Last Plane to Heaven (42 page)

Sesalem couldn't imagine any local nut-cutter carrying that bag. It had to belong to her. Logo aside, it was too clean for downtown.

“Stupid,” rumbled Fork-Foot. “I tell you, you listen. People never listen.” His voice faded to a ritualistic grumble.

“Was the perp one of yours?” If so, case closed, and move on. Make a call to her parents, if she had any they could find.

“No. Aura's no good.”

Demons killed for sport, about like people ate and slept—automatic as breathing, hard to get through the day without. Most victims were in free-kill zones, where there was no call for investigation. Even when not, the crime was usually so obvious as to merit only the most cursory review.

People killed for sport too, some of them far too emboldened by the demon-haunted world of the Rapture. That was still illegal. In theory.

“What about one of the Damned?”

“No.” Fork-Foot offered no further explanation, but his word was literally law.

Sesalem sighed. “One of ours, then.” He nodded at the forensics tech. “Okay, Jackie. Do your stuff, tag and bag her, then ship her to county. Somebody text me if we get a positive ID from this mess. And … be kind.” Sometimes it took a soul a while to realize it was finished with life.

He walked back to his parked car, ignoring the stabbing pain in his kidneys. Those who hadn't rammed broken-necked through the roofs of their houses and cars to go to Jesus during the Rapture were mostly Afflicted since. Kidney stones sucked, but it beat having snake hair or tear ducts that dripped shit.

Fork-Foot leaned on the fender of Sesalem's car, a short-wheelbase Toyota Land Cruiser painted to resemble a zebra—if zebras had balloon tires and bull bars. The metal groaned, eliciting a sympathetic wince from Sesalem.

“Not one of yours, either.” Fork-Foot's tongue shot out of his muzzle to lick one eyeball.

“Not one of ours?” Sesalem asked. “That doesn't leave a lot of options.”

“Them.” Fork-Foot pointed at the sky. He locked his thumbs to make butterfly wings. “Bird brains.”

Not butterfly wings, Sesalem realized. Angel wings. “I don't believe it.”

Fork-Foot shrugged, then jumped straight up to the top of the building they had been standing in front of. Sesalem watched the demon leap across the stunted skyline of the Pearl District. It was headed downtown, presumably for the local demons' nest in Pioneer Courthouse.

“Angels.” Sesalem shook his head. “No way.”

*   *   *

The instant message came through on his cell phone's tiny screen about two hours later. Sesalem was eating a pork burrito in front of a little trailer on Southwest Fifth.

“Alley vict Sheshondra Rouse 17 yrs Albina resident cause of death heart failure. Mutilation post-mort.”

Post-mortem mutilation? Not demon work, then. Pre-mortem was their style. They definitely preferred to prolong the suffering.

The pay phone a few yards to his left began ringing. Sesalem glanced at it, then at the
vieja
running the trailer. She shrugged. Cell phones had continued to work pretty well since the arrival of the Legions of Hell, but the land lines had really suffered. They mostly worked by Demonic—or sometimes Divine—intervention.

Rational people didn't answer ringing phones.

Rational people didn't work Homicide in a demon-haunted world, either. Sesalem walked over and picked up the receiver. “Hello?” he said cautiously.

“Detective Sesalem.” It was a distant, tinny voice, the line crackling with static and crosstalk in some guttural tongue. “This is Control.”

Control
. What the few agents of the Divine still on Earth called their semimythical upstream management. Parallel to the demons' New Jersey headquarters, in a sense. Either this was some joker with brass balls the size of coconuts or Heaven was calling.

Under the circumstances, Sesalem went along with it. “Sure. Go ahead, Control.”

“Back off the Rouse case. Let it go, and return to doing good works.”

“Good works my ass,” Sesalem snapped, his own self-discipline slipping. “Too damned late for that.” He slammed the handset down onto the hook. He truly hated being told what to do.

Then he sat down to finish his burrito and think about why a birdbrain would commit murder. The pay phone rang again, but he ignored the noise.

It had to be murder. Otherwise Control wouldn't have bothered to call him. And it wasn't a demon. Notoriously dishonest as they were, he couldn't figure why Fork-Foot would bother to lie.

