Broken Angels Read online

  “Man, you don’t know about The Experience?” Kurtis regarded his friend with a mild look of disgust. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Oh, relax,” Anika said as she backhand-slapped the air toward Kurtis. “Not everyone has heard of them yet.” She said to Robert, “They’re a collective of artists that stages these humongous concerts at The Poet’s Pit every other weekend, when they’re not on the road, that is.”

  “All types of artists,” Kurtis said. “Singers and skaters, dancers and martial arts experts, actors and mimes, ice-sculptors and magicians, acrobats and contortionists—”

  “It’s a real circus,” Anika said.

  “Sometimes they all perform at once,” Kurtis said, “but for some numbers, only one of the artists performs. Melodie Might is a singer, but she never finishes a song because, in the middle, she starts crying.”

  “Melodie might make it to the end, one day,” Anika said. “We guess that’s the reason behind the name.”

  “We’re catching one of their shows after dinner. Want to come?”

  “I’ll pass,” Robert said.

  “Ready to order?” the waiter asked. This was his first official visit to the table, but there was impatience in his voice. Robert saw why. It was the same waiter Anika had sabotaged earlier.

  “Death by Gumbo,” the girl said. “And again I’m really, really sorry.”

  “S’okay,” the waiter said. “We won’t charge you for it. This time.”

  Smart guy, Robert thought. Only one accident so far, but he’d already correctly figured she was probably going to cause more.

  “And you, sir?”

  “I’ll try a bowl of that alligator stew,” Robert said. “Two drops weren’t enough.”

  The waiter didn’t get the joke, or found it unfunny; he only looked at Kurtis, who responded, “Death by Gumbo for me, too. And can we get a refill on the ice teas?”

  After the waiter left the table, Robert thought of the earlier accident and took another look at Anika. During the confusion, he’d seen a few drops of food touch her clothes too. They were now gone.

  “Didn’t take you long to clean up,” he said to her.

  “I don’t like to spend a lot of time in the bathroom,” she responded.

  Robert ignored the wise-aleck response mumbled by Kurtis and asked, “When you were going in, was someone else coming out? Someone tall, with dark hair?”

  “A friend of yours?” Anika asked.

  “Unlikely,” Robert said.

  “Then who are you talking about?”

  “That short-haired, porcelain-white woman at the bar. Near the door. Don’t look, Kurtis. And don’t make it obvious, Anika.”

  Both ignored the request without hesitation then spoke at the same time.

  “Who?” “There’s no one at the bar who looks like that.”

  Robert turned and saw they were right. The woman had vanished. Another woman was in her place. A short, stocky, strawberry blonde who was chatting happily on her cell phone and downing the last of what appeared to be a martini.

  Robert sighed as he turned back around, taking his bottle of medication out from his jacket pocket. What he’d taken in the bathroom probably hadn’t been enough.

  “Sure that stuff ’s helping,” Kurtis asked, “and not just messing with your mind?”

  “If anything’s messing with my mind,” Robert said after swallowing, “it’s not the pills. These things help me keep control.”

  Anika shook her head. “So you say. But from what I’ve read, any medicine offered for…those who have what you have is either dangerous or just a placebo.”

  “These are neither,” Robert said. “They keep their promise.”

  “You’re too trusting,” Kurtis said.

  “I’ve heard different.”

  “Well, I heard that a ring of identity thieves was broken up yesterday,” Anika said, “and that maybe a certain nonprofit group profited nicely by finding a lost girl.”

  “I guess there’s nothing wrong with your sense of hearing after all,” Robert said as he smirked at Kurtis.

  Kurtis only rolled as his eyes and mumbled, “Congrats on the find,” before taking a sip of his tea.

  Robert didn’t know how they found out about the previous day’s hush-hush activity—the HSA had taken full credit and released next to no details to the press—but it was a good sign. They were still on their game. He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I need another favor.”

  “Research?”

