Desolate Angel (23 page)

Sarah’s sister knew it, too. When I looked up, Alissa Hayes had vanished.

I would never see her again.

Chapter 24

I have come to understand, in my brief otherworldly existence, that humans have the capacity to bind themselves to one another and that, in doing so, they can become so much more than they could ever be by themselves. I did not understand the dynamics fully, only enough to know that I had missed out on something powerful and profound by not opening my heart to others when I was alive. I first realized this a few months after my death. It was spring and this dead man’s fancy had turned to love. So I took to standing in the park, grappling with my loneliness, watching lovers walk hand in hand and families playing on the lawn. I witnessed how love can strengthen, brighten, and sharpen the very core of our existence, changing it forever. I came to understand that love is a permanent strengthening of the spirit, a gift that lingered long after the love itself was gone.

Even so, I was moved that Alissa’s love for her sister had driven her to put off the easing of her earthly pain so that she could warn me of the danger to Sarah. And I was moved by a more anonymous love I witnessed when Sarah was delivered into the care of strangers whose job it was to repair the damage done by those who used the need to love as a weapon against their own children.

The woman who welcomed Sarah into her foster home had seen it all before. Her heart was hidden beneath a veneer of efficiency, but only because it had been broken too many times to count by the stories she’d heard from the children who passed through her life. She remained a loving woman, despite the overwhelming evidence she’d seen of man’s cruelty. She had felt Sarah’s fear at once, understood her pain, and welcomed her into the safety of a temporary home. I knew Sarah would be okay in the sprawling, life-filled house crammed with toys and chaos. She could begin her new life here.

Maggie was reluctant to leave her. She waited with Sarah in the front room of the foster home until the social worker could arrive, asking gentle questions about the most ordinary of topics—school—in order to help Sarah create the illusion she would need to survive: the illusion that normalcy was possible.

It was close to midnight by the time Maggie left. As she drove through the dark streets, I felt her mind switch directions and she homed in on Alan Hayes. All empathy vanished and the kindness in her hardened to a nonnegotiable resolve to stop him. Oh, but she wanted to bring him down. I sat beside her, thinking of myself as a sort of spiritual co-pilot, rooting her fury on. Her mind never stopped trying to figure him out. She retrieved her cell phone from the depths of a knapsack tossed carelessly right in my lap and made a call, despite the lateness of the hour. When she started talking, I knew it was Morty.

“Is he back yet?” She frowned. “That means he’s on the run. He knows.” She was silent. “Could be. How about her? Is she awake?” She nodded in the darkness. “He could be wherever it is he’s been going at night. I’ll keep the two men outside until dawn and get Gonzales to authorize replacements.” She listened intently. “Are you sure? Okay, then. Let’s both get some sleep.”

Maggie would not get much sleep. The phone rang as soon as she laid it back down on the seat. This time, she pulled over to the curb to take the call, pressing a palm against her free ear to muffle all other sound. “I can’t hear you,” she said loudly. “Slow down and talk louder.” Her face strained with effort as she listened—and then she paled.

“Don’t let him leave, Roger,” she shouted into the phone. “Just tell him I’m on the way. And thanks. I owe you one.” She listened again. “Yes. I can do that. Favor made, favor repaid.”

She tossed her cell phone on the seat, flipped a switch on the dashboard, slammed her foot down on the gas pedal, and just like that, I was riding the lights at night again, watching the purple and blue beams sweep the traffic away from the road in front of us. God, it felt good. We flew through town, blowing through stoplights, leaving other cars in our dust. As she took the final turn out of town and headed down the blacktop, I knew where we were going: the Double Deuce bar on the outskirts of town. Why?

Before we reached the Double Deuce, Maggie switched off the blue light, not wanting to trigger a mass exodus. We glided into the parking lot in a spray of gravel. She cut the engine and was out the door in seconds, running toward a crowd clustered near the front entrance of the bar.

It was Bobby Daniels, the man I’d put in prison for the murder of Alissa Hayes. Somehow he had been released and ended up here at the Double Deuce, the last place on earth he should have gone.

I sat on top of her car for a better view. Bobby was lying on the ground, surrounded by onlookers, his back propped up against the brick building. Roger, the well-muscled owner and bartender of the Double Deuce, was holding a cloth to the side of Bobby’s head. It was soaked with blood. The neon signs above them blinked pink and blue in a steady rhythm, rendering Bobby first a healthy pink, then a sickly blue, then pink and blue again.

The surrounding crowd was at least six people deep, each one shamelessly sipping from a beer as they enjoyed the Double Deuce’s specialty show: watching blood flow. I scanned the faces in the crowd, looking for anyone I recognized. And an odd thing happened. Every now and then, I’d find someone staring back at me—face still, eyes unblinking, but their attention undeniably on me perched atop Maggie’s car. Two were men and one was a woman. But my attention was diverted by a side scuffle that broke out and was quickly quelled, and when I tried to find the trio among the crowd again, all three were gone. They had vanished.

I thought of the way they had looked at me. I thought of the black shapes I could sometimes see out of the corner of my eye. And I decided they had been of my world, not of the living. Had they left disappointed that they were taking no one with them? I wondered if that meant Bobby Daniels would live.

I watched Maggie fight her way through the crowd to the front. “Let me through,” she said impatiently, not wanting to pull rank. She wisely kept her badge in her pocket as she tossed aside bikers and women twice her size with a strength that impressed me. “Let me through. Coming through.” She finally reached the front and knelt down beside Daniels. His face was covered with blood. “What’s the story?” she asked Roger.

“He’ll be fine,” the bartender said. “It missed his eye and all major arteries, but it sure looks like that was what they were going for. It’s a long gash and it’s on his face, so it’s going to bleed a lot. Might need a stitch or two.”

