The Reapers

That night, Angel lay awake in the darkness. Louis sensed his sleeplessness.

“What is it?” asked Louis.

“You didn’t tell them about the fifth team.”

“They didn’t need to know. Nobody needs to know every detail except us.”

Angel didn’t reply. Louis moved beside him, and the bedside light went on.

“What is it with you?” said Louis. “You been like a lost dog these last two days.”

Angel turned to look at him. “This isn’t right,” he said. “I’ll go along with it, but it isn’t right.”

“Taking Leehagen?”

“No, the way you’re going about it. Pieces aren’t fitting the way that they should.”

“You talking about Weis and Lynott? They’ll be fine. We keep them away from each other, that’s all.”

“Not just them. It’s this small team, and the holes in Hoyle’s story.”

“What holes?”

“I can’t put my finger on them. It just doesn’t ring true, not all of it.”

“Gabriel confirmed what Hoyle told us.”

“What, that there was a beef between him and Leehagen? Big deal. You think that’s enough of a reason to kill someone’s daughter and feed her to hogs, to pay the best part of a million dollars in bounty on the heads of two men? No, I don’t like it. It seemed like even Gabriel was holding something back. You said so yourself after you spoke to him. Then there’s Bliss…”

“We don’t know that he’s out there.”

“I smell him all over Billy Boy.”

“You’re turning into an old woman. Next you’ll be talking about getting a cat, and clipping coupons.”

“I’m telling you: something is off.”

“You that worried, then stay here.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Then get some sleep. I don’t need you any edgier than you already are for this.”

Louis turned out the light, leaving Angel in darkness. He did not sleep, but Louis did. It was a gift that he had: nothing ever got in the way of his rest. He did not dream that night, or he could not remember if he did, but he woke up just before dawn, Angel at last sleeping beside him, and his nostrils were filled with the smell of burning.

Their names were Alderman Rector and Atlas Griggs. Alderman was out of Oneida, Te

Alderman-nobody ever called him Rector, as though his Christian name had become the title that would always be denied him-was five-ten and so thin that he looked almost mummified, his high-yellow skin tight against his bones, with little flesh to suggest that Alderman was anything more than an animated corpse. His eyes were sunk deep in their sockets, and his cheekbones were so pronounced that they threatened to shred his skin when he ate. His hair grew out in soft, dark curls that were turning to gray, and he had lost most of the teeth on the lower left side of his mouth to a bunch of crackers in Boone County, Arkansas, so that his jaws didn’t sit right, giving him the ruminative expression of one who had just been burdened with a piece of unsettling information. He was always softly spoken, forcing others to lean in closer to hear him, sometimes to their cost. Alderman might not have been strong, but he was fast, intelligent, and unflinching when it came to doing injury to others. He kept his fingernails deliberately long and sharp in order to do maximum damage to the eyes, and thus he had blinded two men with his bare hands. He kept a switchblade beneath the band of his watch, the band just tight enough to keep the knife in place but loose enough to allow it to be released into Alderman’s hand with a flick of his wrist. He preferred small guns,.22s mostly, because they were easier to conceal and lethally effective up close, and Alderman liked to do his killing where he could feel the breath of the dying upon him.

Alderman was respectful to women. He had been married once, but the woman had died and he had not taken another wife. He did not use prostitutes or dally with women of low character, and he disapproved of others who did so. For that reason, he had only barely tolerated Deber, who had been a sexual sadist and a serial exploiter of women. But Deber had a way of insinuating himself into situations that provided opportunities for enrichment, like a snake or a rat squeezing itself through cracks and holes in order to reach the juiciest prey. The money that came Alderman’s way as a result enabled him to indulge his sole true vice, which was gambling. Alderman had no control over it. It consumed him, and that was how a clever man who occasionally pulled off some low-to medium-sized jobs came to own only two stained suits that were once the property of other men.

Griggs, by contrast, was not intelligent, or not unusually so, but he was loyal and dependable and possessed of an unusual degree of strength and personal courage. He wasn’t much taller than Alderman, but he had fifty pounds on him. His head was almost perfectly round, the ears tiny and set fast against his skull, and his skin was black with a hint of red to it in the right light. Deber had been his second cousin, and the two men would trawl for women in the towns and cities through which they passed. Deber had charm, even if it didn’t run deep enough to drown a bug, and Griggs was handsome in a meaty way, so they did okay together, and Griggs’s adoration of his cousin had blinded him to the more unsavory aspects of Deber’s dealings with women: the blood, the bruising, and, on the night that he had killed the woman with whom he was living, the sight of a body lying broken in the alleyway behind a liquor store, her skirt boisted up around her waist, her lower body naked, violated by Deber even as she was dying.

The final fight was just about to start when Griggs arrived at the old potato shed that housed the pit. It was August, almost at the end of the season, and the birds that had survived bore traces of their earlier fights. There were no white faces to be seen. The interior of the shed was so warm that most of the men present had dispensed with their shirts entirely, and were drinking cheap beers from buckets filled to overflowing with ice in an effort to cool themselves down. It smelled of sweat and urine, of excrement and the cock blood spattered around the inside of the pit and soaking into its dirt base. Only Alderman appeared untroubled by the heat. He was seated on a barrel, a thin roll of bills in his left hand, his attention fixed on the pit below.

Two men finished sharpening the gaffs on their birds’ legs and entered the pit. Instantly, the pitch and volume of the spectators’ voices altered as they sought some final betting action before the fight began, exchanging hand signals and shouts, seeking confirmation that their wagers had been recorded. Alderman did not join them. He had already placed his bet. Alderman left nothing until the last minute.