Rusty Nails (The Dade Gibson Case Files) (18 page)

“She’s a dealer,” Leon hissed. “I’ve had to score a few bags of goodies before for rich-types that wander in to The Black Cat from time to time. She deals out of that motel room at The Briarwood.”

Dade nodded and smiled. “I think we might need to pay a little visit to that room of hers.”

Leon stayed in the car and tended to his wounds while Dade picked the lock to Louise Hartwell’s room. The motel room looked the same as it had a few days earlier. Try as he might, Dade couldn’t forget the way angel’s blood had splattered against the walls like an abstract painting.

Immediately, he began to ransack the room, breaking everything he could get his hands on that might have been used as a hiding place. He started with a lamp. Then, he tore the bed pillows into shreds. That was followed by the systematic dismantling of the dresser, the television set, the telephone, the toilet tank and bowl, the mattress and box springs. When none of those searches proved fruitful, he began kicking in the sheet rock. After making quite a few holes in the walls, he noticed a place that had been recently patched with joint compound. He kicked it in without question and then calmly reached in and pulled out a silver thermos.

“Jackpot,” he said with a smile.

Chapter 45

“We’ve sat here long enough,” Liz sighed as she thought of all the potential trouble Dade was probably getting himself into.

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Pyriel added.

“How are we ever going to find out where Dade and Leon went?” Jack Gibson asked, flickering like a candle flame.

“And what can we possibly do to help Dade once we figure that out?” Jane chimed, glimmering in and out of focus like a poorly received television station.

“Those are both good questions,” Pyriel said. “But I’ve got a better one. Where’s Abbadon? He seems to have slipped away.”

Everyone looked at each other and knew that there was no good explanation as to why none of them had noticed the angel’s departure. They had each been too wrapped up in their own problems, too deep in thought to mark the absence of one of their group.

“I should have noticed,” Pyriel sighed. “But my senses aren’t as keen as they used to be before the nails.”

“Well, can you still catch Abbadon’s scent?” Liz asked.

“I’m not a bloodhound,” Pyriel replied, obviously a little offended. “But, yes, I can still track his scent.”

“Then let’s follow it. I have a feeling that we’ll find Dade and Leon if we can find Abbadon.”

“You heard the lady,” Jack Gibson shouted. “Let’s go and find my boy.”

Pyriel nodded grimly and followed the smell of absinthe.

Chapter 46

The angels sat inside an old limousine that had been balanced atop two stacks of Toyotas. The boy that wasn’t really a boy sat on the floor in the middle of them.

“You know more about what’s going on here than you’re letting on,” the angel of death remarked. Rush looked up at the angel, his eyes not seeming as innocent or as confused as they had on the day that Father Benjamin pulled him out of that dark alley.

“I know lots of things.”

“And you’re going to tell them to me.”

“I doubt that,” Rush said with a boyish smile.

“I don’t,” Samael laughed. “Once I’ve finished with you, you will wish that you had handled things differently.”

“I doubt that,” Rush said in a singsong voice.

“You should stop saying that,” Samael growled.

“I doubt that.”

Samael glared at the boy. Rush stared back at him balefully, daring him to act. Samael’s hand was around the boy’s throat before he could react.

“I think you might want to reconsider who you’re dealing with here,” Samael growled. Rush didn’t cough or gasp for air. Instead, he laughed, taunting Samael.

“When you find out what’s been going on around you,” the boy said, “you might want to reconsider who you’re dealing with.”

Samael threw the boy against the backseat with a soft thud. Rush kept that same smile plastered to his face like a well-placed mask.

“There are other angels who are far more capable of overthrowing heaven than you.”

Samael’s eyes burned with rage, and he smashed one taloned fist through a side window, spilling small shards of glass on the floorboard of the Cadillac.

“Like who?” he said through clenched teeth. “Uziel? Michael? Abbadon? None of them understand why we’re fighting. None of them have felt what’s it’s like to be free from guilt every time we indulge ourselves in some foreign pleasure. And Lucifer certainly couldn’t do any better. After all, he’s tried this before and look where it got him.”

“I still don’t understand why you’re wasting your time,” the boy said with a trace of the old smile. Samael snarled and lunged at the boy, grabbing him by the shoulders and forcing their faces together.

