Free Stalking the Angel by Robert Crais

on. The guy with the missing finger who’d been out front my first time around was curled atop a gray metalfile cabinet. His head and his right arm were hanging over the edge. His neck was limp, the front and side of it purple as if he had been hit there very hard. Someone had cleared Nobu Ishida’s desk of papers and ledgers and pencil can and phone. They had put all that on his swivel chair along with his clothes and then pushed the chair out of the way and tied Ishida spread-eagled on his desk, naked, arms and legs bound to the desk legs with brown electrical cord. They had used a knife on him. There were cuts on his arms and his legs and his torso and his face and his genitals. Some of the cuts were very deep. His bladder and his bowels had let go. The blood had crusted into delicate red-brown rivers along his arms and legs and had pooled on the desk and then dripped heavily onto the floor to mix with other things. The pool on the floor had spread almost to the door and looked slick and tacky. A gray stuffed Godzilla had been jammed in his mouth to smother the screams.
    I stepped around the blood to the chair and looked through the things that had been on the desk. Ishida’s wallet was still in his right back pants pocket. I took it out, opened it, copied down his home address, then put the wallet back the way I’d found it. I used my handkerchief to pick up the phone and called Lou Poitras. He said, “What now?”
    “I’m at Ishida’s place of business. He’s dead.”
    There was a pause. “Did you kill him?”
    “No.” I watched the pool of blood.
    “Don’t leave the scene. Don’t touch anything. Don’t let anyone else in. I’m on my way. There’ll be other cops but I’ll get there first.”
    He hung up. I put the phone down and stepped around the blood back onto the catwalk and pulled the door closed. I worked up spit and swallowed and tookseveral deep breaths. I expanded my lungs from the diaphragm and expelled the air in stages from the lower lobes to the mid-lobes to the upper lobes. I tried everything I could think of but I couldn’t get rid of the taste or the smell. I never could. Like every encounter with death, it had become a part of me.

10

    I went downstairs and sat at one of the two tables in the deepening darkness until Lou Poitras pulled up out front in a light green Dodge. A black-and-white pulled up behind him and the plain white van the crime scene guys use pulled up behind the van. Cops on parade.
    I went to the front door and opened it. Across the street, the ATF cops were on their feet in the big window, ZZ Top screaming into the phone, the other one pulling on a jacket. I gave them a little wave.
    Poitras said, “Knock off that shit and come in here.”
    If Lou Poitras wasn’t a cop he could rent himself out as Mighty Joe Young. He spends about an hour and a half every morning six days a week pumping iron in a little weight room in his back yard in Northridge, trying to see how big he can get. He’s good at it. I’d once seen him punch through a Cadillac’s windshield and pull a big man out over the steering wheel.
    He shouldered past me. “Where?”
    “In the back. Up the stairs.”
    One of the uniforms was a black guy with a bullet head and a thick neck and hands four sizes too big for him. His name tag read LEONARD . His partner was a blond kid with a skimpy Larry Bird mustache and hard eyes. Leonard mumbled something and the blond kid took the crime scene guys into the back after Poitras.
    “You don’t want to see?” I said.
    Leonard said, “I seen enough.”
    I went back to the two tables and sat. Leonard found the lights, turned them on, then went back up front. He leaned against a floor-to-ceiling case of toy robots with his arms crossed, and stared out into the street. You do this job long enough, you know what’s going to be back there even without going back there.
    The little door chime rang and the two ATF cops from the insurance office came in. They