Grave of Angels

by Michael Prescott

  “It can probably wait.”

  “No, I’ll be headed in that direction on my way back anyway. I’ll check it out. It should only take a minute. And we need some good news tonight.”

  SHE ought to be scared. But she didn’t feel anything anymore.

  Chelsea sat in the padlocked confessional with Chanticleer in her lap. Though she wasn’t Catholic, the room seemed oddly familiar. Probably because she’d seen it in the movies—the little bench you were supposed to kneel on, where she was seated now, and the metal grille and the priest in the next compartment listening as you ran through your sins.

  Like God cared. Like God gave a shit if you blew some guy or shoplifted a video or took His name in vain. If God cared so fucking much about her, then why was she locked in this room waiting to die?

  Kate Malick had talked about God. About prayer. But praying wouldn’t stop Swann from doing whatever he wanted. Swann was real, and what he would do to her was real, and all the rest was wishful thinking.

  Swann had promised she wouldn’t get hurt, but she’d met plenty of liars and he was just one more. Except he wasn’t some studio asshole blowing smoke; he was a psycho, mean and malicious, and a stone killer.

  Mr. Darkness. The shadow man who haunted her funkiest dreams and now was back, in the flesh, to make her dead.

  Whatever he did, she wouldn’t fight him. There was no point. If she tried to fight, he would only laugh at her. And if he laughed, she would absolutely lose it. Just absolutely go fucking insane.

  She sat rigid, waiting. It was almost like watching herself in a movie. She was on screen and in the audience—in two places at once—part of the story but safely removed from it. Surreal. Maybe dying would be like that. Maybe she would see the bullet enter her heart, watch herself slump to the floor. Dead and not dead. Maybe.

  Disconnected memories played in her mind. Swann in the bathroom, emerging from the stall. Chanticleer barking. Grange turning, but not fast enough. The shock of blood as Swann drove Grange’s head into the cinder block wall…

  The empty club. Swann leading her through the flickering downspots. Then outside, past the bouncer, someone who could help if only she could talk or scream, but her throat wouldn’t work. She was drifting in a dream and nothing was real…

  Into a car, then another car, then dragged under a gap below a fence and hauled into a church. Everything so bright all around her, and yet blurry, bleary, like the world was melting, melting in the rain, acid rain, was she on acid, tripping, bad trip, nothing made sense, she must be asleep, asleep and dreaming…

  Then a needle in her arm, a hard shock of alertness, and Swann was leaning over her and it was real. It was real.

  She shook her head, didn’t want to relive it. Didn’t want to think about it or about anything. Wanted to turn off her brain, but her thoughts kept coming with a will of their own.

  Her head hurt. She never got headaches or hangovers, but tonight she had something. Probably whatever Swann had drugged her with was still causing side effects. But the headache wouldn’t kill her. Swann would.

  She stroked Chanticleer’s belly and breathed in, out, in, out. It was all she could do, just pet the dog and breathe. And soon she wouldn’t be breathing anymore.

  But she didn’t care. Like Swann said, she’d been trying to off herself for years. She was ready to die.

  “So come on,” she whispered, “just kill me, get it over with, shoot me, blow my fucking brains out.”

  It would be a goddamned relief, a blessing. Sure it would.

  Except that wasn’t true. It was only another lie, like everything else in her stupid, pointless life. Her friends were lies; they only wanted to hang out with her to share her spotlight. Her mom was a lie, faking love when all she cared about was the next paycheck and her 25 percent cut. Her career was a lie—pretending to be other people on screen, wearing a mask, living a fantasy.

  All bullshit. Nothing real about any of it. Every minute of her life had been a fucking joke. Now it was over and all she could say was that it had been a big, dumb waste of time.

  Even so, she didn’t want to die. She’d never realized that fact until just now, when it was too late to matter.

  She shut her eyes and for some reason began to sing the willow song. The sound of her own voice was comforting in the darkness, like the reassuring touch of a friend. As long as she could breathe and sing, she wasn’t dead. She held onto that thought. She wasn’t dead.

