Angel

by Nicholas Guild

  Pratt allowed himself about fifteen seconds to study the traffic, but he didn’t see any beautiful blond women in open convertibles rushing in pursuit of their prey. Fat chance. He went back into the hotel and found himself a public telephone.

  The switchboard operation at the local Bureau office didn’t seem very impressed when he asked to speak of the agent in charge on a matter of extreme urgency.

  “Yes . . . It’s an emergency . . . That’s right, a matter of life and death. Tell him it’s Warren Pratt, Dayton Homicide. He should have received a fax from Preston Richards in Washington . . . No, I’m not in Dayton, sweetheart. I’m right here in San Francisco.”

  It took three whole minutes to get the stupid fuck to come to the phone. Jim Kinkaid is riding around town at the whim of a lunatic, and the Bureau wants to make an impression by keeping everyone on hold.

  “Special Agent Blandford here,” came the response—finally. “What is this in relation to, Mr. Pratt?”

  So obviously he hadn’t received the fax. So wonderful.

  “Agent Blandford, this is in relation to a double homicide that is certain to be committed today, unless we can prevent it. You’ll want to get on the wire to Preston Richards at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crimes, who knows all about this matter, but in the meantime I need you to get people to the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges. We have to get some sort of homing device into a car.”

  “Mr. Pratt, perhaps you should be speaking to the local police, since homicide falls within their jurisdiction. I can give you their phone number . . . .”

  “Agent Blandford, I know I sound like a mental case, but if you don’t want a major disaster on your hands I suggest you call Richards. We have no time on this. I’ll be knocking on your office door in five minutes.”

  Actually, since he got lucky with a cab, and the traffic was light, and the Federal Building wasn’t very far away, he made it in about four and a half. By then Special Agent Blandford had apparently spoken to Washington.

  “I don’t know what the delay was,” he said hurriedly, taking Pratt by the hand as if they were fraternity brothers. “We still haven’t received our copy, but a federal warrant on a charge of interstate flight was issued this morning against one Angela Wyman. Of course you have our complete coöperation—if you could just bring us up to speed on this . . . .”

  “Absolutely, but right now we need to get men in toll collector’s uniforms out to the bridges. Angela Wyman’s next victim is on his way to her right now, and if we can’t pick up on him before he gets to where he’s going I think we’ll almost certainly lose both of them.”

  It took another ten minutes of fumbling around before agents with the proper equipment were actually out the door and even longer than that before Agent Blandford, who had a map of San Francisco open on his desk and kept drawing what he called “sweep corridors” over it, could be dissuaded from launching a full-scale manhunt, complete with helicopters.

  “We put a bird in the air and we’ll track down your friend Kinkaid,” he said, apparently still under the impression that Jim, if not an actual fugitive, was at least some sort of accomplice. “They find the right make of car, they fall back to get the angle on it, they got lenses up there can read a license plate from four hundred yards like it was the headlines of your morning newspaper. No sweat, we’ll find him.”

  “And then what? You’ll just follow along behind until he leads us to the Angel of Death?”

  Pratt shook his head, as if he could hardly believe what he was hearing. In police parlance the FBI were called the “suits”—not real cops, but bureaucrats with badges—and this joker Blandford was a perfect example of the type.

  “Let’s just remember that a helicopter is a fairly noisy and conspicuous object, and our subject is neither deaf, blind nor stupid. Besides, she’ll be looking for a tail. This is a very clever nut case we’re dealing with here, so let’s try not to underestimate her.”

  This didn’t sit very well with Blandford, who kept drumming the eraser end of a pencil against his map. He was a thick, strongly built man with a wide face, and like a lot of the Bureau’s supervisory personnel he bore a carefully cultivated resemblance to the late J. Edgar Hoover.

  “This fellow Kinkaid goes bumbling in there and we could end up with something very messy,” he said, apparently having just made that discovery. And then, as if to himself, “Yes, very messy.”

