Black Angel

by Thomas Laird

  Perhaps I’ll have his new bitch executed along with her two daughter-bitches. I’d like to be there to see them hanged as the mother watches, just before she gets blinded. Yes, this time I think we should alter the scenario so the mother gets one eye plucked and one eye blasted to gelatinous goo. I’m sure I can have all that arranged.

  I know Koehn would love to catch me just so he could sit in on the interview with me. He’d love to hear the Department shrinks proffering their questions at me:

  Did you have issues with your father?

  Did you hate your mother?

  I never knew my own parents. I was raised in foster families. All very loving, I suppose. But the first pair shied away from me when I was twelve. All the family pets kept on disappearing. They never caught me at it, the poor souls, but they suspected I was severely ill. They simply couldn’t prove it because I toyed with the Social Services counselor, a pretty woman named Delores. She couldn’t come up with a name for what I have, but she could see the anxiety on the faces of my petless foster parents, and so I was given up to another pair of foster parents.

  When I was sixteen, Janice, my second foster mother, died of a coronary. It was called “natural causes.” They never found out what induced the shock that caused her massive heart attack, but my foster father, Daniel, went back to Social Services and claimed he couldn’t handle me any longer, so they dumped me on a Beverly Hills lawyer. He gave me a lot of room, he and his second wife, and I didn’t want to rouse any more suspicion about me, so I behaved until I was eighteen. I went away to college at USC, and I graduated Summa Cum Laude in pre-law, which tickled my foster dad. But then I broke his heart by joining the Corps. Because of my grades, I went to officers’ candidate school, and from there…

  It’s just history.

  The Corps loved my anti-social attitude. All the way from boot camp through officer’s training, they thought I was a natural cold-blooded killer. And they were smarter than any Social Services bitch.

  I wasn’t mistreated during my stays in those foster homes. I suppose the animals in that first home didn’t deserve what they got and neither did the mom with the heart attack in the second household, but you have to learn your trade from the beginning, through experience. You have to learn to improve as you work.

  The Internet is a godsend. It was my way of reaching out and contacting men just like me. We’re sort of an unofficial fraternity.

  I read about Leopold and Loeb when I was in pre-law. Darrow was brilliant in their defense. I’d like to hire Darrow if they ever do close in on me—but they won’t. I’m too separate from the fray. I always knew how to distance myself from trouble.

  That’s why I’m in Mexico, beginning a new false cause. I find the oil ruse boring, now. The others do not, but I do. I’ll keep on trying to enflame them with my scheme to terrorize oil companies by murdering low level drones. I’ll keep on telling them that we’re just practicing, just perfecting our art on our way to the powerful overlords of black gold. Oil is an incredible boiling point for the young, easily-indoctrinated and the insane. Not that I think my co-conspirators are necessarily nuts. It makes it easier to evangelize them, though.

  It fascinates me how supposedly intelligent men can be so easily brainwashed. The Chinese and the North Koreans experimented with brainwashing in the Korean War. Hence the book, The Manchurian Candidate. Richard Condon fabricated and exaggerated, in his novel, but some of it rings true. The power of suggestion is incredible, to a certain kind of human creature. When I reached out into cyberspace, I had no idea that I’d get as much cooperation. Not with murder, anyway. It’s the ultimate prey, afterall. The human being. Killing a dog or a cat or a parakeet or any mammal or reptile cannot come close, by comparison. There is no excitement like it in the rest of the world.

  Getting away with murder. There’s nothing on its level. Nothing.

  This is a beautiful part of Mexico. The climate is temperate. Aguascalientes means warm water. There is indeed a warmth here. In central Mexico you don’t have the crush of humanity that Mexico City has. Mexico City reminds me of Los Angeles, except there are even more Mexicans south of the border in Aguascalientes.

