The Reapers

And that was why the boy was so troubling to the policeman who watched him through the two-way mirror on the wall. The mirror was one of the few concessions to modernity in the town’s little police department. There was no a/c, even though the units had been installed. The problem with the units was that they kept blowing all of the fuses in the building on account of how the wiring was no good, or so the local electrician had explained. For the a/c to work properly, the whole building would have to be gutted and rewired, and that was going to be an expensive job in a structure this old. The town fathers were reluctant to sanction this expenditure, not if its sole purpose was to ensure that Chief Wooster didn’t break a sweat during the hot summer months. Truth was, there were those who felt that it wouldn’t do the chief the least bit of harm to break some sweat now and again, the chief being, according to the general consensus, a lard-ass with a heart that was seriously overworked, and not due to his general affection for humanity.

So the little room from which the chief was observing the boy was cooled only by a desk fan, and the desk fan wasn’t worth a gnat’s fart in the enclosed space. The chief’s uniform was pasted to his body so that even the outline of his belly button was clearly visible through the tan cotton, and the sweat was ru

And yet he did not move. Instead, he stared curiously at the boy, willing him to break. Chief Wooster might have been a lard-ass, and his view of his fellow men and women was certainly colored by a cynicism bordering on misanthropy, but he was no fool. The boy interested him. The boy had managed to kill his mother’s lover, a man named Deber, without laying a finger on him, of that the chief was certain, and Deber had been nobody’s idea of an easy mark. Deber had himself done time for a murder committed when he was barely thirteen, and there had been others since then, even if no one had been able to pin them on him. One of the killings of which Deber was suspected was the murder of a pretty young black woman down in the city. The son of that pretty young black woman was now sitting on the other side of the mirror being interrogated by two detectives from the state police. They weren’t getting any further with the boy than the chief’s own men had, and the chief’s men had been far less gentle than the detectives. The bruises to the boy’s face and the swelling beneath his right eye were testament to that. Clark, one of the men in question, told the chief that the boy had pissed blood when they had taken him down to the bathroom to clean him up. The chief had told them to ease up on the boy after that. He wanted a confession, not a corpse.

It had taken the state cops a day to organize themselves sufficiently to make the journey north. During that twenty-four-hour period, the chief’s men had worked the boy pretty hard. They’d started with beatings, then threats against the boy’s family, who had provided him with an alibi. The cops had fed him soda spiked with Ex-Lax, then tied him to the chair and left him there. The chief had watched the boy fight against the urge to void himself, his mouth trembling with the effort, his nostrils flaring, his hands clasped into fists. When he was certain that the boy could take the pain no longer, he’d sent Clark in to make him an offer: confess to the Deber killing and they’d haul him straight to the bathroom. Otherwise, they’d let nature take its course and leave him to sit in what resulted. The boy simply shook his head. The chief almost admired his resilience, except it was making him look bad. He instructed Clark to accompany the boy to the men’s room before he burst, as he didn’t want him stinking up the building’s only interrogation room. Clark had acquiesced, albeit reluctantly. Afterward, he had taken the boy out to the yard and hosed him off on the ground, his trousers around his ankles and the other cops jeering as the water jetted painfully against his privates.

Threats against his family hadn’t worked either. He came from a house full of women. Wooster knew them. They were good people. Wooster wasn’t a racist. There were good blacks and bad blacks, just like there were good whites and bad whites. It wouldn’t be true to say that the chief treated them all equally. Had he tried, even if he’d had the inclination, he wouldn’t have lasted a week in his current position, let alone ten years. Instead, he treated blacks and poor whites pretty much the same. Wealthy whites required more careful handling. Wealthy blacks he didn’t have to worry about, because he didn’t know any.

Wooster believed in preventive policing. People ended up in his cells only when they’d done something seriously wrong, or when every other attempt to persuade them to follow the path of righteous and decent behavior had failed. He knew the people in his charge, and he made sure that his men knew them, too. The boy and his family had not once required his attention during the first nine years that he had been chief, not until Deber appeared and wormed his way into the affections of the boy’s mother, if that was truly what he had done. There had been nothing in Deber to suggest that he was capable of arousing the affections of anyone, and the chief suspected that threats and fear had been more responsible for the gestation of the relationship than any depth of feeling on the part of either party.

Then the mother had been killed, her battered body found lying in an alleyway behind a liquor store. There had been reports that Deber had been seen in that same liquor store less than an hour before the discovery of the body, and someone told of hearing a male voice and a female voice raised in argument at about that time. Deber, though, was like the boy now seated in the interrogation room: he hadn’t broken, and the killing of the boy’s mother remained unsolved. Deber had returned to the house full of women and taken up with the boy’s aunt, or so local gossip had it. The women were frightened of him, and had good cause to be, but he should have been frightened of them, too. They were strong and clever, and nobody thought it likely that they would tolerate the presence of Deber in their house for much longer.

And then, not long after the commencement of that particular relationship, someone had taken the metal whistle that Deber used to summon his work crews, separated its two halves, and replaced the pea with a wad of homemade explosive. When Deber had blown the whistle, the charge had torn most of his face off. He’d lived for a couple of days afterward, blinded and in agony, despite the efforts of the doctors to keep him medicated, then had passed away. The chief was pretty sure that, wherever Deber now was, his agonies were continuing and were likely to do so for all eternity. Deber was no loss to the world, but that didn’t change the fact that a man had been killed, and the person responsible had to be found. It wasn’t good to have people wandering around freely creating booby traps out of household items, didn’t matter if they were targeting blacks or whites. Guns and knives were one thing. They were commonplace, just like the people who used them. There was nothing particularly u