The Reapers

by John Connolly

  Two men finished sharpening the gaffs on their birds’ legs and entered the pit. Instantly, the pitch and volume of the spectators’ voices altered as they sought some final betting action before the fight began, exchanging hand signals and shouts, seeking confirmation that their wagers had been recorded. Alderman did not join them. He had already placed his bet. Alderman left nothing until the last minute.

  The breeders crouched at either side of the pit, their roosters pecking at the air, sensing that combat was imminent. The birds were introduced to each other, their hackles rising in instinctive hatred, and then they were released. Griggs worked his way through the crowd as the birds fought, catching occasional glimpses of flashing spikes, of blood spatter landing on arms, chests, faces. He saw a man instinctively lick the warm blood from his lips with the tip of his tongue, his eyes never moving from the combat below. One of the birds, a yellow-hackled rooster, got spiked in the neck and began to flag. The breeder withdrew it temporarily, blowing on its head to revive it, then sucking the blood from its beak before returning it to the fray, but it was clear that the rooster had had enough. It went cold, refusing to respond to the attacks of its opponent. It was counted out, and the fight declared over. The losing breeder picked up the distressed bird in his arms, looked at it sadly, then wrung its neck.

  Alderman had not moved from his barrel, and Griggs could tell that the night had not gone well for him.

  “Bullshit, man,” said Alderman, his voice like that of a mourner whispering prayers for the dead, or a soft brush sweeping ashes from a stone floor. “That was all bullshit.”

  Griggs leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette, in part to get some of the smell of the pit out of his nostrils. Griggs had never been much for cockfighting. He wasn’t a gambler, and he had grown up in the city. This wasn’t his place.

  “Got some news for you,” he said, “something might ought to cheer you up.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Alderman. He did not look at Griggs, but began counting and recounting his money, as though hoping that the act of moving it through his fingers might multiply it, or reveal a previously unseen twenty among the fives and ones.

  “The boy that done Deber. Could be I know where he’s at.”

  Alderman finished counting and slipped the bills into a scuffed brown leather wallet, then placed the wallet carefully in the inside pocket of his jacket and closed the button. They had been searching for the boy for ten weeks now. They had tried intimidating the women at the cabin, pulling up outside it in their big old, beaten-up Ford, all false smiles and implied threats, but the boy’s grandmother had fronted them right there on her porch, and then three men had appeared from the trees, locals looking out for their own, and he and Griggs had moved on. Alderman figured that even if they did know where he was, the women wouldn’t tell them, not even if they took a knife to one of them. He could see it in the matriarch’s eyes as she stood there before her open door, her hands on her hips as she cussed them softly for what they were trying to do. Like Chief Wooster, Alderman knew something of the woman’s reputation. They weren’t ordinary cuss words she was using against them. It made no nevermind to Alderman, who didn’t believe in God or the devil, but he admired the woman’s demeanor, and was respectful of her even as he tried to communicate to her the level of damage he and Atlas were prepared to inflict in order to find the boy.

  “So where he at?” he asked Griggs.

  “San Diego.”

  “Boy’s a long way from home. How’d you come by it?”

  “Friend told a friend. Met a man in a bar, they got talking, you know how it is. Man heard we was looking for a young nigger, heard there might be money in it. Said a boy like ours showed up in San Diego looking for work about two months back. Got him a job as a kitchen boy in a diner.”

  “This man have a name?”

  “White guy, didn’t give no name. Heard about the boy from some redneck owns a bar in the boy’s hometown. But I made some calls, got someone out there to take a look at the boy at his place of work. It’s him, sounds like.”

  “Long way to go to be wrong.”

  “Got Del Mar out there. Not far to Tijuana neither. It’s him, though. I know it.”

  Alderman got up from the barrel and stretched. There wasn’t much to keep them here, and he did owe that boy: Deber had been close to setting up a score, and his death had fucked that up royally. Without Deber, he and Atlas had been struggling. They needed to hook up with someone new, someone with juice, but the rumors about what the boy maybe had done to Deber had spread, and now he and Atlas weren’t getting the respect that they ought to have. They needed to fix things with the boy before they could start making money again.

