The Fourth Angel

by Suzanne Chazin

  “I could burn you and this whole friggin’ car in the time it’d take to shoot me.”

  With his other hand, the man reached under her jacket and dug through a layer of sweater before he was able to slip the nine-millimeter out of its holster. “You buried the goddamn piece, anyway. What’s the matter? Afraid you might kill someone? It wouldn’t be the first time, now, would it?”

  A shudder traveled up Georgia’s spine, electrifying the hairs on the back of her neck. She didn’t recognize the voice, but the tone, the references—the familiarity of it chilled her.

  “Do…I…know…you?”

  The intruder chuckled to himself. “You do now.” Then he let go of her arm. It still ached at the shoulder. Her feet had grown numb. She could no longer move them. “So…” he exhaled. “You meet any of the brothers at the hotel while they were engaged in their…um, civic activities?”

  His words tore through her like a hot poker. A bitter, metallic taste settled on her tongue. A pins-and-needles tingling washed over her whole body.

  “You’re…the Fourth Angel,” Georgia whispered, as if the name itself had the power to ignite. All at once, her conscious mind seemed to bail out of her body, then hover in the air above, like a spectator at a movie. The earthly vessel it left behind—in the driver’s seat—barely had the power to talk.

  “What do you want?” she managed to choke out.

  “Something you took from me and can’t give back.” He paused, watching her fidget and tremble as she tried to make sense of his words. Then, abruptly, he leaned forward. Georgia could feel his hot, soggy breath on her neck and the polyester fibers of his ski mask.

  “But hey, this little chat’s been grand. We’ll have to do it again sometime…real, real soon, Georgia. I promise.”

  The blow came sharply and swiftly from behind. A crack, then darkness, then a cool burst of air. Shattering glass. Voices…

  …The sound of her back window being broken.

  30

  “Scout? Jesus Christ, you’re bleeding. Hold on.”

  Strong arms opened Georgia’s door and began pulling her from the car.

  “Can you hear me, girl? An ambulance is coming.”

  The words ebbed and flowed, like shoreline chatter to a swimmer. Those hands, that voice—she knew them well. They belonged to Mac Marenko. Her dilated pupils tried to take in her surroundings. Monitors beeped and blinked red. A bag of saline bulged at the end of an IV running to her vein. A plastic valve mask lay pressed against her face. She went to sit up, but a callused hand gently pushed her back down. Her head felt like it was going to explode.

  When she came to in the emergency wing at Saint Vincent’s Hospital, Randy Carter was hovering over her, his basset-hound eyes looking sad and shaken. She tried to lift her head to speak to him, but it felt like a firecracker was ricocheting around in her skull.

  “Lie still, okay?” Carter pleaded, easing her back down. He went to the examining-room door and called for a doctor. Georgia had never seen him so jittery. Or gaunt.

  “You want something?” he asked. “Hungry? Thirsty? Name it and I’ll get it.”

  “A date with Mel Gibson.” She tried to smile, and it hurt.

  Carter made a face. “This is no laughing matter, girl. Have you blanked or something? You got hit upside the head.”

  She put her hands over her face to blot out the glaring fluorescents. Her skin felt too tight across one cheek. Probably swollen. She was afraid to look in the mirror.

  “Not for nothing, Randy, but you don’t look so hot these days, either.”

  “Forget about me. I want to know what happened back there. It wasn’t a robbery. Your gun was on the backseat, a full sixteen rounds in the clip, and your purse was retrieved with eighty-six dollars still in it—and a screwdriver, girl, though it’s beyond me why y’all carry that thing…”

  “Tell me about Broph.”

  He stopped and squinted at her. “Huh?”

  “Your ex-partner, Paul Brophy.”

  Carter ran a hand down the sides of his mustache and frowned at her. “You want to talk about that now? Why?”

  Silence.

  “You’re a doozy, Skeehan—you know that? There’s nothing to tell.” He shrugged. “Broph was a gambler, he turned dirty, and he went down.”

  “You mean, you took him down.”

  “Yeah, okay. So? You want to crucify me along with the rest of the department?”

