Blood Of Angels (43 page)

'What happened then?'

'When?'

'After you'd killed whoever it is you're talking about.'

'You came along.'

'I'm not… okay. What did I do?'

'We buried her close and you helped me clean everything up and move and you used contacts to make it all fade away. You made me kill people for you and then you stopped asking and I heard nothing for years and years. I didn't kill. I took pictures. I was like everyone else. I thought you had gone for ever. For every year that passed I tried to imagine one angel subtracted away. I thought maybe I could get back to none. But you never go. You're always there. You're always fucking here.'

'It's not me. It's someone else.'

'It's you. You look different, but it's you. It's always you.'

'Why did you come back here?'

'You made me come. I was supposed to deal with the girl who saw me back then, who had started killing in my way. But she had already been arrested. And… you wanted me to do other things for you.'

'You killed the cop at the Holiday Inn.'

'Yes.'

'You abducted Nina, the FBI agent. Brought her here.'

'For a few hours, but then we drove. We could have driven for ever. No one would ever have found us. I wasn't going to… Then you came, and I had to come back here to my house. You made me.'

'Who?'

'You.'

'It's
not me'
I stared at him. 'Wait — came
here?
To Dryford? When?'

'This morning.'

'Paul came
here
this morning? By himself?'

The man stared at me, and finally seemed to get I was not the person he'd been talking about. 'In a car with some kid,' he said. 'They don't know what he's really like. They don't understand he's not even real.'

'Where is he now?'

'I don't know. He went.'

'When?'

'Two hours ago.'

'Does he have Nina with him?'

Jim/James suddenly tried to pull himself upright, catching me off guard. I kicked him back down again.

'Tell me or I swear to God…'

'He's got her.'

'She's alive?'

'She was when they left.'

I pressed the gun harder into the head of someone not much younger than my father had been when he died. 'Where are they? Where did they go?'

'I don't know.'

'What kind of car?'

'Big. Black.'

I tightened my finger on the trigger but I looked in his eyes and saw there was nothing in there worth killing.

Instead I left him crawling into the long grass and went quickly back to Monroe. I was going to close his eyes but then realized there are worse things to look at forever than branches waving gently across a cold blue sky.

Then I turned and ran back to the car.

Lee was getting pissed off. Lee was getting confused. Lee was beginning to feel that none of this was making much sense.

They'd put the woman in the back of the car and Paul had got in with her. The windows were tinted. Nobody could see who was in there. Paul told Lee to sit up front with the driver. This guy was short and had heavy brows and a hook nose and was basically the kind of person Hudek usually went to some trouble to avoid. The flat smile he gave Lee when he got in the car said he felt much the same way about him.

They drove back through the woods to the bigger town and cruised around. Occasionally Paul's phone would beep: he looked at the screen but didn't answer. Once in a while Paul would ask for something. The car would stop, and Lee would go get it. The driver came with him and stood just outside the door each time. Presumably this was in case Lee decided to run off, and the precaution made him mad. He wasn't going anywhere. He just wanted to be told what was under way, and what this job he was supposed to do was. They went to the Starbucks and Lee withstood the usual wait to bring back coffees. They went to the grocery market and Lee was sent in for cigarettes. Lee was told to go take a digital photograph of the inside of the church, and the outside of the police station, both of which he did. He went and bought batteries from the Radio Shack in the strip mall on the edge of town, and onion rings for the driver from the Renee's up the road. At each of these places the people were friendly to him. They smiled and nodded and wished him good day like they were in some advert for small-town living. None of this dissuaded Lee one iota from his view that the place was utterly lame.

Finally they headed back into the centre and the car pulled up outside a long run of iron railings with an ornate gate in the middle. On the other side was an open patch of tended grass leading up to the school. Kids of various ages were milling around in front of it, stretching a few extra minutes of freedom out of lunch break. On the opposite side of the road was a smaller building in the same style. A super-friendly sign said this was a kindergarten.

