Angel of Death

TWENTY-FOUR

The wheels of the gurney rattled irritably upon the polished linoleum of the St Mary’s emergency room. Metal doorways and wire-reinforced windows scurried past on one side, a long, unrelieved expanse of flowered wallpaper on the other. The blue-white glow of fluorescent lights flashed overhead in warning.

“Pulse steady at a hundred twenty. Pressure seventy over forty and dropping. Breathing rapid and shallow.”

The man pushed, his face pimpled with cold sweat above his heavy EMT coat, which dragged stiffly at his arms.

“Injury? What happened?” The intern looked frumpy in her gray scrubs, white coat, and hair net.

“I don’t know. The paramedic was a new guy. He disappeared after the first toll. He must’ve screwed up and panicked.”

“God damn it. Here, this way. Got an empty bay over here. What did he do to her?”

“He gave her some oxygen. After that, I don’t know.”

“Oxygen or anesthetic? She could be overdosed, back in a coma, or worse.”

“What about the rapid breathing? That’s not from anesthetic. More like a toxic reaction.”

“God damn it. She was supposed to be safe with us. Anything else?”

“Not that I can think of.”

“Clear off. Nurse, ready the crash cart. IV push. Get somebody checking her mouth for signs of poison. Hell, her shoulders and hips for needle marks, too. God damn it! It’s like that bastard’s able to reach right into shit. Cut her clothes off. Check everywhere. Check every inch of her. Who knows what that fucker did to her.”

I shouldn’t have done that one. I shouldn’t have done him like I did. From the very start, it was a lark. A whim. There wasn’t enough grim poetry in it, only the fun of a lawyer strangling at sixty-five miles an hour on the Edens. But it wasn’t fun. It was cheap and sour and foul.

He was a lawyer, a sometime-prosecutor – a killer, like me, except authorized by the government instead of by God. He made sure criminals received what was coming to them – sometimes steel cages, sometimes death. We were peas in a pod, he and I. I had the same outlook and wanted him to get what he deserved. I chose him partly for that, but mostly because I couldn’t resist when I saw his name spelled out in white plastic capitals on the office register: PHIL JUDGEM.

I shouldn’t have done him. Right then I knew it. This would be no more than a cheap joyride. A fling. A hand-job…

The elevator doors parted. Phil Judgem stood within the red-velour space. He wore a sleek suit of gray-blue, cut to hide his pudginess. A suit can do only so much. His neck strained in its white collar, and venous hands drooped beneath silver cufflinks. The glint of metal was brief, like a spark at his wrists. Judgem moved on. He walked through the lobby. It was a modern sanctuary of glass, steel, and marble. There were others of his kind here, silent and sleek and a little wide-eyed like salmon nuzzling past each other. Judgem reached the perpetually revolving doors, timed his feet, and came out into the sunlit plaza.

I was waiting. The valet jacket was only slightly too big for me. The cap fit perfectly.

“The green Mercedes,” he said to me, holding up the claim card.

I nodded enthusiastically, snatched the keys, and hurried down into the parking lot.

The place was dark, a cave of cement and rusted wire. It smelled poisonous from exhaust. I scanned the current batch, fitted tightly bumper to bumper, and found a dark green Mercedes. Going to it, I tried the key. It fit. I opened the door, sat down in the driver’s seat, started up the car, and pulled out, heading for the main entrance. It was some car, with seats of black leather, power everything, and a ride quiet as a purr.

The gray parking garage gave way to a wedge of cloud-cluttered sky. The car glided up the ramp and came to a smooth stop beside Judgem. I opened the door, stepped from the driver’s seat, and gestured him toward his car. He placed a dollar in my hand and moved past me to get in.