  “Kinkaid won’t bumble into anything, so don’t worry. And we have to wait on him. We don’t have any choice.”

  “He was a damn fool to go out on his own like that, though. He’s got about an eighty per cent chance of getting himself murdered.”

  “I think he would consider that an acceptable risk,” Pratt answered with a faint, joyless smile.

  “Well, let’s just hope we can avoid a hostage situation.”

  “You seem to forget—we have one already.”

  39

  Angel was gone. There was no doubt of it. She had closed the front door behind her and the sound of her car’s engine had faded into the distance. Her house was now quite still. Lisa could feel the silence flowing from room to room, thick as water, like bottom currents around the riblike spars of a sunken ship.

  Yet she was not quite alone. The two dead men were there with her for company. Was it her imagination or were they beginning to smell?

  The big one, lying so close to her, his right arm hidden beneath his body and what was left of his head pointing into the room, looked as if he had been shot in the act of trying to run away. His left leg was bent slightly at the knee and the trouser cuff on the other was pushed up over the top of his sock, revealing a band of white, hairless flesh about an inch wide. In fact he had only been trying to stand up, more likely from motives of chivalry than fear, when his brains had made their sudden and unanticipated exit. He might simply have collapsed back into his chair, or he might have fallen backwards, but in either case Lisa probably would never have noticed the lump under his left trouser leg.

  “Don’t get excited, Two-Gun.”

  She had stared at that lump for a long time before it occurred to her what it might be. “Show her your leg iron and you could be next.”

  As chances go it wasn’t much, but when the alternative was ending up on the floor with a couple of dead gangsters you tried everything.

  The sole of the fat man’s shoe was about five feet from the wall to which Lisa was handcuffed. With her maximum reach, supporting herself on the fireplace ring and stretching herself as far into the room as she could go, she could not quite touch him. But she could reach his chair, so she settled for that.

  It was a heavy, deeply upholstered chair, designed for comfort and stability, and the only place Lisa could get a purchase on it was one of its short, square-cut legs, the corners of which cut into her feet. Dragging it to the wall was not a pleasant business.

  But by standing on it she could bring her hands down to her waist and unwrap the coil of wire she had stolen from the toilet paper dispenser. The wire, when pulled as straight as it would go, was only about five feet long. Unfortunately, if she held the wire in her hands, that was about two and a half feet short feet short of what she needed.

  So it was back up onto the chair to try to wriggle out of her pantyhose, no small feat with your hands chained to the wall. She managed to work the pantyhose down to her crotch, but that was it. Even standing on the balls of her feet she just couldn’t reach any lower.

  She went through about five minutes of the most terrible desperation before she noticed that the armrest of the chair upon which she was standing had about an inch and a half of lip. If she squatted down very low, and was very careful not to fall, she might be able to snag the waistband on that lip and pull them the rest of the way down.

  After several tries it worked, after a fashion. She got them down to her knees, after which it was a simple matter to work her way out of them.

  This meant that her feet were bare.

 
; She made a tight loop at one end of the wire and bent the other end so she could hold it loosely with her toes. It was clumsy, but it would give her something with which to grapple.

  She moved the chair around so its back was to the wall and then sat down on the edge of the seat. Her arms were stretched painfully back over her head, but it gave her a secure position from which to go fishing up the dead man’s trouser leg.

  With the first try she was sure she had guessed right. Held between the toes of her right foot, the wire was almost like an extension of her body. Through it she could feel a smooth, hard object about three inches wide at the top and tapering toward the bottom. When she tapped at it, the sound she as much felt as heard was crisp but without any metallic ring.

  It was leather—stiff, heavy, molded leather. It was a holster.

  And a holster implied a gun.

  Two-gun. Of course. Angel had missed it when she frisked the corpse. She had found a pistol in the man’s waistband and she had stopped looking.