Paul told Lee to come have a seat in the back. Lee got out, came around, climbed in. The woman was sitting where she'd been put, tied hand and foot. Lee looked her in the eyes for a moment and thought that for someone in her position, she seemed remarkably unafraid.

'You going to make me kill her?'

Paul look at him, eyebrows raised. 'Why would you think that?'

'Like a blooding thing, or something.'

'That's not what I had in mind. Hand to hand I'd bet evens, anyway. At best.'

'So — what?'

Paul reached beneath the seat and pulled out a small black bag. Looked like the kind of thing you might tote an iPod around in, or a CD player. He handed it to Lee. Inside were four small jars of pills.

'What's this?' Lee said. He looked out the window at the school. 'You want me to go sell drugs?'

'No. I want you to give them away.'

Lee was about to tell the guy he didn't have to be sarcastic but then realized he wasn't joking. 'Why?'

'Priming the pump.'

'That's
the big job you've got lined up for me?'

'Just a warm-up, Lee. I'll be back in an hour, and then we'll get to the main lesson for today.'

Lee got out and watched as the car drove away.

He knew he would do what he'd been asked — told — to do, but the situation was really beginning to try his patience. This didn't seem like enough for someone who'd been through what he had, who'd had his life cut out from under him. He was a guy who wanted to make his mark. Up until a week ago he'd been going in the right direction, heading along a good, straight track of his own devising. He had a crew. He had friends. He had a life. He had a plan.

He was the one who drove.

For a moment he hesitated right there on the sidewalk, and realized how much he missed Brad. Sleepy Pete, too, a couple others, but mainly Brad — even though his ribs still ached from their fight. They had been friends a long time, and Lee never had too many friends. Brad had a way of saying things, subtly and offhand, that Lee had eventually taken on board. He had sort of understood that this process took place, but never as acutely as he did now. He wished Brad was here to say 'Shit on this, man, it sucks,' or 'Okay, it's weird but let's get busy.' Or that he could hear Pete droning on about the hidden rooms in some game or other, or even see Karen passing by on the other side of the street. He wished he'd made more of an effort after that one time they slept together. He had felt awkward afterwards, emotionally exposed in a way he was unaccustomed to. Natural response — don't call. He hadn't even realized he'd like to see her again until it was too late and she'd moved on to Brad, and Lee's dad had always been one for saying you can't go home again.

For one bizarre moment Lee even thought about calling his old home, talking to his parents. Saying:
I don't understand what's going on. What am I supposed to do?

But something told him they'd just gently put the phone down. He wasn't their kid any more. He was Paul's. He belonged to this bigger family now and maybe always had. He should really ask:
What was the conversation you were having in the photograph I saw this morning? What was going on? What deal was being made? What did you get?

What was I ever to you?

It wouldn't be any use. Did anyone ever really get what went on in their parents' HBO lives? Did they understand your MTV main event? Or were you always walking tracks parallel in direction but separated by time, once in a while waving across a distance about the length of a misty football field?

Whatever, he supposed. In the end, you walk alone.

He unzipped the bag and got out one of the little jars. Loosened the lid for easy access, and slipped it into his pocket. He walked up to the gate and ran an eye over the few kids he saw dawdling inside. They dressed the same as kids everywhere. He wouldn't stand out, as Paul had evidently known. Worst case and some teacher called him on what he was doing there, he'd be someone's older brother with a message from home. He'd done this before, in the old days, back when he was eighteen and just starting out. Maybe Paul knew that. Maybe Paul knew everything.

Lee turned at the familiar rocky sound of hard little wheels, and saw a kid clacking down the road towards him on a skateboard. He was about to give the guy a wave and get straight to business with him, when he realized the boarder was a little older than he looked, and his red backpack looked familiar. The guy winked as he passed and went sailing down the hill, just part of the scenery.

So Lee turned back and walked in through the gates.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Paul took her gag off soon afterwards.

