...Yes, it’s good. Burt, I gotta go now. I’ll call ya later.”

  He hung up and spread his hands over the glass countertop in a bartender’s what’ll-it-be? fashion. He peered over his bifocals with the unpracticed seriousness of a shopkeeper unaccustomed to adult visitors, nodding to Pender because the shop was on his beat.

  “Hello, Jim. How are things in local law enforcement?”

  “George,” Pender said, “I need your help.”

  George Dempsey’s eyes shot to Reed, then to Pender.

  “This about that gang shooting in Oakland?”

  “’Fraid not.” Pender leaned on the counter and into Dempsey’s personal space. “This is Mr. Tom Reed. He’s looking for his son, Zachary.” Pender studied Dempsey’s face. “He may have come in here within the last ninety minutes. Nine years old and how tall, Tom?”

  Reed held a hand to his chest.

  Pender continued. “That tall, blond hair, new sneakers, school backpack, and interested in model ships.”

  Dempsey tugged thoughtfully at his fluffy sideburns. “Ships? Sure, was a kid like that in here a while ago.”

  “How long!” Reed stepped to the counter. Pender raised his big hand to warmly caution him.

  “How long, George?” Pender repeated, softer.

  Dempsey twisted his sideburns before guessing. “Hour?”

  “An hour?”

  “Yes, then he left with that other cop.”

  “What?” Reed said. “They found him!”

  “What other cop, George?” Pender took out his notebook, glancing at his watch. “Think.”

  “He was plainclothes, uh, special state investigator, white guy, six foot.”

  “He definitely said special state investigator? You sure?”

  “Absolutely.” Dempsey scratched his chin. “Flashed his badge, name was Lamer? Lampson? No--Lamont, Randall Lamont.”

  “He left with the boy?”

  Dempsey nodded.

  “Which way?”

  “Well, I didn’t see. Say, what’s this about?”

  “Tell me exactly how it happened.”

  “Not much to tell. Kid walks in, goes to the shelf there all doe-eyed over the Kitty Hawk, then this Lamont comes in a few minutes later asking--yeah just like you--asking if I’d seen a kid. Then he goes to him, they have a little chat, then leave together.”

  “What was the boy’s demeanor?”

  Dempsey blinked and looked at the ceiling. “Scared, like he just got some bad news.”

  Reed felt the first stirrings in his gut. His worry about Zach’s running off was about to be swallowed by a greater terror.

  Pender scanned the shop. “George, you ever do anything about your shoplifting problem, like I told you?”

  “I did. I got security video installed a couple months ago. It works just fine and--I see what you’re askin’.”

  “Let’s run that tape, George.”

  Dempsey hoisted a small black-and-white video monitor to the counter, angling it so Pender and Reed could see.

  “I was plagued by little thieves until I got this.” Dempsey grunted, squatting to operate the video controls from a low shelf behind the counter. A montage of ball-capped boys coming, going, and buying things, swam in super-fast motion on the monitor. “Glue, paints, scale model racing cars, electric motors. One kid stuffed the Titanic under his shirt. It all adds up. There he is!”

  Dempsey slowed the tape, Reed watched Zach enter the store and sit on the floor before a shelf of models. Dempsey advanced the tape to the entrance of a man in a suit, wearing dark glasses, showing identification.

  “You know this guy?” Reed said to Pender.

  He shook his head without removing his gaze from the monitor. “You?”

  “No,” Reed said as the man approached Zach. They talked, then left together. Reed’s face flushed. His heartbeat quickened. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  “George, take it back to when the cop walks in,” Pender said.

  Dempsey reversed the tape.

  “You have any audio?” Pender said.

  Dempsey nodded. The tinny sound of homemade videos, with hard noise amplified and monotone voices, hissed from a tiny speaker on the monitor: “I’m looking for a boy, about ten years old, blond hair, backpack, sneakers. He was last seen in this area within the last half hour.”

  “Could be the fella you want, drooling over the Kitty Hawk there. He just came in. Anything to do with that gang shooting in Oakland?”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss the matter.”

