Angel Among Us Read Online Free

she was and that she went to St Raphael’s.’
    â€˜No kidding?’ Calvano said. ‘I went there as a kid. I was an altar boy. I still go there now and then.’
    No one in the room seemed impressed.
    â€˜Good,’ Maggie told him. ‘You can go talk to the priest there while I go talk to her husband.’
    â€˜No way,’ Calvano protested. ‘For all we know, he’s the reason she never showed up for work. I’m not letting you go out there alone.’
    Maggie looked insulted. The principal looked like he might have a stroke. The secretary looked relieved.
    â€˜Seriously?’ Maggie asked her partner. ‘Did you seriously just say that?’
    â€˜I mean it,’ Calvano said. ‘I know Danny Gallagher. He lived in my neighborhood when we were kids. He’s bad news. He always had a temper and people don’t change that much.’
    I found that hard to believe about Danny Gallagher. I had watched him in the privacy of his own home, a place where people are always themselves. He had seemed to be a content and gentle man. Calvano was just being an ass. He did that quite well.
    â€˜If you know him, then you are not going out there to question him, either,’ Maggie decided. ‘The last thing we need is for someone to claim favoritism.’
    â€˜No one has to come out to question me,’ a voice said quietly from the doorway.
    I was as startled as everyone else to see Danny Gallagher standing at the edge of the room, staring down at his muddy work boots. ‘What’s this about? Where is my wife? She should have been home an hour ago. She’s not answering her phone.’
    When they told him his wife had not shown up for school that day, he collapsed. All six foot three of him froze in what I was pretty sure was pure terror, then he slid slowly to the floor and put his face in his hands. A shocked silence filled the room.
    Maggie was the first to break it. ‘What is it?’ she asked him. ‘What do you think has happened to your wife?’
    â€˜They’ve got her,’ he whispered. ‘She always said they’d come for her.’
    Maggie and Calvano looked grim at this news. They knew that no one was that good an actor. Chances were good that Arcelia Gallagher was in real trouble.
    As if he could read their minds, the husband let out a sound that stopped just short of a scream. I could feel him fading into the darkness. As the others watched in disbelief, he gave himself up to his fear and slipped to the floor unconscious.
    Maggie and Calvano stared at him, unsure of what to think.
    Once again, it was the school secretary who finally acted.
    â€˜For God sakes,’ she commanded the principal. ‘Call an ambulance.’

FOUR
    I had been a professional disaster when I was alive and a detective on the force. I had bungled nearly every case, seldom finishing an assignment and pretty much living in the bottom of a bottle. Having a partner just like me had not helped. We had gone down in a blaze of infamous glory. But even on my worst days, those days when I was still drunk from the night before and smelled like the bottom of a bar’s bathroom floor, I still had the wherewithal to be terrified of Commander Gonzales.
    He was the perfect police commander. Tall, urbane, impeccably dressed and of Latino heritage – which was no small advantage when our little Delaware town was rapidly filling up with immigrants in search a better life for their families. Many of them had drifted down our way after trying New York and finding it too large for their tastes. Enough of them were voters that the traditional Irish and Italian power brokers in town had anointed Gonzales as their golden boy.
    In truth, Gonzales had as little in common with the Mexican and Central American newcomers as I did. He shared their skin color, but that was it. Rumor had it that his grandfather had owned most of some Mexican state once upon a time.