Conspiracy of Angels Read online

  There were scrapes on his knuckles from breaking two of her teeth. He rubbed the raw, infected skin while he argued.

  She was breaking up with him. He couldn’t yell loud enough to berate her, wanted to hit her even then, but she was miles away.

  He had a thumper dangling from his belt—something shaped like a mini-baseball bat used to test the tires on his truck. I couldn’t say how, but I knew the nature of the little tool in an instant. Red in the face and raging, he grabbed the thumper and beat it repeatedly against the side of the phone. Then he was screaming into the receiver that she couldn’t do this to him, that he would show her, he would make her pay.

  Through hiccupping sobs, she said no more—she wouldn’t let him hurt her anymore.

  That was when she grabbed the gun sitting next to the box of tissues. When she closed her lips around the muzzle, the blast nearly drove me to my knees. With a hoarse cry, I tore my hand away from the side of the pay phone. It felt like I was going to vomit again, and my pulse hammered painfully in my head. I tried to breathe through it, acutely aware of the feel of eyes on my back.

  What the hell? Was this some kind of vision? If it was, what was I supposed to do with it—run out and stop her? I didn’t recognize either the woman or the man. Maybe it was something that had already happened. Yet it was so immediate—I could still taste the metal of the gun.

  Clenching my teeth against the echo of the gunshot, I tried to get a grip on myself. There wasn’t anything I could do for anyone, not in my current state—even if what I’d just seen was real. I closed my eyes and counted my breaths until my heart resumed a steadier pace. I had to get my own shit sorted out.

  Picking up the business end of the phone, I started feeding it quarters. With trembling fingers, I punched in the number for Heaven. I needed answers. With luck, they would be on the other end of the line.

  4

  No one picked up. I counted to ten, gritting my teeth tighter with each ring. It didn’t even go to an answering machine.

  I was tempted to revisit the abuse to the phone, only with my fist instead of a thumper. Knowing how little that would accomplish, I took a deep, steadying breath. Still, I hung up the phone with such force that it made the internal bell ding. The coin return vomited quarters and they cascaded onto the floor. I could feel eyes on me from the bar again and I just put my back to them.

  After collecting the change, I leaned over the little shelf next to the phone, gripping my head with both hands. All the weird shit spinning around in my brain made it hard to think.

  I was just about to call the Roadway Express and ask about a room when something prompted me to try the number for Heaven again. Nothing so clear as a vision. Just a feeling.

  Couldn’t hurt. I had the quarters.

  The line started ringing. I pressed the phone to my ear, irritably pacing the short distance its cord allowed, looking everywhere but at the people who were glaring at me. The flickering television screens caught my eye, if only for a few moments each. A football match. A poker game—which somehow was a sport now. Local news. World news. Hockey.

  By the fifth ring, I was ready to give up on the hunch and just call it a night. Sure, I was going to have to walk at least another mile to the damned hotel, but at the end of that walk there was a hot shower and a soft bed waiting for me—assuming the platinum card in my wallet was legit.

  Abruptly, the monotone ring cut short and the throb of very loud, oontzy dance music spilled from the other end. Then there was a muffled voice, lilting and female.

  “Club Heaven. Can I help you?”

  I opened my mouth and went totally blank. What was I going to say?

  Hi, this is your friendly neighborhood amnesiac. I’m lost in East Bumfuck and seeing all kinds of weird shit. Come pick me up, please.

  Sure, that would work.

  Stammering a bit, I managed, “Uh, this is Zachary. Zachary Westland?” The name still felt foreign on my tongue.

  She was silent on the other end, though the pounding music never ceased. I started to worry that she hadn’t heard me clearly.

  “Hello?” I prompted.

  Pitching her voice a little louder, she repeated, “Can I help you?”

  “It’s Zachary Westland,” I said a little more firmly.