  I can find perhaps ten or twelve kindred spirits on the Internet, and these young men are very happy to do murder to clean the pestilence that is the government. We speak in code on the computer. I teach it to them after I find out their addresses. Then I mail them the code so that I’m untraceable. I use a post office box that is at least a hundred miles from where I am, and each time I send a letter with the code, I use a different post office box.

  It spends some gas, but I’m not a fanatic about oil. My friends in the north are a bit balmy about fossil fuels. Oil is simply a boiling point that I employ in order to get them to do the killings.

  Personally, I have no desire for sex with young females. I prefer older prostitutes. I have never killed a whore, either. Why deplete the numbers of women who actually endeavor in honest labor? You can’t argue that they supply an important service to mankind. No, I have no urge to rape little girls. It’s all a throw-in, to keep Will Koehn et al off the real track. He’s so busy looking for pedophiles that he’ll never raise my scent in his nostrils. He’ll be too busy chasing others, in Illinois and in California.

  It’s unfortunate about Gerald. But I have no fear of our Eastern brother. He does not know my real name, nor does he know my whereabouts. None of my killer fraternity knows who I really am. Not even the men who served in Desert Storm know who I really am. They might attach a name to me, but that doesn’t give up my real identity.

  Desert Storm seems a thousand years ago. It seems a whole world apart from where I am now, and it almost is that far away.

  Maybe I’ll give up this pursuit in the years to come. The odds are not with me if I continue. Perhaps I shall quietly fade into the woods, like some jungle beast that has natural camouflage. You never know. Maybe I’ll fall in love with a non-hooker, I’ll marry, settle down and have daughters of my own. Stranger events have occurred.

  Jack the Ripper was never apprehended. He always remained elusive and greasy.

  Too chancy. You go on scene, you leave a little something behind. I was amazed that didn’t take place in Kuwait. No fingerprints, no DNA, nothing. A cold trail. Two cold cases.

  I can imagine the frustration that Will Koehn and his old partner from NCIS must still feel, knowing we’re all still out here. Then he might imagine we’re just one. But we are legion. He’ll never embrace the scope of this venture. It’s really too bad I can’t write it all down. Some of it is fiction—killing low level oil workers and their entire families and making it appear that the oil cartel is somehow responsible.

  No, I am responsible. I am a mature man, and I take accountability for what I do. I did it. No question about it. I was the brains behind the scheme.

  Now I am a few thousand miles from Detective Koehn and Detective Clemons and that war hero boss of theirs, Captain Pearce. I might as well be in a different solar system.

  I have Gloria coming to visit me in an hour. I have the tropical white suit and I have the straw hat with the broad brim and the orange hatband. I have the white shoes of a gringo, too. It’s what everyone expects me to wear, here. So I don’t disappoint anyone. I dress as they expect a Norte Americano would dress.

  I like Gloria. She’s an Indian, she’s dark, and she never says anything, before, during, or after. I pay her in pesos, and I come away from her feeling refreshed and relaxed. I come away from our encounters feeling sane.

  Which psychiatrist or philosopher said that the only time a man is truly sane is the ten minutes in afterglow, right after the orgasm? I can’t recall, but there is wisdom to those words. I could never kill any living thing after having sex, but the impulse always returns quickly after those ten minutes.

  Killing is the way of nature. It is only in the human community that we indulge ourselves with the comedy of glorifying anti-violent behavior. We ignore our civility frequently
, but we like to repeat and recite the fairy tale about the sanctity of life. There is nothing holy about life. We are killer organisms. We kill to eat; we murder to survive. We destroy life to celebrate our way of life. It is all hypocrisy, and the Church is the worst hypocrite of all. These pompous celibates with the red hats preach non-violence, but they have perpetrated most of the mayhem on this planet. Check out Northern Ireland, the Middle East, and the genocide of the Native American. Manifest Destiny was simply a façade for mass murder. It indulged our lust for manslaughter. Whack them for the American Dream! What an ungodly hoax!

