Last Angel Page 9

  Another shard of blood red glass hooked into the cut in his torn jeans, coiled around his leg, freezing like a second skin of ice around the tense muscle, feeding a bloody red malevolence into his dead body.

  Lamenzo threw back his head and tasted the air in back of his mouth, brimstone eyes wide with fire. Sand trails of sweat trickled down the crystalline sheen of his spine.

  Downstairs, a door closed.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  The foyer reeked. Dead man’s curls of sun-faded wallpaper peeled away from the wall. Stained yellow.

  Gabriel Rush let the door swing closed and sniffed. Piss, probably a stray’s. He started up the stairs thinking his way through another way to say what he had to say. Without even thinking about it, he stepped over the broken riser. The smell grew stronger the higher he climbed. Rounding onto the fifth floor landing the fetid mess of odours could have masked the not so subtle perfume of an exhumation.

  Taking a deep breath, he knocked on Ashley’s door, the biggest part of him not wanting her to answer.

  Behind him someone sniffed, an ugly wet sound, followed by a hacking cough. Instinctively, Gabriel stiffened, one hand moving of its own accord for the cold comfort of his gun as his mind picked a path through the minefield of bad scenarios tripping through his mind. He stopped himself from thinking about it and turned slowly.

  There was a wretched figure hunched uncomfortably on the staircase, elbows on knees, holding his head in callused hands. Gabriel’s hand drifted back to his side. Junkie, he thought, dismissively. Speedfreak… A second, uglier thought that began to blossom into a fast-wilting flower as the derelict looked up.

  The man coughed again, a ragged abrasion of a sound. A bubble of caked phlegm dribbled down over the crest of his top lip and into his quivering mouth. The deadbeat’s tongue licked out to lap it up.

  Sickened, Gabriel turned away, but not before the wino’s brimstone and winter eyes locked with his own. The eyes were sickly, veined with a turgid parody of Gabriel’s cried out tears. The eyelids fluttered closed, open, the wino staring through the windows into his damaged soul. Raking through his memories. Sifting the wreckage of his life for salvage.

  Smiling sadly, the deadbeat licked at his spittle-flecked lips and lifted a jerky finger to his left cheek to trace the line of Gabriel’s scar. Traced a slow, shaky circle around its length.

  A black kind of understanding, like a lover’s hand, stroked a line down the ridges of chest, cupping with cold certainty around his shrinking testicles. “Sacred Mother of the Blue Skies,” Gabriel breathed, his voice betraying his clenched teeth in its need to be heard. He was unable to look away. Lamenzo looked bad, greasy coils of hair hanging in his eyes, skin desiccating beneath the rub of some kind of facial alopecia. Decaying, he thought, curiously distanced from reality. He’s decaying, bit by bit. Cold air blew in from somewhere. He felt empty, gutted and soulless under the stare of The Trinity Killer. Couldn’t tear his eyes away.

  Cold heat flared in his chest, a lethal paradox that scoured like steel wool against the inside of his ribcage. Gone as quickly as it came. Nothing more than the ghost of a feeling left for dead in his chest. He was being drained somehow, he knew it but knowing didn’t mean he knew how to stop it. The murderers chill caressed the fine hairs on the nape of his neck, chasing a shiver the down the ladder of his spine.

  Face to face with this incarnation of Death, he felt a sudden powerful surge of terrified exhilaration. His vision filled with a dizzying colour show, a Rorschach collage of yellow and blue and white, drowned finally by this all-consuming red.

  Just when it seemed the sensation would last for whatever was left of forever, he felt the miracle begin to fade; flecks of reality began to slither between the slipping curtain of colour, spreading and blending to paint a whole. Gabriel blinked with eyelids that felt like raw foreskin and his Manhattan reality burned back to life all around him.

  He felt the cold hand of fear close around his churning stomach, fingers curling, clenching, squeezing.