But Fork-Foot had hinted at something.

Sesalem needed the demon again, needed to know what Fork-Foot knew. He walked far enough away from the still-ringing pay phone to dial Fork-Foot's pager from his cell phone.

*   *   *

Fork-Foot dropped to the bricks of Southwest Fifth like a runaway freight elevator. Sesalem flinched from the cloud of chips and dust accompanied by a stench like an electrical short. Brimstone would have been an improvement.

“Nothing to liaise here,” said Fork-Foot in his metal-shredding voice as he looked around. “You got something personal to discuss?”

Cut to the chase,
thought Sesalem. Don't extemporize, don't apologize. Just look him in the eye pits and talk. The detective took a deep breath. “Why would an angel have murdered Sheshondra Rouse?”

Fork-Foot shrugged. It was like watching an earthquake ripple through a wall. “Why not?”

“They're forces of good.”

Fork-Foot laughed. At least Sesalem thought it might be a laugh. “Read the Bible, little man. Angels are no different from demons. Just prettier wardrobe, better public relations.”

“This isn't Gomorrah. It's Portland. She was a good kid from the Albina neighborhood. There's no
reason
.”

“Even angels got to play.”

“Sport? That's all you think it was? A sport killing, like one of your hunts through Old Town?”

“You better off believing that.”

What the hell did that mean?
“Better off than what? Some dead black kid?”

“Better off than some dead black detective,” said Fork-Foot.

“Tell me,” hissed Sesalem, his voice dropping like it did when he was sweating a perp.

“Already did,” said Fork-Foot. “Don't need to page me no more.”

Then the demon was gone in a swirl of brick dust. All around Sesalem, phones were ringing, from office windows, from passing cars, his own cell.

*   *   *

Back at the crime scene, Sesalem left his cruiser blocking the mouth of the alley. There was nothing left but draggled police tape and some empty film canisters. Forensics still hadn't gone all digital.

He stood where Sheshondra Rouse had screamed her last. Black paint had been hastily slopped over whatever stains had resisted the quicklime and hot water the cleanup crew normally employed. It was still sticky, already crisscrossed with boot prints, clawed demon feet, and a motorcycle.

“Why'd you die here, baby?” he asked the brick walls. Somehow this didn't seem like angel play.

“Angels are no different from demons,” Fork-Foot had said.

Did they ever change sides?

As if summoned by the thought, a rush of warm, moist air blew in, Leviathan itself breathing upon the alley, followed by a flutter of wings. The angel landed next to Sesalem in a straight drop eerily reminiscent of Fork-Foot's most recent appearance.

It was almost seven feet tall, cadaverously thin, with junkie arms—all slack, stringy muscles and blue tendons. It wore leather pants with buckled motorcycle boots. The angel's bare chest was covered with an ornate tattoo of Michelangelo's
Pietà
. Great gray wings swept behind the angel, matching greasy gray dreadlocks and sea-gray eyes. The angel had silver rings on each finger and he smelled like an overheated motorcycle.

“Just because we're good,” the angel said, as if picking up a prior conversation, “doesn't mean we're nice.”

“The good don't kill the innocent.” Sesalem palmed his .38. Even loaded with silver bullets dipped in holy water and myrrh, the gun wouldn't do much for him now. It still made him feel better.

“The good do what they can in these late days.” The angel glanced at the sticky paint on the pavement. “She would have met someone. He would have been the wrong person, led her places she shouldn't go. She had power in her, Detective. Power that could have blossomed into something terrible.”

“People get crucified on traffic lights in this town,” said Sesalem. “I got a new definition of ‘terrible.' So why not just turn her around and point her home? Or better yet, kill that wrong person. He might have deserved it.”

The angel shook its head. “There were no good exits from this alley for Sheshondra Rouse.”

“You needed him,” breathed Sesalem in a burst of insight, “him but not her. He's a source or a contact or something. She had some spiritual power, loose in the world. Disposable.”

“My war never ends, Detective. Does yours?”

Was it a man Rouse had come to see? An angel? Or a demon?

