Black Angel

by Thomas Laird

  “I’ll try.… What if he doesn’t answer the phone?”

  “Count ten slow after the fifth ring. On ten, you better be out of the way. Please, Will. After ten, he’s never going to hear another count in his lame fucking existence. Just make sure you’re out of the line of fire. Please, because we’re going in, one way or the other. This guy don’t walk, today.”

  I nod, and he cuffs me warmly on my right shoulder.

  I proceed toward the door. I knock when I arrive in front of it.

  “You unarmed?” he bellows behind the entry.

  “Yes.”

  “You better be, Will, or I’ll shoot your father first, and then you.”

  “I’m unarmed.”

  “Tell your SWAT friends that they’re unwelcome here!” he shouts through the door.

  He couldn’t have seen them through my father’s windows. They were all parked a good half-block south of here. And the block on either side has already been quietly vacated. No cop has come within one hundred yards of my father’s home here in Bridgeport. He’s trying to anticipate me.

  “I came alone, like you said.”

  “Really, Will? You wouldn’t lie to me, would you? Because this .22 has a hair trigger.”

  “Are you going to let me in or not?”

  The door cracks open.

  I go inside, and then he slams me against the entry and frisks me. He doesn’t have a gentle touch.

  “You came alone? Truly?” he whispers in my ear, the barrel of the .22 pressed against my temple on the left side.

  “I came alone.”

  “Why do I doubt you, Will?”

  “Because you don’t trust me. I wouldn’t.”

  “Very candid.”

  My father is sitting on the sofa. He has duct tape over his mouth, and I assume his hands are bound behind him with the same stuff that covers his lips.

  He appears to be just out of range from the front window. You can’t be certain where their fire will travel. They didn’t set up until I got to the door. They understood Anderson’s demand that I come alone, but they weren’t going to let it happen. I had to fight with Pearce to be allowed to come inside, but he gave in when I explained my father was dead for sure if I didn’t enter as asked. He retorted that both of us would be killed if we went along with Anderson, but I finally convinced him that I had to get in there to try and get between the Captain and my dad. He wanted to plant a weapon on me, but I convinced him that Anderson would find it right away and use it on me or my dad or both of us.

  Then I explained the plan Bailey Jackson and I concocted. I told Pearce that it was the only chance my father really had with this mutt. We both knew that SWAT would storm the house regardless of what Benjamin Anderson did, but I had to be inside to try and somehow distract him so SWAT had a chance to kill him clean. Pearce eventually gave in to me.

  “You get killed and I’ll be very displeased,” he said before he shook my hand and okayed the plan.

  So now I’m inside and face to face with the man I’ve been hunting since that brief war in the most volatile, violent spot on earth.

  Bailey is giving me a few minutes to see what’s going on before he has his tacticals make the phone call. He’ll allow me to try to maneuver my dad away from his fields of fire. Snipers don’t normally shoot blind at a subject, but the spray it’ll come in three volleys, we agreed is what will give me just a second or two to knock Benjamin Anderson down and try to overpower him and disarm him before SWAT bursts in and finishes him, regardless of whether my dad and I are still breathing.

  “We finally meet,” he says as he releases me and walks over by my father.

  There is a phone here in the living room. It sits on a table next to the couch where my father is strapped and gagged.

  It’s the old rotary kind, and it’s black like the one in his bedroom.

  “You came close. More than once,” he smiles.

  “Let him go. He’s a civilian. You don’t need to kill him, too.”

  “So you’re planning on dying, Will?”

  “Everyone does. The game is fixed.”

  “Yes. Indeed it is.… Don’t you want to know why I killed all those people, before I kill you both?”

  “No. Go fuck yourself.”

  “Will, such a negative attitude. Wasn’t I your worthiest adversary?”

  “You’re just a rich punk who has a taste for killing. You’ll be on my solved board in the morning. And pretty soon after that, no one will remember who the hell you were. You’re just another savage that needs to wind up in a cage, Anderson.”

  “I thought we’d have more mutual respect. I thought I really was a worthy adversary, Will.”

  “Don’t call me anything but ‘Detective Koehn,’ you sad piece of shit.”

  My face burns with the desire to shoot out his eyes.

  “You chased me all over the country. You had at me, back in the Middle East. Surely you have to admit I was a challenge. Maybe even the greatest challenge you’ve had as a policeman?”

  “What do you want? Hugs and kisses. I’d shoot you in the eye and fuck your skull right now, if I had the opportunity.”

  He looks almost disappointed with me, at the moment. He’s got a sour, nearly-sad expression on his face.

  “I thought we had a connection, Will.”

  “I’d like to connect your nose to the muzzle of my piece. That’s the only connection I want with you, asshole.”

  “I can understand why you’re angry. I mean with your father, ready to die with you, now.”

  I feel the anger flush my own cheeks, again.

  “Walk out. Dump the pistol. Live the life of a celebrity in jail. Think of all the books you can write, inside the slammer, dickhead.”

