Avenging Angel Read online

  Annotation

  INNER-CITY HELL…

  CIRCA 2031

  The city rises like an evil vision from its surroundings… the heavily guarded suburbs, the garrisoned farmlands. Life is sweeter in the fortified elite Hill section where the privileged few live, but elsewhere the city makes its own rules for life and death.

  Even in this ruthless, anything-goes world, Jake Strait has his limits — a line that he won't cross willingly. He won't do political jobs. But when a rich, pampered couple from the Hill sets him up, he is drawn into a plot that plans to drench the city with blood.

  AGAINST HIS WILL, JAKE STRAIT BECOMES THE FAVORITE SON OF A PEOPLE'S REVOLUTION — AND THERE'S HELL TO PAY.

  * * *

  Frank Rich

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  Epilogue

  * * *

  Frank Rich

  Avenging Angel

  OCR Mysuli: [email protected]

  1

  "I've seen God and I tell you he's crazy!" the mad prophet cried.

  "Maybe he was just drunk," I said, stepping into the dim room. The old man sat deep in an ancient armchair, fat and as drunk as Bacchus. Spent bottles and hypos surrounded his low throne — the minions of a mad king. I pointed my 20 mm gyrapistol at his head, knowing I should shoot him right then. The old man looked infirm enough, but I knew Graham's kind: evil and full of tricks.

  "No! He is completely insane!" Graham shrieked, his hands fluttering over his head like bats. "Heaven is in ruins. None could stand before his terrible power. The heads of those who tried are impaled on the Pearly Gates… St. Thomas and Francis, the valiant St. Christopher who tried to warn man."

  "What about St. Peter?" I asked.

  "He's God's number-one enforcer. He guards the gate, allowing no mortal souls in or out."

  "Are you telling me the Lord is reneging on his biblical contract?"

  "He never signed the damn thing! You fools don't realize that ours is a passionate god, not some kind and bland computer full of logic circuits. He is as frail with emotion as those created in his image, and now he's completely wigged."

  "Jesus Christ," I said.

  "He's missing, perhaps the prisoner of his own father."

  I stared at the madman. "Where do you get your information, anyway?"

  "Firsthand! I've traveled the cosmos! I've slipped beneath Heaven's gates. I've ranged the seven hells, my soul clutched tightly. I've spoken with the Devil!"

  "How is Nick?"

  "He surrendered his dark throne to mortal souls blacker than his own! Now he wanders the most desolate plains of hell, shamed and broken, weeping tears of the hottest flame."

  I watched as Graham chased a handful of pills with a good two-inch pull from a bottle of gin. Tears welled from the red pits of his eyes.

  "I have to stay awake these last moments," he sobbed. "I have to face the great unknown like a true prophet."

  I nodded and removed a folded document from my coat pocket. Graham's beady eyes clawed at it.

  "What's that?" he asked.

  "Your execution warrant."

  "You're going to read it?"

  "No, I'm going to leave it with your body so everyone knows the score." I dropped it in his lap.

  He fingered the document with a morbid reverence, testing the texture of the paper with his fingers. "So you're a bogeyman."

  "Yes."

  "How much is my demise worth to you?"

  "Four hundred credits. Enough to pay the food and liquor bills for the month."

  "That's not much."

  "Not for a mass murderer it isn't."

  "Murderer!" Fire jumped in his eyes. "I didn't murder my faithful. I dispatched them on the greatest mission mankind has ever undertaken."

  "The way I heard it, you lined them up in your Church of the True Path in ten neat rows of ten, then put a bullet in the back of each head. You must have had to pause every twelve bodies or so to slap in a fresh magazine." Rage began squeezing the trigger. "One hundred men, women and children."

  "Trained pioneers, all of them! Handpicked and instructed by myself." The old man wiped away tears with the back of his hand. "I didn't murder my dear children. I freed their souls. To find a new Heaven."

  "What?"

