Last Angel Read online

Al Culpepper had his hands over his ears.

  It was a miracle the magnificent stained glass window of Jesus and St. Malachi didn’t shatter.

  Culpepper drew his pistol, holding it at waist height. It was all he could do to keep his hand from shaking. Maybe it was the work of the noise, the voices, he couldn’t tell, but the shroud covering the dead man had been shucked off and lay discarded in a heap on the floor.

  No Face took a step closer, reaching out.

  Culpepper’s heart was racing wildly out of control, and though he might, he couldn’t believe that what he — what they all — saw was some kind of hysterical delusion.

  Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the screaming ceased. The myriad other noises lying beneath the screams, noises they couldn’t hear, disappeared with it.

  Gradually, colour by colour, he erratic pulsing of lights faded from the gaudy carnival lightshow. Soon only a halo of red remained around the iridescent body of No Face, painting its gory pallet over the scene.

  Inside, Al Culpepper felt some claws of glass rake over his heart, freezing it.

  He was sure he was going to die.

  He’d never been so sure of anything in his life.

  He was right.

  No Face stopped in front of him. It had his eyes again. His face.

  Death reached out with a single finger. Touched him, slipping through the coarse blue weave of his shirt, burning through his chest, wriggling between third and forth rib, touching the smooth outside wall of his heart. Stilling it.

  Then withdrew.

  Oblivion swelled up to overwhelm Al Culpepper, blackness shivering through his bones, eating at the marrow until he fell the rest of the way to the floor, into the waiting arms of death.

  Seth Lawson bolted for the sacristy, stumbling and weaving. The big, gangling youth seemed to be composed of long legs and arms of jelly, all elbows and knees. Retching sounds came from his throat as he struggled with the closed door.

  Jay Bogdanovich stumbled a step back but couldn’t take his eyes off the bloody red Jesus as it knelt over the body of Lamenzo. Frostlike ribbons of red ice were growing everywhere, spreading over every surface like a film of glass. The statue of Christ appeared to be weeping.

  For the love of God… Bogdanovich’s mind wailed as the statue laid aside its crown of glassy thorns… Glass? They were wooden… and leaned down until his lips touched those of Lamenzo’s, kissing the twin strips of bluish flesh and breathing life back into the lifeless body…

  Chapter Thirty-one

  I’m dead, Lamenzo thought — the first thought of his new life — tasting the dank breath of the wooden Jesus seeping down his throat, tasting the dry dead strips of varnished wood clamped over his own lips, the rancid tang of the air being forced into his lungs.

  No, I’m not…

  The wooden mouth went away, then came back, its touch glass. Breathed another rancid lungful of life into him.

  Went away again.

  He coughed and gagged on a mouthful of clean air. Normal air had never tasted so good.

  He was alive again.

  He opened his eyes.

  He was lying on his back just beyond the sanctuary railing in St. Malachi’s. Faces were looking at him, expressions a mixture of fear and amazement. Eight standing, one kneeling, one sprawled out on the floor much like he was…

  Mostly fear.

  He looked around, saw the guns levelled at him.

  Why? He thought, and remembered…

  Rosie Bossman.

  He started to rise, drawing his unsteady legs under him.

  Seeing him rise, the nine men gathered in the church fired. He heard the bark of bullets coming his way, then they struck him: upper thigh, groin, abdomen, cheek, spleen, lungs, heart and arm. He felt them push him and twist him into a capering fool, but continued to haul himself erect. Someone fired again, bringing a second volley of fire. Two shots took him in the chest, one ploughed through his temple, another into his leg, four went wide.

  “Look at me,” he heard the kneeling figure say as it drew itself erect and reached out to take him by the hand. The hand around his felt as cold and heartless as an ocean of glass. “A life for a life… I’ve waited a long time, do you want to live?”

