Black Angel

by Thomas Laird

  We drive back to Oakbrook, kissing and mauling each other at every intersection with a red light, regardless of nearby cars that might witness our unabashed lust for each other.

  We barely make it out of my Cavalier and into her Oakbrook house before we begin to disrobe hurriedly on the way up the stairs to Hannah’s bedroom. Luckily the girls are once again with their father, so we’ll have no embarrassing scene with the kids on the stairway.

  We’re halfway up the flight when I grab hold of the banister for support as she hooks her right leg over me and lets me join her here. I feel her heat as we come together, and she climaxes as soon as I enter her. But I’m able to withstand that irresistible desire to flood her with my seed at the beginning of our coupling.

  She is able to hang both legs around my waist, now, and I let go of the banister and begin to ascend the last few stairs to the top landing that lies in front of the bedrooms. When I struggle to get us to the upper floor, I stand still as she undulates atop me. Her hips lunge at me in an insistent rhythm. Finally I let us settle to the floor where we make love in the traditional fashion.

  “I want a baby with you,” she whispers.

  “I want what you want.”

  “Well, I skipped my pill tonight,” she grins.

  “Good foresight,” I grin back.

  She urges herself up at me, and then I can no longer control the tide. It happens quickly and intensely, and Hannah smiles up at me as she wastes me lovingly.

  *

  I take her to target practice regularly, three times a week. I have all my stuff out of the Clark Street apartment, and I’m fully moved in. I have to keep the Chicago address, though, because I have to live in the city to work for the cops. It’s a rule we have that I never thought about until I considered moving in here and ditching the flat in New Town. Jack tells me I can either lie about my residence or keep paying for the place on Clark Street. I think I’ll opt to just renew the lease. Unless Hannah wants to move to the city after we’re married. Which I don’t see happening. And I have to admit that I love it at her place. So I’ll keep the apartment and reconsider subletting it. Maybe Sammy, my brother, might want to live there after he graduates.

  I’m not giving up my job or my badge; that much I know for sure.

  *

  I still see the crime scenes in Kuwait sometimes in my dreams. Things like that are not so easy to turn away from and leave forever. They haunt you and stay with you as if they happened to you personally, which in a way they did. It is difficult to remain aloof and separate from the madness I witnessed in the Middle East. The madness I’m referring to is not limited to the murders I investigated. It includes the terror of those criminal investigations as well. You cannot harden yourself to make things impersonal, just business, no matter how tough or military you might consider yourself. If there is a shred of humanity inside yourself, you suffer at the sight of what “human” beings can perpetrate on one another. If you don’t show that reaction on your face or with your body language, then it manifests itself in your subconscious and in your dreams. That’s the way it happens with me. For all the cool I try to transmit on my exterior, I pay for it all on the inside.

  So I return to Kuwait to those dual scenes of misery and lunacy. I see what Benjamin Anderson and Carl Thomas and Philip Brandon spawned as a result of an Internet conspiracy that was supposed to have some political meaning to Brandon and Thomas, at least to explain its ferocity. Now we know it was all slight-of-hand on the Captain’s part, but knowing why doesn’t relieve the nightmare he created and executed.

  How could someone supposedly human, like Anderson, grow into the thing who mutilated at least three young girls and the beast who destroyed the girls’ families as those dying children watched?

  I could spend the rest of my career and the entirety of my life trying to unravel that ultimate mystery: evil. Why is there such a grand dose of it in our world? Better minds than mine have gone full tilt trying to fathom the causes of such despicable human behavior.

  Blame it on the devil and his demons. Say it’s the work of the indifference of the cold, materialistic, spiritually-depleted society around us, and still it gives us no comfort to know why.

  I’ve read a lot of the Russians. Especially Dostoevsky. He went into that black ocean in Crime and Punishment and in some of his similar stories. Raskolnikov was an axe murderer in Crime. He hacked up an old pawnbroker to steal her goods and then spends the rest of the novel trying to free himself from his conscience before he ultimately confesses to Porfiry Petrovich, the detective. Then he goes to Siberia for seven years and it is suggested by the author at the end that Raskolnikov has been reborn by his love for Sonia, his hooker significant other. The book’s a classic psychological study because it explores the psyche of a killer, but it doesn’t cop out by making Raskolnikov a fucking nut! He was deadly sane when he wasted the old lady pawnbroker. He couldn’t explain his crime away with “madness” as a plea!

