Майкл Коннелли - The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

St. Gabriel only appears four times in the Bible. Some scholars of God say St. Gabriel is an archangel, on the same plane as Michael, and deals in vengeance and death. St. Gabriel is credited with having destroyed Sodom. Others say St. Gabriel is the angel of mercy, one of God’s highest, maybe the highest, messenger. I don’t claim to know. Somewhere it says that St. Gabriel never really appeared, that all references to St. Gabriel are actually dreams that God had and St. Gabriel is mercy come to life through God’s dreams and that mercy isn’t what we understand it to be. Dying can be a privilege, I came to understand that in prison, as much as living can be its own gift. Mercy can be flowers, or making sure your aim is true. Dreams die hard. I know mine did. I don’t imagine God’s died any differently. Maybe St. Gabriel will appear again sometime.

I met her and it was like meeting life for the first time. She opened the eyes of my heart. In any other city she’d have been a model, not a dancer.

After, I asked her if she wanted me to go get some cigarettes. So she could smoke and go to sleep.

“Yeah,” she said. “That would be nice.” She smiled in the dark, hugging the pillow. She was all curves and so alive. Beyond beautiful. A for-real woman. We had talked for hours before this, about everything. She was without a doubt the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Inside and out. Her voice wasn’t that sweet sickly Southern crap — she was Cajun, spoke her mind and had a good laugh. She lived like she meant it.

I put on jeans, a shirt, and my light jacket and walked out into the New Orleans night. The fog was there, the storms had just ended. Crushed cars sat on Canal Street, but on Bourbon it was business as usual. I bought the cigarettes and a lighter and headed back.

She was gone when I got back to the room. No note, nothing. The sheets were still warm from her body, the pillow smelled of her. And I tried to take it like a good thing, that maybe she felt like I did and the possibility of getting closer was much more frightening than she could say. Or that she had a man to get home to and leaving was polite — my karma had come back on me from Montana and I put the cigarettes in a drawer with the lighter.

The mess from the destruction went on and on. My brother and I burned through chains and gas and oil. We’d go out and check downed lines or move them with hot-line tools. Then we’d start cutting, so the scoops and chippers could come along and take care of what we left. When the humidity rose, my shirt was wet all day. The sawdust bounced off my safety glasses. We were cutting hundreds of years of growth. It was all the same to us.

She was at the room when I got back that one day. She was a little drunk, high. She had on a red top and jeans over those long legs. That didn’t last. We fucked like champs and kept going. Beyond where we’d been before. She made my cock so hard it hurt and my mouth ached from being on her, everywhere. Hours. We smoked and talked in bed. Drank some beer. She was having problems in town, within the city. The cops were harassing her, her ex was harassing her. The guy she lived with turned out to be friends with dealers. The cops were watching her. They wanted to kill her, as revenge on her man. And she wanted to leave. She had children, two young boys, and wanted to give them a better life and she wanted a better life for herself. We came up with a plan that fit the hurricane. We made a hurricane of our own.

There is a town in Louisiana called St. Gabriel. It’s a new town, only been around a couple years. After the hurricane, it was the morgue for all of New Orleans. The women’s prison is in St. Gabriel too, they hold all the security classifications together under one roof. Women from Sodom, you might say, kicked out of New Orleans for their crimes. I doubt that anyone at the prison even knows who St. Gabriel is or was supposed to be. And the number of dreams that have died within those walls, countless thousands, even dying now. It could make your soul cry, if you were a sentimental person.

My brother didn’t show two mornings later and when he hadn’t come around in the afternoon, I went looking. He wasn’t at the bar we hung out at. I finally walked over to the police station about two in the afternoon and talked to them. They had grabbed him, thinking he was me.

“Who are you again?” the black cop behind the bulletproof glass asked me. He had the NOPD fatigues on and his gun sat smart at his right side.

“I’m his brother,” I said. “I’d like to see him.”

“We’d all like things,” the cop said.

“Can I see him?”

The cop studied the sheet in front of him. “Lots of charges here,” he said. People went in and out of the station house with a dazed look.

“What’s the bail?”

“No bail,” he said. “Just charges.”

“What charges?”

He shook his head. “Felonies.” Then he went and got the detectives.

They took us in a cop car and another unmarked car out to St. Gabriel prison. Nobody spoke on the way out. We drove around the facility and pulled up in a parking lot, near the edge of some trees. They had my brother cuffed. We walked out through the mud, until we could see something on the ground in front of us at the very edge of the woods, covered with some dirt and leaves. Half in the woods. It was a woman. In a red top and jeans. A large-caliber shell had passed through her rib cage.

“Do you know her?” the cop asked. The detectives stood back, watching us.

“Not really,” I said. It looked like her, but not if you knew her. Up close, like I did.

“She’s been shot at long range. We think she was trying to escape and during the hurricane, someone had it in for her and shot her.” He shrugged. “Or something.”

“That’s a good theory,” I agreed.

“You wouldn’t happen to know any boys from Montana, that have a reputation as long-shot artists, would you?” he asked with a New Orleans slow drawl.

“No,” I said. “I honestly don’t.”

“That’s funny,” the one cop said. “Because after we ran your sheet and came up with some facts, we kind of thought it might have been you that pulled the trigger.”

“I’ve never shot a woman,” I said in truth.

“People change,” the other cop said.

“Not that much,” I said.

“We were looking for this woman, in New Orleans,” the one cop said. “We were watching you.”

“She was here,” I said, pointing at the ground.

“You know,” the one cop said, “during the hurricane, some bad folks in New Orleans disappeared.”

“Must have got caught up in the storm,” I reasoned.

“Certainly,” the other cop said. “That stuff happens.”

“This woman here,” the one cop said. “This woman got caught by someone else.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” I said. “I don’t know why you have us out here.”

The head detective walked over to the corpse and kicked it in the head as hard as he could. He watched me. “I’ve got y’all out here,” he said, “because we think you were together and you’re a killer. We have established that. What we haven’t established is who this woman is. She was just printed the other day and that got destroyed in the storm. If she’s the woman from the prison. On the other hand, if she’s this woman we were looking for from New Orleans, the one hooked up with that dealer, then we can call that off, because we’d have done this to her anyways.” He drew his foot back and kicked the head of the corpse again as hard as he could. The whole body moved off the ground a foot. “So which is it?”

“I know who it is,” I lied. “I know her.”

“Why’d you kill her?” the detective asked. “Did she owe you money? Drugs?”