The Reapers

by John Connolly

  Vallance seemed to sigh in his seat, then got out of the car and led two of his fellow agents to the door of the chief’s office, bypassing the cop at the desk to enter the main area.

  “Chief Wooster,” he said, nodding with a pretence of amiability.

  “Special Agent Vallance,” said Wooster. He didn’t stand. Vallance had never addressed him by anything but his first name before, and Wooster had returned the familiarity, even when there was business at hand. Vallance was giving him the nod, letting him know that this was serious, that both he and Wooster were being watched. Still, Wooster wasn’t about to stand down on his own turf without a fight, and there was the matter of that butt to consider.

  Wooster looked past Vallance to where the other four men stood, the old-looking guy in the middle of the pack, smaller than the others but with his own, quiet authority.

  “What you got here, a wedding party?” asked Wooster.

  “Can we talk inside?”

  “Sure.” Wooster rose and spread his hands expansively. “Everybody’s welcome here.”

  Only Vallance and the older man entered, the latter closing the door behind them. Wooster could feel the eyes of his men and his secretary on him, boring through the glass. Knowing that he was on show before his own people made him step up to the plate. He straightened his shoulders and stood taller, his back to the window, not bothering to adjust the blinds, so that they had the sun in their eyes.

  “What’s the deal, Agent Vallance?”

  “The deal is that boy you’re sweating back there.”

  “Everybody sweats here.”

  “Not like him.”

  “Boy is a suspect in a murder investigation.”

  “So I hear. What have you got on him?”

  “Got probable cause. Man he killed may have murdered his mother.”

  “May have?”

  “He ain’t around to ask no more.”

  “From what I hear, he was asked before he left this world. He didn’t fess up to anything.”

  “He did it, though. Anyone believes he didn’t is ready to meet Santa Claus.”

  “So, probable cause. That all you got?”

  “So far.”

  “The boy bending?”

  “The boy’s not the kind to bend. But he’ll break, in the end.”

  “You seem real sure of that.”

  “He’s a boy, not a man, and I’ve broken better men than he’ll ever be. You want to tell me what this is about? I don’t think you have jurisdiction here, Ray.” Wooster had given up being polite. “This isn’t a federal beef.”

  “We think it is.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Dead man was a crew chief on the new road by the Orismachee Swamp. That’s a federal reserve.”

  “Will be a federal reserve,” Wooster corrected him. “It’s still just swamp now.”

  “Nope, that swamp, and the road that’s being built, have just come under federal jurisdiction. Declaration was made yesterday. Rushed through. I got the paperwork here.”

  He reached into his inside jacket pocket, produced a sheaf of typed documents, and handed them to Wooster. The chief found his glasses, perched them on his nose, and read the small print.

  “So”, he said, when he was done, “that don’t change a thing. Crime was committed before this declaration was made. It’s still my jurisdiction.”

  “We can agree to differ on that one, Chief, but it doesn’t matter anyhow. Read closer. It’s a retrospective declaration, back to the first of the month, just before road construction began. It’s a budgetary thing, they tell me. You know how the government works.”

  Wooster examined the paper again. He found the dates in question. His brow furrowed, and then blood soared to his cheeks and forehead as his anger grew.

  “This is bullshit. The hell should this bother you anyway? It’s colored on colored. It’s not a rights issue.”

  “This is now a federal matter, Chief. We’re not pressing charges. You’ve got to cut the boy loose.”

  Wooster knew that the case was slipping away from him, and with it some of his authority and his standing with his own staff. He would never be able to recover it. Vallance had made him his bitch, and the boy in that cell was going to skate, and laugh at Wooster while he was doing it.

  And Wilfrid back there, with his prematurely graying hair and his neat, if slightly threadbare, clothes, had something to do with it, of that Wooster was sure.

  “And where do you fit into all this?” he asked, now directing the full force of his ire at his second visitor.

  “I apologize,” said the little man. He stepped forward and stretched out a perfectly manicured hand. “My name is Gabriel.”

  Wooster didn’t move to shake the hand that had been offered to him. He simply left it to hang in the air until Gabriel allowed it to fall. Screw you, he thought. Screw you, and Vallance, and good manners. Screw you all.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” said Wooster.

  “I’m here as a guest of Special Agent Vallance.”

  “You work for the government.”

  “I supply services to the government, yes.”

  That wasn’t the same thing, and Wooster knew it. He was smart enough to grasp the underlying meaning of what had just been said. Suddenly, he got the sense that he was very much out of his depth, and that however angry he was, it would be unwise to ask any more questions of Gabriel. He had been trussed up like a hog ready for the spit. All that remained was for someone to shove a spike in his ass and all the way up through his mouth, and Wooster intended to avoid that fate at all costs, even if it meant giving up the boy.

  He sat down in his office chair and opened a file. He didn’t notice what it was, and he didn’t read what was written on its pages.

  “Take him,” he said. “He’s all yours.”

  “Thank you, Chief,” said Gabriel. “Once again, my apologies for any inconvenience caused.”

  Wooster didn’t look up. He heard them leave his office, and the door close softly behind them.

