Desolate Angel (37 page)

Somehow I would stop him.

I melded into Hayes, insisting on occupying the same place in time and space. I paid a terrible price for it. Pain swallowed me instantly, filling every fiber of my being. My torso and legs felt as if they were on fire, yet my blood remained cold, much colder than when I’d been alive. I could feel it moving through me like ice, freezing everything it touched, leaving me paralyzed as if I, too, had turned to ice. Screams filled my head, obliterating my ability to think. They were high-pitched cries of agony, and below the terrible sounds of that suffering, I heard the sobs of hundreds more wailing in grief.

This was what Hayes fed on. This was what Maggie was walking into.

Hayes had left several of the lights on intentionally, hoping to lure Maggie inside. They illuminated the front half of the cave as she entered, creeping forward slowly, advancing only when she saw that the way was clear. She stepped forward and saw no one. She glanced toward the dark half of the cavern, examining it for signs of danger. The beam of her flashlight danced across the rock walls and the two stone altars. She caught a glimpse of the old man’s body crumpled behind one of them and, forgetting all else, rushed to him. Turning her back to us, she knelt beside the old man and placed her flashlight on the ground next to his head before she checked his pulse.

Hayes struck.

Maggie was in perfect physical shape, and she was armed, but Hayes had the advantage of surprise. It took him a single step to reach her. He knocked the gun out of her hand and it hit the flashlight, spinning it in a circle until it came to rest with its beam pointing mockingly toward the only way out. Before she knew he was even there, Hayes had his arm wrapped tightly around her throat and was pressing in relentlessly, choking off her air supply. Maggie bucked and kicked furiously, stomped backward with her heels, bit at his hands, twisted and turned, trying to inflict damage. She was strong, but not as strong as Hayes. Her struggles only infuriated him and made him more determined to bring her under his control. She could not break free. The lack of oxygen started to take its toll and her struggling grew weaker. Soon she would be his.

I was mad with rage. There was nothing I could do. I lacked corporeal substance. “Maggie,” I screamed, though I knew she could not hear me. “Fight him, Maggie. Fight him.”

I cried out for no one but myself. I felt the consciousness slipping from her as her life force dimmed and her strength began to ebb away. Alan Hayes now had his other arm wrapped over her chest, holding her half aloft, as he used his right arm to play with the pressure on her larynx. He did not want her dead. He wanted her alive—and under his control. I could feel the excitement rising in him, alive and unstoppable.

I would lose her.

I was mad with grief, I was cursing the heavens that kept me here to see it, when the cave exploded with sound, a reverberating blast that lingered even as a dark spot in the very center of Alan Hayes’s forehead bloomed and began to ooze blood.

His life was over in a heartbeat.

He wavered, released Maggie, and let her fall at his feet, then slumped against the rock wall and slid to the floor. He was dead by the time he hit the dirt, his life erased as completely as if someone had flicked a light switch off. He did not fight, he did not linger, he was not claimed by anyone or anything. I felt nothing leave him, nothing fighting to stay.

He was simply there one moment and gone the next.

Maggie lay sprawled on the floor, fighting her way back to consciousness, unaware of who her savior had been. Me? I was overcome at what I saw. At first, I did not recognize the figure rushing toward her from the entranceway, gun in hand, panting from his journey up the hill. My mind refused to process that it was him. But as he drew closer, my mind acknowledged what I was seeing at last. I put together the overweight body, disheveled clothes, sweating face, ginger hair, the smell of stale liquor: Danny.

My old partner, Danny, was a hero.

“Oh, my god,” he said, sinking to his knees. “Are you okay? Maggie? Are you okay?” He held Maggie in his arms, propping her up gently as he shook her and probed for a pulse.

And in that second, I realized that, though Danny feared Maggie for some unknown reason I could not understand, he also loved her as I did. Some long-forgotten, long-dormant place inside him, still lit by hope, actually longed for her. I felt pity toward him for the all-too-human disappointment that awaited him. But I felt gratitude toward him, too. He had done what I had been unable to do—he had saved her.

