J King - Angel of Death

“Why not? Samael is the name the Jews give to the Archangel of Death.”

“Yes,” Counselor Barnett responded. “Muslims call him Azrael, and Christians call him Michael, which is why you call yourself Azrael Michaels – but the papers are calling you Samaele-”

“I’m not really the Archangel of Death.”

“No?” she asked sarcastically.

“I’m just an angel. One of his deputies.”

Counselor Barnett stopped and took a deep breath, looking infinitely weary. “Look, Mr Doe, just because I am an overworked public defender handling the cases of people who are broke and desperate doesn’t mean I ignore my research or do a slapdash job. I’m a damned good attorney, but you’re going to have to meet me halfway on this. Drop the insanity act just long enough to give me your name, Social Security number, birth date – that stuff.”

“This isn’t insanity,” John Doe replied calmly. “Nor is it an act. I truly am – truly was the angel of death for this area.”

The lawyer sighed wearily. “What area?”

“The Chicago-Milwaukee metropolitan area, stretching from Lake County, Indiana, up to the northernmost suburbs of Milwaukee.”

She wrote. “And how long have you been assigned this area?”

“For almost fifteen years.”

That, too, was noted. “And how many people did you kill in that time?”

“That is a difficult question. Do you mean how many deaths did I approve, or how many did I arrange?”

“How many did you arrange?”

“About four hundred thirty per month.”

She stopped writing. “The cops have been through this before with other drifters of your stripe. If you’re planning to delay your trial while police haul you from state to state for questioning about various unsolved murders, you’re sadly mistaken-”

“Murders? Ah, well, many of the ones I arranged were accidents, not murders. If you are asking how many murders I arranged, that’s more like about ninety-five per month.”

Ms. Barnett looked stunned. “You want me to believe you killed, what…? Three people a day for the last fifteen years? That’s, what, a thousand per year… about fifteen thousand murders before getting caught?”

“First of all,” John Doe returned quietly, “I did not kill them. I arranged their murders. Others did the actual killing. Secondly, you are right: A mortal could not have slain so many without being caught.”

She nodded. “If you are an angel, why don’t you just blink out of here?”

“I’m no longer an angel,” the man said. “I’ve fallen.”

“What sin made you fall?”

“Love.”

With that, she slid the papers back into her leather satchel and stood. “Mr Doe, regardless of what you were, we both agree that you are human now, and that you are on trial for multiple murders in a human criminal justice system. Either you come clean with me so I can provide you the best possible defense, or you get multiple life sentences without the possibility of parole

– and get stabbed to death by an inmate with a broomstick. Who says Wisconsin has no death penalty?”

She turned and walked from the room.

Counselor Barnett arranged a competency hearing. She wanted to take away my right to determine my own defense, but I didn’t cooperate.

In court, I was the picture of sanity and was declared fit for trial.

I lay on my bunk. It’d taken me two weeks to consider this body to be truly mine, not a mere convenience to make me visible to humans. Now, I knew it. It was my body that lay on the thin mattress. It was me.

A defense. I needed a defense. My mind would not settle on the idea.

Perhaps my situation was temporary. Perhaps my fall from grace was a kind of warning from God. In my line of work, I had orchestrated numerous near-death experiences, in which a living person dies briefly, has a vision of the beyond, and is returned, chastened, to life. Perhaps I was having the opposite, a near-life experience. Now, I waited merely to be returned to heaven, chastened. I would regain my divinity, but would have to vow never again to dabble in human hearts. That would be a very difficult vow. Love cannot be simply shut off. I had used my one phone call to talk to Donna. She said she’d come to see me soon. She said I’d be okay. She said she’d bring a friend to help us sort everything out. I couldn’t wait to see her. I had no idea the boredom and tedium of being trapped in space and time, or the agony of being trapped in love. I told my cell mate about my plight. He was a fiftythree-year-old white businessman whose well-trimmed graying hair and narrow, sensitive eyes made him look distinguished even in a shapeless orange jumpsuit. Derek Billings was his name, an embezzler. (I hadn’t asked his crime. The first time I had asked someone’s crime, I’d gotten a black eye. Billings told me of his own accord.)

I told Billings my crime, too. He looked very alarmed. I kept talking, relating my angelic past. My voice was low and gentle, my manner polite and deferential. Billings slowly calmed. White-collar criminals are that way, comfortable among well-educated, soft-spoken psychotics. The inmates that Billings feared were the uneducated but sane ones.

The only reason an embezzler was put in with alleged murderers and rapists was the scope of his crimes. Billings had embezzled thirty-five million dollars, had stashed it away in coded accounts he still would not divulge, and had already made one attempt to flee the country. The judge at his arraignment had bent quite a few guidelines to establish bail at thirty-five million dollars. Apparently, the judge believed Billings could be trusted not to flee only if he no longer had the money to flee with or to. Billings confessed to me that the judge was right, and so kept his stash a secret. We made a perfect team, the polite white men whose soft-spoken manners belied the enormous crimes we had committed – allegedly. Further, the prosecutors were sure that we both hid the key to our crimes locked away in our brains – Billings with the location and numbers of his accounts, and me with the human name and past that I couldn’t divulge since I didn’t have them.

“Well,” said Billings as he sat beside me on the lower bunk, “they want you to have a name and a past, so why don’t you give them one?”

“None of it would check out. There are no records of me anywhere – no birth certificate, no immunization sheet, no school performance, no family, no friends.”

“The documents, you can forge,” he replied. He made a motion as though he were smoking, one of his few joys in life, though he had been denied any money to buy cigarettes. It didn’t matter. The air was rank with smoke, anyway. “I know a good guy. He’s expensive, but he does good work.”

“It doesn’t matter if I have the documents. One call to the hospitals or schools to verify, and the forgery would be obvious.”

“Not if the hospital was torn down or the school burned,” Billings said easily. “For a little extra, my guy can slip your stats into the archives of existing hospital computers and school archives. Investigators will stop there. They don’t want to look too deep.”

I shook my head. “I can’t pay your guy. Angels don’t have money. Never needed it.”

“I have money,” said Billings, releasing a long draw of imagined smoke from his lungs. “It’d be tough to get to, but we could buy you a past.”

“Well, thank you for the offer, but I don’t see how a name and a past are going to help me out of this.”

“Easy. Right now, you’re just an uncommunicative, uncooperative psycho who’s damn-near certainly responsible for five gruesome slayings-”

“Much more than five,” I said, “though they have evidence only for those.”