The Black Angel

by John Connolly

  “Hey,” said Harry. “We’re closed.”

  The fat man paused, the sole of his right foot poised just above the floor. Harry could see an unbroken peanut just beneath his shoe leather.

  The foot began to complete its descent. The shell started to flatten beneath the weight.

  And Harry was suddenly confronted by the face of the fat man, inches from his own, staring straight at him. Then, before he could even begin to take in his presence, the fat man was to his left, then to his right, all the time whispering in a language Harry couldn’t understand, the words an unintelligible mass of sibilance and occasional harsh consonants, their precise meaning lost to him but their intimation clear.

  Stay out of my way. Stay out of my way or you’ll be sorry.

  The fat man’s face was a blur, his body zipping from side to side, his voice an insistent throbbing inside Harry’s head. Harry felt nauseous. He wanted it to stop. Why wasn’t anyone intervening on his behalf? Where was Miguel?

  Harry reached out a hand in an effort to support himself against the bar.

  And the movement around him suddenly ceased.

  Harry heard the peanut shell crack. The fat man was where he had previously been, fifteen or twenty feet from the bar, his colleague behind him. Both were looking at Harry, and the fat man was smiling slightly, privy to a secret that only he and Harry now shared.

  Stay out of my way.

  In a far corner, Harry saw a hand raised: Octavio, who took care of the whores, absorbing a cut of their income in return for protection, and passing on a little of it to Harry in turn.

  This was none of Harry’s business. He nodded once, and returned to cleaning off the overspill from the beer taps. He managed to complete his task, then slipped quietly into the little bathroom behind the bar, where he sat on the toilet seat for a time, his hands trembling, before he vomited violently into the sink. When he returned to the cantina, the fat man and his partner were gone. Only Octavio was waiting for him. He didn’t look much better than Harry felt.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  Harry swallowed. He could still taste bile in his mouth.

  “Better we forget, you understand?” said Octavio.

  “Yeah, I get you.”

  Octavio gestured to the bar, pointing out the bottle of brandy on the top shelf. Harry took the bottle and poured the alcohol into a highball glass. He figured that Octavio didn’t need a snifter, not this time. The Mexican put a twenty on the bar.

  “You need one too,” he said.

  Harry poured himself a glass, keeping his hand heavy.

  “There was a girl,” said Octavio. “Not local. Black Mexican.”

  “I remember,” said Harry. “She was here tonight. She’s new. Figured her for one of yours.”

  “She won’t be back,” said Octavio.

  Harry lifted the glass to his lips, but found that he couldn’t drink. The taste of bile was returning. Vera, that was the girl’s name, or the name she had given when Harry had asked. Few of these women used their real name for business. He’d spoken to her once or twice, just in passing. He’d seen her maybe three times in all, but no more than that. She’d seemed pretty nice, for a whore.

  “Okay,” said Harry.

  “Okay,” said Octavio.

  And, like that, the girl was gone.

  There were only three rooms occupied at the Spyhole Motel. In the first room, a young couple on a road trip to Mexico were bickering, still argumentative after a long, uncomfortable journey. Soon they would descend into uneasy, prickly silence, until the boy made the first move toward reconciliation, heading out into the desert night and returning with sodas from the machine by the office. He would place one of the cans against the small of the girl’s back, and she would react with a shiver. He would kiss her, and tell her that he was sorry. She would kiss him back. They would drink, and soon the heat and the arguments would appear to be forgotten.

  In the next room, a man sat in his vest upon a bed, watching a Mexican game show. He had paid for his room in cash. He could have stayed in Yuma, for he had business there in the morning, but his face was known, and he disliked staying in the city for longer than he had to. Instead, he sat in the remote motel and watched couples hug each other as they won prizes worth less than the money in his wallet.

  The last room on this block of the motel was taken by another solo traveler. She was young, barely into her twenties, and she was running. They called her Vera in Harry’s Best Rest, but those who were seeking her knew her as Sereta. Neither name was real, but it no longer mattered to her what she was called. She had no family now, or none that cared. In the beginning, she had sent money home to her mother in Ciudad Juarez, supplementing the meager income she gleaned from her work in one of the big maquiladoras on Avenida Tecnologico. Sereta and her older sister Josefina had worked there too, until that November day when everything changed for them.

  When she called home Sereta would tell Lilia, her mother, that she was working as a waitress in New York. Lilia did not question her, even though she knew that her daughter, before she left for the north, had frequently been seen leaving the gated communities of the Campestre Juarez, where the wealthy Americans lived, and the only local women admitted to such places were servants and whores. Then, in November 2001, the body of Sereta’s sister Josefina was one of eight found in an overgrown cotton field near the Sitio Colosio Valle mall. The bodies were badly mutilated, and the protests of the poor increased in volume, for these were not the first young women to die in this place, and there were stories told of wealthy men behind barred gates who had now added killing for pleasure to their list of recreations. Sereta’s mother told her to leave and not to come back. She never mentioned the Campestre Juarez to her daughter, and the rich men in their black cars, but she knew.