  “Are you calling about a special event?” the woman asked. She sounded bored. Then I heard a male voice and her giggled response. The pulse of the music suddenly grew muted, as if she’d cupped her hand over the phone. There was the dim exchange of voices, hers and the man’s. None of the words translated, but there was enough vocal inflection to guess that they were—at the very least—flirting.

  I scowled, whirling around in the alcove on the short leash of the phone cord.

  That’s when I saw it. My face—or at least a reasonable approximation of the face in the driver’s license. It was a police sketch. Of course, considering the kind of day I was having, what else could it have been?

  The reception on the TV was terrible, lines marching up the screen and flickering spastically. At the bottom, a little ticker-style announcement scrolled along.

  …wanted for questioning in the Rockefeller Park shooting. Consider armed and dangerous. Notify police immediately. It was followed with a hotline number, as well as a code for texts.

  “Shit,” I breathed and nearly dropped the handset.

  A brassy-haired woman sitting at the end of the bar followed my gaze, then did a double take. Her gaudily painted lips opened to make a little “O” of surprise. The sketch was replaced with an innocuous image of a park—nothing but some leafless trees and a statue of what looked for all the world like Mahatma Gandhi. The woman squinted, trying to follow the scrolling letters as the warning repeated across the bottom of the screen.

  A sick cocktail of anxiety and fear roiled in my gut.

  Not good. Not good at all.

  The music on the other end of the phone came through clearly all of a sudden.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said, a little breathlessly. “Were you calling about a special event?” A throaty purr beneath her words replaced the boredom.

  “Zachary Westland,” I repeated automatically, as if the name were a talisman, but my real attention was on the woman with the bad dye-job as she debated what to do.

  Considered armed and dangerous. Notify police immediately.

  “Sir, this is Club Heaven. We’re open from ten pm till three am Thursday through Sunday. We do special events weekdays…” She droned on, reciting from memory. The brassy-haired woman bent to retrieve a mammoth purse from the floor beside her stool. Digging around frantically in its depths, she pulled out a cell phone and retreated to a quieter corner of the building.

  “Oh, fuck me running,” I complained.

  The girl on the other end of the phone thought I was swearing at her. She cursed right back, her voice rising stridently.

  “Look, you stupid bastard, we don’t have a Zachary Westland on staff. Ask a real question or get off my goddamned phone—hey!” This last came out as an indignant squeak. There were sounds like a mild struggle over the handset, then another voice came across the line.

  “Zaquiel? Is that you? Why on earth are you calling this line?” It was the male, no longer murmuring. He spoke in a clear, mellifluous tone, words clipped with a subtle accent that I couldn’t quite place.

  The name lanced through me like lightning. Images flooded my head, jumbled and incoherent. The only thing I made out with any clarity was the thunderous music of hundreds of voices raised in perfect song. Beautiful and agonizing, it hit me like a punch to the gut. I struggled to recover, and at the same time, I saw the woman snap a picture of me with her cell.

  Damn, damn, damn!

  “Gotta go,” I said hastily, hanging up the phone and snagging my coat in one swift movement. Then I headed for the door as quickly as I could without attracting any further attention. I kept Ms. Bad Dye Job in sight out of the corner of my eye. She was talking rapidly and urgently on
her phone as I slipped out to the parking lot.

  It wasn’t like I had anywhere to go. No getaway car. Not even a good pair of running shoes.

  Fuck my life.

  5

  I stood on the small patch of concrete that seemed to serve the Pub n’ Sub as a patio in warmer weather, wracking my brain for what to do. I scanned the night, looking for flashes of blue and red. Nothing so far, but with the way my luck was running, that wasn’t going to last.

  My gaze fell to the three bikes parked in front of the bar. According to the card in my wallet, I was insured to drive a motorcycle. Did that mean I knew how to steal one? At least I wouldn’t have to break into it, like I would a car. Of course, these three were right out front, in full view of the windows. There were about ten guys in there, not counting Biker Santa of the beard net, and some of them were as big as he was. None of them seemed kindly disposed toward my person, and I didn’t think their opinions of me would improve if they caught me stealing one of their bikes.