  “Yeah. I need you to find out about this girl, Stavan Darden, from Spencer, Virginia. First name is spelled S-T-A-V-A-N and pronounced STUH-von, but she goes by ‘Ava.’ Approximate age is eighteen or nineteen. Do whatever electronic magic you do to find out every tiny bit you can about her. Especially stuff someone like me might find relevant.”

  Robert felt a tingling sensation on his right wrist. “Damn it.” He put his fingers on the face of his watch, intuiting the message. “Damn it.”

  “What’s the matter?” Kurtis asked as Robert stood up.

  “Gotta go. Emergency.” Robert tossed a twenty on the table to cover his cost of the meal. “Let me know when you find something.” He rushed for the door. On his way out, he glanced at the seat where he’d seen the snow-skinned woman. It was empty, but the lipstick-stained coffee cup was again on the bar. Several bills and change were lying next to it. He furrowed his brow but kept moving.

  He felt a chill when he stepped out onto the sidewalk. Even though the sun had already set, September’s early evening air was still warm enough to get by with just a T-shirt. Robert was wearing a T-shirt and a windbreaker. Regardless, he’d felt a chill. He nonchalantly looked all around him as he crossed the street. He looked around once more as he headed for the parking lot between the paint store and the pharmacy. And he glanced all over one last time before he unlocked his car’s door. He swore he was being watched—and followed. But neither his parasite-given abilities nor his mathematical tricks helped him detect a thing.

  No time to dwell on it. Adam had contacted him to tell him that their most recent find had disappeared again. Darryl was otherwise occupied, apparently, so it was up to Robert to get to the hospital as quickly as he could.

  He was there in thirty minutes. He spent the next thirty minutes questioning everyone he could about what had happened. They had very little to tell him. The nurse who’d checked in on Ava around three o’clock saw she was sleeping soundly. When the nurse checked in on her again a short time later, Ava was gone. No one had seen her leave the room, or the hospital.

  Robert wasn’t surprised. He’d spent much of the day studying the videos in the IAI’s archives of her fight with Marie-Lydia McGillis. He was familiar with her abilities. Ava was skillful enough to sneak undetected out of a big busy building like a hospital, no matter how secure it allegedly was. The recordings made by the building’s surveillance cameras would be worthless, he knew, even though someone affiliated with the IAI would review them anyway. After relaying to Adam what he’d found, there was nothing left for Robert to do but go home…or maybe go looking for Darryl. Pin him down, stage a one-man intervention.

  But he felt it again after he passed through the hospital’s sliding doors. A chill. This time he felt it and shivered more than once before reaching his car. Again he looked all around him. Again he saw no one.

  The enhanced abilities of his eye and ears only went so far; instinct always went farther. Robert knew he was being watched and followed even though there was no good evidence, and there was no way he was going to lead a potential threat straight to his doorstep. If his stalker wanted that prize, he or she would have to survive a maze of fast tracks and blind curves.

  Robert walked away from his car, out of the parking lot, and kept on walking until he was able to catch a cab.

  “East Falls Church Metro station, please.”

  He planned to start out on one of the outlying Northern Virginia stations of the area’s subway system. He would
ride it into and under the District before coming up in Maryland for air, checking it for pollutants. If he couldn’t lose his spy on the road, he’d lose the looker on the rails. At the very least, he hoped he’d lose his funny feeling.

  But the nerve-prickling sensation at the back of his neck branched out to other regions of his body the moment he stepped onto the platform of the Metro station.

  Damn parents. There were none in sight, or at least none who were acting in the role. The platform seemed crowded with nothing but a range of children and teenagers—some of the older ones so drunk or drugged up they could hardly walk, and the youngest so young they’d probably only started walking within the past year. The noise-level of their voices was tolerable; the volume-level of their tiny portable media players was bearable; but the words Robert heard were something else. Much of the language coming from the mouths and seeping from the loose earbuds was as foul as the atmosphere. Despite being an outside, above-ground platform, the odors didn’t move very far from the many that smoked cigs and joints, drank from bottle-shaped brown bags, and ate from greasy bags of fast food, in blatant violation of the posted signs and occasional loud-speaker announcements about Metro station rules.

