Black Angel

by Thomas Laird

  *

  Kormelov sits across from us in the same Denny’s where we met before.

  “This man, Carl Thomas. He has a liking for prostitutes who let him, how you say it? He likes to bite. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Yes,” Jack confirms.

  “He is a pretzel. Twisted, this fuck.”

  “Yes,” I add.

  “He likes one particular whore that an associate of a friend of mine handles. She is a Russian, unfortunately, but I don’t judge how a man or woman makes their bread. Her name is Nina Simonov. She lives at 412 Dempster Avenue on the northside. She does business in her residence there. My man says Carl Thomas has visited her several times in the last month. The last time he was there, he almost maimed this woman. He got carried away and bit her a few times. The friend of my associate says they beat this Thomas up and sent him to the hospital with a broken cheekbone but the son-of-a-bitch came back for Nina again. This time he promised not to misbehave. So she tripled the fee, and the dumb bitch took him on again.

  “Apparently he will return for the encore performance because he is, how do you say it? He is obsessed with this nibbling business. Nina doesn’t care what kind of sex a man requires, and it is pretty obvious she’s a very stupid cunt.”

  Jack smiles at him, and then he asks for a rerun on Nina Simonov’s address.

  *

  We set up on the Russian woman’s apartment with three shifts. Jack and I take the late shift because it’s more likely Carl Thomas will be arriving at Nina’s at a very late hour. He’s been smart before, and there’s no reason to suspect him of being rash. He’ll show up when the streets are deserted.

  As they are now, at 12:22 a.m. It is mid-November, and it’s turned wintry. No snow, but there is frost in the air. We’re wearing leather coats to ward off the Hawk, the northeast wind off the Lake. We turn on the Ford’s heater, but neither of us likes to run the motor too much. The exhaust is a tip-off that we’re staking the place out.

  We listen to Jack’s classic rock station until neither of us can stand the high energy of the music at this late hour.

  We take turns dozing, but Jack’s a snorer, and he bothers me when I hear him stop breathing every so often.

  About 12:43 a.m., a man in a leather thigh-length jacket approaches Nina’s three-flat, here on Dempster, just four blocks from the Lake.

  I nudge Clemons out of a grunt and a snore.

  “Show time,” I whisper.

  I call in for backup as our boy enters the doorway and buzzes Nina’s apartment. She lets him in and we get out of the LTD with weapons drawn. There’s no time to wait for backup, even though we know we’ve broken the cardinal law of stakeouts by proceeding ahead without the cavalry.

  He’s gotten away too many times before. Not tonight. Not on this watch of ours.

  We get to the hallway. Jack punches the other two buzzers, not Nina’s. The first floor buzzes us in. When we walk by the apartment, Jack tells an old lady who’s grunting in Spanish to get her hoary ass back into her apartment.

  “Policia,” he explains to the old bat. She retreats and shuts her door.

  Nina is on the second floor. When we arrive up the steps, her door is closed shut. I put my ear to the entry, but I hear nothing.

  “We could wait for the swinging sledge,” Jack whispers at me, in barely audible sentence.

  I shake my head, and before my partner can protest, I put my right heel to the door, near the handle. The rectangle crashes open. We burst through and head, with weapons pointed in front of us, toward Nina’s bedroom. It’s a three-room apartment, so our choices of where it’s located are very limited.

  When we enter the darkened bedroom, Thomas snaps on a bedside lamp.

  They’re naked, and he’s got a switchblade at her throat, and he’s clutching the nude whore from behind. A small droplet of blood dribbles its way down Nina’s throat.

  “Great tits. But she’s as frigid as a block of ice. You know?” Thomas smiles.

  “Let her go and stand up,” Clemons demands, his nine millimeter pointed directly at Carl’s forehead.

  “You shoot, and I’ll cut her and sever an artery that’ll kill her for sure.”

  “She’s a whore. Go right ahead,” I tell him.

  Nina’s eyes aren’t much smaller than the tits he was talking about. They’ve widened hysterically. She must speak pretty fair English.