  Footsteps.

  She heard their slow approach and broke off the song.

  Swann was coming back.

  She shuddered. Silent now, forgetting even to pet the dog, she waited.

  The footsteps stopped outside the confessional, and she heard the creak of the door to the other compartment. Light filtered into the priest’s cell. Through the grille, she saw a man’s face.

  Not Swann.

  “Mr. Farris,” she said, her voice hushed. “What are you doing here?”

  Daniel Farris stared at her through the grille, an unsmiling confessor. He raised his hand, and in it gleamed a gun.

  “I’m an old-fashioned guy when it comes to my family, Chelsea. I believe in an eye for an eye…and a life for life.”

  TEEN Alliance smelled of Lysol. Inspirational posters checkered the cinder block walls. Fluorescent tubes buzzed overhead, behind plastic casings spotted with insect carapaces. It was the kind of place Kate’s father would have disapproved of. You can’t help people who won’t help themselves, he would have said. Yet her mother would sneak dollar bills into the poor box when he wasn’t looking. Or had he only pretended not to look?

  Kate looked over the few people who occupied the place, mostly kids lounging in plastic chairs, watching a wall-mounted TV. Some of them glanced her way, sizing her up.

  They were just like the kids she’d ministered to. The same unlined faces and wary, hooded eyes. The boys, sullen, leaning forward with bunched fists, sending every signal of challenge. The girls, brazen in their tight, unbuttoned shirts, marketing bodies that were bruised, scabby, and wasting away.

  They wanted so badly to be men and women of the world, but they were children. Lost children. Some would make it and some wouldn’t. Survival of the fittest, according to the hard logic of the modern mind.

  Only one volunteer was on duty. Georgia was a heavyset woman whose milky Southern drawl fit her name. Her desk was littered with pamphlets and chits for soup kitchens. A corkboard displayed handwritten letters, expressions of gratitude from parents and kids. Success stories. There weren’t many.

  “She was in here earlier tonight,” Georgia said. “But it wasn’t till later that I saw the flyer. I was shuffling through papers and came across it.”

  “You’re sure it was her?”

  “I heard her friends call her Skeeter.”

  “Her street name,” Kate said.

  “Yes. Like on the flyer.”

  “Did she look okay?”

  “Tired.” She rendered the word as one long syllable, honey-smooth. “But they all look tired, don’t they? Otherwise, I’d say she’s in good shape. Holding up better than a lot of them do.”

  “Did she say anything?”

  “She asked about meal vouchers for herself and her friends, that’s all.”

  “Any idea where she hangs out?”

  “You know the Western Avenue overpass above the 101 Freeway? She and her friends crash there sometimes, I’m told.”

  “I’ll check it out. Listen, if I don’t find her, and she comes back here…”

  Kate took out a business card embossed with the words Guardian Angel, Inc., a halo askew over the capital A. She wrote a number on the back. “Here’s my personal cell phone number. You can call me anytime, night or day.”

  “Don’t you ever sleep?”

  “I had a good night’s sleep once. Back in 1985, I think.”

  Georgia took the card. Her hands were older than her face, age-spotted hands with blue protruding veins and bitten fingernail
s. “You’re taking quite an interest in this girl.”

  “I’m a friend of the family.”

  “And they wish to remain nameless? Is that why there’s no last name on the flyer?” Georgia didn’t expect an answer. She smiled, a kind smile marred by a dead tooth turning brown. “Whoever she is, I have a feeling you’ll find her. Things have a way of working out.”

  “I hope so.” Kate thought of Mila Farris. “Not every story has a happy ending.”

  “You just need a little faith.”

  Kate managed a smile.

  ——

  She headed to the overpass, thinking of Amber Banning.

  By now the girl must know how badly she’d screwed up, but she hadn’t phoned home, and Kate knew why. It wasn’t stubbornness. It was the deep, crushing certainty that an irreparable mistake had been made.

  Kate understood that feeling. She knew what it was like to fall down a steep precipice, to fall so far you were sure you could never climb back up.

