The Angel Maker

by Ridley Pearson

  Wong Kei persisted, “I have a sum for you now which, as I have just said, is to show my good faith. Yours as well as mine. Please take it.”

  No mention of a final figure. Tegg liked it that way. “No hurry,” he said.

  The ferry rocked violently to the left. Dozens of cars complained.

  “You are a trusting man,” Won Kei put forward.

  “Not really,” Tegg said. “If you don’t pay me, I’ll take the heart back.” He waited. “It was a joke,” Tegg added.

  “You joke about my wife’s life?” His chin trembled. “Is that what I am hearing from you?” He drank more of the Coke, spilling some. “Allow me to explain something, Dr. Tegg. Allow me to explain the obvious.” He finished the drink. He studied the empty can as if reading it. “I am relying on you. That is all I am going to say about it. That should be self-explanatory. Yes?”

  Tegg didn’t like the sound of that. “You will call me when your wife is admitted and ready to go,” Tegg instructed. He wrote out his cellular number on a blank memo pad from his DayTimer. No name, just the number. “Only the cellular. If you call me on the land lines, I will hang up.”

  Wong Kei sat forward, reached over the seat and dragged a small Alaskan Airlines flight bag to him. He looked incredibly tired. Anxiety and grief were swallowing him whole. Tegg knew the symptoms. “Take this. This is the purpose for this meeting—my purpose. Our time is wasted otherwise. I insist.” He didn’t shove it at him, but he made its handle available.

  Tegg accepted the bag, his curiosity mounting. He understood the commitment his acceptance of it represented. He was crossing a dangerous threshold: He would now owe this man. He immediately regretted his acceptance of the bag, but knew it would be impossible to return it. Wong Kei’s expression told him as much.

  For emphasis, the Asian added, “We must not overlook the seriousness of the situation. Time is everything. There is nothing I will not do to restore my wife to health. Yes?”

  Tegg thought he meant it as some sort of veiled threat, although it was difficult to interpret exactly. Perhaps he was offering his help. Tegg said, “If I don’t hear from you first, I’ll call when we’re set to go.”

  The man nodded. The ferry slowed and bumped the loading dock.

  From the ferry’s deck, Tegg, all alone in the wind and the night, watched the black car as it and the others disembarked. In the glow of a few meager street lamps and a mercury light far in the distance, he watched sea gulls resting on pilings, standing on one leg. Balanced.

  Tegg felt delicately balanced as well. Pamela would not assist in the heart harvest. They had discussed the possibility of it before—it was constantly on Tegg’s mind—and she had rejected it outright. It would have to be a solo harvest, even more challenging. More risky. Perhaps it was time to sacrifice one of the dogs to practice. “Practice makes perfect,” he said into the wind as the ferry lumbered through the chop and headed back toward Seattle. Toward his family. His children. And yet away from all of that at the same time.

  Toward his future, he thought, however it was now defined.

  SATURDAY

  February 4

  13

  Dr. Elden Tegg attempted not to touch anything in Donnie Maybeck’s van. Concern about leaving fingerprints behind had nothing to do with it—he was wearing gloves. The place was a cesspool. For a man repulsed by dirty environments, a man who had a fetish about cleanliness, this vehicle was a nightmare. A thick layer of dust and grime had baked onto the cracked vinyl of the dashboard. Some kind of solidified scum—soda? beer? coffee? worse?—had drooled over the engine cover that separated the two front seats and was now fuzzy with lint. The windows were tinted in a yellow filth, and the carpet—what was left of it—was matted like the hair on the backside of an incontinent dog. For a man accustomed to the sights and smells associated with invasive surgery, it was strange to feel nauseous.

  “You don’t look so hot,” Donnie Maybeck said.

  “Drive.”

  “Hey, I know you don’t like this, but I ain’t doing this alone. And Connie ain’t no help in this kinda thing.”

  “We’ve been over this.”

  “Don’t be so fucking pissed about it, because there’s nothing can be done.”

  “Just drive.”

