Angel

by Nicholas Guild

  He looked at Angel’s gun, which he was still cradling in his arms like a baby. As far as he remembered, it was the first time he had ever even held one. He pointed it at Angel, who by then was standing some ten or twelve feet away.

  The ringing had never stopped.

  “Lisa, go answer the phone. It’s driving me nuts.”

  She didn’t want to leave him. She put her arms around him and touched his face with her hands. Never, he thought, never had he loved her as much as he did that moment.

  “Go on. Really, I’ll be fine.”

  “It’s on the floor over there,” Angel said. She smiled, as if she had said something funny. “Remember? Right where you left it. Aren’t you going to ask if I’m hurt, Jim?”

  “Go get the phone, Lisa. We’re going to call the cops.”

  She brought him the phone, a cellular about the size of his wallet. The operator wanted to know if their service had been interrupted by the storm.

  “No, but if you’ll give your headset to the nice policeman who is doubtless standing right beside you I’d be glad to talk to him.”

  It was someone from the Marin County Sheriff’s Department.

  “We could use an ambulance,” Kinkaid told him. “No, I don’t know the address. You’ll have to figure that out for yourself.”

  Suddenly he felt very tired, so he handed the phone back to Lisa.

  “They’ll be here as fast as they can,” he said.

  “So what happens next? I mean, to me.”

  Angel was still smiling her odd, taunting smile, but Kinkaid shook his head.

  “I wish for your sake you were in that grave back at Sherman’s Crest.”

  “I think you mean it,” Angel said

  “I do.”

  He raised his hand and, without taking his eyes from Angel’s face, touched Lisa on the cheek. It was a gesture that told the absolute truth, that his heart was no longer divided, that the last claim Angel Wyman could make on him was to his pity.

  She looked away.

  “Prison or the loony bin,” she said. “Will they send me to the gas chamber, do you think?”

  “No.”

  “Too crazy? You’re probably right. Just the same, I think it’s time I took a swim.”

  “I don’t think so.” Lisa was aiming at Angel’s head, but her hands were shaking badly.

  “I’ll take my chances,” Angel said. And then, with the odd, crablike gait of someone in pain, she started toward the open front door, through which the rain was slanting in to beat against the stone floor.

  There was the sound of a shot, but it didn’t hit anything. Probably it went straight out into the darkness.

  “Oh shit.” Lisa knelt down and began to sob.

  “Angel, don’t do this,” Kinkaid said.

  Just at the door she turned around, and smiled once again. Then she was gone, out into the night and the storm.

  44

  It took the Marin County Sheriff’s Department exactly six minutes to have officers and an ambulance at the house. And that was just as well, because by then Jim Kinkaid was in a pretty bad way.

  He and Lisa were already gone when Pratt arrived, on their way to the closest emergency room. On the scene the FBI and the Sheriff’s Department quickly became embroiled in a jurisdictional dispute, but to Pratt’s intense satisfaction the Sheriff’s Department had the better claim—a murder investigation with three bodies in situ will always take pride of place over an interstate flight warrant.

  It was probably academic anyway, because nobody seemed to know where to find the chief suspect.

  It was half an hour before a version of events came back from the hospital—Lisa, one gathered, had not been wonderfully patient with the FBI special agent who tried to take a statement from her while the surgeons were patching the hole in Jim’s right lung. But at last a clear picture began to shape itself.

  “She shot him in the back,” Blandford announced after he closed up his cellular phone.

  “Who? Angel?”

  “No. His girlfriend. The slug they just pulled out of Kinkaid was a .25 caliber. Angel’s gun was a .32. Apparently he got caught in the cross fire when he rushed Angel. He’s got balls—I’ll give him that. I don’t think I’d care to charge a loaded gun.”

  “It’s probably a good thing he did,” Pratt replied. The forensic techs were busy circling bullet holes in the floor and walls. So far they had found two near the front door. “I’ll bet both of them turn out to be .25s.”

  “So the first two shots went wild, then she hit Angel, then she missed and hit Kinkaid. Then she realized what she had done and stopped shooting—which accounts for the one round left chambered when we found the gun.”

  “It’s a theory.”

  “Yeah.” Blandford didn’t seem entirely satisfied. “What I’d like is a theory about where our Miss Wyman has taken herself off to.”

  They didn’t have to wait long.

  There were still two cars parked in front of the house, and a third was discovered in a garage around back. If Angel had attempted to flee she was probably on foot, and in any case there were roadblocks up all over Marin County—she wouldn’t get very far that way.

  Besides, they had found her shoes.