  Chief Wooster. The big fish. Well, he’d just been shown the reality of his situation. He was a little fish in a small pond who’d somehow drifted into deep waters, and a shark had flashed its teeth at him.

  He stared at the closed office door, visualizing again the wall beyond, the observation room behind it, and the boy in his cell, except now it was Gabriel watching him, not Wooster. Sharks. Deep waters. Unknown things coiling and uncoiling in their depths. Gabriel watching the boy, the boy watching Gabriel, until the two blended together to become a single organism that lost itself in a blood-dark sea.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WILLIE BREW’S HEAD HURT.

  Things hadn’t started out too badly. He’d woken feeling dehydrated, and aware that, despite the fact he hadn’t shifted position an inch in the night, he still hadn’t slept properly. Maybe I’ll get away with it, he thought. Maybe the gods are smiling on me, just this once. But by the time he reached the auto shop his head had started to pound. He was sweaty and nauseated by noon, and he knew things would go downhill from there. He just wanted the day to come to an end so that he could go home, go back to bed, and wake up the next morning with a clear head and a deep and abiding sense of regret.

  It had been this way with him ever since he had given up hard liquor. In the good old, bad old days, he could have knocked back the guts of a bottle of even the worst rail booze and still been able to function properly the next morning. Now he rarely drank anything but beer, and then usually in moderation, because beer killed him in a way liquor never had. Except a man didn’t reach the big six-oh every day, and some form of celebration was not only in order, but expected by his friends. Now he was paying the price for seven hours of pretty consistent drinking.

  Even lunch hadn’t helped. The auto shop was located in an alley just off 75th Street between 37th and Roosevelt, close by the offices of an Indian attorney who specialized in immigration and visas, an astute
choice of business address on the attorney’s part as this area had more Indians than some parts of India. Thirty-seventh Avenue itself had Italian, Afghan, and Argentinian restaurants, among others, but once you hit 74th Street it was Indian all the way. The street had even been renamed Kalpana Chawla Way, after the Indian astronaut who had been killed in the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003, and men in Sikh turbans handed out menus throughout the day to all who passed by.

  This was Willie’s patch. He had grown up here, and he hoped that he would die here. He had biked out to LaGuardia and Shea Stadium as a kid, throwing stones at the rats along the way. It had mostly been the Irish and the Jews who lived here then. Ninety-fourth Street used to be known as the Mason-Dixon line, because beyond that it was all black. Willie didn’t think he’d even seen a black face below 94th until the late sixties, although by the 1980s there were some white kids attending the mostly black school up on 98th. Funny thing was, the white kids seemed to get on pretty well with the black ones. They grew up close to them, played basketball with them, and stood alongside them when interlopers trespassed on their territory. Then, in the 1980s, things began to change, and most of the Irish left for Rockaway. The gangs came in, spreading outward from Roosevelt. Willie had stayed, and faced them down, although he’d been forced to put bars on the windows of the little apartment in which he lived not far from where the auto shop now stood. Arno, meanwhile, had always lived up on Forley Street, which was Little Mexico now, and he still didn’t speak a word of Spanish. Below 83rd it was more Colombian than Mexican, and felt like another city: guys stood on the sidewalk hawking their wares, shouting and haggling in Spanish, and the stores sold music and movies that no white person was ever going to buy. Even the movies showing at the Jackson 123 had Spanish subtitles. Through it all, Willie had survived. He’d hadn’t cut and run when times got tough, and when Louis had been forced to sell the building down by Kissena, Willie had taken the opportunity to relocate closer to home, and now he, and his business, were as much a part of the history of the place as Nate’s was. It didn’t help his hangover, though.

  They’d eaten at one of the buffets, avoiding, as always, the goat curry that seemed to be a staple of the cuisine in this part of the city. “You ever even seen a goat?” Arno had once asked Willie, and he had to admit that he had not, or certainly not in Queens. He figured that any goat that found itself wandering around Seventy-fourth Street wasn’t going to live for very long anyway, given the clear demand for dishes of which it was the main ingredient. Instead they stuck to the chicken, loading up on rice and naan bread. It was Arno who had converted Willie to the joys of Indian food, goat apart, and he had found that, once you stayed away from the hot stuff and concentrated on the bread and rice, it provided pretty good soakage after a night on the tiles.

  Now they were back at the auto shop, and Willie was counting down the minutes until they could close up and go home. Softly, he cursed the Brooklyn Brewery and all of its works.

  “A bad workman blames his tools,” said Arno.

  “What?” Willie hadn’t been in the mood for Arno all day. The little Swede or Dane or whatever the hell he was had no right to be looking so spruce. After all, they’d finished the night propping up the bar together, talking about old times and departed friends. Some of those friends were even human, although most of them had four wheels and V8 engines. Arno had no qualms about drinking liquor. His only stipulation was that it had to be clear, so it was always gin or vodka for him, and Arno had matched Willie with a double vodka tonic for every beer. Yet here he was, bright and cheerful at the end of a grim day for Willie, listening in on his private conversations with the gods of brewing. Arno never seemed to get a hangover. It had to be something to do with his metabolism. He just burned it off.

  Today, Willie hated Arno.

