The Reapers

by John Connolly

  Eventually, Willis and Harding ended up in the pay of Arthur Leehagen, a man whose illegal means of making money sat easily, if discreetly, alongside his more legitimate business concerns. Willis and Harding, like a number of Leehagen’s more specialized employees, were involved principally with the former activities, although they had proved useful whenever problems had arisen with the latter as well. When the cancers had begun to bloom like dark red flowers, it was Willis and Harding who had been sent out to talk to the more indignant sufferers, the ones who were threatening loudly to sue, or to go to the newspapers. Sometimes it took just one visit, although occasionally the two men had been forced to wait outside school gates to smile at mothers picking up their children, or to sit high in the bleachers during cheerleading practice, watching those short skirts ride up, their eyes lingering hungrily on thighs and breasts. And if the coach decided to ask them what they thought they were doing, well, the coach had kids, too. As Willis liked to say, there was plenty for everybody, boys and girls alike, and he was not a picky man. And if the cops were called, then Willis and Harding were Mr. Leehagen’s men, and that was as good as diplomatic immunity right there.

  And if someone was stubborn enough, or foolish enough, to ignore those warnings, well…

  Willis and Harding might almost have been related, because they looked a little alike. Both were tall and rangy, with straw-blond hair darkening to red, and pale skin dotted with the kinds of freckles that joined together in places to form dark patches on their faces like the shadows cast by clouds. Nobody had ever asked them if they were related, though. Nobody ever asked them much of anything. They had been employed precisely because they were the type of men whom it seemed unwise to question. They spoke rarely, and when they did it was in tones so quiet and unobtrusive that they seemed to belie the substance of what was being said, yet left the listener in no doubt about their sincerity. It was whispered that they were gay, but in fact they were omnisexual. Their intimacy with each other had never extended to the physical, yet each was otherwise happy to sate his appetites wherever the opportunity lay. They had shared men and women, sometimes together, sometimes apart, the objects of their attentions sometimes submitting willingly, and sometimes not.

  As the sky grew lighter that morning, and the rain briefly ceased, they were both identically dressed in jeans, black work boots, and billowing blue denim shirts as they sat in the cab of the truck, Willis driving, Harding staring out of the window, idly blowing cigarette smoke into the air. Their primary role in the operation was to keep watch on the northern bridge and its surrounds, as well as patroling the outer ring road of Leehagen’s property in case, through some miracle, the two trapped men managed to break through the initial cordon.

  Beside them were the guns they had used to kill Lynott and Marsh. Others had taken care of the second pair of men. Willis had felt a grim satisfaction that Benton, despite his protests, had been excluded. Willis didn’t like Benton: he was a local bully boy who would never graduate to the majors. Willis was of the opinion that he and Harding should have been sent to New York, not Benton and his retard buddies, but Benton was a friend of Michael Leehagen’s, and the old man’s son had decided to give him a chance to prove himself. Well, Benton had proved something, that was for sure, but only that he was an asshole.

  Now that the men at the bridges were dead, Willis and Harding were no longer concerned about further incursions, although they planned to stick to the outer road, just in case. Their thoughts had moved on to other matters. Like a number of Leehagen’s employees, Harding didn’t understand why they weren’t simply being allowed to deal with the other intruders themselves. He didn’t see the point in paying someone good money to do it for them. It never struck him that the man who would be arriving to kill them might have personal reasons for doing so.

  He was distracted from his meditations by a single word from Willis.

  “Look.”

  Harding looked. An enormous 4x4 was parked on the right-hand side of the road, facing in their direction. On either side of the road, pine trees stretched away into the distance. There was a man sitting on a log close to the truck. He was chewing on a candy bar, his legs stretched out in front of him. Beside him was a carton of milk. He did not appear to have a care in the world. Willis and Harding both simultaneously decided that this would have to change.

  “The hell is he doing?” said Willis.

  “Let’s ask him.”

