Black Angel

by Thomas Laird

  “Look, asshole, I’m touched about your concern for me, but no thanks. All I want is your confession and corroboration at trial. The prosecuting attorney here in Cook County has authorized us to offer you a shot at life in prison, which beats the shit out of the alternative. I’m betting that Gerald fries you after the jury hears about you and Nina and her near-death experience. I think our circumstantial case will bury your ass without any help from Gerald. What do you think, Carl?”

  Carl doesn’t answer. His court-appointed attorney just stares out the window at downtown Oak Lawn.

  *

  Now all we have to do is catch Anderson, which is like saying all we have to do is de-fang King Kong with a set of pliers. Finding him has been impossible since he staged his own death by burning up those two other Marines in Iraq. He’s slipped past the radar ever since his “disappearance.”

  So Jack suggests we go back to Arkady Kormelov, one more time.

  *

  “I can’t be seen with policemen so often,” he says to Jack.

  We’re at Morlinka’s Russian Tea House on Randolph Street in the Loop. It’s a genuine Russian restaurant, Jack told me.

  “I apologize, Arkady,” Jack tells the muscular Soviet. “But this is even more important than scoring Thomas.… And your eighteen-year-old phenom on the piano is now headed toward citizenship thanks to my INS lady friend, no?”

  Arkady grins at my partner.

  “There you have me, yes.… All right. But one more favor and we are quits, yes?”

  “Yes,” Jack agrees.

  “You are looking for a dead man. Am I correct in this?”

  “Yes,” Jack replies.

  “Then how in the fuck do you find a ghost? Do you ask a priest? Do you go to a medium?”

  Jack shrugs. I’m all out of advice.

  “You know lots of people. People who are involved in illegal pharmaceuticals,” Jack smiles. “Anderson’s father made his fortune defending trash in the court room. He amassed millions. Someone who made that kind of cash must have done business in this city. They would know how to find Sonny Boy. Through his father, Kady. Am I getting warm?”

  Arkady Kormelov shows us his fine white teeth. Now I see the predator in this charming thug.

  “You might be warming up,” he says, straight-faced.

  26

  When I arrive at the drop, my guy is waiting for me.

  “This is my last trip,” the young blond man with the wispy white mustache tells me. “Your old man is in the shit. The IRS wolf is at his door.”

  The two of us are standing in front of a park bench in Lincoln Park, near Lake Michigan. I can smell the water from here.

  “What’re you talking about?” I ask the young man with the silvery blond hair.

  “Your old man is going to get arrested by the feds. It’s any day now. Your cash cow is getting its fucking throat slit.”

  “You’re lying. You’re stealing my money for yourself. You know what I’ll…”

  “I’m telling you the fucking truth, man. They’ve caught Daddy messing with his tax returns. He’s going down officially for income tax evasion.”

  “My father… My foster father is being taken down by…”

  “You’ve grasped it, dude. Now give me my tip and I’m on my way and it’s adios muchacho forever.”

  “Are you Mexican?”

  “Who? Me? Are you fuckin’ kiddin’? What’s that?”

  “This? Oh, it’s called a k-bar.”

  “Now listen…”

  Before he gets another word off, I stab him in the forehead. He staggers back with my military blade stuck in the space between his two eyes and just above the eyebrows. The tip must have pierced his skull and made its way into his brain, because his eyes roll, and then he collapses onto his back.

  There is no one in Lincoln Park to observe the blond man’s death. It’s 3:46 a.m.., according to my lit Benrus watch. I drag his body into the shrubs behind the park bench, and then I see a male jogger approaching quickly. He starts to pull up and stop on the path in front of the bench. He sees me coming out of the bushes.

  “Something wrong?” he asks.

  I’ve got the k-bar palmed behind my back.

  “I was out for a walk, you know? Couldn’t sleep. And when I got where you are now I heard someone moaning.”

  “Is there someone back in there?”

  “I think so, but I can’t quite locate him in the dark. The street lamp doesn’t do much good back here.”

