Last Angel Read online

  Inside the room, Gabriel’s guess about the bad air confirmed itself.

  The body of a white man, naked but for a pair of black stockings, suspenders and patent leather heels, stretched flat on his stomach, lay on the sagging mattress. His pallid face was set at right angles to his shoulders; his sightless — half-eaten — eyes still open on death. The blood had drained away to his legs, leaving a stark blue discoloration around the base of his spine. An elaborate series of cuts in the dead flesh made the body and arms of a crucifix. Suspended from each arm, the cups of a scale, weighing out sins and atonement. A single large cut opened him from balls to throat, splitting the image neatly in two.

  The neck of a broken wine bottle lay on the floor, clotted blood clinging to its jagged edges.

  The dead man’s face was all he needed to see the final mercy death had been when it finally claimed him; set as it was in a cruel sculpture of agony forever recorded by the hand of rigor mortis.

  Bill Stern, Costello to Mannelli’s Abbot, was standing over the body, a thick Cuban cigar jutting out of the corner of his dour mouth. Stern’s face was deeply seamed and pitted with the crags and craters of acne from twenty five years ago. “Good to see ya, Gabe. Danny. Not a pretty picture is it?” He grumbled, every other word punctuated by a wispy puffball of smoke.

  Gabriel moved over to the window and stared out at the stark stretch of the Manhattan skyline. The rain might have stopped for the morning, but the sky over the city was slashed with streaks of silver, grey and white; the sky a backdrop to a latticework of cold, rippling clouds and the fading outline of a werewolf moon.

  Using the hard edge of a fingernail, Gabriel traced the outline of two simplistic shapes carved into the wooden sill. A tadpole and a crude frog. Old magic… The metamorphosis from water to earth… He shook his head, thinking of his father’s tales of the Old Man who defeated the terrible underwater enemies of mankind. The perpetual war between the sky and the water spirits. Salt had been powdered into the opened grains of the wood. Next to white man wardings… This was one scared man.

  He scratched the tattooed relic on his chest, looking for inspiration.

  Great Spirit, help me, he thought bitterly and said: “Hey Dan, something over here you ought to see.”

  Forensics took photos of the warding from above and from either side while he explained its significance. The clash of cultures and superstitions. Stern grunted, making notes in his pad, then thumbed over a page and scrawled: SALVATION DAMNATION TRINITY as if the words themselves were. “Wait ‘til you get a load of this, though. Shirley Bassey here’s the priest from St. Malachi’s. Don’t seem to me like a man of God would be messin’ with your Voodoo, Gabe. No matter how scared he was.”

  Gabriel’s fingers strayed back to his chest, seeking the comfort of the raven. He didn’t argue, simply slipped the camera from his pocket and took three quick shots of the crime scene. He knew the superstitions and the hexes as well as he knew the scent of rain. You can take the man out of the Reservation, but you can’t take the Indian from his soul, and that was the bitterest irony because that was exactly what he’d done, playing along with their dirty White Man magic, sacrificing the Great Spirit to the four winds. My world has moved on, he told himself, knowing it sounded like the lame excuse it was. There’s no place for the old ways in my life, no place… His fingers scratched almost angrily at the tattoo, denying the lie of his thoughts.

  “You sure about that, Bill?”

  “Yeah, had a run in with him three years back. Same night Al Culpepper was shot. The padre here gave last rites after…” After that doped-up speed freak put a slug through his head. Killed in a fuckin’ church, killed in the fuckin’ arms of God… Stern sucked on his cigar, let out a shaky breath. Didn’t say any of that out loud.

