It was the oldest trick in the book. Press every door buzzer in the apartment building foyer and someone would buzz back and open the entrance door. It worked like a charm and Dean made his way up to the apartment number Bobby had given him. Checking the door for traps Dean was mildly surprised when he found none. Just a harder than usual lock that took him a few seconds longer to pick. He reached his hand inside along the wall and flipped the light switch and the room lit up as did his eyes when he finally stepped inside. He was defiantly in the right place.

Angel's living room was sparsely furnished and decorated in Sportsman's Warehouse with subtle accents of Cabela's. The trappings of her trade were racked or stored on heavy metal shelving units lining the walls. Perusing her apartment he saw sub-zero sleeping bags, down coats, cross country skis and a pair of snowshoes stored on one rack. He could almost see a Yeti head mounted on her wall over the fireplace. Climbing gear such as pitons, ropes, harnesses and slings were draped over specially constructed racks along with nets and snares all of which were easily accessible whenever the call came in to go after a demon or, apparently, a hunter.

Looking around Dean hadn't come to her place to shop or to pry into her life…scratch that. He had come to pry and to find out anything he could about her, anything that could help him find Sammy and who exactly had put the bounty on his brother's head…and to take a breather between beatings.

Dean made his way across the living room and into the bathroom and switched on the light. Jesus, he thought looking into the mirror. It was a good thing it was dark out and that he'd kept to the shadows. Lifting the toilet lid he unbuttoned his bloody, dirt-streaked jeans and let lose a steady stream of red tinged urine. "Two more body parts heard from," he said aloud with a small, pathetic laugh.

His kidneys had joined his throbbing head and jaw, which felt like it should be wired up, and his ribs, the latter shooting excruciating pain throughout his body every time he took a deep breath. He sat gingerly on the edge of the tub for a good five minutes breathing in and out slowly before making his way to the kitchen where the large sub-zero refrigerator was a huge disappointment, not even a long forgotten science project bitch had plenty of cabinet space although most of it was taken up with gun cleaning equipment and supplies like waterproofing oils for leather goods.

The kitchen fridge was lacking but the liquor cabinet in the living room more than made up for it. It was a drunkard's dream and, kneeling on painfully skinned knees, Dean pulled out a bottle of forty-year-old Hankey Bannister, sat down on the couch and leaned back with a sigh. "Oh Angel, I gotta remember to tell you how much I love you," he said caressing the bottle tenderly, "Right before I shoot you."

He opened the bottle and took a long pull of the amber liquid. It was a shame to negate its smoothness with the sting of running it over the myriad of cuts in his mouth but, when it hit his throat, it was pure nectar. He lowered and rested the bottle bottom on his leg and continued to survey his surroundings. The desk beckoned but, first things first, and he took another drink of the Bannister.

It took him a good while to finally figure out where she hid the real tools of her trade. The guns, the knives and the ammunition to hunt her prey, both demon and hunter alike but he eventually found the mother load. There was tens of thousands of dollars worth of the finest, deadliest weapons on the market, all racked with meticulous care behind a false wall in, of all places, the shower. Also, squirreled away in the hiding place, were thousands of rounds of copper jacketed, hollow point, fang faces in 9mm and 45 calibers, plus easily a hundred boxes of enhanced penetration rounds, each with the ability to penetrate heavy skin, dense bone and then fragment once inside the softer tissue of the target. In other words they were first-rate monster bangers.

Selecting six of the handguns and a couple different boxes of ammo, Dean closed up the false wall and piled all but one of the guns from his cache on the couch then moved on to the desk. It was an old flat top piled high with paperwork of all kinds. He searched through the stacks, ignoring the few bills, briefly checking out the maps and then moved on to the torn pages of demonology and folklore that eventually made up the bible of every hunter. Newspaper articles on otherworldly phenomena were strewn helter-skelter and mixed in with the other hunt materials. Angel's office skills were as chaotic as her fieldwork was methodical but he found nothing regarding Sam and angrily pushed the debris off the desk.

Pain flared in the small of his back and he leaned back in the desk chair and decided it was as good a place as any to await her return. In his present condition the only way he could be a match for Angel was to use her own sweet Heckler & Koch HK45C on her and, as his hand touched the gun reassuringly, a stray thought came to him. All desks, especially those belonging to cold, calculating bitches like Angel, had hidden compartments.

He reached out to run his fingers down one side of the desk then back up the other until they felt the subtle change in the wood. He pressed in and the false bottom of the middle drawer gave way giving up the desk's secret and a lone manila envelope that fell to the floor. Inside were newspaper clippings and microfiche printouts from the local papers in and around Madison, Wisconsin going back three years. One front page, torn from the Capital Times with a headline in at least one-inch type accompanying a color photograph, caught his eye. 'Local tattoo artist found dead. Wife and children missing.'

"Angel, you changed your hair color," he said aloud then, looking closer at the photograph, added, "And your eyes?"