Black Angel

by Thomas Laird

  *

  I kiss her once, then again. But I don’t talk about Brandon or Thomas or Captain Benjamin Anderson or any of those spooks who’ve haunted my house. They don’t have to inhabit Hannah’s home too. I kiss her again, and then I embrace her tightly, here in my bed in New Town.

  “The kids are with him?” I ask her.

  The brown eyes grab me, as usual. Her torso is sweaty and slick. I run my hand down to her pubic hair, and she flinches, deliciously. Her body is lanky and elegant. Her legs are long and athletic—like a runner’s legs. They’re not overly muscled, just strong and sexy.

  “I already told you twice. Yes.”

  “I’m sorry. I must have forgotten.”

  She sits up in bed.

  “Bringing work home with you?” she asks.

  Her lips are full, but not puffed, like some actress who visits the plastic surgeon. They’re enticing, yes. They have the slightest tinge of scarlet still remaining after I’ve kissed the color off, for the last half hour of passion.

  “Yeah. I guess so. I’m sorry.”

  “Am I safe, Will?”

  I take her and pull her back toward me. She relents and lies down beside me.

  “I won’t do it again,” I tell her.

  “You say that all the time.”

  Her eyes have warmth as well as color. They bid me to keep coming closer. Then she takes her delicate, long fingers, and she runs her rose-colored nails down my right thigh. She’s putting me in a very painful state of arousal. She takes hold of me and squeezes until I issue a mock protest.

  “I mean it all the time.”

  “I read about Brandon being found shot and then dying this morning in the paper. How come you didn’t tell me last night?”

  “They’re still out there. At least two of them. When we get them all, you’ll be the first person I tell.”

  She sits back up and I breathe out.

  “Don’t hide stuff that concerns me and the girls, Will.”

  Her passion has been replaced by sober concern. She’s not angry. Just disappointed in me, in all of us, I think.

  “I tell you everything I can tell you.”

  “Are you telling me the truth or are you telling me what you think I want to hear?”

  “I won’t lie to you. But there are things I can’t discuss. Not with anyone, Hannah.”

  She returns to soft. She rakes her lovely rose fingernails down both of my thighs, and then she kisses my calves and then moves her way up to my navel.

  “Okay. Just so I know the rules.”

  “It’s the life.”

  “That the way it was for you in the military? ‘That’s the life?’”

  “I don’t want to lose you.”

  She takes me in her mouth and a shock wave jolts me to my core. Then she rises back up quickly, just to let me know she’s the lover in command, here.

  “I don’t want to lose you either.”

  “If I say what I really think, I’ll frighten you off.”

  “Frighten me off?”

  “Yeah. You’ll say I’m going too fast.”

  Her arms are thin and lithe, a contrast to my thick and heavily muscled forearms and biceps. She’s the lean one. I’m the ex-athlete who’s thickening, year after year, lately. My legs are twice the size of Hannah’s—but she insists she likes my bulk. She says I’m not really fat and that I never will be.

  “Yes. You might do that, if I know what you’re referring to.”

  “Well, I’m not going to go there tonight. This is all too short, so I’ll save it for much later.”

  She looks out into the darkness of the pre-dawn from my front window that faces Clark Street.

  “You really want to get all this serious?”

  “Yes, Hannah.”

  I never want to leave this house. It exudes the same warmth and safety that I feel while I’m in her arms. This is a safe place. Nothing bad can harm us, here. This is my citadel, my safe place that cannot be stormed and taken. Hannah is the source of the comfort I feel when I’m with her in her home.

  “So do I.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes, Will, I do.”

  “How am I supposed to take that?” I ask her.

  “For what it’s worth. I love you, you know.”

  I aim those words right back at her.

  “Don’t bring your work into our bedroom again, okay?” she says.

  And then she lies back down next to me.

  *

  Forensics can come up with no evidence. If it was Anderson, he left no trace. He just left a dying Philip Brandon in his wake.

  We have federal wiretaps on Anderson’s lawyer-daddy. Nothing has come up yet. I don’t think it will. Anderson is too smart to get himself caught electronically. If he’s living off Daddy’s money, we can find no account. There is of course the off-shore solution for him. It makes it much more difficult for us to find a paper trail.

  If I’m guessing right, because he disappeared in Kuwait, it will be very difficult for us to look into his disappearance from here. The Kuwait police are not very helpful and they are not very efficient. And like most countries we’ve ‘liberated,’ they don’t have much use for Americans, either.

  So we beat on, boats against the current…

  Fitzgerald was one of my favorite authors. He wrote prose-poetry. His lines were lyrical and sometimes cynical, but you can’t ignore the beauty of his words. I’m flapping against the current, myself. I’m trying to find at least two killers, one of whom is a rapist as well, and I haven’t been able to come up with a whiff, not a single scent nor one solid trail. They remain elusive—that’s why I thought of The Great Gatsby. Boats against the current. Everything seems uphill.

