The Reapers

by John Connolly

  Willie was a creature of the city, and of New York in particular. It wasn’t that he considered green fields merely to be suburbs waiting to happen. He wasn’t entirely without sensitive feelings. No, it was just that New York wasn’t like other states: it was a place defined by its largest city in a way that nowhere else in the country was. When you mentioned New York to most people, either American or foreign, they didn’t think of the Adirondacks, or the Saint Lawrence, or of forests and trees and waterfalls. They thought of a city, of skyscrapers and yellow cabs and concrete and glass. That, too, was Willie’s New York. He could not equate it with its rural obverse.

  He realized that Angel and Louis had probably come this way. He was shadowing them, driving in their tracks. The thought seemed to renew his sense of purpose. He checked his mileage and calculated that he had only an hour or so to go before he reached the place where he was supposed to meet the Detective. He felt his stomach tighten again. The gun was heavy in his pocket.

  He drove on.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  JUST AS ANGEL AND Louis had hours before, Willie emerged from small towns and forests into a cluster of motels and casinos close to the Canadian border.

  He’d only been this far upstate once before, and that was farther west, over at Niagara. He and his ex-wife had gone there for their honeymoon. In January. He must have been crazy but, then again, he had been in love, and neither of them was exactly a summer person. He’d had enough of heat and sweat in Vietnam, and she had simply wanted to see the falls. She told him they would be even more spectacular in winter, surrounded by ice and snow. He supposed they had been pretty impressive, although the chill that had entered his bones should have served as a warning for what was to come later in their married life. All things considered, he ought to have stuck her in a barrel right there and then and pushed her over the edge.

  He spotted the Detective’s Mustang parked outside the Bear’s Den, a big truck stop and diner about ten miles from Massena, and experienced a sense of pride at the sight of the vehicle. He had sourced that car for the Detective, beating the dealer down on price until he thought the guy was going to start weeping on the lot. Willie had then brought the Mustang back to the shop and taken it to pieces, checking every moving part, substituting those that were worn or threatened to give up the ghost in a year or two. Seeing it here, far to the north, he felt the way a school principal might feel upon encountering a former student who had done particularly well for himself. He half expected the car to beep softly in recognition as he approached. After he had parked, he walked around the Mustang twice, giving both the interior and exterior a brief examination. When he was done, he sighed contentedly. There were one or two little nicks to the paintwork, and the treads on the right front tire were wearing thin, but otherwise she seemed to be in good condition. Still, he wanted to take a lengthy look under the hood soon. He was sure there were halfway-decent mechanics up in Maine, but they couldn’t love his babies the way that he did. He patted the hood affectionately and entered the diner, passing some tattered stuffed bears in a glass case beside the main door, their fur rubbed bare in places. They made him depressed, and he quickened his step to put them from his sight.

  It was shortly after 6:00 A.M., and the sky was only just beginning to lighten. The rain had stopped falling for a while, but the sky was gray and brooding, and Willie knew that there would be more to come. The Bear’s Den was a big place, and it was already half filled with people eating breakfast in the booths. They were smoking, too. It reminded Willie, once again, that NYC rules didn’t apply up here. You tried lighting up over breakfast in the city and there would be a cop kneeling on your back before you could get to the funny pages, assuming your fellow diners didn’t beat you to death first.

  The Detective was seated in a red vinyl booth at the back of the room, a little fake hay bale made from wood shavings on the windowsill beside him, topped with a miniature scarecrow and plastic pumpkins. He was wearing dark-blue jeans, a black T-shirt, and a black military jacket. He hadn’t removed the jacket, despite the warmth of the diner. Willie could guess why. There was a gun under there somewhere. The Detective was supposed to have surrendered all of his weapons after his permit and license were revoked, but Willie figured that only counted for the ones the cops knew about. Like Louis, the Detective wasn’t the kind to go around advertising all of his possessions.

  There was a cup of coffee before him, and the remains of bacon and poached eggs. Willie took the seat across from him and a waitress appeared. He ordered coffee and toast. He wasn’t very hungry. He wasn’t tired either, or not as tired as he had expected to be. That surprised him. Then again, he wasn’t a big sleeper at the best of times. Four, maybe five hours a night was usually enough for him.

  “I see you couldn’t resist giving the Mustang a once-over,” said the Detective. He was smiling.

  “You send them out into the world, and all you can hope is that the world treats them the way it should,” said Willie. “Like children.”

  He saw the Detective’s smile flicker slightly, and wished that he hadn’t mentioned children. You lose a child, especially the way this man had lost his, and it will always be a red, raw wound to you.

  “She running okay?” asked Willie, moving on to safer ground.

  “She’s running fine.”

  “Helps not having her shot up by folk.”

  Willie had never quite forgiven the Detective for allowing his previous Mustang, also sourced by him, to be shot to pieces in some godforsaken Maine town. The car had been beyond salvation, although Willie had been forced to rely on Angel’s testimony in that regard. Willie had offered to transport the car back down to Queens at his own expense to see what could be done, but Angel had put a consoling hand on Willie’s shoulder and quietly suggested to him that this might not be a good idea. He reckoned the sight of what was left of the car would be too upsetting for Willie. It was the equivalent of a closed casket at a beloved relative’s funeral.