  “Hang on a minute.”

  The jogger, lithe and wiry-looking, approaches the bushes and me.

  “You say you heard what, where?”

  When he’s in front of me, I stick the k-bar in the small of his throat, and he staggers back the way the blond man did. When he falls on his back, I see a river of black blood rising from the gaping wound the k-bar has caused. I draw the knife out, and then I jab him repeatedly in the face until there’s no face left uncovered in gore. The blood is of course all over me, so after I drag his body into the bushes, I wipe the blade on my sleeve and I head for the beach and the Lake. It’s only a few blocks from here, and the sidewalks are deserted now. The jogger—what the hell was he doing, running at 4:00 in the morning?—and the wispy-mustached bagman are the only two other souls in my vicinity. It’s as if the rest of the city is sleeping. The cops, the firemen, all the municipal workers… No one’s here except for the three of us. And two of our trio is now very much elsewhere.

  I continue down onto the beach and I remove my shoes and wade into the icy water. I rinse my hands and my face. I’ve got a jacket made of cloth that I’ll get rid of. There is nothing I can see on my pants, in this dim light from the street lights that circle the beach’s parking lot. The only spray from the jogger hit me from the chest up.

  There is a pier nearby, so I walk out to the end of the pile of concrete blocks and I toss the jacket into the lake. I feel the chill from the wintry November air, so I hurry back inland. I run toward my parked Mustang, and then I make my way back toward the Stevenson Expressway. I drive south to Joliet. I get off at Route 30 and drive farther to the small farmhouse that my father’s associates rented for me.

  His friends are Italians. They are members of the Outfit. And they asked no questions when old Dad offered them some reliable legal advice in trade for the use of one of their safe houses. It’s good to have connections like my father’s, but it’s also worrisome to hear the bagman telling me the IRS is about to incarcerate the old man.

  I never knew the extent of my foster father’s mob-related activities until college. Then he bailed me out of trouble a few times, and he made the complaints literally disappear. My old guy has very good connections in several of the major cities.

  When I told him I was going to join the Marines, he almost had a seizure. He couldn’t believe I’d want anything to do with the military; he was convinced I’d become an attorney in his mold. I thought of getting into the kind of “business” my good dad was in. It’s very lucrative, naturally. But he was always very lavish with money whenever I wanted any. Later, he told me if he didn’t give it to me it might be lost in a real estate deal some day, so he figured he’d rather smother me in cash than let the banks have it if he ever got unlucky with property. His generosity made me very popular with women at the university, and I had more than a few good drinking buddies.

  I’ve never really been interested in the law or in the buying and selling of property.

  Killing gives me all the buzz I need.

  I watched the lights go out on the blond man at Lincoln Park. I watched the glow dim in the eyes of the jogger when he realized what was now intruding into the flesh of his throat. The facial wounds were all superfluous. They’ll make the police think it was an act of rage.

  I’m never angry when I take life. There is passion, yes. There is emotion. But there is never a point at which I lose control. I don’t allow it. It’s almost like a scientific experiment, every time it happens. I�
��m in control of life and death. A person passes me on the street, and I say to myself: “Is this the last moment of their existence?” I have control over their fates. I’m the manipulator of their destinies. It’s all in my hands. I’ve taken the controls from God, and now I am their lord and commander. Nothing in nature can stop me from sending them on their ways, dispatching them to heaven or hell or oblivion. It’s in no one’s hands but mine.

  It is, as they say, a rush.

  With limited monies, I’ll have to limit my movements, as well. I sit on the leather couch in my Joliet farmhouse. I turn on the TV to a 24 hour newscast, but news of the two murders hasn’t been reported yet. They may not find those two men for several hours. I’ve put them both in some thick foliage.

  Yes, I will have to curtail some of my plans in the United States until I can come up with a new source of income. If my father doesn’t get indicted by the IRS, perhaps he can connect me with the right Italians in Chicago or some other big burg. Or it’ll be the Russians or the Vietnamese—I don’t care, as long as I become liquid again.

