Last Angel Read online

  The Last Angel

  By Steven Savile

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2010 Steven Savile

  Copy-edited by: Darren Pulsford

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  OTHER CROSSROAD PRESS BOOKS BY STEVEN SAVILE:

  Novels:

  The Sufferer’s Song

  Hallowed Ground – With David Niall Wilson

  The Last Angel

  Collections:

  The Forgetting Wood

  Unabridged Audiobooks:

  The Forgetting Wood – narrated by Ian Stuart

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  Chapter One

  Manhattan, where the sun shines red on the upturned faces of angels and Antichrists.

  If the man coming in out of the rain ever owned a halo, it had long since corroded into flakes of wishes and dead iron. Fat rain came down from a charcoal sky as Gabriel Rush let the glass-tinted door swing closed behind him. The grey of cigarette smoke corkscrewed lazily into the haze of stale December air.

  Two talkers slumped down beside the cool blue of the fish tank, threadbare elbows steeping in the warm wet circles of beer staining the table between them. Their conversation was muted by the sleazy whisper of saxophone jazz humming in the barroom. Drowning their philosophies.

  Beneath the stained window of St. Jude, patron saint of drunks and losers, Nik Lomas stared into his half-empty whiskey glass. Gabriel joined him at the window, waiting for Jake to look up from towelling out a well-worn tumbler. Lomas rolled his glass absently between thick fingers. Scratched a line of blue ink across his notepad. His hands were square, with awkward thumbs that jutted out at angles from his forefingers. The skin was hard, ingrained with some chalk-like powder; a journalist born with construction workers hands.

  Gabriel sniffed, wiping a thin trickle of rain from his brow, and lost himself in the glass reflection behind the bar. The face in the mirror had sad eyes, framed by this just longer than shoulder length hair, raven-black, mussed and tired looking. In the mirror, his eyes were darkened to midnight blue, not the deep blue of the ocean, but close enough that they could have been father and son. The man was beaten down to the dye of his red skin. There was a small scar beneath the left eye from a cut that couldn’t be stitched. You’re no Geronimo, he told himself, a cynical smile on his lips.

  “Jesus, Gabe. You look like shit,” Lomas’ voice brought him back.

  Behind the bar, Jake laughed, setting down the well-wiped tumbler. It was a deep grumble that gurgled around inside his ample gut long before it reached his lips. “And you don’t smell so good, either. You okay?”

  “Depends on what scale we’re using,” Gabriel answered, rummaging in his pocket for a couple of crumpled bills to put on the counter. “Put it this way: I’m not dead yet, but I’m beginning to think it might not be such a bad idea. Know what I mean?”

  Another laugh. “Yeah, only too well, bud. You wanna beer? Course you want a beer, right?” It wasn’t a question. Balancing off a thick head of cream he put the beer on the counter. “You hear about Mike Beijer?”

  Gabriel shook his head doubtfully, sketching a childish face in the froth of his drink. “What sort of mouth does he get?” He asked, pointing down with his eyes. “Happy or sad?” The question was part of a ritual carried over from the playground, the bleached yellow faces painted on the concrete beneath the skipping ropes.

  “I’m thinking sad. Gabe, Mike took a bite on his .45 last Friday. Pulled the trigger and left half his head on the kitchen wall for his kid to scrape up.”

  “Jesus…” What little colour the rain hadn’t stung out of Gabriel’s cheeks leeched away as —

  The vertigo-rush of sound, ghost voices of yesterday launched themselves at him, dancing on the edge of consciousness, the divide between waking and dreaming, the silken hiss of the suicide song howling… To the pulse of light… Blinding… White light… The sound of a pan filled with fat and fries hissing on the stove… Dark… Black… The face of a shocked five year old scrunching balled fists into her eyes, screaming but he can’t hear… Screaming… Screaming… As the greasy back wall runs with thick sugary red water… Light… And on the floor… Daddy lies dying… The blood red rose of a bullet hole flowering in the side of his head…

  — the glass shattered in his hand, a jagged splinter biting deep into his palm. The song of suicide haunted him, a lullaby of blood running between his fingers. Gabriel opened his hand, holding it out stupidly while blood and alcohol blended.