  "Hell is in turmoil, Heaven won't take us. Mankind has to provide for its own salvation now. We have to find a refuge before Jehovah makes his move. Even now he's organizing his dark angels to attack earth and destroy all our souls. We were a mistake, and now he wants to get rid of us. My one hundred went out to search the cosmos for a new afterlife sanctuary for mankind. They must have found one or they wouldn't have sent you."

  "What makes you think they sent me?"

  "How did you find me?"

  "An anonymous call."

  "Isn't that unusual?"

  "Happens all the time. Criminals are always finking on each other. Keeps the competition down."

  "No one alive knew I was here. I was very careful about that. Only the one hundred knew."

  I checked my chrono. I'd spent ten minutes listening to the ravings of a lunatic I was supposed to kill. "Have you any final words of repentance?"

  He laughed. "Do you really think repenting will change anything?"

  "Not if God is as wiggy as you say he is."

  Graham gazed at the hand scratching his immense belly. "Do you realize how little technology has advanced in the last thirty years, since the end of the twentieth century? Mankind is spiritually and genetically bankrupt, as obsolete as the dodo bird. We won't last much longer."

  "Maybe we're just in a slump."

  A dry laugh creaked out of his mouth, and sneaky eyes slunk up to mine. "Don't you wonder why I've told you all this?"

  "Because you're drunk or crazy or both."

  "No. I've told you so you'll be prepared. Because you're going with me." He opened his shirt, and around his fish-white belly was strapped a fat black cylinder the size of a fist. His hand came away with a grenade pin. "I don't want to go alone. You can keep me company. There's room in the new afterlife for ruthless young men. You can be my enforcer. I'm saving your soul, bogeyman. Eight seconds to paradise!"

  "You dirty bastard!"

  "Seven seconds, bogeyman!"

  I pulled the trigger, and Graham's laughing head expanded into a blood-red halo. I leaped upon his flapping body and tugged at the thermite grenade, but the nylon strap held it fast. Graham's nerve-animated body rolled out of the chair, his immense weight pinning me to the floor.

  Six seconds.

  For a breathless instant I struggled beneath his smothering bulk, the live grenade digging into my ribs.

  Five.

  With desperate strength I heaved, and the trembling mass of flesh rolled off me like a monstrous bag of Jell-O. I sprang to my feet.

  Four.

  I lunged down the hallway, arms pumping furiously, boots booming on the hardwood floor like cannon shots. The corridor looked a million meters long.

  Three.

  I collided with a rain-soaked breeze pouring through the open window at the end of the hall, the very window I'd crawled through like a thief ten minutes earlier.

  Two.

  I leaned into my headlong stride, my ent
ire being focused on the window, my mind, spirit and body aligned for one powerful purpose. The window became Heaven, hope, my sole salvation.

  One.

  With still two meters to go, I left earth, launching myself at the window like an awkward spear.

  The blast grabbed me by the nape of the neck and threw me into the night like a drunk. I met the alley floor with a bone-jarring crunch and slid on my belly into a row of garbage cans.

  I awoke facing the sky, my eye sockets full of water. Fat drops of radioactive rain fell in vain on the flames devouring Graham's hideaway. A churning column of smoke reached into the night sky and with it went any chance of collecting my bounty. After long moments of despair, I crawled to my feet, pawing the filth from my clothes.

  Except for ringing ears, jangled nerves and a big bruise that started at the bottom of my feet and ended at the top of my head, I felt grand. My fleshly shell was marred, but inside, my soul was safe. I found my pistol in the garbage, none the worse. I crept out of the alley, angling across the street.

  A small group of children stood in front of Graham's funeral pyre. I checked the geiger on my chrono. With the reading above two hundred rads, they shouldn't have been outside. Over the crash of the downpour and the crackling of the fire rose a song chanted in the voice of innocence long forsaken.

