The Reapers

by John Connolly

  Goatee now had his own gun in his hand.

  “You know,” he continued, “you ought to be more particular about who you go into business with. I mean, I know men who keep company with faggots. I don’t respect ’em, and I can’t say that I much like what they do together, but it happens. Then, Lord knows, I’ve known men to keep company with killers. You might say that I am one of those men, and my buddy back there is as well. We’re both like that, in a way: we kill people, and we keep each other company while we do it. But you, you’re covering all the bases at once. Hanging out with fag killers: that’s quite something. Guess you ought not to be surprised at what comes next.”

  He pointed the gun at Willie’s head, and Willie closed his eyes. He heard a shot, and grimaced, but the sound hadn’t come from up close. Instead, it echoed inside the storage room. The noise distracted Goatee for an instant. His head turned, and in that moment Willie was on him. He picked up the wrench as he came, raising it almost to his shoulder and then bringing it down sharply just above the man’s gun hand. He thought that he felt a bone snap, and then the gun was on the floor and Willie’s weight was forcing the other man back against the trunk of the red Olds on which Arno had been working. Even with one hand injured, Goatee was still fast. His left hand lashed out, catching Willie’s busted nose and sending fresh daggers of pain through his face, blinding him for an instant. Willie kicked with his right foot, and the steel toe cap of his work boot connected with a thigh, deadening it so that his opponent stumbled as he stretched to reach his gun. The action caused Willie to lose his own balance, and he fell. He managed to knock the gun away with the side of his foot, sending it skidding into the shadows of the garage, just as he heard a second shot and glass breaking. He tried to make himself smaller, to find some cover, and when he looked up the back window of the Olds had shattered and Goatee was moving away quickly, still limping on his dead leg. There was a third shot, and Goatee’s right shoulder was pushed forward, even as he slipped out of the garage door and disappeared into the night, his departure hastened by a final shot that struck the brickwork nearby.

  Arno was standing at the entrance to the storage room, a gun in his hand. The gun wasn’t very steady, and looked too big for Arno to hold. Arno didn’t like guns and, as far as Willie knew, had never fired one before. It was a wonder that he’d managed to hit his target at all. Arno moved cautiously toward the garage door. There was the sound of a car starting up, then driving away.

  Willie struggled to his feet. “What happened to the other fella?” he asked.

  “I hit him with a hammer,” said Arno. He was very pale. “His gun went off when he fell. You okay?”

  Willie nodded. His nose hurt like damnation, but he was alive. His hands were shaking, and now he felt sure that he was going to vomit. He reached out and gently removed the gun from Arno’s hand, putting the safety on as he did so.

  “What was all that about?” asked Arno.

  “I need to make a call,” said Willie. “Find some wire and tie up the guy in the storage room.”

  Arno didn’t move. “I don’t think we’re gonna have to do that, boss,” he said.

  Willie looked at him. “Jesus, how hard did you hit him?”

  “It was a hammer. How hard do you think?”

  Willie shook his head, although he wasn’t sure whether in despair or admiration.

  “I’m working with fucking Rambo now,” he said. “I don’t even know how you managed to wing that other guy.”

  “I was aiming for his feet,” said Willie.

  “What were you trying to do, make him dance? Aiming for his feet. Jesus. Lock the doors.”

  Arno did as he was told. Willie went into his office and picked up the phone. He knew by heart the number that he dialed.

  The call transferred to a machine. Then he tried the service, and the woman named Amy took his number and said that she’d pass on the message. Finally, he tried the cell, using this week’s number, to be utilized only in the gravest of emergencies, but a voice told him that the phone was off.

  For Louis and Angel had troubles of their own.

  Mrs. Bondarchuk was in the hallway when she heard the buzzer sound. She looked through one of the frosted-glass panes of the inner door and saw a man standing on the stoop outside the main door. He was dressed in a blue uniform and had a package in one hand and a clipboard in the other. Mrs. Bondarchuk pressed the intercom switch just as the buzzer sounded again. Her Pomeranians began yapping.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, in a tone that suggested any help would be a long time coming. Mrs. Bondarchuk was wary of all strangers, and especially men. She knew what men were like. There wasn’t a one that could be trusted, the two gentlemen who lived upstairs excepted.

