Free Azrael by William L. Deandrea Page A

word for souls like Clara’s, you know. The ones who come to Earth to help one special person, then return to heaven.”
    “What word?”
    “They call them angels.”
    They call them angels. Tina couldn’t get the words out of her mind. For a week, the conversation kept running through her head. It was the same old bull, sure, Speech Number Fifteen, consoling bereft mothers. But he’d sounded so sincere. He believed it, even if Tina didn’t. The idea that God would waste an angel on her was ridiculous. And she missed her baby, dammit, she wanted her baby! How dare he try to palm her off with—
    She’d gone back to give him another piece of her mind, and a few days later she’d gone back again to give him another. Pretty soon she was just asking questions.
    Today, she’d gone to him because for the first time, she had found herself thinking of her child without tears welling up in her eyes. Until it came to her that it shouldn’t be that way; then the guilt made her cry.
    And he had made her feel better. Again. “I’m coming to services on Sunday,” she told Mr. Nelson on the way out.
    “It will be a pleasure to have you.”
    “It’s the least I can do, taking up so much of your time,” she’d said, and Mr. Nelson had made his joke about the Creation.
    Special Agent Joe Albright sat behind the wheel of a pickup truck and watched Tina Bloyd walk down the white steps of the church to the walkway that led to Main Street.
    Joe had taken a small garage in the Flats and gone into the junk business—or, as you had to call it in Kirkester, the Salvage/Reclamation business. He had his truck and a pair of khaki overalls with “Joe” scripted in red threads over his pocket. He could go anywhere, at any time, knock on anybody’s door, and engage in conversation. He had also made the Government of the United States of America a net profit of $527.68 in the first week and a half. Seems that Albright Salvage/Reclamation was the first black-owned business in the history of Kirkester, and the paper had done an article on him (too bad Trotter didn’t write it). The people in town had read the article and had been falling all over themselves to prove that even though everybody they ever voted for, from president to dogcatcher, was a Republican, they were not prejudiced.
    That was okay with Joe. That same impulse led people to talk to him a lot longer than they normally would to a junk—a Salvage/Reclamation man. In between “It’s good to see a young man starting his own business” and “We don’t care what somebody looks like, only what they’ve got inside,” he’d found out a lot about the three deaths. Not much that added up, at least on face value. Joe had a little idea he was developing, though, that might make sense of things. The question was, did he, or did he not, tell Trotter?
    Another question was, why was he hesitating to approach Tina Bloyd? He’d talked to the other parents without a qualm.
    It had damned well better not be, he told himself, because she was black. The day he let race shit get in the way of his job was the day to pack it in. All right. She’s been to the preacher so much, she’ll be in church on Sunday. I’ll put on my best suit, tune up my hymn singing, and meet her there.

Chapter Five
    “I F YOU THINK THE Russians are crazy enough to blow up the world over a maniac like Qaddafi, you have a lower opinion of them than I do.”
    Trotter kept himself from smiling—it wouldn’t have been appropriate. This was a serious discussion, and he knew Petra Hudson was watching.
    It was amusing. The tone and editorial policies of the Hudson Group were very similar to the positions Trotter was taking, so Regina’s mother should be on his side. On the other hand, the opposition was James Hudson, Jr., home from college and showing off a previously unsuspected fiancée.
    The fiancée’s name was Hannah Stein, and Trotter liked her already. She was small, not especially pretty, but with shiny