Murder of Angels Read Online Free Page B

degrees, and she imagines someone else out there somewhere, staring across the square at this bedroom window, at her, so scared and angry and completely insignificant. Forget the rock-star shtick and she’s nobody at all, a frightened, hungover refugee from another world, the girl who fell to earth or San Francisco, and yesterday her lover tried to kill herself with a handful of pills.
    “I’m sorry, Marvin,” she says, blinking at the sunlight, blinking because she’s trying not to cry. “I think my brain’s still back in Little Rock,” but Marvin’s gone to get her drink, or maybe he’s finally had enough of this shit and walked out on them, halfway back to anywhere sane by now.
    “Fuck me,” she whispers and sits down on the edge of the bed. There’s still a pack of cigarettes in the inside pocket of her leather jacket, the pack she bought from a newsstand at the airport, and she takes one out and lights it, blowing the smoke away from Niki.
    “If the band doesn’t string me up for this one, baby, the promoters will, or Jarod or the fucking label. I already told Alex he might as well get in line with the rest,” she says and touches Niki’s forehead with the calloused fingertips of her right hand, brushes tangled black hair from Niki’s face, and she makes a tiny, uneasy sound in her sleep. Her almond skin feels cool as stone, as smooth and incomprehensible as marble. And at this moment, in this clean Pacific light, she might almost be the same girl that Daria Parker saw for the first time nearly ten years ago, ten years plus a lifetime or two; the same rumpled, carelessly beautiful Vietnamese girl on the run from herself and New Orleans and a head full of ghosts, stranded and alone in downtown Birmingham.
    Daria glances back up at Ophelia hanging on the wall, and Jesus, she never liked that painting to begin with. Despair like something sacred, something virtuous.
    “You’re scaring the holy shit out of me, Niki. Do you know that? I can’t keep doing this,” and then Marvin’s back with her drink, Bombay and tonic and fresh lime in a tall, plastic tumbler, ice cubes that are round, and she thanks him for it. Daria raises the glass to her lips, and it’s half empty when she sets it down on the table next to the blue vase, the cold gin warm and familiar in her belly, burning its way quickly towards her dizzy head, and she tries not to notice that Marvin’s staring at her.
    “You still haven’t told me what happened,” she says to him, and Marvin shakes his head, sits down on the hardwood floor beneath the window, makes a steeple with his fingers and thumbs and rests his chin on it.
    “What makes you think I know? I woke up yesterday morning and she was gone.”
    “And she didn’t say anything or do anything Friday night?” Daria asks, then takes another long drag from her cigarette and reaches for the rest of her drink.
    “I ordered take-out. We watched a movie, and then she listened to some old CDs until she took her meds and got sleepy and went upstairs to bed.”
    Daria exhales, and the smoke hangs thick and gray in the space between them. “And that’s all?” she asks. “You’re not leaving anything out?” and Marvin glares at her and frowns.
    “It was Thai take-out,” he says.
    “Fuck you, Marvin,” and Daria closes her eyes and rubs hard at her left temple.
    “You’re doing it again.”
    “Doing what? What is it that I’m doing again?”
    He watches her silently for a moment, the stern and gentle press of his gaze against her tender, jet-lagged skin and the feather-iron weight of his silence. She knows he’s choosing his words more carefully now, and Daria lets herself wish she’d stayed in Little Rock. She can feel guilty about it later, when the headache’s gone and Marvin’s gone.
    “You know what I mean,” he says. “Thinking maybe if you just try hard enough you can be Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud and Florence Nightingale all rolled into one.”
    “Is