  “Delivery,” the voice came back.

  “Delivery for whom?”

  There was a pause.

  “Mrs. Evelyn Bondarchuk.”

  “Leave it inside,” said Mrs. Bondarchuk, hitting the switch that opened the outer door only.

  “Are you Mrs. Bondarchuk?” said the delivery man, as he stepped into the entrance.

  “Who else would I be?”

  “Need you to sign for it.”

  There was an inch-wide slot in the inner door for just such eventualities.

  “Put it through the hole,” said Mrs. Bondarchuk.

  “Lady, I can’t do that. It’s important. I need to hold on to it.”

  “What am I going to do with a clipboard?” asked Mrs. Bondarchuk. “Sell it and fly to Russia? Put the clipboard through the hole.”

  The front door closed behind the man. She could see him properly now. He had dark hair and bad skin.

  “Come on lady, be reasonable. Open up and sign.”

  Mrs. Bondarchuk didn’t like the suggestion that she was being in any way unreasonable.

  “I can’t do that. You’ll have to go, and you can take your parcel with you. Leave the number and I’ll collect it myself.”

  “This is stupid, Mrs. Bondarchuk. If you don’t accept it, I got to haul it all the way downtown again. You know, it could get lost,” the man said, his implication clear. “Maybe it’s perishable. What then?”

  “Then it’ll start to smell,” said Mrs. Bondarchuk, “and you’ll have to throw it away. Leave now, please.”

  But the man did not leave. Instead, he drew a pistol from beneath his uniform and aimed it at the glass. It had a cylinder attached to the end of it. Mrs. Bondarchuk had seen enough cop shows to know a silencer when she saw one.

  “You dumb old bitch,” he said as Mrs. Bondarchuk’s finger left the intercom button, ending their conversation, while her left hand hit the silent alarm. The man glanced over his shoulder at the empty street behind him, then aimed the pistol at the glass and fired twice. The sound was like a pair of paper bags bursting, and almost simultaneously two impact marks appeared in front of Mrs. Bondarchuk’s face, but the glass did not break. Like most things about the building, Mrs. Bondarchuk included, it was more formidable than it first appeared.

  The man outside seemed to realize that his efforts were in vain. He slammed his gloved hand once against the glass, as though hoping to dislodge it from its frame, then opened the main door again and ran onto the street. For a time, all was quiet. Then Mrs. Bondarchuk heard noises from the basement at the back of the house. She checked her watch. Five minutes had passed since she had hit the silent alarm. If, after ten minutes, nobody came, her instructions were to call the police. Her two gentlemen had been very specific about this when the new security system was installed, and it had been repeated in an official letter to Mrs. Bondarchuk from Mr. Leroy Frank himself. It informed her that a private security firm, a very exclusive one, was employed to monitor Mr. Frank’s properties in order to take some of the pressure from the city’s finest. In the event of trouble, someone would be with her in less than ten minutes. If, after that time, no help had arrived, only then should she call the police.

  The sounds from the back of the hous
e persisted. She hushed her Pomeranians and quietly made her way downstairs to where the back door opened onto a small paved area where the trash cans were kept. The door was reinforced steel, and there was a spy hole in the center. She looked through it and saw two men, both of them wearing courier uniforms, attaching something to the exterior of the door. One of them, the man who had fired at the front door, looked up, and guessed that she was there from the change in the light. He waved a slab of white material, like a piece of builder’s putty. Something that resembled the stub of a pencil stuck out of one end, with a wire attached.

  “You ought to step back from the door,” he said, his voice muffled by the steel yet audible. “Better still, lie against it, see what happens.”

  Mrs. Bondarchuk moved away, her hands pressed to her mouth.