  Gabriel moved over to the body, laying his hand palm flat on the clammy skin. His fingers stopped moving as they touched the ugly Trinity tattoo, his thoughts blind men suddenly cursed with the gift of sight. Suddenly, touching the dead man was like feeling the fangs of an electric serpent sinking into his fingertips, the venomous contact burning up through his arm, the violently discharged voltage sending him reeling as —

  The boy rose from his knees, looking bewildered, blank… His Latino lips moved, suddenly hungry to taste the fresh air… He was circled by the black-eyed gaze of guns… the smoke curling from the votive candles, a lazy lover done dying for them… and then the silent screams and the not-so-silent curses as the boy’s body was suddenly forced into a twisting, jerking dance by their bullets… spinning, arms drowning and dying as his body crashed into the stone altar… Up above, the crucifix… Wearing its crown of thorns… Drifting down, breathing its sickness into the boy… and the boy rising again… reaching out to touch his cheek, a fingernail burning its scar into his face while the stained window wept its tears of broken glass…

  — the light bulb hanging from the bare flex shattered, raining hot glass on his scalp and the dead padre’s rumpled sheets. Gabriel recoiled involuntarily, hands flying up, crushing the heels of his palms against his temples, face twisting in a mask of agony.

  “Get… out… of… my… head…” The words hissed between clenched teeth even as he started to collapse. His legs buckled and he hit the floor, head clipping off the side of the bed with a sickening crunch.

  Mannelli reacted first, making a grab for thin air as Gabriel slipped through his fingers.

  Face a mask of concern, he knelt down beside Rush, “You okay, Gabe?” He reached out, touched his forehead.

  Gabriel’s eyelids fluttered, reacting to the sounds, the intrusion of light, bringing him back. His fingers touched the gash left by the bed’s edge, tentatively feeling out the wound. The scar on his left cheek throbbed. Sickness knifed his stomach, but that was all. It came and it went. He blew out a pained breath. A ragged sigh. “I’m not feeling so good; this whole place is spinning…” He bit back the urge to tell Mannelli, to explain, how his world was turning itself upside down.

  Mannelli helped him to his feet, supported him. “You’ve got to lay off the Peace Pipe,” his friend joked, the hardened cop again, trying to make light of Gabriel’s sudden collapse. “I suppose it’s too much to ask, but I don’t suppose there were any witnesses were there Bill?”

  “The old lady downstairs reported it. Found him like this when she came up to give him his early morning wake-up call. Seems she used to get the padre up at four every morning so he could go down in time to deliver the morning Mass.”

  “Now there’s devotion for you, four every morning, huh?”

  “Yep. Anyways, the doc’s in with her right now, treating her for shock. Poor old cow’s gonna be on Prozac ‘til she croaks, but as far as I can tell, she didn’t see shit.”

  “Sure is getting to be repetitive, ain’t it?”

  “You think?”

  “How long’s he been like this?” Mannelli nodded downwards, eyes straying back to the grey putty beneath the suspenders.

  “About eighteen hours, give or take. We’ll have to wait for the Morgue to give us anything more precise. If it’s another one of The Trinity’s and not some other freak out for a good time, this takes him on to four hookers, two cops, a college kid, a city girl and a transvestite preacher. Can’t make up my mind if he is moving up or down in the world.”

  “Too fucking funny, Bill. Cover the padre up, will ya?”

  Chapter Five

  “Who are you?” Gabriel wondered softly. The red-tinged Judas light of dark room bled across the drying prints, colouring his thoughts.

  Looking down at the girl in the developing tray, he drew on the unfiltered nicotine of his roll-up. A wisp of smoke coiled around her, lingering, like the languid arms of a lazy lover. He felt a long way from the usual cast of runaways and wife-beaters, lost in a rabbit-warren of dirty streets and dirtier lives.

  Carefully, he used a pair of plastic pinchers to rescue the contact sheet from the shallow tray of developing fluid and a peg to hang it f
rom the roped-up washing line. He felt cold looking at her like this, reduced to the size of a thumbnail gazing through five of the ten squares. The definition wasn’t particularly sharp in any of them, but it was recognisably her.

  As Gabriel ran his eyes over the contacts, one stood out. One where her sad eyes were aware. Looked out through the wet paper and saw deep into his own.

  Turning his back on her, he turned off the overhead red and went through to the luncheonette to grab a Pepsi from the cooler. It was a serious case of Old Mother Hubbard syndrome in there. A pitta bread growing its own penicillin cultures, half a green bell pepper and a clutch of carrots, otherwise, the cupboard was bare.