  “I do try to avoid getting shot up whenever I can,” said the Detective.

  How’s that working out for you, Willie was tempted to ask. The Detective exerted a seemingly irresistible force of attraction over bullets, knives, fists, and just about anything else that could potentially do a body harm. Even sitting this close to him made Willie nervous.

  The coffee and toast arrived, distracting him for a time from his concerns for his personal safety. The coffee tasted good, and he could feel his brain responding to the rush of sugar and caffeine.

  “Is it okay to talk here?” asked Willie.

  “I wouldn’t. We can talk in the car. I take it they haven’t called, though?”

  “No.” Suddenly, Willie’s cell beeped. He found it in his overalls and felt his hopes rise, until he saw the message welcoming him to Canada.

  “We’re not in Canada, right?” he said.

  “Not unless they’ve invaded quietly.”

  “Fucking Canadians,” said Willie, turning his disappointment to anger and aiming it north. “Be just like them.”

  He went back to nibbling at his toast. He had a lot of questions he wanted to ask, not least of which was if they were up here alone. The Detective was good at what he did. Angel and Louis had said so often enough, and Willie had no reason to doubt their word, but he wasn’t sure if two men would be able to handle whatever they were about to face. Much as he loved Angel and Louis, Willie had no pressing desire to throw himself on their pyre for no good reason. Suddenly, the gravity of the situation impacted upon him fully. He put down his piece of half-finished toast. What little appetite he had disappeared. He excused himself and went to the men’s room, and there he doused his face and neck with cold water and dried himself with a wad of paper towels, then went back outside.

  The check had been paid, and the Detective was waiting for him at the door. If he knew what Willie was feeling, he gave no indication of it.

  “You need anything from your car?” the Detective asked.
r />   “No. I got all I need here.”

  Instinctively Willie patted the Browning once again, and instantly felt ridiculous. He sounded like a gunfighter: a smug gunfighter, the kind that got shot at the end of the third reel. The Detective looked at him quizzically.

  “You okay, Willie?”

  “I didn’t mean that to sound the way it did,” said Willie apologetically. “You know, like I was Dirty Harry or someone. I’m just not used to this kind of thing.”

  “If it’s any consolation, I do this a lot, more than I’d like, and I’m not used to it either.”

  They both got into the Mustang, and the Detective pulled away from the curb. He drove for about a mile until he came to a deserted lot, then pulled in and killed the engine. The Detective produced a series of pages. They were satellite images, printed in high resolution from a computer. One showed a large residence. The second showed a town. On others there were roads, streams, fields.

  “Where’d you get these, the CIA?” asked Willie.

  “Google,” said Parker. “I could plan an assault on China from a home computer. Arthur Leehagen has a compound south of here; that’s the main house by the lake. It looks like there are two roads in and out, both heading roughly west. They cross a stream, which means Leehagen’s land is almost entirely surrounded by water, except for two narrow tracts to the north and south where the stream comes close to the lake before veering away. The southern road veers northwest, and the northern road southwest, so they come close to meeting near Leehagen’s house. Two other roads intersect them, running north to south, the first near the stream, the second about a mile or so in.”

  As he spoke, the Detective pointed out the details on one of the images. Willie didn’t own a computer. He figured it was too late in life to worry about these things, and he had little enough spare time as it was. He had a vague notion of what a Google might be, but he couldn’t have explained it to anyone in a way that made sense, not even to himself. Still, he was impressed by what the Detective was showing him. Wars had been fought with less detailed information in hand than this. Hell, he’d fought in one of them.

  “You okay with the gun you’ve got?” asked the Detective.

  “Louis gave it to me.”

  “It should be good, then. You fired a weapon recently?”

  “Not since Vietnam.”

  “Well, they haven’t changed much. Show me the gun.”

  Willie handed the Browning to the Detective. It weighed less than two pounds fully loaded, and had a blued finish. It was a pre-1995 model, as the magazine had a thirteen-round capacity, not a ten. The chamber was unloaded, according to the indicator on the extractor.

  “Nice and light,” said Parker. “Not new, but clean. You got a spare clip?”

  Willie shook his head.

  “With luck, you won’t have to use it. If we have to empty clips, then we’re probably outnumbered, so it won’t matter too much either way.”

  Willie didn’t find this entirely reassuring.

  “Can I ask you something?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “Is it just us? I mean, no offense meant, but we ain’t exactly Delta Force.”

  “No, it’s not just us. There are others.”

  “Where are they?”

  “They went on ahead. In fact-” Parker checked his watch. “-we ought to be joining them about now.”

  “I had another question,” said Willie, as the Detective started the engine.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Is there a plan?”

  The Detective looked at him.

  “Not getting shot,” he replied.

  “That’s a good plan,” said Willie, with feeling.

