Black Angel

by Thomas Laird

  She’s wearing a summer dress that Irwin Shaw might have liked and might have written about. It isn’t low cut, but it’s very attractive on her. It’s a forest green that accentuates her hair and face, somehow I’m no fashion person.

  “Hello,” I tell her, and I can feel my face flush.

  She gives me a kiss, and when I introduce my father to her, she gives him an affectionate peck on the cheek. I can see the old man blushing slightly, as he does when he’s surprised or when he’s moved by somebody or something.

  “You’re as pretty as he said you were. And I thought he might be exaggerating because he’s in love with you, you know.”

  The old man smiles at her to take the pressure off what he’s just suggested.

  “He’s told you about me?” she smiles.

  The warmth has reached my ears, now.

  “It’s all he talks about—except for the job.”

  “I’m at the top of his conversation, am I?” she continues to beam.

  “You are a very important personage, yes.”

  “That’s very good to hear, because I love your son very much.”

  I look over at her as if it’s the first time I’ve seen her face.

  “Well, now that all the mush is dispensed with, you suppose we could get a drink in this goddam joint?” he laughs. “Tulio!” he yells out to his favorite waiter.

  Tulio rushes over.

  “What can I get you folks?”

  “Two beers. And for the lady?” my Dad asks Hannah.

  “I’ll have a scotch on the rocks, with a little glass of ice water on the side.”

  Dad makes the order with Tulio, and the waiter rushes off. Maggio’s is very busy tonight. All the joints in Oak Lawn are hopping on weekend evenings. We were lucky to get a table at 6:00 p.m. The place jams up after 5:00 p.m.

  *

  We finish our meals—Dad and I have the New York strip and Hannah has the salmon—and then we have another round of drinks.

  “Once you get past all that dead-seriousness, my boy’s a load of laughs,” he cracks to Hannah.

  “I don’t think he’s all that serious. I think it’s all a big front, Mr. Koehn.”

  “My name is George.”

  “George,” she smiles back.

  I look over to her and I reach for her hand, and then I squeeze it tight.

  “I think he’s a deep well, yes. But I sure like the water,” she tells the old man.

  21

  We search for Carl Thomas in the Chicago area. It’s still possible that Carl might have shot Brandon, and that my theory about the Captain is all the stuff that nightmares are made of. I’ve told Jack and Captain Pearce about my suspicion, but until we can come up with evidence that Anderson is really alive, we’ll continue looking for the one suspect we know is real and alive—the last we heard, anyway.

  The FBI has questioned Thomas’s sister in Peoria, and they’ve threatened her with obstruction, but her lawyer knows the drill, and they can’t keep coming at her. She must know her phone’s tapped, so listening in on her has provided no leads as to her brother’s whereabouts.

  There have been no more killings in Mexico that resemble the two that already took place. I’m wondering if Anderson is still up here. He’s the type to try and take off when he smells a scent in the air. He’s been tipped by lawyer-daddy in California by now, I’m sure, so he’d be dumb to hang around. But then there’s the arrogance factor. It’s the one card we still have to play on him. He’s in this for the personal power play. He’s not a fanatic bent on any political gain. It wasn’t about oil or about who rules south of the border. It’s about his ability to get away with murder right in front of our very eyes. He’s trying to flaunt his power and his intelligence at me, as if this were a competition between the two of us catch me if you can. First at the NCIS and now at the police in Chicago and the cops in Mexico as well. It’s a muscle/testosterone thing, I’m saying: “Look at the balls on me!”, he’s declaring. You know, catch me if you can.

  Gerald, the Vermont rapist/killer, told the cops in the Northeast that it was a typical topic for Carl Thomas to talk about the Leopold/Loeb case back in the 1920’s. It was the case where Darrow got the two thrill killers out of an execution for the murder of a young man. He got them life instead of death. The thing that fascinated Thomas, Gerald told the police, was that they’d kill someone just to see how it felt. I wonder if Carl came up with that obsession all by himself, or I wonder if someone else fed him all that food for thought.