  They pulled up about ten feet from the monster truck and climbed out of the cab, shotguns now cradled loosely in their arms. The man nodded amiably at them.

  “How you boys doin’?” he said. “It’s a fine morning in God’s country.”

  Willis and Harding considered this.

  “This isn’t God’s country,” said Willis. “It’s Mr. Leehagen’s. Even God doesn’t come here without asking.”

  “Is that so? I didn’t see no signs.”

  “You ought to have looked closer. They’re out there, ‘Private Property’ printed clear as day on every one. Maybe you just don’t read so good.”

  The man took another bite of his candy bar. “Aw,” he said, his mouth full of peanuts and caramel, “maybe they were there and I just missed them. Too busy watching the sky, I guess. It is beautiful.”

  And it was, a series of oranges and yellows fighting against the dark clouds. It was the kind of morning sky that inspired poetry in the hearts of even the most tongue-tied of men, Willis and Harding excepted.

  “You’d better move your truck,” said Harding, in his quietest, most menacing voice.

  “Can’t do that, boys,” said the man.

  Harding’s head turned slightly to one side, the way a bird’s might at the sight of a worm struggling beneath its claws.

  “I don’t think I heard you right,” he said.

  “Oh, that’s okay, I didn’t think I heard you right either,” said the man. “You talk kind of soft. You ought to speak up. Hard for a man to get another man’s attention if he goes around whispering all the time.” He took a deep breath, and when he spoke again his voice rumbled up from deep in his chest. “You need to get some breath in your lungs, give the words something to float on.”

  He finished his candy bar, then carefully tucked the wrapper into the pocket of his jacket. He reached for the carton of milk, but Harding kicked it over.

  “Aw, I was looking forward to finishing that,” said the man. “I’d been saving it.”

  “I said,” repeated Harding, “that you better move your truck.”

  “And I told you that I can’t do it.”

  Willis and Harding advanced. The man didn’t move. Willis swung the butt of his shotgun around and used it to break the right headlamp of the 4x4.

  “Hey, now-” said the man.

  Willis ignored him, proceeding to the left headlamp and shattering that, too.

  “Move the truck,” said Harding.

  “I’d love to, honest I would, but I really can’t oblige.”

  Harding pumped a round into the chamber, placed the shotgun to his shoulder and fired. The windshield shattered, and the leather upholstery was pockmarked by shot and broken glass.

  The man put his hands in the air. It wasn’t a gesture of surrender, merely one of disappointment and disbelief.

  “Aw, fellas, fellas,” he said. “You know there was no need to do that, no need at all. That’s a nice truck. You don’t want to do things like that to a nice truck. It’s-” He struggled for the right words. “-a matter of aesthetics.”

  “You’re not listening to us.”

  “I am, but you’re not listening to me. I told you: I’d like to move it, but I can’t.”

  Harding turned the shotgun on him. If anything, his voice grew softer as he spoke again.

  “I’m telling you for the last time. Move. Your. Truck.”

  “And I’m telling you for the last time that I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not my truck,” said
the man, pointing behind Harding. “It’s their truck.”

  Harding turned around. It was the second-last thing he ever did.

  Dying was the last.

  The Fulci brothers, Tony and Paulie, were not bad men. In fact, they had a very clearly developed, if simple, sense of right and wrong. Things that were definitely wrong included: hurting women and children; hurting any member of the Fulcis’ distinctly small circle of friends; hurting anyone who hadn’t done something to deserve it (which, admittedly, was open to differing interpretations, particularly on the part of those who had been on the receiving end of a pummeling from the Fulcis for what seemed, to the victims, like relatively minor infractions); and offending Louisa Fulci, their beloved mother, in any way whatsoever, which was a mortal sin and not open to discussion.

  Things that were right included hurting anyone who broke the rules listed above and-well, that was about it. There were creatures swimming in ponds that had a more complicated moral outlook than the Fulcis.

