Black Angel

by Thomas Laird

  She already knows the answer as well as I do.

  “We’re doing everything we know how to do,” I reassure her.

  “I know. I’m sorry, Will.”

  “If you weren’t anxious about all this, then I’d really be concerned about you.”

  She tries to smile. It doesn’t come off very well, here in our dim bedroom.

  “You haven’t slept at all the last two nights. I hear you rolling and turning all night, Will.”

  “If it keeps you up, I’ll sleep on the…”

  “Don’t you even say it.”

  I smile at her.

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” I tell her. “But I’ll try real hard to keep still for you.”

  “I’ll dream of the day we’re free of Benjamin Anderson,” she smiles warmly.

  Then she closes her eyes.

  I know I won’t sleep again tonight, but eventually my eyes will have to shut. And in ten more minutes, they do.

  *

  I dream of playing football in high school. I dream that my brother Sammy is playing on the same team with me. Which he didn’t, being three years younger than I am.

  But we’re in some big-deal contest in Soldier Field. It must be for a trophy, because there’s an overflow crowd.

  We’re winning. We’re romping and stomping, as a matter of fact. Sammy opens up gaping holes for our running back, and I catch two TDs.

  Then the clock on the far end of the field holds up the game because it stops running. The refs catch the busted timepiece, and there’s a very long delay. The crowd becomes hushed at the stoppage, and I find myself looking for someone in the crowd of 60,000. I’m looking for George Koehn. I’m looking for my father. And when I can’t locate him, I look for Hannah and the girls. None of them appears.

  Then I notice my boss, Captain Pearce, stalking our sideline. He stops and waves to me. I see a smile on his face.

  But then I see someone in a ball cap and aviator sunglasses coming up fast behind him. The guy in the shades is carrying a k-bar, but he’s making no effort to conceal the blade. There are uniforms and security all over the place, but Benjamin Anderson is rushing Captain Pearce and no one’s doing a damn thing about it.

  Anderson stabs my boss in the back, but I don’t hear any screams or outcry from the stands. Security still has made no moves toward the ex-Marine, and the crowd is more interested in the delay of the game. Everyone’s heads are turned toward that stadium clock. They don’t notice that Captain Pearce has fallen. No one but me seems to notice the policeman’s collapse on the sideline.

  I try to rush to Benjamin even though I know I’m too late. And Anderson stands behind the fallen, immobile police captain. He’s unashamed and in no hurry to flee.

  I look at my feet, suddenly, and I find that my cleats are missing. I’m standing barefooted on the turf of the football field.

  Then I look up, and Pearce and Anderson have both quietly vanished. The time clock is still broken, however.

  And I awaken to a sound from downstairs in Hannah’s Oakbrook home. I bolt out of bed, but when I look down at my wife, I see she’s soundly asleep in spite of my jerking upright and then springing off the mattress.

  I already have the weapon from under my pillow in my hand. I see that the digital clock reads 2:16 a.m. I have only boxer shorts on. I normally throw on sweats before I walk out into the house from the bedroom. I don’t feel right, waltzing before two young girls in my skivvies.

  But I don’t have time for the amenities. I hurry out the bedroom door. Then I peek inside both of the girls’ bedrooms. It’s still dark, and I’m not going to wake them by flipping on a light. Everything seems in order, but it’s really too dark to tell for sure.

  I tell myself that I’m overreacting, and that overreacting is precisely what Anderson wants me to do. That’s part of his power thing.

  I walk softly down the stairs from the upper floor, nine millimeter firmly in hand, safety off. When I reach the main floor, I do a room by room, saving the kitchen for last.

  There is no light in that kitchen save for a nightlight that Hannah always leaves on. I see the dim glow through the crack in the swinging door. I’ve been here once before, I remember.

  I throw the door open, and I find Beth on the floor, sobbing.

  Then I click on the overhead fluorescents.

  “What’s wrong, honey?” I ask as I kneel down next to her in front of the kitchen sink.