  “Christ, Gabe. Let me have a look at that.”

  The splinter had broken off in his palm and looked like an angel’s glass tooth in the mouth of his hand.

  Hearing the soft brush of the glass doors opening behind him, Gabriel turned on his stool, bleeding hand still held out straight, the drips of red flowering on his Chinos, in time to see a tall, dark skinned woman glide in. She had a chiselled, bony face, nose a little too long, with ink-stain eyes and the rich black curls of an Afro-American. She looked tired as she placed herself in an empty booth. She moved with the practised grace of a dancer. Or a hooker, a little voice inside him said.

  Two hands on his shoulders turned him around. The bartender had wrapped ice in a towel and was tying it into a makeshift bandage. Gabriel winced at the sting of the cold on the cut. The blood soaked quickly into the wet towel.

  On his notepad, Lomas quickly scribbled a note. He ripped off the top sheet and passed it across to Gabriel: She looks like an angel with her wings on fire.

  His gaze drifted back to the newcomer, the loose cling of her white cotton blouse, the gentle swell of temptation beneath. The red tag of her faded jeans a delicacy in cotton. Hair swept back tightly and braided with strings of black pearls.

  “I wouldn’t mind getting burned,” Gabriel said, crumpling the note in his good hand and slipping it into his pocket. “Who is she?”

  Jake laughed his laugh again, not without humour. “Hundred and fifty dollar hooker, my friend. Calls herself Celine, after that singer. Some kind of Hispanic, not that you couldn’t guess. Why? Your hormones hearing the call?” His eyebrows creased upwards in a conspiratorial wink as he chuckled to himself.

  “Full Tom-Tom drums and smoke signals. Wait, I’m getting a message… They’re saying… One hundred and fifty bucks… One hundred and fifty bucks.”

  “Go talk to her then, you old silver tongued devil you. Just don’t go making trouble.”

  “Would I?” Gabriel quipped with a grin.

  “I know you Gabriel.”

  “That you do, my friend. That you do.”

  It would have been easy to talk to her, but Gabriel walked back out into the rain of Third Avenue Looked at her as she sat framed by the smoky glass of the bar’s window. A sad faced girl alone in a street corner bar, drinking her day away. Between her fingers she twirled a flawed rose. Delicate white petals flaunting their imperfection; a single red tear weeping through the silk weave. There was something desperate in the way her long, sculptured fingernails pinched the fake stem. Her gaze drifted out of the window, to the lamppost across the wi
de street, some ghost of her past leaning against it, watching her.

  Gabriel huddled under the pale shelter of a tenement stoop and matched her movements, rolling a straggly licorice-paper cigarette between his bloody fingers as he watched her. Lit it. Inhaled. Exhaled jaundiced smoke as a municipal bus rumbled by. His hand ached as he slipped his camera out of his pocket, sneaking a flashless shot of her profile.

  Through the lens she looked less an angel, more a melancholy dreamer only anchored to this earth by the weight of her thoughts.

  He took four more photographs of her, two of the rose in her hand.

  Chapter two

  He lay there, legs tangled in the damp bedclothes, staring up at the raindrops as they broke and spilled the length of the skylight.

  They lay in pools of celluloid around the bed; newspaper cut-outs, black and whites, Polaroid’s. The usual cast of runaways, husbands and wife beaters highlighted by the backsplash of light coming off the soft spotlight.

  There was no glamour in trying to pretend he was Jimmy Stewart. Real life wasn’t Rear Window; it was taking candid snaps of melancholy girls in street corner windows. Stealing moments of their souls to put food on the table. Taking candid photographs of infidelity for the divorce courts. Hustling up bucks off paranoia, feeding the green-eyed monster. That was real life. Money, drugs and sex. All shades of the truth, black, white and grey.

  Gabriel wasn’t proud of what he had become, the depths he’d sunk to, the waters so grey they’d drowned the idealist’s fire, washed it from his eyes.