  It turned out adults were present, just not willing to take up their rightful mantle of supervision. Some appeared oblivious to the goings-on; others were participating. Robert did spot five or six who were trying to keep their heads down and stay out of the way as they waited for the train to arrive and carry them to safety. Some had better luck than others. The giddy young roughhousers rarely stayed within their own play-zones, and unwilling participants were bumped and shoved almost as much as those who were in on the childish games.

  Authority figures were also on the grounds—downstairs, on a different level, sitting inside their big-windowed kiosks, probably talking about last night’s Nationals game or, more likely, napping. No one would disturb them with questions about ticket purchases at this hour; they could rest in peace. The station’s surveillance cameras provided only a wink to security. If something were to happen, something spontaneous and big, Robert wondered how many people would end up beaten and bloody before sufficient help arrived.

  He didn’t like the situation, but he’d been in it so often, he was almost inured to it. Almost. It took all but superhuman strength of will not to allow himself to lapse and fall in with those resigned to the way things were, with those who didn’t give a shit and had just given up on society, themselves, and the future of human civilization.

  Kids…There was more than one way for their parents to lose them. They weren’t all runaways, abductees, or premature corpses. Some kids stayed close to home, with no direction in life, lost to themselves and anyone else in the world who would be close to them. But it wasn’t Robert’s job to keep them in line, only to find them when they ended up too far astray. At the moment, he had to perform the tricky task of ignoring them while searching for something else that might be astray.

  As he maneuvered through the drunk and the joyous and the careless, Robert kept his ears perked for immediate threats and his eye alert for anyone who might be watching him with too much interest. He detected nothing, but he found a clear spot from where he could keep a lookout over the rotten slice of nightlife around him.

  Robert did give the revelers some credit. When the train arrived, they were smart enough to toss their tobacco and weed sticks, declining to bring them onto a cramped car that had limited ventilation. He was happy to see they adhered to some rules of civilization, or at least fell back on the instinct of self-preservation.

  He was less happy to hear the noise-level only increased when the train’s doors opened. The higher volume and a packed car would only make personal surveillance much more difficult. But he fought for one advantage.

  Robert had posted himself near the train’s last car and—manner to ladies and children be damned—he made sure he was one of the first to get on. Nudging and pushing, he made his way to the end of the car and leaned his back against an emergency door, putting everything and everyone in front of him and only the door behind him.

  There he stayed while the running train slid underground, traveled beneath Washington, and resurfaced for a few stops before reaching the end of the line in Maryland. During the ride, he’d been the subject of many dirty looks, a few bad jokes, and some good nonverbal taunts (eye patches weren’t popular, and those who wore them even less so, especially if they didn’t have a strapped or muscular crew standing with them), but Robert hadn’t seen anything that was a serious threat to him.

  After riding through a few stops on the train heading back in the other direction, on a whim he decided to switch lines at the Gallery Place station. He hopped off the orange line train and ran onto the green line train just as its doors were closing. He was attempting to confuse whatever unseen person or persons had been following him; instead he’d only succeeded in jumping into a pit of potential danger.

  Robert had entered through the middle door of the car, a car filled with rowdy individuals who by their words, clothes, and actions made clear their intent to wild-out all night long. Shortly after the train made its first jerking motions forward, two of the more menacing riders stepped toward him.

  The two teenaged boys were shirtless and sockless, clomping toward Robert in unlaced shoes. Their ratty vests and tattered, ripped jeans were faded and grimy, as if they’d gone through multiple cycles of being machined-washed and hand-dragged through soot.

  “Yo ho ho, matey,” one of the grinning boys said as they closed in. “Lookin’ for some swiggin’ swag?”