  Pender was staring at Reed. A fist covered Reed’s mouth, the veins of his neck were pulsing.

  “You recognize that voice, don’t you, Tom?”

  “It’s Edward Keller.”

  Where was Keller’s beard and long hair? Reality stabbed Reed with switchblade suddenness. Keller had Zach. Had his son!

  Have you ever lost a child? No. You have children? A son, Zach. He’s nine. My eldest boy was nine when he died.

  Pender seized his portable police radio.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  Sirens.

  Wailing. Yelping. Screaming.

  It wasn’t real. Couldn’t be real. It was a terrifying drug-fueled dream. Reed was numb. Detached. Alone in the shop, watching everything unfold. Detectives talking to him as models of World War II fighters strafed them from above.

  “Mr. Reed, anything you can remember about Keller that might...”

  His mouth wouldn’t work. What were his lines? What was he supposed to say? My little boy. My son. My only child has been taken. What was he supposed to do? Faces in his face. Dead serious. Faces at the shop window. Police cars. Flashing lights. A crowd gathering. A TV news camera, no, two--three. Coffee-breathed detectives who wore strong cologne clasping his shoulder.

  “Mr. Reed, Tom, we need your help....”

  Zach needs me. My boy. I did this. Zach. Keller, his hand on Zach’s shoulder.

  Sirens. Wailing. Yelping. Screaming.

  Sirens--the score of his profession. The chorus cueing his entrance upon a stranger’s tragedy. And it was always a stranger, it always happened to other people. It never touched him. Oh, it grazed him in the early days. But he grew skilled in his craft. He knew the bridges into their pain, knew his way over the crevasses that would consume you if you failed in your mission, knew how to cradle their suffering long enough to serve himself.

  The city shares your grief. Now is the time to say the things that need to be said, by way of tribute.

  And in virtually every case, they would struggle to help. Stunned by their loss, they would recite an inarticulate requiem for their son, daughter, father, mother, husband, wife, sister, brother, or friend. Some would scrawl tearstained notes, or show him the rooms of the dead, their accomplishments, their dreams, their disappointments, the last things they touched.

  And would you be able to provide the paper with a picture?

  Dutifully, they would flip through family albums, rummage through shoe boxes, yearbooks, wallets, purses, reach to the mantel for photos. Drinking in each image before placing it tenderly in his trusted hands. But there were times a relative would see him for what he truly believed he was. They knew.

  Oh, the years-off-the-street, J-school profs and burned-out hacks could pound their breasts about the unassailable duty of a democratic free press, safeguarding the people’s right to know, ensuring no one dies anonymously and secretly on American streets. But that constitutional crap turned to dust when you met bereavement face-to-face, took it by the hand, and persuaded it to expose itself. You steeled your soul with the armor of a champion. The
sympathetic, respectful reporter. Democracy’s champion. But at the bottom of your frightened heart, you realized what you were: a driver ant, leading the column to the carrion, overcoming and devouring the mourners who open their door to you, those too pained to flee.

  And before he left, they would usually thank him.

  That was the joke of it. They would thank him. For caring.

  He was shoved, prodded, and paid to succeed at this, and they thanked him. For caring.

  Don’t thank me. I can’t care. I can’t.

  But he would smile, professionally understanding, all the while fearing he might never find the bridge back, for his ears rang with tormented voices chanting:

  Wait until it happens to you. Wait until this happens to you.

  Now it had.

  He was paying the price for the sum of all his actions. This was his day of reckoning. The toll was his son.

  Zachary, forgive me.

  “--Where is he? You let me go!”

  It was Ann. Pender struggling to hold her, failing. She ran to Reed. He opened his arms to take her. A horsewhip crack of her hand across his face.

  “Bastard!”

  Reed saw stars and Franklin Wallace’s widow, her accusations resurrected with Ann’s voice. It was his fault.

  “You bastard!”

  Pender must have told her everything. “Ann, please.” His face burned. “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand and I blame you! You had to get close, had to keep digging for the sake of a story! Well, you’ve got a good one now, don’t you? You used my son for it!”

