The Heat of Angels

by Lisa Girolami

  She tried to call Sarah but hung up when her voice mail clicked on again. She stared at the glowing face of the phone, displaying a picture of Abel she’d taken when he was first assigned to her. She wished she could go back to the first day she met Sarah. And if she couldn’t do that, she’d just ask to go back a couple of days to change the way she’d behaved.

  She clicked over to messages and typed.

  Sarah, I didn’t thank you for helping me when I was sick. Actually, drunk. And I want to tell you how I regret being so horribly wretched to you last night when I was drunk yet again. Two hugely stupid mistakes. And the third mistake, worst of all, is that I was an idiot and was callous to you. I am asking for the opportunity to apologize in person.

  She reread the text. It was a start, she supposed. She hit send and wished she could be transported to Sarah as quickly as the message whooshed to her.

  *

  As she pulled into her garage, Chris hit a few keystrokes on her dash-mounted computer to sign off of her shift and turned off the car’s engine. The nightly routine was more like a ritual for Abel and her. She let him out and he sat in front of her, fidgeting excitedly because he never wasn’t excited. She took his vest off and his tail wagged eagerly. His ears were alert and his eyes focused on nothing else but her.

  “Did you do well today, Abel?” she said quietly.

  His tail wagged even harder.

  “Are you the best partner ever?”

  Out of habit, his body shook with anticipation.

  She paused, watching him hang on her every movement and word, and said, “Good boy!”

  He leaped up and she caught him as he hit her full force in the chest. He slobbered all over her face, and she was, as always, filled with pride and love as she let him back down.

  He waited for her at the garage side door, ran into the backyard when she said it was okay, and peed when she told him to take a break. He then let himself into his kennel. She fed him, locked the door, and as she went inside, she checked her phone. She didn’t have any calls or texts from Sarah.

  She threw her keys on the counter, but they slid off and landed on the floor. She walked by them and stopped, backtracked, and picked them up.

  As she placed them on the counter, she said, “Nice, Bergstrom. The floor is bad. The counter is good. You couldn’t just leave them there because that would be bad.” She snatched up her keys again and cocked her arm back to launch them at the wall.

  Her frustration and disappointment over the way she’d treated Sarah had been building since that night. A foul burst of anger exploded inside her but evaporated just as suddenly, and the withdrawal wrenched her gut. As if someone had suddenly knocked the wind out of her, her knees buckled and she reached out to lean on the counter.

  Her cell phone rang and she fumbled through her pocket to get it. Sarah, she thought, thank God.

  “Bergstrom.” It was Sergeant Shaffer.

  “What the hell happened at the bar call with Davidson and Billings?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You mouthed off to that suspect.”

  “She assaulted me.”

  “What am I supposed to do when the suspect lodges a formal complaint?”

  “I guess you’ll have to take that complaint.”

  “Cut the shit. I’m thinking of writing you up for it.”

  “Yes, sir.” She closed her eyes and mouthed the F-word.

  Chapter Fourteen

  At three o’clock in the morning, Chris was still in her uniform pants and undershirt. She hadn’t showered, which wasn’t a good thing after pulling overtime on a sixteen-hour shift. But she didn’t really care.

  She hadn’t done anything but sit outside and swirl in a toilet bowl of her own bullshit. A thousand re-creations of her last conversation with Sarah weren’t going to change things. No matter what she could have, or should have, said mattered as little as hitting the brakes after your car has gone over a cliff.

  She’d fucked up royally, all within one twenty-four-hour period.

  How had things changed so drastically? She and Sarah had been doing well and really getting to know each other. Sure, they had personality differences, but the whole opposites-attract notion seemed to work with other people.

  It did with Paige and Avalon. Those two were from different worlds. Sure, Paige worked in the same entertainment industry as Avalon, but she was a photographer and wrote coffee-table books, whereas Avalon was a famous actress. Paige was grounded and Avalon was a bit wild.

  They had a lot of ups and downs, but they worked them out.

  But had Sarah written her off? Was she fuming, gathering a maelstrom of words to throw back at her? That would be fine, Chris thought. She deserved it. She’d take anything that would allow her to hear Sarah’s voice again.

  But her phone had remained unsympathetically silent.

  She typed another message to Sarah.

  I can’t sleep. I don’t know where you are. I’m sitting on my front porch and it’s foggy, damp, and eerily quiet. I can hear water drip off the roof of another house. A coyote just yapped for a minute somewhere just north of me. I heard a bunny scurry across a neighbor’s yard three houses down. I hear a frog croak every so often down the street. No birds. I’ll bet they’re roosting somewhere, tucked in their wings for the night. It’s like my senses are hypersensitive right now as I sit here. It’s a strange feeling.

  And I want to yell as loud as possible. To scream to the world how sorry I am that I hurt you. How I regret that while you were trying to help me and explain things to me, I just wouldn’t listen. I want to yell until it breaks through the fog so you can get my message.