  *

  I love the Loop. I love this city for all its blemishes and for all its crazies and wombats and kiddie molesters and assault artists and conmen and crooked pols.… It’s like the world’s ugliest dog. He’s so goddamned ugly that he’s attractive. It’s not that Chicago doesn’t have its eye candy. The Sears Tower and the Tribune Building and the Art Institute and the Shedd Aquarium and the Natural History Museum and the Science and Industry Museum and the Planetarium and Wrigley Field and Soldier’s Field and Comiskey Park and the Gold Coast and Lakeshore Drive and.… On and on.

  If I’m able to take some time, I like to walk the Loop and its environs. I write poems in my head that’ll never meet the paper and ink. I’ll forget them in a few minutes, but I like hearing the words in my mind.

  I drive down to Monroe Street and park the LTD in underground parking, because it’s cheaper than the private parking joints. I can walk to the Lake or to the History Museum or the Art Institute from where I am right now. I think I’ll head toward the Natural History building. It’s only a good stretch of the legs.

  It’s late October, but the cold hasn’t filtered down from Canada quite yet. It’s still in the mid-fifties. Invigorating, the weather guys might call it. The air is crisp, most of the leaves have already descended to earth, and November is looking at us down the barrel. It can stay fairly comfortable until mid-December, some years. The scientists are talking about global warming, whatever the fuck that really means. El Nino, or some shit. Something about the warm winds coming off the Pacific I never get it straight.

  I can see the portals of the museum dead ahead. It’s a Thursday, and there are school buses parked all over the lot to the left of the entrance. Maybe I should head elsewhere, but I had my sights set on seeing that pile of dinosaur bones that always fills the entrance to this hall of history. The dinosaur must have been huge, according to the size of his skeleton. I can’t imagine the patience it must have taken to reassemble him or her.

  I watch the MEs go over bodies with that kind of imperturbability. They take hours studying minutiae, just to get us the details of cause of death. They’re better men than I am, Gunga Din.

  It’s eight bucks to get in, but I wait my turn behind a bunch of middle schoolers from the city. They’re Black and Hispanic kids, perhaps fifth or sixth grade. The pretty little black girl in front of me has the tiny braids with all the cat toys tied on. I can’t imagine the tirelessness of doing all that handiwork on her hair, either. Some people can simply focus. The girl turns and smiles at me with the most beautiful set of teeth I’ve ever seen. The kid just radiates at me.

  We finally get our tickets, so I head right for the bones of the Tyrannosaur. He stands right before us in the middle of the entry hall. The little girl with the cornrows and the cat toys suddenly stops and begins to wail. Then her teacher, a black woman about thirty and very attractive, rushes to her and consoles her and finally gets her giggling when she assures the kid the Tyrannosaurus is good and dead.

  I would have thought she was too old to be scared by a bag of bones, but who knows what scares people.

  Captain Benjamin Anderson and Lieutenant Carl Thomas scare me. Philip Brandon used to frighten me. And Gerald was fairly spooky, too. Big bones don’t do much for me except pique my interest in the dawn of creation. It’s lucky that human types weren’t around when these gigantic lizards were. I don’t think our adaptability would’ve helped us much in one-on-ones with these pricks.

  A
fter wandering from gallery to gallery, I figure I’ve blown an hour and a half. I go downstairs to the cafeteria to get a McDonald’s burger and a Diet Coke. My extended lunch hour is way over, although I really just took some time to wander away from the job. In fact, Capt. Pearce suggested I take some time. He said I looked like I was more haggard than usual. And Jack had to go to a dentist’s appointment, so I was without a partner.

  When I get in the long line at the museum’s McDonald’s, I feel the hair on my neck stand up. The dinosaur exhibition didn’t make my skin crawl, but I suddenly feel a distinct chill rise up my backbone. I turn quickly—I do a 180. But there is nothing out of the ordinary behind me: just schoolchildren, scattered adults, and museum employees.

  I get the Big Mac and Diet Coke and I head for one of the lunch tables. There are only a few seats available, so I don’t have much of a selection. I sit next to a chubby Hispanic middle-schooler.

  “My name is Felipe,” he grins.

  “I’m Will, Felipe. Glad to meet you.”

