Midnight's Angels - 03 by Tony Richards Read Free Book Online Page B

papered walls.
    “Ever since your phone call,” Levin told me, “I’ve been reaching out, trying to discern what’s going on. I can’t tell. But I can see Doctor Willets.”
    He meant through his inner eye.
    “He’s alive?”
    He nodded. And I thought, Thank God .
    “I can tell that he is agitated, lashing out at something. But the weird thing is, I can’t see what.”
    Which took me aback. The creature that had chased me was as plain as my own face. So what was the judge talking about?
    I felt my brow crease up. “You … can’t see visually? Can’t sense?”
    “None of the above. If anything’s there, then my inner eye won’t focus on it. And when I reach out with my other senses, I get precisely nothing. The town as normal, no visitors present. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were making this up and the doctor was play-acting.”
    I absorbed that and turned it over. What it told me, in the end, was that whatever we were facing, it was nothing of a kind that we had encountered before.
    The judge had figured that out too. His cheeks flushed for a moment, then his manner became calmer. He went across to a cabinet, fished out a couple of Montgolfier glasses and a crystal decanter full of golden fluid. He only poured half an inch for each of us, which under the circumstances was probably wise. Handed me a glass. I sniffed it. Cognac, of the finest marque.
    “You must get tired, on occasion,” he remarked, “of living such an energetic life.”
    “Gives me something to do,” I muttered.
    The bridge of his nose furrowed and he snorted faintly.
    I took a sip. It made my head spin very slightly. Levin invited me to take a seat, then settled down on the nearby couch and asked me to describe -- in detail -- everything I’d seen and done the last few hours.
    By the time I’d finished, he had rummaged in his pockets and put on his glasses. They made him look shrewder, more alert. And his expression was more focused than it had been. I had his complete attention.
    “So where’s the third of these angel things?” he wondered. “Yes, that’s an extremely good point. I think we need to get the police in on this.”
    I started punching buttons on my cell phone once again. But all I got was a pre-recorded engaged message.
    Ritchie Vallencourt was being kept busy. And I could only imagine how.

CHAPTER 8
    Ritchie felt the hairs on the nape of his neck crawl as he stared at the completely darkened house. There was nothing outwardly remarkable about it. It was on two stories and recently painted, with a rather grimy white truck parked out front. But he’d been around trouble his whole adult life. Before he’d been promoted, he had mostly worked the Tyburn area of town, which was a challenging beat to put it mildly.
    So he knew what trouble looked like, felt like. It set up a low vibration on the air. And right now, he could sense it clearly. Lord, he could almost taste it.
    “This has been happening all over town?” he asked the uniformed patrolmen who had called him here.
    “Fourth report we’ve had so far,” replied the older one, Harrison Whitby. “And Christ knows how many others have gone unreported so far.”
    They were on Cartland Street, on the inner edge of the Greenwood district. Garnerstown lay to the south of them, and Tyburn to the west. The air was very still around them, and their breath was misting slightly on it. The whole street looked perfectly normal, except that a few lights had come on in the windows of the nearest houses, and a few faces were peering out. A scream had been reported coming from this place, some forty minutes back. A family called the Hermanns lived here.
    But it wasn’t these patrolmen who had turned up in the first place to investigate. They hadn’t even been inside, as yet. A second black-and-white was sitting on the driveway with its doors wide open and its lights switched off. Ritchie knew whose car it was. Bob Beecham and Luther Clayburgh’s, good