  “Do I want to?” he asked, a slight irritation in his throat and temple, from the bullet wounds. “Yes…”

  “Good, come then…” His own personal Jesus reached into him, slipped into him, opened him like a book of bones and blood, occupied him, made him live and breathe…

  Father Joseph D’Angelo, drawn by the riot of sounds, stood in the open sacristy doorway, clutching his faith in trembling hands. He could not believe, would not believe, the drama laid out before him. Though he saw the corpse reach out, its dirty fingernail smouldering as it bit deeply, burned, into the left cheek of an Amerind officer. Though he saw the stained glass window of Jesus and St. Malachi melt around the thing that had once been a statue of The Son of God just as it had once been the dead body of a child killer lying on the cold stone of the church floor, though he saw the discoloured patch of wall above the altar so recently vacated, though he saw the fallen body of Lieutenant Al Culpepper, and though Seth Lawson babbled in his ear, he could not believe.

  In the window only a gaping hole remained, its shape that of Jesus Christ Our Lord in benediction. It was a hole plenty large enough for a body to escape through.

  But he was dead…

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Bill Stern was the first to speak.

  “I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell ain’t saying I saw what I just saw… It didn’t happen.”

  A few heads nodded as others agreed with him.

  Silence for a moment, occupied by the aromas of spikenard, myrrh and cordite.

  “What about Al?” D’Angelo didn’t recognise the speaker.

  “We say that fucker put a bullet in him, Jackson, easy as that.”

  “They’ll know.”

  “Soon fix that,” Bill Stern said, bringing his pistol up and aiming it at Al Culpepper’s head. He pulled the trigger. “There. Now, what say we just tell them the bastard got away and forget all about it, huh?”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  He stopped reading and slipped the yellowed cutting back into his pocket.

  And that was his story, The Trinity Killer, in his last breath a child killer, the lowest of the low, Carlos Lamenzo found life, breath, sanctuary in the arms of a God he’d never believed in.

  Father Joe was gone and the truth was spreading thinner. He could smell them in the city, smell their guns, the air back to their bullets. Lawson was dead, and Bogdanovich. The others, the women, were just window dressing, to drag the eyes from the truth. Was he in their dreams? The men who had killed him? He hoped he was, hoped every time they closed their eyes they saw him rise again. He wanted to live in their dreams as much as they lived in his.

  He wanted them to know they were spiritually if not physically dead.

  Soon, he would look for the others.

  Soon.

  Maybe today, maybe not. Either way, he couldn’t let the day end without tears.

  He watched the woman pass, sniffed, could smell the dark skinned cop on her, smiled to himself, a dead smile, then followed her.

  “Sweet Ashley, save the last dance for me.”

  His cold laugh shivered through the glassy sky.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  He was tired. So very, very tired.

  And he had good right to be. Most of the previous three nights had been wasted on fruitless searches through Brighton Beach and Oriental, and now, with the sun setting on another day he found himself moving out into the great wide open again, naked in a wilderness of concrete thieves. And that feeling of nakedness always left him vulnerable.

  He looked down at the smudged headline again: Nik Lomas’ name beneath: “Trinity Claims His Tenth.” He felt a warm tingling sensation crawl up the length of his arms, almost as if some miniature farmer was p
loughing shallow furrows of delight through the wiry tangle of his steely grey body hair.

  He was The Watcher now. Back at the doors of St. Malachi’s. Waiting.

  He still felt bad about having to rush the priest. As it was, he had done a sloppy job of it; he’d only just finished the cutting, hadn’t had time to run the stake through his heart to finish the dance of death he’d begun thanks to the interfering old bag and her damn wake-up call.

  He rolled down the window, letting the cigar smoke leak out into the foggy evening, and leaned across the backseat to check on his tool bag again. Everything was there, as he had known it would be.

  Smiling, he lifted out the sharpened piece of wood he was saving for The Father of All Things Bad with his crown of glass thorns, and tested its point on the pad of his index finger. A dewy drop of red welled up on the tip of the pudgy digit and started to congeal.

  I haven’t forgotten, he thought. I can still see your face, Lamenzo. I can still see your face…

  Leaning his head out through the open window, The Watcher shouted: “Here I come, ready or not,” as if it was some macabre game of Hide-and-Seek he was playing with the Devil. He gunned the car’s idling engine.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  “Ashley,” he tasted her name on his tongue as he chased her glittering halo.

