Rubble and the Wreckage

by Rodd Clark

  Chapter Twenty

  THE WORLD USED to have seven wonders, but even those great feats of architecture, artistry, and beauty were falling away . . . as Gabe was fond of saying: “Everything crumbles.” His relationship with Chris would be challenged and altered, and it would come from the smallest of women. Her name was Shea Baltimore, and she’d lost her mother to cancer when she was just entering the tender age of eight.

  Gabe had always had a complicated relationship with God and the divinity. His father Bennett claimed Catholicism was their chosen religion, but he rarely dragged his family to church on Sundays, usually because he was still hung-over from Saturday night. Even with his wavering commitment, he would extol the virtues of religion like some misguided saint.

  “Do as I say, not as I do!”

  But it had been inside the St. Ignatius Parish Cathedral, on one of those infrequent visits, where a young Gabe would first see the stained glass windows. The beautiful artistry of Saints and Angels reproduced with colored, cut, and soldered glass. With every representation of angel or saint, the boy noticed the halos of gilt and gold that surrounded their heads. He remembered it well because his mother, Sissy, had grabbed his tiny finger and pointed it up to a side window where he could see a robed figure with wings and that same halo of gold, and she’d whispered, “That is the Angel Gabriel,” confiding with him under her breath that was how he’d gotten his name. It had been at St. Ignatius, so many years before, that the notion of the white-light radiance, which would later surround each of his victims, was first born.

  If you asked him today, he would not remember the pews, the song selections, the ceremonial standing before kneeling. All of that had already left his memory, pushed purposely backward so there was no opportunity for a connection to be made inside his mind to all his later victims and a nearly faded and forgotten memory from his childhood.

  During one of their so-called interviews, Chris leaned in to Gabe with a serious scowl on his face then asked him what he thought his victims might have said about being chosen or how they might feel about their white-light designation. After a minute of contemplation, Gabe surprised them both by simply saying, “I didn’t choose them. God did.”

  Gabe’s victims couldn’t be objective, since they didn’t know their place in God’s design. They couldn’t see their own radiance. If you didn’t understand that you were chosen, you couldn’t understand that no homicide had been committed. By being occluded from seeing the grander picture, they had little to offer in the form of an opinion. But he knew they couldn’t blame Gabe, because he had not been the one choosing them. “Blame God,” he would say.

  Gabe was merely a player in those events, one whose role had been preordained by the Almighty. And Chris would never have the courage to ask him if it wasn’t really something he had just created in his mind, due to some weird enchantment he fashioned after staring at stained glass windows nearly thirty years earlier. But the Angel Gabriel’s strongest role, as described in the book of Daniel, was the role of revealer, and he carried that role out in later books. Gabe saw himself as very much the revealer of all those he saw bathed in God’s light, who, in his waking mind, he knew he’d murdered. But in his deeper soul, he understood he had committed no crimes, just fulfilled a prophecy and listened to his heart.

  To date, there hadn’t been anyone who might’ve changed Gabe’s mind regarding his participation in the murders. Even Chris sat on the sidelines, a bystander to every killing Gabe instigated. His newfound lover hadn’t tried to alter his course; he sat in judgment, naturally, but he did so from the comfort of the Mayflower, or from under the sheets of his own bed. Then again, Gabe had yet to meet Shea Baltimore. Although she had seen him across the courtyard of their shared apartment building.

  A DOLL-LIKE figurine, Shea Baltimore had been a tiny girl. When at eight her mother succumbed to cancer, she was left alone with her father, DeWayne Baltimore, in a less than modest home in Southwest Seattle. She’d suffered at the loss of her mother, and DeWayne suffered the devastation alongside her. It created a gaping distance between them, one that should never have happened, but it had. DeWayne tried in vain to raise his daughter well, but as a single parent he lacked skills. It was more than fumbling fingers over hair ribbons and bows; it became the awkward handling brought on by his own sadness and regret. No matter how hard he tried, he seemed to fall short in every area, and Shea was left to fend for herself far too early.

