Last Angel Page 14

  “Listen to the song,” Red Fox Hunting’s no voice whispered to him from somewhere in the black. Then he felt the touch of ice and fire, the burning pain of spirit-death as Lamenzo reached beyond the edges of his soulflame. “Quickly,” The voice urged. “Open your mind to the notes. Feel them.”

  He tried, but Lamenzo’s fingers kept dragging him back to the pain. Fingers suddenly claw-like, jags of red glass-bone. The sensations built quickly. The first faint flowering of pain nothing against the growth of agony that marked Lamenzo’s fingers closing around his pumping heart, squeezing the straining valves.

  “Illusion,” the voice hissed. “Fight it. Fight the —”

  And yet the searing bursts of pain were intense. The blood inside the straining walls of his forcibly stilled heart surged up against the dam-like valves, the wash of the red tide advancing within him, needing to give way, to burst…

  “— ILLUSION!” the sudden explosion of sound shattered the claws, fragments of glass and bone spinning off into the black. Lamenzo reached out again, the jags of bone-glass reforming as they raked across the cusp of Gabriel’s soulflame.

  He spun away, the dirt suddenly very cold beneath his buttocks. “How do I get back?” he yelled frantically, tasting his fear in the dead air all around him. “How the hell do I get back?”

  “Open your mind to me, reach out, feel the dirt of the earth, taste the air, the smoke, see your body, your face…”

  Lamenzo’s soulflame was burning up, the colours shifting crazily, burning up through the spectrum to an all consuming red.

  Gabriel tried to focus his thoughts on the single shred of identity he’d somehow managed to cling to, tried to pull himself back into his name, to relearn himself, his face, his body. Felt himself drawn. Falling.

  But still the thing that was Carlos Lamenzo came for him, the borrowed flesh falling away from its blazing form, peeling back on its skin of fire, its flesh of red hate-flame. Sparks burned angrily, the conflagration fanned by hate, lust, need, desire, pain, spanning across the black, burning for him. Burning for Gabriel.

  I can taste your soul, Indian. I can taste it on my tongue. You’re mine. You always have been…

  But he was gone, the rush of ecstasy, exhilaration, life hurling him back towards the empty shell that was his body.

  Chapter Sixty-three

  I’m dying, Gabriel thought, locked in the memory of gunshots; bullets taking him in a rush of agony, upper thigh, groin, abdomen, cheek, spleen, lungs, heart and arm. The dance of death they forced his dying — dead — body into even as he tried to stand. The bark of more shots, the icy cold of St. Malachi’s. The punches came again, in the chest, temple, leg. The touch of something cold, glass, on his hand…

  He touched tentatively at his face, feeling for the pits of decay beneath the desiccating skin, but felt soft flesh. Felt the scar on his left cheek. Gabriel’s scar.

  Gabriel’s scar. Not his. He wasn’t Gabriel. He was… He was… but his name, the very core of his identity danced seductively on the edge of reason, tantalisingly close but out of reach.

  He swallowed down the bile, the fear and opened his eyes.

  He wasn’t in the church, wasn’t bleeding, and wasn’t dying. He was sitting, cross legged and stripped naked, beside Red Fox Hunting and Sky Dancer, baking in the heat of the sweat. Beads of perspiration peppered his skin. Gabriel was aware, vaguely, that the memory of St. Malachi’s wasn’t his. He knew the scene, had pulled one of the triggers. But every time he’d lived in that memory he’d been on the outside of the ring, looking in, doing the killing.

  But in this memory, in this insistent memory, he was on the inside of the ring, feeling the death offered by the bullets, tasting Lamenzo’s confusion and fear even as the angel claimed his soul.

  “Welcome home Star That Travels.” The voice was Sky Dancer’s. Gabriel had to fight the urge to say that wasn’t his name; to say that his name was Carlos Lamenzo. But it wasn’t. His name was… the scar on his left cheek… Gabriel’s scar… his name was Rush… Gabriel Rush. He pressed his fists into his temples, as if trying to drive Lamenzo’s thoughts, memories, out of his head. Because bullets weren’t the only thoughts, the only memories he shared with The Trinity Killer —

  “Lamenzo’s florists, ma’am. Got a bouquet for you.” he said, tasting the goodness of the lie. The rightness… waited… opened the door… He smiled at his reflection in the glass… Yes, yes… rounding the first flight of stairs… talking to the hunger inside him… The door… 5a

  — There were others. Others much closer to home. The phone that rang unanswered. He could see her face in the collage of victims and didn’t know whose memory he was trawling, but he didn’t need to, he could taste Lamenzo’s hunger on his tongue. The need that gnawed at his guts, drove him on.