  “It’s not the same as the others. You said so yourself. This here is kidnapping. This here is some serious shit. Connie could never do this.”

  “You shouldn’t involve her in any of it.” He saw no point in attempting to reason with a little person like Maybeck. There were fly specks along the bottom of the windshield. Donnie Maybeck was a fly speck. And what was that lodged into the defrost slot? A discarded plastic wrapper for a Sheik Elite with Spermicide! He recoiled, wanting to levitate and not have to touch anything.

  “Hey, she’s involved in it, all right. Okay? She’s in this up to her short hairs. Ain’t nothing can be done about it. Without her, without updating the database, how we gonna pick which donor to approach?”

  “Humor me: Shut up and drive.” Tegg felt uneasy. A mistake he had made years earlier had cost a human life. Now he possessed the skills and abilities to correct that wrong, even though it came at the cost of deepening his involvement with Maybeck.

  “You’re sure she’s alone?” Tegg asked.

  “You’re the one who talked to her, not me.”

  Tegg had called Sharon Shaffer twenty minutes earlier and had introduced himself as a public health official. He apologized for calling on a Saturday but explained that this was something that couldn’t wait. It was a question of some plasma donations she had made several years back. He suggested he and his assistant pay her a visit and that for confidentiality’s sake, she would probably prefer to be alone. She had taken the bait, and she had sounded scared: just right.

  “You understand she could recognize me,” Maybeck said to him, interrupting his thoughts. “I mean chances are, since she’s in the database, that I mighta sold her a fake I.D. at some point.”

  “If she says anything, tell her you work for BloodLines. We know she hasn’t sold her plasma for over two years. She won’t remember you. I do all the talking. Not a peep out of you. You’re only there for control purposes—if things get out of hand, and only then if I tell you to act. Hmm?” The man didn’t answer. Tegg felt nervous, a condition so foreign to him that at first it was unrecognizable. He thought maybe he was sick.

  Maybeck sold fake I.D.s to underage runaways who needed them to sell their plasma. In this way, he won their confidence and obtained their vital statistics. He had been doing this ever since he had stumbled upon Tegg’s Secret. The Secret had led to blackmail, the blackmail to a certain draining of Tegg’s available cash, and subsequently to a new business for both of them: harvesting. With Maybeck assuming the streetside risks and logistics, connecting Tegg to the donors, this shaky alliance had begun. Now a kidnapping—their biggest risk to date. Tegg searched the dashboard’s control panel, looking for a way to get more air.

  Maybeck was in it for the money. Tegg, on the other hand, felt uncomfortable with the money. He gave every last cent of his share to charities in his wife’s name, enhancing their social prominence. Feeling Maybeck’s recklessness, he wondered how he would handle the man if he went too far—if he asked for too much. You had to watch the little people when they cottoned on to the smell of money.

  Tegg knew they couldn’t screw this up. Wong Kei was unlikely to be a man with a predisposition toward forgiveness. He had a mobster’s reputation. If Tegg failed this harvest, it might be his last. His moral salvation commanded a high price.

  Tegg finally threw a lever, and a gust of dusty air dislodged the condom wrapper from the defrost vent. He swatted at it frantically.

  Maybeck slowed and turned into Freemont Lane, a dead end servicing a pair of apartment buildings to the right and, to the left, the back doors of houses on Lyden Avenue, including the green one, thirty-six thirty-nine and a half.

  “Bring the laptop with you—
it’ll make you look more official. And remember to keep your mouth shut,” Tegg reminded. He meant this literally: those teeth were enough to terrify anyone.

  Sharon Shaffer had spent the last twenty minutes in terror. She had tried to drown out her recollection of that phone call by cleaning up, by running the vacuum. Public Health. The blood supply. It could only mean one thing … She answered the knock on her back door.

  Two men. The bearded one was well dressed and looked distinguished, especially compared to his assistant, who reminded her of an aging James Dean. He carried the Toshiba laptop computer in his right hand.

  “May we come in?” the distinguished one asked. She knew that voice from the phone call.