  I wish it would become the same scenario for Benjamin Anderson, series murderer. I wish he would have a conflict with his conscience and then come find me and confess and get himself thrown into a hole for eternity, if, by some legal loophole, Illinois refuses to execute him. I don’t really care anymore if he gets the death sentence, of course. I wish it would work out neatly, as it does in the storyline of Crime and Punishment, where the bad guy comes to justice.

  Justice seems fainter and more remote as each day passes in my real world here in Chicago. This is not St. Petersburg, and there is no literary logic and logical denouement here. Bad guys get away with murder, and the old truth about the longer a case goes without closure.

  Dostoevsky dramatized murder, as all writers do. Real murderers sometimes avoid the justice and the closure that novelists give us, the readers, and knowing all that scares the shit out of me no matter how much I’m aware that you can’t catch them all.

  This one has to be nabbed. He can’t slip through time’s fissures. He has to be stopped! I know Clemons is right---it is counter-productive to obsess about him; but I have no choice. Too much is at stake. Too many lives are involved. Sammy and my father and Hannah and her girls. My mother. Myself. He has no right to dangle this noose over our heads, but it’s dangling, nevertheless.

  “Will you come to school and talk about what you do?” Beth asks me.

  I have to think it over for a beat.

  “You want me to frighten your classmates? And how’re you going to explain our…relationship?”

  “You’re my mom’s fiancé.”

  “That sounds cool. Say it again.”

  She smiles and I’m hooked. Show and tell day for her is next week. I’ll have to get a couple hours personal time to make the appearance for her, but I never really considered turning Beth down.

  *

  This is domesticity, except for the anxiety and dread business that is mutely present in our lives. We go shopping on Saturdays and we buy our necessaries at the Mart place and at a local meat market. The only things which distinguish Hannah and me from all the other shoppers at both places are the automatic in my shoulder holster and the .38 snubnose in Hannah’s purse.

  I’ve taught her to wrap the handles of her purse around her elbow so that some street booster doesn’t snatch the bag and the piece out on the curb somewhere. So far, she’s done everything I’ve suggested.

  We bring the groceries back home and we prepare our meals at noon or at six in the evening. We go out to movies as a family, sort of, and the girls go to school every day, and we go to our own jobs, and it’s all very ordinary.

  The girls know the danger they’re in because I’ve talked it over with them. I am very proud of the stiff-upper-lip they’ve assumed. And I don’t think it’s false courage. I think they’re just as strong as their mother.

  Except no one else in the neighborhood is being sought out by a Marine-trained murderer. We have that one distinction, all to ourselves.

  33

  Interesting ma
n, Detective Will Koehn. He’s shaken up his routine by changing his route to the Loop every day, and I’m sure he’s watching for a tail, although he’s being followed by a police car with two plainclothesmen inside. They don’t appear to be taking any pains to stay out of sight, probably because they want to discourage someone exactly like me from following the homicide investigator and ex-NCIS dick.

  I wonder if he’s had some warm family get-togethers, lately. I’m wondering if he’s been over to his father’s place and if he’s had a cozy meal with the patriarch. Maybe he’s been down to Champaign to visit his brother, the ex-jock, and his sweet little live-in mamasan. It’s almost saccharine, the way they all relate to each other so lovingly. Makes me want to puke, every time I think of them. It’s like a fucking Norman Rockwell cover for The Saturday Evening Post.

  I remember the NCIS policemen as having little paunches at the belly. And they wore gray or navy blue suits so it was easy to pick them out in a crowd. They all looked like junior FBI agents. They came aboard our ships and told us not to shoot the indigenous personnel in Kuwait or in Iraq. It was all anyone could do not to laugh at them, but they were so solemn in their duties that we withheld any merriment, more or less.