  One year later, Lilia too was dead, taken by a cancer that her daughter believed was a physical manifestation of pain and grief, and now Sereta was alone. In New York, she had found a kindred spirit in Alice, but that friendship too had been sundered. Alice should have stayed with her, but the grip of the sickness was tight upon her, and she had made her own choice to remain in the big city. Sereta, instead, had headed south. She knew these desert places and how they worked. She wanted those who were pursuing her to think that she had crossed into Mexico. Instead, she planned to skirt the border, making for the West Coast, where she hoped to disappear for a time until she could figure out her next move. She knew that what she had was valuable. After all, she had listened to a man die for it.

  Sereta too was watching television, but the volume was down low. She found the glow comforting but did not wish the babble to disturb her thoughts. Money was the problem. Money was always the problem. She had been forced to run so suddenly that there was no time to plan, no time to assemble what few funds she had to her name. She had a friend bring her car to her, then drove away, putting as much space between herself and the city as possible.

  She’d heard about the Best Rest in the past. It was a place where nobody asked too many questions and where a girl could make some money quickly, then move on without any further obligation, as long as she paid her cut to the right people. She took a room at the Spyhole, negotiating a pretty good deal, and had nearly two thousand dollars put away after just a few days, thanks in part to a particularly generous tip from a truck driver whose sexual tastes, messy but harmless, she had indulged the night before. Soon she would move along. Maybe just one more night, though, she thought, even as, unbeknownst to her, her existence had already bound itself to the lives of those who had taken her sister.

  For far to the north, the Mexican named Garcia might have smiled familiarly at the mention of Josefina’s name, recalling her final moments as he busied himself with the remains of another young woman…

  There was only one other person on the motel property. He was a slim young man of Mexican descent, and he was seated behind the reception desk in the office, reading a book. The book was entitled The Devil’s
Highway, and it told of the deaths of fourteen Mexicans who had attempted to cross the border illegally not many miles from where the motel lay. The book made the young man angry, even as he felt a sense of relief that his parents had made a good life here and that such a death was not destined to be his.

  It was almost 3 A.M., and he was about to lock the door and retire to the back room for some sleep, when he saw the two white men approach the office. He had not heard their car pull up and supposed that they must have deliberately parked some way off. Already he was on his guard, for that made no sense to him. There was a gun beneath the counter, but he had never had cause even to show it. Now that most people paid by credit card, motels provided poor pickings for thieves.

  One of the men was tall and dressed in blue. The heels of his cowboy boots clicked upon the tiles as he entered the office. His companion was absurdly corpulent. The clerk, whose name was Ruiz, believed that he had never before seen a man who looked quite so unhealthy, and he had seen many fat Americans in his young life. The fat man’s belly hung so far between his thighs that Ruiz guessed that he must have been obliged to lift it up each time he made water. He carried in his hand a tan straw hat with a white band, and wore a light jacket over a white shirt, and tan pants. His shoes were brown, and polished to a high sheen.

  “How you doing tonight?” asked Ruiz.

  The thin man answered.

  “We’re doing well. You full up?”

  “Nah, when we’re full we turn on the NO VACANCIES sign out on the road to save folks a trip.”

  “You can do that from here?” asked the thin man. He sounded genuinely interested.

  “Sure,” said Ruiz. He pointed to a box upon the wall, lined with switches. Each was carefully labeled with a handwritten sticker. “I just flick a switch.”

  “Amazing,” said the thin man.

  “Fascinating,” said his colleague, speaking for the first time. Unlike the other man, he did not sound interested. His voice was soft, and slightly higher in pitch than a man’s voice should have been.

  “So, would you like a room?” asked Ruiz. He was tired and wanted to get the two men booked in and their cards processed so that he could catch up on his sleep. He also, he realized, wanted to get them out of the office. The fat man smelled peculiar. He hadn’t noticed any stench from the one in blue, but the tubby guy had an unusual body odor. He smelled earthy, and Ruiz involuntarily found himself picturing pale worms breaking through damp clods of dirt and black beetles scurrying for the shelter of stones.

  “We may need more than one,” replied Blue.

  “Two?”

  “How many rooms do you have?”

  “Fifteen altogether, but three are occupied.”

  “Three guests.”

  “Four.”

  Ruiz stopped talking. There was something wrong here. Blue was no longer even listening. Instead, he had picked up Ruiz’s book and was looking at the cover.

  “Luis Urrea,” he read. “The Devil’s Highway.”

  He turned to his companion.

  “Look,” he said, displaying the book to him. “Maybe we should buy a copy.”

  The fat man glanced at the cover.

  “I know the route,” he said drily. “If you want it, just take that one and save some money.”

  Ruiz was about to say something when the fat man struck him in the throat, slamming him back against the wall. Ruiz experienced a sense of pain and constriction as small, delicate parts of himself were crushed by the blow. He was having trouble breathing. He tried to form words, but they would not come. He fell against the wall and a second blow came. He slid slowly to the floor. His face was turning dark as he suffocated, his windpipe entirely ruined. Ruiz began to claw at his mouth and throat. He could hear a clicking noise, like the ticking of a clock counting down his final moments. The two men did not appear particularly interested in his sufferings. The fat man walked around the desk, stepping carefully over Ruiz. The dying man again caught the smell of him as he switched on the NO VACANCIES sign out on the highway. His companion, meanwhile, flicked through that night’s guest registration cards.

