Caleb Carr - The Angel Of Darkness

I did just as I was told. I’d been nailed before, and when you got a command like that it was generally best to follow it until you’d had a chance to see who and what you were up against. Putting my hands halfway into the air, I turned slowly toward where the growling, desperate, and somehow familiar voice had come from: the front stairs.

On them stood what must’ve been Micah Hunter. He looked to be in his fifties, and he was wearing a badly faded white nightshirt. Two bony white legs stuck out from its hem, and his gray, grizzled face-with a similarly colored, unkempt mustache-plainly bore the mad, foggy expression of a morphine jabber in full binge. He held what looked like a rifled musket unsteadily in his hands, and as I turned he stared at me in wild disbelief.

“ You !” he said. Then he started to glance around nervously, and little whimpering sounds came out of his throat. “ You …?” he repeated with less energy this time. “Where-where’s Libby? Libby !”He looked at me again, very afraid. “It can’t be-it can’t be you… This ain’t the right house…” His voice got stronger, though no less frightened. “This ain’t the right house-and I already killed you !”

I’ve had a lot of peculiar things said to me in my life, but none to top that. The poor old fool genuinely believed that he had killed me, too, that much was plain from the desperate fear that was all over his drug-ridden face. But why he should have believed such a thing, I had no idea.

Then another batch of firecrackers went off out in the street, and Micah Hunter spun round, holding his musket toward the front door. “So!” he said, determination replacing some of his fear. “You ain’t alone, reb!” He shouldered the musket, looking ready to do battle with whoever came through the door. “Well, come on, you bastards-”

“Hunter!”

Both Hunter and I snapped our heads round to the hallway, out of which had boomed Detective Sergeant Marcus’s voice. “Hunter!” Marcus called again through the kitchen window, causing the old man to grow fearful once more. “Stand down, soldier! That’s an order!”

“Captain?” Hunter mumbled. “Captain Griggs?”

“I told you to stand down, man! You’re wounded-unfit! We don’t need you, soldier-back to the hospital!”

“I-don’t understand…” Hunter glanced at me again, then around the house quickly. “Where’s Libby? I ain’t well!”

“Go on!” Marcus insisted. “Put down the weapon and get back to the hospital!”

“But I…” Hunter let the gun drift to his side-

And that was all I needed. Like a shot I was back into the hallway, racing toward the kitchen window. Old man Hunter screamed something after me that I couldn’t make out, but nothing could’ve stopped me from slipping back through those bars like so much water. Marcus helped me through, and then cupped his hands to give me a boost back up onto the brick wall: I was a ways beyond professional pride, at that point. I used the rope to get back down into the alleyway, then grabbed the end that was still on that side of the wall. Looking around quickly, I found a water pipe with a spigot standing nearby. I tied the rope off onto it, then whispered “Go!” Marcus’s boots scratched against the wall as he climbed up top, and then he pretty much just let himself fall to ground on the other side, the studs on the boots hitting the concrete alleyway hard and, to judge by the look on his face, painfully.

“Pull it over!” he said, from which I took it that he’d untied the other end of the rope. I gave it a yank, and it came over with a whipping sound. Coiling it up around my arm quickly as we ran back to the open rear window of the stables, I handed the thing to Marcus, who stuffed it away in his satchel. Then we got through the window, closed it, and jumped back into the calash and under the tarpaulin, both of us breathing as hard as little Mike.

“What do we do?” I asked, the quick heaving of my chest making it hard to whisper.

“Shh!” Marcus answered. For a long few seconds we just lay there listening. Some dogs were barking in the yards behind the stables, and in the far distance we could hear Micah Hunter yelling away, though his exact words were still impossible to make out.

“I think we’ll be all right,” Marcus finally said. “The people around here must be used to that kind of thing from him. We can’t panic.” He pulled out a watch and checked it. “Lucius should be here within half an hour. Just catch your breath and try not to move.”

I followed the order, taking in deep gulps of air as I stroked the confused Mike through the leather of the satchel. “Shit,” I finally said, when I could do it quietly. “I think the old maniac really might’ve shot me.”

“It was the fireworks,” Marcus said. “And the morphine. My bet is, she gives him a hell of a dose before she leaves at night. If you get woken up during the first couple of hours after a strong injection like that, you’re generally pretty delusional. He seemed to think he was back in the war-and you were some Confederate kid he’d shot, somewhere along the line.” Marcus paused to take in air. “What about the baby?”

“Long story,” I said. “She’s down there, all right-I don’t think we’re wrong about that. But getting to her’s going to be tough. Maybe impossible. The rack of preserves is some kind of mechanical doorway, and it won’t give. I found some other stuff, though-”

I clammed right up when I heard a soft tapping on the side of the calash. “Stevie? Marcus?” It was Detective Sergeant Lucius. “Are you in there?”

“Yes,” Marcus answered. “And we’re all right.”

“I heard shouting,” Lucius said. “From inside. What happened?”

“Later,” Marcus whispered. “Get us out of here!”

“What about the girl? Did you find her?”

“Lucius! Get us out of here- now !”

In a few seconds the calash started to roll out toward the front of the stables. Lucius paused to pay the attendant, and then it was out onto the street, turning left: he’d rightly decided to head uptown along the river, as far from the Dusters’ joint as possible. Within half a block he had Frederick up to a nice clip, and when we felt the carriage turn right, Marcus and I figured it was safe to come out from under the tarpaulin.

The sky above the Hudson was still blazing with fireworks, and there were groups of people all along the waterfront watching them. But we didn’t pause for any sightseeing, just kept cantering forward toward Number 808 Broadway. Lucius was full of questions, but Marcus told him to hold them all ’til we got there. I undid my satchel to see if Mike was okay, and found him peering up at me, still very agitated but otherwise fine. With that, I took a deep breath and leaned back on the seat of the calash. Bringing the stolen papers out from inside my shirt, I handed them to Marcus, then lit up a cigarette and offered him one.

We were both bitterly disappointed about how things had worked out; and because of this, the warm welcome we received from the others-whose disappointment could not have been much less than ours-when we got back to Number 808 was all the more appreciated. I think that both Marcus and I, in mulling over what had happened, had forgotten just how much more wrong things could have gone. But the relief what was clear in the faces of all our friends served as a reminder. Miss Howard offered me a big hug that lifted me clear off the ground, while the Doctor put an arm around my shoulders and near squeezed them through to each other, smiling all the while. The fact that we hadn’t succeeded was obviously far less important than the fact that we’d survived-and seeing that thought reflected in all their faces, in turn, made it much easier to talk about the break-in.