  The dance led him from street to backstreet, backstreet to alleyway to highway, across bridges, through tunnels and back again, The Trinity Killer sniffing out the woman’s winding trail like some relentless bloodhound. And on her, heavy on her sweating skin, the stink of the cop.

  Someone had sprayed “Snoop Doggy Dog” on the pavement beside “Notorious B.I.G.” He ran over them, pushed passed a few milling people with downcast eyes set in odd faces. Faces that pushed desperately against the flimsy curtain of fog as if they were struggling against the taut stretch of cellophane. Sucking hard, struggling for lungfuls of unbreathable air. Their eyes would be dragged up and forced to look his way as he ghosted across their vision, and they would look, but they wouldn’t see.

  He felt the need of that thing inside him, the hunger, and the barely audible whisper inside his head, goading him on.

  “Soon,” he soothed. “Just a little patience, my angel.”

  Lamenzo looked at the door that closed him off from his cornered quarry. Stark grained, designed to keep people out. On the side wall a panel of names paralleled a double row of buttons. Beneath the buttons a wire meshed intercom system was set up. He ran a finger over the list of names, getting a feel for their individual colours, stopping on the fifth one, apartment 5a. The only one with the distinctive green-yellow combination of auras surrounding it.

  He read the name plate.

  “Ashley Powell.”

  And smiled as he pressed the button.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Night was falling, New York City opening its foggy heart to the darkness.

  Gabriel traced the curve of the scar on his left cheek, where the Trinity Killer’s burning finger had marked him so cruelly. His eyes were a cried-out red in the rear-view mirror. How many times? He asked the small photograph of Francesca half-tucked into the sun visor. How many times am I going to cry over you?

  He pushed the sun visor back up. A menagerie of cars slipped by, picking up speed as they merged with the fast flowing traffic of the Expressway. An artery in the city’s motorway of veins, pumping vital blood into the coldly commercial heart.

  Gabriel gently swung the Black Hawk back into the traffic, turning onto West 114th beneath the swaying citrus pines at the entrance of the Columbia campus, took a left and eased carefully onto a well lit stretch of Broadway. He offered a thirty foot tall David Letterman a wry smile as he rolled by the Ed Sullivan Theatre.

  Before him, the distinct brake-lights of a yellow cab glared briefly. Behind him, the Empire State Building added its own heavy pall to the already gloomy city. People shuffled aimlessly about wasting their aimless lives, crossing and recrossing at the blinking lights, and ducking into and out of closing stores as they chased after rack after rack of needless bargains.

  His foot on the brake, Gabriel eased out around the flashing tail lights of a double-parked Camaro, changed down and sat in behind the dull gleam of an old Ford’s lights.

  On the radio a gravelly voice spliced Tori Amos into Joan Osborne into Lou Reed’s Perfect Day. Gabriel leaned across to pluck the now heated lighter from the dashboard, lit the straggly licorice paper roll-up dangling between his lips and killed the singer. Alone. Only the sounds of the cars, the streets. A dull monotony of beats and rhythms.

  Ashley’s apartment was on the corner of Prospect and Vine, overlooking the red brick gargoyles of the Magdalena Chapel with their hunched backs and leprous eyes blind to the comings and goings of the underlife crawling about on the streets below. The streets around Prospect all looked the same. He pulled in behind a parked station wagon, crimping the tyres against the sidewalk and pushing down on the handbrake.

  Gripped the steering wheel hard, knuckles whitening as his fingers clenched.

  Outside the five story apartment block the fog had thickened so much so Gabriel found himself staring at the glowing tip of the cigarette, unable to see the Studebaker’s stretched hood beyond it. A siren in the distance seemed to be calling out to him. Ambulance or squad car.

  He sat and smoked, concentrating on nothing but inhaling the smoke, trying to taste the tar as it settled in his lungs.