“You really want to know?” the death angel said, running his tongue over the tip of one sharpened incisor. “I’m sure that Darael would be more than happy to explain the whole thing to you.” The angel whose flesh was pierced innumerable times by tiny silver needles looked surprised and delighted, like a child that has been given an unexpected gift.

“We’ve sort of grown attached to the pitfalls of human living,” Darael said, smirking and fiddling with the large spike that pierced the skin over his right eye. “We need the drugs. The Johnny Walker. The women to give birth to our nephilim children. We need the human way of life because it is what we’ve grown accustomed to, and God wants to wipe it all away like scribbling on a blackboard. That’s why we’re trying to bring about a few changes. We like the way it is now and don’t want to see the things we love go away.”

“How quaint,” Rush replied. “A nice little Hallmark answer.”

Darael’s smile fell like a poorly baked cake. Samael hardly seemed to notice the boy’s sarcastic remark. “Someone’s here,” the death angel said, sniffing the air like a dog in the midst of a manhunt. “We’ve got company.”

Darael shifted a little in his seat, anxious to go out and have a look for himself. Samael held him in place with an upheld hand.

“Not yet,” he replied. “You may have a little work to do here.”

Darael’s face lit up like a neon sign at an all-night bar, and for the life of him, Samael couldn’t ever remember seeing anyone get so excited at the prospect of torture.

“You’d really better go and see who it is,” the boy said to Samael. “We wouldn’t want someone jeopardizing your plot to overthrow heaven.”

“Not yet,” the death angel replied. “You haven’t answered the question that’s gnawing at me the most. Who are you really?”

“The reincarnation of Jim Morrison,” the boy replied smartly.

“Not a good choice of answers,” the death angel remarked. “Darael, would you care to change his mind for him?”

Darael didn’t need to be asked twice.

“Now hold still, boy,” he ordered as he slipped one of the needles out of his flesh and used it to puncture one of Rush’s ears. The thin piece of metal slipped effortlessly into the cartilage without eliciting so much as a grunt of discomfort from the child. Darael’s eyes went wide at the sight of a smile on the boy’s face.

“Let’s try again, shall we?” Samael said, trying hard not to seem shocked. “Who are you really?”

“The Pope.”

“Wrong,” Darael replied as he jammed a needle into the back of Rush’s arm. The boy never flinched.

“Next answer please,” Samael requested, hardly believing what he was seeing.

“Ronald Reagan.”

The needle bit deep into Rush’s right cheek. And yet the smile never faltered.

“Care to try once more?”

“Bruce Springsteen.”

Darael had run out of needles above his eyebrows which left those in his upper and lower lips. He graciously pulled three out with a sick, wet pop, sticking one in each of the boy’s lips and the other in the soft tip of his nose.

“He’ll be ready to talk to us in a minute,” Darael remarked, amazed that the boy wasn’t showing any sign of pain

“I doubt that,” Rush replied, his eyes burning with rage and fire.

“You’ve got one more chance to answer correctly,” Samael offered. The boy coughed up a wad of spit that sizzled and burned as it ran down the death angel’s face.

Samael exploded, grabbing Rush by the hair of the head and jerking him off of the seat like a marionette that responds to pain instead of a movement of strings. For some reason, he felt hot being so close to the child, as if he was standing too near a blazing furnace, and inexplicably, that made him a little uneasy. Tired of the games, he nodded to Darael and watched as, one by one, Darael began to insert the needles underneath each of the fingernails on the boy’s right hand.

“Still not going to break, are you?” Darael said smartly. “Well, you’ve got another hand, and I’ve got a cigarette lighter.” Rush’s eyes narrowed as the angel began to heat the needles until the tips glowed a bright orange-red.

“The other hand, Samael?”

“Of course.”

This time the needles made a slight hissing sound as they touched the cool flesh beneath his nail bed. Much to Samael’s surprise, the flesh on the child’s hand began to shrink away from the heat, revealing scaly flesh beneath that stank of sulfur.

“I’ve had just about enough of this,” Lucifer said, tearing away the fake skin like a Halloween costume made of cheap plastic. The angels’ eyes grew wide as the Prince of Darkness spread his wings inside the crowded limousine, knocking both doors off of the hinges and standing up to tear away the roof. The Cadillac teetered and tottered uncertainly.