  He’s got a little baby fat, but he’s going to be a killer with the ladies. Dark brown eyes. Latin lover. He’ll lose the chubbiness in high school, become an athlete, maybe a baseball player, and the babes’ll be standing in line for Felipe. I can simply see it all in his childish face.

  He goes back to his cheeseburger Happy Meal that all the other students received. He’s next to his also-Hispanic teacher, and she’s already dynamite. Very young, extraordinarily ripe. I try to conjure Hannah in my mind so I don’t blurt something stupid to her.

  I gobble the burger and down the Diet Coke. I go up to the pop machine for a refill, and then I put a lid on the cup and grab a straw. One for the road.

  On the way up the up escalator, I feel that same ice on my backbone again. I whirl about, and then I see him. At least twenty people separate him from me, and I’m just about to get off this escalator, so I have to step out of the way.

  It was Anderson. He was wearing shades and a Cubs baseball hat, but it was the Captain.

  I take the nine millimeter from my shoulder holster, and I palm it. No one is paying attention to me. I thought I’d hear someone shriek: “He’s got a gun!”

  But no one is looking at me. I’m wearing a thigh-length black leather jacket, so the holster was concealed, of course, and my hand all but conceals the weapon.

  I’ve got very large hands. That’s why Illinois wanted me for a wide receiver or tight end. And my hands were very soft in football too.

  He never rises on the escalator as I wait for him, so I look back down the upward-moving stairs, but I can’t make him. I haven’t got time to find the down escalator, so I begin to run down the up version. I have to weave among the ascenders, and some of them don’t look too happy with a grown man bursting the wrong way past them, but I get down to the basement in a hurry. I’m still palming my piece.

  I look all around the McDonald’s serving area, where I started, but I can’t sight him.

  Then I see the Cubs hat and the shades at the far end of the eating gallery. He’s about to leave, heading toward some other hall in the museum. I bolt toward him, but the wash of museum-goers slows me down drastically.

  Finally I make my way toward his last sighting, and when I get into this next gallery, I see him departing, at the far end again. I run as fast as I can, zig-zagging between all these vertical bodies, and suddenly I think I’m gaining on him.

  The strange thing is that he doesn’t seem to be running away from me. He’s moving fast, but he hasn’t broken into a run or even a trot. It’s as though this were a bad dream, and there’s no way I can catch up with the monster/villain in my nightmare.

  He’s prodding me after him, but he’s confident I’ll never catch up with him.

  He moves on to the Neanderthal exhibition, which is jammed with school-kids. I’ve still got the nine in my hand, and I’ve got my hands at my sides so I won’t alarm the children or the adults in here. I don’t have my portable phone because I left it in the LTD, and now I’m living to regret leaving it there.

  He’s going to get out of here because I don’t have any backup. It’s as if he knew I’d leave that goddam phone in the car. I only figured to be in here for a few minutes. I didn’t figure on pursuing anyone.

  He’s taking me back to the Tyrannosaurus in the entry hallway. Now I know where he’s headed. But just as I sprint into that hallway, I lose sight of him again.

  And this time I know I’ve lost him for good.

  *

  “For once in this whole sorry business, I was right. He’s alive. It was him. Shades and ball cap aside, it was Captain Benjamin Anderson. He’s no spook. He’s no zombie, he’s no walking dead. The sad fuck is alive and humping. It was Anderson in the museum, Captain. I’m certain of it.”

  “How does this ghost get out of a war in Iraq, get himself back to the States, get into the country in the first place, wander around killing as he goes maybe even in Mexico too, if you’re right.… How does he get around to accomplish all these things?”

  “He gets out of Iraq by way of Kuwait. There’s lots of money in Kuwait,” I tell my boss and Jack in Pearce’s office, two hours after I put my tail between my legs and returned to headquarters from the History Museum.

  “When there’s lots of available cash, you can buy almost anything. He buys himself a berth on some small vessel and he makes his way back toward somewhere in Europe, where he procures documentation, a false ID, the whole bit. He flies to Canada, where immigration isn’t the strictest, and his ID is good enough to pass him in. Then he filters down into the US, somewhere from the Canadian border, where they’re not too vigilant about bogus IDs. And no one’s on the lookout for this prick because he’s already dead.”

