Black Angel

by Thomas Laird

  Tiny Tim says: “God bless us all.”

  I miss Sammy, right now. He’s with his girlfriend at her parents’ house.

  “I’m getting tired of this movie,” George Koehn says.

  *

  The LA cops have made overtures to David Crowley concerning the whereabouts of his foster son, but to no good end. The lawyer seems to be willing to go down with the ship and one large rat, his son Benjamin.

  We’ve reached out to the various gangs in town to see if anyone wants to trade a favor, but there are no offers out there. They really don’t seem to know where our man is either.

  He could be using disguises to move about. He could be going out only at night so he is more difficult to spot. It’s not likely he’s gone to a plastic surgeon because our department has those physicians pretty well blanketed—even the not-so-legitimate surgeons. They know that if Anderson contacts them they better be in touch with us immediately. Aiding and abetting is no joke in this city and state.

  We’ve thrown out the net for one big fish, and sooner or later he has to get snagged in the lines.

  *

  New Year’s Eve is when I take out the ring at Hannah’s. I can’t wait for the axe to fall on Anderson’s neck any longer.

  Much to my surprise, Hannah utters, “Yes.” I had prepped myself for a negative response, and I was going to tell her I understood why my timing was lousy, but she jolted me with a quick and definite affirmative.

  “You’ll make a big fan out of my ex. No more alimony. Nothing but child support until they turn eighteen.”

  She smiles and kisses me.

  We’re going to be married in June, as corny as it sounds to both of us.

  The ring cost me three months’ pay. It’s a fair-sized diamond, but you would have thought it came from King Solomon’s Mines the way she beamed over it when I slipped it on her ring finger.

  “It’s stunning. I love it,” she declared.

  The kids were with Dad on New Year’s, so we made love on the couch. We fell asleep ten minutes after midnight. The emotion was a bit too much for both of us, I figured.

  The sound came from her kitchen. We were naked underneath her comforter on the couch and the TV was still on without sound, but I heard the noise clearly and it jarred me out of sleep. Hannah mumbled something incoherent, but I told her to go back to sleep. She put her head back down on the pillow.

  I got up and threw my jeans on and a tee shirt. I kept my weapon and holster underneath the couch, so I reached for them and retrieved them. Then I walked barefoot toward the kitchen. It was the room adjacent to the living room, so it was close by. There was not much light coming out from the crack where the swinging door swivels, but there was a dim glow from the nightlight she always keeps burning in there.

  I shoved the swinging door open, and there was nothing there to shoot at. Just the stuff that belonged in her galley-type kitchen. Pots and pans hanging where they belonged. A sink with no dishes. Drawers for utensils of every ilk.

  She has a security system, so if anyone enters the house, it should have gone off by now. There’s a loud alarm that fires up inside as well as outside. No silent alarm for Hannah. She wants something to scare the shit out of any intruder.

  I walk slowly through the room with my gun pointed in front of me, and I swivel to sweep the entire area as we were first taught to do in NCIS and then later in the Academy in Chicago. There is no one here.

  So I try the study that is next, after the kitchen. I flip on the lights and find that nothing has been disturbed. I’m thinking that I would be able to smell Anderson’s presence, but there are no unusual scents in the air. My hair is up on my back. It’s as though I sense him, right behind me.

  Next, I ascend the stairs toward the girls’ bedroom. I check Barbara’s room, and then Beth’s. Still nothing. I look in the upstairs bedroom and the situation remains the same. It’s deserted. No one.

  So I come back downstairs, my gun finally lowered. I flick on the low wattage bulb farthest away from Hannah and the couch, and when I look up, I find my naked fiancée pointing a snubnosed .38 right at my noggin.

  I raise my hands.

  “Don’t shoot me, darlin’,” I plead.

  “Jesus, Will! Where the hell did you go?”

  “Thought I heard the boogey man.”

  “That isn’t funny.”

  “No, it’s not, Hannah. Lower the gun, huh?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Hey.”

  She begins to cry.

  “I can’t keep looking for goblins in the dark, Will.”

  “You won’t have to. You have my word.”

  I wrap us both in the comforter, and a bit later things get out of hand again on that couch.

  *

  January is a long month. Almost as long as March, I think. The three months before spring arrives are usually dreary, drawn-out matters. It’s on the order of cabin fever. You get cramped up being inside most of the time. It seems like it’s always snowing or sleeting or dipping below zero, especially when The Hawk swoops off the Lake from the northeast.

  Northern Europeans are said to be prone to alcoholism, and part of the problem is relegated to the climate. I don’t know how that works with the steep rate of homicide and mayhem in sunny Florida and temperate California, but there are those who adhere to the notion that the weather brings the loonies out to play.

  Maybe. But it doesn’t draw Captain Benjamin Anderson out to the surface where we can lay irons on him. He lurks just below. It’s almost like Dante’s Nine Concentric Rings. Anderson has put himself below ground, but we can’t be sure how far he’s descended. My preference would be the Ninth Circle where Judas is being munched on by Satan, but Iscariot never gets consumed. Now there’s some frontier justice.… Too bad it’ll go down easier for our guy if he’s caught. I have the sick feeling he’ll be placed in a mental institution instead of getting himself a firing squad, like the good old days in the military.