  “Don’t,” she gurgles.

  “I said, let her go,” Jack repeats in an even voice.

  “You’ll shoot me anyway,” he says, looking directly at me.

  “Yes,” I answer.

  Nina gurgles, and her breasts bob as she struggles to avoid being pierced by the tip of his blade.

  Now Carl’s eyes become a bit rounder and a bit more enlarged. It’s as if he finally believes I’m about to let loose a round regardless of what he does to the hooker. Jack is watching me now, as well.

  My partner shakes his head.

  “Don’t,” he mouths to me.

  I look back at the naked man and woman in front of me, and then I shoot Nina in the right shoulder, and the bullet obviously keeps right on going through her and then into Carl Thomas’s upper right chest, which forces him to suddenly release the knife.

  Nina collapses forward onto the floor, off the bed, and Thomas is writhing in pain on the mattress.

  I put my pistol’s muzzle against his forehead.

  “Will,” Jack pleads.

  Thomas’s eyes roll back in his head, and then Jack Clemons turns around and finds four uniforms bursting onto the scene behind us.

  25

  I’m put on paid leave until they investigate the shooting of Carl Thomas and the hooker I shot him through. Nina recovers nicely. Fortunately I didn’t blast through any major arteries, and she will make it. Thomas, on the other hand, is more iffy. They give him 50-50 odds of making it. The slug did significant damage to his upper chest, but the surgeon in ER told me after his operation that Carl would likely pull through because of his generally excellent physical condition prior to my giving him a new hole to bleed out of.

  Jack has already been interviewed by Internal Affairs, and from what he tells me, it went well after he explained that Carl was about ready to decapitate Nina with that wire clothes hanger. He thinks they bought his story, and when they talked to me I confirmed that I believed Nina’s life to be in jeopardy, and I also believed a head shot to Thomas was highly unlikely, and so I felt shooting him through her would be my only chance to prevent one or two deaths. The three interrogators seemed reasonable to me. At least the three guys who asked me questions seemed understanding regarding the predicament we were in at Nina’s apartment.

  It’ll be a few days before the decision comes down, Captain Pearce informed me, so I get a short vacation, which I’ll be spending protecting Hannah and her daughters from Captain Benjamin Anderson, the lone perpetrator to all these murders. Carl’s alive, but he won’t be going anywhere for a very long time. We have him for nothing less than attempted murder on Nina, and maybe Gerald will help us put the finishing touches to the other homicide/rape raps on the son of a bitch.

  I spend time with Hannah, at least when she’s home from her job at the accounting office for the gas company. She returns to Oakbrook about 6:30 p.m. and then the four of us have dinner here, and then the girls do their homework upstairs, and Hannah and I watch TV and occasionally neck on the couch in front of the tube. We have to be careful the two young girls don’t descend the stairs and catch us in the act, but they rarely come downstairs once they hit their rooms. They each have phones and computers, and they’re busy with their own young-woman worlds.

  We make love only when we’re alone, at my place, or here when Barbara and Beth are with their father. I can’t bear the lack of privacy when they’re around, and Hannah feels the same way.

  I’d ask her to marry me, but I’m terrified I’ll scare her off or that she’ll give me the brush the way Mary Janecko, my FBI lady, did
. It’s frightening what a two- letter word can do to you:

  No.

  I love her and I’ve told her so in spite of my trepidation about her rejecting me. I can’t help but say it in and out of bed because it is simply true. I know I have a bad habit of speaking what I’m thinking, and it’s put other women off, even before my FBI babe.

  When I tell her tonight, she looks right into my eyes.

  “You want to escalate this war?”

  “Which war?” I smile.

  I take my fingertips and trace her throat from top to bottom. Her flesh is warm and smooth. No imperfections. It isn’t right, somehow, that there are no flaws on her perfect flesh.

  “The war of the sexes,” she laughs.