I might not have killed him even then, might have let him drive off, but for the sweaty crumple of that dollar in my hand. I thought of the fifty from that reporter, Blake Gaines. It had been the same. Warm and intimate. Disgusting. One kick knocked him sideways into the passenger seat. He kicked back at me. I shot him. It was a fat bullet. The impact shoved him all the way over. I climbed behind the wheel, locked the windows and doors, and roared out toward Ohio Street and the ramp onto 94 North. He cowered beside me. His hand lay limp in his lap. One fat leg was wrenched a little sideways.

“You can have the car. You can have my wallet. You can have everything, just let me go.”

It was going sour. The whole thing. He smelled of feces – maybe the bullet had cut through bowel, or maybe he’d dirtied himself. He was white and soft as a pudding. He jiggled.

“Please. Anything.”

“God damn it, shut up. Shut the fuck up.” I pointed the gun at his head. I felt sick. I couldn’t enjoy it anymore. He was disgusting. Not like the others. There was no dignity. It was like walking on white worms lying in rain puddles. “Shut the fuck up.”

He vomited. I pressed a button. His window rolled down halfway. We were going sixty-five up the Edens.

“Stick your fucking head outside!” I shouted. Wiping his mouth, he stuck his head out the window. I pressed a button. The glass rose to catch him beneath the chin. He tried to pull his head out, but already it was caught between glass and chrome. He fumbled to reach the controls, but I kept my finger down so nothing he did made a difference. I was sick. He was like a pig with its head stuck in a gate, fat and grotesque as he struggled and died. I couldn’t stand it. I emptied the gun into him, let down the window, and let him roll in beside me. God, what a fucking mess.

Samael was not the angel of death who turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt. Nor was he the angel of death who stole through Egypt to slay all the firstborn sons of the land. Samael’s commission began later, when it was time for Moses to die.

Elohim sought an angel to descend among his people and separate the soul of Moses from his body. God asked the archangel Gabriel, the great messenger to humans, who did not wish to slay the Lawgiver. Next God asked Michael, who was the head of Heaven’s armies and would in time become the angel of death for Christians, but he also refused. Samael, however, was eager for the job of killing God’s greatest prophet.

Though as holy and angelic as all the rest, Samael had a certain penchant for cruelty. After God gave him the task of killing Moses, Samael spent a long while determining how best to do it. Perhaps Moses should die through a series of Egyptlike plagues – his blood would turn to water, his hair to locusts, his genitalia to toads, his skin to boils, his shadow to impenetrable darkness, and so forth. Or, perhaps, Moses could be enticed to part the Jordan River and cross, despite God’s prohibition against him entering the land of milk and honey. Then Samael could loose the tide when Moses was halfway, and the water would crash over him, and he would drown. Or, best of all, Moses could be murdered by a man who, in the single act of killing him, broke all Ten Commandments. The murderer could be Moses’s covetous son, who dishonored his father in an adulterous affair with an idol-worshiper on the Sabbath and, when discovered in the act by Moses, blasphemed and stole Moses’s dagger and murdered him with it, then ran away and testified that his neighbor had done it. Unfortunately, Moses had no such son.

Samael at last settled on simply killing Moses with his bare hands. Samael descended from Heaven, appearing in human form to choke the life from Moses’s body. Moses’s face, however, shone so brightly from having seen God that Samael was scared off. He had planned full-scale atrocities, but this man shone like God! Samael complained to the Creator, who chastised him and sent him back to finish the job. Samael appeared again in human form before Moses, who was ready this time. With his fabled staff – the one that had turned into a serpent – the great prophet walloped Samael. Samael was not used to such treatment at the hands of mortals and went again to complain to God. Meanwhile, Michael and Gabriel, who had said they would not kill Moses, went down to complete the task. They created a heavenly couch and invited the weary old prophet to sit down for a rest. When he did, they whisked the couch up to Heaven.

