The Reapers

“He won’t call here,” said Willie. “That’s not how he operates.”

“Then he’s not coming back,” said the man.

He turned to walk away. After a second’s hesitation, Willie opened the door and followed him into the night, slipping the gun into the pocket of his overalls. The visitor was approaching the rear passenger-side door of a black Lincoln town car that had been parked out of Willie’s line of sight. As Willie appeared, the driver’s door opened and a man emerged. He didn’t look like any chauffeur that Willie had ever seen. He was young, and neatly dressed in a gray suit, but he had eyes so dead they properly belonged in a jar somewhere. His right hand was hidden behind the door, but Willie knew instinctively that there was a gun in it. He gave silent thanks that he had not walked out of the garage with the little Browning visible. Instead, he held his hands away from his body, as though preparing to hug the man that he was following.

“Hey,” said Willie.

The man stopped, his hand on the handle of the car door.

“Who are you?” asked Willie.

“My name is Milton. Louis will know who I am.”

“That’s no good to me. He’s gone. They’re both gone. Can’t you do something? Can’t you help them?”

“No.”

“I’m not even sure where they are,” said Willie, and he heard the hint of pleading in his voice, of desperation, and felt no shame. Angel had told him a little, but it had meant nothing to him. He was surprised that Angel had chosen to share any details at all with him, but he had been more concerned about returning to his beloved auto shop at the time. All he had was the name of a town upstate. What the hell use was that if they were in trouble? He wasn’t a one-man army. He was just an overweight guy in overalls, with a gun that he didn’t want to use.

But Louis and Angel were important to him. Whatever his fears and reservations, they had saved him, in their way. Willie was under no illusions: when Louis had first approached him, it was not out of altruism. It had suited him to have Willie in the building that he had acquired, for reasons that Willie himself still did not quite understand. Yet, self-interested or not, Louis had permitted Willie to keep doing what he loved. That was a long time ago, and things were different now. They had paid for his birthday party. They had even given him a gift: a Rolex Submariner Oyster, discreetly handed to him after everyone was gone from Nate’s that night. It was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen that did not have four wheels. Never had he even imagined that he would own something so lovely. He was wearing it now. Only for an instant had he considered putting it in a drawer and saving it for special wear. He didn’t do “special.” If he put it in a drawer, then it would stay there until he died. Better to wear it, and enjoy the fact of it upon his wrist.

He owed these men. He would do whatever he had to in order to help them, even if it meant getting down on his knees in the middle of the street before a stranger and his armed acolyte.

And the visitor relented, if only slightly.

“They’re hunting a man named Arthur Leehagen. He lives upstate in the northern Adirondacks, not far from Massena. Now that you know where they are, what are you going to do about it?”

He opened the door and got into the car, pulling the door closed after him without another word to Willie. All the time, the man with the dead, unblinking eyes kept watch. Only when the rear door was closed, and his charge was safe, did he get into the front seat and drive away.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

ONCE AGAIN, THE AUTO shop was locked down. The radio had been silenced, and the lights around the two vehicles upon which Willie and Arno had been working were now extinguished, the cars standing raised in the gloom on their hydraulic lifts like forgotten patients on a pair of operating tables, abandoned by the surgeon for more deserving cases.

Willie and Arno were in the small office at the rear of the premises, surrounded by invoices and scribbled notes and oil-stained boxes. There was only one chair, which Willie was occupying. Arno squatted on the floor, small and thin, his head slightly too large for his body, a gargoyle evicted from its pedestal. Each had a cup in his hand, and a bottle of Maker’s Mark stood on the desk between them. If ever there was a time for hard liquor, Willie supposed that this was it.

“Maybe it’s not as bad as it sounds,” said Arno. “They’ve been in trouble before, and they came out of it okay.”

He didn’t sound as though he entirely believed his own words, even if he desperately wanted to.

Willie took a sip of booze. It tasted terrible. He wasn’t sure why he even kept it in his filing cabinet. It had been a gift from a grateful customer, although not one grateful enough to give a better bottle as a token of appreciation. Willie had been meaning to give it away for, oh, at least two years now, but he kept holding off just in case it came in useful for something. Tonight, it just had.

“After all, it’s not like we can call the cops,” said Arno.

“No.”

“I mean, what would we tell them?” Arno’s brow briefly furrowed in concentration, as though he were already trying to construct in his mind a plausible yet entirely fictitious explanation for some imaginary law enforcement officer.

“And it’s not as if we can go up there and help them either. You can use a gun, but I never held one in my life until last week, and that didn’t go so good. I nearly killed you with it.”

Willie nodded glumly.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Arno continued. “I’ll do whatever it takes to help them, up to a point, but I fix cars for a living. For what we’re talking about here, that’s not going to be too much use to anyone.”

Willie put his mug aside. “I hate this stuff,” he said wearily, and Arno wasn’t sure if he was talking about the booze or something else. Willie rested his elbows on his desk, cupped his hands before him, and buried his face in them, his eyes closed, his fingertips almost touching across the bridge of his nose.

Arno watched his boss with an expression of tenderness on his face. It would be true to say that Arno loved Willie Brew. He loved him completely and devotedly, although had he ever chosen to say so out loud Willie would have had him committed. Willie had given him a place in which to work that was as much a sanctuary as Arno’s cluttered, paper-filled apartment. He respected Arno’s skills, even if he was scrupulously careful never to demonstrate that respect through either word or deed. He was Arno’s closest friend, the one to whom Arno had turned when his beloved mother died, the man who had helped him carry her casket, walking alongside him with two anonymous undertakers behind. He was the finest mechanic Arno had ever met, and the most decent of men. Arno would have done anything for Willie Brew. He would even have died for him.

But he would not die for Louis and Angel. He liked Angel, who was at least friendly at times in a vaguely human, nonthreatening way. Louis, though, he did not like. Louis scared him to hell and back. He knew that this was a man whom he should respect, someone of power and lethality, but Arno respected Willie more. Willie had earned his respect through his actions, through his humanity. Louis required respect in the way a panther did, because only an idiot wouldn’t respect something so potentially dangerous, but that didn’t mean you wanted to spend any more time in the panther’s cage than was absolutely necessary.

He recalled how Willie had spoken to him the morning after that first meeting with Louis. Willie had bought coffee and doughnuts, and the smell of them had been wafting from the office when Arno arrived for what he fully expected to be his last day in the auto shop. Willie had told him of Louis and his offer, and of how he felt that he had no choice but to accept it. That was how he put it, Arno remembered: he would take the loan, but only reluctantly. Willie was too wise to the ways of the world to imagine that such gifts came without conditions both acknowledged and unacknowledged. At the time, Arno had just been grateful that they would be able to continue in business, and he didn’t care if the guy offering the loan had cloven hooves and horns coming out of his head. That changed once he met Louis, and saw the physical form that was about to cast a shadow over what had previously been a regular business. Angel had lightened that shadow a little, but for many years Arno and his beloved boss had still been forced to work under it, and Arno was human enough to resent that fact.