  It was irrefutable evidence that some fathers cannot function without the help of a woman in their life. Without a guidebook, DeWayne wasn’t able to give the same support to Shea that he longed to offer her. He loved his daughter greatly, but the weight of raising a child after the death of his wife overwhelmed him. Leaving the little girl in the wake of ripples and waves behind him, all due to his drinking and depression. He wanted to be the best father he could, but his personal demons always seemed to intervene, and there were many nights when a young Shea would play alone in her room, while her father sat in the dark living room stacking aluminum beer cans in tall columns beside his chair.

  But mercies abound sometimes. Held together like the strands of a spider’s web in the corner of Shea’s room. Being alone didn’t kill her, it simply made her stronger. Shea Baltimore wasn’t raised by a father in denial; she was raised by her vision of how she saw things. She would stare at those things, as innocent as they were, and see them differently than others saw them. A spider’s web in the corner of her tiny room at night became a thing of beauty, and in the solitude of her room, she began to draw out the innocent elements around her, and she did it surprisingly well.

  As she grew older, Shea found herself preoccupied, maybe even slightly shielded, by her ability to draw. She spent her teenage years isolated from her peers. In that time she learned she could paint as well as draw. The image of a diminutive girl playing with paper cutout dolls on the floor of her room became a picture of a pretty teen girl who spent countless hours painting at her easel. Shea Baltimore learned to blossom regardless of being denied any love or light—that photosynthesis all children require. What all babies should be bestowed from birth, just naturally. Her life was lacking the crucial support a young girl desires by a neglectful and alcoholic father. Proving sometimes children just find their own way.

  Shea spent so many hours alone, painting in her room, that she learned some comfort inside her own isolation, and then a teenager grew into a young woman. One who worked during the day but spent too many nights alone, sitting at her easel or sketching on a daybed in her room and listening to the radio. It had been extremely difficult moving out of her home and leaving her father. Her daddy had learned to rely on Shea for nearly everything, which held the two together. She wondered how he’d survive without her cooking or cleaning the apartment and doing all their laundry. She wondered whether he would even pick up the numerous bent beer cans that littered their living room floor on every other morning.

  But Shea did find the courage to move away, knowing her life would only have meaning once she could fulfill her dream of becoming a great artist and move to New York. But her job as a checkout girl at a local grocery store didn’t pay much, and she was only able to find a tiny apartment in a dirtier part of the city. However small and dismal her surroundings, she knew it was hers, and hers alone. It would be a place of joy; she would leave the sadness back at home with her father. Being poor had never mattered before, and it wouldn’t matter now. Every artist had to suffer—this was just her time.

  She first observed the FOR RENT sign when she was driving around looking for an apartment in the seedier district of the city. She thought the courtyard lovely with its overgrown honeysuckle and its decaying plaster fountains. It reminded her of a villa from the faraway coasts of Spain. She was after all, young and impressionable. The rose-colored glasses of inexperience prevented her from seeing the building for what it was: broken, dilapidated, and destined for eventual razing. But it was after the fat leasing agent mentioned that
the building had a reputation among the Seattle artist-types that she was drawn in without reservation. It was within her price range; even the innocuous, but lazy, cigar-smoking landlord couldn’t deter her from looking elsewhere. She signed a lease application that same afternoon, then rushed home to break the news to her dad, stopping by the store to pick up the items for a nice meal. Anything to help ease the discomfort of the conversation they would share over pasta.