Though they had gotten Moses off the earth, his soul still did not want to leave his body. He clung tight to the couch. Even the great archangels had failed. In the end, Moses was slain by a kiss from God himself, which made his soul leap for joy, right out of his body. The sun has already set behind the wall of skyscrapers along Grant Park, casting building wedges far out across the foamy lake. I sit on a green-painted park bench. I feed the pigeons. It is an image I cannot resist. The gentle killer. The quiet murderer. The pensive and reflective monster. I don’t like the fat pigeons. Those I kick when I can. I like the skinny little ones. I like the gimp pigeons, the ones with only two claws on a foot, or none at all. I like them because they bear up under the crushing heel of God. God knows when every sparrow falls from Heaven, and when every pigeon goes gimp, and those broken little ones are the fleshly manifestation of His ethereal will.

The dark is deep now. The building shadows have taken over the whole lake. The trees are as black as Purbeck marble. Beyond stands the gray wall of Chicago.

Lincoln Park Zoo is closing. Already, the parking lot is half empty. They’ve locked one of the big iron gates in front. People trickle out the other, in ones and twos and clinging clumps. The numbers dwindle. The people walk low at heel. Their limbs hang tiredly on them. Out comes an old man. His sweater hangs in two triangles above the baggy knees of his gray trousers. At his side capers a child, a tow-headed boy. They could have been Abraham and Isaac, age and youth, patience and vigor. They are coming this way, down this path. I toss out more bits of cracker. I want the pigeons to be as thick as autumn leaves when the boy arrives. I want him to charge into their midst and scatter them in a bleating flock.

The pigeons cooperate, but not the boy. He moves forward with the nudging caution of a car pushing through a flock of sheep. I smile gently at the boy as he and the old man pass me by. They round a hedge and head into a pedestrian tunnel beneath Lake Shore Drive. For some reason, I stand and follow. It is not their time to die. Not today. Not by my hand. Perhaps that is why I follow.

The gun is the charcoal color of the tunnel’s fitted stones, but it glints an even rod of light. The darkness behind it is an alcove, and a man in the alcove. The boy and his grandfather – I had decided that was their relationship – stand in at rigid attention, their hands held comically above their heads.

“Leave them alone,” I shout.

The gun swings toward me for a moment. “Fuck off.”

I continue into the tunnel, already five paces away.

“You fuck off.”

As I close on him, he shoots twice. I feel a strange, disjointed heat in my right hand, but don’t understand it until I swing a fist at the man and see meat and blood and bone slap limply against his face. My left has his gun. I kick him in the groin and wrench his gun away. I turn it and shoot, emptying the cartridge into him. Then, as an afterthought, I fling the hot gun at the gurgling fountain of blood that he has become. Turning, I gaze at the trembling, terrified child and his grandfather. I sketch an ironic bow and gesture them safely on their way.

It was all too familiar – the acoustic tiles, the peach-colored walls, the bed rails and plastic tubes and furtively beeping machines. At first, Donna thought she was awakening from a relapse of the coma, but the speech at the plenary loomed too large in her mind. Something had happened. Something dreadful. Her hand moved down to the mound of her baby. She felt the baby kick, awakening also. She also felt a dozen sore spots. At each one a bright-colored plastic pouch clung leechlike to a taped slit in her skin.

“It’s for the infection,” said a female voice. “It draws the seepage away from your organs.”

Donna glanced stiffly to one side and saw the short, red-haired doctor she vaguely remembered from her previous awakening. “Hello. I just woke up.”

“I just walked by,” responded the doctor, coming to sit at her bedside. “How are you feeling?”

“Wrung out.”

The doctor smiled. Her lipstick was the same hue as her hair. “That’s what we tried to do. Wring you out. The cleaner got all through your peritoneum.”

“In English?”

“Your abdominal organs were bathed in Windex for about three hours. We drained it off, but there was a layer of necrosis on the outsides of some of them. Your body is getting rid of the dead cells, and the little bladders here are drawing out the infection.”

“Windex. How the hell -?”

“He injected you. I think he was trying for the baby. It’s good he didn’t know what to do with a needle. By the time he got through your abdominal muscles, he thought he was into the uterus. He wasn’t into anything except a layer of fat.”