Chapter 47

Abbadon heard the shouting and knew that he should be moving faster. Up ahead, he could see some of the rebels circling in the sky like hungry vultures, and he suspected that that was where they were holding the boy captive. With every step he took, the shouting got a little bit louder, and at last, Abbadon couldn’t restrain himself any longer. Yet, the minute he started running toward the lamentations, was the moment that the circling angels overhead started to dive. The best he could tell there were only two of them, and he fully expected them to attack him head on. What he didn’t expect them to do was to pull up just before landing and take to the air again. It wasn’t long before he saw what they were planning, and his blood ran cold at the thought.

He recognized the two angels on sight, Raziel and Muriel, and had even considered them friends once before the war broke out. They didn’t seem very friendly now, however, when they tipped one of the uppermost cars in the myriad stacks off of its rusty Chevrolet pedestal. Abbadon watched in amazement as the automobile rolled and toppled end over end toward him, hurdling in his direction at breakneck speed. He managed to jump out of the way just as another car was being thrown at him.

No sooner had the second automobile crashed harmlessly to his left than he had his leather jacket off, letting his wings stretch out on either side of him. The only place he would be safe in this mechanic’s Eden would be in the air. Or at least he thought so until he saw at least another handful of angels take to the skies.

“Great,” he muttered under his breath, drawing his mace from the loop in the belt that held the keys to the abyss. Never did he realize that one of those keys was missing.

Like a fighter pilot engaged in evasive maneuvers, Abbadon swooped between the towering piles of Volkswagens and Ford trucks, making certain not to spread his wings out too far for fear of hitting them on the side panels of the broken down machines. The dissident archangels were close behind him, but not so much so that they saw him slip unnoticed into the backseat of a beat-up Cavalier. The car was small, so much so that Abbadon’s wings cramped from the confinement.

He knew that he would have to act quickly or else Raziel and Muriel would be onto him like flesh-eating cancers. His eyes darting rapidly from floorboard to floorboard, hoping to spot something that he could put to use, Abbadon’s gaze stopped as he saw something under the front seat. After all these years in Reznick’s Junkyard, Abbadon didn’t really think that there would be anything left in the car that would save his life. However, he was pleasantly surprised to find a half-empty bottle of motor oil, still viscous and pungent. Not wasting any time, he covered as much of himself as he could until the plastic container was empty and hoped that the camouflage would work.

Chapter 48

From their vantage point amongst the clouds, father and daughter were able to see more than they would have actually liked. The junkyard across town seemed to be infested with angels, hiding in the shadows, lurking inside of ill-lit cars, scurrying from wreck to wreck like cockroaches.

“There must be hundreds of them,” Jack remarked as they veered away from Reznick’s scrapheap.

“There’s no way that Dade is going to stand a chance even if Abbadon is there to help,” Jane agreed. “Samael seems to have worked a lot of this out ahead of time.”

“So what do you suppose we should do?” he asked. “Send up an SOS via the prayer chain. Or maybe we should ask the Christian Women’s Organization to type us up a nice letter and address it to God.”

“Lucky for you, I’m quite resourceful,” Jane said as she held up the key that she had stolen from Abbadon’s belt.

Jack’s eyes widened at the sight of the key to the bottomless pit. “Where did you get that?” he asked, his expression wavering in and out of focus.

“I stole it from Abbadon. I thought we might be able to put it to good use.”

“I’m afraid to ask what you might be thinking.”

“Good,” Jane replied, looking down on the city, teeming with thousands of people, all oblivious to how precariously the balance of fate was tipped in favor of the angel of death. “Then this will probably work.”

Chapter 49

Leon had bought enough drugs from Louise Hartwell in the past to know that she didn’t always make deals at The Briarwood. On more than a few occasions, he’d been forced to drive to the outskirts of town and wade through the mountains of junk for a few precious needles full of smack in order to make The Black Cat’s customers happy. Since she was in league with Samael, Reznick’s Junkyard seemed like a logical place to start looking. Their suspicions were confirmed long before they reached the edge of town. It wasn’t hard to spot formations of angels circling in the air like fighter jets.