  I look out the front window of this small brick house that sits on twenty acres of fallow land. There are trees and bushes to conceal a lot of the outside of this home, so it’s almost impossible to see me from the road that ends at a half-mile driveway that leads to the front door here.

  I’m well concealed. It would take an informer to help the police locate me. This place is truly off the beaten path.

  I was remembering my father’s reaction to my joining the Marines. I recall the look of disgust on his face when he heard what I planned. He was in the Vietnam War. He only enlisted to further his political career—he thought, back then, that he would someday run for public office, but it never turned out that way. He fucked up, in other words, because he could’ve got himself wasted. But he survived in spite of his blunder.

  My foster father was what you might call amoral, which is a good thing to be if you’re an attorney. Then you won’t mind defending people who don’t deserve justice. It’s a wonderful system we have in this country. Every piece of shit is equal to every other piece of shit—in theory, at least. Christ knows, the poor are fucked in this nation. But poverty and injustice do not interest me, either. I’m too busy trying to keep my face above the surface of the water. It’s that struggle to keep breathing that makes living interesting. And being one step ahead of my pursuers always makes my life vital and interesting. I’m never bored. Only those who indulge in routine become mired in the mundane, the everyday. If nothing else, my life is exciting. Never a dull moment, my dears.

  If I’m going to kill Detective Will Koehn and his brother Sammy and his father George, his mother who’s in a home, and Will’s mistress, Hannah Menke, and her two lovely, delectable daughters, Beth and Barbara, I will have to conserve all my finances. I will have to be sure to be careful with my outlay of cash, because that source of drachmas is quickly drying up, now that my war veteran old man has been stupid enough to become ensnared by the Internal Revenue Service. What an ignominious way to go—it’s the same way that Italian, Capone, was smoked. By a bunch of fucking accountants. How dreary. How bourgeois. How vulgar.

  I would have thought Dad would’ve liked to go down in a drive by at the hands of Dominicans or Cubans or some such Latin cretins. Like the movie Scarface, with Al Pacino. Now the way Tony Montana went down is the way my old man should’ve dreamed it up for himself. But to be handcuffed by a herd of CPAs? Christ, it’s just too funny.

  When I go, it won’t be with a whimper, but with a bang, like in The Wasteland. I’m a big fan of Machiavelli, and I’d much rather be feared than loved.

  It was I who kicked Hannah Menke’s door down after Carl Thomas told me things were becoming a bit too dangerous for the both of us. I was going to kill him, but Philip was there instead, and I missed my opportunity to rid myself of a co-conspirator. Thomas would have been caught eventually, and eventually is now, according to the newspapers. And suddenly another dead man has become a “person of interest.” That person is me, of course. They are “on to me,” as they say.

  How to do Will Koehn and crew before the rest of his boys get on to me?

  I could lay low and wait for the heat to evaporate. I could use my remaining funds, such as they are, and purchase a new identity, complete with plastic surgery to totally alter my appearance. I hesitate to change my face because of the ease of disguising it, and I also have become quite accustomed to the countenance that greets me in the mirror every morning.

  It was too dark to see that visage covered in the jogger’s blood in the surface of Lake Michigan. If there had been a full moon, then I might have had the opportunity to see myself bathed in someone’s blood. There is no equivalent snapshot in life.

  I do not expect to go out unscathed when I do meet with my end. I expect a bloodbath ending. It’s only just, only right, that I should burst into a crimson flame when I finally expire. I would prefer that that climax be put off for quite some time, but I do not fear extinction, I don’t dread death. It is a part and parcel of this life. The food chain insists that the stronger creature consume the smaller and the weaker. Darwin was the poet of our times. His words are made true every time one observes animals in the wild. And how dare we consider ourselves higher in the life chain than a cheetah or a lioness? We’re predators as they are, our eyes squarely in the front of our faces. It is ludicrous to suggest our nature is really any different from theirs.