  She just looks at me with a glance of hopelessness. She doesn’t say a word, but now it’s down to a sniffling.

  “Don’t tell Mom I was down here, okay?” she asks.

  “Of course I won’t.”

  I feel awkward, sitting next to her in my underwear, but I’m not about to leave her here alone.

  “He’s taken our house over,” she says. “First he kicked down the door. He or that other guy. And now he’s got us living like we did something wrong.”

  “He’s the bad guy. We’re not. You have to remember that. And remember that the house is being watched, every day and night. And they’ve got people following me and the three of you, and they’re watching my family too I mean my dad and brother.”

  She sniffles briefly again.

  “Do you feel safe, Will?”

  I look at her, but I don’t answer.

  *

  I find myself at the target range whenever I have a free hour. I empty load after load into the bulls-eyes, and my accuracy has never been truer. I have higher scores now than I had as an expert marksman in the Corps. My skills degenerated slightly when I went into NCIS. I improved again when I went into the Academy here at the Police Force, but Homicides don’t get much opportunity to fire their side arms. We investigate a whole lot more than we get into gunfights. Gunplay is the aberration; it’s the exception to the routine. We deal with guys who are already dead, but there are moments when we have to make arrests that can turn very dicey. We wear vests and we take precautions, but all that doesn’t help you with a shot to your melon. Headshots mean vegetation or death, most of the time.

  I prefer neither.

  However, I continue to improve as long as I keep shooting. We’re required to hit the range regularly, but I’ve exceeded my number of visits to this firing area.

  I picture his face on the targets. I superimpose them over the paper bulls’ eyes. Then I take aim for his forehead and his eyes. I’m not going to give him the chance to survive a headshot. If I place one in his mid-forehead or through one of his white orbs, he’s meat. If I shoot him in the cheek, he might survive. Should I hit him in the chin, he has a chance too. In the eyes or below the hairline, his odds decrease dramatically.

  In the Corps they taught us to aim at the torso on the first volleys, and then you aimed around the knees on the second burst, the idea being to finish him on his way down. I can’t depend on that reasoning. This has to be a one shot deal, maybe two at most. I have to hit where I aim. I can’t let him make it to trial if he gives me the opportunity. If I can find that feverish brain, I have to plant one deep inside so that it eradicates Benjamin Anderson irrevocably. It has to be a one shot blast. Nothing else is acceptable.

  I have to be perfect with my marksmanship. When the moment arrives, I cannot fail.

  37

  April finally lets go, and we’re in May. It becomes warm and fragrant, even by the Lakeshore in this first week. Easter was a few weeks ago. I haven’t been a practicing Catholic the trip to confession a while back was my first foray into the Roman ritual in a long while. I never attended mass while I was in the Middle East, being a cop in the NCIS, or even when I was in my four year hitch in the Marines. The Marines always had to know what religion or denomination you were because it was the military and it was a formality, so I never denied being baptized in the “old, corrupt faith of Rome,” as Mr. Hawthorne called it in The Scarlet Letter. I’ve never thought of my religion as corrupt. Certainly it is no more polluted than the evangelists and their ilk on TV. But I’ve just ne
ver had any real interest in spirituality, until recently.

  I’ve gone to mass the last few Sundays in a row, but Hannah is an Episcopalian, “Catholic light,” as we call it, and she doesn’t attend with me. I go early anyway, to the 6:30 a.m. masses, and that’s way too soon for Hannah to rise on Sundays.

  However, Barbara has gone with me both times. She says she’d like to “explore the faith” with me, as she put it. So I agreed after asking Hannah if it was all right.

  “You can get either of them in a church,” she told me, “and you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.”

  So Barbara is my bodyguard, along with the two plainclothesmen who shadow me everywhere during their rotating two-man shifts. The morning guys meet the late shift guys just after we get into mass this third Sunday. Easter is past, as I say, and Barbara is still fascinated by the Resurrection. She wants to know if I really buy into it.