  “Ash,” he said sickly, struggling to stand with the need — the same need —suddenly, desperately driving up through him. “Ashley.”

  “What is it?”

  “He’s got her… Oh God… He’s got Ashley.”

  “How do you know?”

  Gabriel clutched at his scalp suddenly, tearing at it, clawing, trying to open it up. “Because he’s in here…” he yelled then, the heels of his hands jamming into his temples. Twisting. “He’s in my head.”

  Chapter Sixty-four

  Dull light slithered over the page, throwing its shadows over the words of the coroner’s report. Words he knew too well. Descriptions of savagery he didn’t need photographs to visualise.

  Daniel Mannelli thumbed over the page, swallowing a mouthful of lukewarm coffee, tasting it leak down his throat like treacle. The face of Caroline Öberg smiled up at him in one shot. Her mutilated corpse bled for him in the black and white beside it. He could hear the squad room busy with subdued life.

  He shifted his glance towards the window, his thoughts drifting through the plate glass and out onto the street, seeking out the Trinity Killer and his elegiac cortege.

  He stood, paced, sat again.

  And not for the first time he found his thoughts chasing around the rabbit-warren of murky streets and murkier crimes that were described so accurately by The Watcher.

  Questions he had, but no answers to go with them. Where did he learn so much about the killings he described, the mutilations? A handful of detectives had been trusted with truth about the garrottings and dismemberments, no words for the press, no hints to the blackly macabre side of The Trinity’s nature. Murders and murderers there were aplenty, the number of active serial killers in the States alone had peaked at over eighty in the last month, but this kind of killing, this brutal vivisectionist nightmare, this was a taboo limited to single figures. The damaged killers whose psychoses and neuroses drove them into the arms of depravation.

  But slowly things had begun adding up; after Brendon Ellery’s call to Delgado about his copycat theory, The Watcher’s cleaning up made a sick kind of sense. Not a copycat killer. A street cleaner who lacked the subtle artistry of the man he followed. A man killing the dead because his own demons insisted they would rise again.

  Mannelli reached around for the tape recorder, suddenly needing to hear the voice again, knowing it and knowing he knew it.

  “Doesn’t hurt does it, padre?” Bill Stern wheezed at him.

  Chatper Sixty-five

  The angel fed corpse of Carlos Lamenzo pulled his teeth away from the motorway of capillaries that was the dead policeman’s neck and inspected his handiwork.

  The need was still upon him, no matter the blood staining his lips, the carrion settling in his stomach; there was no slaking it, no end to the craving. He wanted more. Needed more. Needed to know that they were empty, like him, the dead men he was hunting. The last witnesses to his miracle. This one lying in his hands left two more for his cull, the little Indian and the fat man.

  He could taste their fear even this far away from them, but when he closed his eyes, when he thought about the Indian and his gun, when he smelled the journey of his bu
llet, the images were all wrong, confused. Death was flowing backwards, away from him and into the corpse of Lamenzo.

  But he was Lamenzo; at least a part of him had fed on all that was left of the child killer. He was an angel… He was Gabriel… No, no… He was… He was… The Angel of Red… The Angel of Pain.

  Suddenly, the image of a woman flowered, the face of the woman he loved… no, the face of the woman the little Indian loved… his dead smell was all over her.

  He pushed himself up, fighting the need to feed, the need to taste more of the dead man sprawled at his feet.

  It was her his soul hungered for. Her soul that would quell the need. Take the hunger away.

  Sweet Ashley.

  Chapter Sixty-six

  “Oh Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ.”

  Mannelli slammed the open palm of his hand into the plaster wall. The shockwaves were still chasing down the bones seconds later as he opened the squad room door. Standing there, Stern’s voice taunting his back, he yelled for Delgado: “Jack, get in here now and tell me this isn’t who I think it fucking is!”