  *

  It was past four in the morning when Chris finally went to bed. She closed her eyes, telling herself to fall asleep, which was as successful as demanding a tree to drop its leaves. At some point she must have drifted off, but within two hours, the sun was up, poking at her eyelids.

  Before she was even fully awake, Chris reached for her phone and felt the lead weight in her heart sink to the bottom of a pool of gloom. Still no calls or texts from Sarah.

  Her eyes hurt and a headache was prying at her skull, attempting to gain access and beat the shit out of her brain. Sitting up didn’t help much, so she got up and swallowed some aspirin.

  Wandering around the house, she went into the living room and stood behind the couch. After a minute, she wondered why the hell she was staring at the magazines on the coffee table. She plodded into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Again, she stared at nothing but finally grabbed a Diet Coke just so she’d avoid getting pissed that she was caught in an aimless circle.

  She could think of absolutely nothing positive to do. Making breakfast didn’t appeal to her, and the thought of doing laundry sucked. She had the morning off, to do anything she wanted, but the empty span of time seemed like a prison sentence because she couldn’t talk to the one person she needed to reach.

  She certainly wasn’t going to stalk Sarah or call her every ten minutes. The ball was not only not in her court; it had been picked up and taken home.

  She went back to her bedroom and grabbed her cell phone. She needed a friendly voice.

  “Good morning, sunshine.” Paige sounded like she’d been up for hours.

  “Why are you so chipper?”

  “I’m seeing my girl tonight, the concept for my new book is coming along brilliantly, and it’s Thursday.”

  “What’s so special about Thursday?”

  “You’ve forgotten.”

  What had she forgotten? “Geez, Paige…my head’s not right. I’m sorry.”

  “I can’t believe it dropped out of your head that we’re going to the Dapper Cadaver.”

  “Oh, yeah. I remember now,” Chris said as she sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes. Paige needed props to use in a book-cover photo shoot she was planning. The theme had something to do with Hollywood horror movies, and the Dapper Cadaver was a prop house and fabrication shop tha
t made all sorts of corpses and guts and body parts for films and television shows. They’d talked about it a few times and picked a day to go. That all had occurred before her life changed at the blackberry bin of Whole Foods Market. “You want me to go see fake versions of what I see every day during my regular work hours?”

  “Yup,” she said a little too cheerfully. “You’re my consultant.”

  “All right, but I need to be back before this afternoon.”

  “Going in to work early?”

  “No,” she said. However, that wouldn’t be a bad idea. “I just need to be busy.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  Chris got up to brush her teeth, which tasted like hairy bits of taffy. “I’ll tell you when you pick me up.”

  *

  Even long after rush hour was over, Interstate 5, the freeway that began in Mexico and didn’t stop until reaching into Canada, had its typical clog of cars going Lord knows where. The sun beat down on the windshield, and Chris slouched in the passenger’s seat as though she were in math class, her worst subject.

  “Tell me what this adventure is about?” Chris glared at the trucker who stared down at her from his big rig.

  “I already told you, like four times, we’re going to a horror shop full of gory prop body parts.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Things weren’t sticking in her head lately. Maybe it was only those things that had nothing to do with Sarah.

  “And quit changing the subject.” Paige moved over a lane just as she crossed under the Ventura Freeway in Glendale. “So, you left off where you said some horrible things to Sarah and then she left.”

  “I was drunk.”

  “That’s bullshit. The alcohol didn’t form the words you said to her. You did.”

  Chris rubbed her forehead. “I know.” She elaborated on more of the conversation she’d had with Sarah, feeling nauseous just retelling the awful facts.

  “So then what?”

  “I haven’t heard from her. I worked a long shift yesterday and texted her a couple of times. I guess she doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  “Would you want to talk to you?”

  “This pleasant chitchat in which we’re partaking isn’t helping.”

  Paige rolled her eyes and began to merge over to the slow lane. “It’s called tough love.”

  “I need to find her and apologize. I want to ask her, if it’s not too late, if I can try again.”

  “You think it’s actually over between you?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t get ahold of her. The evidence seems to point to a fait accompli.”

  “You’re getting all French on me. Have you been arresting baguette bakers?”

  Chris thought a moment about the term and its finality. “You know when you fire a gun?”

  “No. I never have.”

  “Theoretically. Jesus, Paige. When you fire a gun and it shoots through a window, what’s the result?”

  “A call to the maid to bring a broom?”

  Chris snatched up Paige’s coffee from the middle console.

  “Hey!” Paige reached for it unsuccessfully. “Give that back.”

  “You’re being a brat.”

  “Okay, okay. Give Paige mommy’s little helper.”

  Chris handed it back to her. “You get a presumably irreversible outcome.”

  Paige took the Hollywood Way off-ramp and turned south. “Probably. But until you talk to her, it’s still a presumption.”

  Her phone hadn’t vibrated all morning, but Chris checked it again anyway. She saw Paige watching her and pushed it back into her front pocket.

  “Listen, Chris, it’s not over until the corpulent lady sings.”

  Chris snorted.

  “You’re not going to give up, are you?”