  Bogeyman, bogeyman, go away,

  Come again some other day,

  You killed my pa

  Cuz he broke the law,

  Killed my mother

  And my brother,

  You won't kill me,

  I'll be free,

  I'll take my life

  With a butcher knife,

  Bogeyman, bogeyman, go away,

  Come again some other day.

  Before I could reach my car, one of the children spotted me and screamed.

  "Bogeyman!" A half-dozen fire-lit faces turned on me and for a second they stood frozen with a collective breath-stealing terror only children knew. "Bogeyman," one whispered and they scattered like leaves in the wind.

  I crawled inside the Cadillac's weathered hulk and started the engine. No matter how I dressed, no matter how hard I tried to hide it, the children always knew.

  2

  The red sun squatted low on the horizon, swollen and corpulent. The big bay window of my third-story office also offered an excellent view of Hayward, the sleaziest street of a sleazy city. I stuck my hands in my pockets, pockets as poor as a Sunday-morning wino's, and contemplated what Graham had said three weeks earlier.

  Sluggish streams of industrial workers filed past on the sidewalks below, their faces hammered slack by hours of monotonous labor. Proper citizens with real jobs getting off another endless shift, dragging their tired feet to Hayward's many bars, brothels and drug dens, hoping to loosen the rude harnesses life tightened daily. The indigent street life moved among them like jackals, going about their business with an arrogant ease that spoke of no higher authority. Pimps stood in doorways like rogue fashion plates, brooding and watchful; hustlers shuffled about, probing for human frailty; gaudy whores challenged passersby like listless sentries; junkies moved to that hectic junky beat, arm eager for the needle.

  Maybe Graham was right, maybe God was crazy. It would explain a lot.

  I drew my hand from my pocket and formed a fleshy pistol. Sighting down the forefinger, I let the thumb-hammer fall. Below, in my mind's eye, a pimp sprawled into the gutter, his heart ruptured. Another invisible bullet sped downward, and a pusher collapsed on the corner. A chubby hornbug was about to get his karmic reward when my office door opened and the first clients I'd seen in a month stepped in.

  The pair teetered in the doorway as if my office were a yawning black abyss they had a bad feeling about falling into. I followed their worried stares to my hand. Collapsing the pistol into a fist, I walked to my desk and sat down.

  "Please have a seat," I said, gesturing to a worn plaid sofa near the door. The couple exchanged reassuring glances, clasped hands and crept to the sofa. They left the door open a crack as if they wanted a clear means of escape if things got too scary. After another exchange of glances, they very cautiously lowered their posteriors to the sofa. They sat with a straight-backed tension that suggested they were fully prepared to spring the required two meters to freedom if the need arose.

  I looked them over with a professional eye. They were as out of place in the neighborhood as a bottle of Dom Perignon in the hands of a local wino. The man wore a silver executive-style jumper as if it were a suit of armor, and I could have sold his chrome-tipped wing tips to any tasteful pimp for at least two hundred creds. Over his suit hung a rumpled gray overcoat with the collar turned up. He probably imagined it helped him blend in with the neighborhood. The rumples looked somehow artificial, as though he'd had the butler put them in with a special tool. He wore his hair in the manner of the rich, long and wavy. He was smart enough not to wear jewelry.

  The woman was hooched up in a loose-fitting drab gray pantsuit with flared collar and oversize cuffs. Black canvas jungle boots and crossed bandoliers complete with plastic bullets finished the costume. They probably sold it in a boutique on the Hill as the "streetwise proletariat look." Her orange hair towered into a monstrous beehive, serving to narrow her wide Nordic face. A jeweled headband and emerald choker clashed badly with the rest of her outfit, but they did serve to say that although she dressed like the lower classes, she was definitely not lower class. She had a plastic, contrived sort of beauty and looked too young to be the man's wife — not that that meant anything. There was also an air about her that said she wasn't getting enough sex at home but was too tasteful to look for it elsewhere, the unhappy union of frustration and resignation prominent in her eyes and mouth.

