Dancing With Ghosts

From the prologue. . .

"There was a girl.  Pretty little thing.  Lauren.  I think her name was Lauren.”  The interrogation room was full of smoke and memories that night.  Axel Mullen rocked in the squeaky wooden chair, his bony shoulders hunched together like those of a frightened child and exhaled twin plumes of cigarette smoke through his crooked nose. 

“She might have been thirteen,” he continued.  “Maybe fourteen.  No older than that.  She looked innocent like a new-born kitten.  Long curly hair the color of cornsilk.  She had blue eyes, chocolate freckles, and her laughter was like a barn-swallow singing in spring.  But she didn't laugh much.  She told us she had run away from home.  Her mother wasn't married.  Her daddy had left them a long time ago.  Her old lady was working two jobs to support her newest washout boyfriend who crashed at their trailer and whined about how unfair it was he wasn't born into money.  She said he used to get drunk and throw beer bottles at her.  She had a red star-shaped scar on her right cheek, and if you looked at her closely one eye seemed a little bluer than the other one.  The face of a flawed angel."

He had a tattoo of two skeletons performing oral sex on each other etched against his thin forearm.  He ignored the two large men sitting across from him and just stared at the dark, hard wall with an addict's haunted eyes.  He was twenty-two years old and had tasted the dust on the Reaper's shroud.  He had seen the dreams of madmen and had danced with devils in the dark.

"We found her two miles from a trailer park.  Jude wanted to stop and get some burgers.  Even psychos zoomin' on smack and gettin' jiggy with genocide have to eat, you know.  And there she was.  Huddled in the shadows next to a garbage can.  Half starved.  Gnawing on a chicken bone she had pulled out of a greasy bag covered with dead ants.  Fresh bruises on her wet cheeks.  It didn't take much to get her in the car.  We waggled a warm hot dog with ketchup and some leftover fries at her and she hopped right in like we was family.  Her old lady kept the beer and cigarettes stocked but I guess food wasn't a big priority."  He paused long enough to take another drag and blinked smoke out of his red eyes.  "And just like that another neglected kid was swallowed by the night.  Mathias has a thing for kids.  He says that heaven turns a little blacker when you're cruel to kids.  If that's true, then from what I've seen heaven must be as black as the ash from the bones of sinners burning in hell."