  His neck was stiff, ached from hours in the rain. Stretching, he scratched at his chest. A black-inked raven was tattooed in the hollow of his breastbone, wing-tips touching each of his nipples. The raven, the Black Foot’s bird, wisest of all.

  “Gabe, we got us a little problem. Can you come in to the Stationhouse?” Mannelli’s voice had taken on a distant quality, leaving it half-hidden by the sullen buzz of static. The frail spectre of that voice was an ethereal hand from an unwanted past reaching into Gabriel’s here and now. An unwanted ghost that dragged his eyes back to the line of photographs on the dresser, each photograph a part of his life he refused to bury: Francesca, another woman with a rose in her hand who had stolen his heart, and Sam, smiling on his third birthday. You’d have been a little over six now, he thought, the sadness of a widower’s thoughts sinking like a smooth sided stone in his stomach.

  He pressed his thumbs into his eyes and sniffed back the sleep. 4 a.m. “Yeah, sure. I’m on my way.” He fumbled the receiver back into the cradle and sat up.

  Next to those, the last photograph, a woman holding cotton candy and smiling mischievously at the camera.

  The future.

  Gabriel sighed.

  The future. In essence, all that meant was someone else to consider.

  Ashley.

  He found himself thinking about her more and more, her laughter lines and the deep blue-green sea of her eyes. And every time he pictured the lines of her face creasing into that smile of hers he felt a delicious shiver of anticipation wriggle the length of his spine. Somehow, this heightened sensitivity only left him feeling even more distant.

  Love?

  The morning after the crash all of those photographs spread out across the floor had become his life, the be-all and end-all. A private investigator sludging through the sickness of the streets, the ripped open garbage sacks and the used Coke cans in the gutter of Manhattan and the Bronx. Life reduced to taking photographs of corrupt business partners and wayward spouses. It wasn’t a conscious decision, just the way it turned out. He’d even managed to convince himself liked it that way — up to a point. But that small tingle of anticipation?

  Did she love him?

  Maybe she couldn’t stand him; maybe she just didn’t have the heart to tell him as much?

  Francesca… Frankie…

  Ashley…

  Same kettle, very different fish.

  Gabriel looked over at the sickly green time as it blurred into four-ten.

  “A little problem,” he muttered, swinging his legs around and getting out of bed. There was only one type of problem that warranted calling in an ex-cop (an ex-homicide detective) at 4 a.m. and it wasn’t a little one, no matter what Mannelli said.

  Chapter Three

  Gabriel Rush made the turn into Westwood twenty minutes later.

  Despite everything, nothing had changed. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose; loosely translated, the more that things change, the more they stay the same. A craggy faced Chinese woman with snowy locks, baggy black pyjamas and straw sandals shuffled through the mixed smells of ginger, cabbage, onions and urine. Behind her, her granddaughter laughed, one hand in the pocket of her C.K. jeans. A deathless man, his face bleached by years of exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke, leaned against the still dark doorway, the cigarillo hanging limply from his downturned lips. The wet broom in his hand was matted with Chinese cabbage and onion peelings brushed up from the street. The old man’s eyes followed Gabriel as drove slowly by.

  Clothing Kit’s all-purpose store on the corner of Sedgewick and Columbia was open for the pre-dawn crawl. J.C. Penney’s window a lone black tooth in the smile of the street.

  The smells of New York by night still drifted over the neighbourhood; not-yet-morning smells all too soon swamped by the dirty smells of the city’s dirty life.

  The 1956 Black Hawk coughed out a plume of smoke as he pulled in by the fire hydrant in front of The Lotus House, its red-gold hoarding advertising Hunan Szechwan cuisine around the clock. The water dragon roared its discounts and specials. Across the four lanes of traffic the Stationhouse loomed, with its rusting fire escapes and carved seven-story facade. Abandoned patrol cars and police bikes lined the curb out front. The old green globes over the door burned dimly, the black legend POLICE faint but clear in the coming light.

  Gabriel ducked past the desk sergeant as he entered the building, walked through the empty muster room and went up the stairs; a narrow, winding passage of carved wood; its majestic balustrade old and weak and riddled with woodworm; its metal-tipped steps worn shiny by the shuffling feet of a thousand cops over a hundred years.