  They had come to Maine when they were in their early teens, after their father had been shot in a dispute over garbage collection routes in Irvington, New Jersey. Louisa Fulci wanted a better life for her sons than for them to be drawn inevitably into the criminality with which her late husband had been associated. Even at the ages of thirteen and fourteen respectively, Tony and Paulie looked like prime candidates for use as instruments of blunt force. They were then barely five feet four inches tall but each weighed as much as any two of his peers, and their body fat ratio was so low that a waif model would have wept for it.

  Unfortunately, there are individuals whose physical appearance condemns them to a certain path in life. The Fulcis looked like criminals, and it seemed inevitable that criminals they would become. The possibility of their cheating fate was further hampered by their emotional and psychological makeup, which might charitably have been described as combustible. The Fulcis had fuses so short that they barely existed. As time went on, a great many medical professionals, including a number attached to prison welfare and probation services, attempted, unsuccessfully, to balance the Fulcis’ moods by pharmaceutical intervention. What they discovered in the process was quite fascinating, and interesting papers for professional and academic study might well have resulted had the Fulcis been willing to stay still long enough to cooperate in their formulation.

  In most cases of psychological disorder, aberrant behavior could be moderated and controlled through the judicious application of a cocktail of assorted medications. It was simply a matter of finding the right combination of drugs and encouraging the subject to take them regularly and continually. Where the Fulcis were concerned, though, it was discovered that the drugs would only operate effectively for a short period of time once they had lodged in their system, frequently one month or less. After that, their effectiveness dwindled, and upping the dosages did not result in any corresponding decrease in psychotic behavior. The medical professionals would then return to the drawing board, come up with another potential winning combination of blue, red, and green pills, only to discover that, once again, the Fulcis’ natural inclinations appeared to reassert themselves. They were like organ recipients rejecting a donor kidney, or captive lab rats that, faced with an obstacle preventing them from reaching their food, gradually worked out a way to get around it.

  One of the psychiatrists even went so far as to title a possible paper on the Fulcis. It was called Viral Psychosis: A New Approach to Psychotic Behavior in Adults. His theory was that the Fulcis’ psychosis bore some resemblance to the manner in which certain viruses mutated in response to medical attempts to counter them. The Fulcis were psychotic in a way that went far beyond any normal conception of the term. The paper was never published because the psychiatrist was afraid of both the mockery of his peers and the potential damage that might be inflicted upon his person if the Fulcis discovered that he had referred to them as psychotic, even under the guise of protective pseudonyms. The Fulcis were not stupid. A senior law enforcement figure had once suggested that the Fulcis “couldn’t even spell rehabilitation.” This was untrue. The Fulcis could spell it. They just had no concept of how it might be applied to their own situation, for they had no insight into their own psychosis. They were happy. They loved their mother. They valued their friends. It was all very straightforward. As far as the Fulcis were concerned, rehabilitation was for criminals, and they were not criminals. They just looked like criminals, which wasn’t the same thing at all.

  Some branches of the law had been given cause to differ with the Fulcis’ interpretation of their condition over the years. The brothers had been jailed in Seattle for the theft of $150,000 worth of Russian vodka from the port, even though they had only been hired to drive the trucks. Nevertheless, they were the ones who were found in possession of the booze, and they took the fall. They had also done time in Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the Canadian maritime province of New Brunswick, mostly for offenses involving what their good friend Jackie Garner liked to call “transfers of ownership,” occasionally involving a degree of violence if someone deliberately or inadvertently broke one of their rules. As with the law, ignorance was no defense.