  The Trinity Killer rose slowly, a hand clasping the wooden balustrade. He moved as if he was in mounting pain, the first bead of blood breaking on his forehead, bleeding his stigmata even as he smiled at Gabriel. “I can smell you, Little Indian Man. I can smell you like piss on the wind…” He reached out, a stop-motion slash as his burning finger slipped across Gabriel’s left cheek, copying the first scar with a shallow cut. Blood ran through the stubble of Gabriel’s cheek as Lamenzo touched the bloody finger to his lips and kissed it. “You’re marked. I know you. I see you in my dreams.” He blew the kiss back at Rush. “And you see me in yours… I know you do.”

  The first blood mingled with more cuts where each glass thorn had made its mark, where it had bitten deeply into the dead man’s forehead. Tears of suffering cried above eyes too hard to care. Lamenzo lurched forward, left leg buckling then locking. His hand closed around Rush’s throat, each fingernail a fragile claw as brittle and sharp as a slither of glass.

  “I can see it in your memories, right beside,” The killer’s face tilted, as if hearing a whisper carried along by the creeping draft. Came back down smiling. “Oh, we’re the same, you and me. We’re the same.”

  “No. We’re not the same.”

  “Yes. Yes we are.” The killer crooned, the words tickling him. “We both kill children, but at least I never claimed to love my dead girl. Not like you.”

  Lamenzo slammed him back into the wall without releasing his grip, the dead man’s glass fingernails raking ragged furrows into Gabriel’s throat as he fell backwards.

  The killer stepped back, made a gesture with hand and mouth, as if blowing out a light.

  A life.

  The whisper of death so soft between his fingers. “Soon,” Lamenzo promised. “Soon, we do the dance for real and you join your dead son. Soon. It’s a promise from me to you.”

  The shallow cuts burned. Something in them, a sickness left to fester beneath his skin, like dirt from those fingernails. Gabriel’s head rocked back as if the strings supporting it on his neck had been cut. He twisted away from the corpse’s touch and reeled sideways, slamming into the wall. A feeble moan touching his lips even as he reached out to brace himself with trembling hands. Head down, he gagged twice, vomiting onto the pea green sea of polished linoleum.

  The echo of laughter drifted ghostlike down the hallway, accompanied by the more solid sound of footsteps lurching away. When Gabriel looked up he was alone in the corridor and the world was tilting. Desperately, he banged on Ashley’s door even as he collapsed.

  Chapter Forty

  Ashley stepped out of the damp towel, leaving it in a pink puddle on the floor, and into her too short floral summer robe. Chinese silks embroidered with flower-breathing serpents.

  She took a long hard look at her reflection in the full-length mirror and saw a tall, tanned woman with shoulder-length blonde hair that danced on the curve of her supple shoulders and tangled through the silver chain links of her heart-shaped necklace. Neat curves like the city itself, full of sights and delights and places to tempt the imagination right beside places made quite simply for eager hands to explore. She planted her hands on her hips, the silks riding up, and gave herself a twirl.

  “Not bad, girl. Not bad at all.” She laughed at her dizzy reflection, the faintest hint of a smile lingering cynically on her lips as she brushed the strands of wet hair back over her ears. “Not perfect, but pretty damn close.”

  The flower-boy knocked on the door again. With one last look back at her reflection she went to answer. As she reached for the guard chain the flower-boy knocked again.

  “All right, all ready,” she shouted through the wood as she reached up for the catch to open the door.

  Instead of flowers she was greeted by a shape — a slumped body — spilling into her hall. Once open the door refused to close. The weight of the body was too much for her to hold back. The door simply pushed itself open again allowing the body to tumble in; its
disjointed bones concertinaing as it slid to the floor.

  One second.

  Two.

  Three, as her face began to pull into a mask of panic.

  Four, as she began to see, to really see…

  The yellow, vomit stained lips, the cuts and the blood and the vacant eyes of Gabriel Rush staring sightlessly at her ceiling.

  A gurgling, desperate moan knotted in the confines of her suddenly raw throat, sandpapering against the folds of flesh as she lunged forward, helplessly trying to catch him even though he was down.

  It was several minutes before she could stop shaking, certain she was seeing death laid bare in its simplest of forms. She stood there in the hall listening to her own panicked breathing, a gradual coldness settling on her chill-puckered skin, the forgotten pepper-splashes of shower water turning to ice in the cold air.