  “Still, it’s hard to figure he could just walk out of a war, Will,” Pearce says.

  “We’ve had AWOLs before. The NCIS goes after missing persons all the time. He sure wouldn’t be the first guy to go over the fucking hill.”

  “You’re certain it was Anderson?” Jack asks me.

  “It was him, Jack,” I confirm. “I’ve memorized the son-of-a-bitch’s face from the photos in his jacket, and it was Captain Benjamin Anderson.”

  *

  He let me see him. He’s taunting me and telling me he can reach out and touch me, like the phone ads, any time he feels like it because he’s slyer than I am. He’s the superior intelligence. He has the muscle and the cojones, and he can tap me any time he feels like it.

  Or he can put one in the back of my head any time he chooses, also. It wasn’t just a message—it was a threat.

  Now I’m worried about Hannah, once again. If he’s been tailing me, he knows we’re together. He also knows where my father is. He knows where we all live.

  *

  “I got a weird phone call today,” Sammy says.

  “Yeah? From who?”

  I already know.

  “He didn’t say. He just said he wanted to let me know that he saw you at the museum.… Were you at some museum recently?”

  “Yeah. History. Yesterday.”

  “So why is this idiot telling me about it?”

  “He calls again, you put a trace on your phone. I’ll pay for it.”

  “What the fuck’s going on, Will? I haven’t said anything to Megan about it, but…”

  “Don’t. Don’t say a damn thing to her. But if anyone makes another call, call the phone company and tell them you want a trace on harassing phone calls and that you want to prosecute.”

  “You going to tell me?”

  I explain to him about Anderson and about Thomas and about Brandon and about the beginning of it all back in Kuwait.

  “Jesus. Can’t you grab this bastard?” he asks.

  “I will. Just keep an eye on Megan. Stay with her. Keep your locks locked. Get the trace if he calls again.… I don’t think he will, Sammy. I think he’s just fucking with me. There’s only one of him, and we’ve got a lot of cops. We’ll get him, so don’t let h
im frighten you.”

  “Forget about me. How about you? Is he scaring the shit out of you, Will?”

  22

  I took them along for the ride, knowing the day would come when I would have to liquidate them both. I took care of my loose threads in central Mexico before I returned. Now I’ve got to meet up with Carl Thomas. Then I can go home to California and take care of that loose thread, near Auburn.

  I was expecting Carl to be there when I went into that Chicago apartment, but it was just as well Brandon was there instead. It saved me hunting him down and shooting him. Not getting Carl as a result of coming to this city was a disappointment, but it only delays the inevitable for this second of my acolytes. I’ll find Carl as I found Julio Guerrero and Jorge Montellano in Mexico City. They were both fervent anti-government, modern day Zapatistas, and it took no real arguing or cajoling to get them to do murder. Then I simply took care of the policia’s job and I whacked them both, burned their bodies in a kiln, and dumped the ashes in the sewers of Mexico City. They are now flowing with the rest of that ciudad’s flotsam and shit.

  It was unfortunate that I was forced to leave Brandon’s body in that apartment, but it would have been more difficult to dispose of after seeing the police clear the buildings around me. Luckily I was able to leave the apartment building with the downstairs neighbors before Detective Koehn and his entourage were able to come catch me in the act. They missed me by mere minutes.

  I thought his sighting of me in the museum was very amusing. I hope it gave him a little cheap thrill as well. I have plans for Will Koehn. I’ve come all the way to Chicago for a three-fold purpose. I know Carl Thomas is somewhere close. I know Philip Brandon has already expired, courtesy of me. And I know Detective Koehn will not run from me. Other cops might very well take off on leave of absence, knowing they’ve become a target for a man like me who they will undoubtedly call “insane.”

  It matters little to me, a handsome young dog in his late twenties, what their analysis of my character turns out to be. I’m sure if they ever caught me I’d spend no time in a prison. In Illinois they have an institution called Elgin. It’s where they keep the chronics and some choice acutes. The terms I use are no doubt old fashioned, but I’m an old fashioned kind of guy.