Blood of Angels Read online

  'No, seriously. I had this weird fucking dream just before I woke up. I was in the mall and I went to McD's for lunch. Except it was night, you could tell because the big windows behind where the tables are were dark, but it felt like lunch. And instead of buying like a burger or something, I asked for a salad, which you'll agree is pretty fucked up.'

  'Beyond amazing,' Brad said. 'Hold the front page. Alert CNN. That's some crazy shit, bro.'

  'No, that's not it. I asked for a salad, okay, but they didn't give me a salad. They gave me this huge bag of Fritos. And I enjoy potato chips more than the next guy, but I didn't want any right then. I wanted a fuckin' salad. And so I said, jeez, hand over the green shit, dude—what's your fucking problem? And this guy who was serving just kind of smiled at me, and he didn't look like your normal server droid, he was much older with grey hair and he was big and he looked kind of weird and scary. He took the chips back though, and handed me a McD bag, folded over. I walked away and then suddenly I was in the parking lot and I opened the bag and saw it still wasn't a fucking salad.'

  'What was it?' Brad asked, despite himself.

  Hudek tuned them all out, gazing up the street into the Valley, savouring the moment, knowing it was here and now where his life kicked into a higher gear. It was already hard to believe what had happened back inside the building, in fact it too felt a little like a dream or something he'd watched on TV—but the bags he held in each hand said it was not.

  'Apple pie,' Pete said. 'I wasn't going to go all the way back in the mall to sort it out, so I just opened it and took a bite. But the filling was all red. And it was absolutely freezing cold.'

  Brad stared at him. 'That's it? That's it?'

  Suddenly all their cell phones started ringing at once.

  'Okay,' Hudek said. 'The customers are getting restless. Let's get it on.'

  •••

  Back inside the building, the other men had stepped once again out of the shadows. Someone flicked a switch and the room was bathed in light.

  'He'll be fine,' the man in the chair said. He stood up, slowly, stretching his shoulders and back. 'But tweak him anyway. Then we're good to go.'

  Chapter 5

  Jim sat at a table in the window of a place called Marsha's, in South Carolina. He had followed 95 up as far as Savannah and fifteen miles north from there made the turn-off onto 321. He had made slow progress all the way from the Keys, and already taken a day longer than the journey merited. Had stayed in the slow lane of the freeway all the way north, just another grey-haired guy in an old car, the kind you whip past on your way to somewhere or other. At first this had been partly because it was a long time since he'd made such a drive: he'd barely used the car in the last eight years, except on local grocery runs. He soon got used to the sensation of road passing under the tyres again, however, and could not blame caution for his speed. Nor sheer perversity, though that was also a factor.

  Heavy clouds were gathering overhead. It was only just after five o'clock, and yet outside all was muted and dark. The word at the counter, which Jim could hear without effort, was that they were going to see some serious rain this evening, and it was about time.

  The waitress came by and refilled his coffee without asking. He smiled, and she smiled back, and then waddled off to perform some other kind deed. Jim watched her reflection recede in the table's napkin dispenser. Her hair was dyed a funny shade or two of lurid blonde and had she been a refrigerator you could have stored a lot of food inside. And yet there was something very appealing about her, something true about her ordinariness. Strange how it could be that way. Good, capable hands and a nice attitude made more difference than people thought. Jim realized, with mild wonder, that it had been over a decade since he'd had sex. The thought brought him little but relief.

  He stirred a spoonful of sugar into the brew and looked out the window a while longer. It was coming down to it, now. He had dragged his feet, made as if coming north meant fighting some natural slope in the landscape which his car was not equal to. Now he was only an hour or so from his first destination, and it was time to stop pretending. He was going where he was going, unless he stopped now. There were miles still to drive, but they were getting fewer. This was the time, this lacuna. If he was going to not do something, now was the time to start not doing it.