  She touches my face with her slender fingers. The tips just glance against my cheeks, and a chill rises up my back. She keeps touching me as if she’s reading me by her very contact with my cheeks and with my chin. Her eyes are a mist; they’re so close to mine. I feel as if we’re in some fog bank. The air is thick between us. The atmosphere is dense, and I wonder why I’m not having trouble breathing.

  “If you mean do I want to get serious with you, with us, then the answer is affirmative.”

  “Very military. Very precise.”

  She’s smiling warmly at me. She knows the effect it has on me. I want to drop the girls off at their Daddy’s and head for a four-hour nap. But I will not leave them alone in the house. I’ve told Hannah that’s not negotiable, especially at night. I will not leave them unattended.

  “I love you. And, yes, I want to get very serious with you.”

  She kisses me.

  “And the age factor?”

  She smiles slyly at me. She loves to tease me until I have to grab hold of her and end my misery. I can only hold back from embracing her for a very short time, and she damn well knows my limits.

  “Stop. There is no age factor. Stop reading that goddam Cosmo.”

  I can only fake being really angry with her. She plays me very well. She’s in command, and she knows I want her to lead me on endlessly.

  “You’re not angry, are you, Will?”

  “No. Not really. But I don’t know how to make it any clearer that I don’t give a shit how old you are, and I never will. And women outlive men all the time anyway.”

  She looks as if she’s in her early to mid-thirties. She could pass for a peer of mine, age-wise. There are no striations on her beautiful face. It’s as unmarked as her gorgeous throat. There are no telltale markers that suggest she’s anywhere near her true age.

  “I don’t think I really have a problem with your age, Detective. You seem a lot older than most thirty-something guys I work around at the office. You seem too serious, sometimes.”

  “I get that a lot.”

  I blush at her insight. She knows me as if she’s been with me for decades. Time. It’s always about time, when we’re together. But the truth is that the clock moves far too quickly when I’m near her.

  “I’ll bet. You’ve scared a few off, I gather.”

  “Yeah. As a matter of fact, I have.”

  “And you’re afraid to scare me off, too?”

  That teaser face is in place, again. Her lips part and she shows me just a glimmer of a grin. Her arms are crossed in front of her, and her breasts lie on top of her forearms, and she knows I can’t help staring at that delicious pair.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Like right now, Will?”

  “Like right now, yes.”

  If I don’t take hold of her soon, something embarrassing is going to happen. I’m like a schoolboy who’s never been laid. But she takes mercy on me and embraces me, and the pent-up explosion within relaxes. Everything inside me relaxes, and I’m somewhere soothing, the moment her warm arms are wrapped about my waist.

  She kisses me hard.

  “It’s Friday night. I have a sister, Franny.”

  “You never told me about Franny.”

  “I never told you anything about my family, other than those two upstairs and that bastard who fathered them.”

  “Franny?”

  She giggles when I say her sister’s name. I like her giggle. I like her laugh. They’re both soft and casual and real. Her humor is just as genuine as everything else about her.

  “My younger sister. She lives in Palos Heights. She’s the girls’ favorite relative. And the rumor is that there’s a motel near her that specializes in four-hour naps.”

  She picks up the phone. Franny must be there because Hannah engages in a short, precise conversation.

  “She asked me why I didn’t bring them over before.”

  *

  The girls agree to visit Aunt Franny without a struggle. It seems they really do get on with her. Franny is unmarried, once-divorced. She’s a high school English teacher, and when she opens the door, I can see she’s a miniature of her older sister.

  Hannah tells her we’re going to a movie and dinner and that we won’t be very late. Franny already knows about the attempted assault and about the break-in at Oakbrook, so she’s all for having the girls with her so they won’t be left on their own.

  Barbara and Beth protest that they’re really old enough to take care of themselves without a babysitter, but they go along with the scenario because they are indeed fond of their Aunt Franny, who’s a writer of adolescent fiction, Hannah explains to me. Franny seems to squirm when her older sister brings up her vocation beyond teaching.

  “I wrote some poetry that actually got into print, in college,” I tell her.

