Free Avenging Angel by Rex Burns Page B

he’d have been proud to see his kid in dress blues. Besides, it promised a world where excitement was not only permanent but approved, a world that turned out to be the bleak DMZ in Korea, the orange clay and green jungle of northern Okinawa, the bare crushed coral and barbed wire of Landing Zone Delta in Vietnam. There, not yet twenty-five and already wearing one hashmark, Staff Sergeant Wager saw what he had long suspected: that life was as casual as death, and that the only meaning to be found in either was what he gave to it. Which, he guessed, was what had ultimately landed him in law enforcement when he found himself bored by the kinds of jobs that an infantryman with eight years in the Marine Corps could qualify for. A cop accepted the importance of the rules that tried to order the randomness of life and death, and his job was to go after those who did not accept the rules. Usually they were merely the careless ones; on rare occasions they were the ones who were neither careless nor blind to the rules, but who knew them and chose to stay outside them. That was the real meaning of “outlaw” to Wager, and those were the ones you ruptured yourself to nail, because they were truly dangerous. They reasoned what they did and they struck like feeding sharks at those penned in by the rules; they were the ones who crossed the line between order and chaos, and who brought to their victims not only a fear of death but a terror of the soul.
    Nosing the Trans-Am into a vacant slot near the motel’s canopied entrance, Wager sat half listening to an adenoidal singing group on the car radio. Those angel drawings had come from that kind of outlaw. He had killed and then left a message, to terrify and to control. To make people run for their lives or shudder with fright. And he had done it, Wager finally admitted to the stillness around and within him, from motives he considered just. He, too, sought justice beyond the law. But Wager saw a difference between himself and the death angel—Tony-O was scum, proven scum that the law couldn’t reach but Wager could. The death angel perverted all sense of justice; his reason was founded on madness—it had to be. And when Wager could discover the reason, or the madness, he’d have a clearer idea who’d left the messages and the bodies.
    The motel’s night clerk was an aggressively friendly and well-scrubbed young man whose smile had not yet become professional. He said, “Sheriff Tice told me you’d be in,” handed Wager a key and a card to fill out, and told him that, yes, the kitchen was still open. The dining room was part of the lounge, where a handful of men sat over beers and joked quietly with the big-chested girl behind the bar. Wager ordered trout and a beer from a tired woman who looked like the girl’s mother, and leaned against the squeaking plastic of the booth’s upright back. It was one of those booths designed to cave in the small of your spine while it pressed against your shoulders, and as Wager squirmed for some kind of comfort a man paused to squint through the dim light.
    “You Detective Wager?”
    “Yes.”
    He was broad-shouldered but slim, balding, and had a plaid shirt closed at the neck by a bolo tie with a turquoise slide. The hand he held out was large, with sore-looking knuckles. “Winston—Orrin Winston. I’m the editor of the Grant County Beacon . Can I sit down?”
    “That’s the newspaper?”
    “The weekly, not the daily. But we have mostly news that’s not fit to print anyway.” He sighed as he slid into the facing plastic seat, and lifted the drooping corners of his mouth in a smile. “Like whose dog got hit by a car, or whose cousin came for a visit last weekend. We don’t get much in the way of murders or city detectives coming out to investigate. That’s real news.”
    “I’m not here investigating. That’s the sheriff’s job. I’m just looking for similarities with a homicide we had over in Denver.”
    “That’s another