Avenging Angel Read Free Page A

taut line against the surge and leap of the fish out of the placid mirror.
    But he was here, ten stories above a downtown Denver street that echoed with the urgent summer noises of automobiles and the shuffle and scrape of feet made restless by the warm night. There was a different kind of fishing down here; perhaps a different kind of savagery. Wager wasn’t so certain about that, though; muggers, rapists, killers—they struck, like any other animal, at the weak, the crippled, the defenseless. They came out of dark crevices between buildings and went after the sure thing as a fish lunged after a wobbling minnow. Except for executioners. Executioners were different.
    An angel holding a sword. Michael, the sword of the Lord, prince of celestial armies. That was the picture Wager remembered from one of the stained-glass windows when he had fidgeted through another of Father Shannon’s droning sermons in old San Cajetano’s. Michael holding his sword before him while below his left foot Adam and Eve slunk away—the top half of Adam, anyway. Eve’s blond head peeked over his shoulder, and the teenage Wager had only been able to imagine faintly what the rest of her looked like. Below Michael’s right foot, a serpentine Satan recoiled in fear, and Father Shannon would point to that glowing scene in every sermon against fleshly lust.
    Father Shannon: a grim man, more like a Lutheran than a Catholic. “He doesn’t have a warm soul,” his mother used to murmur in Spanish. “He doesn’t have the soul of a man who serves God with love.” And his father, whose Spanish, like his adopted faith, often stumbled, would grin. “Maybe he serves God with fear. He sure as hell scares me sometimes!” Michael was gonna get you if you didn’t watch out.
    Wager reported before eight the next morning. Munn, who was getting an ulcer worrying about his ulcer coming back, was glad to check out a half hour early.
    “I’ll be goddamn happy to get off this shift.” The baggy-eyed detective leaned for a moment against the metal door frame of the homicide unit’s suite of partitioned offices and sculpted plastic furniture. The department had finally moved into the new Justice Center, but Wager had not yet gotten used to the expanse of space that surrounded each desk, and his elbows and knees were still cautious. “There’s nobody to talk to,” said Munn. “I got too much time to think.”
    “What do you think about?”
    “My ulcer. I can feel the sonofabitch. I can feel it start to grow.”
    “Take some sick leave, Munn.”
    “I used it all. I just hope I can hang on until retirement.” A sour look crossed his face as his mind turned to something inside. “I got to go. Thanks, Gabe.” He went hurriedly toward the men’s room down the hushed and carpeted hall.
    Wager punched the telephone number for the laboratory. The recording started and then with an abrupt squeak broke into Baird’s real voice. “Lab. Sergeant Baird.”
    “This is Gabe, Fred. What do you have on that victim we found yesterday?”
    “Right now, Wager, I got a cup of coffee sitting on his file. The working day hasn’t started yet.”
    A cop’s working day never stopped, not unless he got transferred to a desk somewhere away from the street and away from a world that never stopped either. But when that happened, you weren’t a real cop anymore. “I could use an i.d. on him, Baird. There’s not much we can do until we know who he is.”
    “Gabe, I really am working on him. I’m filling out the background forms right now, and I’ll be going to the morgue in about five minutes. You can even come with me and watch if you want.”
    “I’ll be right there.”
    He left a note telling Axton where to find him, and after a few twists and turns through the color-coordinated hallways he cleared the security door to the new laboratory. The brochure printed by the department for the taxpayers who toured the recently built Justice Center said it was the most