Blood Of Angels by Michael Marshall Read Free Book Online

jeans and a T-shirt that wasn't cheap. A single barbed wire tattoo around the left bicep (no faux gang crap for him) and looks that weren't head-snapping but would pass for decent anywhere in the continental USA. Standard-issue local fauna, in other words, the young male of the species that roamed this particular valley plain.
    His phone rang a few times and he answered it, methodically fielding enquiries as to why people hadn't received their goodies yet. He knew these people socially, and no one got uptight. It was all cool. Lee would provide. He always did. Always had, anyway. The one person who didn't call was the guy he most needed to hear from, with a new time/place to meet. It was getting, as his dad would say, 'most unusual'.
    Like a lot of his friends, Hudek got on okay with his folks. The difference was that while most tolerated their parents because they gave them so little grief, floating in the background of their lives, giving rides where needed, making cash available for clothes or counselling or rehab, and only intermittently taking time out of their busy careers to wonder aloud if their son or daughter might seek some kind of employment, ever, Hudek genuinely semi-dug his father. When he was around. Hudek Senior was in real estate development, and travelled a lot. He seemed to have plenty contacts and made outstanding amounts of money, and yet he wasn't ostentatious with it. Both he and his wife owned a lot of very expensive stuff which never even left the house, and was tidied away when guests came. He had a sense of humour, too. Lee's choice of ringtone was an in-joke with himself, in recollection of — many years before, when he was just a little kid — seeing his father watching The Simpsons and laughing hard when Homer turned to his children and said: 'Remember — so far as everybody else knows, we're just a normal family.' Ryan Hudek's motto was similar, and unusual for his place and era: if you understand what you're worth, not everybody else has to know.
    Lee had taken that on board, along with a lesson enshrined in countless movies and reinforced every week in real-life cop TV. Showy gets attention, and attention isn't good. So far as most people would ever know, Lee was just another boy with not much to do on a hot Saturday afternoon. That much was cool with him.
    After a while he remembered it was his mother's birthday. He picked up a card and a bottle of the stuff she wore and drove around to their house. His dad was out somewhere, golf probably, so Lee went straight out back.
    Lisa Hudek was semi-reclined on a lounger by the pool, wearing dark glasses and not doing much. She accepted the unwrapped gift and a kiss and smiled in her son's direction, or at least nearby.
    Lee sat out with her for an hour, watching the flickering of the water in the pool, while his mother drank steadily from a tall, frosted flask. Finally the cell rang and it was Hernandez.
    Revised meet was seven thirty. Yes, very late, but that's the way it was. Deal with it. They'd beep him a venue later.
    Oh, and this time could he come alone?
    Hudek muttered 'Yeah, right,' and went inside to make some calls.
    ===OO=OOO=OO===
    At seven fifteen he pulled to a slow halt halfway up the block where Roscoe Boulevard crossed Sennoa Avenue. At the junction fifty yards down was a gas station, as he'd been told. Opposite was a low building Hudek had driven past many, many times in the last few years, without giving it much of a glance. When he was a kid it had been a buffet restaurant, and he was pretty sure the family had eaten there a couple of times. Then it went out of business, became a carpet store and a car spares place and a variety of other things before becoming fundamentally invisible. One of those places, sometimes boarded-up, sometimes in generic business, that drifts slowly off people's mental radar.
    'Okay,' he said, turning off the engine.
    'Very, very far from okay,' Brad said, shaking his head. This time he was in the