  She parked the Jag on Western. Before leaving her car, she rummaged in the glove compartment and found a spare flashlight to replace the one she’d lost in Westwood.

  She stepped to the edge of the grassy hillside that declined steeply to the freeway below. In this part of LA the surface streets, belying their name, were elevated above the freeways. She stood, looking around at the dark street. If her secret admirer was still following her, this was a place he might choose for an ambush. It was no less deserted than the industrial area near the river. She’d been with Sam then. Now she was alone.

  Easing the Glock out of its pocket holster, she placed her finger over the trigger guard. A concrete wall ran along the verge of the incline, but she easily hoisted herself over. She made her way down the hill, her flashlight beam picking out soda cans and beer bottles that threatened her footing.

  This side of the overpass was supported by a colonnade of round pillars. Between the pillars and the hillside was a triangular gap, an artificial cave large enough to serve as shelter. That was where Amber and her friends would be camping, if they were here.

  She saw no flashlights, no candles or trashcan fires. But that didn’t mean the place was empty. She approached with caution. At the threshold of the cave, she paused, beaming her flash inside. There was more litter, the leavings of a group of people. The stuff had been here for a long time, the residue of many nights spent under the roadway, barely protected from the elements, subsisting off the urban wild like the coyotes in the hills. But at least coyotes had some quiet. Here there was always the thrum of traffic overhead and the louder rush of vehicles on the freeway directly alongside the embankment. Even now, at nearly three a.m., headlights flashed past in an inconstant stream, flickering through gaps in the pillars, their glare brighter than her flashlight but less steady. A ceaseless strobing sidelight, reminding her of the pulsing lights in Stiletto.

  She ignored the flicker and focused her attention on the cave as she stepped inside. Makeshift accommodations had been added. A ripped-up, badly stained mattress, probably rescued from a curbside refuse pile, lay draped in ragged blankets. Bottles and cigarette butts and spent matches and a few needles. The pillars and reachable parts of the roof were embellished with tangled skeins of taggers’ marks and obscene doodles and spray-painted obscenities. From her days as a novice she remembered the omnipresence of graffiti in the world of the street people; it was everywhere, a constant backdrop, dirtying every gas station restroom and motel stairwell, every fence and alley wall, even the tree trunks and boulders in public parks. It was inescapable, like the beat of rap and hip-hop.

  The thought of Banning’s daughter in that environment doused her caution. “Amber?” she called out, the cry bouncing among the pillars before vanishing in the traffic noise. “Amber, are you here?”

  No answer. No one was here. Her flashlight had swept the area, finding only garbage and a few sad comforts—a sleeping bag, a hardcover book with waterlogged pages and a broken spine, a cracked CD featuring the British pop singer Adele.

  Did Amber like Adele? Kate didn’t know. She’d never met the girl. Banning, keeping their affair on the down low, hadn’t let Kate into his home. But maybe that was just as well. If—when—Kate did catch up with the girl, she might be able to approach without scaring her off.

  She turned to go, her flashlight lowered again to check out her footing. The beam passed over something shiny in the dirt. Kate stooped and picked it up. A charm bracelet.

  Banning had said his daughter always wore a charm bracelet. Had been wearing it the night she disappeared.

  Something rattled in the dark, the noise echoing. A plastic bottle, perhaps. It could have been disturbed by a scurrying rodent or by the wind.

  Or by a footstep.

  She slipped her finger inside the Glock’s trigger guard and turned slowly in the direction of the sound. It had come from the far end of the tunnel. If someone had followed her here, he might have descended the hill on the other side of the overpass, paralleling her movements while staying out of sight. She stood unmoving, tense in the shadows. Traffic sounds surrounded her, the hum of tires overhead, the whoosh of vehicles on the freeway at the bottom of the hill. The flicker of headlights passing between the columns made the tunnel a stroboscopic dance floor.

  He could be there, yards away, concealed in darkness, drawing a bead on her.

  Another faint, echoing clatter. Something metal. Closer than the noise she’d heard before.