  They held hands tightly and touched at the shoulders. Back at the mansion they probably fought like paranoid junkies, but there was nothing like a potentially hostile environment to make a couple intimate. He looked defensive and vaguely defiant, and she looked as though she wouldn't pass up a good opportunity to scream.

  "Boo!" I said.

  "Eek!" she said.

  No one seemed sure what was supposed to happen next, so the man, a little wide-eyed, stood up and spoke.

  "I am Dashmeil Chamberlain." The introduction packed the somber weight of someone accustomed to respect and maybe even fear. He paused for a moment as if waiting for some sign of recognition, a bow or something. When he didn't get one, he frowned and glared at me.

  "And this…" he gestured economically at the woman"…is Barbara Chamberlain, my wife."

  "Matching last names and all," I said. "That's super."

  They both gave me pained looks. It wasn't a wise thing to say to those who might be willing to break my streak of insolvency, but I couldn't help myself. I hadn't had a client for so long I'd forgotten all my social graces.

  "Just a little joke. How can I help you, Mr. and Mrs. Chamberlain?"

  His first look told me he doubted very much if I could be of any help whatsoever. His next expression arrived after a resigned sigh, a look that said he might be persuaded to let even humble me have a crack at his problems.

  He reached inside his coat, and I reached inside mine. He froze with his hand buried in an inner pocket, and his eye began to twitch. His wife sucked in a double lungful of air and looked ready to scream.

  It wasn't that I thought Dashmeil was going to pull out anything more lethal than a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses, but in my line of work you could never be too careful. Besides, it made me appear hard-boiled.

  "Documents," Dashmeil wheezed. "Just some documents." His face squinched up, and a big, ugly pulsating vein surfaced on his forehead. His hand came out of his jacket timidly, and he laid a handful of papers on the desk. I brought out my own hand with a pack of vitacigs instead of a gun. I popped out a vitacig, and they stared at it as if they'd never seen one before. I lit the cig and left it dangling from the corner of my mouth. Leaning back slightly in the chair, my eyes hooded, I
inhaled a day's supply of vitamins and gave them my cold, confident look.

  "Are you all right?" Barbara asked.

  I sat forward slightly. "Of course I'm all right. Why do you ask?"

  "You looked as if you were in pain for a moment."

  "Are those for me?" I asked, pointing a finger at the documents. Chamberlain nodded and pushed the papers across the desk. I noticed his nails were manicured and his hands were pink and soft looking.

  I picked up the papers. As I flipped through them, Dash gave me a running narrative.

  "The first document is a certified copy of an open warrant for the execution-without-trial of one Rolland Dillon Crawley as issued by the judicial branch of the City's Security and Protection Force."

  I nodded and turned to the next page.

  "Page two is a detailed list of all the crimes that Mr. Crawley has been convicted of in absentia," Dash continued.

  It was.

  "The third and fourth pages," he said, keeping up nicely, "state all available information concerning Mr. Crawley, including physical description, past whereabouts, psychological profile and photograph."

  On a whim I went back to the first page to see if he'd start the narrative over again, like those voice machines built into museum displays. Dash gave me a quizzical look but didn't breathe a word. The guy was sharp.

  "The final page," he said, jumping the gun, "is a true and legal document — a contract, if you like — stating that upon providing legal proof to any branch of the Party Bank of the demise of Mr. Crawley at your or your hirelings' hands, you will receive the sum of five thousand credits, payable to your account." He finished with a nod of self-congratulation for a job done properly and efficiently. His wife beamed with pride, and he tried not to look too vain about it.

  I scrutinized the last document closely. Runaway inflation or no, five thousand creds was a tall stack of plastic. And if appearances meant anything, the Chamberlains were good for it.

  "Is this all?" I asked.

  They searched each other's faces for an answer but couldn't find one. Barbara said, "Should there be more?"