I posted this on another thread a while back.
This is not a short story, it is a chapter (Angel) of a book (Adam) I have been working on for far too long now, but I think it can stand alone as a short story.
Any feedback - good, bad or indifferent - is more than welcome.
I was sitting in on criminal court proceedings, as I often did. Sheriff's officers spend their days parading the most despicable, opportunistic parasites and predators that society has to offer, and the pariahs they make their living defending. JoAnn was the worst of her ilk. Someone should round up all the lawyers in the world and throw them into the ocean with accountants chained to their necks as dead weight.
JoAnn stood before the court wearing an ill-fitting, forty-dollar JC Penny suit over a bright blue shirt that had an elaborately tied, six-loop bow sewed permanently in place just below her chin. Her azure eye shadow and indigo, leather stilettos rounded out the ensemble. She didn't look like a lawyer. She looked like a run down bar fly there to face charges for her third DUI in an attempt to throw herself on the mercy of the court because she needed her license to drive back and forth to work or she couldn't afford to feed her daughter. The whiskey made her look twenty years older than her thirty-five. A steady diet of Whiskey, coffee and not much more will wear a person down. She was soft and flabby all over -a nicotine-stained bag of soggy dough. There isn't much that is less appealing than a thin woman with a double chin and tits down to her knees. When she turned just so, a cigarette hole burned into her shirt just above the left breast would peer out from behind her thin, twill jacket and draw attention to her tired, old bra. Her thinning hair was held in place by a generous application of Aqua Net. Her hairstyle hadn't changed since her senior year high school picture -it was outdated even then.
Every day after work she would go to the usual lawyer's bar to rub elbows and hope to find a rich lawyer to rub other body parts with. Her favorite drink when people were around was a White Russian. If she was with a man when she ordered her drink she would make a crass, woefully unfunny comment about it to the waitress while glaring at him, "I like my drinks like my men. White, strong, straight up and coming all night!" When she laughed it sounded like the wet, phlegmy cough of an old wino. If she were with a black man, she'd order a Black Russian. When she wanted to appear cultured, she would drink White Zinfandel. She stank of cigarettes, liquor and cheap perfume. One of her clients sold bottles of knock-off perfume on the street corner with labels that said things such as, "If you like Eternity, you'll LOVE Infiniti." She was a "Coco by Chanel" woman, herself. She bathed in that crap.
I followed her home a couple of times to see where she lived. It was a fairly typical eight-family apartment building off Tremont Ave in the Bronx. Her building was on the corner, so I could see when the lights in her apartment on the top floor went on and off.
Sirens going off night and day, bums sleeping in alleys, clutching their bottles in place of the woman that left so many years ago, young punks standing on street corners selling drugs... It was a real shit-hole neighborhood, but the rent was cheap. More importantly it was where most of her clientele lived. She practiced law in the neighborhoods occupied by the dregs of society, and had good reason for doing so. She knew the dealers, whores and their pimps. She had a direct line to all the neighborhood dirt. If Mr. Johnson hit his wife, she was the first to know.
She knew all the cops too. She knew what their weaknesses were, which of them were cheating on their wives and with whom. She knew which cops were drunks and which ones were on the take, and took full advantage of the information. If you were a cop in JoAnn's jurisdiction you were either a rookie trying to earn your stripes, a crappy cop that was shelved there by the brass to rot away slowly or a dirty cop who chose to be there because that's where all the opportunity was. Whichever you were, you were bound to fuck up often -misfiled search warrants, improperly handled evidence, protocol failures... the list goes on and on- and JoAnn was bound to spot it. That was her magic. That was why, aside from all her faults, JoAnn was actually a damned successful lawyer. She measured her success by how many scumbags she kept on the street, not how much money she had. After all, most of her clients were ghetto poor.
So I watched her again, as I had quite a few times before, practicing her craft. The piece of filth she was defending this time was Jerry Spolinsky. Jerry was a tall, stocky Pole who made his living repossessing cars for a shady car dealer on Tremont. He purposely made a lot of noise when repossessing a car in hopes that the owner would come out and confront him. He always carried a switchblade, a .32 semi-automatic and assorted other weapons -most of them illegal. His weapon of choice, however, was his Blackjack. A Blackjack is basically a series of three or four nested heavy springs that collapse into each other like the antenna on the back of a portable radio, with a heavy weight at the end. When closed, it's about eight inches long and fits into a pocket. With a flip of the wrist it extends to almost thirty inches long. The springs on a good Blackjack are firm enough to cause some serious damage if wielded by the right arm, but they are pliable enough to not break any bones. Jerry lovingly referred to his Blackjack as his Nigger-Be-Good.
