The Reapers

“You been pretty quiet tonight as well.”

“You complain when I talk too much.”

“Only when you got nothing to say.”

“I always have something to say.”

“That’s your problem right there. There’s a balance. Maybe Willie could install a filter on you.” His fingers gently brushed the back of his partner’s neck. “You go

Although there was nobody within earshot, Angel still glanced casually around before he spoke. It never hurt to be careful.

“I heard something. You remember William Wilson, better known as Billy Boy?”

Louis nodded. “Yeah, I know who he is.”

“Was.”

Louis was silent for a moment. “What happened to him?”

“Died in a men’s room down in Sweetwater, Texas.”

“Natural causes?”

“Heart failure. Brought on by someone sticking a blade through it.”

“That don’t sound right. He was good. He was an animal, and a freak, but he was good. Hard to get close enough to take him with a knife.”

“I hear there were rumors that he’d been overstepping the mark, adding flourishes to simple jobs.”

“I heard that, too.” There had always been something wrong with Billy Boy. Louis had seen it from the start, which was why he had decided not to work with him, once he was in a position to pick and choose. “He always did like inflicting pain.”

“Seems like someone decided that he’d done it once too often.”

“Could have been one of those things: a bar, booze, someone decides to pull a knife, gets his friends to help,” said Louis, but he didn’t sound like he believed what he was saying. He was just thinking aloud, ruling out possibilities by releasing them into the air, like canaries in the coal mine of his mind.

“Could have been, except the place was near empty when it happened, and we’re talking about Billy Boy. I remember what you told me about him, from the old days. Whoever took him must have been a whole lot better than good.”

“Billy was getting old.”

“He was younger than you.”

“Not much, and I know I’m getting old.”

“I know it, too.”

“That you’re getting old?”

“No, that you’re getting old.”

Louis’s eyes briefly turned to slits.

“I ever tell you how fu

“No, come to mention it, you don’t.”

“It’s cause you ain’t. At least now you know why. The blade enter from the front, or the back?”

“Front.”

“There a paper out on him?”

“Someone would have heard.”

“Could be that someone did. Where’d you get this from?”

“Saw it on the internet. I made a call or two.”

Louis rolled the glass in his hands, warming the brandy and smelling the aromas that arose. He was a

“You always keep tabs on the people I used to work with?” he said.

“It’s not a full-time job. There aren’t many of them left.”

“There aren’t any of them left now, not with Billy Boy gone.”

“That’s not true.”

Louis thought for a moment. “No, I guess not.”

“Which brings me to the next thing,” said Angel.

“Go on.”

“The cops interviewed everyone who was in the bar when they found him. Only one person had left: a little fat guy in a cheap suit, sat at the bar and drank no-name whiskey from the well, didn’t look like he could afford to change his drawers more than once every second day.”

Louis sipped his brandy, letting it rest in his mouth before releasing it to warm his throat.

“Anything else?”

“Bartender said he thought he saw some scarring just above the collar of the guy’s shirt, like he’d been in a fire once. Thought he saw some at his right wrist as well.”

“Lot of people get burned.” Louis said the words with a strangeness to his tone. It might almost have been called dispassionate, had there not been the sense that behind it a great depth of feeling lay hidden.

“But not all of them go on to take someone like Billy Boy with a knife. You think it’s him?”

“A blade,” said Louis thoughtfully. “They find it in the body?”

“No. Took it with him when he left.”

“Wouldn’t want to leave a good knife behind. He was a shooter, but he always did prefer to finish them up close.”

“If it’s him.”

“If it’s him,” echoed Louis.

“Been a long time, if it is.”

Louis’s right foot beat a slow, steady cadence upon the floor.

“He suffered. It would have taken time for him to recover, to heal. He’d have changed his appearance again, like he did before. And he wouldn’t come out of hiding for a standard job. Someone must have been real pissed at Billy Boy.”

“It’s not only about the money, though, right?”

“No, not if it’s him.”

“If he’s back, Billy Boy might just be the start. There’s the small matter of you trying to burn him alive.”

“There is that. He’ll still be hurting, even now, and he won’t be what he was.”

“He was still good enough to take Billy Boy.”

“If it’s him.” It sounded like a mantra. Perhaps it was. Louis had always known that Bliss would come back some day. If he had returned, it would be almost a relief. The waiting would be over. “It’s because he was so good to begin with. Even with a little shaved off, he’d still be better than most. Better than Billy Boy, that’s for sure.”

“Billy Boy’s no loss.”

“No, he ain’t.”

“But having Bliss back in the world isn’t so good either.”

“No.”

“I’d kinda hoped that he was dead.” Much of this had been before Angel’s time, before he and Louis had met, although he and Louis had encountered Billy Boy once, out in California. It was an accidental meeting at a service station, and Louis and Billy Boy had circled each other warily, like wolves before a fight. Angel hadn’t thought much of Billy Boy as a human being then, although he accepted that he might have been prejudiced by what Louis had told him. Of Bliss, he knew only of what he had done to Louis, and what had been done to him in return. Louis had told him of it because he knew that it was not over.

“He won’t be dead until someone makes him dead, and there’s no money in that,” said Louis. “No money, and no percentage.”

“Unless you knew he had your name on his list.”

“I don’t believe he sends out notifications.”

“No, I guess not.”

Angel tossed back half of his brandy, and began to cough.

“You sip it, man,” said Louis. “It ain’t Alka-Seltzer.”

“A beer would have been better.”

“You have no class.”

“Only by association.”

Louis considered for a moment.

“Well,” he said, “there is that…”

The apartment shared by the two men was not as those who knew the couple only casually might have imagined it to be, given their disparate dress codes, attitudes to life, and general demeanor. It occupied the top two floors of a three-story over-basement building on the farthest reaches of the Upper West Side, where the gap between rich and poor began to narrow significantly. The apartment was scrupulously tidy. Although they shared a bedroom, each had his own room in which to retire and in which to pursue his particular interests, and while Angel’s room bore the unmistakable signs of one whose skill lay in the picking of locks and the undermining of security systems-shelves of manuals, assorted tools, a workbench covered with both electrical and mechanical components-there was an order to it that would have been apparent to any craftsman. Louis’s room was starker. There was a laptop computer, a desk, and a chair. The shelves were lined with music and books, the music leaning, perhaps surprisingly, toward country, with an entire section for black artists: Dwight Quick, Vicki Va