The Reapers

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 house 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.