On the Side of the Angel

On the Side of the Angel

By J. David Core

Smashwords Version by J. David Core

Copyright 2017 by J. David Core

ISBN

9781370983216

Cover art by the author

Cover photo by Brianna Core

Special thanks to my beta readers; Pete Bennett, Andrea Johnson, Kate Cavell, and Corine Barnes.

This novel is dedicated to all of the hard working indie writers endeavoring to change the world of book publishing. This is for the plotters and the pantsers alike. It’s for the community builders who share their expertise in issues from outlining, to craft, to marketing, and everything in-between. It’s for those who champion the Oxford comma and those who detest it alike. Thanks for helping to create a reality where a book like this one even has a chance of reaching an audience. Whether you’ve always been indie, or you’re a hybrid, or even if you’re a trad who only occasionally dips his or her toe, I’m proud to be included in your numbers.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This story is conceived to be part of an ongoing, multi-author series. The character of the Bartering Angel was developed by a group of independently published mystery and thriller writers. Other stories in the series will be or have been written by different authors each using Angel at different stages of her journey. Watch for a collaboratively written prequel to be released soon revealing the fate of Angel’s family and how she came to her quest to expose the villain, Clifford Francois.

Contents

Copyright info

PROLOGUE

Chapter One

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

EPILOGUE

NOTICE

AUTHOR BIO

PROLOGUE

How had everything gone so wrong? So disgustingly horrifyingly wrong? One minute the clerk with the name tag that said Larry was standing there laughing smugly at his own cleverness; then the next he was gone, a couple hundred pounds of meat on a framework of bones tumbling to the ground where he’d just a moment before stood, living, breathing, afraid. Now half of his face was missing, distributed along with his brain and bits of skull onto the wall behind him. But this wasn’t the plan. This was never the plan.

***

The plan was a good one, and things were going exactly as Dino had laid them out. He and Attie watched from outside until the clerk disappeared behind an obstruction blocking his view of the front door, then they entered the store in tandem, their hoodies drawn tightly against their faces as the clerk stood behind the hot-case marking off unsold food items. Once inside, Attie walked to the cooler to search the beverages, as Dino slipped into a seat in the section of booths near the door. She didn’t glance back to check on her man’s progress, even though the desire to do so was practically like a hand twisting at her neck muscles. She focused, instead, on the cooler’s display doors. Excuse me, she said in a louder-than-normal voice once she decided enough time had passed. Do you have any small bottles of root beer?

It’s right there, the clerk wanted to say. These kids always looked right past what they should easily see. He set down his pen and walked to the other end of his station behind the counter. Second door over, second shelf from the top. Attie located her beverage, but pretended she was confused, giving her man a little more time to sneak to the back of the store. She could feel the clerk watching her as he leaned against the counter near his register. Ah, she said as she acknowledged locating the beverage. She brought her acquisition to the counter and completed her purchase, trying hard not to show her distinctive teeth.

As the clerk completed the sale, she had a thought.

Do you have a public restroom? she asked.

The clerk’s face unconsciously displayed the micro-expressions associated with frustration. His eyes rolled back just a bit. His lips pulled just a little tighter. We do, he said exhaling and trying to appear cordial. It’s in the back, but I’m closing up in two minutes, so please hurry.

That’s okay, she said. I can hold it. Thanks. She took her soda – or pop as they called it in these parts – and headed for the door, but just before leaving she said one last thing.

Meanwhile, her better half had made himself as comfortable as possible behind some boxes in the storage area of the stock room. He knew that the only moment when he would be at risk was after the store closed and the clerk entered to turn off the lights, but he wasn’t concerned about it. The clerk would be focused on the light switch, not the contents of a room he knew to be void of any other human life. Still it was tense, and Dino already had his gun drawn, just in case.

So it was a shock to Dino when the stock room door swung open before the store lights were even out. He cringed but kept an eye on the entrance, but soon he realized who had come in. He called to Attie, in a strangled sotto voice, and she joined him behind the crates. What are you doing? he whispered. This wasn’t the plan.