  The feeling in his guts was one he recognized. A hollow tension, so muted it could perhaps be hunger. He glanced at the menu propped up against the sill and rejected its contents once more. He knew he should have something to eat. Someone two tables over had taken a corned beef sandwich a little while back and it had smelled fine, the bread lightly toasted, sauerkraut warm and rich, the sauce good and thick the way Jim liked it. He had always had very specific tastes in food. Maybe if he ate, the feeling would go away.

  Did he want that?

  He did not know. He truly did not know.

  So he sipped his coffee until it was finished and then left, leaving a dollar tip on a dollar fifty purchase, hoping it went to the right waitress.

  When he got back in the car he noticed the bag on the passenger seat, and was confused for just a moment. Of course. He barely remembered buying the contents, at an outlet mall a little south of Jacksonville. But he had bought it, he knew, just as he had acquired a much heavier item before even leaving the Keys, and so he supposed that meant he had made his decision.

  And it didn't matter anyway. It had already been made for him. The sphere turns, and the heart pumps and blood flows, regardless of what you feel on the subject.

  •••

  Eighty miles up the way he took the turn to Benboro. He took a wrong fork soon after that and had to retrace a little. It was not an area he knew well, nor one which made great effort to make things easier for outsiders. People would only ever be passing through. There were patches of anonymous woodland now and then but usually the land was flat either side of the road.

  After Benboro it was simpler—there was only one road out of the town, such as it was. A mile along it was a big tilted sign on the right. It had been pale green last time Jim saw it, but in the intervening years it had been repainted red: some while ago, judging by the state of it. It looked as though the job had been done by someone who was dimly familiar with letters as shapes, rather than as things that conveyed meaning.

  BENBORO PARK, they said.

  He pulled over and headed up the access road. He had known it would still be here: impulse calls once every couple of years had proved someone still answered the phone at the number for the trailer park. He had not stayed on the line long enough to find out if it was the old woman he had met, or to ensure the park itself was still in business. People lived there, had done so for years. There was no reason for it to go under, turning families and old couples and wild-haired single individuals out into the unknown. Benboro town itself had the dynamism of an old sock. Nobody was going to be developing subdivisions or building a business park outside it anytime soon.

  And what was it to him, anyway?

  Yet still he had called, every couple of years.

  The drive took a curving path that had probably looked artful on the original plan, scrawled on an envelope in some long-ago developer's office shack, but in the real world was just plain long-winded. By halfway along you could see the unlovely sprawl of the sixty or so trailers in sixty or so different designs and states of repair. Unlike many such facilities, the roads they were situated on did not follow a simple grid. The guy with the envelope evidently had a taste for the ornate. Jim imagined this made finding a particular resident far from easy, which probably had both bad and good sides. Luckily he knew exactly where he was going. On the far side of the park, over where a stand of trees marked the beginning of a forty-yard strip of waste ground which led down to the bank of a featureless river, was a line of four low wooden buildings. They were very large, ramshackle. Two were used to store old junk and materials relevant to the maintenance of the park. The others were partitioned into storage area
s which were for hire.

  At the entrance to the park, Jim pulled over. A gateway affair—two grey metal poles with a board held between them over trailer height—confirmed this was indeed Benboro Park and not Bel Air or heaven or the best of all possible worlds. On the other side, the road split. In the centre of the division was a trailer painted the same red as the sign on the main road. This was Site No. 1, and in it lived the woman who ran the park. Hannah, her name was. Assuming she was still alive.

  He got out of the car. The clouds were heavier now, charcoal and frosted and pregnant, but the rain had still not begun to fall. Jim hoped it would sooner or later, if only for the sake of the old boys perched at the counter in Marsha's, to whom it had sounded like a big deal. Though it would spoil the fun of a little girl he now saw, playing by herself in the road outside a trailer down the right-hand fork. She was singing to herself, quietly. It was a nice sound.

  As he walked over to No. 1 he reminded himself of the story he'd told long ago. He had just gone through a long and arduous divorce, that's right, and this was everything he'd been able to save for himself. Wasn't much, but it had sentimental value. He wanted it somewhere safe, away from lawyers and their familiars. He was on his way down to Miami. Friend of his said he might be able to get him a job in a hotel there. Failing that, he might head for Arizona, or Nevada, try his luck further west.

