Timothy Hallinan - The four last things

He did, and saw Angel.

"Hello, darling," he said. Angel said nothing. She was staring at her feet as though the answer to a riddle were written on her Alice in Wonderland shoes.

Ellspeth darted a questioning glance at me.

"All over," I said.

He dropped to his knees in front of Angel. She looked past him. He took her hand between both of his and said, "Angel." One of the cops behind me shuffled his feet.

Eleanor put a slender hand between Angel's shoulder blades and patted her.

Angel drew a deep breath. Without looking at her father she said, "Is Ansel here?"

It was after ten by the time I got to Mrs. Yount's. With the kitten purring comfortably into my jacket, I trudged through the mud and climbed to the top of the wall that surrounded her awful little garden. I'd dropped Eleanor at home in a kind of monolithic silence.

All the lights inside were turned off, but the television screen was glowing. Mrs. Yount sat silhouetted on the floor on her old fur coat, her back to me, eating something out of a tall box. Crackers, maybe. She was looking at a woman named Linda Evans who was coming down an impossibly long stairway wearing a new fur coat.

"You're home, baby," I whispered to the kitten. The kitten didn't say anything. I gathered my muscles and jumped.

I'd forgotten about the Great Wall of Bottles. I landed on top of it with a deafening, shattering tumult of breaking glass. I scrabbled to keep my balance as bottles rolled back and forth under my feet, and then I fell decisively on my backside. Broken glass bit my rear end through my trousers. To add insult to injury, the kitten began to claw at my stomach.

Inside, Mrs. Yount leapt up from the old fur coat and streaked toward the front of the apartment. She was screaming in some Balkan language. She pulled open a closet door and turned around, holding what looked in the half-light very much like a forty-five.

I cleared the wall in a single bound with the kitten still scrabbling at my viscera with its claws, and landed on my hands and knees in the mud. Behind me, there was a boom, and the sliding glass door was annihilated in a silvery cascade of glass.

Something right in front of my nose turned its body into a startled arc and spit at me. It was Fluffy, pink collar and all.

Fluffy hurtled off toward the front of the building and I heard the glass door sliding unnecessarily open. There couldn't have been much glass left. Mrs. Yount fired at the stars while I sprinted for the gray Camaro, bent over and keeping close to the ground.

I tossed the kitten roughly onto the front seat and then slid behind the wheel and tried to catch my breath. The kitten sat down calmly, licked one of its forepaws, and began to clean its face. I started to laugh. Mrs. Yount had always said she'd know in her bosom if Fluffy were dead. Two more shots boomed heavenward.

When I'd finished laughing, I drove home with my cat. Other Books by Timothy Hallinan The Simeon Grist Series

The Four Last Things (Simeon Grist #1)

Simeon Grist knows the City of Angels inside and out-the sex for sale, the chic seductions, the clientele of every bar from downtown L.A. to Venice. So when he's hired by a Hollywood recording company to shadow one Sally Oldfield, suspected of embezzlement, Grist discovers she's heavily invested in something far more lucrative than CDs-namely the Church of the Eternal Moment-a million-dollar religious scam built around a 12-year-old channeler and the voice of a man who has been dead for a millennium. Though he tails Sally all the Way to a seedy motel and a date with a murderer, he's too late to save her. And now he knows snooping has gotten him in way too deep, for he's become the next target of a very flesh-and-blood entity waiting in the twisted back alleys of sin and salvation to give him a brutal look at the four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell-revelations he could definitely live without…