  Gloria is coming, so I will be too, soon. It only takes about twenty minutes for her to have me speaking in tongues. What the languages are, I have no idea. Speaking in tongues is not a phenomenon relegated to religion. There have been numerous cases of people talking in long-dead languages for centuries.

  The first time it happened, my initial foster mother threatened to have me evaluated.

  But then, her mynah bird disappeared from its gilded cage, never to be seen again. She got the message and told her husband, my foster father numero uno, that Tweety or Whoever had simply flown away, right out the living room window.

  The miracle would have been that bird flying through a screened window. He did not, however, question his quivering spouse about the mynah bird’s disappearance any further.

  Gloria is ringing at my apartment’s doorbell, so I ring her up to my third floor apartment in this very modern apartment complex. Once inside my door, she wastes no time disrobing. She leads me into the bedroom in this central air-conditioned, cool apartment, and she sits me at the foot of the king-sized mattress and she begins felatio on me hurriedly. Once I am erect, stout, she hops aboard my lap and I am deep within her. She tightens on me, and I come almost instantly. She keeps on lunging downward at me until I am flaccid and harmless.

  Then I bend down and bite her nipples, until they perk and turn darker wine-colored then they were when we started all this. I nip at them repeatedly.

  Until she smiles. And then I let go of her and she disengages.

  She sits on the bed and I watch her masturbate herself to orgasm. She throbs at least three times before she’s finished.

  Then she throws her clothes back on. No underwear. Just a white cotton skirt and a short-sleeved white blouse. She wears cheap flip flops on her feet, the kind you can buy at any store for a few dollars. Gloria is not a well-heeled whore. She’s a working woman with no husband and three teenaged sons.

  I give her fifty American dollars—twice what she normally receives. She doesn’t smile, however. She never does. I don’t look for any good humor on her attractive Indian face. Smiles are not what I’m paying for. I’m paying for service. She comes through, so I have no complaints.

  *

  When I left the military, it was difficult at first, but I adapted well, as I always have. I joined the Marines to become an efficient killer. I’d killed before, but I wanted to perfect my technique. The military trains you to kill the enemy only, of course, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use the training for other purposes. Lee Harvey Oswald is a famous case in point. The sniper at the University of Texas is another. There are other examples, as well.

  The Corps taught me discipline, something I only knew by instinct. Plan. Prepare. Execute. Have your escape route ready. Disappear. Vanish inside the crowd. Those are talents the military developed for me. I learned them well. I had good teachers. They were brutal instructors, but the lessons were permanently engraved inside me.

  I had no desire to kill Saddam Hussein or his troops. I had every desire to kill those families in Kuwait. It’s what I signed up for. Killing was a daily event in a war. What better way to get away with murder? We were in a war zone. Death was everywhere present. Loss of life was commonplace. Murder was sanctified by our own government, just the way it always is when a country declares war on anybody.

  And what is it to God if I help dispatch a few more souls to Him? In the course of history, what can it mean to my own soul, if I have one, that I have increased the supply of fresh corpses on their way to heaven?

  18

  She’s sitting at the booth in Denny’s, waiting for me. I sit down opposite her. I haven’t seen her look this good in a very long time.

  “Will.”

  “Mary.”

  Her face is solemn and unreadable. I always have trouble trying to guess her mood.

  “You said you wanted to talk to me,” I tell her.

  “Yes. I did.”

  I feel as though she’s about to lay waste to me with something devastating. Maybe she’ll tell me she’s pregnant. But she’d never make a mistake like that happen to her. She’s careful. She’s smart. She’s on the pill.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “You don’t have to come on that stiff, Will. I’m not going to make another scene.”

  Now she’s become stiff, like a porcupine raising its back at you, quills at the ready.

  “I wasn’t thinking. Yes, I was.”

  She has that damnable freshness that makes me want to grab hold of her in spite of our current situation. Her breasts stand out against her tight, ribbed turtleneck sweater. Her lips are plum-colored and they’re disturbing and devastating me.