  That night, they hit a mom and pop store and netted seventy-five dollars from the register and the safe. When Griggs put a knife to the woman’s throat, her husband had come up with $120 more from a box in the storeroom. They left them tied up in the back of the store and turned the lights out, tearing the telephone from the wall before they departed. Alderman had been wearing an old gray overcoat over his suit and both he and Griggs had cloth sacks over their heads to hide their faces. He had made sure that they parked out of sight of the store before they went in, so their car couldn’t be identified. It had been an easy takedown, not like some of the ones they’d done with Deber back in the day. Deber would have raped the woman at the store out of spite, right in front of her husband.

  They stopped near Abilene at a bar owned by an old acquaintance of Griggs’s, and where a man named Poorbridge Danticat, who knew of Alderman and Griggs and Deber, made a joke about Deber losing his head. Alderman and Griggs had waited for him in the parking lot afterward, and Griggs had beaten Poorbridge so badly that his jaw was re moved almost entirely from his skull and one ear hung crookedly from a flap of skin. It would serve as a message. People needed to learn some respect.

  All this because of Deber, thought Alderman, as they drove west. I never even liked him, and now we have to travel for days to kill a boy just cause Deber couldn’t control himself with his woman. Well, they’d make the boy pay, make an example of him so that folk would know that he and Atlas took these things seriously. There was no other way. Business, after all, was business.

  The diner stood on National Boulevard, not far from the X-rated Pussycat house. The Pussycat had started life as the Bush Theater in 1928, then became, at various stages in its history, the National, the Aboline, and the Paris, before finally joining the porn mainstream in the 1960s. When Louis arrived for work each morning shortly after five, the Pussycat was silent and sleeping, like an old harlot after a hard night’s whoring, but by the time he left, twelve hours later, a steady stream of men had already begun to make use of the Pussycat’s facilities, although, as Mr. Vasich, the Yugoslav owner of the diner, would often remark, “Ain’t none of them staying longer than a cartoon.”

  Louis’s job at Vasich’s Number One Eatery, as a pink and yellow neon sign announced it, was to do whatever was required to keep the place functioning, short of actually cooking the food himself or taking money from its patrons. He washed, shucked, peeled, and polished. He helped carry in deliveries and carry out garbage. He made sure that the restrooms were clean and there was paper in the stalls. For this he was paid the minimum wage of $1.40 an hour, from which Mr. Vasich deducted twenty cents an hour for room and board. He worked sixty hours each week, with Sundays off, although he could, if he chose, come in and work off the books for a couple of hours on Sunday morning, for which Mr. Vasich paid him a flat five dollars, no questions asked. Louis took the extra hours. He spent little of the money that he earned, apart from treating himself to an occasional movie on a Sunday afternoon, since Mr. Vasich fed him well at the eatery and gave him a room on the second floor with a bathroom across the hall. There was no access to the diner itself from where Louis stayed, and the rest of the rooms were given over to file storage and a collection of mismatched and broken furniture, only some of it connected to the business be
low.

  After two weeks had gone by, he took the bus down to Tijuana and, having walked the streets for two hours, eventually bought a Smith & Wesson Airweight alloy.38 and two boxes of ammunition from a store close to Sanchez Taboda. The man who sold it to him showed him, using a combination of broken English and simple, hands-on demonstration, how to release the cylinder and push back on the ejector rod to access the central ejector plate. The gun smelled clean, and the man gave Louis a brush and some oil to keep the weapon that way. When he was done, Louis tried to get a sandwich but all the bakeries and bread stores had been closed, apparently because a pesticide had been stored alongside the ingredients for making bread in a government warehouse in Mexicali, resulting in the deaths of a number of children, so he settled for half a chicken on a bed of wilted lettuce before returning to the United States.