Once I got inside, I had an idea, she said. I noticed the restroom sign was back near the entrance to the stock room, so I asked the checkout guy about it, then as I stood in the exit from the store I told him I think that I might have knocked a bottle off the back of the shelf when I got my pop. He went into the cooler to check, and I ran to the back of the store.

What if he’d caught you?

If he caught me, I’d have said I was going to the bathroom after all.

You’re a genius, Dino said, and he pulled her in for a kiss. But I bet you forgot the masks, huh?

***

Except for a strange confluence of events, they never would have met. But the moment they did, they were instantly inseparable. They both had demons, each their own, distinct from one another but in many ways the same. It was what drew them to each other. In each, their demons had been born in the misery of another.

Attie had feared telling anyone her story – a story of lost innocence and secrets – which led to her acting out. Then, when she finally did tell, nobody believed her because she’d already established a reputation for lying. She thought she couldn’t trust anyone, but she trusted him.

Dino had sought attention from older women; teachers, counselors, the mothers of his friends to make up for the love he never received from his mother; but he was inevitably distrustful of it when he found it. He sabotaged every and any relationship with a female authority before they could hurt him first, even though most of them would probably never have hurt him at all.

The ironic thing was that his demons – his issues – were fundamentally misplaced. He faulted his mother for her apparent coldness, and he cherished his relationship with the father who doted on him; but if he’d only known the truth behind that tortured family dynamic; if he’d only understood that his mother wanted nothing more than to embrace and coddle her son; but she was too afraid. Her husband had made it clear that he wouldn’t have a sissy for a son. His son would be strong, an aggressor, a man’s-man, a leader.

Dino needed love from his mother, and never got it, never felt it. So he rebelled. His petty vandalism evolved into petty theft, and finally to bigger and more personal thefts and destruction. His father had helped him escape punishment for the larceny and destruction of property, but when he’d expanded his repertoire to arson, even his father – a fast-rising member of the Western PA syndicate – was unable to keep him out of juvie. It had been during his stay in juvie – actually while on a day’s outing doing community service – that he had met her.

***

The coal festival was one of those bucolic local events when each year the townies would gather to enjoy shopping at craft displays and partaking of carnival foods. A judge who was up for re-election had promised some of the boys that he would lessen their time if they would agree to work sanitation detail at the festival. Dino and three other boys had agreed to wear shirts which – on the front – acknowledged them as clean-up crew, and part of the county’s juvenile work-release crew on the back. It was humiliating, but he didn’t expect to run into anyone he knew; so here he was, picking up other folks’ garbage and dressed in a neon yellow tee with bright green lettering that may as well have simply read LOSER!

As for Attie, she found herself at the coal festival that year because her mother had sent her away for summer vacation to spend time with her aunt and three cousins. Her cousins were all girls, and they were all younger by three to seven years. Basically, she was there to babysit. Her uncle (the guy who had married her aunt) was a nice-enough man who worked way too much; and her aunt was a lonely homemaker who tanned far more than was healthy, and had too much of a love of merlots. So with Attie’s uncle at work, and a bottle chilling in the fridge, Attie’s aunt had given her niece forty dollars and indicated the direction of the coal festival grounds; and that’s how Attie happened to be standing idle and bored as her cousins watched the man from the honey farm indicate which of the bees in the glass display case was the queen.

She was watching the handsome boy with the beauty mark in the bright yellow shirt with a young girl’s admiration when he hoisted the broken plastic bag out of the barrel spilling most of the contents onto the walk. One of the other boys on the crew – a slightly bigger boy – had seen it too, and it had caused him to giggle. You think that’s funny? the boy holding the broken bag had asked his teammate.

The other boy was unnerved; he’d shaken his head and gone back to picking up trash, but it was too late. The boy with the broken bag was frustrated and angry that he’d been laughed at. The one who’d laughed knew that he was going to pay for his mistake.

