Black Angel Read online

  The man was stripped naked to the waist, although his chest was streaked in glistening rust-and-crimson-colored oil, or maybe oil mixed with paint, or blood. He had the knotted muscular chest of a dedicated weight-trainer, although Joe thought: weird, this guy’s extra-weird, because his nipples were both pierced with shining gold rings, from which hung ragged collections of beads and feathers.

  He wore a heavy black-leather belt with a silver buckle in the shape of a grinning skull, and tight black jeans, and boots. Slung from his waist was a heavy canvas sack. He was enormous—six-three, easily, and well over 200 pounds. And what made him so frightening was that Joe had never seen anything like him, ever before.

  He didn’t look like a Hell’s Angel; or one of those overdressed homosexual fetishists who came clanking into San Francisco General to visit their dying friends; or any one of those archetypal crack-maddened freaks whom you could encounter unexpectedly around any street corner, and without whom the San Francisco Police Department would have been almost a normal place to work.

  This man was different. This man was decked out like an emissary directly from Satan himself.

  What was more, he had smashed down their front door with a firefighter’s jack, and unless he had known for sure that the other two apartments in the building were empty this weekend, he obviously hadn’t cared how much noise he made. To Joe, that meant that he didn’t particularly care whether he lived or died, and if he didn’t care whether he lived or died, that meant that he wasn’t afraid to kill.

  A long time ago, on Green Street, one of Joe’s partners had made the mistake of trying to cajole the shotgun away from a man who didn’t care whether he lived or died. His face had splashed Joe’s shirt like a tipped-up plateful of minestrone soup.

  Nina’s eyes pleaded, but she couldn’t speak, and if the man hadn’t been gripping her by the hair, she would probably have collapsed.

  Joe spread his arms, to make it clear that he wasn’t carrying a weapon; to show that he wanted to talk.

  “What is it?” he asked, his throat clogged with tension and phlegm. “What do you want?”

  The great masked head turned slowly as Joe circled around the coffee-table.

  “What do you want?” Joe repeated. “Is it money? Is it drugs? Just tell me what it is, come on, anything, and we’ll talk about arranging it. Come on, you’ve got my wife there, friend, you don’t think I’m going to fool around, do you?”

  “Joe—!” gasped Nina, in desperation.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart, it’s okay,” Joe told her, knowing all the time that, Jesus, this guy could go crazy at an instant, and cut her throat, and kill me too, he’s totally irrational. Who the hell busts into somebody’s condo with a jack? Who takes out their whole door, when there’s nothing to steal but silver-plated baseball trophies and a four-year-old video recorder?

  Who the hell wears an insect mask and smothers themselves in blood?

  “Come on, friend, what is it?” he repeated.

  The man hesitated for a long, long time. Minutes of dark-sliding silence, like oil pouring over a weir. Then he said, in a deep muffled voice, “I’m not your friend, friend. I’m your worst nightmare.”

  Joe nodded, and tried to clear his throat. “Okay, I’m sorry. I apologize. No offense meant, huh? I’m just interested to know what you want.”

  Another long silence. Then, “You know what I want.” Joe couldn’t stop his heart from scrambling; couldn’t stop his lungs from constricting. Calm, Joe, calm for Christ’s sake. But don’t let him know how frightened you are. “I don’t know, no, how could I know?”

  The great shiny black head nodded and dipped. “What does everybody want? Power, money, revenge, sex.”

  Joe was beginning to panic. “You won’t get any of those things here.”

  “Oh, no?” the man replied. He drew the knife backwards and forwards across Nina’s throat, so that it tugged at her skin. “What would you call this, revenge or sex? Maybe you’d call it power.”

  “Listen, listen, you want money, I’ll give you money,” Joe promised him. “I have at least two and a half thousand dollars in my savings account, you can have it all.”

  The man let out a deep, harsh cry of mockery. “What are you going to do, write me a check? You don’t have the first idea, do you?”

  “Then what?” Joe demanded. “Just tell me what it is, and I’ll do my best to give it to you!”