She said ruefully, “We can’t stop him. Nobody can stop him.”

“Well, apparently your baby can. He’s a fighter. The baby wasn’t touched by the stuff, except indirectly, through the effects of the coma.”

The doctor paused, her eyes compassionate above an apologetic smile.

“When I saw you were awake, I had the nurse call your chief. He’s coming up.”

Donna sighed, leaning back. “It’ll take an hour from Burlington.”

The doctor’s smile turned wry. “Actually, he’s coming up from the cafeteria. He’s been taking his lunch here ever since you landed here the second time. He gives a break to the guys stationed outside your door.”

Donna saw a head leaning around the corner and a brief wave before the whole doorway was eclipsed by a fat and red-faced figure. “There’s my girl!” came Biggs’s ebullient greeting. “I had a feeling you’d wake up today.”

“You’ve said that every day,” the doctor replied. The chief’s bruin body seemed to be crying out for a hug, and Donna lifted her arms toward him. He swallowed her in his hearty embrace.

“I’m so glad you’re back with us.”

Donna drew back, and he released her, standing upright. She smiled. “Hi, Chief. It’s good to be back.” She glanced down at the lumps beneath her nightgown, where the little plastic bulbs clung, and began to cry.

“I’d heard pregnancy was a bitch, but-”

He laughed. “You’re back, all right.”

Miserable, she asked, “How many days this time?”

“Three. Just a long nap.”

“And in that time, you’ve caught the Son of Samael, and the killing is all over, and he’ll never touch my baby again?”

He glanced toward the thickly waxed floor. “Afraid not. Still, it doesn’t look like he’s killed while you were under.”

Sadness deepened across her face. “What happened, Chief? He wasn’t supposed to be able to get to me. Not anymore. What the hell happened?”

Behind rags of red on his cheeks, Biggs looked white.

“I’m sorry, Donna. It won’t happen again. He’ll be in prison soon enough.”

She sighed, leaning wearily back into her bed. “If he’d succeeded, it would all be over. Maybe killing me and the baby would have won him his wings back.”

Biggs looked both dismayed and hurt. “No. Don’t talk like that. We need you, Detective. Besides, I’ve got a better plan.”

“A plan? Something proactive, I hope.”

“You could say that. Your funeral is planned for a week and a half from now.”

“My funeral?”

“He’s been reading the papers, Donna. He knew about you waking up last time, about you talking at the plenary, and about the baby. Now he’s going to find out about you dying. You and the baby.”

“Would he fall for that again?”

“He doesn’t have to fall for it completely – just want to find out. We’ll set up a big funeral – dress blues and everything. Cops from three counties. We’ll even have a twenty-one gun salute. A eulogy for you and the baby. He won’t be able to resist.”

“Why a week and a half? Isn’t that a long time to keep me on ice?”

“You’re not going to ‘die’ until next week. We need time to organize this down to the last detail. We’re going to have a hundred cops there and fifty trained spotters, sharpshooters, dogs, the works. He’ll find himself in the center of a beehive.”

“He’s smart. He’ll know it’s a trap.”

“Maybe, but will he be able to resist? I’m betting he won’t.”

“I want to be there,” Donna said, putting on a brave face and struggling to sit up higher in the bed. Every one of the plastic bladders pulled achingly. “I know him better than anyone else. Besides, it’d be nice to sneak up on him for a change.”

“I knew you’d say that. I also knew you’d be invaluable there. This guy’s become a master of disguise. To catch him, we’ll have to let in a lot of pedestrian onlookers, and we’ll need every eye we can get. Yes, you’ll be there – part of the reason we need the extra time for you to recover well enough to walk. But you’ll be armed, and disguised, and wearing a wire and microphone, and guarded by three men.”

“A little conspicuous, don’t you think?”

His lips rolled up between his teeth in a grim smile.

“I’m not willing to lose you again.”