  Six weeks later, Shea was settled in her first apartment. She worked whenever a shift was available, carrying home her own groceries, and painted whenever she had supplies. It was a dull existence, but she hadn’t known much else in her twenty years. To her abstract mind, any drab existence she endured was just another option to create the bittersweet beauty in her sketches. And her isolation aided her immensely—her work was represented with female nudes and portraits of each face she encountered during her daily travels. Every face she sketched held a powerful sadness and a longing of its own, and every dark pupil of every eye, seemed to be staring off at some unknown horizon as if they were pining for some nameless desire or some lost love. Shea noticed the new tenant shortly after he moved into his tiny furnished apartment. She spotted him as he crossed the courtyard, and she lingered there at her window, watching him unlock his front door and slip inside with a backward glance, which looked suspicious.

  The new tenant was a striking man. She was stimulated with his manly appearance, intrigued because in the study of him over the course of the next two weeks, she never observed him doing any entertaining. He never had any overnight guests that she could tell, and she never saw him carrying in an armload of groceries. This made him an enigma, worthy of further examination.

  In her mind there would be a chance meeting. She would accidently drop the contents of a grocery sack at his feet, he would smile and bend down to assist her, their eyes would meet, and like some Hepburn character, a look would be exchanged telling both of them they would not be dining alone that evening. He appeared more brutish than cavalier, but he was the only single occupant of the courtyard who was not currently riddled with drug addiction or saddled with the sallow continence of someone living on the edge.

  But getting the stranger to notice her was hard; he kept irregular hours and never had a smile on his face, making him unapproachable. Still he was a man, and she possessed what they all wanted. It would happen for her if she just made herself available.

  One evening, the young woman watched the courtyard for the man’s return, and when he did, she was trapped in the image of the stranger standing at his balcony in his shorts and nothing else. It was unseasonably warm that evening, and each room was only equipped with tiny fans instead of air conditioning units. She could easily understand why he’d removed his clothing and stood there begging a breeze in, but the picture he made of masculine symmetry could have been a charcoal drawing worthy of framing.

  Even from across the piazza, she could see his expression. She caught a look of anguish painted on his face from the moonlight. She suspected he was a man in transition; the inner turmoil clearly visible in those lovely eyes, suggested the man had complicated stories, and knowing that made him even sexier than at first glance. How heavy the crown, she thought, he must have burdens and responsibilities that he didn’t have the confidence to share. He had a face that implored for a woman’s soft caress, and she figured she would make as honorable a choice for queen as any other lady in waiting.

  SHEA COULDN’T have been more wrong about Church. Although he may have been weighing lofty decisions that night, he only appeared kingly because of his masculine energy. He wouldn’t turn out to be the noble beast she’d hoped he would be. He was a killer with a twist, a villain from a dozen lives rolled into something fresh and dangerous. It wouldn’t benefit her life to be a player in the play where a man bends to help a lady in distress and their longing eyes meet with that suggestion of intimacy. Meeting Church would, at the very least, break her heart, and at the worst, create events that could ultimately be her undoing. But whether it was sadistic trickery of the sisters of fate or all-knowing God playing pranks with mortal lives, she would not know the real Church . . . at least not until much later.

  AFTER LEAVING the Pony, Gabriel and Christian walked back to his car in the rain. The dampness plastered Christian’s hair to his forehead, but he wasn’t concerned with the warm Northwesterly rain, not when he was in Gabriel’s company. They turned on 13th Avenue, just off East Madison, and headed back to the direction of downtown and Christian’s car. They were not the only patrons from the bar who’d chosen to leave at that time. There were obviously gay men skirting the rain, either heading from the Pony, or heading there to make the late night crowds.

  Gabriel’s shirt was clinging to his form like a rubber skin, but like Christian, he seemed unconcerned. It wasn’t like they couldn’t dry off at his loft. They heard the distant horns from ferries along the Lake Washington Ship Canal, which connected the fresh water to the salty inland seas of the Puget Sound. Gulls screamed overhead, but their calls became lost on the winds and mists from the Pacific. The breeze carried the aroma of fish and red seaweed, but it wasn’t unpleasant, smelling much like freedom and the carefree abandon that came from stories of pirates or seafaring traders.