  “Or some shakin’ booty?”

  The oil-stain colors on the boys’ tongues and the look in their eyes made it clear they’d had a low dosage of Jelly Raptures; no more than one or two beans apiece. The night was still young for them.

  Robert ran his eye over both druggies, then said, “Don’t bug me, man.”

  The word “man” wasn’t an accurate description, and it wasn’t meant as a sign of respect. Robert had simply meant it as an indirect warning to what looked like a fifteen-year-old and his younger friend: Push me and I’ll take you on like an adult. With their body art and piercings, it was clear they were no strangers to pain. The lines on their faces showed they’d already experienced trials beyond their young years. He wouldn’t need to go too easy on them.

  “Where’d you get that faggoty lookin’ eye patch, man?” the younger one asked.

  “From your father,” Robert said, “back in the alley.”

  The questioner stopped grinning. He balled one hand into a fist and took two steps forward. Robert left his fingers outstretched and furrowed his brow, letting the iris of his eye fade from a mahogany brown to a shade of maroon before trading its hue for a bright cherry-red.

  “Bug me,” Robert said, “and get zapped.”

  Fighting young ones to save young ones—another one of life’s beautiful contradictions. When Robert was the only one being threatened, he had a choice, and he almost always chose to remove himself from the situation, if allowed. If not, he tried to encourage the aggressors to remove themselves. Retreat without regrets.

  The boy stopped advancing, uncurled his fingers, and looked as if he wanted to say something, something that would erase what he’d just said to Robert. His friend put a hand on his shoulder and pulled him back a step to whisper something in his ear. The older boy’s moving lips were hidden from Robert’s line of vision, and he only heard the word “back,” but when both retreated from his personal space, he figured he could safely ignore them.

  Robert avoided looking at the two Jellyheads and, at the next stop, left the car for another one. He saw them leave the car after him, but he didn’t realize they’d followed him into the new one until after the doors had closed. He’d entered at one end of the car, they at the other. The throng of people between them made the two difficult to spot at first, but shortly after seeing and recognizing them, Robert again made a conscious decision to ignor
e them and find a position where he could keep an eye on more serious happenings—like the something happening in the middle of the car.

  A little boy was approaching a woman in a wobbly manner, babbling and pointing at her headscarf as he neared. The woman, presumably a Muslim, was with two small children, most likely her daughters. A teenage girl was sitting adjacent to the woman, her cell phone oriented in the direction of the boy. Robert saw the phone’s camera function was on, recording. The snickering girl was anticipating something. Something funny. Robert looked at the boy to try to guess the joke.

  He initially figured the boy just wanted to know why the woman’s head was covered. Today’s kids were not only curious but also bold. This one was having trouble expressing himself. The woman said something akin to, “What?” in her original tongue as she leaned nearer, bringing her face closer to the boy. Robert had a second guess about the boy’s intent just one second before he smacked the woman across the face. “Bold” wasn’t the word for it.

  “Happy slap! Happy slap!” The girl with the cell phone yelled with glee as her companions howled with laughter.

  The boy smacked the woman twice more before turning to her children, the children who were barely old enough to walk and nowhere near old enough to defend themselves.

  Robert cursed as he looked for the nearest emergency call box and cursed again when he spotted it next to the emergency exit door. An embracing couple stood between him and the red button, a couple so lost in each other’s affectations they could have no idea of the emergency taking place. Robert nudged them over with his shoulder and elbow, into the seats and onto the laps of another amorous couple.

  He didn’t wait to talk to the questioning voice that came through the box’s speaker in response. Someone who heard it might have responded with “Fight!” or something similar, but all Robert heard was the laughter, crying, and screaming from the commotion.

  A small area of space had cleared so the victims and victimizers were clearly defined. Most of the bystanders—whether appalled or amused—had moved themselves as far out of the way as possible, clogging Robert’s route to the scene.