Black Angel

He lowered his head. There was a moment when he didn’t know whether he would be able to do it or not. After all, what guarantee did he have, after he had nailed Nina’s hand to the floor, that the man wouldn’t kill them anyway? But his police training kept telling him: compromise, take the line of least resistance. He had seen too many times what had happened to people who had tried to be heroes.

It was 9:03 on the night of Thursday, August 11, 1988. Joe stood up with his cigarette dangling between his lips and carried his plate to the dishwasher. “I wish you’d quit,” Nina chided him, taking out the cigarette and kissing him. “Two a day, is that smoking?” he appealed. “Two too many. I want you to live for ever.” There were marginally fewer than eight minutes left to go. Joe said, “I’ll try to cut down to one, okay? But you’ll have to give me time to decide which one. I need the morning one to get me going and the evening one to calm me down.” “Oh, decisions, decisions,” Nina teased him.

Shaking wildly, Nina held the nail between finger and thumb, about two or three inches above the back of Joe’s hand. Joe took hold of the point and placed it between his finger-joints, well clear of his veins. “I can’t do it,” Nina panted. “I can’t do it. Please don’t ask me to do it.” “Listen,” said Joe, “it won’t even hurt. You remember Bill Gates? He caught a .45 slug in the middle of his hand, just like he was playing baseball. He didn’t even feel it, and he’s fine now. Absolutely fine.”

Very slowly, still tightly gripping her hair, the man forced Nina to kneel down next to Joe. “The nail,” he told her. “I can’t,” she choked. A thin runnel of blood had slid straight down the center of her larynx and pooled in the hollow of her neck. “Tell her, Joe,” the man coaxed him. “Tell her what’s going to happen if she doesn’t behave.” “Nina,” said Joe. “You’re going to have to be brave.” “But I can’t do it! I can’t!”

“Joe—!” gasped Nina, in desperation. “It’s okay, sweetheart, it’s okay,” Joe told her, knowing all the time that, Jesus, this guy could go crazy at an instant, and cut her throat, and kill me too, he’s totally irrational. Who the hell busts into somebody’s condo with a jack? Who takes out their whole door, when there’s nothing to steal but silver-plated baseball trophies and a four-year-old video recorder? Who the hell wears an insect mask and smothers themselves in blood?

He didn’t look like a Hell’s Angel; or one of those overdressed homosexual fetishists who came clanking into San Francisco General to visit their dying friends; or any one of those archetypal crack-maddened freaks whom you could encounter unexpectedly around any street corner, and without whom the San Francisco Police Department would have been almost a normal place to work.

Something inside of his mind said: This is madness. This is too terrible to be true. This is the nightmare that haunts every hardworking taxpaying middle-class man and woman, and it simply doesn’t happen outside of dreams, or movies.

“Nina!” he screamed. (Or did he? Maybe he was incapable of saying anything, he wasn’t sure. As a cop, he had listened to tape-recordings of men under severe stress—hostages, suicides, men trapped in gradually flooding sewer-pipes. These men had all believed that they were speaking calmly and rationally – but all that anyone could hear was an almost alien gibberish, and the huge gasping of hyperventilation.)

But he had been born here, and his mother had been born here, and his grandfather had been property-boy at the Chutes, one of the few theaters to survive the great earthquake and fire in 1906, and where else in the world could he possibly live? One minute to go. Then less than a minute. Then fifteen seconds. Then ten. Not enough time to say the Lord’s Prayer, even if he had known that he ought to.

But here was Caroline’s thin blue-veined wrist lying on her My Little Pony pillow, and her shining blonde hair spread everywhere, like the gold that Rumpelstiltskin had spun. Her lips were slightly parted, and she was breathing with a slight catch in her throat.