  “Yeah. It’s like part of the deal,” I tell her. We walk out into the early morning rays. It’s still very chilly out here in front of St. Stanislaus.

  “I find it kind of hokey,” she smiles as we walk to my Cavalier. I wave to the two plainclothesmen parked next to me in the church’s lot. They both wave back, but neither is smiling. I’d be pissed too if I had to do surveillance on an early Sunday a.m.

  “Why do you think so?” I ask her as we get in the car.

  “Ghost story.”

  “Yes, it is. But then there were lots of other miracles, too, in that book.”

  *

  We arrive at Smiley’s Pancake House on Fullerton on the North Side. I’m taking her to breakfast, since she made the grand effort of rising as early as I do for a mass.

  We sit in a booth. The waitress has taken our order.

  “You believe in ghosts?” she asks.

  She’ll be as pretty as Hannah in a few more years when she blooms. She’s already a dazzling young woman. They’re both gorgeous, in their own ways.

  “I guess I do. Otherwise I’d sleep in on Sundays, don’t you think?”

  “You might just be going because of all this…trouble.”

  I look at her wise young face. She looks fresh, the way most kids do to me. Not the wiseass fresh, but fresh like the morning breeze.

  “You’re right. That’s part of it, I suppose.”

  “Don’t you find that a kind of shaky reason for going to church?”

  “I can see why you’d think so.”

  “I’m not trying to be snotty, here, Will. I just really want to know.”

  “When I was your age, I never had time for mass. I just had my own life. That was the way it was all through college and the military, too. But now I feel helpless, sometimes. In the Marines they used to say there were no atheists in foxholes. I never fought in combat, but I saw a lot of it from the convoys we tagged along with in Iraq.

  “I don’t much want to repeat what I saw. I hope you never witness the evil I saw as a cop, especially, in the Middle East. You might have read about it or seen some of it on TV, but it’s not the same as smelling it.”

  She looks at me intently, listening to every word.

  “Smelling it?”

  “The stench of death. It’s intolerable. Not even doctors can hack it for very long without gagging. As a cop, I was supposed to get used to it, but I never did. And I’m not used to it now, on the force, either.”

  She seems to sense my frustration at explaining myself, but, as usual, she is patient with me. There is only calm on her pretty face.

  “We were talking about ghosts, Will. You’re avoiding the issue,” she grins.

  The waitress gives us our orange juice. I don’t drink coffee, but Barbara opts for a cup with her juice.

  “Stunts your growth,” I tell her.

  “Come on, back to the part about ghosts.”

  I look down at my hands on the tabletop.

  “All those dead guys I was telling you about, they remind me of resurrection. Because if there really is no afterlife, all this seems… It just seems futile, pointless. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “Sure. Life’s too short. I’ve heard that over and over again from Mom and my dad.”

  “They’re right, Barbara.”

  “I suppose, but it seems awfully long to me right now.”

  “This’ll be over soon. Look, I just needed to feel like there’s some logic to what I’m doing, to everything that’s going on. I used to think I didn’t need anybody’s help, but I’m finding out I was wrong. I need your mother. I need you two, you and Beth. But I needed something else. Mass supplies some kind of need I never even knew I had until all this crap.”

  “It makes sense that there’s a God. I’m talking strictly logic, here.”

  “Yeah? How’s that?”

  “In English class, we talked about dichotomies. Everything comes in twos: large and small, skinny and fat. You’d have no notion of tall unless you had short to measure tall by.”

  “Yep. I get it.”

  She fiddles with her bacon and eggs. She pokes the yellows with the prongs of her fork, and her upper lip twitches, nervously, from time to time. She’s concentrating so hard, it makes me tense, too.

  “So if there’s a devil, there’s got to be a God to give us an idea of how evil Satan’s supposed to be.”

  “Heavy stuff from such a young babe,” I smile at her.

  “I’m serious.”

  There’s no doubt about that. Her eyes almost pierce mine as she drills her gaze at me.

  “So am I.”

