The Reapers

by John Connolly

  And so Gabriel watched Louis through the glass, and the boy stared back. Five minutes passed in this way, and at the end Gabriel nodded once to himself in apparent satisfaction, then stood and left the room to face the fifteen-year-old killer.

  Like any good leader, Gabriel loved his people, in his fashion, even though he was prepared, at all times, to sacrifice them if the need arose. Over the years that followed, Louis fulfilled, and even exceeded, Gabriel’s expectations, except in one regard: he refused to kill women on Gabriel’s orders. It was, Gabriel supposed, a legacy of his upbringing, and Gabriel made allowances for it, for he did indeed love Louis. He became like a son to him and Gabriel, in turn, became the father of the man.

  Gabriel stepped into the interrogation room and took a seat across the table from Louis. The room smelled of perspiration and other less pleasant things, but Gabriel did not give any indication that he noticed. The boy’s face was shiny with sweat.

  Gabriel unplugged the tape recorder from the wall, then sat across from Louis and placed his hands upon the table. “My name is Gabriel,” he said. “And you, I believe, are Louis.”

  The boy did not answer, but simply regarded the older man silently, waiting to see what might be revealed.

  “You’re free to go, by the way,” said Gabriel. “You will not be charged with the commission of any crime.”

  This time, the boy reacted. His mouth opened slightly, and his eyebrows lifted an inch. He looked at the door.

  “Yes, you can walk out of here right now, if you choose,” Gabriel continued. “Nobody will try to stop you. Your grandmother is waiting outside for you. She will take you back to your little cabin. You can sleep in your own bed, be among familiar things. All will be as it once was.”

  He smiled. The boy had not moved.

  “Or don’t you believe that?”

  “What do you want?” said Louis.

  “Want? I want to help you. I think you are a very unusual young man. I might even go so far as to say that you’re gifted, although your gift is one that might not be appreciated in circles such as these.”

  He waved his right hand gently, taking in the interrogation room, the station house, Wooster, the law…

  “I can help you to find your place in the world. In return, your skills can be put to better use than they would be here. You see, if you stay in this town you’ll overstep the mark. You’ll be challenged, threatened. That threat may come from the police, or from others. You’ll respond to it, but you’re known now. You won’t get away a second time with what you did, and you’ll die for it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Gabriel wagged a finger, but it was not a disapproving gesture.

  “Very good, very good,” he said. He chuckled, then allowed sound to drift into silence before he spoke again.

  “Let me tell you what will happen next. Deber had friends, or perhaps ‘acquaintances’ would be a better word for them. They are men like him, and worse. They cannot allow his death to go unremarked. It would damage their own reputations, and suggest a degree of weakness that might leave them open to attack by others. Already, they will know that you have been questioned about what happened to him, and they will not be as skeptical as the state police. If you return to your home, they will find you and they will kill you. Perhaps, along the way, they will hurt the women who share that home with you. Even if you run, they will come after you.”

  “Why should you care?”

  “Care? I don’t care. I can walk away from here, and leave you and your family to your fate, and it will cause me not a moment’s regret. Or you can hear my offer, and perhaps something mutually beneficial may result. Your problem is that you do not know me, and therefore cannot trust me. I fully understand your predicament. I realize that you will need time to consider what I am suggesting-”

  “I don’t know what you’re suggesting,” said Louis. “You haven’t said.”

  He is almost droll, thought Gabriel. He is old beyond his years.

  “I offer discipline, training. I offer a way for you to channel your anger, to use your talents.”

  “Protection?”

  “I can help you to protect yourself.”

  “And my family?”

  “They’re at risk only as long as you remain here, and only if they know where you are.”

  “So I can go with you, or I can walk out of here?”

  “That’s right.”

  Louis pursed his lips in thought.

  “Thank you for your time, sir,” he said, after some moments had passed. “I’m going to leave now.”

  Gabriel nodded. He reached into his jacket pocket and produced an envelope. He handed it to the boy. After a moment’s hesitation, Louis took it and opened it. He tried to hide his reaction to what was inside, but the widening of his eyes betrayed him.

  “There’s a thousand dollars in that envelope,” said Gabriel. “There’s also a card with a telephone number on it. Through that number I can be reached at any time, day or night. You think about my offer, but remember what I said: you can’t go home again. You need to get far away from here-far, far away-and then you need to figure out what you’re going to do when those men come calling on you. Because they will.”

  Louis closed the envelope and left the room. Gabriel did not follow him. He did not have to. He knew the boy would leave this town. If he did not, then Gabriel had misjudged him and he was of no use to him anyway. The money did not matter. Gabriel had faith in his own judgment. The money would come back to him many times over.