  But the most significant moment in their lives occurred when they were arrested for murder in Connecticut. The death in question was that of a bookie named Benny the Breather, who had engaged in a little creative accounting that did not meet with the approval of his bosses. These bosses were distantly related to some of the individuals who had been involved in the garbage disposal dispute that had ended the life of the Fulcis’ father. Benny the Breather was so named in honor of a conviction for making lewd and lascivious telephone calls to various women who had been less than flattered by his attentions. Since Benny had made all of the calls from the comfort of his own bed, it hadn’t taken the police long to track him down. In the course of his arrest, Benny had taken a nasty tumble down the stairs of his apartment block due to the fact that one of the women he had called was the wife of a sergeant at the local precinct. This fall had left Benny with a slight limp, so he was also sometimes known as Benny the Gimp. Benny hadn’t cared much for either of his nicknames, and had been known to protest vociferously at the use of either of them, but the judicious introduction of a bullet to his head had solved the problem for all concerned.

  Unfortunately, a good citizen had witnessed the crime and came forward with a description of the men responsible, which happened to match that of the Fulci brothers. They were hauled in, identified in a lineup, and tried for murder. Circumstantial evidence was found confirming their presence at the scene, which was nearly as surprising to the Fulcis as their initial identification in the lineup, given that they hadn’t killed anyone, and certainly not Benny the Breather, aka Benny the Gimp.

  The judge, taking into account psychiatric reports, sentenced them to life imprisonment, and they were sent to separate institutions: Paulie to the Level Four Corrigan Correctional Institution in Uncasville, and Tony to the Level Five Northern Correctional Institution in Somers. The latter was designed primarily to manage those inmates who had demonstrated an inability to adjust to confinement and posed a threat to the community, staff, and other inmates. Tony’s immediate incarceration there-do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars-was ordered because his mind began to shake off the shackles of his medication while his trial was still ongoing, resulting in an altercation that left one jailhouse cop with a broken jaw.

  And there the brothers might have remained-puzzled, hurt, and innocent-had the men who ordered the killing of Benny the Breather/Gimp not felt a pang of guilt at seeing two Italian-Americans wrongfully convicted of murder, particularly two Italian-Americans whose father had died in the service of a greater criminal good, leaving a widow who was regarded by one and all as a model of ethnic motherhood. Some calls were made, and it was suggested to a crusading attorney that the convictions in question were unsafe. The case against the Fulcis was further weakened when two similarly large gentlemen w
ere arrested in New Haven following the attempted murder of a nightclub owner and were found to be in possession of the weapon that had killed Benny. Apparently, it had some kind of sentimental value to one of them, and he had been reluctant to part with it.

  The result was that the Fulcis were pardoned and released after thirty-seven months in jail, and obtained a very nice settlement from the state of Connecticut for their troubles. This they used to ensure that their mother would be kept in comfort and style for the rest of her days. Louisa, in turn, gave the brothers a weekly allowance to do with as they chose. They chose mainly to buy beer and ribs, and a monster Dodge 4x4 that they customized to within an inch of its life. Next to their mother, and each other, it was their most cherished possession on earth.

  It was this truck that Willis and Harding had just busted up with their shotguns.

  “Wow,” said Jackie Garner, because it was he who had been sitting by the side of the road, waiting for the Fulcis to finish their business in the woods, “you guys are so screwed.”

  Thus it was that when Harding turned around he saw two very large and very irate men emerging from the woods. One was hurriedly zipping up his fly. The other was staring unhappily at the truck. Their faces, which tended toward redness even at times of relative calm, had assumed the complexion of a pair of mutant plums. To Harding, they looked like trolls dressed in polyester, twin refrigerators in big-man pants and jackets. They couldn’t even walk properly, they were so wide. Instead, they shambled from side to side, like wind-up robots. The sight of the two men lumbering in their direction was so confusing to Harding and Willis that it took them a moment or two to react, so that Harding was still raising his shotgun when Tony Fulci’s fist connected with his face, breaking a number of bones simultaneously and sending him flying backward into Willis, who at that moment had lifted his own weapon and was about to fire. The shot tore through Harding and killed him instantly, even as Jackie Garner rose up and clubbed Willis across the back of the head with the butt of a pistol. Paulie then finished the job by pounding on Willis some more, until he was on the verge of departing this life and following his partner to his final reward, at which point Paulie desisted because his hand hurt.