  I have trailed after the good detective on earlier occasions, notably the foray to that Lakeside museum. Now I have to be carful to alternate the three vehicles I have been supplied with by one James Zagnarelli, capo of the Chicago Outfit and certainly no fan of Koehn’s. Will apparently tried to muscle Jimmy Z into helping the cop locate me. Since I laid fifty large on the wop, I am now back in his good graces. He’s found three “rental” cars for me, and none of them are hot. They were paid for in cash out of the fifty Gs. He said he wanted to see the policeman dead for the insulting way he talked to him at one of Jimmy’s restaurants. I was more than happy to pledge my help in making his wishes for Will Koehn come true.

  *

  She lives alone in an apartment. She has no current paramours that I have been able to spot. I was expecting Koehn to come visit her, but apparently their relationship has been severed. Still, they were at one time a hot item. He made frequent visits to her home here, and it was pretty obvious that they were having some kind of horizontal boogie joy together. It’s got to hurt when he hears I’ve killed her.

  I come up her stairs at 2:12 a.m. She’s been settled in for at least four hours. I’m sure she’s an early riser, having watched her for three consecutive days, now.

  It is mid-April. It is false spring, my favorite time of year. Today, on this early morning, Mary Janecko gets hers.

  I pick her lock quickly and quietly, but she’s clever enough to have a chain on her door. I have to use my pincer device to open the chain before the door swings all the way open.

  Inside it is pitch dark. The bedroom must be off to the left, down her hallway. I wait a beat to progress toward her, and then I walk softly down that hall. The bathroom door has been left open, and there is a dim nightlight on inside. It helps guide my way toward the last door, which has to be her boudoir. There are no other choices left.

  I crack open the bedroom entry and walk in stealthily. I hear no sound, and there is no light inside. I see a shape on the bed. I take the k-bar out of my pea coat, and then I inch toward that form. When I reach the bedside, a light snaps on behind me.

  “Noisy little bugger you are,” she says.

  I turn and see a woman dressed in navy blue sweats pointing a nine millimeter handgun at my face.

  “Drop the blade,” she tells me.

  Very demanding. I like it.

  I drop the k-bar on the floor. It thumps softly on her thick carpet.

  “On your knees,” she says.

  “No,” I reply.

  “Pardon me?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll kneecap you, you son of a bitch.”

  “Go ahead. I won’t kneel.”

  She looks at my knees as if picking a target. I’m standing next to her nightstand. The telephone lies on top. It’s a pink “Princess” phone, and it tickles me to know it’s in her bedroom.

  She moves slowly toward the telephone.

  “Back up,” she orders.

  So I back up.

  She’s within three steps of the nightstand, and I have my shoulder blades against her papered wall.

  When she takes one more step toward me, I lower my shoulder and charge her. The weapon explodes with a shot, and I feel a searing stab in my right shoulder. It knocks me backward, but while I’m on the floor, scrambling, I grab hold of the k-bar. She appears a bit woozy from my tackle, and she doesn’t see the blade in my right hand. I try to sit up, and I see her staggering sideways, the piece pointed toward the floor. I lunge out at her with everything I can muster, and I succeed in leaping far enough forward to spear her left foot with my knife.

  She screeches in horror and in pain as she sees the handle of the k-bar quivering on top of her foot. She tries to raise the barrel of the nine millimeter toward me. I’m on my back again, and I know I’m bleeding heavily, but when she tries to aim the gun at me again, this time she falls back on the bed behind her.

  I rise to my feet. I hear footsteps outside her door, and then the footsteps recede and go away down the hall. I want to take that gun or the knife and finish her, but I don’t have time. Someone has already made the call to the police by now, and I’ve got to get the hell out of here.

  *

  I’m driving with crossed eyes. I finally make it to a phone booth on Crossplains Avenue. I swoon my way to the phone and find some change, and then I dial the number. It’s after three in the morning, and fortunately, I’m able to prop myself up in the booth for thirteen minutes, as I make it on my watch, and then Jimmy Z’s man appears in a Lincoln Town Car beside my booth.

