Blood of Angels

by Marshall, Michael

  Some of this happened to me, but not all of it.

  I'll tell you what we know.

  •••

  The first email had come a few days before summer ended. Nina and I had spent the afternoon in Sheffer, the nearest shopping opportunity to where we were living. A very small town in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State, Sheffer has a main drag of wood-fronted buildings divided by five cross streets which fade into fir trees without much ceremony or regret. The town has a market and a cafe that serves good food, as well as selling second-hand books and CDs and curios of no value whatsoever. There is a pharmacy, a sundries-and-liquor store and a place for ladies to get their hair cut the way they did when Jimmy Carter was president. The town is home to a couple of upmarket bed and breakfasts and three bars, with a motel conveniently just up the road in case you lose track of the time or drink a little too much to drive home. In our case, both had been known. There is a small railroad museum, a police station run by a good man, and that's pretty much it. It's a decent place, and some nice people live there, but it's little more than a wide spot in the road.

  Our temporary residence was smaller still, a log cabin that had once been part of an old-fashioned resort down on the Oregon coast. At the end of the 1990s a retired couple from Portland bought three of these cabins, moved them up on the backs of trucks, and installed them on a forty-acre lot at the end of a failed subdivision in the forest thirty minutes north-east of Sheffer. The husband had died soon after but Patrice was still going strong. She reminded me a little of my mother, and if Beth Hopkins had still been alive it would have been tough to choose who to bet on in a fight. Patrice offered us the use of one of the cabins after we extricated her from a situation out in the woods. We thought about it, made some arrangements, accepted the offer.

  Patrice's acreage backed onto national land and had its own big pond. If you looked out across it on an autumn afternoon it was easy to believe mankind had never existed, and it was easy not to mourn the lack. Our cabin was on the far side, half a mile from the road. It had a sitting room with a fireplace and a kitchen area, plus a bathroom and a bedroom. It was plenty big enough. My life had condensed to the extent that I could store my possessions in the trunk of a not-very-large car. We had one of those too. It belonged to the woman I had first been introduced to as Special Agent Baynam.

  Nina. She was presently out on the porch in front of the cabin. The air was cold but not bitter and had a relenting quality about it that said winter knew its time was not quite come. Nina was supposed to be watching the sun go down, but I knew she wouldn't be. Just having your head pointed in the right direction does not count. The sun was probably grateful for the break. Being glared at by Nina when you're trying to slip gracefully below the horizon is more pressure than any celestial body needs.

  I was in the kitchen area of the cabin putting together a salad, and making a meal of it in more ways than one. Nina had been quiet for most of the day, quiet in the manner of a large rock resting halfway up a hillside. I had asked if she was okay and received affirmatives which were unconvincing but non-negotiable. I have no idea why women do this, but there's nothing that can be done about it until they're good and ready to talk. I knew that we were going to be having a conversation soon—it had been brewing for a week—and I was in no hurry for it to start. Consequently the salad was taking on baroque proportions. Any culinary aesthetic had long departed and it looked more as though someone had decided to conserve on counter space by tossing the whole salad bar into one bowl. I had gone as far as steaming some French beans on the stove and was waiting for them to cool in a bowl of ice water in the sink.

  To kill the time I wandered into the living area and flipped open Nina's laptop. I had one of my own but it wasn't really mine and was hidden in the roof space of the cabin. The material on it was backed up, encrypted and stored on a server far away. The files on the laptop were the earliest versions I had, however, and retained a kind of precedence in my mind. Strange how the human mind confers status and antecedence even on digital data, on electrons which can be everywhere at once and hence nowhere at all. We have to believe that things begin somewhere, I guess. Otherwise, how can they stop?

