Broken Angels Read Online Free PDF Page B

to those willing to visit, pay, look, and play in the pits of the blackest holes in cyberspace.
    Yes, the tip had been right, but something was all wrong. She didn’t have red hair. She wasn’t chubby. She was a few years older than the fifteen-year-old girl they thought they’d find.
    “She’s alive,” Darryl said.
    “But it’s the other girl,” Robert said. “Right movies, wrong star.”
    “Yeah. Contact The Burrow. Tell Adam what happened, and what we found. Get the proper authorities out here. Quick.”
    Robert touched the face of the watch on his right wrist as Darryl turned to walk back down the hall.
    The defeated remained motionless on the billiard room floor, but no telling when some of them could come to. Before tying them up, Darryl decided it would be a good idea to first check on the two Robert had secured. It was possible they could’ve gotten free or, worse, called for backup. Darryl wanted to make sure they were still down and out.
    Near the entranceway to the TV room, he noticed for the first time an odd smell. Probably the smell Robert had mentioned earlier, before the disco ball of pain had been switched on. Darryl looked around until his eyes stopped on the coat closet near the front door. He tried to see through the closet’s door, but couldn’t. He had to open it in order to find the decapitated woman, and the bound and gagged child in whose lap her head rested.

THREE
    “Illiberal world—
    and still some manage to find freedom,
    but is it only in their heads?”
    Robert listened to these lyrics, sung in the most perfect way, as he studied the singer’s eyes, and lips, and throat. As much as he wanted to believe it, as much as he felt it, he wasn’t naïve enough to believe that unique voice was singing songs only for him. Without thinking about it, he picked up the knife.
    He weighed it in his hand for a while, and then dipped it into the glass.
    It was the same glass of grapefruit juice he’d ordered when he first came into the club, two hours ago. What was left had become too warm to drink, but he wasn’t even considering it. Only the movement, the motion…Stirring was his way of dancing to the performance piece of slow poetry and cool melodies.
    An admired artist was onstage, performing and testing snippets of a larger dramatic work she and her troupe had been developing. The crowd was small, but it didn’t matter. Many artists’ past experiences had shown, no matter how seemingly empty, this particular dawnclub always managed to have the right mix of people, a good cross-section comprising a fair and honest audience open to hearing new experimental music.
    Robert sometimes lacked the courage to be completely honest about what he saw and heard, even to himself. He usually preferred music without words, or in a foreign language, giving him the chance to provide his own lyrics in his mind. But Sin Limite, the multilingual singer on the stage, had been a favorite since junior high school. He’d discovered her during a pretty rough time. She was such a different type of vocalist; he put her in a special category. No matter what she said or how she said it, Robert valued every word. And he felt no shame in smiling and applauding at anything she did, even if it was simply making a brief appearance on stage to do nothing but raise her finger.
    At the moment, Robert saw someone else make an appearance. He didn’t wave or signal. He just shifted his eye and stared, waiting for his partner’s eyes to meet his. Darryl saw him. Robert turned his attention back to the attraction on the stage.
    Sin Limite had turned the song over to a chorus of five preteens. They and the jazz ensemble accompanying them were just one small part of the performance artist collective known as “Phantasie’s rEVEnge,” or “The Phantasie” to loyal fans. Even though he didn’t care for most of The Phantasie’s work, Robert followed Sin Limite. Keeping tabs on her latest projects, he knew The Phantasie