Before There Were Angels (25 page)

The sequel to ‘Before there were angels’.

Read Chapter One now.

Chapter 1

I’ll rephrase my own saying. ‘Everybody believes in ghosts, only some think they are actually
exist, and no-one expects a ghost to stab anyone.’

And some people are virtually impossible to turn into ghosts, however much they deserve it, and however much we prayed for it to happen.

So Rafaella survived - worse, she thrived - once she got to the St. Francis’ Hospital. Those guys are too brilliant by half. It’s just a shame they don’t give people a psych test before they operate on them.

Stevie and I had a problem. We were saying … what? That I was talking to Belle from the doorway, Stevie was standing next to me, and someone we didn’t notice came up and stabbed her in the back.

That was going to hang together well.

“Who was this person?” the detective asked me, cynicism written all over his face.

“We didn’t see him,” I said. “Or her,” I added, because logically if I didn’t see him, it could have been a her. And whoever it was did use a kitchen knife to stab her.

“What, never?” the detective pressed me.

“Never.”

“He,
or she
,” he  smirked, “just vanished into thin air?”

“That’s exactly how it was,” I said. “You’ve got it in a nutshell. I couldn’t have put it more succinctly.”

The smirk turned into a snarl. “Let me get this straight -“

“You’ve got it straight already,” I interposed sarcastically, curious to see what his next expression would be. After all, when you have had to deal with
Rafaella fucking with your entire family, even a snarky San Francisco cop holds no perils. I might have handled an LA cop more cautiously.

Pure hatred.
That was his next expression. Wherever could he go from there, homicidal rage? “Let me get this straight …” he repeated, “you and your son -“

“He’s not my son,” I corrected him.

“You and your
step-son
,” he bulldozered on.

“Even that is arguable,” I said.

“You and Stevie Parsons -“

“He prefers to go by his father’s name.”

“Which is?”

“Bullhorn.”

He gave me a double-take on that. “Seriously?”

“Actually, yes.”

“Why did he call himself Steven Parsons earlier?”

“So you wouldn’t be able to trace him afterwards?”

“You and Stevie were talking to your ex-wife, Claire Parsons, or
Rafaella
,” he hurried on before I could interrupt him again, “and someone, male or female, stepped up behind her, stabbed her forcibly in the back, and disappeared.”

“That was less concise,” I commented, “but absolutely correct nonetheless.”

“And you have no idea who this person was?”

Now how did I answer that? I paused. “Would you believe it was a ghost?” I asked.

“No,” he replied flatly.

“Then I don’t have the slightest idea who it was.”

He booked me.

*  *  *

Rafaella, of course, on her immortal soul - not that she had any of it to lose - insisted that I had stabbed her, and Stevie insisted that my story was correct.

They believed
Rafaella over me but they had some hurdles to overcome. The knife that had been used had only her fingerprints on it. It had not been wiped clean, only wiped to the point of being smeared, and those fingerprints were indubitably hers. Secondly, the attacker had been right handed and I was left handed.

However, the killer, so to speak, to their case was that I am 6 foot 5 inches. The assailant was much more Stevie’s height, even exactly Stevie’s height. Try as they might, they couldn’t get a 6 foot 5 man to deliver that blow at that angle without pretending that he tripped over the edge of her rug and stabbed her by accident while he asked her what she wanted to eat for lunch. They must have gone through close to one hundred dummies trying to recreate my downward slice to flow conclusively into her wound, but concluded that it was irrefutably not me who delivered it.

They then questioned whether Stevie had stabbed her and I was covering up for him, but Rafaella had declared categorically that it had been me, not him.

So the invisible man got it. He may still be in prison. Nobody has seen or heard from him since.

Not the real invisible man, of course. Zack was doing just fine, only slightly frustrated that he hadn’t managed to see Rafaella off once and for all. “I should have stabbed her twice. I should have stabbed her forty times. What was I thinking?”

Privately, we told Officers Martinez and Nielsen the whole truth.
Rafaella had been stabbed by Zack and, unfortunately for them, and fortunately for him, not only was he beyond their jurisdiction, we was living in an entirely different realm entirely.

The officers laughed. I think they even believed me. They said they hoped that Zack didn’t turn his hand to other crimes because there would be no stopping him.

In parallel proceedings, I dropped my charges against Belle for her knife attack on me and we were all home again in no time, teasing Belle about her sudden desire to hang curtains all around the house.

But behind our high spirits and our excitement at being united, untouched by the criminal injustice system, we knew that
Rafaella lived on and that this time she would be even more vengeful than before. She was never one to forgive a kindness, never mind to forget an attempt to murder her.

She would be back.