  I checked my email accounts once every couple of weeks at most. I wasn't really in contact with the outside world. The one guy who used to email me regularly was dead. It was his laptop which was stowed in the roof. The only mails I received now were sporadic opportunities to harden or lengthen my penis, be showered with college grants, or view footage of whichever bubblehead was currently juicing her celebrity through suspiciously well-lit home movie footage. The non-specificity of these invitations, their generic inapplicability, made them even less meaningful than total silence. Maybe that's what I was hoping for. Further quietness, additional white noise, and through these a promise that this thing we were calling life was going to continue for a while longer.

  So when I saw I had a single email, and that it appeared to be to me in particular, I suddenly felt very still.

  The subject line said just: WARD HOPKINS

  I didn't recognize the sending address. It was a Hotmail account, favoured lair of spammers but not exclusively so. It had been sent to an address of mine which I'd had for many years but not used in two or three. It didn't seem likely a message to that account could have any current bearing on my life.

  I opened it. It said only this: I need to talk to you.

  No you don't, I thought. Goodbye.

  I pulled the message towards the trash but something made me hesitate. Should I at least make a record of the sending address? Deletion is not the same as negation, as I had reason to know.

  I heard a creaking sound from outside and turned to see Nina heading towards the door. She was wearing black jeans and a thick brown jacket I had bought her down in Yakima a couple of months before. She looked good, but grouchy.

  I quickly shut the computer and went over to the kitchen.

  'Ward, I done stared at that sunset as long as I'm able,' she said. 'Where the hell is the food?'

  'Coming right up.' I took the beans out of the water, shook them a little, and spread them artfully on top of the other stuff in the bowl. Nina watched this in silence, staring at the result with what appeared to be genuine bafflement.

  'Voilà,' I said. 'The salad to end all salads.'

  'You're not kidding. How about a few pine cones on top? A pair of squirrels, in a tableau. I can fetch a couple if you want. Or, like, a whole tree or something. Say the word, maestro.'

  'Stop, stop.' I held up my hands. 'Really, I don't do it for the thanks. Just the pleasure on your face is enough.'

  She smiled, a little. 'You're an idiot.'

  'Perhaps. But I'm your idiot. Come on, give it a try. Actually, you have to. There isn't anything else. I used it all up.'

  She shook her head, then smiled more genuinely. Spooned some salad out onto a plate, and then added an extra scoopful, to show good intent. Pecked me on the cheek and carried her plate and the wine bottle back out onto the porch.

  I followed. Talk minus a half-hour and counting, I reckoned.

  •••

  We ate for a while.

  The air was still soft, but had edges within it now, carried down off the higher reaches of the mountains. It wasn't a salad kind of evening. After about ten minutes Nina set her fork at a 'that's enough of that' angle. Her plate was still over half full.

  'I'm sorry,' she said, when she saw me noticing. 'You've gone to a lot of trouble.'

  'Way too much. It sucks. It's the Salad of Shame. I told you we should just have bought a big box of Izzy's fried chicken.'

  'Maybe.'

  'Definitely. You should trust me on these things. I have junk-food wisdom. It's a gift. On any given day I'll be able to predict the best type of junk food to have—not just for me, but for the tribe as a whole. In epochs gone by I would have been a snack shaman. I'd have consulted bones and read portents in the sky, and finally pronounced: "Lo, guys, you'l
l be in the mood for tacos later, so try to snag a mammoth when you're out." And I would have been right.'

  Nina was looking at me. 'Are you still talking?'

  'Not me. It must be the wind.'

  The lake was assuming its twilight form, black and glasslike.

  Nina stared out over it for a while, and finally she spoke. 'What are we going to do, Ward?'

  There it was. I realized what I'd been trying to put off was not a conversation after all. It was just that. A question. The question.

  I lit a cigarette. 'What do you want to do?'

  'It's not like that and you know it. It's just…it can't last. This is no way to live.'

  'No?'

  'I don't mean it like that. You know. I mean these circumstances. I mean not having a choice.'