  She felt afraid. If she refused them entry, would the reason for their being here leave with them? There were men she had been with during her years on the streets, complete strangers. There were things she had done that now, a few years later, she could hardly believe possible. She had not blocked them out, for she had no desire to forget her past; it was memories of her past that inspired her present work, that enabled her to so easily relate to the women who found their way to The Shelter. In an odd way, she was even proud of her past. But the characters she had encountered during that time were behind her now. She felt terrified. Was it true that your past always catches up with you?

  She stepped back and admitted them. She knew what this was about. It was about dirty needles. About sex. About a different life, a different Sharon Shaffer. These two were about to ruin her new life. She felt faint. She waved them toward the dining table, for the place was small and there were only two stuffed chairs over by the television, and she wanted them all to sit. She had to sit no matter what.

  The bearded man said, “BloodLines Incorporated maintains an active database of all of its donors, past and present.” James Dean patted the laptop and set it down. The bearded man explained, “The donated blood is tested prior to distribution—for disease.”

  There was the word she had dreaded. Fear turned her palms icy. Her eyes threatened tears. As hard as the streets had made her, as welcome as death would have been back then, she felt weak and terrified now by this one word.

  “What has happened,” the man continued, “is that the state’s department of health, in a routine audit, discovered a glitch in the software that drives the BloodLines’ database. With that glitch removed, certain donors appear in an at-risk category, as concerns certain diseases.”

  “HIV,” Sharon said. It was no guess. They didn’t come to your door on a Saturday morning over measles.

  “Yes, but we needn’t jump to conclusions.”

  “AIDS,” she whispered softly.

  “What we need,” the man continued professionally, “is a fresh blood sample. There’s no need to jump to any conclusions until the results of those tests are in. No need at all,” he emphasized. “The computer has been wrong once. It could certainly be wrong a second time.”

  “I’m shown as positive,” she stated.

  “It’s only a computer. We need to run the tests again. I’m a doctor. We can take your blood now, or you can come downtown later in the week. It’s entirely up to you.” The doctor added, “It won’t take us five minutes, if you’d care to get it over with now.”

  “Are you expecting anyone?” James Dean asked.

  She shook her head. She found it difficult to speak.

  The doctor said encouragingly, “One thing in favor of doing this now is that you will get the results much sooner.”

  “Let’s do it now,” she said. “How long until I know?”

  “A few days. Four or five working days, usually.”

  “Oh, God. That’ll seem like forever.”

  The doctor addressed his assistant, “I’ve left my case in the van. Go and get it for me.” It was an order, not a request, and it struck her that there was no love lost between these two. James Dean stood and left through the back door, leaving the laptop computer standing on the carpet. “Our apologies for coming to your back door,” the doctor said. “We’ve found most people would just as soon not explain anything to the neighbors. We try to park in the back and keep a low profile.”

  Again, she couldn’t find any words. She nodded, just barely holding on. A lifetime lost?

  “It’s probably nothing more than a computer error. Really.”

  “That’s what your voice says, but that’s not what your eyes say,” she wanted to tell him. He knew something, all right. He was as nervous as she was.

  His lips tensed and his eyes hardened, and for the second time she felt a nauseating fear. She put her hands into her lap so he wouldn’t see them shaking.

  “I wouldn’t worry,” he said.

  “Yes, you would. If you were me, you would.” She stared at him. “You frighten me,” she said without meaning to.

  “It’s the possibility of the matter that frightens you, not me,” he explained in that harsh, grating voice he seemed stuck with.

  James Dean returned with a small soft-plastic case and handed it to the doctor. It had tiered shelves, like a fishing tackle box. He tore a plastic bag off of a disposable syringe and took hold of her wrist to time her pulse. His fingers were ice cold.

  He did some more preparations below the lip of the table, out of sight from her, and then slipped on a pair of surgical gloves.

  He’s afraid of contamination, she thought. She felt dizzy.

  He swabbed her upper forearm with alcohol and then wrapped surgical tubing tightly around her upper arm. He asked her to make a fist. She looked away. These days, she hated the sight of needles.