  It was likely to be a flat, small-caliber automatic, or perhaps something like a derringer. Nothing extraordinary in the way of firepower, but perhaps good enough at close range. Lisa’s father, the ex-Marine gun nut, had always said that no pistol was worth much except maybe across the room.

  Anyway it was better than nothing.

  Or would be, if she could figure out some way to get it. The god damned thing was doubtless strapped in at the top to keep it from falling out every time the fat man took a walk. How the hell she was going to slip it out she had no idea.

  She needed to get the trouser leg up so she could see how the holster worked and see what she was doing. The wire was plenty long enough, but it was way too flexible to push back the heavy fabric, especially with the weight of the dead man’s leg holding it in place.

  It seemed she was all through.

  Lisa knew she was very close to coming unstuck. Her arms ached and the handcuffs dug cruelly into her wrists. Her nerves were ravaged by the constant fear. She was exhausted. And now it looked as if her last, best chance of saving herself had eluded her by about half a yard. Terror, the numbing, immobilizing terror that abandons all hope, the final surrender to death seemed ready to engulf her the way the sea engulfs a drowning swimmer as he slips below the surface.

  But there was something inside her, some small central core of will that would not let her give up. She was just not ready to die.

  Despair can sometimes bring with it a wonderful clarity of purpose. Lisa’s eyes, bright with unspent tears, searched the room for anything, anything that would give her those extra fifteen or twenty inches. She was no longer herself, but a ruthlessly efficient machine with no purpose but its own survival. Her mind, chilled with fear, searched for some possibility of life.

  She found it in the fireplace screen.

  It was the usual thing, coils of brass wire linked together to form a curtain that could be pulled aside by a small cord. Around the top, concealing the rod that held the screen in place was a strip of brass trim apparently bolted to the wall at either side of the fireplace.

  The rod was at least four feet long. Each end fitted into a small hole in the trim, but whatever held it in place couldn’t amount to more than a couple of screws. A good yank and the whole curtain should come down.

  She had to balance herself on the arm of the chair and grip the curtain with her feet. It was clumsy, but a couple of tries and the whole thing gave way and fell to the floor in a heap.

  The rod simply slipped out. It was just about a quarter of an inch thick. Perfect.

  Back on the edge of the chair seat, only this time using the rod, she managed to get one end hooked into the cuff of the fat man’s trouser leg. Then, pushing the other end with her feet, she raised his shoe off the carpet. It took her about twenty minutes to work the trouser leg up high enough to let her see the gun butt.

  The holster was held in place by two straps, above and below the bulge of the calf muscle. The pistol was a nickle-plated automatic with pearl grips, the sort of thing a woman might carry in her purse, and the snap that kept it from falling out was at the top of the stock. It was the work of a few seconds to pop open the snap and then to slip the tip of the rod through the exposed trigger guard and pull it free.

  Lisa slipped her instep under the rod to tilt it so that the pistol slid down its length until it came to rest against her foot. Then she kicked it over closer to the wall and stood up. The backs of her legs were stiff and her arms were killing her. She tried picking up the pistol with her toes, but the experiment was not a success. Finally she gave up and used the wire, bending the loop at the end into a hook.

  When she was able to examine the pistol, she wondered why a professional criminal had troubled to carry around such a toy. It was .25 caliber, which didn’t say a lot for its stopping power, and it would only be accurate to within about squirt-gun range. She pulled the clip, which slipped out of the butt, and found only four bullets. They were the ordinary solid-point type. With hollow-point bullets you could do some real damage, but the fat man clearly hadn’t taken this weapon very seriously. Still, it was better than nothing.

  Or maybe not.

  The real question was how she was going to use it with her hands chained to a wall four feet from the floor. From that position how could she aim the thing? And she had nowhere she could hide it, not where she could get at it without a major production, and she could hardly stand there holding it, waiting for Angel to come back. The front door was at least forty feet away. Angel would come in, take one look, and go right back out. Even if there was time for a shot Lisa knew she was in no danger of hitting anything, not at that distance, and then it was all over. Angel could take all the time she wanted finishing her off.

