Guardians of the Night (A Gideon and Sirius Novel)

by Alan Russell

  Seth removed the skillet from the heat and then added a prohibitively expensive cup of chicken meal and brown rice dry dog food. The kibble Seth buys is so expensive I am surprised it doesn’t come with gold leaf. After stirring his gastronomic masterpiece, he put Sirius’s dog bowl on the counter to let it cool.

  “You need only look in the mirror for insight,” he said. “You still hate being a hero. Given a choice, you would have embraced anonymity. Even today you dislike being recognized for what you did.”

  “I don’t like the guilt by association of Ellis Haines.”

  Seth nodded in a noncommittal fashion. He knew there was more to it than that.

  “Besides, there’s another big difference between me and the Hero: I was just doing my job.”

  “Perhaps the hero is like you in that he doesn’t think he’s a hero.”

  I laughed. “Flying bullets didn’t stop him. They would have stopped me.”

  Seth tested the dog food with his index finger and decided it had cooled off enough. He put the bowl on the floor and then sat down in the other easy chair.

  “The Reluctant Hero might look at his actions differently than most,” he said. “It’s possible he feels unworthy. I wouldn’t be surprised if he feels guilty about something. Perhaps he can’t come forward for a compelling reason. Maybe he’s a wanted criminal. Or his presence on the scene could implicate him in activities of which he is not proud. All of us have secrets; maybe his compel him to keep his heroic act quiet, especially if that publicity could complicate, or even ruin, his life or that of others.”

  I was nodding my head to everything Seth was saying. “My gut agrees with what you just said, especially his not wanting to be exposed for fear of harming either himself or others. I have no proof of that, but I’ll be surprised if I’m wrong.”

  “What’s his motivation?” asked Seth.

  I shook my head.

  “Guess,” he said. “Tell me the first thing that comes to mind.”

  “Love,” I said.

  My own answer surprised me, but it seemed to work for Seth. “Now you just need to find out if it is self-love,” he said, “or the love of others.”

  “Is that all?”

  “We know the Hero is a hero. It would surprise me if his behavior isn’t, well, heroic.”

  “You think he doesn’t want to hurt someone?”

  “It could be more than one person.”

  “Part of me just wants to let him be. Part of me is damn curious as to why he wants to be anonymous.”

  “So you’re going to continue looking for him?”

  “The mayor is anxious to give him the key to the city. And the Chief is anxious to please the mayor. And Sirius is damned nosy.”

  “I thought your false report had put your anthropomorphic days behind you.”

  “Don’t worry, I learned my lesson. But I wasn’t kidding when I said Sirius is damned nosy.”

  At the mention of his name, Sirius looked up at both of us. His eyes were twinkling and his tail was wagging. He knew he was in on the joke. I would swear to that, but never again would I put it in his writing.

  “I want to hear more about the angel,” said Seth.

  “Is your interest personal or professional?”

  “It’s both, but my view of angels is not totally in keeping with Judeo-Christian tradition. I believe angels live on a higher plane and act as messengers between our world and the spirit world.”

  “Then how come we don’t see these angels?”

  “How come we don’t see the air around us?”

  “Have you ever seen an angel?”

  “I have seen helping spirits who may or may not have been angels.”

  “And what do those helping spirits look like?”

  “They are beings of light. They are human in form, but not flesh or blood. Imagine trying to see the reflection of your face through the reflection of moonlight on a calm lake. Your features emerge through the light. That’s akin to the fleeting images I’ve seen.”

  I chewed my lip. Wrong Pauley had described his angel in much the same way.

  “This afternoon I talked to a homeless man in Venice Beach who claims he saw a fallen angel who was wounded. And then he thinks someone murdered that angel.”

  I described what Wrong Pauley had told me, including my questions and his answers. It took me a long time to tell the story, but Seth never interrupted, just listened carefully the whole time.

  “I’m sure it’s all a waste of time,” I said. “The security footage will probably show moonlight interpreted by my drunk as an angel.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Seth said. “Some people are able to see what others won’t or can’t.”

  “This isn’t a production of Harvey,” I said. “This is supposed to be an investigation.”

  “In the Bible, Daniel saw an angel with a face like lightning. That’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? Confronted by such a face, I doubt if most people would even recognize what they were seeing.”

  “Then maybe it wasn’t there. Maybe it was a figment. In my work that happens all the time. People let their imaginations go wild, and they fabricate a reality that was never there. I expect that’s what happened with my witness.”

  Seth only smiled. “The path will lead you where the path leads you, but I wouldn’t be so sure of your destination before you set out. Cicero said ‘So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge.’ ”

  “You think you’re the only one who can quote an ancient philosopher? Plato said: ‘He was a wise man who invented beer.’ ”

  “Does that mean you’re ready for another?”

  “Far be it from me to contradict Plato.”