  He found an old bicycle in one of Mr. Vasich’s storerooms and paid to have the tires repaired and the chain replaced. The following Sunday, he filled a bag with a bottle of water, a sandwich from the diner, a doughnut, some empty soda bottles, and the.38, and biked west until he had left the city behind. He stowed his bike in some bushes and walked away from the road until he came to a hollow filled with rock and scree. There he spent an hour firing at bottles, replacing them with rocks when only broken shards were left. It was the first time that he had held and fired a revolver, but he quickly got used to its weight and the sound that it made. Mostly, he fired from a range of not more than fifteen feet from his targets, figuring that, when it came down to it, he would probably be using the gun up close. Once he was satisfied with himself and his knowledge of the weapon, he buried the pieces of broken glass, carefully collected the spent cartridges, and biked back to the city.

  The waiting came to an end on a warm, still August night. He woke to the sound of boards creaking outside his room. It was still dark outside, and he did not feel as though he had slept for long. He did not know how they had managed to get so close without being heard. The second-floor rooms were reached by way of rickety wooden stairs to the right of the building, and Louis always kept the main door locked at Mr. Vasich’s insistence. Yet he was not surprised that they had found him at last. Gabriel had told him it would happen, and he had known it himself to be true. He slipped from beneath the sheets, wearing only his boxers, and reached for the.38 just as his bedroom door was kicked in and a fat man with a round head appeared in the doorway. Behind him, Louis could see another, smaller man hovering.

  The big man had a long-barreled pistol in his hand, but it was not pointed at the boy, not yet. Louis raised his own weapon. His hands shook, not from fear but from the sudden rush of adrenaline into his system. Still, the man at the door misunderstood.

  “That’s right, boy,” said Griggs. “You got a gun, but it’s hard to kill a man up close. It’s real-”

  Louis’s gun spoke, and a hole blew dark blood from Griggs’s chest. Louis walked forward, his finger pulling the trigger again, and the second shot hit Griggs in the side of the neck as he fell backward, almost taking Alderman Rector with him. Alderman fired the little.22, but the shot went wild and took out the windowpane to the right of Louis. The gun in Louis’s hand was no longer shaking, and the next three shots impacted in a tight circle no bigger than a man’s closed fist in the center of Alderman’s torso. Alderman dropped his gun and turned, his right hand clutching at the wounds in his body as he tried to support himself against the wall. He managed a couple of steps before his legs crumpled and he fell flat on his stomach. He moaned at the pressure on the wounds, then started to crawl along the floor, pulling himself with his hands, pushing with his feet against Griggs’s corpse. He heard footsteps behind him. Louis fired the last bullet into Alderman’s back, and he stopped moving.

  Louis stared at the gun in his hand. He was breathing fast, and his heart was beating so hard that it hurt. He went back to his room, dressed, and packed his bag. It didn’t take him long, for he had never really unpacked it, understanding that the time would come when, if he survived, he would have to move again. He reloaded the.38, just in case these men had not come alone, then stepped over the two bodies and walked to the end of the hall. He opened the door and listened, then cast an eye over the yard below. There was no movement. A beat-up Ford was parked below, both of its front doors open, but there was nobody inside.

  Louis ran down the stairs and turned the corner, just in time to catch a man’s fist across his left temple. He collapsed to the ground, blinded by the pain. Even as he fell he tried to raise the.38, but a boot connected with his hand and forced it to the ground, stamping on his fingers until he was forced to release his grip. Hands grabbed hold of his shirtfront and hauled him to his feet, then pushed him around the corner until he felt the first step against the back of his calves. He sat down and saw clearly, for the first time, the man who had attacked him. He was six feet tall and white, his hair cut short like that of a cop, or a soldier. He wore a dark suit, a black tie, and a white shirt. Some of Louis’s blood had landed on the material, staining it.

  Behind him stood Gabriel.

  Louis’s eyes were watering, but he did not want the men to think that he was crying.

  “They’re dead,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Gabriel. “Of course they are.”

  “You followed them here.”

  “I learned that they were on their way.”

  “And you didn’t stop them.”

  “I had faith in you. I was right. You didn’t need anyone else. You could take care of them yourself.”

  Louis heard sirens calling in the distance, drawing closer.