  Mount Baker was an illumination of white crests in the backdrop of their walk, bringing to Christian’s mind a serenity he had never known while strolling the city streets. It must be the jovial nature of his companion combined with Seattle’s splendor, he thought. Throughout their day, Christian had shoved back every dark reflection of Gabriel as a serial killer. It had been a great day. He didn’t want to spoil the mood with questions he didn’t really want the answers to. But in that moment he was seized with a newfound concept of simply scrapping the book. He’d never understood what motivation Gabriel had for allowing his story to be told anyway. There would be fallout if the book ever reached the public. It would end their budding romance forever, and for the first time since they had met that had become an unacceptable resolution.

  His heart expanded uncomfortably in his chest, and even with Gabriel chatting nonsense in the background, his mind raced with the impulse to just leave the horror of the book behind. He would have to get Gabriel to stop his murders of course; he would push him to seek professional help for his sickness. They would learn to date, slowly. He would go back to work. He would do everything he could to try and normalize Gabriel—wipe all of what he’d learned from his mind like steam from the bathroom mirror after a shower.

  He could do that, he knew he could . . . if it only meant he’d be able to keep Gabriel in his life.

  Turning and interrupting his companion in midpoint of some lame story, he asked, “If it meant that you and I could be together . . . would you ever consider stopping everything . . . no more murders, so you and I could remain together . . . free?”

  GABE SEEMED startled by both the look on his friend’s face and the urgency in his voice. “Jesus. What are you talking about?”

  Rambling back with a harried pace in his words, Chris continued his line of inquiry, “Our lives converged . . . for reasons neither of us could’ve understood. But we’re here now. I can’t face losing you, not now. So far you haven’t been caught. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  They both stopped walking, noticing they were gratefully isolated from bystanders. Turning to face each other, Gabe could see the younger man getting agitated, like he was pushing a hefty load inside a wheelbarrow uphill. But just minutes earlier, he’d seemed fine. What the hell is going through his head now? Gabe was stunned by Chris’s quick transformation.

  “Chris, calm down. I think you were having another conversation in your head. Maybe you should let me into that; maybe just give me a chance to catch up?” Gabe took his friend by the elbow and pulled him closer, but the writer couldn’t be pacified easily. His breath was coming in rapid succession, and his eyes darted nervously.

  “When we met, we were both a hundre
d miles from anywhere. We got a chance to meet under . . . err, terrible circumstances, but we did meet,” Chris said. His expression genuinely intense, vaguely panicked, as if he had just awoken from a dream that had quickly turned sour.

  “All I’m saying is that we could put it all behind us . . . just slip away. But only if you put this aside, this . . . sick cause of yours . . . at least to give us an option at a life, together.”

  He was rattled, and it hit like the opening of a floodgate. Gabe recognized this wasn’t the same man he’d shared beer and conversation with some twenty minutes earlier. Gabe had to step back and take a breath. The same nervous energy that was coursing through Chris was jumping like electricity wanting a connection; it hit his body and traveled upward, it gripped his chest and held tight. It prevented his heart from beating. He was immediately anxious and uncomfortable. It wasn’t that he hadn’t considered the same thing himself, but the words had never been fully formed in his mind . . . certainly they’d never escaped his lips. He was shocked to hear Chris stammer out that notion. Bringing a voice to a once hidden hope of his.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” he said, making more pretense than acceptance. No matter how much of the shock he fabricated, he couldn’t cover the lie with just his expressions.

  CHRISTIAN COULD see that Gabriel had dreamed that likelihood before. Maybe he’d contemplated it but thought it was impossible, so he let it go, moved on, but it had been there once, he could tell. The writer had become familiar with those pale eyes by now. He could see things Gabriel tried to conceal—their time together had at least given him that.

  “This is nonsense,” Gabriel said, turning away, trying to disengage. But Christian was already deep in the waters and there was no going back then. He grabbed Gabriel by the arm and twisted him back around by force.