Bring me a new sack, the boy with the fractured bag said, and even though he was larger and the boy with the broken bag had a nearly full box of his own on his cart, the other boy brought a fresh bag to his smaller teammate as ordered. I’ll hold it open and you pick up what dropped, okay?

The larger boy nodded, and the smaller good-looking boy smiled coldly. He unfolded the bag and billowed it to allow the air to open it all the way. Then he draped it over the open trash can and walked away leaving his larger companion to clean up his mess.

Dino walked over to a recess in the wall of a nearby church and took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, lighting up where he could smoke and watch to make sure the big kid who’d laughed at him did a good job picking up after his mess. That wasn’t very nice, he heard a girl’s voice say from just outside of his cubby. He braced a foot and pushed forward so he could see past the wall. She was blonde, freckled, a little gap-toothed, and cute as hell.

It wasn’t supposed to be nice, Dino said letting the cigarette bounce between dry lips for effect as he spoke. Do you know what that kid done?

He laughed at you, Attie said with a shrug.

I mean, the boy said as he pulled his smoke from his mouth, do you know what he done to get his self sent to juvie?

The blonde shrugged and pouted slightly.

He shot his neighbor’s dog with an arrow. A dog. I like dogs. That means I don’t like him.

That don’t mean you have to be mean to him, Attie said. He’s bigger than you. Maybe he’ll want to get even. He liked that she was being assertive.

Dino finished taking a pull on his smoke and said, He won’t. He’s afraid of me.

And why would he be afraid of you? the girl asked with a half-grin.

Because, Dino said as he threw his burning cigarette to the ground, he knows what I done to get sent to juvie. Attie liked that he was being aggressive. He stepped out of the recess and crushed the cigarette with his foot, then called to his teammate, the dog killer, to make sure he cleaned that up too.

The boy and girl spent the rest of the day bumping into each other accidentally on purpose. After the festival ended, they became pen pals. Dino wrote to Attie about his plans for when he got out. She wrote to him about how she hated her life, and longed for excitement. When his time inside came to an end, they became a secret couple. They were together the first time they tried cocaine, and they were together the first time they broke into a closed gas station and stole the change box; and they agreed that the high from the break-in was much better than the high from the coke.

There had been several close calls. The alarm going off was always scary and exhilarating and dangerous and fun. Dino made the plans and Attie loved his assertiveness. She embraced the plans with zeal and he loved her aggressiveness. Escaping the danger was a rush and a turn-on like no drug ever could be. Pretty soon, they were choosing places they knew were alarmed, and then they were choosing places closer and closer to the local police station. They’d begun carrying weapons to make the potential charges worse should they be caught. It added to the danger, and therefore to the thrill. After each clean break-in they’d collapse into a rapturous embrace. They were intensely in love.

Then came the day Attie had suggested stepping up the thrill. They’d been pulling off these smalltime heists for over a year, so she wanted to take it to the next level. She wanted to take a hostage and escape before the cops arrived, leaving their captive tied up and potentially able to identify them. The boy was excited by the idea, even more so because he saw how excited it made her; so he promised he’d find the perfect place, and a little over a week later, on a damp Tuesday evening in mid-September, he coaxed her into his car with plastic masks, a pair of matching gray hoodies, and a map with the location he’d staked out, circled, and underlined in red.

Soon they were in the parking lot of a Kwik Eze Mart and Gas Station in a small town just over the border in West Virginia. The locals called it Kwikies. Dino explained the plan as Attie bit her lip in anticipation. The guy who closes on most weekdays is called Larry. He has a regular routine. He locks up, does his closing routine, goes into the cooler to fill the beer for in the morning, then comes to the back to set the alarm before leaving and locking the door behind him. We’re going to come in just before closing and while you distract him, I’ll go to the back of the store and hide in the stock room. You’ll leave before he closes and locks the door, and I’ll remain hidden ‘til he goes into the cooler, then I’ll let you back in and we’ll take him when he comes out of the cooler. Dino loved that Attie would get to assert her dominance. She loved that he had planned something so aggressive.

CHAPTER 1

If anyone found her, she would say her name was Lina; she had