  The detective squad room could have passed for an office in any insurance company; telephones on desks, computers instead of the Naked Lunch typewriters of a year before.

  It had been a long time since he’d called this room home…

  The door to Mannelli’s office concealed a two-way mirror. The detention cage, crammed in a corner, sat all but empty; a wasted looking vagrant huddled up against the back bars, drying out. Steel mesh covered all of the windows. Cardboard wastepaper bins were scattered randomly about the room, the overflowing garbage topped with Styrofoam cups, empty Coke cans, pizza boxes and scrunched up bagel wrappers.

  Jack Delgado sat at one of the desks, typing up a rape report with two fingers, his two-hundred and ten pounds crammed in behind the Formica, deep-set piggy eyes lost beneath the Simian concentration. Another one of New York’s finest stood at the bank of cabinets, one hand holding the line to the Assistant D.A.’s office open, the other juggling the contents of a case folder.

  Delgado looked up, two fingers hovering. “Fuck me. What’re you doing here, Tonto? They kicked you off the Reservation for smoking the peace pipe again?”

  “Screw you, Kimo Sabe.” Gabriel drew himself a cup of tasteless black treacle from the vending machine, knocked on Mannelli’s door and let himself in.

  Second generation Italian, Dan Mannelli was a tall man blessed with a continental swath of dark features and a thick crop of Italian-black hair to match. The law man had wide shoulders made wider by the padded jacket he’d thrown on; brown leather with the faded painting of an old war girl flaking on the back. He smelled like he hadn’t slept, or washed, in a few days. Dark circles ringed his eyes.

  There’s a man with the woes of the world on his back…

  “Stern’s just called one in from Lexington,” Mannelli said, w
asting no time on the niceties. “I want your eyes on this one, Gabe. I’ve got a bad feeling. Some of the stuff sounds… Damn it all to freakin’ hell… It sounds like he’s started pulling some freakin’ ritual shit… Started believing his own freakin’ press.”

  Downing a mouthful of tepid coffee, Gabriel’s eyes drifted to the stack of well-thumbed sheets strewn across Mannelli’s desk; the coroner’s reports on The Trinity’s victims one through to five; reports six, seven and eight sat neatly stacked on the swivel chair. A New York City street map hung against the back wall. Six red-topped pins with neatly lettered dates etched on their flat heads plotted out the killer’s movements over the last three months; each silently marking off the passing of another unfortunate. Another thirty or so pins pooled in the small plastic tray beneath the map, waiting for more spent lives to mark off. A stunted aluminium Christmas tree started and finished Mannelli’s concessions to the festive season. Five leaves had browned and curled, burned by a stray cigarette.

  “What have you got to go on, Dan? Same M.O.?”

  “That’s just it. Killings are usually systematic. You know this shit, Gabe. They have mathematical patterns built into them, stuff for the profilers to build on. Be it how they’re chosen, killed or dumped afterwards. There’s some kind of underlying logic, but not with this guy. He’s off on his own personal vendetta that just happens to involve carving elaborate patterns all over his victims’ bodies.”

  Chapter Four

  One of the two patrolmen standing in front of 1143 Lexington flagged them down as they approached.

  Closing the Black Hawk’s door behind him, Mannelli called to the uniform: “Where’s Stern?”

  “Up on the third, Lieutenant,” the officer answered, falling back into position beside his partner as they went through the open door.

  The door to the third floor studio stood open, letting the bad air circulate. Gabriel breathed deeply, as if trying to smell any traces the murderer might have left behind; the stench of his rotten soul clinging to the grease and the fat in the frying pans. The floor was covered by cracked linoleum, the checkerboard pattern broken up by missing tiles and the gap-toothed grin of the floorboards beneath. A grubby kitchenette stacked with rotten food and the chitinous sound of hatching maggots ran the length of the room. Next to an open window was a bed, its fittings tarnished brass, and a chipboard chest of drawers. Not many possessions to mark the passing of a life.