  “Please God,” she begged, not knowing which God she was meant to beg to, hers or his? Her head began to throb thickly, as though trapped under the ice, drowning in a bad dream. “Don’t be dead. Please. Don’t be dead.” Putting two shaking fingers up against his throat Ashley checked for a pulse.

  It was there.

  Now she felt calmer, more able to think.

  A tear she didn’t want to cry ran a leisurely course down her cheek. She sniffed and rubbed at her eyes. Pulling her robe tight to her own throat, she said a silent thank you to whoever, and tried to lift him.

  Light struggled behind the blinds, slanting vague rays of moon and streetlight through the slatted chinks.

  Unconscious, Gabriel’s body was as good as a dead weight. Ashley closed her eyes, refusing to look for the bullet wound she knew was there somewhere, the gunshot steeling this last chance at happiness. Another minute slipped away. Two more. She looked back over shoulder, to the door of the bedroom. Inside her head the room became a sanctuary to the madness out here in the hall. A place where the light couldn’t find them. The place they had to be.

  She knelt and slid her arms under his, trying to lift him again but forced to settle on a rough man-handled carry-drag across the floor which was the best she could manage. She heaved him into the bedroom and finally up onto the bed.

  Ashley hovered uncertainly, gritted her teeth and began to undress him, each layer of clothing coming off as if it were bandaged across flayed skin. He groaned once, the only suggestion that he was even alive. Done, Ashley folded his clothes and left them on the wicker bedside chair as she went through to the bathroom. She felt the chill of linoleum replace the soft brush of carpet beneath her feet with minute shocks of ice. Balancing on her toes, Ashley searched the drugs cabinet for Tylenol, put two on her tongue and washed them down with a mouthful of cold water. Then, walking as gingerly as if the floor were littered with fans of razorblades she went back through to the bedroom.

  Gabriel was still out cold but his breathing was shallow and regulated, relaxed and calm once again.

  Not dead, thank you God, not dead.

  She walked back through to the hall and picked up the phone, wondering who she could call. Daniel Mannelli’s face surfaced and she put a 911 call through to the Westwood Precinct.

  The Italian lieutenant listened anxiously, interrupting as she told him how she’d found Gabriel. Had she checked for wounds? Was he bleeding badly? What kind of wound was it? Should he call the paramedics? Ashley smiled nervously, chewing on the soft flesh of her bottom lip when he promised to make his own house call.

  Putting the phone down, she walked back through to the bedroom. She stopped in the shadowy arch of the doorway, eyes compelled, unable to draw her gaze away from the bed and Gabriel’s fretful slumber. A shiver scuttled down her spine. It reminded her of a mortuary slab, a single white sheet spread over a still body. She tried to kill the illusion but it was inside her head now and it wasn’t going anywhere. She felt her teeth sharp inside her lip as she slipped out of her robe, the iron tang of her own blood on her tongue.

  “Oh, for fucks sake,” she hissed, hovering, unsure, before lying down next to him, spooning him neatly so that shins, thighs, belly and breasts were all one single point of contact between them. The sheets were cold, still mortuary sheets in her mind, but it didn’t matter because he was there with her.

  She was no longer alone.

  She lay there perfectly still, almost afraid to move for fear of waking him.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Brendon Ellery stared at the open door of locker 31.

  The darkness hiding the empty drawer.

  No shroud.

  No body.

  No Father Joseph D’Angelo. He’d tagged and bagged the dead priest himself after the autopsy and filed it away in locker 31. Ellery stood back, fingers tapping impatiently on the edge of the locker door, marshalling his thoughts into some sort of logical order. He’d bagged the body and finally closed the file on D’Angelo, he looked up at the plain clock face, ten hours ago, over a week since he’d first come downstairs to Hospital Hell. Since then he’d taken lunch, cut open a crack baby, dead two weeks before birth, congestive heart failure, and dissected a septuagenarian who’d O.D.’d on domestic bleach after his wife’s last lethal stroke.

  No signs of a break in. Nothing else missing.

  Well, it’s not as if he just did the Resurrection Shuffle out of here under his own steam. Ellery’s face twisted into an ugly little smile as he closed the door on his erstwhile Lazarus’s bed. That’s one option that’s not happening. He checked the residents of the neighbouring lockers. The only viable alternative left, accepting the fact that a: the dead weren’t walking and b: he wasn’t losing it, was body-snatching. The thought didn’t shock him; it numbed him.