  The cigarette dwindled and the thoughts came slipping back like thieves of sanity. Hungry little beggars with dirty fingernails and blackened teeth —

  Leaning down, the ugly muzzle of Bill Stern’s gun resting against Culpepper’s forehead, black eye against the bruise and then the blood red rose flowering in the wake of the dead trigger… one shot opening a world of lies behind the miracle… sweet deceits and black lies… in a world of coloured glass…

  — that claw and bite away on the thin wall between madness and the miraculous, tearing back the skin of the everyday to expose these raw wounds that cut deeply into his bruised psyche. The magic that shouldn’t, couldn’t, be real.

  Gabriel turned the gold ring on his wedding finger, pulling it unconsciously towards the first knuckle as if taking it off. It wasn’t coming off, not so long as her name was still inscribed inside the band: Francesca 02/24/1994.

  He sank back into the driver’s seat, his gaze drifting along the rows of dirty windows hiding their dirty lives, living each one of those dirty lives in a few seconds, tasting the sickness behind the glass facade, and able to do so because somehow, somewhere, he’d stopped caring about them and slipped into the past. He knew, deep down where it mattered, he didn’t love her, didn’t love Ashley the way he’d loved Frankie, and that he wouldn’t, couldn’t, love her that way. Just couldn’t.

  He wondered what she was doing up there, wondered how he could tell her he didn’t love her? What words could he use to say goodbye to the rest of his life?

  He reached inside the glove box for the makings of another cigarette. Remembered watching Francesca sleep. It didn’t feel like that long ago. That long since watching her sleep had been his secret. His way of quietly thanking God. That was in the beginning of his life, when she was this porcelain miracle walking fresh into his world, before Sam, before… and this, this was the end. Sitting there hurt.

  It wasn’t like that with Ashley. He didn’t find himself looking at her face, falling into it, they way he had with Frankie.

  But how long can you keep making love with yours ghosts?

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Ashley had just stepped into the shower when the buzzer intruded.

  “Just bloody typical,” she muttered to no one but herself, wrapping a damp towel around her middle and stepping out. Stretching, she shivered and reached back in to shut off the stream of water.

  The buzzer sounded again.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming,” she shouted, knowing whoever it was downstairs couldn’t he
ar her anyway. Sliding the glass shower door closed, she padded out into the passage, her feet puddling sodden footprints on the carpet, the contrast of air from the bathroom to the kitchen bringing goose bumps to her patches of exposed skin. “Hello?” she said into the intercom’s fake phone, brushing a strand of wet hair out of her face.

  “Miss Powell?” a voice asked.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “Lamenzo’s florists, ma’am. Got a bouquet for you.”

  “Flowers?” she said, thinking out loud. “Bring them up,” shaking her head, she pressed the door release and looked around for her purse to tip the delivery boy. “Oh, Gabe, you sweet, sweet fool…”

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  The Trinity Killer smiled at his reflection in the glass.

  “Positively angelic,” he said, and opened the door. “Like taking candy from a baby.”

  The foyer was a long, thin, high-ceilinged tunnel tiled with chipped alabaster and bordered on one side by a thick mahogany stained balustrade that twisted around to crown the first flight. A strip of worn carpeting ran a line of emerald through the centre of the tunnel, edged on both sides by strips of polished green linoleum.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, rounding the first flight of stairs and starting up the second, talking to the feeling inside him, the hunger. The second riser groaned under his weight. Up, up, and up again. The door to apartment 5a was the first of three on the landing. Behind him, the floor danced with a brittle glass-frost.

  Something red ran and washed into his eye, staining the world the colour of blood. He touched his forehead, felt the weeping wounds left by the crown of glass thorns. Strands of glittering light wove a hypnotic ballet around his ankles, twisting to the rhythm of silent belly dancers. He felt the touch of glass against his skin, burrowing a bloody passage into his ankle, grating against the calcine bone and cutting upwards, slicing through ligaments like some sort of coiled worm crawling through the dead skin of a roadkill, moving up, towards his gut. His skin rippled, the only outward sign of the glass’ advance.