  Catching some angry yokel’s bullet struck me as a pretty rotten way to die.

  That was when I spied the tarp. Sun-bleached and covered in a fine layer of dust, almost the same color as the dead stalks of corn lining the field behind the bar. Crabgrass and Queen Anne’s Lace had grown thick around the bottom edges, dried to a yellow tangle now that summer had come and gone. The bike beneath the tarp hadn’t moved in a while, tucked halfway behind the building, but it was out of sight of both the road and the front windows.

  “Best chance you got,” I muttered, shrugging into my damp leather and trotting along the thin strip of concrete that hugged the side wall. I whipped off the tarp, scattering a wave of dust, seeds, and field spiders. It was a beautiful old Harley, the casing over its gas tank a deep, rich red. Betting it belonged to Biker Santa, I honestly felt bad at the thought of stealing it. It looked like something from the late ’70s or early ’80s, but was in pristine condition.

  Someone loved this bike.

  Still, I needed wheels, and fast.

  “I’ll get it back to him,” I promised myself, and I meant it, too. Which made me wonder about the police bulletin. Armed and dangerous. Seriously? I was agonizing over a motorcycle. “Feel bad once you’ve managed to steal it,” I chided myself.

  Disengaging the stand and trying to ignore the spiders underfoot, I swung my leg over the bike and settled onto the seat. I was a little too tall for the thing, and if I managed to get it going, I was risking the loss of my toes by riding barefoot, but I gripped the handlebars tightly, getting a feel for the controls.

  As soon as I did, I was inundated with impressions—riding with someone clinging to my back, the welcome warmth of her nearness eclipsing even the exhilaration of the open road. Younger times, the days spent riding and the nights spent tangled together, often under the open stars. Then a crushing sense of absence. Impossible to ride the bike without wrestling with her ghost. Revisiting it to polish and care for it every anniversary, then mournfully returning the tarp. A sense of loss so sharp, there was no surcease.

  “Not my feelings, not my feelings,” I whispered, fiercely willing the emotions away. In that instant, there was no denying what they were—psychic impressions of some sort. I wanted to ask Biker Santa about his wife—if they had ridden together, and how long ago she had died.

  Yet I already knew the answers.

  Gripping the handlebars that somehow still held cherished memories of his long-dead lady, I fought to focus on the here-and-now. Dried-out strands of crabgrass rasped against my ankle. It took all of about thirty seconds for me to realize that I didn’t know the first thing about how to steal a motorcycle.

  Sirens wailed in the distance.

  “Dammit!” I snarled. It was a kick-start bike, so I tried forcing it into neutral and rolling forward as I jammed my foot down on the starter. With the way my feet were chewed up from walking, that hurt about as much as I thought it would. The pain was hardly a deterrent, though. I did it a second time and fiercely willed the thing to go.

  The engine growled to life.

  Astonished, I gaped at the controls. Down the road, the sirens blared ever closer, overpowering the pulse of the engine.

  “Not the time for questions,” I mumbled.

  Readjusting my grip on the handlebars, I pulled out of the lot just in time to see a bunch of guys spilling out of the front of the bar. They were led by Biker Santa. His face was scarlet as he aimed a shotgun at me, and he wasn’t the least bit jolly. Police lights flashed against the buildings south of the pub and the sirens ratcheted up to a deafening wail. My bad luck was holding. The cop cars were effectively cutting me off from the direction I needed to go.

  “Move now, think later,” I snarled, then swung the growling bike around and sped into the cornfield behind the bar.

  6

  Riding a motorcycle through a cornfield without protective gear is a recipe for pain. Doing it while barefoot ranks right up there with rappelling down razor wire or wrestling a rabid porcupine. I was cruising for a Darwin Award. Add in the after-effects of weird psychic visions, pursuit by the local authorities, and being chased by a pack of gun-toting bikers, and my day was rapidly approaching nightmare status.