  He was a man of the world, and had certainly heard of weirder things, especially in high profile cases… including hideously maimed corpses waking up the moment before the scalpel made its first incision, but they were always before the cutting got underway.

  Turning his back on the bank of lockers, Ellery pushed through the swing doors and into the twin smells of disinfectant and ammonia, hospital smells. An empty gurney rested against the wall. His footsteps echoed as he headed back towards reception, tongue clicking against the roof of his mouth, lips curling into a genuine smile as his eyes fixed on the surveillance camera at the end of the corridor, its single black eye looking down from above the swing doors.

  “Got you,” he said softly, pushing through the second set of doors into reception.

  Brendon Ellery took the phone from the wall-mount and jabbed out the number of an office in Westwood, waiting for someone to answer. Mannelli picked up the phone, making it his problem.

  Chapter Forty-two

  The Watcher’s Coupe pulled up at the entrance to a seedy looking motel complex, beside a hissing neon sign. The middle two tropical coloured bulbs had blown so in the full dark the hoarding advertised something called Par ise, about as close as the mismatch of rising cones, supplicant chimneys and rows of empty rooms could claim to being paradise. A series of hand-painted white lines marked off parking spaces and a small half-panelled door (boarded up where the glass ought to have been) served as the entrance to the reception.

  Around the forecourt windows hung open, some missing sheets of glass in their metal frames; garbage bins overflowed with empty beer cans, pizza boxes and McDonalds wrappers; fallen rain pooled in oil streaked rainbows and hungry squalling seagulls fought over rashers fallen from the bins. He watched their aggressive dance, angled the wheel and rolled the car into a vacant bay outside the reception.

  “Now don’t you be getting any ideas about going anywhere,” he said to the dead body on the backseat. “I’ll be right back.”

  He slammed the door and ran up the short ramp to the reception.

  The unwashed aroma of weeks old sweat clung to the little room.

  Behind a battered looking plywood desk a wrinkled Spanish relic sat reading a yellowed copy of The People’s Friend. Looking up as he closed the door, she lifted a pair of fragile horn-rimmed specta
cles from her wrinkled nose and cracked him a rictus of greeting. “You want a room, no?” she asked in methodical Pidgin English.

  “Yes,” he nodded.

  “Ah, good, good. Be so kind… Twenty five dollars, yes…” she mumbled to herself, lifting down the key to chalet 21. “Over on far side, by big bins, coin slot for TV. Takes 50 cents only, hokay?”

  “Fine,” The Watcher smiled, fumbling with his wallet for the money. He laid the bills on the counter. Her hand snaked out and snatched them away.

  “Sign, sign.” She said, pointing agitatedly at a space in what he took to be the register, then she turned back to her book.

  Chapter Forty-three

  The room wasn’t a palace, but it was clean. It looked cheap and it smelled awful.

  “Not that you’re going to be complaining about the smell,” he said to his roommate’s body, slumped spinelessly in a cabbage patterned lounger. A bare bulb hung from a naked flex, throwing 60 watts of pearl across the small room. Under its glare, the dead priest wasn’t looking too healthy. “Now, I think we need to sort out some house rules, don’t you?”

  He began unpacking groceries from a straining paper bag. Stuffed olives, anchovies, pasta, ravioli, basmati rice, eggs, milk, coffee, noodles, ketchup, chicken fillet. Air freshener. “No bringing girls back without asking first. No loud music. Personal hygiene’s important. You’re not smelling so good, if you don’t mind me saying. One shower a day, and use soap. I get the bed, you get the couch.”

  He uncapped the air freshener and sprayed half a can of Winter Harmony into the air. Coughing he opened one of the metal-framed windows. “Ah, now there, that’s better isn’t it.”

  He took a thick Cuban cigar from the tin in his coat pocket, peeling away the shrink-wrap. Bit off the leafy end and chewed tobacco before he lit it, drawing the petrol taste of his battered brass lighter deep into his lungs. Coughed a deep tubercular cough. Tapped the ash tip off on the carpet and fed 50 cents into the television.