Border Angels by Anthony Quinn Read Free Book Online Page A

envelope.
    Inside it were Fowler’s passport and two plane tickets for a flight the following Saturday to Malaga. One of the tickets was made out to Fowler; the other bore the name of Lena Novak.
    Daly heard the name echo inside his head. He was surprised. The prostitute had found her knight in shining armor, he realized. Unfortunately, Jack Fowler had failed to sweep the missing woman off her feet. Instead, he had left her with one foot in a fairy tale, the other at the center of a crime scene.

7
    Even though Easter was early, the sky was blue and the sunshine warm in the hilltop Andalucian village. Ashe relaxed in the grounds of the shrine to La Virgen de Nieve. He watched the Semana Santa parade wind up the dusty track, the heavy crucifixion scenes carried on floats by barefoot pallbearers, the doleful music punctuated with hysterical cries from a straggle of wizened women dressed entirely in black.
    He leaned against a holy statue and joined in with the prayerful crowds, their voices echoing across the hillsides, which were dotted with the dark green foliage of orange and lemon trees. The spectacle was more like a mass mourning event than the drunken, noisy fiestas that usually filled the streets of the Spanish village.
    Ashe was taller than the other spectators, who were mostly old and infirm. The dangerous muscularity that ran under his dark shirt seemed out of place amid the religious fervor of the procession. In addition, his praying voice was tenacious, practiced and hard. It jarred with the theatrical wailing of his coworshippers.
    It was Ashe’s habit to join in the procession every year as part of his journey away from violence. However, sometimes he feared his attendance was simply a means to alleviate the deep disquiet of his soul, which was the totality of all the demons he had invoked during his youth, when he had been a gunman for the IRA. He feared that this disquiet was untreatable, no matter how stubborn his prayers.
    When the procession had passed, an elderly Englishwoman in a lavender hat turned round and smiled up at him.
    “Good evening,” she said, clutching a palm frond.
    There was a frailty about her face that momentarily entranced him.
    “Oh. Hello. How are you?”
    “Just wonderful. Absolutely.” She appeared pleased to be asked the question.
    A man, who Ashe presumed to be her husband, walked up and joined them.
    “What are you smiling at?” Ashe asked her.
    “The procession,” she replied. “It was breathtaking. At times like this, don’t you think the world is a wonderful place? That we are so close to God?”
    Ashe glanced at the remnants of the procession. One of the hooded pallbearers had stopped to steady himself against a stone wall. He wore Nike trainers and was carrying a can of Amstel and a half-smoked Ducados in one hand.
    “Your vision is very limited,” he said.
    However, the woman did not appear to be listening. Her eyes were fixed on the sweep of his shirt beneath his left arm, where a gun was neatly holstered. Her brow furrowed. Her husband delicately gestured her away, and Ashe went back to saying his rosary. He had been reciting it all evening with weary efficiency. Moments of transcendence were elusive and had to be earned by effort. He knew that. He also knew that the woman was wrong. Try as he might, he did not feel closer to God. Nor was the world a wonderful place. In fact, it was a nest of boundless evil and calamity that made the very notion of goodness seem as out of place as the drunken pallbearer in running shoes.
    He put away his rosary beads and walked back down to the village where the familiar evening aromas of coffee and garlic were wafting onto the streets. He had a limping gait and his progress was slow. He shunned the bars and restaurants that were beginning to fill with the crowds released from the holy vigil. He bought a lemon ice cream at a heladería . The taste of it was refreshingly real and cold. On his way back to his hostel, a man