  I took her hand. The summer had been good to us, despite everything. We had mainly stayed around Sheffer. Got to know some of the locals while keeping our heads firmly down. Got to know each other, too: when we'd accepted the use of Patrice's cabin we'd only been together a week, though our lives had been linked for six months before that. Since soon after my parents had died. Or been murdered, as it turned out. Nina knew most of what there was to know about my past. I knew stuff about her, too. More than anyone, I suspected, including a man called John Zandt who had once been our friend but appeared lost to the world now.

  The three of us held secrets it would have been better not to know. That was why our life was this way.

  We went for long, long walks in the woods, cooked healthy food on a barbecue I'd made out of flat rocks. Nina laughed when she saw it, pointed out I'd somehow made it in a half-assed Prairie style. It worked, though. With all the walking and helping Patrice and others with manual work, I was in the best shape I'd been in for years. The injury I'd received to my shoulder five months before didn't trouble me any more. While I'd lost some pounds Nina had gained a couple of ounces, and—though she was never going to be called anything more than slim—it suited her. We'd been on a couple of road trips too, driving east and south more or less at random. They made us feel less like we were in hiding. We had to go down to LA on two tense occasions and on the second of these fetched a few things from Nina's house, a precarious structure perched in the less fashionable side of the Malibu Hills. We couldn't stick around long enough for her to put the place on the market—in the unlikely event anyone would want to buy it—and in the end we secured it and left it as it was.

  Which, in a way, was what Nina was talking about. Fundamentally everything was still the way it was, however much I might want to pretend otherwise. We had boarded up our windows but the world was still out there. Nina had a job, for a start. A serious job. Her negotiated leave of absence had been stretched to the point where it squeaked: she was going to have to either resign or go back. My own position was more fluid. I had worked for the CIA, some years before. I specialized in media surveillance. In the end, they let me go. Actually, as my friend Bobby had been fond of pointing out, I walked—just ahead of a mandatory polygraph test.

  We talked around the subject for a while but we could sense this hiatus breaking, and neither of us wanted it to. It had been like being held in a giant's warm hand for a spell. We could feel that hand lowering, preparing to put us back down.

  'We'll decide something,' I said. 'But for tonight life could be worse. I sit here with you and I don't feel I'm lacking much.'

  'Well who would? I am, quite literally, a peach. Attractive, smart, even-tempered. The perfect companion in all ways.'

  I raised an eyebrow. 'I'm not sure I'd go that far.'

  'No? Name a failing.'

  'Well, you shot your last boyfriend.'

  'It was an accident.'

  'Yeah. So you claim.'

  'I do. It was.' She winked. 'But it won't be next time.'

  I laughed, and the question went back to hide under its rock for a while longer. We sat out there on the porch, talking and watching the lake darken to a void, until it was too cold and we went inside. Later we lay in bed together and I listened to the trees and Nina's breathing as she slept, until I could no longer tell the sounds apart and I was asleep too.

  Five months may not sound like much, but it made this one of the longest relationships I'd ever had. It still felt mildly miraculous to me. It felt like somewhere I could live. I didn't say anything about the email I'd received, nor about the second—with exactly the same subject and message—which arrived two days later. I deleted this one and buried the other deep in a folder. Simplicity has not been a feature of my life, nor the sense of having a home. I fought their departure in the only way I could. By hiding.

  For a few more days, it worked. It was only on the morning when a car pulled up the track towards Patrice's cabin that I accepted nothing—no smile or white lie or overblown salad—would be enough to stop the world coming to find us again.

  Chapter 2

  The call came at just after eleven in the morning. I was down near the lake, screwing around with some big pieces of old, grey timber I had salvaged from an afternoon helping patch a barn. I had thought maybe I could make a rustic table out of them so we could eat close to the lake without having to drag the small one off the porch. In my heart of hearts I knew we could not be eating outside for much longer, and I further suspected that anything I made would not long stand the rigours of supporting anything heavy, like a full glass of wine. I heard the three short beeps of Nina's cell phone ringing in the distance but didn't give it much thought. The cabin didn't have a phone. If one of our acquaintances in the area wanted to get hold of us, it was her cell they called. I kept clattering around, holding bits of wood together in a speculative fashion, until I looked across to see Nina standing on the porch, white-faced.