  “A policeman/author, huh?” she beams.

  I think I just made a new friend.

  *

  The four hours go by very quickly. It isn’t enough time to make love to her. The full deal would take a few months in bed together without interruptions. I cannot seem to tire of her. When we finish, I want her all over again and almost immediately. There is none of that male, “well, it’s been nice, and now I’m getting the hell out.” It wasn’t that way with Mary, either, although she seemed to like to get dressed and then go out and do something else in a hurry after we copulated.

  There is nothing quite like holding Hannah after we’ve made love. There is nothing similar in my life to just being physically near her when all the fireworks have ceased. The interim between the couplings never takes very long, though. The passion is intense, even firier than it was with Mary Janecko.

  It’s hard to explain the loss I feel when I have to leave her. It’s literally painful. I can’t tell her that yet because then I know I’ll scare the hell out of her. I’m going to have to follow Jack Clemons’ advice:

  “Leave them wanting more.”

  I have a hell of a time leaving her at all.

  *

  The Internal Affairs detectives have cleared me—with reservations. They said I might have waited for a clean shot at Thomas’s melon, without plugging the prosty too. Since she’s recovering, with my good fortune, they don’t think she’ll be prosecuting me for the harm I did her; Captain Pearce has reminded her of her probation for possession of heroin and other illicit drugs. She’s agreed to live and let live, in other words.

  They give me back my shield and my gun and I’m back in the saddle on a late November Tuesday.

  *

  We visit Carl Thomas at Christ Hospital on the southwest side.

  “Hello, Carl.”

  “You shot me, you prick. I don’t want to talk to you. Or him.”

  He means Jack.

  “You don’t have a choice,” I tell him.

  His public defender is standing right next to us.

  He looks at the PD, and the lawyer nods at him.

  “Talk to them, Carl. It might make a difference,” the public defender tells him.

  “What if I fire you and ask for another lawyer?”

  “He’d tell you the same thing, Carl. They’re after the big man in your thing.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Carl says, lying o
n his bright white hospital bed. There’s an armed uniform standing outside the door.

  “Carl. They have a witness who’ll fry you in deep fat. Talk to them, Carl.”

  He’s referring to Gerald, who’s ready to squeal sooey for our prosecuting attorney.

  “What’s the deal, then?”

  The PD now has clarified Carl’s situation for him.

  “You save your sorry life if you finger Anderson for us.”

  He smiles back at me.

  “You mean the oil terrorist?”

  “Whatever,” Jack says. “You just testify that Anderson was behind the deaths and you might save your own scrawny ass.”

  “I could give it a shot with a trial. See if they believe that idiot you’re threatening me with, whoever he is.”

  “You could get escorted to the gas chamber. Or maybe it’s the electric chair, Old Sparky. I can’t keep up with it, frankly, Carl,” I grin. “But I know it’ll be painful, especially those last few days before they torch you.”

  There’s no smirk on his face any more.

  “Well?” I ask him.

  “I need to think about it,” Thomas replies.

  “The offer is null and void the second Jack and I leave this room, Carl,” I explain.

  Thomas looks at his attorney, and the PD simply nods.

  “All right. All right. But I don’t know how much I can give you. I don’t know where he is right now. The guy floats. He’s got money.”

  “Coming to an end, there, Carl. It seems the IRS has issues with Benjamin’s lawyer-daddy. It was those same boys from IRS that put Capone away, and then Big Al promptly died of syphilis and other assorted ailments, and compared to Capone, Carl, you are very small potatoes indeed,” I smile again.

  “The last I knew, he was in the area. He’s got a hard-on for you, Detective Koehn. He’s had that stiffy since you began sniffing after us back in the shit, back in Iraq and Kuwait.”

  “Really?” I grin.

  “I wouldn’t be so cheery about Anderson wanting your throat, Detective. After all, he’s still out there. And you’re no closer to him than you were in the Middle East. He’s very smart, very clever. You couldn’t catch him then, and it isn’t likely you ever will.”