  Delgado looked up from his two-finger typing, pinched at his nose, pulling on the wiry hair growing out of his nostrils, and pushed his chair back. He was a big man, suited to life in a chair. He walked slowly, trying to look over Mannelli’s shoulder into the empty office; looking for the person he was supposed to be identifying.

  He could hear Bill Stern’s voice. That familiar gruff New Yorker’s burr. Odd, he thought, glancing across at the clutter of Styrofoam cups littering the detective’s otherwise empty desk. He hadn’t noticed Stern come in. Sick, he was supposed to be. Stomach flu. Hadn’t been around since the autopsy on Father Joseph D’Angelo.

  “What is it, Chief?” he asked, popping his shoulder-joint as he stretched, working the blood through the old bones. Mannelli, he saw, was clenching his right hand in his left, as if nursing it.

  “Just listen,” Mannelli said, still blocking the doorway. “Tell me what you hear. Everyone else,” he yelled again. “Shut the fuck up for twenty seconds. I want silence.”

  But there wasn’t silence, because in it, where it should have been, Bill Stern said: “I’m a regular fucking hero… That’s what I am…”

  “I thought you were too sick to be coming in, Billy-boy?” Delgado said, trying to look past Mannelli at the fat policeman who wasn’t there.

  “Fuck,” Mannelli spat. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck.” He span on his heel and slammed the office door only to emerge with a tape recorder in his hand, the tape spooling backwards so he could play Bill Stern’s radio appearance to the whole squad room, looking for one person to say no, it wasn’t Stern at all. That he was wrong, that they all were. He pressed play:

  “…Jesus Demon they call The Trinity Killer. It is time for The Watcher to stop watching. Time for me to shed the skin of The Watcher, time for the beautiful Actor to emerge, to grow and live and feed off the daylight. Metamorphosis. We watch, we learn, we grow. I am growing. Can you hear me? I am growing. I am The Actor and Death walks inside me…”

  Movement stopped. A torpor of disbelief slowly folded itself around the people in the room as they listened to their friend describe the killings, the mutilations, and his twisted role in them.

  “I want this sick fuck found, do you hear me? I want him found and I want him finished.”

  Behind him, in the office, his telephone rang.

  Chapter Sixty-seven

  He waited, cold on the street corner, for someone to open the door to her building, for someone to open the door and let him in, let him in so the dance could begin.

  “Can I help?” he asked a pale skinned woman, as she juggled shopping bags and struggled with the door.

  “Thanks,” she said, letting him take the door.

  Smiling, he let himself in behind her.

  This close, the need twisted around his stomach like a hungry fist, pulled at his guts like sickness. He climbed the stairs in the grip of it, tasting her smell on the air, knowing it was her the need cried out for, knowing that she could at least bring an end to his hunger.

  5a.

  He knocked once and waited, running a hand across his cheek, feeling out the deep wounds where his flesh was failing, where the need was killing this body again. Behind the door, he heard the purposeful bustle of footsteps and out-of-tune humming as the guard chain was slipped into place.

  The door cracked open.

  “Yes?” Ashley, his Ashley… no.. no… the little Indian’s Ashley… asked through the four inch crack.

  “Miss Powell?” he asked, a confident, antiseptic smile slipping easily over his crumbling features.

  “Yes, can I help you?”

  “I sincerely hope so, Miss Powell, almost as much as I hope to help you.” His voice dripped with too-sweet honey. “My name is Lamenzo, Carlos Lamenzo.” He held out a hand to be shaken.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Lamenzo?” she asked, ignoring his outstretched hand.

  “I’m a salesman, Miss Powell, but,” he purred, “before you slam the door I think you ought to hear what it is I am selling, don’t you?” She didn’t move. “Heaven,” he crooned. “That’s my product. I’m selling tickets to heaven. Now, you can’t refuse an offer like that, can you?”

  “Sounds… delightful,” she replied. “Perhaps some other life.”

  “Your loss,” he said as she closed the door on him.

  Chapter Sixty-eight

  She closed the door on the Salesman of God and moved back into the kitchen to fill the glass cafetiere with Columbian roast. On the windowsill the radio played away to itself, Dave Matthews’ voice lost behind the bubble of water boiling on the stove. Turning the volume up, she dismissed her visitor as just another one of New York’s colourful cranks. Harmless, but crazy.