  *

  It costs another thirty grand for him to get me medical aid. He’s put me up in another safe house near a farm in Mokena, not far from the Joliet site that I inhabited once before.

  “This is it, Anderson,” Zagnarelli himself tells me when I wake up and find him and a woman standing by my bed. “Your goodwill has run out. I don’t give a fuck about your money, and if you rat me out with the cops, I’ll cut you into ground chuck myself. Are you getting the picture here? Because you’ll be flat on your ass for a few weeks. You’ve lost a lot of fuckin’ blood. Helene, here, is a nurse—or she used to be. She’ll watch over you. And as soon as you’re walkin’, you’re the fuck outta here. Capeesh?”

  I nod. I feel like throwing up.

  “Good. You better disappear forever this time, asshole. You stabbed a fuckin’ FBI agent. You killed a cop. Your life expectancy was up yesterday, asshole. I’m havin’ no more to do with your sad ass. I hope I make myself clear. You and Koehn are quits as far as I’m concerned. Go kill people somewhere other than Chicago, or I’ll do their job for them. You follow?”

  I nod again.

  *

  Helene is a good-looking nurse. She’s in her early forties, and she shows me that’s she’s carrying a .22 pistol just in case, as her boss, Jimmy Z put it, “I get frisky.” She says she’d be happy to cap me herself, but she has orders to do so only in self-defense.

  Since I have no weapons of my own presently, and since I’m as weak as a wounded rabbit, Helene has all the cards in her hand. I’m not interested in killing her, anyway.

  But I might try recruiting her.

  *

  After four days—we’re in the third week in April now—I’m regaining strength. This ex-surgical nurse has sewn my wound and told me it was superficial in nature, regardless of all the bleeding I did on the way over here. She says Jimmy Z had to torch the car they transported me with. The car I was using was towed away from the phone booth and burned to the ground as well.

  “You are a very pretty woman,” I tell her.

  “You tell all your victims the same thing?” she smiles at me.

  “I didn’t kill those girls and their families. I just watched.”

  “You a
re a very twisted young man,” she grins.

  “I must be like a lot of the people you ‘work’ for.”

  “I’m not a whore. I just do medical work for Jimmy’s associates.”

  “The kind of work he can’t hire from a regular hospital, right?”

  “You have grasped it, Mister Serial Killer.”

  “I’m no such thing. You’ve got it all wrong.”

  “Sure. And that’s why that FBI lady splattered you in her bedroom. You’re just misunderstood.”

  “Can’t we be friends, Helene?”

  “If you take one step toward me for any reason, I’ll pop you with this Saturday night widow-maker. You ever seen what a .22 does to a piece of meat?”

  “I’m conversant with firearms, yes.”

  “Are you conversant with brain-dead as a minimal injury from one shot to the noggin with this handgun? It’s the Mafia weapon of choice, killer.”

  “Again, you have me all wrong.”

  “Step off that mattress and you’ll never have to worry about being misunderstood again.”

  “I think we’ve’ come to terms.”

  “I’m giving you some morphine so you’ll sleep and shut the fuck up, Anderson. By the way, I don’t like you. You aren’t charming at all.”

  She sticks me with a shot, and a chill follows the fire of the hypo.

  *

  I dream of oil fires in Iraq. I see flames shooting up from derricks. I see charred bodies along the highways, most of them native bodies, not American. I see the faces of those two families in Kuwait. I see their surprise as Carl Thomas aims his rifle at them and as he makes them cower on their knees before the three of us—Brandon, himself and me.

  Their eyes seem to roll back in their skulls even before the fun begins. The first little girl faints as Thomas tears her clothes off. There can be no greater insult to a Muslim than to see his daughter deflowered before his very eyes. I don’t participate in the rapes or the shootings or the hangings. I watch. I’m an observer. I’m the director of this scene, not a participant. They are all actors performing my script. I have orchestrated this home movie, but no one is filming it. Too many so-called “series killers” make the mistake of taking mementos of their killings from the sites. They want reruns of the deaths so they can watch them over and over.