  “I want you to tell me the truth.”

  “I just did,” he said. “End of story.”

  “End of story? How do you know?” Georgia asked angrily. “You’re always so fucking sure of yourself, aren’t you? How do you know Paul Brophy isn’t so pissed at you—at this whole department—that he’d torch anything just to get revenge?”

  “You ain’t making any sense, girl.”

  Georgia tried to sit up, but nearly keeled over. Carter caught her just in time. His embrace was firm and paternal, and it melted the thin layer of anger she’d been clinging to to keep from dealing with the wild, dark tumor of fear beneath. She sobbed into his shoulder and he held her close. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “It’s gonna be okay…”

  “Oh, Randy…” The scene in the car began to come back to Georgia in fractured snippets like a jigsaw puzzle. “The man who attacked me? He was the Fourth Angel. He knew stuff…about this department…about me.” She shivered as it sank in.

  Carter pulled a blanket over her shoulders and frowned. “You don’t seriously think Broph—?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.” She wiped her eyes. “But I do think the Fourth Angel is, or was, FDNY. That makes everyone we know a suspect. I’m so scared.”

  “What you need is rest,” he told her, trying to ease her back down on the examining table.

  She bobbed up on him again like a cork. “Where’s my car?”

  “Frankel’s having it dusted for prints.”

  “Can I get anything out of it?” She was thinking of the building records—and her laundry. Most of the pants she used for work were in there.

  “You’ll get it back Monday—”

  “But I need those records. And my laundry.”

  Carter looked at her, puzzled. “What records? What laundry?”

  “A pile of reports on the front seat. And the big green duffel bag in back.”

  “Skeehan, there were no reports. There was no big green duffel bag. I saw the car when they were dusting it. There was nothing in it but your gun and pocketbook.”

  “Who saw the car before you?”

  Carter sighed, then ticked off the possibilities. “Half a dozen cops, Frankel, the technicians on loan from the NYPD. And Mac, of course. He was first on the scene.”

  Mac took the records. She was sure of it. But the laundry?

  “I need my laundry,” she whined like a little kid. Amazing what a normally rational mind can choose to focus on under stress.

  A nurse walked by the examining room and checked her vital signs.

  “I want to go home,” Georgia insisted.

  “The doctor wants you to stay overnight for observation,” the nurse explained.

  Georgia turned to Carter. “Randy, get me out of here, will you?”

  “I can’t. I’m on duty. Stay here, girl,” he pleaded. “You’re not thinking straight. You can’t work. Y’all can’t even sit up.” Carter always got more southern when he got mad.

  “I still want to go home.”

  “Marenko’s getting his arm stitched up down the hall from busting your back window. He’ll take you.”

  “I’d sooner have a root canal.”

  Carter clicked a retractable ballpoint pen in his jacket pocket. Up and down. Up and down. “You’re not a…?” He gestured, embarrassed, running two fingers down the sides of his graying mustache. “You two aren’t…?”

  “What, Randy? Spit it out.”

  “I thought you and Marenko were, you know…Actually, first I thought maybe you and the commissioner we
re, you know. But then, I figured you couldn’t be, you know…doing it with both, you know…I guess I was mistaken.”

  “I guess you were,” she said flatly. “But hey—you know.” What have I done to my career? “What’s today?”

  “Saturday. Why?”

  “Jimmy Gallagher’s working the six-by-nine over at Fifty-seven Truck. Call him, will you? Ask him to get early relief. He’ll take me home.”

  Carter shook his head. “I don’t know who’s gonna collapse first on this case, you or me.”

  “We’ll get her killer, Randy. I swear,” said Georgia.

  31

  Dawn was peeking over the Whitestone Bridge by the time Jimmy Gallagher began the drive to Queens. Georgia hadn’t seen him since Quinn’s funeral on Tuesday. In the car, she realized how much she’d missed him.

  She could smell the faint charred odor of smoke on his clothes, mingled with sweat and Old Spice aftershave. His bearish hands were embedded with dirt that couldn’t easily be scrubbed off. And along the knuckles and cuticles, he sported a colorful assortment of fresh scrapes and bruises that told the tale of a hard night’s work. It reminded her of when her dad used to come home after a tour of duty.