  He was coming.

  She crouched low and moved to the nearest column, taking cover. She debated her options. Run for it, and he could gun her down. Once on the hillside, she would be exposed. She couldn’t make it to the top before he took her out.

  Stay put? If she did, he could work his way back up the hill and descend on the nearer side, taking her from behind. Or he could simply wait her out. She couldn’t hide all night. And he was patient. He’d already proven that.

  Right now the advantages were with him. He must have a good idea of where she was, while he could be anywhere. If she could trick him into revealing his position, she might have a chance.

  “James?” she called, hoping the sound of his own name would startle a reaction out of him.

  Her shout came back at her in an eddy of echoes. There was no other reply.

  “James, I know it’s you!”

  More echoes. And something else. Muffled and indistinct.

  Laughter.

  He was laughing at her. Laughing in the dark.

  She tried to pinpoint the sound. No use. It was too soft, and the maddening acoustics distributed it everywhere, an ambient noise blending with the traffic thrum.

  “Show yourself, you son of a bitch!”

  The laughter stopped. Now there was only the road noise and the dimming echoes of her own cry.

  He was going to make his move. She felt sure of it. If he hadn’t known where she was, he did now. And if she tried to move to new cover, she risked exposure.

  Her best bet might be to retreat out of the tunnel, crawling through the dirt. Get outside and take up a position near the entrance, and she could nail him when he followed.

  If she made it that far.

  She began easing down onto her belly, and then the tunnel lit up in a shaft of white light, fanning through the gap in the pillars. A searchlight from a patrol car easing to a stop in the right lane of the freeway, cherry lights flashing to warn off traffic.

  Saved.

  She pocketed the gun and emerged from hiding, then tramped the rest of the way down the hill, holding her hands well away from her body so as not to make a threatening silhouette. She prayed the cops weren’t Mertone and Berlinski from the Brewers’ house.

  They weren’t. She’d never seen this pair. The cop on the passenger side looked at her through the open window. “Hello, ma’am. Got a reason to be here?” He wore rimless glasses that caught reflections of the passing glare.

  “Looking for a runaway. Was tipped off that she and her f
riends might be camping here. But they’re gone.”

  The cop nodded, his gaze fixed on the bulge in her pocket. “You carrying?”

  “I have a permit. I’m a security professional.”

  The driver leaned forward in the seat. “I know you. Malick, right? Guardian Angel?”

  “That’s me.”

  “You came by the station when Joey Puck got picked up on a D ’n’ D.”

  “You’ll have to narrow it down,” Kate said, and they all smiled. Puck was a client, a stand-up comic with a wild hair for booze, drugs, and fistfights. He’d been detained many times, but somehow charges were never pressed. The rules really were different for celebrities—at least in this town.

  The cop riding shotgun let his gaze slide past her, up the hillside, where the beam of light continued to probe.

  “There a problem?” Kate asked him.

  “Thought we saw someone moving around in there. Not you. Someone else.”

  “Somebody was in there. I heard him.”

  The cop shrugged. “A vagrant.”

  She didn’t argue the point. If she told them she was being stalked, she would be tied up in questioning. Besides, nothing had happened, really. Already, she doubted whether the man in the dark had been James or just some drunken derelict.

  “It’s not good to go nosing around in places like this in the dark,” he added. “Some real nutcases wandering around.”

  “That’s why I need to find this girl.”

  “Well, if she was here, you just missed her. We came by about an hour ago and a whole bunch of kids took off running.”

  “Why? Are they in trouble?”

  “Nah, they always run. They know if we bust ’em for loitering, we’ll run ’em through missing persons, and they’ll be sent home.”

  “Why’d you roust them?”

  “Sometimes they set fires to stay warm. Dry as it’s been lately, fire is a hazard. We’ve been told to keep the grassy areas clear.”

  The driver studied her. “Why would Guardian Angel be looking for a runaway?” he asked.

  “It’s just personal. Favor for a friend.”

  “Well, if you have a picture of the kid you’re looking for…”