Angel Time (The Songs of the Seraphim 1)

You know what to do.

That meant the disguise, the method of approach, the choice of poison for the syringe, and the departure, under the same circumstances as I'd made my way inside.

"This is what I know already," The Boss said. "The man stays in; the woman shops. That was the Vegas pattern anyway. She leaves about ten o'clock in the morning after screaming at him for an hour and a half. Maybe she lunches. Maybe she drinks, but you can't count on it. Get in as soon as she leaves the room. He'll have two computers going, and maybe even two cell phones. You do it right. Remember. Heart attack. Won't matter if all the equipment goes dead."

"I could download the cells and the computers," I said. I was proud of my abilities at all that, or at least of picking up every scrap of decodable equipment. It had been my calling card with The Right Man ten years ago, that, and a dazzling measure of ruthlessness. But I'd been eighteen years old then. I hadn't really understood how perfectly ruthless I was.

Now I lived with it.

"Too easy for someone to pick up on it," he said. "Then they know it was a hit. I can't have that. Leave it, Lucky. Do as I say. This is a banker. You don't pull this off, and he gets on a plane to Zurich, and we're in a fix."

I didn't say anything.

Sometimes we left a message with these things, and other times we came and went like a cat in an alley, and that was the way this would be.

Perhaps it was a blessing, I thought. There would be no talk of murder among the employees of the one place where I felt solace, and just a little glad to be aboveground.

He laughed his usual laugh. "Well? Aren't you going to ask me?"

And I gave my usual answer. "No."

He was referring to the fact that I didn't care why he wanted me to kill this particular man. I didn't care who the man was. I didn't care to know his name.

What I cared about was thathe wanted it done.

But he always pushed with that question, and I always pushed back with the no. Russians, bankers, money laundering--that was a common framework, but not a motive. It was a game we'd been playing since the first night I'd met him, or been sold to him, or offered to him, however one might describe that remarkable turn of events.

"No bodyguards, no assistants," he said now. "He's on his own. Even if there is somebody, you know how to handle it. You know what to do."

"Already thinking about it. Worry not."

He clicked off without saying goodbye.

I loathed all this. It felt wrong. Don't laugh. I'm not saying that every other murder I'd ever committed had felt entirely right. I'm saying that something here was dangerous to my equilibrium, and therefore to what might go down. What if I'd never be able to go back and sleep under that dome again in peace? In fact, that is probably just what would happen. The pale-eyed young man who sometimes carried his lute with him would never appear there again, handing out twenty-dollar tips and smiling so warmly at everyone.

Because another brand of that same young man, heavily disguised, had put murder at the heart of the entire dream.

It seemed foolish suddenly that I'd dared to be myself there, that I'd played the lute softly under that domed ceiling, that I'd lain back on the bed and stared at the upholstered half tester, that I'd gazed up for an hour or more into that blue sky dome.

After all the lute itself was a link to the boy who'd vanished out of New Orleans, and what if some good-hearted cousin was still looking? I had had good-hearted cousins, and I had loved them. And lute players are rare.

Maybe it was time to detonate a bomb before someone else did.

No mistake, no.

It had been worth it to play the lute in that room, to strum it softly and go over the melodies I used to love.

How many people know what a lute is, or what it sounds like? Maybe they've seen lutes in Renaissance paintings, and don't even know such things exist just now. I didn't care. I liked to play it so much in the Amistad Suite, I didn't care if the room service waiters heard or saw me. I liked that very much, the way I liked playing the black piano in the suite at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. I don't think I ever played a note in my own apartment. Don't know why. I'd stare at the lute and think of Christmas angels with lutes on richly colored Christmas cards. I'd think of angels hanging from the branches of Christmas trees.

Angel of God, my guardian dear ...

One time, Hell, maybe just two months back at the Mission Inn, I'd made a melody to that old prayer, very Renaissance, very haunting. Only I was the only one who was haunted.

So now I had to think of a disguise to fool people who had actually seen me many more times than once, and The Boss said this had to be done now. After all, the girl might get him to marry her tomorrow. The Mission did have that brand of charm.

Chapter Three - Mortal Sin and Mortal Mystery

IKEPT A GARAGE IN LOSANGELES, SIMILAR TO THEone I kept in New York: four panel trucks, one advertising a plumbing company, another a florist, one painted white with a red light on top of it so that it looked like a special ambulance, and one that was simply a beat-up handyman's set of wheels, with rusted junk in the back. These vehicles were as transparent to the public as Wonder Woman's famous invisible plane. A beat-up sedan attracted more attention. And I always drove just a little too fast, with my window rolled down and my bare arm showing, and nobody saw me at all. Sometimes I smoked, just enough to reek of it.

I used the florist truck this time. No doubt it was the very best thing, and especially with a hotel in which tourists and guests mingle freely, and wander freely, in and out and at random and nobody ever asks you where you're headed, or whether or not you've got a room key.

What works in all hotels and hospitals is a resolute attitude, a steady momentum. It would certainly work at the Mission Inn.

No one sees a dark shaggy-headed man with a florist logo stitched to his green shirt pocket, with a soiled canvas bag over one shoulder, carrying only a modest bouquet of lilies in a foil-wrapped earthen pot, and no one cares that he goes in with a quick nod to the doormen, if they even bother to look up. Add to the wig a pair of thick-rimmed glasses that completely distorted the habitual expression on my face. The bite plate between my teeth would give me the perfect lisp.

The garden gloves I wore hid the plastic gloves that were more important. The canvas sack over my shoulder smelled like peat moss. I held the pot of lilies as if it might break. I walked with a weak left knee and a regular swing to my head, something somebody might remember when they didn't remember anything else. I put out a cigarette in a flowerbed on the main path. Someone might make note of that.

I had two syringes for the job, but only one was needed. There was a small gun strapped to my ankle under my trouser, though I dreaded the thought of having to use it, and for what it was worth, I had, in the lapel of my starched company shirt, a long thin blade of plastic, stiff and sharp enough to cut a man's throat, or both his eyes.