  What does Anderson do next? He kills Carl Thomas. He killed Brandon because he thought Philip was stupid enough that we’d eventually nab him, and then we’d find out about the Captain’s rebirth. He’s burning all his bridges behind him. He’s getting rid of witnesses before they can be caught and squeezed. Carl’s next.

  I have to find him before Captain Benjamin Anderson does. I have to find him before this “dead” man re-enters the world beneath us once more.

  20

  Bridgeport is an old neighborhood, one of the oldest in the city. It lies near Comiskey Park, home of the White Sox. Richard J. Daley was the Mayor for decades, and he lived not far from my father. I come to visit my dad often, even though I’ve moved out now. I get lonesome for him, as I always do, and then nothing can take the place of seeing him in the flesh. He’s seventy-two, and so I know someday not too far off I won’t be able to see him anymore. Death was something you could get used to by sight, but you could never get used to the smell of it, back in the Middle East.

  That same smell greets me and Jack when we visit homicide crime scenes, here in the city. If the vic has been lying there for a while, it reminds me of the stink in Kuwait City and in Iraq.

  I sometimes regret that I left the Corps for NCIS just when the shit hit the blades of the fan in Desert Storm because it would have been my only real shot at real combat. I’ve been shot at a few times trying to apprehend bad guys over in the war zone, but I’ve never had a bead drawn on me in the States yet. I’m kind of hoping I won’t, also.

  My dad looks just slightly grayer than he did the last time I was home, but he looks healthy. His color’s good, and his posture is the same as always, board-stiff-erect. He must have a good supply of calcium in his bones, but I’ve never seen him drink milk in my life.

  “When’s Sammy coming home again?”

  It’s October, and I already know the answer.

  “Probably Christmas,” he says. “You know how busy he is with school and with his girlfriend.”

  His girlfriend’s name is Megan. He’s living with her in an apartment in Champaign, Illinois, home of the Fighting Illini and the University of Illinois. Sammy’s got two more semesters before he gets his MBA. He wants to work in Chicago, and Megan wants to work and cohab
it with him in the city, as well, he’s told me on the phone. I don’t have the time to visit him on campus now that I’m on homicide because we’re always on duty and because of the rape/murder business that headlines our unsolved board in my office.

  “How are you, Will? Really. How’re you doing?”

  I’m sitting at the ancient kitchen table across from him. The windows are opened because it’s a warm day 60 degrees—and because George Koehn is a fresh air fanatic. He used to battle with my mom over opened windows off season, but the old man won every fight, and my mother got used to wearing a couple of sweaters in the house.

  “I’m all right, Dad.”

  “Let me ask you one more time, without the perfunctory bullshit response,” he smiles.

  “I’m all fucked up. Better?”

  “Why?”

  “The job.”

  “The rape case you were telling me about? The one connected back to that little war?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what else, Will? You can’t be living your life without those damn personal entanglements. You’ve been watching Oprah again?”

  He knows I rarely watch any kind of television. I didn’t when I was a kid, either.

  “I’m still with Hannah, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “Don’t get angry, kiddo. I wasn’t trying to make you mad.”

  “I’m still with her. And I know she’s older than I am.”

  “When she’s sixty. You know how that goes. You really want to watch her age? I had to watch her age in front of my eyes, and shit, she’s only a little younger than I am.”

  “I can’t help how I feel. Next time I’ll screen them with a questionnaire. I’ll have the age thing number one, just for you.”

  He laughs.

  “She make you happy, Will?”

  “Yeah. She does. Yes, she does.”

  “Then you take it from there. You’re a big boy. You were a big boy even when you were little. I don’t mean size. You were always more grown up than the other guys around you. Anyone could see that. You always knew your own mind. You weren’t a follower, that’s for goddam sure.”

  “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

  “Actually, it’s a complaint. I don’t ever remember you being a child. I remember you being smaller physically, but you were always like talking to an adult. It’s as if you just skipped being a kid and went right to becoming an old fart in a young man’s body.”

  I look down at my fingers.

  “It’s just that you never acted childish. You know what I mean? It made me, and your mother, worry about you some.”

  “You worried about me?”

  “We thought you might turn into one of these whacked-out little shits. You know, prodigies or whatever. They said your tests were unusually high, the scores, I mean.

  “You were always so goddam stone-serious, Will. I can’t remember hearing you laugh after you passed twelve.”

  “I laugh, Dad. That isn’t right.”

  “It isn’t the way I remember you. You were as serious about football as you were about school, and you never had a girlfriend for very long, so I was wondering if you even liked girls.”

  “You thought I was gay?”

  “Not really. I just thought you might be what they call anti-social.”

  “I don’t have many friends. No.”

  “Jack Clemons a friend?”

  “He’s my partner. He has his own life and friends.”

  “Your partner from NCIS?”

  “Donato?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Same deal, Dad. We were on the job together. He’s still in the Navy cops.”

  “Why don’t you have any guy friends?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t. It’s just hard for me to get that close to anyone.”

  “Was it hard to get close to this Hannah?”

  “No. It wasn’t. That’s why I’m still with her, so to speak.”

  “So to speak? She isn’t talking anything permanent?”