  'It's Patrice!' she shouted. 'Someone's coming.'

  I dropped the tools and walked quickly back up to the cabin. My head felt clear, my chest cold. 'How many?'

  'One vehicle. So far.'

  While Nina ran back inside I reached under the porch and pulled out something long and heavy wrapped in a thick plastic sheet. I loaded the rifle quickly, my ears burning, listening for any sound from the other side of the water.

  When I was done I went inside. Nina had our two handguns out on the table. 'Anything yet?'

  'No,' I said, taking my gun and pocketing it. I kissed her and then hurried back outside. I stood for a second and looked across the lake again. I could now see a car outside Patrice's cabin. You couldn't get a vehicle any closer. Any person or group of persons heading our way would have to make the last two hundred yards on foot. There were only two possible routes: following the rough path around the lake shore, or cutting up around through the trees to approach the cabin from the back. Both were mine to hold.

  I picked up the rifle and looped around the cabin, climbing a narrow ridge which was well hidden in trees. I kept low and went about a quarter of the distance around the lake. There was a vantage I had found which gave a good view towards the path thirty yards below, but which would be hard to spot from the lower ground. I hunkered low at the trunk of the largest tree, wedging myself for stability. I pulled the rifle up into position, got it locked into my shoulder. I had spent hours out in the furthest reaches of Patrice's land, practising. I had little doubt that from this range I would be able to hit whatever I aimed at, and no doubt whatsoever that I would be willing to try.

  One car. Four men, most likely. Assuming there was not another vehicle waiting out on the road. And that other men had not been sent to come at us through the forest. If so, I would hear Nina shooting before she heard me.

  After six minutes I began to hear faint sounds of approach down and to the left. Feet crunching amongst the leaves on the path, carried on the clear air. I waited, willing my heart steady and quiet, trying not to think about what would happen if I had to shoot. About where we would go, what we would do. About whether it would even be an issue, or if the best of us both would seep into the indifferent ground right here, red for an hou
r, brown for a few days, then indistinguishable from the other mud and dust. That last thought was easiest to push away. I have no intention of dying. Not now, not ever. I simply don't think it's necessary. Sooner or later the world will just have to see this my way.

  After another two minutes I saw a flash of movement down at the bottom of the rise. Enough to tell it looked like two men, three at the most. That was either good or meant they had backup elsewhere. I leaned backward and glanced left along the ridge. I couldn't see anyone else. I turned back and waited the twenty seconds it should take for them to come level with the next sight line below. It took nearer to forty, which gave me pause. They weren't coming quickly. I didn't know what a measured approach might indicate, and you're going to want to respond very differently to caution or covert expertise. I still didn't know how many there were, either: as they crossed the second clear space a flat blade of sunlight flashed off the lake beyond, filling my eyes with yellow-white.

  Then they were behind trees again. I had one more, final, window. Two or three guys—it ultimately didn't make a lot of difference. We'd still have to drag them out into the woods, lose them somewhere deep.

  I stood and edged forward between the trees to a second position where the line would be clearer, and my safety about the same. A confusing shot coming from behind them might give me an extra two seconds, my position disguised by shatter-echoes from the surrounding trunks.

  I dropped to one knee and sighted. I saw the first glimmer of dark clothing through the trees, five yards short of the clear space I was waiting for them to reach. Thirty seconds ticked by.

  Then I heard something.

  Didn't know what it was at first. Then I realized it was the sound of Nina's phone ringing again.

  I froze, aghast. This was a bad error for Patrice to be making. Very bad. She shouldn't be checking what was happening. This had been agreed. If she saw someone, she called Nina. If she subsequently heard a shot she was supposed to call a friend in Sheffer. That was all. Otherwise she was just supposed to sit tight in her cabin and pretend to be out, or dead, or both.