  Again the man was silent for what seemed like hours. Joe strained his ears to pick up the warble of a distant siren – anything that would tell him that help was on the way. Hadn’t the neighbors heard his door being broken down. for Christ’s sake? Were they stone deaf, or stupid, or what?

  He could hear the fog-lagged noises of San Francisco at night, but that was all. Traffic, aircraft, and the long animal cry of a ship’s foghorn. No sirens. He and Nina and Caroline and Joe Junior were trapped with their nightmare, in a city that seemed to have turned over and gone to sleep.

  Nina choked, “Please. Please don’t hurt us.”

  The man turned to Joe. “You want to live?”

  “What kind of a question is that?”

  “Under the circumstances, pretty reasonable, wouldn’t you say?”

  Joe smeared the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. “Of course we want to live. We have kids to take care of.”

  “Sure you do,” the man nodded. “So what I want you to do is, to kneel down on the floor, and to place both of your hands flat on the floorboards.”

  Joe hesitated. “That’s all? That’s all you want me to do?”

  “Just kneel down on the floor, like I said, and place both of your hands flat on the floorboards.”

  Joe did as he was told. The man looked at him for a while, and then said, “Okay, that’s good.”

  He released his grip on Nina’s hair, but when Nina started to sag, he nudged at her neck with the butcher knife, keeping her upright. With his left hand, he rummaged in the canvas sack that was tied to his belt.

  Joe said, “Can’t we talk? There must be something you want. I can arrange to have some cash brought around. My brother-in-law—”

  “Screw your brother-in-law,” the man growled. With some difficulty, he tugged out of his sack a small heavy-headed hammer, and then probed inside with two fingers, and brought out a long steel rail dog – a flat-sided nail used for pinning rails down to railroad ties.

  “Here,” he said, shuffling forward a few paces, bringing Nina with him, and shoving them aggressively under Joe’s nose.

  “What?” asked Joe, bewildered. He felt a sharp wetness down the side of one leg, and suddenly realized that he must have squirted pee into his pants. Fear beat against his forehead like an endless monotonous drumbeat. Please go away. Please don’t be here. Please let me open my eyes and find you gone.

  “Here,” the man repeated. “Take the goddamned hammer, will you?”

  Mutely, Joe took it, and tried to take the nail, too.

  “Unh-hunh. Not the nail. Your lovely wife’s going to hold the nail.”

  The man reached down and tried to press the nail into Nina’s hand. But Nina’s fingers were trembling uncontrollably, and she dropped the nail on to the floor, and it bounced and rang.

  “Pick it up,” the man told Joe. “Give it back to her.”

  Joe picked it up, and placed it gently back in Nina’s hand, and closed her fingers around it.

  “What do you want us to do?” Joe asked. His voice didn’t even sound like his own.

  The man grasped Nina’s hair again, and slowly levered her head back. Her bare throat was stretched. White skin, visible veins, highlighted by the white triangular reflection of the knifeblade. The knife’s reflection didn’t waver once. This man isn’t even human, thought Joe. Not only isn’t he scared; he isn’t excited, either. He’s calm, he’s relaxed. He’s not even threatening us because it turns him on.

  “You spread your left hand on the floor,” the man instructed Joe. “That’s right. ni
ce and flat. Now your lovely wife’s going to kneel down beside you nice and slow, and she’s going to hold that nail for you right in the middle of your hand, she’s going to hold it real steady. Then you’re going to knock it right in.”

  Joe stared at those dead black eyes in horror. “You want me to nail my own hand to the floor? Are you crazy?”

  “You can do as you’re told or you can watch your wife die, up to you.”

  “You’re out of your mind!” Joe gasped at him.

  The man grunted, dipped his masked head. “It doesn’t matter squat to you whether I’m sane or I’m crazy. All that matters to you is staying alive. And the only way you’re going to have any chance of staying alive is if you do what I tell you.”

  Very slowly, still tightly gripping her hair, the man forced Nina to kneel down next to Joe.

  “The nail,” he told her.

  “I can’t,” she choked. A thin runnel of blood had slid straight down the center of her larynx and pooled in the hollow of her neck.