  “One couple in two,” he told the fat man. “One male in three. The name sounds Mexican. One woman in twelve, registered under the name Vera Gooding.”

  The fat man didn’t acknowledge him. He was now standing over Ruiz, watching blood and spittle trail from the corners of his mouth.

  “I’ll take the couple,” he said. “You take the Mexican.”

  He squatted down beside Ruiz. It was a surprisingly graceful movement, like the dipping of a swan’s head. He extended his right hand and brushed the hair from the young man’s brow. There was a mark on the underside of the fat man’s forearm. It looked like a twin-pronged fork, recently burned into the flesh. The fat man turned Ruiz’s head from left to right.

  “Do you think we should bring it back for our Mexican friend?” asked Blue. “He works well with bone.”

  “Too much trouble,” said the fat man.

  His tone was dismissive. The fat man gripped Ruiz’s hair, turning his head slightly, then leaned in close to him. His mouth opened slightly, and Ruiz saw a pink tongue and teeth that tapered to blunt ends. Ruiz’s eyes were bulging, and his face was purple. He spit red fluid, and as he did so the fat man’s lips touched his, his mouth closing entirely upon Ruiz’s, his hand clasping the young man’s face and chin, keeping his jaws apart. The Mexican tried to struggle, but he could not fight both the fat man and the end that was coming. A word flashed in his head, and he thought: Brightwell. What is Brightwell?

  His grip upon the fat man’s shoulder loosened, his legs relaxed, and the fat man drew away from him and stood.

  “You have blood on your shirt,” Blue told Brightwell.

  He sounded bored.

  Danny Quinn watched his girlfriend as she carefully applied the small brush to her toenails. The polish was a mix of purple and red. It made her look as though her toes were bruised, but Danny decided to keep this opinion to himself. He was content to bask for a time in the afterglow of their lovemaking, taking in her concentration and her poise. At times like these, Danny loved Melanie deeply. He had cheated on her, and would probably cheat on her again, although he prayed each night for the strength to remain faithful. He wondered sometimes at what would happen if she found out about his other life. Danny liked women, but he distinguished between sex and lovemaking. Sex meant little to him, apart from the satiation of an urge. It was like scratching an itch: if his right hand was broken and his back was itchy, then he’d use his left to deal with it. All things being equal, he would prefer to use his right hand, but an itch was an itch, right? If Melanie wasn’t around—and her work with the bank sometimes required her to be away from home for two or three days—then Danny would go elsewhere for his pleasure. Mostly, he told the women involved that he was single. Some of them didn’t even ask. One or two had fallen for him a little, and that had created problems, but he had worked them out. Danny had even used hookers on occasion. The sex was different with them, but he did not consider sex with hookers as cheating on Melanie. There was no emotion involved at all, and Danny reasoned that without emotion there was no real betrayal of his feelings for Melanie. It was clinical, and he always practiced safe sex, even with the ones who offered a little extra.

  Deep down, Danny wanted to be the person that Melanie thought he was. He tried to tell himself, each time he strayed, that this would be the last. Sometimes he could go for weeks, even months, without being with another woman, but eventually he would find himself alone for a time, or in a strange city, and the urge to trawl would take him.

  But he did love Melanie, and if he could have turned back the clock of his life and made his choices again—his first hooker, and the shame he felt afterward; the first time he cheated on someone, and the guilt that came with it—he believed that he would live his life differently, and that he would be a better, happier man as a result.

  I will start again, he lied to
himself. It was like alcoholism, or any other addiction. You had to take things one day at a time, and when you fell off the wagon, well, you just got right back up again and started counting from one.

  He reached out to stroke Melanie’s back, and heard a knock at the door.

  Melanie Gardner was afraid that Danny was cheating on her. She didn’t know why she thought it, for none of her friends had ever seen him with another woman, and she had never found any telltale signs on his clothes or in his pockets. Once, while he was sleeping, she had tried to read his e-mails, but he was scrupulous about deleting both sent and received mail, apart from those that had to do with his business. There were a lot of women in his address book, but she did not recognize any of the names. Anyway, Danny was regarded as one of the best electricians in town, and in her experience it was women who tended to make most of the business calls to Danny, probably because their husbands were too ashamed to admit that there was something around the house that they could not repair themselves.

  Now, as she sat on the bed, the warmth of him gradually fading, she felt the urge to confront him. She wanted to ask him if he was seeing someone else, if he had ever been with another woman in the time that they had been together. She wanted to look in his eyes as he answered, because she believed that she would be able to tell if he was lying. She loved him. She loved him so much that she was afraid to ask, for if he lied, she would know, and it would break her heart, and if he told her what she feared was the truth, then that would also break her heart. The tension she had been feeling had broken through at last in a dumb argument about music earlier in the evening, and then they had made love even though Melanie did not really want to. It had allowed her to delay the confrontation, nothing more, just as painting her toenails had suddenly seemed a matter of great urgency.