  “No,” she said. “Oh, no.”

  She had to call the police. She retreated farther. She needed to get back to her apartment, needed to summon help. Mr. Leroy Frank’s security people had not come. They had let her down, just when she most needed them. She began to run, and realized that she was crying. Her ears were filled with the sound of yapping Pomeranians.

  Twin shots came from outside the door. They were much louder than the earlier shots, and they were followed by the sound of something heavy falling against the metal outside. Mrs. Bondarchuk froze, then turned in the direction of the door. She raised the tips of her fingers to her mouth. They trembled, tapping lightly on her fleshy lips.

  “Mrs. Bondarchuk?” someone called, and she recognized Mr. Angel’s voice. “You okay in there?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes. Who were those men?”

  “We don’t know, Mrs. Bondarchuk.”

  We. “Have they gone?”

  There was a pause. “Uh, in a way,” said Mr. Angel.

  Mrs. Bondarchuk went back to her apartment, closed and locked the door, and sat with a pair of Pomeranians on her lap until Mr. Angel came to see her some time later with a chocolate cake from Zabar’s. Together, they ate a slice of cake each and drank a glass of milk, and nice Mr. Angel did his best to put Mrs. Bondarchuk’s mind at rest.

  CHAPTER SIX

  TO WILLIE’S SURPRISE, AND to Arno’s relief, the man in the storeroom wasn’t dead. His skull was fractured, and he was bleeding from his ears, which Willie didn’t consider to be a good sign, but he was definitely still breathing. This took the decision on what to do next out of Willie’s hands. He wasn’t about to let a stranger die on his floor, so he called 911 and, while they waited for the ambulance and the inevitable cops to arrive, he and Arno got their stories straight. It was a bungled holdup, pure and simple. The men had been looking for money and a car. They were armed and, in fear of their lives, Willie and Arno had tackled them, leaving one unconscious on the floor and forcing the other to flee, wounded.

  Willie took one further precaution. With Arno’s help, and using a candle that he warmed and flattened on the radiator, he took the unconscious man’s prints by pressing his fingers against the warm wax. He then placed the candle behind a pile of old documents in the office closet, and locked the door. The man wasn’t carrying a wallet or any other form of ID, which Willie thought was odd. He knew that the cops would probably print him, but he also understood that Louis might want to make some inquiries of his own. To further assist Louis in any such endeavor, Willie told Arno to take some pictures of the guy, using his cellphone. Willie’s cellphone didn’t take photos. It was so low-tech that it made a tin can on the end of a piece of string look like a viable alternative, but that was just the way Willie liked it.

  Both Willie and Arno played their parts to perfection when the cops arrived: they were honest men faced with the threat of harm and, possibly, death, who had fought back against their aggressors and now stood, shocked but most definitely alive, in the center of the small business they had so determinedly defended. It wasn’t far off the mark either. The cops listened sympathetically, then advised them both to come down to the station the next morning in order to make formal statements. Arno asked if he was going to need a lawyer, but the detective in charge told him that he didn’t think so. Off the record, he said that it was unlikely any charges would be pressed even if the mook died. No DA liked prosecuting an unpopular case, and Arno was in a position to offer an ironclad self-defense plea. The next step, he said, was to identify the gentleman in question, since the only items in his pockets were gum, a roll of tens, twenties, and fifties, and a spare clip for his gun. Willie and Arno did their best to look surprised at this news.

  Willie reckoned they were 99 percent done when a pair of new arrivals, one male and one female, entered the garage. They both wore dark suits, and when they showed their IDs to the patrolman at the garage door he looked over his shoulder when they had passed and mouthed the word “feds” to his colleagues inside, as if they hadn’t already guessed who the visitors were.