  He knocked on the door, listening to the sounds of television from inside. Before very long the door was opened.

  'Yessir?'

  It was the woman he remembered. Additional years of pickling in a trailer full of cigarette smoke had turned her skin the non-colour of a once-white dishcloth. Dry, grey-brown hair was pulled into a ragged ponytail that said she knew she looked like shit, and honestly didn't care.

  'Hi,' Jim said, smiling broadly. 'Hannah, right? Don't know if you remember me?'

  'Can't say that I do, no. You're not from the park.'

  'That's right. I rented storage space from you a little while ago. I need to get to it.'

  'Okay,' she said. 'What's the number?'

  'Seventeen,' Jim said, keeping his voice steady.

  She wandered off towards a cataclysmically untidy office area in back. This was the point, Jim knew, where things could get sticky. He waited just outside the trailer, eyes on the road. The little girl had disappeared.

  A couple of minutes later Hannah came back. 'Little while ago is right,' she said. 'It's been twelve years. You only left enough for five.'

  'I got held up,' he said.

  She nodded. 'You the fellow who was heading off to Australia?'

  'Miami. That's right.'

  'No good?'

  'It's okay. Kind of hot.'

  'Hot? Don't talk to me about hot. This summer was a bitch, and it still ain't rained. You owe me money.'

  He gave her the bundle of bills he had prepared. She counted it.

  'I haven't allowed for inflation.'

  She laughed. 'Ain't no inflation round here. We can't afford it.'

  Jim smiled. 'I want it for another year, if that's okay.'

  'All right by me, and I see the money's here.' She handed him a small, rusty key. 'Goodnight. Leave the key on the step.'

  Then the door was shut, and Jim was finished.

  As he drove through the park, heading for the far side, he was bemused at how easy it had been. He had arrived late, that night twelve years ago, and in an intense frame of mind. His cover story sucked, and yet Hannah had actually given him a ride back to Benboro so he could catch a bus for Miami. He had booked five years and then disappeared for over twice as long. You'd have thought she would be…well, whatever. He'd evidently just made a good choice, that was all, divining correctly that storage turnover out here would not be high. Or perhaps she'd just sold his belongings long ago and was sitting in her trailer now, door bolted, laughing over his money.

  He parked outside the third of the big sheds, and walked along to the fifth big door. He used the key to unlock it, and went inside.

  Space 17 was a simple rectangle partitioned off within the big interior, ten feet wide by twenty deep. It was immediately evident that it still held what Jim had left behind.

  He pulled the cover off and let it fall to the ground. Then just stood and looked at it for a moment. He had meant to be businesslike about this, but he could not help but pause.

  For something that looked so luminous, the object in Space 17 was remarkably prosaic. It was an old VW camper van, in white: a vehicle in neither good nor bad enough condition to draw the eye. There was the big window in front, for optimum visibility. None in the sides. The quarter-height one in back was obscured by a thick white blind. You couldn't see the interior but it held a minuscule kitchenette and a tiny divided-off sleeping area at the back which ran the width of the van, and was just about feasible if you weren't too tall and didn't mind lying on your side and drawing your legs up a little. It was everything a travelling man needed. This particular travelling man, anyhow.

  Jim walked back to his car and got the two bags out. He opened his small suitcase, put his hand into the shoebox, and pulled out the old set of car keys. Felt funny with them in his hands, with the worn plastic fob, a free gift advertising a school craft fair eighteen years ago. He was becalmed by it for a moment, remembering that afternoon, recalling buying it. Another life.

  Back in Space 17 he unlocked the camper's driver-side door and threw the lighter bag across to the passenger seat. Then he carried the heavy bag to the back of the vehicle. He drained the small amount of gas still in the tank and replaced it with new. He removed the van's battery and swapped it with the one in the second bag, then carried the dead one back outside and stowed it in the trunk of the car. Walked back to the van.