  Gabriel popped the can’s tab. His neck was stiff, ached from hours in the rain and not enough sleep.

  In the bathroom, he set the shower running, opened the cabinet and rescued a half-popped foil of Tylenol, swallowed, stripped and stepped in, savouring the delicious sting of the water on his skin, tiny burns that ran like scalpel blades down the length of his back. Gabriel planted his hands against the wall tiles and simply soaked, thinking about sleep, thinking about the girl with the flower, thinking about the transvestite preacher’s labyrinth of bloody tattoos. Thinking about the boy who wouldn’t die, even in his dreams…

  Chapter Six

  As an insipid sun rose over Manhattan, sending its pale golden shafts into the bedroom, Gabriel Rush tossed and turned fitfully; sleep taunting him with its infinite possibilities and unanswered prayers. The sun that hid the one unchangeable thing in his world, the stars, the sky river and the giant turtle. The same stars that had looked down on the First Father and old Saukamappee’s thunderbirds.

  His dreamself was standing on a high place, looking down over a city of coloured glass, being buffeted and battered by a howling wind. Ice chapped against his fingers, freezing into a brittle jigsaw of crystals that cracked and flaked away, stealing skin.

  He wasn’t alone.

  Daniel Mannelli was with him; though not the Mannelli he knew, his companion was Mannelli just the same. That dream identity where the soul clad itself with whatever skin it desired. Together, they stood side by side, gazing down onto a crystal-coated sheet of ice, watching as ribbons of coloured gossamer thread cavorted through the streets of the glacial wasteland.

  All around him, things were wrong.

  There was something…

  Not quite a face.

  Something else… a crown… of glass thorns…

  Spectral, ethereal, moving through the sunlight.

  “I’m walking in your footsteps, Indian,” the voice of the nightmare rasped. “I’m the end of your everything… I will…” It paused for a full second, letting the nightmare’s wind sing its lonely lament. When the voice came back to him it was filled with such venomous hatred, “Taste your soul…”

  The image shattered, and he fell, plunged, down and down into the arms of a gnarled tree of clear glass…

  The echo of a word carried back to him as he woke, “Soon…”

  Chapter Seven

  He woke feeling worse for the few hours of restless sleep.

  There was an over-exposed fuzz over part of her face in one of the photographs. Nothing precise, but something peculiar. It could have been dirt on the lens or from the window, there had been enough glass between them, but then the smear would have been on all of the shots.

  He took the contact sheet down from the washing line and used a fisheye lens to magnify the girl.

  Her long lashes, thick with mascara, guarded her eyes. He saw it then, the substance in the haze, the body and form of the illusion, melting into her left cheek, the mark of the Trinity; Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the simple rendition of three from one carved into her cheek…

  A body with a foetus carved where a stomach should be, the pair surrounded by a bloody nimbus that was mark of the ghost…

  Quickly, Gabriel checked the single shot of the dead preacher. There was something on the dead man’s cheek, amid the swirl of cuts, but it was too still too small to be certain.

  It could be anything, he told himself but even as he thought the thought, he knew exactly what he’d find there if he made an enlargement:

  The mark of The Trinity.

  Chapter Eight

  Gabriel developed the reflections of two souls in the dark room. A4 exposures of the window girl and the dead preacher.

  He half-hoped (but didn’t expect) that the strange tattoo-haze over her cheek would be proved benign; a smudge or smear on the glass between them, and not the Trinity tattoo at all.

  He slipped them into a manila envelope along with photographs of The Trinity killer’s other victims. The quality of the printouts was grainy, but each one shared the same macabre tattoo on left cheek.

  Gabriel went back to the bar on Third Avenue, because he didn’t know where else to go. Stood across the street, camera in hand. Waited for her. Counted the buses going one way in the rush hour traffic and the yellow cabs coming the other. Felt the subway train rumble by beneath the sidewalk and lost count. Watched a red faced Santa Claus rifling the bins for scraps, the neck of a brown baggie-wrapped bottle peering out of a festive pocket.