  After he was released, Louis walked back with his grandmother to the cabin in the woods. They did not speak, even though it was a two-mile walk. When they reached home, Louis packed a bag with his clothes and some mementos of his mother-photos, one or two items of jewelry that had been passed on to him-then took two hundred dollars from the envelope and secreted the cash in various pockets, in a slash in the waist-band of his trousers, and in one of his shoes. The remainder he divided into two piles, slipping the smaller into the right front pocket of his jeans and the rest back into the envelope. Then he kissed good-bye to the women who had raised him, handed the envelope and the five hundred dollars it contained to his grandmother, and got a ride on Mr. Otis’s truck to the bus station. He asked to make only one stop along the way. Mr. Otis was reluctant to oblige him, but he saw what Wooster had seen in the boy, and what Gabriel had seen, too, and he understood that he was not to be crossed, not in this thing or in any other. So Mr. Otis pulled up just past Little Tom’s bar, his truck hidden by the bushes that lined the road and watched the boy walk into the dirt lot, then disappear from view.

  Mr. Otis began to sweat.

  Little Tom looked up from the newspaper that lay open on the bar. There were no customers to distract him, not yet, and the radio was tuned to a football game. He liked these quiet moments. For the rest of the night he would serve drinks and make small talk with his customers. He would discuss sports, the weather, men’s relationships with their womenfolk (for women did not trouble Little Tom’s bar, any more than the coloreds did, and thus the bar was a refuge for a certain type of man). Little Tom understood the role his bar performed: no decisions of great import were made here, and no conversations of any consequence took place. There was no trouble, for Little Tom would not tolerate it, and no drunkenness, for Little Tom did not approve of that either. When a man had consumed what Little Tom adjudged to be “enough,” he would be sent on his way with some words of advice about driving carefully and not getting into any arguments once he was home. The police were rarely called to Little Tom’s premises. He was in good standing with the town fathers.

  None of this distracted from the fact that, like many men who practiced a public and superficial version of what they considered to be a reasonable way of life, Little Tom was an animal, a creature of violent and abusive appetites, sexually incontinent and filled with loathing for all those who were different from himself: women, especially
those who would not touch him unless money was involved; Jews, although he did not know any; churchgoers of any liberal stripe or persuasion; Polish, Irish, Germans, and any others who spoke American with an accent or who had names that Little Tom could not pronounce with ease; and all coloreds, without exception.

  Now, a young black man was standing on the threshold of Little Tom’s bar, watching him as he read his newspaper. Little Tom didn’t know how long the colored had been standing there, but however long it had been, it was too long.

  “Be on your way, boy,” said Little Tom. “This ain’t a place for you.”

  The boy did not move. Little Tom shifted position and began to walk toward the raised hatch in the bar. Along the way, he picked up the bat that lay beneath the bar. There was a shotgun there, too, but Little Tom figured that the sight of the bat would be enough.

  “You hear what I said? Be about your business.”

  The boy spoke. “I know what you did,” he said.

  Little Tom stopped. They boy’s composure unnerved him. His tone was even, and he had not blinked since Little Tom had first noticed him, not once. His gaze seemed to penetrate Little Tom’s skull and crawl like a spider over the surface of his brain.

  “The hell are you talking about?”

  “I know what you did to Errol Rich.”

  Little Tom grinned. The grin grew slowly, spreading like oil. So that was what this was about: a colored, a nigger, letting his anger get the better of his senses. Well, Little Tom knew all about dealing with coloreds who couldn’t keep a civil tongue in their mouths in front of a white man.

  “He got what was coming to him,” said Little Tom. “You’re about to get what’s coming to you, too.”

  He moved swiftly, swinging the bat as he came, striking up instead of down, aiming for the boy’s ribs, but the boy stepped nimbly forward, into the stroke instead of away from it, so that the bat struck the wood of the door frame at the same time as fingers gripped Little Tom’s throat and spun him against the wall. The impact of the bat on the wood sent a painful vibration up Little Tom’s arm, so that it was still weak when the edge of the boy’s left hand hit it, causing the bat to fall to the floor.

  Little Tom was too surprised to react. No colored had ever touched him before, not even a black woman, for Little Tom did not consort with other races, either forcibly or with their consent. He smelled the boy’s breath as he leaned closer. The fingers tightened on his throat, and then he heard the back door of the bar open and a man shouted something. The grip upon him eased a little, and then he was flung to one side, tripping over a stool and landing heavily.

  “Hey,” said the voice, and Little Tom recognized Willard Hoag’s gravelly tones. “The fuck do you think you’re doing, boy?”

  The boy picked up the bat and turned to face the new threat. Hoag, unarmed, stopped. The boy looked at Little Tom.

  “Another time,” he said.

  He backed out of the bar, taking the bat with him. Seconds after he left, the bat came crashing through Little Tom’s window, showering the floor with glass. Little Tom heard a truck pull away, but when he got to the road it was no longer in sight, and he never did find out who had driven the colored to his place. It troubled him for a long time, even after he discovered the boy’s identity and found a way to pass it on to those who had their own reasons for dealing with him. As he grew older, the memory of the offense grew dim. Lots of memories faded, for by the time that he died, Little Tom was succumbing to dementia, even if he managed to hide its effects from those who frequented his increasingly ailing little bar, as the business went into decline along with its owner. Thus it was that when the boy eventually returned as a man, and made Little Tom pay the price for what he had done to Errol Rich, Little Tom was unable to connect him to the only colored who had ever laid a hand upon him.