  “No. It ends today. It ends right now.”

  “It isn’t going to end the way you think, jackass.”

  He blinks, and then his eyes widen. He knows what’s coming.

  The phone rings.

  “You lied! They’re here!”

  “No. It has to be someone else. Pick it up and see if I’m telling the truth. I came alone.”

  He looks at the phone on the third ring. I’m standing by the front door, now with my shoulder blades against the wall.

  He looks over at me.

  “It’s them, isn’t it.”

  “Only one way to find out,” I tell him.

  I grin at him, my eyebrows raised as comically as I can manage. I’m trying my damnedest to make him go for that phone.

  I eye my father. He should be safe where he’s sitting.

  Then Anderson picks up the phone. The count is already at seven.

  Eight, nine…

  “ANDERSON!” I yell out as loudly as I’m able.

  I hit the floor as the shots pulverize the front window into flying shards. I cover my head and count the bursts. When I hear three volleys, I jump up, and I find Anderson scrambling to his feet as well. I notice my father slumped over, on the couch behind him.

  I race toward the ex-Captain, and I lower my shoulder into his lower abdomen. I hit him and knock him against the wall next to the couch. He manages to hang onto the gun after the collision, but I knock him to the floor, and we struggle hand-to-hand for possession of the handgun. We roll over twice toward the center of the floor, and then I try to lift him up so I can wrench the gun free.

  But he forces me back to the blown-away window, and suddenly we’re leaping together, clutching each other, out the gaping hole in the wall of my father’s living room.

  We plummet to earth, and the concussion of hitting my dad’s front lawn separates us and I roll away from him, waiting to hear the explosions of gunfire. As I rise to my knees, I see Anderson standing, his gun pointed my way.

  There are six SWATS standing behind him with armed assault rifles pointed at him.

  “DROP THE WEAPON!” someone yells.

  But Anderson points the weapon at me, and now I know I’m dead.

  I hear the crack and the
n the boom of a high-caliber slug, but it can’t be the pop of a .22.

  Anderson flies to his right, and his head explodes. He flops on the grass heavily, and then I see the arterial spray the slug has created on my father’s aluminum siding. There is white and pink gray matter beneath the blood on my dad’s front wall, and Benjamin Anderson’s skull looks like a hollowed-out coconut. His eyes have almost popped out of their sockets, and there’s a terrible grimace on what’s left of his face.

  Bailey charges over to check me out. I have several pieces of glass stuck in my back and on the backs of my legs. The shards are sticking out of my trousers and leather jacket. He calls out for medical help, and there are already paramedics and a doctor on the scene.

  “Get to my father,” I tell them, as the paramedics look me over.

  *

  My father has been hit with a bullet that careened off something in the living room, and it has struck him in the right shoulder. The good news is that it’s not life-threatening, but he’ll be in the hospital for a few days at least since he’s lost considerable blood.

  Pete Donato, Jack Clemons and Captain Pearce are all at the hospital with me.

  “I still kick myself in the ass for letting you go in alone with that asshole,” Pearce admits.

  “He would’ve killed my father before the SWATs hit the doors and the windows,” I remind him.

  “Maybe you’re right. You’re both still alive, so who the fuck cares? Am I correct?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “You ever pull a John Wayne again, and I’ll shoot you myself, bub,” he winks.

  Then he walks toward the hospital exit.

  Pete and Jack and I sit in the waiting room to hear how George Koehn, my dad, is doing. I made the call to Sammy in Champaign, and he’s on the way here with Megan. Then I call Hannah. She curses me for going inside the house against Pearce’s better judgment, but then her relief at the demise of Benjamin Anderson rushes over her, and she weeps over the phone.

  *

  Anderson has no family, no one to take the body. He will be buried by the County at the taxpayers’ expense. Since he’s a deserter, the military will have nothing to do with him, nor would they, given that he’s a mass murderer. Arlington will not have him, naturally, even though he’s formally a “war hero.”

  I go into the Medical Examiner’s when they perform the autopsy. It’s cut and dried. Bailey performed a signature headshot, and Anderson was dead before he flopped. All there was left of him was splattered against my father’s wall. I hosed the goo and crap off the siding the same night Bailey wasted him.

  Two families in Kuwait demolished—at least two we’re sure of, now that we can’t interrogate Anderson. And Thomas and Brandon are unavailable for comment, also. Gerald still survives, but now that he has no leverage by squealing on the ex-Captain, we’re not sure how much talking he’s likely to do. The State gains no benefit by not prosecuting him to the limit after the demise of Anderson.

  It was never about oil, in Kuwait or here in Chicago. It was never about patriotism in Mexico. We know all that now. It was always about the same element.

  It was always about evil.

  *

  I have to ease myself back into my caseload. There are other killers to be caught.

