Natural Born Angel (Immortal City 2)

The men all calmly put their hands in the air. Sylvester motioned for the man in the wife-beater to go stand over by them.

“All I want is to talk to Rusalka.”

A balding man with a thick moustache slowly put his hand of cards face-down on the table and stood up.

“Let’s go to my office,” Rusalka said, leading the detective into an adjoining back room. “You won’t need that.” He pointed to the gun still in Sylvester’s hand.

“If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to keep it handy,” the detective answered.

“Suit yourself,” the balding man said, lifting one eyebrow. He preceded Sylvester into a shabby small office. The desk was covered with papers and old betting digests from the horse races. Old humming fluorescent tubes lit the room from above. It smelled like stale sweat and halitosis. Rusalka closed the door behind them.

“You want one?” the sweating man asked, pulling a pint of liquor and a pair of small glasses off a shelf behind him.

Sylvester shook his head. The man poured a short drink and gulped it down all at once.

“What can I do for you, detective? I haven’t seen you down here in fifteen years. Since you helped take down Ellis and Perez.”

The look in Sylvester’s eyes changed. Only slightly. But enough. As if he were remembering something far off.

“I need information,” Sylvester said, taking the chance to wipe his glasses clean. He put them back on and looked at Rusalka.

“What kind?”

“A couple of weeks ago, a guy you had working as a look-out during one of your night-time ‘business transactions’. Travis Fittum. He disappeared, yes? A guy living down at one of the residential

hotels on Skid Row. And sometimes the Angel City Mission, if he couldn’t raise the hotel money. The same mission that burned two weeks ago and caused the deaths of eight women and children. Fittum was a former associate of yours whom you were giving a second chance.” He looked at Rusalka’s face. “You surprised? Ten dollars can buy a lot of information around here.”

Rusalka looked unblinkingly at Sylvester. “If you think we’d be so dumb as to take out a guy like that and bring cops like you sniffing around, you’ve lost even more than what they say you have.”

Detective Sylvester slightly stiffened.

“The guy disappeared,” Rusalka continued. “Like poof, gone. We didn’t even pay him yet, and he was disappeared.” Rusalka shook his head. “Big deal. Just a bum. We were giving him a second chance, and he blew it. He was at a fleabag hotel this week, back on the street the next. Probably got tired of waiting and wanted to find another way to get his fix for the night.”

Sylvester shook his head. “We’d normally say the same thing, except his best friend filed a missing person’s complaint. He never showed up. This guy’s looked everywhere. All the normal haunts from Spring Street past Mateo. And turns out it’s the night before the deadly fire just down the block. We have one witness, not entirely credible, who puts him in the Angel City Mission shelter early that morning, say six o’clock.”

Rusalka shrugged. “Since when did you start worrying about missing bums?”

“When a dozen go missing in one week, even the ACPD starts to take notice.” Sylvester looked at Rusalka. “Do you remember anything out of the ordinary from that night?”

“Nothing. It was a hot night. We wanted to get out of there. We didn’t know where he went. We weren’t going to form a search party. If he couldn’t stand on a corner keeping watch for an hour without getting loaded, he didn’t deserve his twenty bucks.”

“And you saw nothing else? You don’t know anything about the other disappearances?”

“You’re chasing ghosts, detective. This is downtown. You know that. It’s different from the west side.”

Sylvester was deep in thought.

“Now, if we’re done, I’m hoping you’ll excuse me. I’m one queen away from a full house,” Rusalka said, motioning towards the card game outside.

The detective stood up and followed as the man led them out of the dingy room and into the smoky card game.

“Now where were we. . . ?” Rusalka asked the other men as he reached the table.

“I’ll show myself out,” Sylvester said, walking past the man in the wife-beater who had let him in.

Sylvester stood outside in the dark alley, taking a deep breath. He coughed, his nose burning from the thick pollution from all the trucks running on the freeways that encircled downtown like a noose.

Pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, he cleaned his glasses again and mopped his brow.