I stepped out of the shadows, wanting to be with them both, to be a part of what they shared. But Danny made a sound so primal and terrified, it did not even sound human. He stared at me and started to tremble all over. His gun clattered to the dirt.

Danny could see me.

“It’s okay,” I said, stretching my arms out. “It’s just me, buddy. Your old partner.”

I don’t think he could hear me.

He started to mumble and backed away from me. He fell, clawed at the dirt floor, and scrambled to his feet, then ran to the cave’s only exit.

“I’m sorry,” he called back to me, his face flushed scarlet. “I’m sorry, Fahey. I’m sorry. For god’s sake, I’m sorry.”

“Wait!” I called to him, reaching out a hand, but he only fled out the door.

I followed, trying to make him understand that I was not going to hurt him. That I was grateful to him for saving Maggie’s life.

“Bonaventura!” I called after him, but Danny only ran faster, pushing his aging body in his panic, crashing through bushes and shrubs and brambles, shredding the skin on his arms and face, falling and scrambling back to his feet, hurtling himself forward again, looking back over his shoulder then, seeing me still there, gasping in panic as he pushed himself even harder.

“Danny!” I yelled. “Stop! I just want to help. I know I can help you. Let me.”

Danny reached the rocks marking the end of the paved hiking path and scrambled on top of one of the boulders. His breath was coming in ragged gasps and I knew his heart could not take much more strain. I could feel his pulse pounding, a miniature jackhammer racing toward implosion.

“Leave me alone,” Danny screamed as he clawed his way up the rocks, scrambling from boulder to boulder, going ever higher. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Just leave me alone. For god’s sake, I’m sorry.”

He reached the top of the hill. There was nowhere to go. The pinnacle ended in a steep cliff that fell off in a great slash of stone ending far below. He inched out to the edge of the cliff and stared down at the abandoned quarry a quarter mile beneath him. He was panting and his chest heaved up and down. Sweat poured over his face.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I pleaded as I reached the cliff and stepped toward him.

Danny turned to face me, his eyes filling with tears. His hands were shaking with fear. “I didn’t mean to,” he told me. “I panicked. I didn’t think it through. I just panicked. I wanted to take it all back the moment it was done.”

“I just want to thank you for helping Maggie,” I tried to tell him.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, his eyes locked on mine, and I knew he wasn’t just talking to me. He was talking to everyone he had ever known, everyone who had loved him and been disappointed, everyone he had failed during his life.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered a final time as he leaned back into space and began to fall.

“Danny,” I called out as I threw myself over the cliff after him. He was falling calmly, not thrashing, his arms perfectly still, as if he had made up his mind and was now determined to disappear, to sink as surely as a rock plummeting to a lake bottom.

I would not let him go alone.

I fell with him and time seemed to stop, losing its relevance. I entered Danny’s thoughts and became part of his memories, accessing his final recollection.

What unfolded was as real as it had been the first time around: I could feel the chill of a wintry row house along the banks of the Delaware, hear the scuttling of rats in the corners, smell the urine, see the discarded candy wrappers and other refuse. I could see the wide eyes of the drug dealer staring at us in the dim light of a fading day. I could smell his fear. He held a gun in his hand and he was pointing it first at Danny and then at me. Danny was pointing a gun back at him. I was standing a few feet away from them both, looking at one and then the other, confused.

“You take me down and you go down with me,” the dealer said to Danny. “I know who you are. I know your partner. You can’t touch me. Touch me and you pay the price.”

I made a sound of surprise, and that got his attention. As the dealer turned his head toward me, Danny shot him right through the heart and fired again, hitting the man in his forehead as he dropped to the floor. I stared at Danny in horror, then looked down at the dealer.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

The gun had slid out of the dealer’s hand and Danny walked over to it. He picked it up, looked at it for a moment, then turned and stared at me, puzzled, as if he had never seen me before.

“Danny?” I asked as he raised the dealer’s gun, took aim—and shot.