  “It’s not the brewery’s fault,” continued Arno. “Nobody made you drink all that beer.”

  “You made me drink all that beer,” Willie pointed out. “I wanted to go home.”

  “No, you just thought you wanted to go home. You really wanted to keep celebrating. With me,” he added, grinning like an idiot.

  “I see you every day,” said Willie. “I even see you Sundays at church. You haunt me. You’re like the ghost, and I’m Mrs. Muir, except she ended up liking the ghost.”

  He considered his analogy and decided there was something suspect about it, but he was too weary to withdraw it. “Why the hell did I want to celebrate with you anyway?”

  “Because I’m your best friend.”

  “Don’t say that. I’ll just despair.”

  “You got a better friend than me?”

  “No. I don’t know. Listen, you’re just supposed to work for me, and even that’s doubtful.”

  “I know you don’t mean that.”

  “I do.”

  “Not listening.”

  “Dammit, I’m serious.”

  “Tra-la-la.” Arno disappeared into the little storage room to the left of the main work area, trilling at the top of his voice, a finger lodged firmly in each ear. Willie considered throwing a wheel nut at him, and then decided against it. It would require too much effort, and anyway, he didn’t trust his own aim today. He might miss Arno and hit something valuable.

  He sat down on a crate, propped his elbows on his thighs, then rested his head in his hands and closed his eyes. It was almost eight, and dark outside. They always worked until eight on Thursdays, but in a few minutes they could safely lock up and call it a night. He would get Arno to take in the signs advertising that you could get your brakes fixed for $49.99 and your oil changed for $14.99. Then he would watch TV for a while at home before crawling into bed.

  He wondered later if he had fallen asleep for a few moments right there and then, because when he opened his eyes there were two men standing in front of him. He made them for out-of-towners immediately. He could almost smell the cow turds. Both were of medium height, the older of the two probably in his early forties, with dark hair that hung untidily past his collar, and sideburns that extended out in sharp points at the end to join a goatee, as though all of his hair, head and facial both, was part of a single arrangement that could be taken off at night and draped over a mannequin’s skull. He wore a brown, yellow, and green golf shirt under a brown corduroy jacket, and brown jeans over cheap imitation Timberlands.

  Willie hated golf shirts almost as much as he hated golfers. Whenever anyone came into the shop dressed for the course, or with clubs in the back of the car, Willie would lie and tell them he was too busy to be of service. There might have been golfers who weren’t assholes, but Willie hadn’t met enough of them to be able to give the whole sorry species the benefit of the doubt. Also, in his experience, the more expensive the car a golfer drove, the bigger the asshole he was. His intense dislike of golfers extended to the entire golfing wardrobe, and that went double for phlegm-colored golf shirts and anyone sorry enough to wear one either in private or in public, and most particularly in Willie Brew’s place of business when he was nursing a hangover.

  The second man was broader than the first, and, despite the moderate chill in the air, was dressed only in a faded denim jacket over a T-shirt and distressed jeans. He was chewing gum, and wore the kind of shit-eating grin that suggested here, in the flesh, was not only a jerk, but the kind of jerk who considered it a poor day indeed that didn’t involve inflicting a little pain and misery on another human being.

  And this was the thing: they were both looking at Willie like he was already dead.

  Willie knew who they were. He knew that, not far from the front entrance to his beloved auto shop, there would be a blue Chevy Malibu parked, ready to whisk these men back to wherever they had come from as soon as their work here was done. He should have said something the first time he saw the car. Now it was too late.

  Willie stood. He still had a lug wrench in his right hand.

  “We’re closed, fellas,” said Willie.

  But these men were not h
ere about a car, and anything that Willie said to the contrary was just delaying the inevitable, a pretense for which they would have no patience. They were here on business, and Willie tried to figure out if there was anyone he had bugged so much that they’d want to sic two guys like this on him. He decided that he couldn’t find a name. There was nobody who hated him this much. This wasn’t about him. A message was being sent, and it would be sent through Willie, through the breaking of his bones and the ending of his life.

  Then the gum chewer produced a gun from beneath his jacket. He didn’t even point it at Willie, just let it dangle by his side like it was the most natural thing in the world to walk into a man’s premises and prepare to kill him. He kept his thumb and forefinger in position while he stretched the remaining fingers, an athlete giving his muscles a final loosening before stepping into the blocks.

  “Drop the wrench,” said his goateed buddy.

  Willie did. It made a loud clang as it hit the concrete floor.

  “You don’t look so good,” said Goatee. Willie tried to place the accent, but couldn’t. There might have been some Canadian in there someplace. Not that it mattered, not now.

  “I had a rough night.”

  “Well, I hate to say it, but your day ain’t about to get much better.”

  Goatee punched Willie hard. Willie didn’t have a chance to prepare for the blow. It hit him full in the center of the face and broke his nose. Willie went down on his knees, his hands already raised to catch the first flow of blood. He heard the second man snicker, then move off. The door to the storage area opened. Willie peered through his fingers, and saw the gum chewer enter the room, his gun raised now. For once in his life, Willie prayed, don’t let Arno do anything dumb.