  “Thanks for getting early relief and driving me home,” she said.

  He shrugged his burly shoulders. “I wouldn’t have it any other way, love.”

  Georgia reclined the passenger seat slightly, moving a carton of unfiltered Camels to one side. “These things’ll kill you,” she chided, shaking the box.

  “Terry Quinn didn’t smoke or drink and he’s six feet under,” Gallagher reminded her. “When the good Lord tells you it’s time, it’s time.”

  Georgia laughed. “What was the good Lord trying to tell me when he gave me this?” She pointed to her cheek. An eggplant-colored lump swelled across it. On her nose and lips were scabs the color and texture of sun-dried tomatoes. It was a face only an Italian cook could love.

  Gallagher sneaked a sideways glance at her and shook his head. “The good Lord didn’t do that, love. You put yourself in that situation, you did.”

  “By doing my job?”

  He frowned. “I know you think I’m old-fashioned, but the department’s no place for a woman—”

  “Oh boy, here it comes. The lecture…”

  “Look what just happened to you. And that’s not the only kind of concern your mother and I have. You know what we were both worrying ourselves sick about Thursday night while you were at that fire in Howard Beach?”

  “What?”

  “That you’d step in a soggy basement, touch the hot leg of an electric wire somewhere, and pow! No more Georgia.

  She rolled her eyes. “I was a firefighter, Jimmy—just like you. I’d know better than to touch electrical current with my feet in water. Now, tell the truth, Ma put you up to this talk, didn’t she?”

  “She didn’t put me up to anything. She just loves you and she’s worried about you.”

  “Feels more like control to me.”

  Gallagher raised a bushy, silver-streaked eyebrow. “Then you don’t know her like I do, love. I still remember…” His voice trailed off and he shook his head.

  “What?”

  “The day of your father’s funeral. It rained. Oh, how it rained…”

  “I remember.”

  “And you and your brother were each carrying key chains that your father had given you, with his badge number on them—your badge number now. And you dropped yours as you were coming out of the funeral mass…”

  Georgia smiled at the bittersweet memory. She could still feel the solid weight of the Maltese cross—the emblem of firefighters everywhere—between her fingers, its smooth, cool, beveled edges touching her skin as if for the very first time.

  “I think I cried more about losing that key chain that day than about Dad.”

  “Do you remember your mother? On her hands and knees in the rain over that thing?”

  Georgia closed her eyes, humbled and embarrassed at the memory of her mother’s black crepe dress matted and soggy, her nylons snagged, and her hair plastered to her forehead—all for a key chain. On the same day she was burying her husband. Children can be cruel sometimes. She was learning that as a mother herself now.

  “Ma couldn’t find it. And you guys were crawling all over the pavement, in your dress uniforms, soaking wet…”

  “Ah, that we were…”

  “And then a few days later, that new one came in the mail.” Georgia smiled at him. “I still cherish it, you know. Even if it is just a replica.”

  Gallagher started. “But it’s not a replica. The company that made the originals went out of business.”

  “Then how did you…? Ma said it went down the storm drain—”

  “It did.” He laughed and shook his head. “Me and this other firefighter, Ray Farnsworth—we went back with a couple of good souls from the sanitation department and took the whole drain apart. Took us four hours in the dead of night in the pouring rain. Lord, what a mess.”

  Georgia turned to him now as the full weight of what he was saying sank in. “You didn’t, Jimmy. For a key chain?”

  “For a kid who’d just lost her father. But I never forgot the image of your mother in the rain, on her hands and knees over that thing.” He palmed his forehead, as if even the memory were too potent to let linger. “So if you want to know how much she loves you, just think of that.”

  Georgia stared out the window and thought with a pang of that key chain. The brass had long since tarnished to black. It lay buried in a kitchen drawer, beneath a stack of yellowing mass cards from old memorial services at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Georgia never ventured in that drawer. The past was in there—a past she’d never entirely reckoned with.