  It was time to see. Could be the electrics had gotten damp. The oil would have settled. It had been a very long time.

  He climbed in the front, feeling the seat settle under him like an old friend. Stuck the key in and turned it without ceremony.

  A click, and nothing.

  Turned it again. The van coughed, farted, and then chugged gamely into life. Jim shook his head fondly, not the first person to admire the efficiency of Volkswagen's engineers.

  'Welcome back, old horse,' he said.

  •••

  Ten minutes later he placed the key on the step of Site No. 1 and walked back to the quietly chugging van. He sat in the front and waited while a middle-aged couple wandered across the road. Neither gave him a second glance. A more-or-less white van. Whatever. And of course Jim was over sixty now, and men of that age are seldom assumed to be up to much. The car he had arrived in was in Space 17, covered with the tarp. Inside it were the clothes Jim had been wearing. He was now dressed in black jeans and a faded denim shirt, purchased at the outlet mall. Not the kind of thing Jim Westlake wore. More the style of someone called James Kyle, a teacher and householder and all-round regular guy.

  The little girl was back out in the street again, still playing by herself. Jim frowned. Someone should be keeping an eye on her. Some adult should be sitting on the step, drinking a beer if necessary, but keeping her within view. The people who lived in Benboro Park probably knew each other pretty well but that wouldn't always be enough. It was easy for bad things to befall the young. Too easy. The ease of it was depressing. The world should be organized so that the innocent and unblemished remained so, should be configured and maintained so that every person lived their span and got to its end thinking, 'Well actually, that wasn't so bad.' How often did it work that way? Everyone spent their time staring in the wrong directions. Instead of caring about corner offices and tidy lawns, about this season's hot shoe style or diet or celebrity; instead of obsessing over what other people think of them or over what they thought about themselves, people should be paying attention to other people, to each other's kids and parents and wives and pets. They should be dedicating themselves to protecting these magical things, the living loved ones, because only when something is gone or
broken do you realize how wondrous and unique its completeness was. But people didn't consider this ahead of time, because they were stupid. They didn't, because life holds many distractions. They didn't, just because.

  It was one of the reasons he had done what he did, in the old days. To show them what they should be caring about. To commune with the essential, the one. Or so he had told himself, occasionally: but he told himself a lot of stuff back then and most of it wasn't true. In that regard he had been just like everybody else. Inside, he thought, we are all two people, lying to each other. The only difference is the size and deadliness of the falsehoods we tell.

  Within a few miles the van had warmed up well, and seemed to be enjoying being back on the road. Jim retraced his route until he could rejoin 321, and then continued north into the twilight, storm clouds still following after.

  Chapter 6

  Nina stood in Raynor's Wood wishing the men would be quiet so she could concentrate. She had spent the morning in the Thornton police department being briefed and looking at endless black-and-white photographs of a dead man who had been found six feet from her current position. Much of this had been superfluous. After Olbrich had left them to head back to Los Angeles, she and Monroe had done little on the journey east but talk about the case. She was prepped. There were not too many facts to go around. The more you repeated them the more they bloated, like bread left out in the rain, swollen and fundamentally substanceless. Monroe was now standing twenty feet away down by the stream with a gaggle of cops, rehearsing the same stuff. She tried to tune him out but immediately began to hear another voice, this one much closer.

  'See the bushes? That's how come nobody saw it earlier.'

  The speaker was Joe Reidel, a stocky young homicide detective. He was one of a number of cops out of the Cathridge County Sheriff's office who'd been in Thornton working the case since the previous morning. The local police did not seem to resent the CID presence at all. They seemed cool about the FBI too, though it had been Reidel who'd initiated the contact. It was easy to gain the impression that this town didn't much like having dead bodies turning up, and would be happy for someone else to make the problem go away. Reidel was the only man who had not yet told Nina the facts his own way, given them his own special spin. Maybe if she let him do so then they'd all shut up and let her get on with thinking her own thoughts.