“Not that I can think of.”
“Clear off. Nurse, ready the crash cart. IV push. Get somebody checking her mouth for signs of poison. Hell, her shoulders and hips for needle marks, too. God damn it! It’s like that bastard’s able to reach right into shit. Cut her clothes off. Check everywhere. Check every inch of her. Who knows what that fucker did to her.”
I shouldn’t have done that one. I shouldn’t have done him like I did. From the very start, it was a lark. A whim. There wasn’t enough grim poetry in it, only the fun of a lawyer strangling at sixty-five miles an hour on the Edens. But it wasn’t fun. It was cheap and sour and foul.
He was a lawyer, a sometime-prosecutor – a killer, like me, except authorized by the government instead of by God. He made sure criminals received what was coming to them – sometimes steel cages, sometimes death. We were peas in a pod, he and I. I had the same outlook and wanted him to get what he deserved. I chose him partly for that, but mostly because I couldn’t resist when I saw his name spelled out in white plastic capitals on the office register: PHIL JUDGEM.
I shouldn’t have done him. Right then I knew it. This would be no more than a cheap joyride. A fling. A hand-job…
The elevator doors parted. Phil Judgem stood within the red-velour space. He wore a sleek suit of gray-blue, cut to hide his pudginess. A suit can do only so much. His neck strained in its white collar, and venous hands drooped beneath silver cufflinks. The glint of metal was brief, like a spark at his wrists. Judgem moved on. He walked through the lobby. It was a modern sanctuary of glass, steel, and marble. There were others of his kind here, silent and sleek and a little wide-eyed like salmon nuzzling past each other. Judgem reached the perpetually revolving doors, timed his feet, and came out into the sunlit plaza.
I was waiting. The valet jacket was only slightly too big for me. The cap fit perfectly.
“The green Mercedes,” he said to me, holding up the claim card.
I nodded enthusiastically, snatched the keys, and hurried down into the parking lot.
The place was dark, a cave of cement and rusted wire. It smelled poisonous from exhaust. I scanned the current batch, fitted tightly bumper to bumper, and found a dark green Mercedes. Going to it, I tried the key. It fit. I opened the door, sat down in the driver’s seat, started up the car, and pulled out, heading for the main entrance. It was some car, with seats of black leather, power everything, and a ride quiet as a purr.
The gray parking garage gave way to a wedge of cloud-cluttered sky. The car glided up the ramp and came to a smooth stop beside Judgem. I opened the door, stepped from the driver’s seat, and gestured him toward his car. He placed a dollar in my hand and moved past me to get in.
I might not have killed him even then, might have let him drive off, but for the sweaty crumple of that dollar in my hand. I thought of the fifty from that reporter, Blake Gaines. It had been the same. Warm and intimate. Disgusting. One kick knocked him sideways into the passenger seat. He kicked back at me. I shot him. It was a fat bullet. The impact shoved him all the way over. I climbed behind the wheel, locked the windows and doors, and roared out toward Ohio Street and the ramp onto 94 North. He cowered beside me. His hand lay limp in his lap. One fat leg was wrenched a little sideways.
“You can have the car. You can have my wallet. You can have everything, just let me go.”
It was going sour. The whole thing. He smelled of feces – maybe the bullet had cut through bowel, or maybe he’d dirtied himself. He was white and soft as a pudding. He jiggled.
“Please. Anything.”
“God damn it, shut up. Shut the fuck up.” I pointed the gun at his head. I felt sick. I couldn’t enjoy it anymore. He was disgusting. Not like the others. There was no dignity. It was like walking on white worms lying in rain puddles. “Shut the fuck up.”
He vomited. I pressed a button. His window rolled down halfway. We were going sixty-five up the Edens.
“Stick your fucking head outside!” I shouted. Wiping his mouth, he stuck his head out the window. I pressed a button. The glass rose to catch him beneath the chin. He tried to pull his head out, but already it was caught between glass and chrome. He fumbled to reach the controls, but I kept my finger down so nothing he did made a difference. I was sick. He was like a pig with its head stuck in a gate, fat and grotesque as he struggled and died. I couldn’t stand it. I emptied the gun into him, let down the window, and let him roll in beside me. God, what a fucking mess.
Samael was not the angel of death who turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt. Nor was he the angel of death who stole through Egypt to slay all the firstborn sons of the land. Samael’s commission began later, when it was time for Moses to die.
Elohim sought an angel to descend among his people and separate the soul of Moses from his body. God asked the archangel Gabriel, the great messenger to humans, who did not wish to slay the Lawgiver. Next God asked Michael, who was the head of Heaven’s armies and would in time become the angel of death for Christians, but he also refused. Samael, however, was eager for the job of killing God’s greatest prophet.
Though as holy and angelic as all the rest, Samael had a certain penchant for cruelty. After God gave him the task of killing Moses, Samael spent a long while determining how best to do it. Perhaps Moses should die through a series of Egyptlike plagues – his blood would turn to water, his hair to locusts, his genitalia to toads, his skin to boils, his shadow to impenetrable darkness, and so forth. Or, perhaps, Moses could be enticed to part the Jordan River and cross, despite God’s prohibition against him entering the land of milk and honey. Then Samael could loose the tide when Moses was halfway, and the water would crash over him, and he would drown. Or, best of all, Moses could be murdered by a man who, in the single act of killing him, broke all Ten Commandments. The murderer could be Moses’s covetous son, who dishonored his father in an adulterous affair with an idol-worshiper on the Sabbath and, when discovered in the act by Moses, blasphemed and stole Moses’s dagger and murdered him with it, then ran away and testified that his neighbor had done it. Unfortunately, Moses had no such son.
Samael at last settled on simply killing Moses with his bare hands. Samael descended from Heaven, appearing in human form to choke the life from Moses’s body. Moses’s face, however, shone so brightly from having seen God that Samael was scared off. He had planned full-scale atrocities, but this man shone like God! Samael complained to the Creator, who chastised him and sent him back to finish the job. Samael appeared again in human form before Moses, who was ready this time. With his fabled staff – the one that had turned into a serpent – the great prophet walloped Samael. Samael was not used to such treatment at the hands of mortals and went again to complain to God. Meanwhile, Michael and Gabriel, who had said they would not kill Moses, went down to complete the task. They created a heavenly couch and invited the weary old prophet to sit down for a rest. When he did, they whisked the couch up to Heaven.
Though they had gotten Moses off the earth, his soul still did not want to leave his body. He clung tight to the couch. Even the great archangels had failed. In the end, Moses was slain by a kiss from God himself, which made his soul leap for joy, right out of his body. The sun has already set behind the wall of skyscrapers along Grant Park, casting building wedges far out across the foamy lake. I sit on a green-painted park bench. I feed the pigeons. It is an image I cannot resist. The gentle killer. The quiet murderer. The pensive and reflective monster. I don’t like the fat pigeons. Those I kick when I can. I like the skinny little ones. I like the gimp pigeons, the ones with only two claws on a foot, or none at all. I like them because they bear up under the crushing heel of God. God knows when every sparrow falls from Heaven, and when every pigeon goes gimp, and those broken little ones are the fleshly manifestation of His ethereal will.