The Reapers

Milton stood in a small office steps away from Gabriel’s room. The door was marked “Private,” and behind it sat a desk, two chairs, and an array of monitoring equipment, including both video and audio recording facilities. It was known in the law enforcement community as the Auxiliary Nurses’ Station, or ANSTAT, and was a shared resource, which meant that, in theory, all agencies had an equal call on its use. In reality, there was a pecking order that had to be observed, and Milton was king rooster. He hovered over the two armed agents, watching as Louis left Gabriel’s room and the nurse closed the door softly behind him.

“Action, sir?”

“None,” said Milton, after only a moment’s hesitation. “Let him go.”

They stood in Louis’s office, Hoyle’s papers and maps spread across Louis’s desk. Louis had added his own notes and observations with a red pen. This would be the last time that all of the information they had would be presented in this way. Once this discussion was over, it would be destroyed: shredded, and then burned. On a chair nearby lay fresh maps, and copies of the photographs and satellite images that they would show to the others.

“How many?” asked Angel.

“To do the job, or to do the job right?”

“To do it right.”

“Sixteen, at least. Two to hold each of the bridges, maybe more. Four in the town for backup. Two teams of four approaching the property cross-country. And, if we lived in an ideal world, a big-ass chopper to take them all out once they were done. Even then, there would be problems with communication. There’s no cellphone coverage that deep into the mountains. The trees and the gradient of the land mean that there’s no line of sight, so walkie-talkies are out of the question for us.”

“Satellite phones?”

“Yeah, and maybe we could send the cops a letter of confession as well.”

Angel shrugged. At least he’d asked.

“So how many do we have?”

“Ten, ourselves included.”

“We could bring in Parker. That would give us eleven.”

Louis shook his head. “This is our game. Let’s play it, see what numbers we roll.”

He picked up four images, photographs of Leehagen’s house taken with increasing degrees of magnification, and set them alongside one another, comparing angles, revealed points of access, weaknesses, strengths.

And Angel walked away, leaving him to his plans.

They both understood that this was not the way such things were done. There should have been background checks carried out, weeks-even months-of preparation, alternative entry and exit strategies examined, yet they did none of these things. In part, they recognized the urgency of the situation. Their friends, their home, had been targeted. Gabriel had been grievously wounded. Even without the information provided by Hoyle, they knew that it was in the nature of a man who would act in such a reckless way not to retreat after initial reverses. He would come at them again and again until he succeeded, and everyone close to them was at risk as a consequence.

As in most matters that concerned them both, it was Angel who was the more perceptive, the one who recognized underlying motives, the one who instinctively homed in on the feelings of others. Despite all that remained hidden about his partner, he was attuned to the other man’s rhythms, his modes of thought and methods of reasoning, in a way that he believed was alien to Louis in their relationship. For a man who had lived so long in a gray world, drained of morality and conscience, Louis was always most comfortable with what was black and white. He was not prone to self-examination, and when he did analyze himself he did so entirely at one remove, as though he were a detached observer of his own follies and failings. Angel sometimes wondered if that was a consequence of the lifestyle he had chosen, but he suspected that it was probably an integral aspect of Louis’s makeup, as much a part of him as his color and his sexuality, a thing stamped upon his consciousness before he even left his mother’s womb, waiting to be called into being as the boy grew older. Gabriel had recognized that singlemindedness, and had harnessed it.

Now circumstances had intervened and, in a way, Louis was once again serving Gabriel, although this time as his avenger. The problem was that his desire to act, to strike, to release some of that pent-up energy had made him incautious. They were moving too quickly against Leehagen. There were too many gaps in their knowledge, too many sides upon which they were exposed.

So Angel broke a cardinal rule. He confided in another. Not everything, but enough that, if things began to fall apart, someone would know where to look for them, and whom to punish.

That evening, they ate together at River on Amsterdam. It was a quiet meal, even by their standards. Afterward, they had a beer in Pete’s, once the office crowd had departed along with the free munchies, and half watched the Celtics make dull work of the Knicks. To amuse himself, Angel counted the number of people who were using hand sanitizer, and stopped once it threatened to move into double figures. Hand sanitizer: what was the city coming to, he wondered. I mean, he could understand the logic of it. Not everyone who used the subway was exactly spotlessly clean, and he’d taken cab rides that had required him to send his clothes to the laundry the following day just to get the stink out, but seriously, he wasn’t sure that a little bottle of mild hand sanitizer was the answer. There was stuff breeding in the city that could survive a nuclear attack, and not just cockroaches. Angel had read somewhere that they’d found the gonorrhea virus in the Gowanus Canal. On one level, it was hardly surprising: the only thing that you couldn’t find in the Gowanus Canal was fish, or at least any fish that you could eat and live for longer than a day or two once you’d consumed it, but how dirty did a stretch of water have to be to contract a social disease?

Usually, he would have shared these thoughts with his partner, but Louis was elsewhere, his eyes on the flow of the game but his mind intent upon very different strategies. Angel finished his beer. Louis still had half a glass left, but there was more life in the Gowanus.

“We done?” said Angel.

“Sure,” said Louis.

“We can watch the end of the game, if you want.”

Louis’s eyes drifted lazily toward him. “There’s a game?” he said.

“I guess there is, somewhere.”

“Yeah, somewhere.”

They walked through the brightly lit streets, side by side, together but apart. Outside a bar at the corner of 75th, Navy boys were shouting come-ons to the young women strolling by, drawing smiles and daggered glances in equal measure. One of the sailors had an unlit cigarette in his mouth as he stood at the door of the bar. He patted his pockets for a lighter or a book of matches, then looked up to see Angel and Louis approaching.

“Buddy, you got a light?” he asked.

Louis reached into his pocket and withdrew a brass Zippo. A man, he believed, should never be without a lighter or a gun. He flipped and flicked, and the sailor shielded the flame instinctively with his left hand.

“Thanks,” he said.

“No problem,” said Louis.

“Where you from?” asked Angel.

“Iowa.”

“The hell is someone from Iowa doing in the Navy?”

The sailor shrugged. “Thought it might be good to see some ocean.”

“Yeah, not a lot of ocean in Iowa,” said Angel. “So, you seen enough yet?”

The sailor looked downcast. “Buddy, I seen enough ocean to last me a lifetime.” He took a long drag on his cigarette and tapped the heel of a shiny black shoe upon the ground.

“Terror firmer,” said Angel.

“Amen to that. Thanks for the light.”