  There was a patio down by the ocean. There was a glass-topped table and a few chairs—on nice days it was probably a reasonably pleasant spot, but in this storm the waves came all the way up steep, ten-foot-high rock walls to wash the flagstones. Maybe that was why Angel had left her shoes on the table.

  Pratt borrowed a rain slicker and he and Blandford went down to have a look for themselves. The shoes were neatly placed together and about three quarters full of rainwater.

  “If she took a header off of here she’s fish food,” Blandford said, having to shout over the wind. “Nobody can swim in that water, not in a storm like this, and she’d be beaten to pulp against the rocks. Remember, she’s wounded.”

  Pratt wasn’t arguing. She had come down here after leaving the house—the next day Lisa would identify the shoes as the ones Angel had been wearing—and it was reasonable to assume she would take them off before jumping into the water. If the search parties didn’t find her by morning, there was nowhere else she could have gone except into the drink.

  And why not, under the circumstances? She was shot, she knew she was cornered, and the best hope she had after capture was some locked ward in a mental hospital. Besides, there was no way Angel Wyman was going to allow herself to be taken alive.

  They never found another trace of her. She was gone, swallowed up. The verdict was suicide.

  They went back to the house, where many interesting items were being discovered.

  The two dead guys in the living room were old news. They were local hoods, known by sight to half the plainclothesmen in the Bay Area. Upstairs the Sheriff’s boys found Frank Rizza, lying across the bed with his throat cut. That was a little more interesting. Everyone agreed it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

  But the real treasures, the stuff the Bureau’s deep thinkers back in Virginia were going to just love, were at the other end of the upstairs hall, in a little room which apparently had served Angel as a study.

  Miss Wyman, it became obvious, had approached her victims with the meticulous care of a paleontologist unearthing a dinosaur bone. There was a file on each of them, complete with newspaper clippings of the police investigations.

  Among them was one labeled “Stephen Billinger”.

  “This will clear a lot of homicide investigations,” Blandford said. “She wasn’t very bright to keep all this junk—we could have put her away for about twenty thousand years. It’s funny how they never expect to be caught.”

  “We didn’t catch her.”

  Pratt picked up a handful of photographs that were lying on the desk. They had been taken with a good camera, probably from some distance, and almost certainly during an interval of no more than a few seconds. They showed a man in work clothes standing in a
doorway, leaning against the frame.

  “I know this guy,” he said.

  “Who is he?”

  “His name is Flaxman. He runs a gas station in the little town where Jim Kinkaid lives. He’s the sort that always comes to a bad end.”

  “Looks like he missed it this time. You think perhaps he should be told how close he came?”

  “What’s the point?”

  . . . . .

  The bullet that entered Kinkaid’s back had taken only a small chunk out of his lung, but it was a month before his doctors would trust him on a plane. The day after he and Lisa returned to New Gilead he took her by the arm and walked her down to town hall to apply for a wedding license.

  “Is this my punishment for shooting you?” she asked.

  “No. That was my own fault for getting in the way. Probably it would have been better if I’d simply left you to it.”

  “Yes—I’m such a wonderful shot.”

  “At least you tried.”

  A faint suggestion of something like regret came into his expression, and she knew what he was thinking.

  “You couldn’t have stopped her,” she told him, not for the first time. “The only way to do that would have been to kill her, and you couldn’t kill anybody. That’s one of the reasons I love you.”

  It was the trailing end of August and, while the weather was still warm, already there was something in the air that suggested summer was played out. Kinkaid found himself hoping the winter would come early. He liked winter. He liked to look down from his bedroom window and watch the snow pile up in the backyard. The cold seemed to clarify everything.

  He was getting tired. It was not even half a mile to town hall and already he knew that once he got there he would need to call a taxi to get home again. The doctors had warned him that he would probably be several months recovering. He needed a long, cold winter to pull himself together again. He needed time to remember how not to be afraid.

  And all he had to do was glance at Lisa to realize he was not the only one who carried scars.

  “Maybe it would be a good idea if we tried not to talk about her,” he said. “She’s dead now. I’d like to bury her.”

  “Okay.”

  It was another two months before he was able to put in a full day at the office. He resigned his connection with Karskadon and Henderson, not only because he wasn’t up to the work load but out of a vague feeling that somehow they had betrayed him. He decided he would have to content himself with a small-town law practice.

  To give his mind something to do while he convalesced, he began work on an article analyzing some recent High Court decisions on copyright infringement cases. He finished it the last week in October and sent it off. Three weeks later he got a letter of acceptance from the Yale Law Review.

  “Maybe I could be a law professor,” he said to Lisa.

  “Would you like that?”