  The magic of good, unhurried conversation, complemented by beer, sent me home happy. A late night snack seemed in order, so in my own kitchen I made an open-faced sandwich of turkey breast, romaine, and heirloom tomato, along with a smidge of brown mustard, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar. I munched away while watching the late local news. Some of my general contentment eroded during the weather segment. I wondered if I was being overly sensitive or if the weatherman really was an Ellis Haines clone. Like Haines, he enjoyed winking for the camera and acting as if everything was a big joke. His gestures were also a lot like those Haines used: a swirling index finger for a coastal eddy; spread hands to signal a blanket of fog. All the weatherman was missing was a garrote.

  I had probably just watched too much footage of Haines at work, and now saw him even when he wasn’t there. The good news, or at least weather, was that it was going to be nice in L.A. for the next few days. I tried to think about that, and not the Weatherman, so naturally Ellis Haines kept intruding into my thoughts.

  SAD, I thought. Not the condition of Seasonal Affective Disorder, but the state of the law and J. Glo’s tactics.

  I pulled the bedcovers back and settled in. Sirius took up his spot on the carpeting right next to the bed. I wondered if my presence comforted him as much as his did mine. Every night I faced sleep with some apprehension. My fire dream came with less frequency now—only about once every four nights—but it had been a week since its last visit. A flare-up was overdue.

  I call it a dream, but that isn’t accurate. Whenever my vision occurs, I return to hell, feel the flames and inhale the smoke, and experience in exact detail the events of that night. Doing it once was bad enough. Doing it time and again is torture.

  Pass me by tonight, I thought. It was the kind of prayer you might make to the angel of death.

  I fell asleep and awakened in hell.

  Sirius stood over his prisoner, ignoring his gunshot wound.

  He wagged his tail at my praise even as his blood poured out of him. The red flow was far too fast. That scared me even more than the searing flames all around us.
>
  It was the end of the world, but my partner was still wagging his tail.

  The Santa Ana Strangler was babbling to me, trying to tell me he was a fireman. “Shut up,” I said, cutting short his lies.

  My index finger was white from its grip on the trigger. It was on the edge, just a whisper away from delivering death.

  The Strangler knew death when he heard it and stopped talking.

  I ripped off my LAPD windbreaker and tried wrapping it around Sirius’s chest to stanch the blood. It didn’t work. Sirius was getting wobbly and starting to tremble. But he was still wagging his tail. I had to get him to safety.

  I had put him in this position. I had given him the orders. I had sacrificed him in order to catch a piece of shit who had killed too many people and had now killed my partner.

  No, not yet.

  I thought about Jen. I had failed her just like I had my partner. She’d had the flu, for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t like she had come down with the Ebola virus. When you have the flu, you’re supposed to drink liquids, get plenty of rest, and take aspirin. And you’re supposed to get better. But Jenny never got better. She died.

  I should have insisted that she take it easier. I should have taken time off from work and made sure she stayed in bed. I should have looked after her like she always looked after me.

  The flames were all around us; smoke was everywhere.

  “We’re going to carry my partner out of here,” I told the Strangler.

  As he opened his mouth to object I said, “If he doesn’t live, I am going to empty my gun into you.”

  And then I heard this voice in my mind, and it said, “Why wait?”

  I gasped like you do when you jump into icy water. My system went into its customary shock. As usual, Sirius was trying to ease my return with his calming presence, his muzzle nudging my face.

  He’s alive, I thought, and relief overwhelmed me.

  I’m alive, I thought, and even felt pretty good about that. There had been a time when I hadn’t.

  My skin was hot to the touch, but at least this time there were no heat blisters I could see. As inexplicable as it might seem, the fire was still able to burn me.

  My breathing became more regular, and with my return came the moment after. I still don’t have an explanation for this strange window into a consciousness beyond my understanding. It isn’t a psychic connection, or at least not exactly. Sometimes a hidden insight reveals itself. Sometimes I see things that were unseen before. Sometimes the gods whisper revelations into my ear, although I always have to pay Charon the toll for receiving my otherworldly insights.

  “I’m glad we had our chance to talk about the angel,” said Wrong Pauley. “It came to me just in time.”

  Pauley looked different. He looked at peace.

  “I am going to follow the angel now,” said Pauley. “You’re going to have to follow it as well, but in a different way.”

  Pauley smiled, but it was a Cheshire cat kind of smile. It was obvious he wasn’t all there.

  “Give Sirius a hug for me,” he said, and then added, “It’s too bad we didn’t get to have that pasta.”

  That’s when I awakened fully. What I called my shake and bake was done. As usual, reliving the fire and experiencing the moment after left me spent. In the morning I would think about my vision and what it meant. But now I needed my sleep.

  As I drifted off, I thought about Jenny. Until tonight I had forgotten she’d been on my mind during the fire. The trauma of my partner’s shooting had brought all my feelings of helplessness to the fore.

  I fell asleep, but it wasn’t the alarm that awakened me. My cell phone was playing my Peter Gunn ringtone. I answered it before the sax players really went to town.