  “Mrs. Reed.” Pender and another uniformed officer subdued her.

  Sirens. Screaming. Ann screaming.

  “Come with us, Mrs. Reed.” Pender took her to a back room.

  Reed turned away, meeting the rheumy eyes of George Dempsey, who was pretending he hadn’t seen what he had seen, along with the police people in the shop. Dempsey was showing a detective the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, the one Zach had held less than an hour ago.

  The last thing he touched.

  Suddenly the model fighters suspended from the ceiling began trembling, the shop windows vibrating. Quake? No. A chopper was circling. Reed overheard someone say they had a partial description of the suspect’s van from a clerk at the bakery nearby. The pounding intensified when the door opened. Merle Rust and a posse of FBI agents arrived, flashing ID’s, assuming command, from Berkeley PD, going to Dempsey’s video. Sydowski, Turgeon, and a few others dicks from the task force were with them. Sydowski put his large, warm hand on Reed’s shoulder, just like Reed’s old man used to do whenever Reed lost a little league game.

  “Hang in there, Tom. We’re going to need your help.”

  Reed swallowed, then told them. “It’s Edward Keller. It’s been him all along. I met him for a story”--Sydowski and Turgeon tried to interrupt him, but he continued--“his three children drowned. He’s a religious psychotic--thinks he can resurrect them. I was secretly researching him. My paper found out before I was finished and fired me. Keller asked if I had a son. I never suspected. I--I--I think he’s going to drown...the Farallons where he lost his kids!”

  “Tom, Tom, Tom!” Linda Turgeon’s compassionate eyes offered comfort. “We know it’s Keller.”

  “We found out this morning. I called you,” Sydowski said. “We need you to help us get him.”

  “Martin! Dr. Kate Martin, did you try--”

  Sydowski nodded. “She told us everything she knew. Tom, what did you find out? Addresses? Relatives? Anything?”

  “Okay,” Rust said from the counter where the FBI and SFPD people huddled around the video monitor. “It’s ready.”

  Reed watched the videotape again. Then FBI Special Agent Rust turned to him. “You’re certain that man is Edward Keller?”

  “Yes,” Reed said. “All the information I have on him is at the paper. Keller lost his kids near the Farallons and made pilgrimages there from Half Moon Bay with a guy named Reimer.”

  “The Coast Guard’s been alerted. They’re watching the islands. We’ve got a team going to Half Moon Bay now and local people there have been alerted,” Sydowski said. “Let’s go, Tom. Merle, we’re going to the Star news department.”

  “Okay, first, Tom, give us all the addresses Zach knows, so we can put people there in case he escapes or tries to call.”

  Their home in the Sunset, his room in Sea Park, Jeff and Gordie’s houses, Ann’s mother’s on Fulton, Rust wrote it down.

  “Let’s get going, Tom.” Sydowski took his arm.

  “I have to talk to Ann.”

  Dempsey’s back room was a moldy storage closet. Boxes of ancient model cars, planes, and ships teetered near the ceiling. There was a coffee-stained sink, a hot plate, a small table, and a door to a toilet. The air reeked of cardboard, cigarettes, and loneliness. Ann sat at the table across from Pender staring at pictures of Zach.

  “Ann,” Reed said.

  She did not acknowledge him. The floor creaked when he squatted down and took her unresponsive hand.

  “Ann, I have to go with the police. I have information that could help us find Zach. It’s at the paper. Ann?”

  She was not there.

  Watching her and Reed, Pender said, “Crisis people are coming.”

  “Ann, I’ll bring him home, I swear. I swear to you.”

  Reed tried to hug her, but it was awkward. She did not react until he started to leave. She lunged from her chair at him, crushing his neck in her arms, filling him with pain, love, and courage.

  Sydowski and Turgeon shielded Reed from the tangle of reporters and photographers waiting outside the hobby shop. He recognized some of them and instinctively stopped. Sydowski pushed him into the backseat of an unmarked Caprice. Familiar voices hurled questions.