  “How long do you think you will be able to evade the police?” asked Gabriel. “One day? Two?”

  Louis did not reply.

  “My offer still stands,” said Gabriel. “In fact, more so than before, after tonight’s little demonstration of your abilities. What do you say? The gas chamber at San Quentin, or me? Quickly, now. Time is wasting.”

  Louis watched Gabriel carefully, wondering how he had come to be here at just the right time, understanding that tonight had been a test but not certain how much of it Gabriel had orchestrated. Someone must have told those men where he was. Someone had betrayed him to them. Then again, it could have been a coincidence.

  But Gabriel was here. He had known those men were coming, and he had waited to see what would transpire. Now he was offering help, and Louis did not know if he could trust him.

  And Gabriel stared back at him, and knew his thoughts.

  Louis stood. He nodded at Gabriel, picked up his bag, and followed him to the car. The driver picked up the.38, and Louis never saw it again. By the time the police arrived they were already heading north, and the boy who had worked at the eatery, the one who had left two men dead on Mr Vasich’s floor, ceased to be, except in some small, hidden corner of his own soul.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THEY DROVE NORTH JUST after breakfast. Nobody followed them. As they left the city, Louis employed all the skills of evasion that he had learned-sudden stops, doubling back on himself, the use of dead ends and meandering roads through residential areas-yet he discerned no pattern among the vehicles in his wake, and neither did Angel. In the end, both were content that they had left the city unencumbered by unwanted attention

  Their conversation of the previous night was not mentioned. It would serve no purpose to disinter it now. Instead, they behaved as they always did, interspersing periods of silence with comments on music, on business, or on whatever happened to strike them at the time.

  “Philadelphia,” said Angel. “City of Brotherly Love, my ass. You remember Jack Wade?”

  “Cactus Jack.”

  “Hey, that’s unkind. He had a skin condition. Nothing he could do about it. Anyway, he once tried to help an old lady across the street in Philly and she kneed him in the balls. Took his wallet, too, he said.”

  “It is one unfriendly city,” Louis agreed.

  Angel watched the scenery go by. �
�What’s over there?” he asked.

  “Where?”

  “East. Is that Massachusetts?”

  “Vermont.”

  “Least it’s not New Hampshire. I always worry that someone’s going to take a pot shot at us from the trees when we drive through New Hampshire.”

  “They do breed ’em tough there.”

  “Tough, and kind of dumb. You know, they refused to pass a law requiring people to wear seat belts?”

  “I read that somewhere.”

  “You rent a car in New Hampshire, you start it up, and it doesn’t make that ‘beep-beep-beep’ noise if you forget to put on your seat belt.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yeah, instead, if you try to put it on, a voice calls you a pussy and tells you to grow a pair.”

  “Live free or die, man.”

  “I think that was referring to the forces of tyranny and oppression, not some guy who misjudges the brake time on his Prius.”

  “Cheap gas, though.”

  “Cheap gas. Cheap liquor. Easy availability of weapons.”

  “Yeah,” said Louis. “Hard to see how that could go wrong.”

  They left the interstate close to Champlain. At Mooers, they took a right and headed through the Forks, then crossed the Great Chazy River, which was little more than a stream at that point. The towns all blended into one: there were volunteer fire departments, cemeteries, old abandoned filling stations at intersections, now replaced by glowing edifices at the town limits, the vintage pumps still standing like ancient soldiers guarding long-forgotten memorials. Some places looked more prosperous than others, but it was a relative term; everywhere, it seemed, they saw things for sale: cars, houses, businesses, stores with paper on the windows, no hint now left of their former purpose. Too many homes had wounded paintwork, too many lawns were littered with the entrails of vehicles, cannibalized for parts, and the discarded limbs of broken furniture. They passed through places that were hardly there at all: some towns seemed to exist only as a figment of some planner’s imagination, like a joke on the map, a punchline to a gag that had never been told. Halloween jack-o’-lanterns glowed on porches and in yards. Ghosts danced around an old elm tree, the wind picking at their sheeted forms.