There didn't seem to be a difference.

“One of your people went bad,” Sesalem said. “She died for it.”

“Almost correct,” said the angel. “One of theirs went good. But he needed a soul to carry him upward.”

Then the angel vanished, leaving a swirling gray feather perhaps a yard long. Sesalem holstered the gun, snatched the feather from the air, and trudged back toward his Land Cruiser.

All four tires were flat, slashed by needled claws. Sesalem looked back down the alley in time to catch a beam of light, a young black girl standing in it, talking to a tall, bejeweled demon—Fork-Foot?

Then they were gone.

It was a long walk home. He threw his cell phone in the river to stop it ringing, following it with his badge, but kept the feather. “How good is good?” he asked it.

There was no answer.

The End

 

The Cancer Catechism

This is the end. Really, there's not much more to say. Never walk this road I have walked if you can help it. If you must do so, take my hand. Maybe I can help you a few steps along the way.

People say there are no atheists in the foxholes, but people are idiots. It's awfully tough to believe in God when you're knee deep in mud, blood, and other men's guts. Combat is the Problem of Evil on the hoof.

But if you really want to feel the stress of divine regard, spend time in an oncology unit. The half-hidden whispers and the strained smiles and the whirring click of the infusion pumps form a choir of pain every bit as agonized as the howls of the damned in some imagined hell.

i:
I believe in the dark miracle of uncontrolled cell division, creating tiny, undifferentiated embryos of hate who are nonetheless children of my body.

You enter your days like everyone else. There is an alarm clock sometime before dawn, an electronic voice calling to you through the fragmented wilderness of your dreams. There is a moment of blessed relief as you take the day's first piss. There is that odd echo of flowing warmth in your shower. You shave, perhaps your face, perhaps your legs, depending on your hormonal balances and grooming preferences. You stumble into hopefully clean underwear and minimally food-stained clothes. You microwave yesterday's coffee and choke down a pair of brown-sugar-and-cinnamon Pop-Tarts.

Ablutions, evacuations, and alimentation taken care of, you move out into the wider world.

Sometimes you wonder why you do it this way. Two hundred and forty work days a year. Fifty years of a working adult life. Twelve thousand days of this routine, more than half of your allotted twenty-two thousand. Ninety-six thousand hours out of your life, a quarter of the waking hours you will ever experience.

For what? A paycheck? Friday nights spent drinking with your college buddies before they drift off earlier every year, consumed with bleary-eyed guilt toward tired spouses and squalling children?

Still, you do what everyone does. Then sometimes you do it differently. You take a weekend to the coast. You fly away at the holidays to visit aging relatives who
still
think a sweater vest is a good idea for a gift. You go camping up in the hills and throw out your back sleeping on rocks that were pebbles when you lay down but boulders when you woke up.

Because, really, what else is there? Life is years of sheer, endless boredom punctuated by occasional bouts of the mildly interesting. Not much to do, not much to believe in. Just eat, sleep, shit, breathe, breed, grow old and die.

Somewhere along the way, you acquired your own partner. Or two or three or four, usually in a row with minor overlaps. Serial monogamy is the American way. Changing relationships has become like switching from Cheerios to Rice Krispies. One or two of those partners helped you produce sprogs, either by donating a small amount of warm, sticky fluid to your own efforts, or through dint of nine months of vomiting and backaches and blameful mood swings.

There's not much to believe in except your kids, and in truth, what are they going to grow up to be? Assuming video games don't corrupt their plastic little souls and global warming doesn't drown them in their beds with rising sea levels, they'll just turn out like you.

Then one day you find blood in the toilet while stumbling around amid receding somnolence. Maybe you ignore it for a while, maybe you dart in immediately to see your doctor in a grip of panic. Still it comes back again and again until you do seek medical advice, that little harbinger of terrible things to come which you cannot yet admit to yourself.

Because that day, you have finally found something to believe in. Something
real
. Something intensely personal. Death doesn't play chess for souls anymore, or sit down to an unfriendly game of Texas Hold 'Em. Death approaches along a pathway built from silvery needles and grim lab reports and the hum of CT scanners.