  And as for why Louis took so long to avenge Errol Rich’s death, well, as he liked to tell Angel, Little Tom was worth killing, but he wasn’t worth traveling very far to kill, so Louis just waited until he happened to be in the neighborhood. It was, he said, a matter of convenience.

  That came later, though. For now, he headed west, and he did not stop until he could see and smell the ocean. He found a place in which to live and work, and there he waited for the men to come.

  CHAPTER TEN

  LOUIS WAS EARLY FOR the meeting with Gabriel at Nate’s. He didn’t like being early for encounters of this kind. He preferred to keep people waiting for him, aware always of the potential psychological advantages to be gained in even the most apparently innocuous of encounters. It might have seemed that such precautions would be unnecessary in any meeting between Gabriel and himself, as they had known each other for many years, but both men were acutely aware of how difficult their relationship was. They were not equals, and although Gabriel had been more of a father figure to Louis than any other man in his life, taking the boy under his wing when he was still a teenager, teaching him how to survive in the world by honing his own natural skills, both men understood why he had done so. If one were to regard Louis’s instincts as a form of corruption, his willingness to use violence, even to the point of murder, as moral weakness rather than strength of character, then Gabriel had exploited that corruption, deepening and enhancing it in order to turn Louis into a weapon that could be used effectively against others. Louis was not so naive as to believe that, had he not met Gabriel, he might otherwise have been saved from himself. He knew that, had Gabriel not entered his life, he would probably be dead by now, but he had paid a price for the salvation of sorts offered by the older man. When Louis, the last of the Reapers, had walked away from Gabriel, he had done so with no regrets and without turning his back, and for many years after he had been wary, conscious that there were those who might prefer it if he were silenced forever, and that Gabriel might well be among them.

  The old man had been part of Louis’s life for longer than almost anyone else he had known, the few surviving female members of his own family apart, and he kept even them at a distance, salving his conscience by ensuring that they never wanted for money, even as he acknowledged to himself that they had little need of what he sent them and that his gifts were more for his own peace of mind than theirs. But Gabriel had been there from the crucial later years of his adolescence, then all through his adulthood until Louis had severed their ties. Now they were together again, one in his middle age, the other in his declining years. They had seen each other grow older, and it was strange to think that, when they had first met, Gabriel had been younger than Louis himself was now.

  Louis glanced at his watch. He was particularly unhappy about being early on this occasion, for he was in no mood to wait. He felt the tension building within himself, but he did not try to dissipate it. He recognized it as anticipation. Louis knew that there was conflict and violence on its way, and his body and mind were preparing for it. The tension was part of that, and it was good. The months of normality, of indolence, of ordinary life, had come to an end. Even when he and Angel had traveled to Maine earlier that year to help Parker deal with the revenger, Merrick, there had been little call for his specialized services, and he had returned to New York frustrated and disappointed. They had been glorified bodyguards, nothing more. Now he and Angel were under threat, and he was preparing to respond. What troubled him was that he did not yet have a clear picture of what form that threat had taken. That was why he was here, waiting in the old bar not far from Willie Brew’s auto shop. Gabriel had promised him clarification and confirmation of the information offered by Hoyle, and Gabriel, whatever his faults, was not one to renege on his promises.

  The delivery door at the back of the bar opened with a soft creak, and Gabriel entered. The door had been kept unlocked for him at Louis’s request, Nate leaving them to their own devices in the otherwise empty bar. Nate knew better than to bother them. The bar was another of Louis’s silent investments, a place in which to meet and in which to store some essentials should he ever need to go to gro
und: cash, a small quantity of diamonds and Krugerrands, a gun and ammunition. They were kept in a locked box in a safe behind shelves in Nate’s office, and only Louis held the combination. He had nests like this in five different locations throughout New York and New England, two of which, this one included, were unknown even to Angel.

  Gabriel took a seat and signaled to Nate for a coffee. Nothing was said until the cup arrived and they were alone again. Gabriel sipped at his coffee, his little finger held carefully away from the handle. The old man, thought Louis, had always observed the niceties of civilized behavior, even when he was arranging for men and women to be wiped from the face of the earth.

  “Tell me,” said Louis.

  Gabriel shifted uneasily.

  “Ballantine disappeared on the twelfth. He was under investigation by the SEC. His assets were about to be frozen. Someone, it seems, sent the authorities details of insider trading by companies of which Ballantine was a director. He was facing a series of indictments. It was assumed that he was in hiding, or had fled the jurisdiction.”

  “Is there any evidence to suggest otherwise?”

  “He has a wife and three children. They have been interviewed, and they seemed genuinely at a loss to explain his absence. He hasn’t been in contact with them. His passport was found in his desk at home. There was a floor safe in one of his closets. His wife didn’t have the combination, or said she didn’t. A court order was obtained to open it. There was nearly one hundred thousand dollars in cash inside, along with almost twice that amount in negotiable bonds.”

  “Not the kind of baubles a man on the run would leave behind.”

  “Hardly. Especially not so conscientious a family man as Mr. Ballantine.”

  Sarcasm dripped like snake venom from Gabriel’s words.

  “Too clean to be clean?”

  “He owned a house in the Adirondacks through one of his companies. A place in which to entertain clients, one assumes. And to be entertained in turn.”