“No,” Daniels croaked. “No hospitals. I don’t want a record of this.”

Roger did not ask why. “Might get by with some butterfly bandages. I can give you a handful. We got plenty behind the bar.”

“Thanks,” Maggie said, examining the slice that curved down the side of Bobby’s face. It had been made by a very sharp and very thin blade. There were no hesitation marks or stabbing wounds. Someone had known what they were doing, they just hadn’t gotten close enough to do it properly.

“I need you to keep this one off the books,” Roger said. “One more call this month and I could lose my liquor license.”

“Not a problem,” Maggie assured him. “This definitely stays off the books.”

I don’t know who looked more relieved: Bobby Daniels or the bartender.

“Can anyone tell me what happened?” Maggie asked Roger.

The bartender rolled his eyes. “How many burnouts, goofballs, meth heads, and dusters do you have time for?”

Maggie surveyed the crowd. “As many as actually saw it happen.”

“I can give it a shot,” Roger promised as he rose to his feet. He raised his hands high and the crowd fell silent, as if waiting for a benediction. “Free drinks all night long for anyone who saw what happened and can help this officer out. But, if you’re contradicted by anyone else and I find out you lied just to get free drinks, then you’re eighty-sixed from here permanently. Got it?”

Roger had the wisdom of Solomon. His pronouncement presented most of the patrons, none of them anxious to talk to a cop, with a deep moral dilemma. I had to admire the bartender’s ingenuity, though I figured most people would pass up the offer altogether. I was wrong.

“Well?” Roger asked. “Let’s have it. If you want to stay outside and tell her what you heard, stay and talk. The rest of you, get the hell back inside so some do-gooder driving by doesn’t call in more cops. I’ve told the girls to take off their tops for the next half hour.”

That got them going. Most of the crowd stampeded back inside, but some stayed behind to talk to Maggie. I joined the line, curious to find out what they knew. It was a cross section of lowlifes, ranging from a toothless old man in sawdust-covered Levi’s to a trio of bikers, two overweight women who’d been rode hard and put away wet, one bleary-eyed older woman with frizzy hair who looked like she’d been drinking the last thirty years away, a skinny kid who seemed terrified at being where he was, but was determined to tough it out, and one decent-looking woman on the right side of thirty wearing a pair of tight jeans and a bikini top. She should have been shivering, but she looked like she’d just stepped off the bar top and had plenty of body heat worked up.

“Come on, Jeanna,” the bartender said when he saw the young woman in the bikini top. “Get back inside. You’re my moneymaker.”

“No way,” she said, snapping her gum at him. “I want to talk to her. It’s important.”

“You can send her back out after her next time up,” Maggie told the bartender. “I’ll talk to the others first and wait for her if I have to. And I’ll tip her. You’ll get your cut. I promise I’ll make up for any time she loses.”

“Deal. You can use those tables over there.” He pointed to a pair of picnic tables in the side yard left over from way back when the Double Deuce had been a souvenir stand for tourists, before the new interstate had bled them all away. “The cold will sober people up and there’s no way you’ll hear a word inside. Unless you want to take these people into your car.”

Maggie looked at the old man in filthy Levi’s. “The tables are fine,” she said.

Roger tossed the blood-soaked rag to Maggie and headed back inside, his dancer close behind. Maggie caught the towel and knelt next to Daniels, murmuring in his ear. “Listen to me, Bobby. I need to talk to these people first so we can get the hell out of here. I don’t want you to listen because I need to hear your story straight from you. I can’t have their versions affecting yours. But when they’re done, I’m going to take you to where you’re staying and I want you to tell me every single thing you can remember. You’re going to be okay. I think we can get away with some butterfly bandages on that cut. Just sit tight, keep the rag pressed to your face, and start going over every minute of tonight. And don’t worry about anyone finding out. I’m not telling anyone about this; I’m not reporting it back. It stays between you and me.”

Bobby nodded, too overwhelmed to do more than obey. I wondered what it was like to leave the narrow confines of prison life, where everything was prescribed, only to be tossed into the chaos of a place like the Double Deuce.

“Over here,” Maggie told the witnesses. “I’ll take you one by one.”

“Ah, man,” one of the bikers complained as he tugged on his ZZ Top beard. “This is gonna take all night.”

“If you’re at the back of the line, you can go inside and get your free drinks while you wait. Just come back,” Maggie told everyone. “And you two”—she pointed out the biker and his friend—“when you get back, I want you to stand on either side of the guy who was cut and make sure no one gets within twenty feet of him. There’s twenty bucks in it for each of you if you do.”

“Cool,” the friend said. “I can drink next to anyone for twenty bucks.”

When I died, my price had been hovering around five.

While most of the men in the group headed back in to start drinking on Roger’s dime, the old man with dusty Levi’s and the women stayed put. First up was the old guy and he got right to the point.

“Satan did it,” he told Maggie, sitting down and leaning toward her like they were the best of friends, enjoying a cup of coffee and swapping secrets.

“Satan?” asked Maggie calmly. She’d done this kind of thing before.

“Yup. Looked real sharp, too. Dark hair, nice clothes. Mean face though. I don’t care how pretty he was. He walked in, I saw him and I knew there would be trouble. It was Satan. I tell you that now to save you time.”

“Okay,” Maggie said. “I appreciate the heads-up. I’ll watch my back. Now go tell Roger you’ve earned your free beer.”

The old man smiled his toothless thanks and made room for the older woman with frizzy hair. Maggie took one look at her prematurely aged face, the swollen flesh and broken veins of her body, and sighed. She recognized the signs of a hard-core, cirrhosis-suffering alcoholic when she saw them.

“And what did you see?” Maggie asked. “Because the guy before you claims he saw Satan.”