  Ah, there. I have waxed philosophical for long enough. I could never engage in such discourse in the Marines because my fellow leathernecks were far more interested in common pussy and even more common brew, beer. There was no one to talk to in the Corps, and that is why I decided to bug out and leave, go AWOL. The danger of such a move was also a consideration because the excitement of wasting Iraqis was becoming tedious too. It literally was like shooting ducks in the proverbial barrel. It was all too easy. Pulling off the murders of the Kuwaiti girls and their entire families.… Now that had a little more pizzazz to it!

  The adventure of returning to the United States. The immigration back to my native soil. All very exciting stuff.

  Now the old fossil, my daddy, has to shut off my life’s blood because he wasn’t clever enough to avoid some bright math students in the IRS. I feel like shooting the old son of a bitch myself.

  Perhaps I needed a closer relationship to a mother-figure. That might have put me on the right and proper path. I might not have turned out murderous if I’d had a more tender tit to suck on. I’m not a fan of breasts, anyway. Women don’t fascinate me, except as objects for the cat to toy with before it snaps the prey’s neck.

  Will Koehn is what someone might call my antithesis. He’s a bit different from me. I wonder if he’s religious, as well? But I’ve never seen him go into a church.…

  Oh yes, I saw him enter St. Stanislaus recently. But he didn’t stay long, and it wasn’t a Sunday, nor were there masses scheduled while he was there. No, but they did have a confessional listing on their bulletin board. So young Will must have been unburdening himself to a padre. Interesting. He’s having a moral dilemma.

  You might ask me: Why Will Koehn? My answer would be that I knew his type. I knew his kind, all my life. They were the children of privilege, but I’m not talking about money. They were the kids who had real parents. Those loveable moms and pops you see on television and in the movies. They inhabit my nightmares.

  Maybe you think it’s jealousy, and in a way you might be correct. But it goes deeper than that. Some of my foster parents thought I was mentally ill. That, however, is a pat and facile way to explain me away. I will not be dissected so easily, no.

  Some might call me unnatural. I understand there is no fair play in nature. I understand that some children are born under lucky stars and are endowed with loving, biological parents and that some youngsters have the cruel fate of being passed from household to household like a pet cat that no one wants to keep, any longer. It brews bitterness,
being handed about as I have. It’s no great mystery why I’m the way I am. It is nothing but logical for me to be a furious man. I direct my spleen at God. He’s the rotten son of a bitch who fated me with this existence, and now I have the divine purpose of getting even with the Bastard.

  I don’t need a fancy shrink to tear me into edible pieces to be devoured by the animals around me. You can see their predators’ eyes in every bush. They lurk on the periphery, and you have to be strong and brutal to keep them at bay.

  Why Will Koehn? He’s everything I despise. And he’s inherited everything he has through dumb fucking luck: a father, a mother and a brother. All of them tied in the blood.

  All I can do to get even with people like Will Koehn is to spill some of that precious blood.

  You see, it’s what I do.

  27

  I take Hannah to the gun shop to get her outfitted with a handgun that will suit her needs. She’s fairly petite, although she is in great physical condition. She does use a gym and she does run all the time—which I’m concerned about, for safety reasons. She insists running indoors at her club will be the only compromise she’ll make for me because she says she won’t allow Benjamin Anderson and his crew to take over her life. She has a point, but it still frightens the shit out of me when I think of her alone anywhere.

  We go to a shop that a lot of cops use for their personal hardware. It’s on the far northwest side, and the police come here because the owner, Art Michaels, is an ex-Homicide who is very scrupulous about his chosen business contacts. His paperwork and background checks are famous in this city.

  “I suggest the .38 snub nose,” he tells us. “She looks strong enough for the kickback, and it has the stopping power I believe you’re looking for, Ma’am,” he smiles at Hannah.

  Hannah takes the piece in her hand.

  “You know the most important rule,” Art warns her.

  He’s a big, beefy Mick. Sandy-red hair and flushed cheeks. Very popular with the ladies, the legend goes, in the day.