  “Tell her, Joe,” the man coaxed him. “Tell her what’s going to happen if she doesn’t behave.”

  “Nina,” said Joe. “You’re going to have to be brave.”

  “But I can’t do it! I can’t!” She was close to becoming hysterical; and Joe knew how dangerous it could be, if a hostage became hysterical. That was when you had to go in with guns blazing, because anything could happen, and usually did, and all you could hope to do was keep the casualties down to the minimum.

  “The nail,” the man insisted.

  Shaking wildly, Nina held the nail between finger and thumb, about two or three inches above the back of Joe’s hand. Joe took hold of the point and placed it between his finger-joints, well clear of his veins.

  “I can’t do it,” Nina panted. “I can’t do it. Please don’t ask me to do it.”

  “Listen,” said Joe, “it won’t even hurt. You remember Bill Gates? He caught a .45 slug in the middle of his hand, just like he was playing baseball. He didn’t even feel it, and he’s fine now. Absolutely fine.”

  In spite of his soft words of reassurance, Joe was sweating iced-water, and he could feel his spaghetti knotting and churning in his stomach like a jarful of tomato-flavored worms. If he had to do it, if he had to nail his own hand to the floor, he wanted to get it over as quickly as he could.

  “Just hold the nail there,” he begged her. “Hold it there and close your eyes. You won’t be doing me any favors if you don’t keep it real steady.”

  Nina stared into his eyes, and swallowed. “I love you,” she said. “Don’t ever forget that I love you.”

  “I love you too, sweetheart,” Joe told her.

  “Get on with it, for Christ’s sake!” the man snarled. “You want to see her die?”

  Joe could feel the point of the nail trembling against his skin. He had to hit it hard and accurate—think about it as joinery. He didn’t want to hit his fingers with a 5lb hammer, he could smash his knuckles and never be able to work again. And he didn’t want to hit Nina’s fingers either.

  A drop of Nina’s blood fell on to the back of his hand and that decided him. If she could shed her blood to save him, then he could certainly shed his blood to save her.

  He swung the hammer back, shouted “Ahh!” and banged the nail right through the flesh between his index and middle fingers, right through muscle and cartilage, and into the hard oak flooring.

  He hadn’t imagined that it would hurt so much. After all, Bill Gates had told him that he hadn’t felt a thing. But the nail sent a hideous spasm of pain all the way up his arm to the elbow, and his fingers contracted as if he had been electrocuted.

  “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” he babbled. It was partly a release of tension, partly surprise, mostly agony.

  But the man in the mask wasn’t going to let up. “Again,” he ordered, his voice harsh. “Right in, as far as it can go.”

  His eyes filled with tears, Joe lifted the hammer again. The man had forced Nina to stand up now, well away from him. She hadn’t been able to close her eyes, but she had turned her face away, and she was gray with shock.

  Joe looked down at his hand. The L-shaped head of the nail protruded about an inch-and-a-half above the skin, but apart from a narrow red line that ran between his fingers, there was surprisingly little blood.

  “Again.” the man commanded him.

  Numbly, Joe lifted the hammer, hesitated, and then banged at the nailhead again, and then again, until his hand was pinned flat to the floor. He felt as if he were suffering from severe frostbite. He was overwhelmed by a relentless aching that seemed to penetrate every bone in his body. He dropped the hammer and knelt shaking and silent, not even thinking what might happen next.

  “Now,” said the man. “Mrs. Berry’s turn.”

  Joe lifted his head. “What?” he asked, fearfully.

  “The lovely Nina’s turn,” the man replied. No emotion. No gloating. As matter-of-fact as an airline steward, announcing that it was time for them to board their flight.

  “What do you mean, what are you going to do?” Joe demanded.

  “Will you just cut out all the fucking questions?” the man told him, his voice still muffled but rising.

  “But you’re not going to—”

  “I said shut the fuck up!” the man screamed, and this time Joe was seriously frightened. The man might sound calm most of the time, but it was clear that he was right on the brink. One wrong move, one smart answer too many, and he could kill them both. Joe closed his eyes tight, in excruciating misery, and thought of Caroline and Joe Junior; and tried to think of something hopeful, too, some way out of this terrifying insanity.