  No punishment is really good enough for him. What would justice entail? Torturing him and then finishing him, like old English jurisprudence? The punishment is supposed to fit the crime. One of the most imaginative ones I remember reading about concerns putting a cage over a man’s head with fiercely hungry rats inside it. That’d make one hell of a training film for thugs, wouldn’t it?

  The old man told me he didn’t want me to join the ranks of those very same thugs, but it’s getting more difficult all the time not to want to become part of that crew from The Oxbow Incident. The only difference is that if I were part of that posse this time, we’d be hanging the right man.

  29

  My mother’s name is Vivian. She is seventy-one years old, but she might as well be six. She’s been in the ‘home’ for more years than I can remember, now.

  I’m tracking a mass murderer, I’m engaged to a woman a decade older than myself who has two young-adult children, my father’s house has been ravaged by that same above-mentioned maniac, and I’ve got a “little” brother who’s been threatened in a subtle way by that same nut, Anderson. Then I have to make my semi-annual visit to my Alzheimer’s-destroyed mother. It’s been a pretty fucked up six months, I’d say. The only shining spot to date is Hannah and her daughters.

  The visits are as brief as they are useless. Perhaps “hopeless” is the word I was looking for, because my mother, Vivian, naturally, doesn’t know who the hell I am.

  Her ward reminds me of the glaring whiteness of the hospital walls in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Everything, indeed, appears porcelain and bone white, as a lot of medical centers look. I have always had an aversion for such places, but my mother seems to be treated with patience and kindness here at Rosewood Clinic. The people who care for her seem to actually care for Vivian. They talk to her gently and calmly, and there has never been an incident at Rosewood to suggest their treatment of patients is any different after visiting hours.

  “Am I dying?
” my mother asks me.

  There is no special emotion attached to the query. It’s very matter-of-fact in tone.

  “No, Momma, you’re not dying. You’re still a young woman.”

  “Where’ve you been, Bobby?”

  “I’m Will, Momma. You have two sons. Sammy and me. I’m Will, your older son.”

  “Oh. I thought you looked like Bobby.”

  “I don’t know a Bobby, I don’t think.”

  “You look like Bobby.”

  I gaze around her private room. It’s fairly spacious, with TV, double bed, wardrobe cabinet made of maple wood, sink, and adjoining bathroom. It’s a very decent accommodation, it appears to me.

  “I’m Will, Momma.”

  “I know. I was just kidding.”

  But there’s no smile.

  “You’re the policeman, aren’t you?”

  She has her moments of lucidity now and then.

  “Yes, Momma. I am.”

  “Do you catch killers?”

  “Yes, I do. Sometimes.”

  “But sometimes they get away.”

  “Yes, Momma, I’m sorry to say they do get away.”

  “Caught any of those bad guys lately?”

  “A few.”

  “That’s good, Bobby. There are lots of terrible people in this world.”

  “I’m Will.”

  “Yes. Yes, I forgot. You’re my older boy, aren’t you?”

  My mother has aqua colored eyes. She was once a very beautiful woman. My Dad used to tell me about all the competition he had before she agreed to marry him. She’s tall, about 5’ 9”, and she never had any extra weight on her frame. She looked like a female distance runner, but not quite that severely skinny. More like a tall ballet dancer, I’d say. But when she trained those aqua-hued eyes at you, it felt as if you were in the crosshairs of a sniper’s scope. She had that way of engaging you with her glance.

  She was a schoolteacher, taught the sixth grade until she retired at sixty-two, almost ten years ago. It wasn’t long after that that she succumbed to this disease. She deteriorated within three years to the point that Dad had to put her here where she could be taken care of round the clock.

  “Bobby, you don’t look too good. Is something bothering you?”

  I don’t argue about “Bobby” anymore.

  “I’m fine, Mom.”

  “Your name is Will. I forgot.”

  “You look pretty good, though, Momma.”

  “I’m dying. You’re lying.”

  “You’re not dying, Momma.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Not really. The daffodils will bloom again this year. They do every year.”

  “They will. You’re right.”

  “I was never much of a rose woman. They live too briefly. Their beauty dies with too much rapidity.”

  My mother had a Master’s degree in elementary education. She read a lot. I got my love of poetry from her DNA, it looks like. Now she can’t read because she can’t remember the sentence that she read before the sentence she’s reading.

  “Where’s your father?”

  “He’s at home.”

  “When’s he coming to see me? He never comes to see me.”

  “He visits you all the time, Momma.”

  “There are too many evil people in this world. Your father had to kill them all in the war.”

  “He didn’t kill them all, Momma. He was a soldier, just one man.”

  “Then he should have killed them all.… I have a son who’s a policeman. He used to play football, and then he became a policeman. He catches bad men. He’s told me so.”

  I look out her window. There is snow on the ground. It has been an almost-Arctic winter to date, temperature-wise, but we’ve been spared the snowstorms. Mostly, we’ve received the light dustings that cover the earth and the concrete in the same bone-white as I see inside her room.

  “Do you love me, William?”

  “I always have and I do.”

