Blood of Angels Read Online Free PDF

realizes how beautiful she is. Then she’ll go to New York or Los Angeles or somewhere to watch better-dressed men fall all over themselves opening doors for her.
    I turn right on Broadway, heading to I-65 and the malls. I love that Jasmine is beautiful, and I even love that she reminds me of her mother. But I would love her just as much if she had a nose like a hockey player. She’s my daughter, at least on weekends. She seems to enjoy our time together, and she understands that I’m her real father, not Dr. Knife. But this coming weekend she’ll be at soccer camp, and the next, she’s going to Orlando, for her birthday. Dr. Knife is attending a conference for doctors like him who have figured out how to make a handsome living mining people’s vanity, and Jazz wants to go to Universal Studios. As much as I love spending time with her, I’m smart enough to know there’s no percentage in saying no.
    The traffic is still light, and I make good time going east the short drive to where I pick up I-65 south and head toward Franklin, an affluent and rapidly growing Nashville suburb where the smart money in Nashville is moving. I drive in silence, the radio off. Every half mile or so I force the picture of Wilson Owens begging for his life from my mind. I remember that as the bailiffs—it took two of them—removed Owens after sentencing, he stared at me the whole way out of the room. They were dragging him out, his shoes scraping the floor, and he was locked on my eyes like a missile. And I stared back, positive that hell was where he belonged, happy to be his sword of justice.
    I look up and see the exit for Moore’s Lane, where a collection of retail shops and car dealerships circle the mother ship of Cool Springs Mall. There’s a Toys “R” Us in there, and I’m hoping something brilliant and affordable will explode off the shelves and into my shopping cart. Ideally, this item will costs less than seventy-five dollars. I pull into the parking lot and park, for a reason I don’t yet understand, a good thirty yards away from any other cars. It’s still hot and muggy out, and this makes the walk longer. I put the car in park and stare back at the toy store, wondering what the hell I’m doing. Then my hands, still clenched on the steering wheel, start shaking. I look up at the mirror, and I see that I’m crying. I’m shaking the steering wheel and crying, and I’m seeing Wilson Owens, that asshole, being injected with choline, a respiratory-suppressing drug which was recently outlawed for veterinarian use in putting down animals because it was deemed too cruel. Jesus, maybe I do need Stillman. I sit there and vibrate awhile, seeing my life and Carl’s and Rayburn’s and everybody else who’s about to be fucked if Kwame Jamal Hale is the real killer of Steven Davidson and Lucinda Williams, and it takes me a good five minutes to come down enough to pull my hands off the steering wheel.
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    I LAST LESS THAN ten minutes in Toys “R” Us. It’s the wrong place for me right now, this happiest store in the world, where the frozen, plastic faces of Barbies and American Girls stare down at me. If there’s anything in this place Jazz wants, she probably already has it. I circle back out to the parking lot, ready to drive home. I walk up to my truck and I notice something stuck under the wiper, like a parking ticket. I look around; there’s nobody near the Ford, which sits alone in the half-full lot. I pull out the paper, which is a pamphlet folded in half. I open it up and see an amateurish-looking leaflet from an organization calling itself Citizens for a Just America. I look up, trying to figure out from where it came; scanning the lot, I can see no other cars with anything on their windshields. The pamphlet has a picture of Leonard Peltier, an American Indian who was convicted of murdering two FBI agents. The pamphlet says