  “Yes, I would. There’s no money in it, but you can have a practice on the side and I had a lot of fun in law school.”

  That evening he began mapping out another article.

  A week before Christmas they got a card from Warren Pratt. He was down in Florida bonefishing.

  “I’ll have to write him—tell him about the baby.”

  Kinkaid smiled, the way he always did when he thought about the little being that had been assembling itself for the last two months inside Lisa’s womb.

  There was snow in the backyard and he had started running again. He felt great.

  “If he’s a boy I guess he’ll be James Kinkaid V,” Lisa answered, as if the part about Warren Pratt hadn’t even registered.

  “Maybe he’ll be a girl.”

  “Don’t be silly. Julia told me there hasn’t been a girl born into this family in four generations.”

  “Then we’re due for one.”

  “But if it’s a boy . . ?”

  “Four ‘Jameses’ are enough. What do you think of ‘Mike?’”

  . . . . .

  It was January and the dowagers in dark glasses and straw hats like truck tires sat on benches along the beachfront, staring up at the sun as if trying to remember what it was. Everyone was either very old or very young—retired people, mostly women, and teenagers on roller blades. Across the street were stucco apartment houses painted pink and pale blue.

  Angel kept to the shade. She burned easily and, besides, she didn’t like to be out in the open. Even though she knew no one was looking for her, either here in Florida or anywhere else, she could not quite shake the habit of thinking of herself as a fugitive.

  The manhunt had been a lot of fun for two or three days—she watched the whole thing on television from her apartment in Mill Valley—and for a week she was national news. The San Francisco papers had kept up with the story for more than a month, but they had no suspect sitting in jail, not even a photograph to put on the front page, so they got bored. In California, where there are so many to choose from, they tend to be a little jaded about mass-murder cases. It was all forgotten now.

  In the end she was saved by the policeman’s instinct for finding the easy way out. First they thought she was wounded and then they thought she was dead, so they weren’t prepared for the possibility that she might just walk away, two hours straight through the woods at a fast pace. The rain washed out her tracks, so they couldn’t even use dogs. She had ended the night with nothing worse than a dislocated finger and a bad head cold.

  The suicide theory was so convenient. Poor Jim—he had seen her covered in blood, never thinking that it was all his own, that he had bled all over her wrestling her gun away. He had taken the bullet with her name on it and then had provided her with the perfect out. She was shot and the police were coming, so of course she would throw herself into the ocean rather than endure capture. Once or twice in the days since, she had wondered if leaving the shoes behind hadn’t been overplaying it just a trifle.

  It was a rule of the game that you always gave yourself a choice of holes to disappear into, so she had kept an apartment in San Francisco and the one in Mill Valley, where all she had to do was to wait them out. After two weeks she got on a bus going north. From Seattle she flew to Miami. She had had to leave a lot of money behind, but there was still plenty.

  The hardest thing was abandoning the idea that she could ever go home. She would never live at Five Miles again. She would never be Angel Wyman of the Connecticut Wymans. That door was closed forever.

  But she didn’t blame Jim. She couldn’t really bring herself to blame him for anything—not even for Miss What’s-Her-Name. Miss What’s-Her-Name didn’t count. If Grandmother hadn’t lied, everything would have worked out and they would be at Five Miles this minute.

  And Grandmother had, in fact, lied. There was no doubt of it. In the last few months Angel had relived that night a thousand times, and it always came out the same. Jim would never have thrown her over, even if he had known about the others—Grandmother had lied. One could only guess at her motives, but she had lied.

  Jim had never betrayed her. He deserved to be left in peace.

  The same, however, could not be said of Charlie Flaxman.

  He was down here, in a motel not five miles away. He was under the impression he had won a family vacation from Publishers’ Sweepstakes, two weeks accommodation and round-trip airfare for himself and his disgusting family. Nobody ever looks too close when it’s free.

  They had landed the day before yesterday, and already Charlie was beginning to show signs of restlessness. Excursions to the boardwalk with the wife and kids was clearly not his idea of a wonderful time. He was ready for a little diversion.

  There was one snag. Unlikely as it sounded, Charlie seemed to have struck up an acquaintance, a drinking buddy. Yesterday afternoon and then today, they had had a couple of beers together at an outdoor cafe near the Flaxmans’ motel.

  But it wasn’t anything that need seriously get in the way. Charlie was a fun-loving boy and eventually he would get bored and want l
ivelier company.

  As for the other man, he was harmless. Angel had followed him to his hotel and then asked a few questions. He was nobody, a middle-aged tourist down for the fishing. His name was Warren Pratt.