Angel Fire - Lisa Unger [89]
The time was almost here. He fairly quivered with the rapture of doing God’s work. Though everything had been taken from him, in the place of all that was lost he had become God’s avenger, His warrior, His angel of death.
Standing in his son’s room, he said his farewell to the place where his son had dwelled in life. A feeling of power coursed through him. He remembered the feeling from his surgery rotation as a second-year intern. The ability to save a life, the knowledge that one mistake could end a life. To have a human body sliced open, vulnerable before him, was a thrill that heightened all his senses, made him feel infallible, omnipotent. All that had been taken away from him was being returned to him now.
The room really was a masterpiece—a shrine, in a way, to his son. The cool wind blew in through the window, billowing the baby-blue curtains and ruffling his sandy-blond hair. The air was never cool like that in rural South Carolina where he grew up. The heat was like a live thing wrapped around him, raising sweat from his brow and entering his lungs, expanding there like wet gauze. He pushed the hair back from his face. It was ugly to remember his childhood, horrible to remember what he felt like when he was ten, always angry, always afraid. He stared at his hand. It was his father’s hand, white, roped with thick blue veins, big hard knuckles like stones buried beneath thin, dry skin. He remembered his father’s touch so well, dirty and violent, but something craved nonetheless.
He rose and walked over to the tray of surgical instruments by the metal table and picked up a scalpel. Its sharp edge and what it could do made him think again of Lydia Strong. She was in his thoughts more and more. He needed her to complete his mission. Without her, all that he had done for God would mean nothing. He would let her know her role soon and she would be powerless to deny him. Because that was God’s will. He knew just the bait to draw her to him.
He walked from the room and moved slowly down the hall to the living room, where the flickering blue light from the muted television set cast an ugly strobe on the nearly empty room. There was a vague odor of beer and garbage.
He looked at his watch. It was almost eight. He slammed the door behind him as he left the house, but he didn’t lock it. After all, he wouldn’t be back.
chapter twenty-one
“Okay, we’ll be there as soon as we can,” Jeffrey said to the cop he was speaking with on Lydia’s cell phone.
“What happened?” Lydia asked when he hung up.
“Looks like Juno wound up calling 911 to report his uncle missing like you told him to. The squad car that was supposed to be there was not. Morrow wants us to go to the church.”
“Where’s Morrow?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“We’ll go as soon as I talk to Greg. I don’t want him to find this out from someone else. I need to be the one to tell him,” she said, anxious now for Juno, as well.
They were pulling up to Greg and Joe’s Auto Repair and as soon as she saw the building, she knew something was wrong. There was an air of desertion to it. When she had come the first time, there was an aura of activity. She’d been able to hear music playing from an old radio, see lights on inside the garage, smell paint and gasoline. Today the door was closed, the lights were off, there was an unnatural quiet.
“Busy place,” said Jeffrey. “I hope he has time to see us.”
Lydia pulled her Glock from the glove compartment.
“What are you doing?”
“There’s something wrong. It’s the middle of the morning and the garage isn’t open.”
“So maybe he took the day off.”
“Maybe. But I don’t think so.”
Jeffrey unsnapped the holster on the .38 special at his