I fell to the floor, wounded in my right shoulder, and Danny squeezed the trigger again. This time, it was a shot straight through the heart. He walked over to my body and stared down at me, betraying no emotion, then leaned over until he was inches from my face. He said my name just once: “Fahey?” Satisfied that I was dead, he wiped the gun he still held with a handkerchief, then knelt down and placed the gun back in the drug dealer’s hand. He aimed toward me and took yet another shot, hitting the wall behind where I had been standing, leaving residue on the dead drug dealer and his clothing.

Danny stood up, rubbed the small of his back as if it was aching, then looked around the room, thinking. He walked over and swapped out his weapon for mine. He took the gun he’d used to shoot the dealer and laid it next to me, then took my own from my ankle holster and pocketed it. No one would know. We’d been together too long. And we were using unsanctioned weapons to begin with, smaller revolvers that were easier to conceal and, as Danny often said, easier to aim.

He’d proved it that day.

He knelt by my body, checked my pulse once again, and found nothing. Only then did he pull a cell phone from his pocket and make the call. “Officer down,” he shouted into the phone. “A bust went bad. Fahey is down.”

Down. Yes, I was down—and then down some more. The memory of my last few minutes alive faded and Danny and I were falling again, falling into space, the rocks below rushing up at us, Danny’s eyes locked on mine, his terror emanating from him in palpable waves.

“It’s okay. I forgive you. And it’s not so bad being dead,” I tried to tell him, but time had started again and we had reached the bottom. For me, it was nothing. I was simply there, on the ground, looking down at Danny. For Danny, it was the end. He lay shattered before me, his body broken by the jagged rocks at the base of the cliff, his skull shattered by the impact.

My old friend. My partner. My killer.

He was gone. I had glimpsed the defining moment of his life or, perhaps, more accurately, the defining moment of his death: my own grim passing.

This was what Danny had been concealing from Maggie. This was what Danny had been afraid she might find. That was what had caused him to follow Maggie, to watch her to see what she discovered, to try to find out what she knew about his role in my death and his role in whatever dark partnership had led to my killing. He’d had nothing to do with Hayes except a need to stop Maggie from searching, to stop her and others from looking into our cases and noticing how many Danny had sabotaged.

I’d never known, never even suspected, never been sober enough to notice that my partner was not only unkempt, incompetent, and uncaring—he was also a dirty cop. The one thing I had prided myself on not being.

It had cost me my life.

I sat on a boulder near Danny’s body, waiting for something to happen, contemplating the sorry mess I’d made of my life, wondering if it would be the same in my death.

I’d just driven a man to kill himself, and even if he’d been driven by his own guilt more than anything else, that did not erase my participation in it.

Yet, had Danny deserved to keep on living? It wasn’t as if he treated life with any respect, most especially not his own. It was better for him to have died moments after saving Maggie’s life. He had taken my life, but he had saved hers. I’d be willing to trade my life for Maggie’s in the great karmic stock exchange of the universe. I’d gladly pay that price. The world was better off without me, and it was most certainly better with her in it. If Danny had been an instrument of that balance, so be it. Redemption never came cheap.

I was still sitting on the boulder, staring at Danny’s broken body, contemplating the great mysteries of life and death, when a small black nose appeared in my line of vision. The little terrier had made his way down the hill. Ever the tracker, ever the troublemaker, he now sat, staring enthusiastically at me, his tongue lolling from his mouth after his run, tail thumping the ground happily in goodwill.

“Now you want to be friends?” I asked the dog. “Now?”

I wanted to laugh. It was all too perfect: Terror. Joy. Sadness. Happiness. Luck. Happenstance. Rivalries. Friendship. Love. Hate. All wrapped together in one big crazy set of coincidences people called “life.”

And, somehow, it all made sense.

Above me, around me, moving toward me, came loud voices followed by men and women in uniform, people shouting orders, people hurrying up the old road that snaked through the abandoned quarry, bodies crashing through the bushes toward where I sat, calling out to each other.

All evidence of life, this life, all evidence I had been left behind again.

I was not of the living and I was not of the dead. I was alone.