Before There Were Angels Read Online Free Page B

apartment in San Francisco had been too small to accommodate any of it but the Victorian was just right.
    It was disconcerting to be travelling without Belle and the boys, and indeed without George, but I soon got into lone warrior ‘I can do this’ mode and you can’t go far wrong in leaving San Francisco airport and arriving in Phoenix by air, nor was reaching the Crowne Plaza in Phoenix difficult either as there was a shuttle straight there. Thanks to Priceline, a room in the Crowne Plaza was only costing me $75 for the night.
    So I lazed around in the pool, grabbed some beers and a snack at the bar, and talked by phone to Belle for an hour about how much I missed her and the boys and how the weather in Phoenix had probably not changed since she used to live there, about the time Sarah Palin decided to move to Arizona. Belle already had a tendency to call Arizona an armpit for its harassment of black and Latino drivers under the stop and search laws, but when Sarah Palin arrived it was now officially, as far as Belle was concerned, an asshole state, which could not be said of California, the ultimate land of the free and home of the liberal-minded.
    Belle had arranged for her friend Tony to help me empty her storage unit into the U-Haul truck, so I gave him a call and confirmed I would be at the storage place by nine. It turned out that Tony may not have been such a good friend after all, or he may have just been a practical joker with a tasteless sense of humor, because he brought her ex-husband Robert with him, claiming he had always wanted to know what furniture Belle had bought, an odd thing for a man like Robert to be interested in.
    What he really wanted to do, obviously, was to check me out, and see face-to-face what the better man looked like, a process during which he went from gloweringly hostile, to resigned, to vindictive towards Belle. He couldn’t reasonably hit me because I had met Belle long after she had left him but he managed to smash several pieces of furniture hard against the door frames on the way out.
    “So how are my boys?” he asked.
    “Great,” I replied. “I love them. They’re wonderful kids, great to be around.”
    Robert almost snarled at some combination of my loving his children and my effete British use of the English language. “Wonderful,” he repeated in mocking tones.
    “They are,” I assured him, deadpan.
    “I should call them more.”
    “You are free to phone them anytime.”
    “And you are living in a house?”
    “Yep, a Victorian.”
    “Belle hates houses.”
    “She likes Victorians, especially haunted Victorians.”
    “It’s haunted?”
    “Not sure yet but G eorge seems to think so.”
    “The dog?”
    “Yes.”
    “He’s still alive? That’s a surprise.”
    “I think he’ll stay alive as long as he has a reason to live which, as you know, involves overpriced meat, beer, whisky and gin.”
    “We never gave him that crap.”
    I was going to comment that George had moved up in the world but I had no particular need to be hit.
    “Belle, she still crazy?”
    “Crazy?”
    “Yeah, crazy, loco or whatever.”
    “She doesn’t strike me as being crazy.” I should not have been getting into this conversation but I was interested in Belle’s past, even from a totally biased perspective.
    “All tho se ghosts and shit.”
    “Oh yeah, that might be s lightly crazy but it’s harmless-crazy.”
    Robert stared me hard in the face. “She does it all herself.”
    “She certainly didn’t drink up George’s beer from his bowl. If she did, she’s even crazier than you think she is.”
    He shook his head. “She’s pretty crazy. Doesn’t take responsibility for anything. Bad things happen and it’s always the ghosts’ fault.”
    “Like what?”
    “You’ll see.”
    It took about an hour and a half to load the U-Haul. I offered to buy Tony and Robert a cup of coffee but they said they were going out for some beers and did I want to come? I didn’t put it