  Somehow I managed to lose them.

  More astonishing than that, I managed to find a road. It was little more than a narrow strip of asphalt running between whispering fields of dried corn, but it headed in the right direction. I leaned forward on the Harley, rocketing along as fast as I dared on the lonely country lane. Once in a while I passed houses, but they were all an acre back or more, their lights shaping dim constellations in an otherwise starless night.

  I continued like that for several miles, keeping an eye out for any cross street that was bigger than a driveway. Finally I came to Route 20. Given that this was the first intersection that had a stoplight, albeit a blinking one, it had to be a major road for this lonely corner of the Buckeye State. Swinging right, I followed 20 for a while as the clusters of houses became more frequent.

  Up ahead, fields and houses gave way to a wide and brightly lit expanse of asphalt. A monolithic building sat back from the road, squat and unattractive. From the look and size of it, I first thought it was an institution. As I drew closer, however, I spied the fluorescent lights spilling out from glass shop windows and automatic doors. A strip of navy-blue signage running across the entire upper portion of the building declared it to be a Wal-Mart. There were perhaps sixteen cars in the parking lot.

  Though desolate, it looked open.

  I slowed as I approached the turn-off, mentally tallying the remainder of my cash. If the police were looking for me, I didn’t dare use that platinum card in my wallet, however tempting it might be to procure a fresh set of clothes. But I needed footwear badly. I probably had enough cash to get a cheap but serviceable pair of boots, some socks, and maybe even a package of bandages. My feet were pretty chewed up at this point, so cramming them into boots wasn’t really a delightful prospect.

  Still, it was better than the alternative. I was lucky so far to have only scrapes and blisters, and if things were cheap enough, I might even have some money left over to feed the gas tank. Biker Santa had seen fit to keep it topped off, so that wasn’t yet a priority.

  I pulled up to the front of the store and started to park. Then I realized there was a serious flaw in my plan. Dumb luck and desperation were the only things that had got the Harley running in the first place, so I didn’t dare turn it off.

  “Well, crap,” I muttered to myself, glancing around the lot. No one in sight. Empty fields stretching to either side. “Not much choice,” I observed with a shrug. Then I coasted up to a display at the front of the building.

  Dying mums in battered plastic containers sat beside a boldly lettered sign proclaiming them “On Sale.” I maneuvered the motorcycle close to the half-dead flowers and set the kickstand, leaving the vintage machine idling in neutral. The area was brightly lit, and I hoped this would have the effect
of deterring potential thieves, rather than calling attention to the unattended bike. Reluctantly stepping away from it, I cast a glance heavenward.

  “If you’ve got any mercy at all, let this thing be here when I get back.”

  Regarding the mute expanse of the sky, I was overcome with a near-crushing awareness that nothing up there was listening to me. I blinked with the force of it, tearing my eyes away from the reflective bellies of the clouds. Mercifully, the feeling passed. Swiping at some of the cornfield detritus still lingering on my jacket and in my hair, I scowled.

  “Boots now,” I told myself. “Existential meltdown later.” I padded into the store, leaving russet smears on the tile as I went.

  Management was going to love me.

  As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry. No one I encountered was out to win any beauty pageants. There were three solitary souls browsing the aisles, and if I’d been clean-shaven and less rumpled, I would have stood out more. I kept my head down anyway, and headed for the footwear section.

  Looking over a rack of reasonably sturdy work boots—“Prices Slashed! Now only 29.95!”—I realized that I had no idea what size I wore. The amnesia thing was really starting to get on my nerves.

  I yanked off what was left of my socks and studied my poor abused feet. Probably a twelve. I had long, thin toes to match my long, thin fingers, so maybe it was more like a thirteen. I grabbed a three-pack of athletic socks and tore a pair from the plastic. Looking around for sales associates or security cameras, I eased my feet into the fresh socks, then started trying on boots.