Angel of Vengeance

by Trevor O. Munson

  Coombs asks Tom if any of us look familiar to him and I am surprised to hear Tom say, “No.”

  “Take another look, Mr. Kelley,” Elliot says, a note of irritation in his voice. “Take your time.”

  I feel the eyes on me again.

  “No. None of them,” Tom says at last.

  Elliot says something in irritation that I miss, then Coombs pipes up. “You gave us a description of the guy you saw that night. Read it to him, Ray.”

  Paper rustles and Elliot reads from something. “Caucasian. About six foot. A hundred seventy pounds. Dark hair and eyes. Pale. Unshaven.”

  “Your words,” Coombs says. “You telling me you don’t see anyone in there that meets that description?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Tom says. “But I don’t see anyone I recognize.”

  “How ’bout you take a guess,” Elliot says. “Pretend you have to give us someone so we don’t start thinking you were the last person to see the girl alive.”

  “Is that a threat?” Tom asks.

  “No, sir. But look at it from our perspective. You say there was someone else there that night. We only have your word for it. If you can’t give us something more to go on than that, then we have to at least consider the possibility that maybe there wasn’t, don’t we?”

  “You do whatever you have to, Detective, but I’m not going to pin a murder on someone I don’t think did it just ’cause they fit a description. That would be wrong.”

  “Wrong. You mean like a married father of three taking a stripper home from a club at three in the morning?” Coombs asks.

  Tom’s voice gets tight. “You’re right. I shouldn’ta been there, but I didn’t have anything to do with that girl’s death. If you think I did then arrest me. Otherwise I’m catching a red-eye home to Des Moines tonight.”

  There’s a tension-filled pause, then Coombs says, “Get him outa here.”

  I hear the sounds of shuffling, a door open and close, and Elliot say, “You think he did it?”

  “That guy couldn’t kill a fly,” Coombs says. “Besides, someone was there that night. Someone busted his nose.”

  “Maybe it was the girl. Maybe that’s why she’s dead.”

  “There wasn’t any sign of a struggle. She didn’t have any of his blood on her. No, I think the son-of-a-bitch that did it is standing right in there.”

  There’s a long pause and I feel their eyes on me.

  “Whaddya wanna do with him?”

  “Look at him. He’s at breaking point. Let him sweat a little longer. Then we’ll take one more stab at getting a confession out of him.”

  I sweat bullets waiting for them to come back. When they finally do, they come in and stand over me and stare, trying to build the suspense. Too bad for them I’ve already seen the end of this picture.

  Finally, Elliot looks at Coombs and says, “You wanna tell him or should I?”

  “I told the last guy. You do the honors,” Coombs says.

  Elliot looks at me and shrugs matter-of-factly. “The guy fingered ya, Angel. Picked you out first try.”

  Even if I hadn’t heard all that had gone on, I’d have been able to sniff this whopper out.

  “Tell you what, though. You come clean with us right now, sign a full confession, and we’ll tell the D.A. you gave it to us before the lineup. Make it look like you were cooperating all along.”

  “It’ll go a lot better for you that way,” Coombs says. “Might even be able to get a plea.”

  Even with all the pain I’m in I can’t help but smile at the ploy. Lying is all part of the game. Cops lie during interrogations all the time. There’s no law that says they can’t. It’s funny. They lie, they’re pursuing justice. You lie, you’re obstructing it.

  “Hey, pal,” Coombs says, “you just got picked as the main suspect in a capital murder case. You’ll be lucky you don’t get the needle for this. You think there’s something funny in that?”

  “Yeah I think it’s funny,” I tell him. “I think it’s funny you two think this bullshit lie is gonna get you a confession.”

  “You think we’re lying to you?” Elliot says all shocked and offended-like.

  “I know you are. That guy couldn’t have picked me out of the lineup.”

  “Oh? And why not?” Coombs asks.

  “Because I was never in that goddamn house.”

  22

  I’m on the street again a half hour later. I’m weak as hell and in a world of hurt, but at least I’m free.