  But the masked man had crowded the whole apartment with such a suffocating aura of illogical dread that Joe couldn’t think of anything constructive or optimistic at all; except that he wanted this over. No matter how it ended, he wanted it over.

  He opened his eyes and found that Nina was kneeling on the floor facing him, her hands flat on the floor. Their fingertips were almost touching. The man was hunkered down beside her, his belly rolled over the belt of his jeans, and now he was holding the point of the knife close to her jugular vein.

  Joe could smell him. He smelled of sweat and automobile grease and something else indefinable: a smell like stale hay, or dry leather, or poor-quality marijuana.

  “We’re going to do the same thing again now,” the man said. “Nina’s going to hold the nail and Joe’s going to hammer it in.”

  He produced another railroad dog from his sack, and laid it carefully on the floor close to Nina’s left hand.

  “They’re going to gas you for this,” Joe told him, his voice fragmented, like all the bits and pieces inside a child’s kaleidoscope.

  “Shut up, please,” the man said, much more softly this time. “They’re not going to gas me for nothing.”

  Joe, wincing with pain, said, “You can’t expect me to—Jesus, she’s my wife!”

  “Sure I can expect you to. I can expect you to do anything. It’s up to you, do it or die. What could be simpler?”

  Nina breathed, “Joe, do it. For God’s sake let’s get this over with.”

  She picked up the nail with her right hand and carefully positioned the point over the back of her left.

  “Do it, Joe. Come on, we’ve shared everything before.”

  “Yes, come on, Joe,” the man urged him, digging the point of his knife into Nina’s neck. “Double your pleasure, double your fun.”

  “God, you maniac,” Joe cursed him.

  He lowered his head. There was a moment when he didn’t know whether he would be able to do it or not. After all, what guarantee did he have, after he had nailed Nina’s hand to the floor, that the man wouldn’t kill them anyway? But his police training kept telling him: compromise, take the line of least resistance. He had seen too many times what had happened to people who had tried to be heroes.

  Nina said, “Go on, Joe. Be brave.”

  Joe shive
red. Why did he feel so cold?

  “Go on, Joe,” he heard Nina repeating.

  He tried not to think about anything at all. He lifted the hammer and beat at the nail in Nina’s hand with all his strength, hoping to save her the pain of a second or a third stroke. She let out a strange cry like nothing he had ever heard before; except for a seagull with a broken wing, which he had once seen crushed by the wheel of a slowly-reversing truck, on the Embarcadero.

  He dropped the hammer heavily on to the floor. But the man in the mask said, “Again! Come on, Joe! Again! It’s only half of the way in!”

  He picked up the hammer. He tried to look at nothing but the head of the nail. He beat it again, and still it wouldn’t go in. He beat it again, and again; and at last Nina’s hand was pinned flat to the floor, like his own.

  The man peered closely at Joe, and then at Nina, and they were both weeping.

  “You did good!” he exclaimed. “You did really, really good! I’m proud of you!”

  Joe said nothing. He couldn’t speak out of pain; and humiliation; and complete disgust. Nina kept on sobbing and sobbing; but Joe knew that she was sobbing more out of pity for him than she was for her own pain.

  The man took his knife away from Nina’s throat, and eased himself back so that he was sitting on the floor. “Well, well,” he said. “That’s good. That’s just the way I wanted to see you. Kneeling, you know? Obedient. And sick at heart.”

  He dug the point of the knife into the floorboards, and it vibrated backwards and forwards, like a tuning-fork.

  “Joe’s had his turn and Nina’s had her turn. Now it’s my turn.”

  “Aren’t you satisfied yet?” Joe asked him, wretchedly.

  “Satisfied?” The glossy black mask turned toward him in apparent curiosity. “Don’t you know that his Satanic Majesty is never satisfied?”

  “For God’s sake,” Joe pleaded.

  “Oh, no,” the man replied, and his voice was rich with lewdness. “For Satan’s sake.”