Jerry was a regular client of JoAnn's.
This day, Jerry was standing trial for molesting a fourteen-year-old girl, Jenny Carter, on the subway. As Jenny sat on the witness stand recalling what happened that night, I watched Jerry. I had a clear view of him from the first row behind the Prosecutor's table. He was slung low in the defendant's chair with his right arm hanging over the backrest, bent at the elbow as if it was keeping his greasy body from sliding down to the floor. JoAnn dressed him up in a cheap, dark blue suit with no tie. He looked like that slick appliance salesman whose store keeps changing names following going out of business sales and bankruptcy proceedings.
"People want to know that you’re the type of man who would wear a suit," she would explain, "but you don't want them to think you’re rich, or some Mafia greaseball. You want them to relate to you. Most of them are regular working stiffs. Rich people never get stuck serving jury duty. Rich people are the bosses that are refusing to pay these poor saps for the day."
Some old wives tales are bullshit, pure and simple, but some speak to the collective wisdom of generations of mothers. "If you make that face long enough, it will stick." Jerry's face was permanently plastered with an expression that told the world that he knows he is a real piece of shit, but there's nothing you can do about it, asshole.
It was JoAnn's turn up to bat, and boy did she shine that day! She called her first witness -a respectable decorated police detective from a neighboring precinct. Lieutenant Forrest testified that Jerry couldn't have been on that train that night because he was at a bar in Brooklyn with him at the time. Their night out was padded by at least three hours on each end of the incident. "It was simply impossible for Jerry to have been on the train with that girl!" What the jury was not aware of, is that Lieutenant Forrest was having an affair with JoAnn at the time. I know this because, by stroke of sheer luck, I followed JoAnn home the night that Jenny was accosted. More accurately, I followed JoAnn and Lieutenant Forrest to her house.
JoAnn proceeded to pull one magic rabbit out of her ass after another. By the end of the testimony she had the jury questioning Jenny's honesty, chastity and intentions. Was she just covering herself after a lewd tryst on the subway? Was she ashamed of her actions and wanted someone to point her finger at to her disappointed parents? Was she a predatory Lolita in schoolgirl's clothing? Was it a case of misdirected anger at her uncle who used to touch her when she was five? Of course none of this was her fault - the Freudian quack who JoAnn once defended in a malpractice suit involving a suicidal teen-aged patient he had an affair with testified to that effect. She had Jenny asking the same questions of herself.
JoAnn was all smiles when she walked down the courthouse steps and made her standard right turn towards the lawyer's bar.
I followed.
After one White Russian, two Black Russians and six highballs of Whiskey she finally stumbled through the door towards the subway home.
I followed.
It took her about twenty minutes to find her way to the subway station, negotiate her way down the steps and out to the platform. She stopped for a minute or two to curse at a homeless man sleeping on the platform after she tripped over his legs. I boarded the train one car behind her and off we rumbled to our rendezvous. I made sure to exit the train before her. She was drunk and half-asleep, but a woman like that is constantly suspicious and I didn't want to catch her eye. I walked briskly to the opposite corner of her apartment building and sat on the stoop of the Bodega. I slouched with an empty bottle of Tokay that I picked up on my way dangling precariously from my fingers.
I waited.
It took her a good minute of fumbling with her keys, but she finally made it through the front door. I was prepared to wait a long while for someone to leave the building allowing me to sneak in through the closing door behind them, but I got lucky. Not more than ten-minutes later, a girl of about twelve came rushing out the front door of the apartment building with schoolbooks clutched tightly to her chest. I leapt to my feet as I watched her scurry down the street and I raced to catch the door before it clicked shut.
The inside of the building smelled of curry, rice & beans and wet paint. These buildings always smell of wet paint. It doesn't matter if no one had painted since the late seventies; they always smell of wet paint. The basement door was unlocked. The basement was damp and musty and apparently a rat or some other small animal had died down there in the recent past. The odor turned my stomach. I waited in my dungeon, inhaling mold, dust and the stench of rotting flesh for about two hours until I finally couldn't take it anymore. "As drunk as she was, she has GOT to be passed out by now!"
It was late enough that people weren't milling about in the halls, but early enough for the building to still be filled with the sounds of Salsa music, the banging pots and pans, Mr. Johnson shouting at his wife and the late news turned up loud enough to drown-out the Salsa playing in 3B. Perfect! I walked casually up to the fourth floor without passing a soul and came face to face with JoAnn's front door.