  To fix.

  I make sure I’m not being tailed, then I hail a cab to Griffith Park. I sense the driver thinks it’s more than a little strange to be dropping someone off here at this hour. I could explain it’s because I need to find a grave where I stashed the human blood I need to survive, but I don’t think it will ease his apprehensions any. I pay him instead and disappear into shadow.

  I find the grave and dig with hands like garden trowels. I locate my kit and the cooler of dry ice and vials of blood. I’m so blood-deprived I can hardly feel my hands at all anymore and it’s a world-class struggle just to tie my arm off and get the blood in the needle. It’s even more difficult to find a vein and depress the plunger. Somehow I manage. I am a pro after all.

  I shoot all the blood I have left. It’s not enough. Not near enough after the starvation I’ve just gone through, but it will have to do. I’ve got a busy night ahead of me.

  Places to go. People to bleed.

  I need information and there’s only one person I know of who can give it to me. Problem is he’s blowing town.

  I call the airports looking for red-eyes to Des Moines from a grungy Hollywood pay phone. I find two. Both out of LAX. Both leaving in less than an hour.

  There’s no time to go and get my car so I whistle up another cab. I tell him to take me to the airport and step on it.

  From across the terminal I watch Tom wait for his plane. It’s not much of a show. When he gets up for a last-minute bathroom break, I follow. I follow him into the bathroom and past the sinks and right into a stall. I’m standing there when he turns around to shut the door.

  “What the—?”

  I clamp a hand down hard over his mouth and force him down onto the toilet seat.

  “I’m gonna do the asking, Tom, and if you don’t want to get hurt, you’re gonna do the answering and that’s all you’re gonna do. Understand?”

  He nods. He understands. He’s scared, which bothers me not at all. In my experience people tend to give better answers quicker that way.

  I shut the door for privacy and squat so we’re eye to eye. “You know who I am?”

  He nods, his taped-up nose bobbing up and down. “You were one of the guys from the lineup.”

  I nod back. “Okay, so what gives? Who put you up to it?”

  “Huh?”

  “The lie you told the cops. Who put you up to it?”

  “What are you talkin’ about? I didn’t lie to the cops.”

  “Cut the horseshit. You saw me. You saw me at the stripper’s house that night, just like they said. I broke your nose. I made you leave.”

  “You’re crazy, guy. You’re fuckin’ crazy. Before that lineup I’d never seen you before in my whole life.”

  I stare at Tom. The crazy thing—the really shithouse nuts thing—is he believes it. My stomach knots up on me the way it does at times like this; bad times when things turn out to be a whole hell of a lot worse than I thought and aren’t likely to get any better.

  I look him in the eye. “You never saw me. We never talked.”

  “Never talked,” Tom mumbles agreeably.

  “You catch that flight home and don’t come back.”

  “Don’t come back,” he says.

  I exit, leaving him seated pants-up on the john.

  23

  I grab an airport taxi home. I still have places to go, but I want my car. I go straight up to the garage. My baby’s there in her usual space, just waiting for me. As I start her up, I notice two s
hadows break free of the walls in the rearview.

  I throw an arm over the seat and turn and look. Bandaged up, both legs jutting forward, Leroy sits in a wheelchair a few short feet from the Benz’s rear bumper looking like a reject from an old Lon Chaney mummy picture. He has an angry scowl on his face and a sawed-off shotgun in his hands. Behind him, Ugly, one hand still in a cast, stands holding the now-requisite Glock in the other.

  I wonder how the hell he explained himself to Leroy for shooting him.

  “Out the car, mufucka! Let’s go!”

  Unbelievable. I shake my head. Some guys just aren’t capable of learning from their mistakes. Maybe that’s what Darwin meant about natural selection.

  I roll the window down, lean out. “Get out of the way or get mowed down. Your choice, Leroy.”

  “It’s Leh-roy, fool. An’ I already tol’ you—you ain’t be givin’ me no choices no more. I be givin’ you the choices, you got that, bitch?”