  The Detective kept the headlights on as they drove. Willie thought they might be a little high, but he said nothing. He could worry about headlights another day. Getting shot was on his mind. He’d been shot at in Nam, but no bullets had even come close to him. He was kind of hoping to keep things that way. Still, it paid to know what to expect. He’d been around men who’d been shot, and the range of reactions had startled him. Some screamed and cried, others just stayed silent, holding all the pain inside, and then there were those who acted like it was a minor thing, as though the wind had just been taken out of them a little by a shard of hot metal buried deep in their flesh. Finally, he felt compelled to ask the question.

  “You’ve been shot, right?” he asked the Detective.

  “Yeah, I’ve been shot.”

  “What was it like?”

  “I don’t recommend it.”

  “You know, I’d figured that out for myself.”

  “I don’t think mine was your typical experience. I was in freezing water, and I was probably already in shock when I got hit. It was a jacketed bullet, so it didn’t spread out on impact, just passed straight through. It got me here.” He pointed to his left side. “It was mainly fatty tissue. I don’t even remember too much pain at first. I got out of the water and started walking. Then it began to hurt like hell. Bad, really bad. A woman-” Here, the Detective paused. Willie didn’t interrupt, merely waited for him to continue. “-a woman I knew, she had some nursing experience. She sewed it up. I kept going for a couple of hours after that. I don’t know how. I think I was still in shock, even then, and we were in trouble, Louis, Angel, and I. It happens that way, sometimes. People who’ve been injured find a way to keep going because they have to. I was running on adrenaline, and there was a girl missing. She was Walter Cole’s daughter.”

  Willie knew about this. He had heard some of the story from Angel.

  “A couple of days after it was over, I collapsed. The doctors said it was a delayed reaction to all that had happened. I’d lost some teeth, and I think what they did to repair that damage hurt almost as much as the gunshot. Anyway, it seemed to precipitate everything that followed, like my body had decided enough was enough. They tried to put me in the hospital, but I rested up at home instead. Took a while for the gunshot wound to stop hurting. When I turn a certain way, I think I can still feel a twinge. Like I said, I don’t recommend it.”

  “Right,” said Willie. “I’ll remember that.”

  They turned off the main road, heading south. Eventually, the Detective slowed, searching for something to his right. A road appeared, marked “Private Property.” The Detective turned onto it and followed it for a short distance until they came to a bridge, where he stopped the car. They sat there, neither of them moving. There was a light in the trees, and Willie thought that he could hear a repetitive beeping sound. He looked to his left and saw that the Detective had a gun in his right hand. Willie took the Browning from his jacket pocket and removed the safety. The Detective looked at him and nodded.

  They got out of the car simultaneously and moved in the direction of the light. As they drew closer, Willie could see the vehicle more clearly. It was a Chevy Tahoe. Its side window had disintegrated, and the body of a man lay slumped over one of the seats, a ragged wound torn in his chest. The Detective skirted the Chevy, his gun raised, until he came to a second body farther into the woods. Willie joined him and looked down at the remains. The man was lying facedown with a hole in the back of his head.

  “Who are they?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” He knelt and touched the man’s skin with the back of his hand. “They’ve been dead for a while.” He looked at their boots. They were clean, shining with what Willie thought was almost a military polish. There was only a little mud on them.

  “Not from around here,” said the Detective.

  “No,” said Willie. He looked away. “You think these guys came with Louis and Angel?”

  The Detective thought about it. “They wouldn’t have tried to take Leehagen alone, not with so much territory to cover. It would make sense to try to hold the bridges. So my guess is, yes, they were part of whatever Louis was planning, which means Leehagen’s people found them and killed them.”

  He approached the bridge and stared across it tow
ard the dark woods beyond.

  “So where’s the rest of the cavalry?” asked Willie.

  The Detective sighed and gestured across the bridge. “In there. Somewhere.”

  “I’m guessing that’s not where they’re supposed to be, right?”

  The Detective shook his head. “These guys are never where they’re supposed to be.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE TWO MEN WERE named Willis and Harding. Coincidentally, they shared a first name: Leonard. It was what had set them at each other’s throats when they were small boys in a small town in a large state, the kind of town where it mattered who was Leonard Number One and who was Leonard Number Two.

  As things turned out, the two boys were pretty evenly matched, and in time a bond of friendship had developed between them, a bond that was finally cemented when they stomped a man named Jessie Birchall to death outside a bar in Homosassa Springs, Florida, for having the temerity to suggest that Willis ought not to have touched Jessie’s fiancée on the ass as she was making her way to the ladies’ room. The fiancée in question claimed to have no memory of what the two young men had looked like when the police came to question her, even though one of the men had hit her hard enough to break her left cheekbone when she attempted to intervene on her fiancé’s behalf, a forgetfulness not unconnected to the fact that Willis, his hands still warm with the dying man’s blood, had whispered in her ear for thirty seconds while Jessie Birchall suffocated in redness on the garbage-strewn concrete of the parking lot, time enough to let his little lady know exactly what would happen to her if she saw fit to share with the law everything that she had witnessed. Actually, Jessie Birchall’s fiancée hadn’t liked him that much anyway, not enough to endure what Willis was proposing. She was only eighteen, and there would be other fiancés.