Murder of Angels Read Online Free PDF

her, but leaves space for an answer anyway. “Now, if you don’t think you can do your job, I can look for someone else.”
    “I’m trying to do my job,” he says, the angry smudge at the edges of his voice. “I’m trying to keep her alive.”
    “Well, you sure could’ve fooled me.”
    And then neither of them says anything else, only one or two heated words away from something that can’t be taken back, apologized for, excused. Daria sits in the chair by the bed, running strong fingers through her spiky blond hair, staring at Niki’s bare shoulders as though there might be answers printed on her skin like tattoos or scars. The answers she needs to hold the world together around her, around them both, some secret talisman or incantation against all her fears and failures.
    She was playing your music. She plays your music all the time these days.
    “Will you leave us alone for a while?” Daria says. “I need to get my head together, that’s all. I have to figure out what the hell I’m going to do next.”
    “Yeah, Dar, sure,” he replies, the reluctance plain to hear, but at least he doesn’t sound pissed off anymore. “If you need me, I’ll be in the kitchen.”
    “And take this damned thing with you,” and she reaches into her jacket, removes her cell phone from a pocket and hands it to Marvin. “If anyone calls, especially that prick—”
    “You’re busy.”
    “Whatever. You can tell them I’m off screwing a herd of sheep for all I care.”
    Marvin turns the phone over in his hand a couple of times, as if preparing to pass judgment on its molded plastic faceplate, plastic the indecent color of ripe cranberries. “It does have an off switch, you know?” he says and points to a tiny black button on one side.
    “Then turn it off and take it with you.”
    Marvin nods his head and walks past her to the bedroom door, has already started pulling it shut behind him when he stops and looks back at Daria.
    “Hey. Who was Spider?” he asks her, and she stares at him like someone struck dumb, struck stupid, someone too far gone to ever be surprised by anything ever again but this one thing.
    “What?”
    “ Spider. Last night, at the hospital, when Niki started coming back around, she asked for someone named Spider a couple of times. I’d almost forgotten—”
    “I don’t know,” Daria lies, answering the question much too quickly, and she can see from his expression, the mix of confusion and concern, that Marvin knows perfectly well that she’s lying.
    “I’m sorry,” he says. “I thought it might be important,” and he closes the door, leaving Daria Parker alone with Niki and Ophelia and the sun-bright walls.

     

    “She wrote this song when we lived in Boulder,” Niki said, and Marvin frowned at her, at Niki Ky sitting in the center of about a hundred jewel cases, the scatter of CDs like tiny space-age Frisbees. Niki in a gray-green cardigan at least two sizes too large and a black T-shirt underneath, faded black cotton and a big white letter Z with a question mark behind it—Z? inside a white silk-screened square—and then the song started again.
    “When we still lived with Mort and Theo on Arapahoe,” she said.
    “Yeah,” Marvin replied and he turned a page in the book he was trying to read. “You told me.”
    “She used to play it on Pearl Street, for spare change, you know, and I’d sit on top of the big bronze beaver and listen. Sometimes Mort would tap along on his snare drum, if he didn’t have to work that day.”
    “You told me that, too, dear,” and Marvin stared at her over the top of his paperback Somerset Maugham novel. “But haven’t you played it enough for one night?”
    “You had to have a license, but there were lots of street performers on Pearl. No cars allowed. We knew a girl who juggled wineglasses, and a guy named Silence who played the hammer dulcimer.”
    Marvin made a face like a cat trapped in a small child’s lap, sighed and glanced back down