'Going to ask you to do something for me,' he said. 'You're not going to want to, which I can respect, but if you don't do it I will kill you immediately. No second chance.'

Now Lee was out of the car, Paul's manner had changed abruptly. Nina realized he put on an act for the young man, that he put on a different act for everybody. He was probably doing one for her now, without even realizing. The machine, doing its job, impersonating.

'What are you doing here?' she asked. 'A town full of innocent people. What's here for you?'

'Getting it back,' he said. 'Don't you
feel
it? Can't you tell?'

'No,' she said. 'Just feels like a regular town to me. Guess you must be imagining it. Probably a side-effect of being insane.'

He smiled coldly. 'You feel it well enough. There's other places like it. Areas we lived two thousand years ago or more. Then we moved on. We like to roam. Sometimes we come back, but we always move on. There was plenty of room before everyone else arrived. But in they flooded, and they found useful piles of stone, and tracks, and they said how
convenient
for the Indians to have left these lying around for us to build our little farms out of, our stupid little towns. Not realizing they're picking through things that
belong to somebody else.
That
we
put it here for a reason. That it was all
ours.'

'You should really sit and have a proper talk with John Zandt. He has some pretty whacked-out theories about you guys too. Of course, he would probably want to kill you first.'

'Oh, I'm looking forward to meeting him again. I've gone to some trouble to engineer it. It's going to be a brief conversation, though.'

His phone beeped and he paused for a second to examine a message on the screen. 'Not long,' he said. He got a gun out of his jacket pocket, efficiently loaded it and flicked the safety off. Kept it in his hand.

'Whatever it is you have in mind,' Nina said, 'I'm not going to do it.'

'Yes, you will,' he said, calmly. 'Or I'll find a way of getting your heart to Ward, with a note saying you didn't care enough about him to stay alive. That it meant more to you to play the heroine. That you only ever slept with him to get closer to me. And that you did it on a suggestion from Charles Monroe.'

Nina looked quickly out of the window, trying to focus on the town as it passed gently by.

'That's not true.'

'Maybe. But he'll never know.'

They didn't believe me at first. Unger was a man with thousand-year timelines in his head, and flat-out said he thought I was trying to stall them in town when they had far more important business elsewhere. I had to shout down the phone to get them to stay around long enough to talk to them. They agreed to wait only twenty minutes. I drove to Thornton as fast as I could.

When I got to the coffee house they were sitting tensely inside, bulky and incongruous on a burgundy sofa by the window, surrounded by normal people. Unger was talking urgently on the phone. He was turned to the window in an attempt to be discreet, but vigorous hand movements were involved and he was red in the face. He looked like a man who was experiencing difficulty in getting people to take him seriously. I wasn't surprised.

'What?' John said. 'What the hell happened?'

I sat close and spoke fast. 'We found where Julia Gulicks grew up. And we found the house of a guy I suspect she saw kill his own wife when she was eleven years old. We went in the house and found a basement, and that's where Nina was this morning. She was in a van the rest of the time. The FBI were never going to find her in a house-to-house search: the abductor had her on the move.'

'Hang on.' John held up a hand, trying to slow me down.

I took a deep breath, knowing I had to sell him on the idea of staying here. 'I shot the guy who took Nina,' I said. 'And he says Paul is
here.
Here in Thornton. Right now. He has a kid with him and he also has Nina. And two hours ago she was alive.'

'Why would you believe this guy?'

'Because he wanted me to kill him and I said I would if he told me the truth.'

'Did you?'

'No. Fuck him.'

Unger ended his call. 'Ramona didn't show up for work today,' he said. 'The woman I worked on the email stuff with? She's not answering at home either. Everybody I want to talk to at Langley seems to be elsewhere. The line went dead twice.'

'What about LA?' John asked. 'Are they going to move into position for us there?'

'We're going to have to go there and work it in place. There's too much obtuseness going on over the phone.'