  Pete Donato will return to The Intrepid and his job at the NCIS. Jack Clemons and I return to our routine of finding braindeads who continue to be braindeads. They club each other to death over the price of a Big Mac. They rape those who arc unable to defend themselves. They steal because they are too stupid to engage in the labor of the world. Murder goes on and on, and we’ll always have job security in Homicide.

  *

  I still have nightmares about Desert Storm. I wasn’t an official participant. I somehow missed the only war I’ll likely be eligible to fight. At least, I hope I’ve missed my turn at war. Finding apeshit killers is war enough for me. I don’t feel as though I missed my chance at combat. I was well-trained when I was in the Marines, and I know I would have done my duty. I was always serious about my commitment to my country and to the Corps. But I don’t feel as though I missed the opportunity of a lifetime, the way some guys bemoaned missing Vietnam, now that they’re sixty and they avoided the shit over there. No, I feel as though I got lucky that I never had to kill anyone in the heat of battle and that I was even luckier that I didn’t get killed in Desert Storm. I’m hoping that if Hannah and I ever have a son that he never has to bear arms against his fellow human beings. Maybe we’ll finally get smart and stop doing that silly shit.

  But probably we won’t.

  Benjamin Anderson will be buried in what they used to call a “pauper’s field.” It’s where they plant the indigent, the poor. He wasn’t poor, but we never found the stash he took from David Crowley’s incinerated Beverly Hills pad. We never found the book of names he supposedly heisted, either. We found the place he lived at on the southeast side by the Lake because the landlord finally came forward and spilled that Benjamin Anderson was his one-time tenant.

  His bicycle goes into Property, and his file goes into a cardboard box in the bowels of Property, as well. The rest is history. The papers and the TV media will have their day with this dog, and then I hope his name will be forgotten forever.

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  Epilogue

  We get married again in June and on schedule. The baby is on the way.

  Hannah is showing proper color in her face these days. She’s a normal, healthy, pregnant woman, with nothing on her mind except her due date. She has cravings, but nothing extreme. She loves cucumbers and chocolate milk, but not together.

  My father has recovered well, but my mother slowly declines in the nursing home. My brother Sammy is due to receive his MBA from Illinois next summer, and then he has plans to wed Megan.

  I’m the one who has bad memories. But I don’t let them get in my way. I have the future. I have a life with Hannah. I have a life with her two girls.

  Jack Clemons makes nice progress with the INS agent he’s been seeing, but no engagement is imminent, he murmurs embarrassedly.

  Captain Pearce is busy with other murderers, as Jack and I are, and I suppose Pete Donato is still pursuing AWOL sailors and Marines, along with assorted violent criminals too. I’ve heard from him a few times since he returned to The Intrepid.

  We planted Captain Benjamin Anderson in County ground with no one in attendance except for Jack and me and the gravediggers, who used a Cat to burrow into the six feet of earth. We saw them put him down, but I have a feeling Anderson isn’t done descending quite yet.

  None of my current cases seems inclined to make a personal attack upon me. I find it relaxing to know that they’re doing their best to avoid me. It’s the way it’s supposed to be. They hide and I seek.

  Years have gone by since the adventure in the deserts of Iraq and the murders in Kuwait City. Months have passed since the Milan family in Chicago has been laid to rest.

  I’ve visited some of their relatives to let them know directly from me that the killer has been put down forever. It wasn’t required of me to contact the Milans—I did it for my own peace of mind, and for closure.

  Not all my cases have an ending. Not all of them are neatly tied up by one bullet from an ex-Marine’s sniper rifle. That would make life too simple, of course. One thing that life is not is uncomplicated.

  Hannah makes my existence seem that way, though. At least when I’m with her it becomes easier. The girls are a source of great happiness, too.

  And then there’s the baby, waiting to enter our world.

  Now there’s a complication to my life that I can look forward to.

 

  Author’s Note

  Fort
y-five caliber handguns are atypical for officers who fought in Desert Storm--they used nine millimeter weapons, for the most part, I was told by a veteran of that conflict. As is usually the case with fiction writers, we make stuff up.

  Acknowledgements

  Much can be learned by reading The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain. They both have much to say about American soldiers under great duress in the Iraq conflicts. The author hopes that Black Angel, in its own humble way, will honor the veterans of those two wars.

  About the Author

  Thomas Laird has published five novels: Cutter (2001), Season of the Assassin (2003), Black Dog (2004), Voices of the Dead (2006), and The Underground Detective (2012). The first three books were co-published in London and New York by Constable & Robinson and by Carroll & Graf (Perseus), the fourth in the Czech Republic by Domino Publishers, and the fifth by Parkgate Press. The books received favorable reviews from the Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, the Independent on Sunday (UK) and Crime Time (UK).

  Thomas Laird lives with his wife Marsha (Masha) near Germantown Hills, Illinois. He also shares his residence with Mick the Australian Shepherd, Jimmy the alley cat, and Tar (Tarzan) the Amazon Yellow Nape parrot. He teaches English part-time at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, the hub of the arts in central Illinois.