  Willie’s face had been taped up by one of the medics. The medic had reset Willie’s nose in his office, thus saving him a trip to the hospital, and it was now throbbing balefully. Added to the nausea that he was still experiencing from his hangover and the comedown from the adrenaline rush of the fight, Willie was having trouble remembering the last time he’d felt so bad. Now, as he sat on a stool beside the busted Olds, Arno nearby, he watched the two agents approach and, with a dart of his eyes, signaled to Arno that there was trouble on its way. Willie was no expert on law enforcement, or the niceties of jurisdiction, but he had lived in Queens long enough to know that the FBI didn’t show up every time someone waved a gun in an auto shop, otherwise they’d never have time to do anything else.

  The man was black and introduced himself as Special Agent Wesley Bruce. His partner, Special Agent Sidra Lewis, was a bottle blonde with piercing blue eyes and a set scowl on her face that suggested she believed everyone she met in the course of her work was guilty of something, even it was only of thinking they were better than she was. They separated Arno and Willie, the woman taking Arno into the back office while Bruce leaned against the hood of the Olds, folded his arms, and gave Willie a big, unfriendly grin that reminded him of the way the gum chewer had smiled before Arno had knocked the smile from his face with a chunk of wood and metal.

  “So, how you doing?” asked Bruce.

  “I been better,” said Willie, which were just about the first completely honest words he’d uttered since the cops had arrived. He got the feeling that big old Special Agent Wesley Bruce here was well aware of that fact.

  “Looks like our two friends picked the wrong guys to mess with.”

  “I guess so.”

  “You say they were looking for a car?”

  “A car, and money.”

  “You got much money here?”

  “Not a lot. Most people pay by check or credit card. We still get some that like to work with cash, though. Old habits die hard around here.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Bruce, as though Willie was not talking about cash payments but something else entirely. Willie tried to figure out what that might be, but there were so many possibilities from which to choose, legal and illegal, that he was spoiled for choice. Finally, Willie made the connection: like everything else that night, it was about Louis and Angel. The understanding did not affect his demeanor, but it made him dislike Special Agent Bruce even more than he already did.

  In the meantime, Bruce gave Willie the hard eye. “I’ll bet,” he said again. He waited. Willie could hear Arno’s voice coming from the office. He was talking a lot more than Willie was. In fact, Special Agent Lewis appeared to be having trouble just getting a word in.

  Welcome to my world, thought Willie.

  Eventually, Bruce seemed to realize that Willie wasn’t about to break down and confess to every unsolved crime on the books, and resumed his questioning.

  “So they wouldn’t have raked in a whole lot of money for their trouble, even if they had managed to get away with it.”

  “Couple of hundred maybe, including petty cash
.”

  “Lot of grief for a couple of hundred. There must have been easier pickings for them.”

  “We don’t have a camera.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Security cameras. We don’t use ’em. Most places do now, but we don’t. Maybe they figured we didn’t have them, and thought, what the hell, let’s try it.”

  “Desperate times, desperate measures.”

  “Something like that.”

  “They strike you as desperate men?”

  Willie considered the question. “Well, they weren’t friendly. I don’t know from desperate.”

  “I mean, they strike you as the kind of men who needed money?”

  “Everybody needs money,” replied Willie simply.

  “Except our friend who got his head stoved in had four or five hundred in cash on him, not to mention a very nice gun. Doesn’t strike me that he was hurting enough to take down an auto shop for a double century.”

  “I got no insights into the criminal mind. That’s your department.”

  “No insights into the criminal mind, huh?” Bruce seemed to find this funny. He even laughed, although it didn’t sound natural. It was as if someone had written the words “Ha. Ha. Ha.” in front of him, then held a gun to his head and told him to read them aloud.

  “What about the car?” said Bruce, when he was done laughing.

  “What about it?”

  “According to what you told the police, they drove here, and the other, uh, ‘alleged’ thief got away in the same vehicle. Why would they need a car if they already had one?”

  “Could be they were planning a robbery and wanted something that couldn’t be linked to them.”

  “Would have meant killing you and your buddy, then, just so you couldn’t identify them or the car.”

  “Well, that’s why one of them ended up wearing a hammer instead of a hat. Look, Mr. Bruce-”