  “I’m touched, Jimmy,” she said finally, unable to find the right words after so many years. But he didn’t want thanks. She could see that now. He just wanted her to love her mother—as he did—faults and all. “When I lost Dad, I kind of focused on myself…”

  “You were a child.” He shrugged. “You would.”

  She thought of Terry Quinn’s widow up in Yonkers, and the two little girls he’d left behind. “I imagine Quinn’s family’s going through the same thing now…Maybe they’ll turn that halfway-house property he fought so hard for into a park in his memory.”

  “Maybe. The county doesn’t own it anymore, though. After the house burned down, Terry convinced some muck-a-muck to cough up the dough and buy the county out.”

  “Really? Who’d buy a piece of scorched earth in a marginal neighborhood?”

  “Don’t know. But it worked out well for the community.” Gallagher laughed. “I tell you, Quinn could sell ice to an Eskimo, he could. Gift of the blarney.”

  “I trust that was his only influence in the matter.”

  A taxi slammed its brakes in front of them, and Gallagher muttered under his breath. When he turned to her, his eyes were narrowed, cautious. “I don’t make it a habit to speak ill of the dead.”

  “Jimmy, you’re not saying he had a hand in burning that halfway house, are you?”

  Gallagher frowned at her. “You should know better than to ask that. But think about it, love. Here was a neighborhood of working stiffs who spent their life savings to buy a little bungalow with a yard for the kids and a street to play ball on. Then one morning they wake up and pow!…The county’s put perverts next door. They’re scared—who wouldn’t be? Their kids can’t play outside. They can’t sell their homes when they retire. They’re trapped. And who trapped ’em? A bunch of high-and-mighty judges who don’t even live in Yonkers.”

  Georgia gave him a sour look. “That doesn’t justify arson.”

  “I never said it did.”

  “But if Quinn was involved—”

  “Jesus, Joséph, and Mary.” Gallagher hit the dashboard in frustration. “Do I have to spell it out for you, lass? Terry Quinn didn’t burn down that halfway house. The fire was ruled accidental; the case is closed. L
eave the family alone, love. I’m begging you. They’ve suffered enough.”

  Georgia and Gallagher rode in silence the rest of the journey. As they turned the corner onto her street, by some unspoken agreement, they both dropped the matter. Maybe it was the sight of the police cruiser parked outside Georgia’s house for protection. Suddenly, there were more important things to worry about.

  Margaret was waiting at the front door. She ran out when she saw them, crossing herself at the sight of her daughter. “Oh, dear Lord. That’s it—you’re off the case.”

  “Ma,” Georgia whined. “You can’t tell me…” She caught Gallagher’s frown. “We’ll discuss it later, okay?” she said to her mother.

  Richie hovered by the front door, clearly taken aback by her appearance, but slightly awed, too, she noticed. The bruises had clearly elevated her coolness. He hugged her tightly, something he hadn’t done in ages.

  Just walking from the car made her head spin, so she flopped on the living room sofa. Something small and hard rubbed up against her back. She reached around and fished out a nub of pool-cue chalk.

  “Ma,” she said, holding up the chalk, “I hope you’re not playing in any seedy dives again. I swear, some of those places—the clientele have more tattoos than teeth.”

  Her mother turned to Gallagher. Georgia caught the girlish blush. “What?” she asked.

  “Grandma won a pool table,” Richie blurted.

  “You won a what?” Georgia looked at Gallagher, who shrugged.

  “Kelly’s Bar was going out of business,” he explained. “They had a tournament. Your mother won.”

  “A good pool table costs at least two grand.”

  Gallagher laughed. “You haven’t seen the table. A real mess. It’s in the basement. I’m bringing my tools over to start work on it tonight—” Gallagher caught Richie’s look of disappointment and checked himself. “That is, right after Richie and I finish building that slot car. Right, kiddo?” He gave the boy a chuck on the shoulder and Richie beamed.

  The cordless phone rang. Gallagher found it on top of the glass case of Hummel figures. He answered, made a face, then handed it to Georgia.