  “No.” She was just currently petrified to confront Sarah. And that was pretty funny because her job consisted of nothing but confrontation. Except, at work, she was always on the straightforward side of conflict. All she had to do was observe and listen to the facts and then hook ’em up or let ’em go. This time, she was the perpetrator. And she was thoroughly ashamed.

  But she was also sick of moping around in her own shit. She needed to find Sarah and hope to hell she’d listen.

  “Then what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to get out of this funk and face the music from the corpulent lady. And then I’m going to go over to her place and throw pebbles at her window if I have to.”

  “That’s right. And you’ll be fine. Just tell her how you feel.”

  As they pulled in front of a very stark and nondescript building on San Fernando Road, Chris sat up straight. “That’s a lot of telling, but I’m ready.”

  A green, coffin-shaped graphic on the face of the building read DAPPER CADAVER—CASUALTY SIMULATION. While the rest of the building blended in with the other perfectly square, gray cement industrial structures that lined the block, the only other indication that bizarre things awaited them inside was a small sign next to the door. It was simply a hand-painted image of an “open” casket. In its restrained simplicity, the place looked absolutely chilling.

  A Metrolink train lumbered by, which was the only movement in the neighborhood. Maybe it was early, Chris thought. Or maybe the zombies hadn’t woken up yet and decided to come on down for a parts replacement.

  Chris and Paige got out of the car and walked up to the door.

  “This is gonna be cool!” Paige said, and they went in.

  The entryway was decorated with jars of what looked like closed-eyed little animals and deformed something-or-others all floating in formaldehyde. Surgical instruments lined the glass cases of the front desk. Anatomical charts, skeletons, and bizarre mermaid-like creatures completed the décor.

  A strangely normal-looking woman directed them into the warehouse—which struck Chris as more like a museum than a store. Disfigured bodies, weapons, and morgue instruments lived in gruesome harmony with semi-fleshy bones, burnt body parts, a couple of mummies, and a myriad of torture devices.

  Chris almost nodded to the man in her peripheral vision, but he wouldn’t return the gesture as it was actually a decapitated guy in a floral shirt and beach shorts.

  Chris leaned toward Paige. “You always take me to the nicest places.”

  They wandered past the funeral caskets and a gutted, naked man with his intestines sprawled along the floor. Chris was so engrossed in the grossness of the eviscerated rubber humans and animals that she didn’t see Paige stop and bumped into her.

  A mass of dismembered, cut-up, and burnt corpses was propped up against a display wall of neatly arranged body parts that would make Hannibal Lecter swoon.

  “This is exactly what I need.”

  “That’s good to know,” Chris said as she surveyed the amazing array of choice parts. “Remind me not to have any more sleepovers at your place.”

  Paige smacked her on the arm. “Admit it, this place is so creepy, it’s a hoot!”

  All Chris knew was that if she had to take Abel in here to conduct a search at night, she’d hope to hell her flashlight wouldn’t crap out on her.

  Paige picked up items like they were shoes at Payless ShoeSource, except these styles had names like gory Jack half arm, bloody meat spine, human-torso skin, eye with optic nerve, and serial-killer scraps.

  Chris picked up a piece called half-eaten arm. “Maybe I should give this to Abel to chew on when we interrogate suspected drug dealers.”

  Paige grabbed it from her. “Ooooh, this would be good, too.”

  “So what are you envisioning exactly?”

  Paige’s eyes were as wide and excited as a sugared-up kid at a slumber party. “I want to create a horror scene and have film equipment around it. Maybe a motion-picture camera with a bloody torso hanging over it, or a movie clapboard that’s severing an arm.”

  “Okay, that’s gruesome for a book cover.”

  “It’ll be done so that it’s obviously not real. That’s the slant o
f the book. I’m photographing the behind-the-scenes of special horror effects and their applications on the set. I’ve already gotten shots of actors playing with things just like this.”

  “Well, I have to admit, this stuff looks pretty real.” She marveled at the artistry in the production of the pieces. Obviously people were used to cast the body parts, and then someone pulled parts from a mold and painted them, but the level of detail was surprisingly believable. She got a kick out of watching Paige pore over her choices, holding up one gory thing and comparing it to another.

  After a while, Paige picked out about five items and happily carried them to the front desk while Chris hung back and stared a mangled corpse straight in its only eye.

  “Come on,” Paige called when she’d finished making her purchase. “Let’s go back to my place and lay all this out on the table!”

  Chris nodded to the woman and then opened the door for Paige. “You play house with your new friends, and I’ll go home and not think about eating a steak for a while.”

  *

  Uniformed and ready for work, Chris loaded Abel in the back of her squad car and drove over to Sarah’s house. She had more than a half hour before she had to log in for her shift and hoped she would talk to her.

  Frazzled nerves danced at the ends of her arms, making her hands shake. What would she say to Sarah? How should the conversation start?

  First of all, Sarah, I am so sorry…

  Sarah, please give me a minute to tell you…

  Here’s the thing, I was an asshole.

  Would Sarah slam the door in her face?