  “C’mon Reed, just give us something!”

  “Tom, please just make a statement.”

  “Is it really your son? Give us a break.”

  One guy smacked the car in frustration. Reed imagined him returning to the newsroom, telling editors, as he himself had done many times, “I couldn’t get anything good--the father wouldn’t talk to us.” Cameras pressed against the glass, their eyes probing, invading.

  Wait until it happens to you.

  Turgeon drove. The dash-mounted cherry blazed, and she gave a few blasts of the siren, inching through crowd. The Chevy parted traffic, gliding, speeding through Berkeley, Oakland. All the while, Sydowski and Turgeon said nothing, allowing Reed his privacy, never once capitalizing on the chance to ask him how it felt to be in the spotlight. They were above that.

  Sydowski broke the silence as they sailed through the tolls of the Bay Bridge to San Francisco.

  “Tom, I don’t think we have much time to find Keller. Tomorrow’s the anniversary of his children’s drownings. If he’s going to do anything, I think he’ll do it then.”

  Reed looked at the Bay, remembering the time Zach was a year and a half old and toddled into his study where he was working. His tiny, determined hands grabbed and tugged at him as he scaled his way to his father’s lap, where he went to sleep, sucking his bottle. How Reed leaned back in his chair, savoring his warmth, his sweet smell, and vowed to keep him safe from all the bad things in this world.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  Zach Reed’s heart hammered in his chest as he ascended from sleep to consciousness, racing through a mental systems check. It was all coming back to him, bubbling to the surface.

  He was not dreaming. He was waking to the nightmare.

  He was kidnapped.

  His mouth tasted salty. Kidnapped by some religious creep who talked about God. And this dungeon stunk big time. Oh, boy, he was in deep trouble. Mom and Dad were going to kill him because he ran away, because he got sucked in by a weirdo. He had to get himself out of this mess because Dad was going to kick his butt.

  Squeak-creak.

  What was that? Sounds of a TV somewhere. Where was he? He was lying on a bed. He opened
his eyes. Two faces swam into focus, jolting him alert. Kids.

  These kids were familiar for some very bad reason. Zach heard the rocking noise above them.

  Squeak-creak. Squeak-creak.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “Who are you?” the girl asked.

  Zach went numb, like the time he was five and saw little Luke Petric get run over by an eighteen-wheeler, mowed down like a rag doll, and all Zach could do was stand there screaming, his scalp tingling as if he’d been electrocuted.

  The kidnapped kids, the ones everybody was looking for: Danny and Gabrielle.

  Squeak-creak. Squeak-creak.

  That was him! Above them. The man who took them was upstairs. What was going to happen? It was getting hard to breathe. Something inside was overwhelming him, on the verge of breaking. Hang on. Calm down. Take slow breaths. Just be cool. He wanted to cry for his parents.

  He was only nine.

  But he was the biggest kid in this place.

  The boy and girl looked different from their happy, smiling pictures. Zach wanted to cry, but Danny and Gabrielle were looking at him. Like he was supposed to save them or something.

  “Who are you?” Gabrielle repeated coldly.

  “Zach Reed. How do we get out of here?”

  Squeak-creak. Squeak-creak.

  “We can’t. Mr. Jenkins has got everything locked up.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Jenkins.” Gabrielle pointed at the ceiling.

  “Well don’t worry, that doof is not going to hurt us!”

  Danny started to whimper. “Can you take me home, now? I want to go home.”

  Zach put his arm around him. “Don’t worry, Danny. It’s going to be okay. I’m gonna fix it so somebody comes for us.”

  Garbage covered the floor--fast food bags, wrappers, and containers. The basement’s only window was barred and covered with newspapers. Zach noticed the door was wide open.

  “Where are we Gabrielle? San Francisco? You know what street?”

  Gabrielle shrugged.

  “And are there any other people here?”

  “Just Mr. Jenkins. My dog Jackson was here, but Mr. Jenkins said he ran away. Did you see him? He’s a blond cocker spaniel.”