  I crank the window back up. No time for Leroy tonight. Too much going on. Bigger fish to fry. Discussion over.

  “I said you got that?” he shouts, louder now.

  I just gun the Benz’s engine in response and throw the car into gear. The tires shriek and peel on the floor as I launch the Roadster at them.

  Through the rear window, I watch as Leroy’s scowl changes from angry to concerned. The shotgun fires. He’s too far away to do any real damage, but the window blows in. Glass and shot embed themselves in my face. It hurts—don’t think it doesn’t—but I’ve been through worse in the past couple of days. Lots worse.

  I keep going.

  The more mobile of the two, Ugly manages to dodge out of the way at the last possible second, but Leroy isn’t so lucky. He never is. Trapped in the chair, eyes wide and fearful, he tries to wheel out of the way but gets nowhere fast. I plow into him, sending him flying in the cripple chair. He hits a cement pillar and lands with a clatter. Looks painful.

  I jam the Benz into drive now. The tires shriek like banshees as I hit the ramp and head down. I don’t look back.

  24

  Reesa’s place. Still early. No one home yet. I sit in darkness on her cherry-wood frame futon and smoke and wait. An hour passes and then a key tickles the lock. The door opens. Smelling smoke in the air, Reesa hesitates in the doorway, her figure-eight form backlit by light from the hall.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Just us suckers,” I say, as she flips a light on.

  “Oh, Mick,” she says with a candle flicker smile. She enters a little reluctantly, shuts the door. She doesn’t lock it, and I wonder if that’s in case she needs to make a quick getaway.

  “Aren’tcha happy to see me?”

  “W-well of course I am. Of course I am.” She slips out of a pair of sandals, comes over and stands in front of me on the pricey oriental carpet. I have to hand it to her, the smile she puts on—the one that says she’s glad as hell to see me—is pretty convincing. Up close, she sees the shrapnel damage on my face and switches to a passable look of concern. “Oh baby, what happened to your face?”

  “Fender-bender,” I say.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Been better, if you want to know the truth.”

  She nods. “So, what are you doing here?”

  “You told me to come see you when I got out. Or don’t you remember that?”

  “Sure I do. Sure. I guess I just thought you’d call first.”

  “I did call. From prison. Thanks for the lawyer by the way.”

  “I called one. More than one. I just wasn’t able to get anybody down there on such short notice. It was pretty late, you know?”

  “Late and getting later by the minute.”

  I drop my cigarette onto the carpet at her feet. I crush it out with the toe of my shoe. I guess I’m feeling a little sore. More than a little. She watches, her happy-to-see-me smile momentarily interrupted by a lightning strike of anger. Then it’s back again. Clear skies. That’s when I really know it’s trouble.

  “Is—is something wrong, baby?” she asks.

  “You could say that.”

  “What is it? Tell me.”

  “Well for starters, on the phone you said I didn’t have a motive for killing Callie, except I hadn’t told you that was Dallas’s real name. For starters.”

  “You caught that, huh?”

  I just nod.

  “I guess this must look pretty bad... ”

  “I guess it must.”

  “Well, it’s not what it looks like.”

  My turn to smile. “That’s the first thing you’ve said I actually believe,” I say. “Because it looks like you hired me to find your sister so you could kill Callie and set me up for it, but that’s not it, is it? Otherwise I’d still be in jail.”

  “That’s not it,” she agrees quietly.

  “Okay, then why don’t you tell me what it is?”

  “Sure. I’ll tell you everything, baby. I was going to anyway, but—it’s a long story. You mind if I go slip into something a little more comfortable? Maybe that kimono you like so much, huh?”

  “Sure,” I say. “No sense being uncomfortable.”

  Reesa smiles uncertainly and heads for the bedroom. I watch her go. I slow-count to sixty, then I follow her. I find her crouched in her closet, cell phone pressed to her ear. She’s surprised to see me. She’s even more surprised when I smack the phone out of her hand. It hits the closet wall with a crack.