  “She thinks I’ll get put off because of her age.”

  “She’s just being realistic, Will. And she’s been divorced. You carry old shit with you whether you want to or not.”

  I can hear the noise from the streets outside. The sound used to put me to sleep when I lived here. On ship, I almost went section eight because of the quiet of the sea. All you had was the sound of the waves against the hull and the occasional outburst from some swabbies back from a shore leave. Mostly it was maddeningly hushed on board The Intrepid.

  This is where I grew up. I played touch football and softball across the street in the playground of the elementary school I attended. My mother and father made it to all the activities I was involved in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts. Later they attended my football games at DeLaSalle High School, a Catholic secondary school not far from here. I was All City my junior year and All State in football my senior year. Then I turned down the chance to play in the Big Ten because I wanted to get my education and leave the game behind. I didn’t want sports to interfere with my learning. All the guys I played with at DeLaSalle thought I was fucking nuts—a full ride to the University of Illinois. They thought my love of words was a little strange, also. I think they had the idea I was a little weird, even though I dated girls in high school and throughout college. I didn’t do what everyone expected me to do. Not what my father or mother or brother thought I was going to do, anyway.

  “You going to catch this piece of shit, Will?”

  He was handsome once. I’ve seen the photographs. Full head of hair. Now he’s got the male balding pattern on the crown of his head. His neck has acquired a little bit of turkey neck, but his chest and arms are still as powerful as they always were. Age has merely bent him, a little bit.

  “There’s more than one.”

  “You going to catch however many of them, then?”

  He has the kind of internal power that a child always takes for granted. He’s a rock, the way any father is supposed to be. But my old man was a survivor; he endured.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “That’s good to hear.… I always dreamed of becoming the sniper who blew the back off Hitler’s head. But the dirty prick did himself in his bunker, or so the story goes. He was afraid the Russians were going to get him.

  “I wouldn’t have tortured him if I’d caught him alive. You know that? I would’ve given him a shovel, fed him real well, treated him like a prized bull, and then I would’ve had him begin burying everybody he was responsible for in those death camps. He never would’ve had time to take poison if I’d got him. I’d have kept him busy twelve hours a day. And then I’d make sure he was fed well and that he slept eight solid every night so he’d be able to dig graves every day of the rest of his fuck-faced life.”

  His eyes are distant, as if he’s returned to Normandy. He’s on that French sand, hearing the bullets buzz by him. He’s seeing the tide turned red with American blood.

  “This guy isn’t even in Hitler’s league, Dad.”

  “Sure he is. Killing one human being is holocaust enough. Just because Herr Hitler murdered millions doesn’t make your guy or guys any less evil. There ain’t no math in killing. One’s as good as a million. One’s all it takes to secure you a spot in hell.”

  I can see him pulling the trigger on Herr Hitler, right now. I can see hatred, murderous hatred, on my dad’s face at the mention of the Nazi tyrant.

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “I’m always right. I’m your old man.”

  A young boy on a bicycle goes flying by the front window. I can see him down the hall from the kitchen here. The leaves are only just turning to reds and oranges.

  “You like your new place?” he asks.

  “I like it when Hannah’s there. I’m not so sure, when the place is empty except for me.”

  My eyes seem to focus more clearly when I say her name. I see a big smile on the old guy’s face. He knows how I feel about Hann
ah. He’s always had more than his share of intuition, regarding what was going on inside my brother and me.

  “Will they let you bring in a mutt?”

  “No pets, Dad.”

  His face saddens. A little liquid gathers in his eyes. He’s a dog-lover, regardless of his bitching about the neighbors’ barking hounds.

  “Too bad. Dogs are good companions.”

  “How come we never had one, then?”

  “Too much aggravation. We got enough goddam barkers in this fucking neighborhood. If it wasn’t illegal, I’d shoot some of these bastards who let their animals yowl all goddam day. They’re a nuisance, these people and their mutts.”

  “Can I do anything for you, Dad? Anything at all?”

  He peers over at me. He’s giving me his “patient” face. I’m being retarded. Slow. He’s way ahead of me.

  “You can take me to Burger King for a double Whopper with cheese.”

  “You don’t like White Castle?”

  “That place is going to kill you and Jack.”

  I’ve told him about my eating habits.

  “All right. Let’s go,” I tell him.

  “When do you have to be at the job?” he asks.

  “I’m off ‘til tomorrow night.”

  “Good. Then I’ll take you out for a steak for dinner at Maggio’s.”

  It’s his favorite restaurant.

  “Is it okay if I invite Hannah?”

  “Hell, yes. I’d like to meet this ‘older woman.’”

  “I’m paying for dinner, and I won’t listen to any of your usual shit.”

  He smiles at me because he knows I used to let him pick up all the tabs until I got this job as a detective. Then I vowed never to let him pick up a check again.

  “It’s a deal.”

  *

  Hannah meets us at Maggio’s. The restaurant is on the far southwest side, so I drive my father, and Hannah takes her car from Oakbrook. The girls are once again with their father this weekend.