  A bunch of dried flowers had collapsed on the draining board, stalks and stems waiting for the knife to trim them for the vase. “Carlos Lamenzo,” she said quietly, pulling at a string that had twisted itself around one of the thorny stems. The dried stalk snapped in her clumsy fingers.

  “The flowers… The flowers never came.”

  Behind her, in the passage, she heard Lamenzo hurl himself at the door, heard the dry cracking of it beginning to splinter inwards, the sudden scream of the guard chain’s mounting being ripped from its wooden bed. Another kick and the splinters were splintering.

  She scanned the kitchen frantically for some kind of makeshift weapon. The long bench was littered with utensils and half-prepared salad. Her eyes trembled across a fan of knives, lingering on a thin bladed carver, its arrogant silver sheen already bloodied with the juices of a beetroot.

  She grabbed at the knife, her heart hammering against her breastbone, and sent it skittering off the bench top onto the linoleum floor. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus…” Quickly, she stooped to recover it, her hand closing around its comforting metal strength. It felt good in her hand. Reassuringly heavy. Heavy enough to gut a salesman of God, she told herself.

  Chapter Sixty-nine

  Gabriel pressed the receiver up against his ear, jammed a finger in the other, trying to shut out the rabble of voices swarming every which way. “Dan?” he half-shouted as the public address system, in the form of a soft, sensuous voice, announced the discovery of a lost child. A family clad in gaudy palm tree print shirts squawked Pidgin English between mouthfuls of cheeseburger. They stopped for a portrait beside the onyx fountain. Gabriel tried to tune them out.

  The AT&T phone booth was sandwiched between a row of glassy-eyed Photo-Me booths and a newspaper rack that seemed to have simply spilled its copies of The Herald Tribune and The Guardian International out onto the airport’s marbled floor. Monitors hanging from the ceiling displayed the departures and arrivals. His flight back to New York was boarding.

  “Mannelli,” he sounded down, on the point of breaking.

  “Dan? It’s Gabriel,” he said quickly, his words trying to race the feeling of inevitability that was slowly stifli
ng him. He’d walked out on Ashley, thrown himself into this fools quest, left her to whatever the thing was that shared his head.

  “We got him, Gabe.” Mannelli said, voice flat, dead. Those three words set his heart soaring. Unconsciously, he searched through the few memories he’d held on to that belonged to The Trinity Killer, but no, there was no recollection of capture in there. No arrest. It must have happened after their separation. “You’ve brought him in?”

  “It was Stern, Gabe. Bill fuckin’ Stern. That man was like, shit he was like my father only he was better, you know.”

  Stern? No… That was wrong. From soaring his heart swooped, swollen and threatening to burst in a wash of blood red pain, so cruel for its suddenness. “Dan, listen to me. It’s Ashley. He’s going after her. Don’t ask how I know. I’ve been trying to call her but I can’t get through. She’s not picking up. You’ve got to get her out of that place, Dan.” He closed his eyes but couldn’t keep them closed because of what he saw

  — in her hand, the edge of metal… a knife… on her knees… —

  “He’s there… Jesus, I know he’s there and I can’t get to her. I’m ten fucking hours away. You’ve got to help me.”

  Chapter Seventy

  Looking up, she saw a pair of stained Neubuck boots standing in the kitchen doorway. Breathing slowly, fighting to stay calm, Ashley moved her eyes upwards, over a pair of ripped denims and to an off-white linen shirt to then to his face.

  Lamenzo held out his right hand. “We can do this the easy way,” he said, smacking his dry lips together and making a show of holding out his left hand. “Or we can do it the hard way. Up to you. Easy? Hard?”

  Her hand closed tighter around the hilt of the knife, knuckles blanching white with the strength of her grip, and slowly, oh so slowly, she brought it up to her side.

  “My, my,” Lamenzo chuckled. “You actually want to do it the hard way? Damned shame, fine looking piece of meat like yourself, getting all cut up.” He stepped forward, shaking his head sadly, a direct contrast to the brittle looking grin that cracked his face from ear to flaking ear.