  The only possibility was surprise. At short range, pull the gun out of nowhere and hold nothing back. Four shots, just like using a fire hose—maybe that would be enough. Maybe.

  Except it wasn’t going to happen that way.

  With a surge of hopelessness that was almost physically painful, Lisa shoved the clip home. The pistol, which had taken so much effort to retrieve, was actually a liability. It would get her killed if Angel caught her with it. Yet the thought of parting with it was bitter.

  She would try to hide it, she decided. Hide it and hope for a chance to use it. The chair was the only place within reach—she used her foot to lever up the cushion and then she threw the gun underneath.

  The next thing was to get the fat man’s trouser leg back down to conceal the holster. Then she had to wriggle back into her pantyhose—she didn’t want Angel wondering why she had gone to the trouble of taking them off—and at last she pushed the chair back into its original position.

  All that was left was the fireplace screen. She would have to provide Angel with a plausible explanation of why she had pulled it down, so she put the rod through the ring to which she was handcuffed and bent it double. Angel could think she had tried to pull the ring out of the wall. Angel would expect her to be dumb enough to believe that might work.

  After that there was nothing to do except to wait. To wait, and to let the silence of the house once more close around her like the waters of some deep and lightless sea.

  40

  Warren Pratt, whose great-great-grandfather had been a saddlemaker in Essex, nursed an abiding prejudice against policemen with Anglo-Saxon names. Righteous cops had names like “Kowalski” or “Glickman” or “Salazar”. If you were black you might get away with “Adamson” or “Jones,” but a white man with a name out of an Edith Wharton novel was probably a lost cause.

  Special Agent Blandford—whose first name turned out to be “Frank”—was a case in point. He knew nothing about the street. He put his faith in gadgets and organizational technique, and there was nothing in his experience or his temperament that allowed him to understand a woman who could shoot holes through the tops of children’s heads while they slept. He worked on the assumption that criminals were morons—which, gran
ted, was usually the case—and he didn’t grasp that he was dealing with a monster who operated without the restraints of either pity or fear and who was at least as clever as he was. How do you explain to the Frank Blandfords of this world that this was Angel Wyman’s game and they had to play by her rules?

  “Leave the local cops out of it,” Pratt told him. “What’s the point of tailing Kinkaid? It isn’t Kinkaid you want.”

  “But Kinkaid will lead us to your suspect,” Blandford countered, tucking his chin under a little as if this were the unanswerable argument.

  “Not if he’s in front of a parade. Trust me, she’ll spot it. And if she does she’ll disappear and pull the hole in after her. Right now she thinks she’s got him all to herself. Let her go on thinking that.”

  But he couldn’t be convinced. The cruisers will have their orders, he said—if they spot Kinkaid’s car they will merely report. They will not attempt to follow. They will remain inconspicuous.

  Sure. Pratt knew all about patrol cops—they hear the calls over the radio and they can’t resist a drive-by. It would be a fucking posse.

  “We can’t take the chance of just losing him,” Blandford said, as if this was the one incontrovertible fact of the case. “We have to stay in control of this operation.”

  “You just get those tracking devices out to the bridges.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Pratt. My men know what to look for. All of that is well in hand.”

  Except that it wasn’t.

  . . . . .

  But Jim Kinkaid never had any illusions about being rescued. As he drove around the Sunset district, haphazardly wandering until he was ordered to switch directions, he knew that Angel had anticipated that he would somehow involve the police. Sometimes he would go far enough west that he was able to look down the thin strips of shimmering asphalt and see how they seemed to drop straight off into the Pacific Ocean, and then with a few abrupt turns he would find himself in a wilderness of tract houses.

  And always, although he never had a glimpse of her, she seemed to know his exact position—“Turn left onto Taraval, which will be the next light.” It was as if she already held him caught in the netlike pattern of streets.