  “Benjamin Anderson is evil, isn’t he, Will?”

  She puts her fork down and stops stabbing the yolks.

  “You could say.”

  “Then we can’t judge Anderson unless there is also good in the world, right?”

  “There you have me.”

  “That’s because cops see so much shit out there.”

  It shocks me slightly to hear her use profanity, but I keep my mouth shut.

  “Can’t have one without the other. Right?”

  “Yes, Professor,” I smile.

  “I’m serious, Will.”

  “I know you are, kiddo.”

  A pout crosses her face.

  “Don’t call me that. My dad calls me kiddo, and he pisses me off when he does.”

  “Okay, sorry.”

  I put a finger over my lips.

  “I’m not stupid.”

  Her brows furrow, now, with intensity.

  “I know you’re not. Take it easy, kid Whoops.”

  She has to grin.

  “Tell me why you believe in ghosts.”

  “I read Walt Whitman. That’s why,” I smile again at her.

  “The poet?”

  She watches me intently. She’s like her mom patient with me.

  “Yes. The very man.”

  “And what’s he got to do with believing in ghosts and God?”

  “You’ve read Leaves of Grass?” I ask.

  “Some of it, in our anthology in high school.”

  “Whitman said that dying is not the end and that what happens after death is far more wonderful than anyone can suppose.”

  “Really? That part wasn’t in the anthology.”

  “Neither was all his stuff about sex.”

  “I must have missed that, too,” she says.

  She appears mock-disappointed. She purses her lips.

  “He was saying that there’s an afterlife, and that this is not all there is.”

  “Really,” she repeats.

  “Yes. You have to have something to anchor the ship, kid Barbara.”

  “You can call me kiddo if you have to.”

  “No. I like your name better.”

  “You really going to get married again in the church in June?”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “Which church?”

  “Your mom doesn’t want to get married in hers because she told me she thinks the reverend there is a dotty old coot.”

  “So it’s
St. Stanislaus?”

  I nod.

  “Good. I like that church. It’s prettier than the Episcopalian place.”

  “You think your mom or Beth would like to come to mass with us?”

  “No. You go too damn early,” she grins.

  *

  While we’re driving to Oakbrook from the North Side, Barbara looks out the passenger’s window pensively.

  “You think there’s really a hell?” she blurts out of nowhere.

  “Huh?”

  “You think this bastard Anderson is really going to hell?”

  “If there is one, yes.”

  “I don’t think God’s vindictive, though. What’s the point of punishing him, Will? Those people are dead, anyway.”

  “Justice.”

  “Justice?”

  “Yes. The punishment fits the crime. I think He knows what’s happening down here, and I don’t think He lets anything slide.”

  “So it’s pitchforks and sulfur?” she asks.

  “No. I don’t think so. I think maybe Anderson gets to feel the weight of what he’s done to all those people he’s stolen from.”

  “Stolen?”

  “He’s stolen their lives and their innocence. He’s stolen them from their parents. He’s taken everything from them all.”

  “I know. I see what you’re saying.”

  She looks back out the window.

  “How can you really believe all this when you deal with the skuzziest human beings on this earth?” she wants to know.

  “It’s a struggle, Barbara. It’s a real challenge. No one said it would be easy.”

  “But why’s God got to make it impossible?”

  “Now there’s a great question. Someone a lot smarter than me might take a shot at it.”

  She smiles warmly at me and looks out the window of my Cavalier. I look into the rearview and see that my tails are right behind me.

  “I love you, Will.”

  I look over at her, but she’s still staring out the passenger’s window at the sidewalks and houses flying by us and behind us.

  *

  This Sunday we go out to a fancy restaurant after mass, all four of us, Hannah, Barbara, Beth and me. We’re going to my father’s for dinner at 6:30 tonight, but we’re having brunch together after the 8:00 a.m. service. This was as early as I could finagle them all into getting up. I would have chosen the 6:30 again because there is less of a crowd, and today is unusually crowded for post-Easter.