  I can’t believe how lucid she sounds at this moment. It’s as if she’s suddenly come back to Earth.

  “Oh. I was just wondering.”

  And she looks out the window into the white world that extends past her window.

  *

  Jack Clemons is a ladies’ man, regardless of his protests to the contrary. He has a girlfriend in the INS, but he has lady friends scattered all throughout the city. I’m surprised one or more of them haven’t shot him because he plays a large deck of cards with all his “relationships.” There’s nothing predictable or uniform about Jack’s female harem. They come in all colors and all sizes, as well. He isn’t prejudiced against “big” women. He loves them all, all shapes and sizes, like the song in Gigi. Except they’re not little girls. They’re all adults, of course.

  He has a fondness for the female sex that goes beyond “appreciation.” He’s a student of them, and I have to say he understands them far better than I do.

  We’re at Burger King on a snowier-than-usual Saturday morning in late January. The Holidays have fled, and we’re entering the dregs of winter.

  “You have to experience deep pain before you can fathom the feminine mind,” Jack smiles at me.

  He’s got the Extreme Omelet Meal. I’ve gone with a Whopper with cheese. I can eat hamburgers any time, which frustrates and infuriates Hannah whenever I order a burger early in the morning when we’re out somewhere.

  “You can’t know women unless you empathize with their personal agonies. My old man used to say, ‘never trust a creature that bleeds every twenty-eight days but doesn’t die.’”

  “That’s spectacularly misogynistic, Jack.”

  “Is that a fucking word?”

  He’s got his merry prankster face on his puss.

  “How the fuck do I know? But your old man was full of nineteenth century shit.”

  “You’re probably right.… How’s it going with the fiancée?”

  He winks like a conspirator.

  “Good.”

  “You sure you want me in the wedding party? A misogynistic fuck like me?”

  Now he’s leering at me with his wise-guy grin.

  “Sammy’s my best man because he’s my brother, but you’re the only friend I’ve really got.”

  “I am?”

  “Yeah. What’s so odd about that?”

  “Because, Will, best friends tend to hang out together—outside of the workplace. We really only hang when we’re on shift.”

  His countenance goes serious and solemn on me. His sincerity briefly takes me by surprise.

  “So? We go out to dinner or we play golf or bowl. Isn’t that what buddies do?”

  “Yeah. Exactly. Didn’t you have any bros in the Marines or in the NCIS?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “What about that Pete Donato character?”

  “He was my partner, but I stayed alone, over outside the World.”

  The World is here in the United States.

  “You didn’t hang with anyone when you were in the military or overseas in the Navy cops?”

  “Not really.”

  “You sat around reading your gay poets,” he says with a mock sneer on his face.

  So much for the sad-faced, serious Jack Clemons.

  Clemons has gay friends too. He’s introduced me to a few when we’d be out in the city from time to time on dinner or lunch break. For a guy with archaic attitudes about women, sometimes he can surprise you with his liberality.

  “Yeah, I sat around reading my fairy queen poets, Jack.”

  “You are a very hard case, Detective Koehn.”

  A redhead walks by who gathers my partner’s attention.

  “I like a woman with just a little too much clustering in her caboose.”

  “You are really lost. You really are a pig.”

  “I know. But I’m loveable. Just ask any of my legion of love.”

  I can only roll my eyes.

  “Has this cocksucker gone under the ground for good?”
he asks suddenly.

  It’s been weeks since we heard a word about Anderson. The Captain’s anxious, I’m worried, and even Lover-Boy here appears genuinely concerned. Jack doesn’t take our caseload to personal heart, he keeps lecturing me. Which is why he’ll burn out far later than I will on this job. I’m beginning to believe him. Except that he’s really a bullshit artist at heart, and not just with the girls in his life. He’s a serious man hiding behind his feminine smokescreen. The guy cares, and he isn’t about to snow me under with his bullcrap.

  “No. Anderson is alive and thriving, if my guess is good. The only thing that’s going to stop him is a fucking stake in the heart. That’s the way all monsters have to die, Detective Clemons.”

  I feel a quick flush of heat in my cheeks.

  “Do I detect a note of levity?”

  “What do you do besides chase pussy?” I ask him.

  “What else is there to do that is worthy of my time and toil, Detective?”

  You can’t make him stay serious for long. He shows those glittering white teeth to me again.

  “You have a point.”

  “I work with wood.”

  “You what?” I ask.

  “I work with wood. Can’t I do something untwisted in my little life?”

  “What kind of woodwork?”

  “I make flutes.”

  “Now you’re fucking with me.”

  “No. I make little flutes and I give them to kids in the street, mostly. I give them to hospitals and they give them to children also.”

  He’s staring at me as if he’s giving testimony under oath.

  “Are you whacking me, partner?”

  “I like having whacking done to me. Not a big fan of servicing others that way, Will.”

  His face is absolutely deadpan, so I think he’s being upfront with me.

  “You make little flutes for little kids.”

  “Yeah. You know about idle hands and the devil.… When I have loose time, I carve them. Bet you didn’t know I majored in music in college, played a pretty mean recorder, too.”

  “Now you’ve gone way over the top of the lid, Jack.”