Los Angeles. City of the Angels.
Kincaid walked down Hollywood Boulevard, his feet stepping on gum-coated stars. Cars whooshed past him, horns honking, tourists gawking. The line outside Graumann's Chinese clutched purses against their sides, held windbreakers tightly over their arms. A hooker leaned against the barred display window of the corner drug store, her make-up so thick it looked like a mask in the hot sun.
The shooting had left him shaken. The crazy had opened up inside a nearby Burger Joint, slaughtering four customers and three teenaged kids behind the counter before three men, passing on the street, rushed inside and grabbed him. Half a dozen shots had gone wild, leaving fist-sized holes in the drywall, shattering picture frames, and making one perfect circle in the center of the cardboard model for a bacon-double cheeseburger.
He'd arrived two minutes too late, hearing the call on his police scanner on his way home, but unable to maneuver in traffic. Christ, some of those people who wouldn't let him pass might have had relatives in that Burger Joint. Still and all, he had arrived first to find the killer trussed up in a chair, the men hovering around him, women clutching sobbing children, blood and bodies mixing with french fries on the unswept floor.
A little girl, no more than three, had grabbed his sleeve and pointed at one of the bodies, long slender male and young, wearing a '49ers t-shirt, ripped jeans and Adidas, face a bloody mass of tissue, and said, "Make him better," in a whisper that broke Kincaid's heart. He cuffed the suspect, roped off the area, took names of witnesses before the back-up arrived. Three squads, fresh-faced uniformed officers, followed by the swat team, nearly five minutes too late, the forensic team and the ambulances not far behind.
Kincaid had lit a cigarette with shaking fingers and said, "All yours," before taking off into the sun-drenched crowded streets.
He stopped outside the Roosevelt, and peered into the plate glass. His own tennis shoes were stained red, and a long brown streak of drying blood marked his Levis. The cigarette had burned to a coal between his nicotine stained fingers, and he tossed it, stamping it out on the star of a celebrity whose name he didn't recognize.
Inside stood potted palms and faded glamour. Pictures of motion picture stars long dead lined the second floor balcony. Within the last ten years, the hotel's management had restored the Roosevelt to its 1920s glory, when it had been the site for the first ever Academy Award celebration. When he first came to L.A., he spent a lot of time in the hotel, imagining the low-cut dresses, the clink of champagne flutes, the scattered applause as the nominees were announced. Searching for a kind of beauty that existed only in celluloid, a product of light and shadows and nothing more.
El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula.
The City of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels of Porciuncula.
He knew nothing of the Angels of Porciuncula, did not know why Filipe de Neve in 1781 named the city after them. He suspected it was some kind of prophecy, but he didn't know.
They had been fallen angels.
Of that he was sure.
He sighed, wiped the sweat from his forehead with a grimy hand, then returned to his car, knowing that home and sleep would elude him for one more night.
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