First I looked at the small gap between the door and the jamb -she forgot to lock the dead bolt, but the chain was engaged. I pulled a clever little device out of my pocket that I bought at the spy-store on Fifth Avenue. You place this little brass tube -a telescope of sorts- up to the lens of the fisheye peephole in the door and you can clearly see the inside of the apartment. The small light over the sink was on and I looked around my narrow field of view hoping to spot her passed out somewhere. From my vantage point, I couldn't see the bed, but the apartment was still. The clothes she had been wearing were piled on the floor in a heap at the end of the sofa. I decided that I was at a greater risk standing in the hall peering into her apartment than I was if I entered and she was still awake. She was fall-down drunk, after all, how much of a challenge could she really be? I took a last look down one end of the empty hallway and then the other as I tried the doorknob. It was locked. I removed another clever little device from my pocket -this one of my own making. It was the thin flexible blade of a metal cake-decorating spatula fashioned into a jimmy of sorts by way of a few notches cut out of each edge. I used it in the same way one might use a credit card to slide between the door and jamb to dislodge the bolt, but it was much more effective. Once I had the door opened as wide as the chain would allow, I used a bent screwdriver to pry the chain anchor loose from the doorframe and I was in. I closed the door behind me and turned the latch on the dead bolt.
No sooner than I turned around, JoAnn was upon me with a baseball bat at full swing about to connect with my left temple. I ducked a bit, tilted my head to the right and took a glancing blow to the top of my head. I grabbed her right wrist with my left hand and used her own momentum to spin her around. Before she even realized what had happened, I had her right arm wrapped around her neck with my body pressed against hers and the knife I pulled from my belt sheath was at her throat.
"Drop the bat and keep your mouth shut." I whispered.
"What are you going to do with me?" she pleaded.
I spoke more slowly and determined, "Keep your mouth shut."
Her left arm fell limp at her side and she dropped the bat.
"On your knees."
She slowly dropped to her knees as I lowered myself with her. I rested most of the weight of my body on my shins that were on her ankles, pinning her legs in place.
"Shhhhhhh. I'm going to let go of your arm. Do not move."
She let her other arm drop and rest at her side. I took a handful of her hair at the base of her neck in my left hand and pulled her head back.
"What are you doi-" my knife cut deeply into her trachea.
The slit was clear across her throat. Her head was loose like a door hinge. She let out a guttural moan that gargled its way up her throat as her lungs decompressed with the rest of the word that managed to escape. I let go of the clump of hair and let her body fall. The floor was covered with blood in seconds.
Just as I heard JoAnn's body drop to the floor with a dull "thud", I heard another sound. A soft whimper escaped from the openings between the slats that shrouded the closet doors. I wanted to believe it was a puppy, but I knew better. No amount of wishing could convince me that it wasn't a child hiding in that closet. JoAnn must have heard me fiddling with the door and rushed her child into hiding for protection. All the signs that had eluded me before now stood out in glaring clarity with a spot light shining on them. The sink in the dirty little kitchenette was filled with child-sized plates with images of Spider Man and cups with spill-proof lids - sippy cups. The videotape collection had Disney titles scattered about. The floor around the area in front of the television was littered with crayons, coloring books and dollar store toys. As I walked closer to the hovel that Mother had convinced her baby would be a safe hiding place, the whimpering sounds grew quieter, muffled by a tiny trembling hand. They were quieter, but higher-pitched than before. The whimpers were being squeezed out through a tight grip of childish resolve to remain silent like Momma said. The child's ability to squelch these whimpers was not as resolute as the force of terror pushing them out. My heart sunk to my feet and I started to weep when I opened the door. He couldn't have been more than three years old, and must have seen the whole wretched scene from behind the thin wood slats of his cell. He sat huddled under a pile of clothing, hoping he wouldn't be seen. Hoping to please his Momma by not being heard. Tears ran in torrents down his cheeks and over his hand that was desperately trying to silence his cries in vain.
To my amazement, the child reached for me. My mind reeled, "Is he trying to attack me and exact revenge upon me for taking his mother away? Is this a desperate bid to garner pity from this murderous madman before him, in an attempt to save his own life?" He wasn't conniving or executing some quickly hatched plan for vengeance. His young, innocent mind couldn't fathom such devices. He was trembling in fear and confused. His mother lay dead on the floor and his need to be comforted by someone, anyone, kicked into overdrive. I was the only person around and he naively reached for me -the demon that just viciously slew his mother before his eyes. I lifted him into my arms and collapsed to the floor holding him. We cried in each other's arms amid my pathetic apologies. I kept saying over and over again, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I am so sorry." I wasn't so much pleading for his forgiveness, but attempting to display my empathy for this poor hapless victim of my wrath and apologizing to the world and whatever forces inhabit it in general. I rocked back and forth trying to comfort him and myself.