  “Cannot tell a lie, no?”

  “I can tell lies. But I never did to you.”

  “How’s the new lady working out?”

  “It’s progressing all right.”

  I’m being very much distracted by her fragrance. I have no idea what she wears, after all the time we spent together, but it’s subtle and sweet, and I can’t take my eyes off her white, delectable throat.

  “Anything serious?”

  Then she smiles at me.

  “Oh. I forgot. Everything is dead-serious with you.”

  “I laugh at things. I laugh at things all the time.”

  “What do you laugh at, Will?”

  There’s nothing amusing happening inside me, now. But I can detect the flush of self-consciousness and embarrassment she arouses in me for still wanting her as badly as I do.

  “I thought you wanted to talk to me about something.”

  She looks down at her clear-polished, short fingernails.

  “Yes. I do. They’ve caught the hacker who procured the victims for Thomas and Brandon.”

  She’s checking her nails fastidiously, as if the edge on those nails can never be finely-honed enough to please her.

  “The guy who found the victims?”

  “Yes. They even think he might have been used back in Desert Storm. Apparently he knows Carl Thomas from way back in cyber history.”

  “He hacked into the personnel files of those oil companies.”

  “It seems to be the case, yes. We’ve interviewed him several times and explained the penalties for accessory to murder, in multiples, and he’s become very concerned about his own longevity.… But he still appears to be hesitant about naming names. All we could get out of him was the names of Carl Thomas and Philip Brandon. I was at those interviews, Will. I think he’s holding back.”

  “Holding back what? Holding back how?”

  “I think he thinks if he keeps that ace of spades up his sleeve that he’ll have better bargaining power at his sentencing. I think he might have all four aces up his shirtsleeve. It’s just my impression. Maybe. I could be wrong.”

  “You’re saying he knows at least one more name. A very important name.”

  I want to feel my tongue inside her warm and pretty mouth. I want to taste her lips with my own, the way I did, not so long ago. I feel the temperature in here going up, although I know it’s my own body heat that’s rising.

  “That could be it. Or it could just be a feint, you know, a false jab, to make us think he knows more than he does. These hackmeisters are an arrogant lot. They think their little machines are going to take over the world.”

  “He might have something there, Mary.”

  She puts on a pouty face th
at she knows will distract and arouse me. It’s the competitiveness in her.

  “You think there’s another player involved who we haven’t spotted?”

  “I think it’s possible.”

  “Meaning?”

  I look at my own fingertips. She thinks I never laugh. What the hell does that mean?

  “There was a Captain Benjamin Anderson we looked at, back in Kuwait.”

  I feel the clench of my teeth down to their roots. It becomes painful as I hold the clamp tightly.

  “And why aren’t you still interested in him?”

  She is now the prosecutor, with the accusatory jab at me.

  “Because he’s dead.”

  “I love ghost stories, Will.”

  Her sarcasm drips all over me, head to toes.

  “There are no ghosts.”

  “You sure? Not even the Holy Ghost?”

  She’s grinning at my obvious discomfort. I want to take her by her hair and flatten her.

  “He was blown out of his boots in Iraq, and there was nothing left but his dog tags. The whole scene was ignited with a small fire bomb, and they finished it off with Willie Peter.”

  “Say?”

  “White phosphorus. The shit burns and burns and it makes big holes wherever it lands. There were three guys in that Hummer, and there were only ashes left of the other two Marines with Anderson. They couldn’t ID any of the three after the intensity of that burn. And none of the three were ever seen again.”

  “So why are you still interested in Anderson?”

  I’m tiring of the berating, but I can see she’s loaded with energy. Her tank is still filled, and she’s not about to let up on me.

  “I wasn’t—until you fed the fire with this stuff about another player being involved. I always liked Anderson. He had a fucked-up family background, foster homes and so on, but he didn’t have anything incriminating in black and white in his jacket. He was another brilliant student.