From the Corner of His Eye

around Angel, Celestina said, "Would you like Uncle Wally to be your daddy?" "That would be the best." "I think so, too." "I never had a daddy, you know." "Getting Wally was worth the wait, huh?" "Will we move in with Uncle Wally?" "That's the way it usually works." "Will Mrs. Ornwall leave?" "All that stuff will need to be worked out." "If she leaves, you'll have to make the cheese."
        The sound-suppressor didn't render the pistol entirely silent, but the three soft reports, each like a quiet cough muffled by a hand, wouldn't have carried beyond the hallway.
        Round one hit Ichabod in the left thigh, because Junior fired while bringing the weapon up from his side, but the next two were solid torso scores. This was not bad for an amateur, even if the distance to target was nearly short enough to define their encounter as hand-to-hand combat, and Junior decided that if the deformation of his left foot hadn't prevented him from fighting in Vietnam, he would have acquitted himself exceptionally well in the war.
        Clutching the purse as though determined to resist robbery even in death, the guy dropped, sprawled, shuddered, and lay still. He'd gone down with no shout of alarm, with no cry of mortal pain, with so little noise that Junior wanted to kiss him, except that he didn't kiss men, alive or dead, although a man dressed as a woman had once tricked him, and though a dead pianist had once given him a lick in the dark.
        Her voice as bright as her bed ensemble, spiritual sister to baby chicks everywhere, yellow Angel raised her head from the pillow and said, "Will you have a wedding?"
        "A wonderful wedding," Celestina promised her, taking a pair of pajamas from a dresser drawer.
        Angel yawned at last. "Cake?"
        "Always cake at a wedding."
        "I like cake. I like puppies."
        Unbuttoning her blouse, Celestina said, "Traditionally, puppies don't have a role in weddings."
        The telephone rang.
        "We don't sell no pizza," Angel said, because lately they had received a few calls for a new pizzeria with a phone number one digit different from theirs.
        Snatching up the phone before the second ring, Celestina said, "Hello?"
        "Miss White?"
        "Yes?"
        "This is Detective Bellini, with the San Francisco Police Department. Is everything all right there?"
        "All right? Yes. What-"
        "Is anyone with you?"
        "My little girl," she said, and belatedly she realized that this might not be a policeman, after all, but someone trying to determine if she and Angel were alone in the apartment.
        "Please try not to be alarmed, Miss White, but I have a patrol car on the way to your address."
        And suddenly Celestina believed that Bellini was a cop, not because his voice contained such authority, but because her heart told her that the time had come, that the long-anticipated danger had at last materialized: the dark advent that Phimie had warned her about three years ago.
        "We have reason to believe that the man who raped your sister is stalking you."
        He would come. She knew. She had always known, but had half forgotten. There was something special about Angel, and because of that specialness, she lived under a threat as surely as the newborns of Bethlehem under King Herod's death decree. Long ago, Celestina glimpsed a complex and mysterious pattern in this, and to the eye of the artist, the symmetry of the design required that the father would sooner or later come.
        "Are your doors locked?" Bellini asked.
        "There's just the front door. Yes. Locked."
        "Where are you now?"
        "My bedroom."
        "Where's your daughter?"
        "Here."
        Angel was sitting up in bed, as alert as she was yellow.
        "Is there a lock on your bedroom door?" Bellini asked.
        "Not much of one."
        "Lock it anyway. And don't hang up. Stay on the line until the patrolmen get there."
        Junior couldn't leave the dead man in the hall and hope to have any quality time with Celestina.
        Aftermath had a way of being discovered, often at the worst of all possible moments, which he had learned from movies and from crime stories in the media and even from personal experience. Discovery always brought the police at high speed, sounding their sirens and full of enthusiasm, because those bastards were the most past-focused losers on the face of the earth,