  Someone else was in her seat, holding a copy of the New York Times at a distance to keep the print in focus. Gabriel stole a single shot of the reading man, more to dismiss the doubt that by rights should have been niggling at the back of his mind. After that, he went inside and settled into a comfortable lean against the bar, a slowly settling Guinness and a saucer full of cashew nuts to chew the wait out.

  The barroom was mothballed in the cheap gasoline scent that was so essentially New York City.

  She came in at lunchtime, just after, ordered an iced lemon tea and nothing else. As she had the day before, the sad faced girl who called herself Celine sat at her window table and stared out at the lamppost across the street, looking for her saviour on the wet sidewalk.

  Gabriel slipped the camera out of his pocket and stole a single flashless snap of her profile, left side, before he put it away again; this one for confirmation of the impossible. Ran a hand through his hair and walked across to where she was sat. Squeezed into the booth opposite her and put his hands flat on the table between them. “Can we talk? Someplace private?”

  Without looking up, she said: “The booth’s occupied mister.” Her voice was low, rich, like the tremble of the black keys on a piano; and her smell…

  …Sweetness; of expensive cologne, rose shampoo and scented bubble bath. Delicate scents fresh from the perfume counter in Bloomingdales.

  “You’re Celine, right? Humour me, Celine.” He took a roll of bills from the pocket of his Chinos, rifled them and pulled out three fifty’s. Sliding them across the table, Gabriel stopped an inch short of her long, sculptured fingernails. They were plastic, fake, he noticed, seeing a leaking glue-bubble. “I just want to talk, even if I have to pay the going rate.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” she breathed, her accent a slow southern drawl, and fixed him with a long suffering look with about as much warmth in it as a dead caveman frozen in an ice floe. “It ain’t even three-thirty in the afternoon, and I ain’t working this place, no way, no how. So put your fucking money away.”

  “Hey, hey. Sorry. Look, this has started all wrong. I’m not looking for a date. I need to talk to you.” Gabriel held out his hands, palms pressed out in a gesture of peace, one bandaged, one bare, shrugged his thickset shoulders. What am I supposed to say? I used to be a cop until I killed my own son…

  She looked at him, her ink-stain eyes moving down the lines of his chest, to the lip of the table and back in open appraisal to his face, saw the pain his eyes and misunderstood. “Talk all you like,” she said. “I ain’t promising I’ll listen.”

  He could feel the dusky bristling of three-thirty shadow poking through his olive tanned chin. There was no nice way to say what he had to say, so he slid a photograph from the envelope and slid it across the table. “Look at the picture, tell me what you
see.”

  Celine studied the photo in careful silence. Then said: “A shadow, something. On my cheek. When did you take these?”

  “Yesterday… I saw you sat here, thought it was a good picture. I’ve got some other photos. They’re pretty ugly but I want you to look at them, same deal. Tell me what you see, okay?” He put the envelope on the table; let her do it in her own time. Let her make up her own mind.

  One by one Celine withdrew the brutal images, laying them out in a macabre fan; the dead faces; the injuries; the Trinity, father, son and bloody ghost carved into each cheek in turn. She looked back at her own photograph. Back at the ghost there, superimposed on her face, looking for the trickery but not finding it. Silence, stunned. Then:

  “You think I’m part of this? That I’m going to get hurt? Is that it?”

  “Like I said, humour me.” There was just the merest hint of irony in Gabriel’s voice. He’d come so close to saying trust me, and that would have been a mistake, given the circumstances. This girl’s world was being turned upside down by a stranger, asking for her trust while he did it was too much, too soon. Instead he asked: “Have you got friends you can stay with for a couple of days? Somewhere to go?” Safe ground. “Surround yourself by familiar faces; maybe take a few days off from meeting strangers. Give this some time to blow over. It’s probably nothing but… just humour me, okay?”

  She nodded mutely, staring at the mess of the padre’s body.

  He left his number of his mobile, the number back at the apartment, Mannelli’s number at the Westwood Precinct, and the photographs for her to think about.