  “Detective Gideon?”

  I looked at the time. It wasn’t quite four in the morning.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Detective. This is Officer Casey Nance. I’m calling from Venice Beach. I wouldn’t be disturbing you at this hour except that we just came upon a body of a man carrying your business card.”

  “Where are you?” I asked, and Nance told me.

  “I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” I said.

  CHAPTER 5:

  FADE TO BLACK

  “So what was he doing with your business card, sir?”

  Patrol Officer Nance was handling the case log. The officer was young and gung ho. His short haircut and straight posture made it a sure bet he had come to the LAPD from the military.

  Nance was shadowing my movements. He wasn’t the only one interested in what I was doing. Sirius was waiting in front of my parked car where I’d told him to sitzen und bleiben (sit and stay).

  Instead of answering the officer’s question, I continued my walk-through of the area. The discovery of a body invariably attracts a crowd, but Wrong Pauley’s death had caused barely a stir. When it comes to the homeless, people are as likely to look away in death as they are in life. Besides Nance and me, there were now only two others at the scene: a coroner’s investigator and a detective from the West Bureau. The last loose end to be tied up, removing the body, would soon be addressed by a rolling gurney.

  “Who discovered the body?” I asked.

  “I spotted him while on patrol,” Nance said. “If not for the moonlight shining down on him, I would have driven right by.”

  “Did his halo give him away?”

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Forget it. What time did you spot him?”

  Nance looked at the notes he was carrying: “It was just after oh-three-hundred. At first I thought he was just dead drunk. I lowered my window and yelled at him to get the hell out of the street. When he didn’t respond, I got out of the squad car and checked to see if he was breathing. Then I called the paramedics.”

  “How long before they arrived?”

  “About twenty minutes,” he said, and then checked his notes. “Twenty-three minutes,” he said.

  “Where was the body?”

  “Pretty much where it is now,” he said. “I’ve got a sketch of its location and position if you want to see it.”

  “In a minute,” I said. “Did you know the victim?”

  “I knew him by sight,” said Nance. “I’ve been working patrol here the last nine months, and I’d seen him around. Usually his hands were wrapped around a bottle, and he was half in the bag.”

  Soon he’d be all in the bag, but I didn’t say that. I continued studying the body from different angles, and my interest in the dead man began to unsettle Nance.

  “Everyone says he died of natural causes.”

  Instead of responding I continued looking around. The crime scene tape had been peeled away in preparation for the body’s removal. As far as everyone was concerned, this was no crime scene.

  I thought about how Pauley and his angel had died in the same alleyway.

  Nance tried to get me talking again. “You knew him?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “The paramedics said he probably had a heart attack.”

  My eyes went up the incline to where Pauley had said he roosted most nights. There was a trail in the ice plant where it looked like Pauley had either slipped or rolled down to the alleyway. There were no other trails in the ice plant, nothing to suggest that anyone besides Pauley had made a path in the foliage.

  There were no criminalists on the scene. Without any sign of a struggle, without any visible wounds on the victim, everyone was happy to call it a natural death.

  “I’m surprised the paramedics didn’t say he drank himself to death.”

  “They kind of did.”

  “Did they also say he’s a bum and that’s reason enough to bag him and tag him?”

  Nance didn’t respond for a few moments, but then he asked, “Is there someth
ing about this guy I should know, sir?”

  The officer had done his job. There was no reason for me to be acting like a prick.

  “I interviewed him about ten hours ago,” I said. “That’s why he had my business card. In this same alley he said he saw an angel being murdered.”

  Nance nodded. “I heard something about that.”

  “It was a big joke for the media.”

  “He got his fifteen minutes of fame just in time.”

  I shrugged.

  “Was he nuts?”

  I was slow to answer. How do you explain a man who loved a little dog so much that he was willing to give her up for her own good? Wrong Pauley was a drunk, but he had somehow managed to hold on to his humanity in circumstances where it would be all too easy to shed it.

  Pauley had offered up most of his confessions to the sympathetic ears of Sirius. I make most of my own confessions in just such a manner.

  “Nuts?” I asked. “I don’t know. But you’re going to think I am.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Watch and see.”

  The coroner’s investigator had finished talking with the detective and was now wheeling the gurney toward Pauley. I stepped in its path and shook my head.

  “I’m taking over,” I said. “The body’s not moving until after the Crime Lab sends someone to work the scene.”

  Alvarez, the detective from West Bureau, turned on his heels. “What?” he said.

  “You heard me.”

  He came at me fast and furious. Alvarez is a big guy who’s used to throwing around his weight. He put his face right in my grill. “What the hell?”

  His show of bluster didn’t bother me, but the same couldn’t be said for my partner. Alvarez was fast on his feet, but my partner was a lot faster. He had come up silently, but now he made his presence known. Sirius’s growl was more than a warning: the death rattle of a rattlesnake couldn’t have been any more threatening.