"What have I done?" I just kept repeating it to myself, "What have I done?" I don't know what answer I was expecting. What could possibly soothe me at this point? My whole world and everything I had believed and fought for and against crumbled around me and blended together in a heap of confusion and self-hatred. A million questions - "What have I done? Who have I become? What am I trying to do?" - swirled around the festering trash heap that was now my life and world. In my mind I tried to justify to this broken child why his mother had to die. I could validate it to myself before I heard his whimper call to me from the closet, but what now?
I had told myself time and again that I wasn't doing this to punish the evil. It wasn't retribution, or revenge in any sense of the word. I was doing it to save the innocents of the world from the evil ones. So, how could I now tell an innocent child that I killed his mother and caused him immeasurable pain and vicious suffering that will haunt him for the rest of his tortured life? What could possibly excuse that for him? How could I have not seen before, that I was causing just as much pain by my actions meant to relieve the innocent from suffering? "'Humans have an uncanny ability to lie to themselves and justify any action that suits their needs.' Those are the words that I mailed to that reporter, aren't they? What made me so damned arrogant to think I was immune to it? Am I not human?"
Somewhere in my questions, the madness of my burning mind and the surreal scene I thrust myself into, I came to a sad conclusion. There is nothing that anyone can do to keep the pure and innocent souls on Earth from suffering. It is an impossible task to undertake. If you allow evil to continue, the innocents suffer. If you destroy the evil people, the innocents STILL suffer. Earth, I concluded, is Hell. We are born into Hell, and if we can face all the evils and demons in the world and still come out as pure and clean as we came in, we have succeeded. We all enter this world innocent. The few Angels among us that leave the world innocent are rewarded with entrance into Heaven, whatever that may be. This is what all the religions in the world seem to say, in their own way, and they are all right. "The answer," say the wise men, "is not to change the world, but to keep the world from changing you." By killing this Angel's mother before him as I did, I stripped away his innocence in one action, like scalding the flesh off his body all at once. In this moment, I embodied all the evil in the world. I was not acting as an Angel for Heaven and warrior for innocence, as I had once believed. All this time, I had been acting as an agent of Hell. I was a Demon. There was only one thing I could do to fix this. I had to make it right. I had to... I had to send this suffering Angel to Heaven before it was too late for him.
I took a deep breath, held it, kissed the Angel on his forehead, closed my eyes and twisted his head swiftly and firmly until I heard a snap. The sound was muffled and dull - like a chicken leg being twisted off its cooked, damp carcass. The sound, however, burned itself into my mind and echoed resoundingly throughout my soul. It felt like my spine was breaking along with his tender little neck. His body fell limp in my lap and I immediately ran to the dirty kitchenette sink filled with his dishes and puked. I didn't want to look, but I had to. Just as I did after my first killing, I had to make sure I could hold this in my mind and accept that it was me that did this. I had to understand and remember. I had to know that this was who I was. I stood for a moment attempting to take it all in.
The Angel's body lay in a pathetic twisted heap on the floor of the filthy apartment just a few feet from his mother's nude, bloody body. The words "grizzly", "massacre", "depraved" and "viscous" flashed into my mind in newspaper headlines. I thought of all the stories I had read in papers and seen on the nightly news that made my blood boil. I thought of all the times that I quietly wished I could be locked in a room with the cowardly perpetrators of such acts. Images of crying family members flooded my mind.
This is the rest of your life, Jack. Accept it, deal with it and come to terms with it, or get out now. This is your moment of truth. This is your turning point. The next step you take becomes the point of no return. Own it, Jack, it's yours to keep now.
The sight of the spreading pool of JoAnn's blood on the floor jolted me back out of my mind with a realization that I had to leave soon. The floorboards in her apartment were dry and cracked. There was the distinct possibility of the downstairs neighbors being startled by blood dripping into their living room.
As I stepped over her body on the way to the door I suddenly felt a sting of what I could only describe as remorse over not getting the opportunity to eviscerate Jerry Spolinsky. "I have a different mission now," I had to remind myself, "I am an Agent of mercy." I walked out to the hallway and officially adopted my new moniker as I closed the door on that part of my life. My mind began to drift, "I wonder if the court records would reveal Jenny Carter's home address."