  “I’ll need to take three samples,” the doctor explained. “But just the one needle. It shouldn’t hurt too much.”

  He pricked her arm then. She jumped with the sensation. All the ramifications, all the possibilities of what had been said here in the last few minutes swam through her head. Her life was finished. Contaminated. Contact with anyone at The Shelter would be minimized and eventually terminated. Worse than a leper. Society would shun her. She would eventually fall victim to the virus. They all did. There would be AZT—at a few thousand dollars a month! There would be counseling. There would be tears and lost friendships. There would be a long, grueling illness, weight loss, and death. She started to cry.

  As she blinked away her tears, she focused on the contents of his medical case. She noticed an electric shaver, some leather strapping that looked more like a muzzle—a dog’s muzzle? Next to it, a choke collar chain! This man wasn’t a doctor, he was … “A veterinarian?” she asked.

  At that same instant a stunning warmth surged through her system. It flooded into her like hot water. She knew that feeling only too well. Valium and some kind of narcotic. A slam like codeine. They weren’t taking her blood, they were drugging her.

  She snapped her head around in time to see the last of the injection administered. She looked up at the doctor—the veterinarian!—whose full concentration remained focused on the injection. She glanced up at James Dean, realizing now, for the first time, that they had not given her any identification. He was smiling at her. He had a mouth full of the worst teeth she had ever seen, like a rotten picket fence.

  She tried to pull her arm away, but it barely moved—ninety-five pounds of dead flesh. She felt too slow, too heavy to offer much resistance. She felt terrified. She felt marvelously content. She felt tired, incredibly relaxed.

  “You’re going to be fine,” he said in a fuzzy voice as if miles away.

  Helpless. Powerless. Nothing she could do.

  Across the room she saw a shadow move along the floor and believed at first it was another effect of the drug, but realized all at once that it was her housemate and hoped that she might yet be rescued. Agnes came around the corner, her seventy-year-old blind eyes open wide in curiosity.

  “Help!” Sharon forced out numbly. Loudly enough to be heard? Had any sound come out at all?

  The invasive warmth loosened every muscle. It felt like love. Pure
and perfect love. Liquid love. Her eyes grew hot, and her lids fell like dark blue curtains. Agnes? Was Agnes out there? Anything but this, she thought. “Give me more,” she felt like saying.

  “Sharon?” It was Agnes.

  Sharon Shaffer struggled to open her eyes, but only managed one last fleeting glimpse of the woman’s silver-blue hair and pale white skin. Someone was dragging her.

  The last thing she heard was the doctor’s angry whisper—like cracking ice—as he demanded of his accomplice: “Who the hell is that?”

  14

  Homicide Lieutenant Phil Shoswitz loved baseball. He arranged his working hours around Mariners’ home games and captained the police softball team. One of his favorite and most overused jokes was that he was the only guy on the force who was a captain and a lieutenant at the same time. His office, which remained constantly cluttered with stacks of pending case files, since Boldt’s last visit had become something of a combination baseball locker room/museum. Its walls were crowded with autographed artifacts, photographs, and shelves of championship trophies.

  As Boldt shut the door, one of the boys called out a warm greeting. You don’t know how many friends you have, he thought, until you return to a place after a long absence. He hadn’t realized how good—how right—coming back here would feel.

  “Thanks for coming,” Shoswitz said in his typically tense voice. “I know it’s a Saturday, but this is important.” He had a dark complexion, a long, thin face, and ever-vigilant eyes, not unlike the hardened criminals he dealt with so regularly. A high-strung type, he chose his clothes poorly and shaved too fast. Married once, he was a weekend father now—at least if he wasn’t stuck with a Saturday rotation. He had been a fair detective but was a brilliant lieutenant. Some people were made for a position of authority and a series of endless meetings.

  “What are you and Matthews up to? First, she pays you a visit at The Joke. Now I get some inquiry from a place called …” he checked a memo on his desk, “BloodLines. A woman named Dundee is asking if we’ve got a cop named Boldt on our line-up. I’m wondering: Do we?”