“Well,” said the doctor, breaking in on the conversation, “if you want your guest of honor to be ready for next week, you’d better let her get some more rest now.”

“Yes,” the captain said. Sweat prickled across his brow. “Yes.”

“Oh, one last thing,” Donna asked, “where am I to be buried? I was always hoping for St Mary’s Cemetery. God’s Acre, and all that.”

The chief shook his head. “St Mary’s is too open, too hard to lock down.”

“St Charles-”

“You don’t want St Charles, with all those woods – paths everywhere and tree forts and kids with paintball guns and guys sitting on rocks smoking weird shit.”

“Where, then?”

“You’re going in with the Protestants. Burlington Cemetery’s got only one access road, and it’s backed by an impassible swamp. We’ll have the road blockaded and cops as thick as gravestones.”

“Sounds restful,” she said, drifting to sleep. The Son of Samael lay against the wall. He would be in a bathtub except that it was down the hall and shared by five other rooms, and the tub was grimier than the cockroach-littered floor. He lay against the wall, wincing with each turn of the splintered stick. Already, the rag around his wrist was tight enough to stop the bleeding, but he wrenched the stick one last turn, hearing the soft grind of the radius and ulna as they bowed against each other.

There, tight enough. He paused, giving himself two long, low breaths and gritting his teeth. Oh, to be done with this pulpy and fragile flesh. To at last be done. Leaning forward, he gingerly slid the second rag out from between his teeth and clumsily, with his one good hand, wrapped the cloth around the stick and his arm, just below the elbow. Fingers working with echoes of pain, he tied the cloth in a half hitch, and then a square knot. The tourniquet was complete.

He sighed. His vision was filled with prickly intrusions where pain and blood loss ate away at his sight. He lifted the wounded hand. It was a mottled blue. Maroon blood seeped from two wounds. One bullet had pierced his palm, cracked the carpal bone of his ring finger, and wrenched out the back of his hand, leaving a mess of splintered bone, oozy muscle, and ripped skin. The other had struck near the base of his thumb. It had torn away the careful stitching the surgeon had done, and left the thumb dangling loose.

Samael stared at the ruined hand. He would wait until all sensation was gone below the tourniquet, then cut the hand off entirely. He had done the same to the hands of others.

The amputation somehow pleased him. He would be rid of one hunk of flesh that not only could but did cause him agony. Perhaps, if this amputation worked well, he would take off the whole arm. Twenty pounds of meat and bone would put him that much farther from the mortal realm. If only he could whittle it all away and regain his angelic form…

Ah, the merciful numbness had come.

He had done this a hundred times. Now was no different. Ram the steel tip down just beyond the heads of the radius and ulna, thereby cracking the ligaments in the joint. Then, shove it through the wrist bones, and saw away at what was left.

He positioned the knifepoint in the shallow cleft above his arm bones. Leaning his sternum upon the butt of the knife, he lunged downward. The crackle of snapped ligaments and splintered bone edges was a white-hot flash in his mind…

Numbly, he realized he slumped over the knife and the pinned flesh of his wrist. He couldn’t breathe. There was a sound like swarming bees in his head, and piercing yellow lights…

He awoke, shuddering, atop the canted knife. He lurched back and sat, panting. His wrist was still pinned to the floor.

Pain. It was the basis of all human morality. Everyone was captive to it. Everyone was vulnerable insofar as others could torture and rape and destroy the body. That is why humans seek to do each other no harm. That is why they consider it wrong to beat or mutilate or kill. That is why they believe in going to Heaven or Hell.

But none of that mattered. He was not human, not anymore. He would toss away this hand as though it were a tin can.

Prying the blade up from the weepy wound, he set the tip again and lunged. The hand tilted away from the blade. One more lunge, and the appendage hung loose on tatters of flesh. He could see the floor through the three stabs he had made.

Only moments more, and I can toss this hand in with the others.

With a grim gritting of teeth, the Son of Samael set to sawing his own hand free.