  “Let me guess, you were calling your vampire friend.” The statement surprises her. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s right and I know it.

  “Wh-what are you talking about?”

  “Don’t play innocent, doll. It doesn’t suit ya. If you could act a lick you wouldn’t be making a living taking off your clothes. You know exactly what I’m talking about. And who. The blond fella who’s been following me around town. Someone altered Tom Kelley’s memory, made him forget all about me, and I’m betting it’s your friend. Where is he right now? Waiting for me at my place?”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  She stops short as I raise my hand to hit her. I want to. Despite my rules, despite my past, it takes all my self-control not to do it. Instead, I put murder in my eyes and back her against the hanging clothes.

  “Don’t you dare touch me,” she hisses.

  “You didn’t seem to mind the other night.”

  She looks up at me, blinks back hostile tears. “You son-of-a-bitch.”

  “Better that than being one,” I say. “So what’s the story? How does a girl like you get herself tangled up with a vampire?”

  “You say it like it’s a bad thing—”

  “It is bad. The worst. If you don’t know that, you don’t know a goddamn thing.”

  “Kind of ironic coming from you, don’tcha think?”

  My turn to look surprised. Seeing it, Reesa smiles and says, “You think no one knows about you, but people who know know.”

  “They always do.”

  “So then what’s the problem?”

  “You don’t have to like what you are just because it’s what you are.”

  “I suppose. But you didn’t seem to mind when it was you I was tangled up with.”

  She enjoys throwing the words back in my face. I decide to change the subject. “So how’s it work? You go looking for him, or did he come find you?”

  “A little of both.” She shrugs. “I’d heard rumors about underground vampire covens in L.A. Real ones. I wanted to find out if it was true or not, so I went looking.”

  I’d heard the same rumors. You don’t keep your ear as close to the ground as I do—under it even—and not hear them. But just because you hear a story doesn’t make it so. Vampires are an antisocial bunch as a rule. Creating new ones is almost antithetical to the cause. It goes against the basic principles of supply and demand. The more vampires you make, the more competition you have for a dwindling food supply and the better the chance of discovery by said food
supply.

  “So you went looking and you found a coven?”

  “No. But I found Cotney.”

  “What’s a Cotney?”

  “My friend. The one who’s gonna teach you some manners when he gets here,” she smiles, thinking about it before continuing. “He came to my show one night to find out about the girl who was going around asking so many questions about vampires.”

  “And he agreed to turn you. Just like that.”

  “No. It took some convincing. And I had to agree to give him something he wanted.”

  “Your body?”

  She smiles cutely. “That too.”

  “What else?” She looks at me, genuine surprise in her eyes. “You’re a lot dumber than I thought. You really don’t know? Really?”

  When the answer comes it hits me like a medicine ball to the gut. “Your sister.”

  Reesa nods, her sweet smile as out of place on her face as a money-shot on the Virgin Mary’s.

  “Why?”

  “Why not? I caught the little tramp fucking my boyfriend. I took her in off the street and that’s how she repays me?”

  “Vin raped her.”

  “Well, I guess that depends on who you believe.”

  Discovering that you were right about the world being every bit as fucked up a place as you thought is a small consolation. I feel sick. Sick and disgusted. With her and with me and with everything.

  “Where is it?”

  She smiles knowingly. “Where’s what?”

  “The bite mark.”

  A defiant look on her face, Reesa slowly draws her skirt up a quarter-mile stretch of leg to her waist and shows me two fresh, red and infected-looking puncture marks at the top of her inner thigh, just outside the white silk pouch of her panties.

  “You’re a goddamn idiot,” I tell her.

  “You’re the idiot,” she snaps back. “You’re so stupid you’re in the middle of all this and you don’t know the first thing about what’s going on.”

  “Then educate me. How did Raya end up staying with Callie-Dean?”

  “I’d heard about Callie. Word on the street was she knew things. Things about vampires. Things I wanted to know.” She shrugs. “She was one of the people I talked to. She’s the one who told Cotney about me.”