The Reapers

“I believe you,” said Louis.

“Good.”

The two men stepped back as Angel and Louis moved away, the barrels of the guns never wavering. When they were almost out of sight, the old man called out.

“Hey,” he said.

They stopped.

“You said that I knew a lot about this. I don’t. I heard someone shoot his mouth off in a bar two nights ago, and then we was warned to keep an eye out for strangers. I figured what was coming. Those men out there, they don’t want to kill you. They’re saving you for someone else.”

“Who?” asked Angel.

The old man shrugged. “Something about happiness,” he said. “That’s what they said.”

“Happiness?”

“No, not happiness,” said Thomas. His brow furrowed as the tried to remember the right word. “Bliss. That was it. They said bliss was coming your way.”

Louis did not speak as they walked away. His arrogance, his anger, had brought them to this. Bliss. He looked at Angel trudging alongside him, lost in his own pain. The shorter man glanced up, and their eyes met. There seemed to be no blame in them, no wrath. This was what Louis had needed to do, and Angel had stood alongside him, despite his own reservations. If that was not love, what was? Suddenly Louis’s feelings of warmth toward his partner were dispelled.

“You’re an asshole,” said Angel. “You know that?”

“Yeah, I know it.”

“Good. I’m cold and I’m wet and I’m going to be killed by a man who collects other killers like scalps, and it’s all your fault.”

“I was just thinking that you hadn’t blamed me for this. I was thinking how much I admired you for it.”

“Are you out of your mind? Of course I blame you. And you can keep your admiration. I’d write that on your tombstone, but I’ll be too dead to do it.” Angel sneezed loudly. “Great. This is just great.”

Louis looked at the sky. “Maybe it will stop raining.”

“It’s something to look forward to, I guess.”

“We need guns.”

“We’ll have to kill someone to get them.”

“We could go back and take them from the old man.”

For a second or two, they considered it. They knew how it would play out. For all of the old man’s bluster and the guns in their hands, he and his family would be no match for them. But there was a child in the house, and there had been something in Thomas’s eyes that told Louis he would fight if they returned. There would be injuries, maybe even deaths. No, they would not go back there.

“They expect us to run, to try and break out of the cordon,” said Louis. “They won’t expect us to do what we came here to do.”

“We try for Leehagen’s house?”

“Yeah.”

“In the absence of anything better, it sounds like a plan.” Angel wrung rainwater from his jacket. “What are we going to do, drown him?”

“In the absence of anything better…”

They walked on.

“You really blame me for all this?” asked Louis, after a few minutes of silence had gone by.

Angel thought. “I blame myself.”

Louis paused. “Is that true?”

“No,” said Angel as he sneezed again. “I do blame you.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

WILLIE BREW AND THE Detective crossed the bridge and followed the road for a hundred yards or so until they came to an intersection. Well, you could call it an intersection, but as far as Willie was concerned it was two roads going exactly nowhere, one heading east to west, the other continuing south. Neither of them looked too inviting, but then any strip that didn’t have a convenience store, a couple of fast-food outlets, and maybe a bar or two barely qualified as a road in Willie’s book.

“Who are these guys, exactly?” asked Willie. The question had been troubling him since they had reached the bridge. He’d only been up in this godforsaken part of the world for an hour, and already he’d seen two dead bodies and, according to the Detective, the dead men had probably been on their side, which suggested to Willie that the odds in their favor had started to shrink. Now the rest of what passed for a rescue mission had disappeared, and the Detective had appeared more disappointed than surprised at their absence. None of this was making Willie feel any more at ease, and he began to wonder if Arno hadn’t been wise to stay where he was, and if he shouldn’t have stayed right there with him.

At that moment, the biggest truck Willie had ever seen in his life appeared from the west. It was jet black, and its tires were so huge that even to stand on them and use them as a means of jumping to the ground was to risk breaking an ankle on impact. As it drew closer, Willie could see that the truck also seemed to be without its windshield, and both of its headlights were busted. The bench seats in the cab were big enough to seat four adults comfortably, but currently they seemed to be seating three men uncomfortably, especially since two of those men were wide enough to qualify as illegal structures if they stayed in the same place for too long. The man squashed between them, who was no Slim Jim himself, wore a look of beatific calm, as if this situation was not only familiar to him, but entirely welcome, despite the rain.

“Shit,” said Willie, involuntarily. Suddenly, the Browning looked very small in his hand. The gun didn’t look like it would have enough stopping power to make any of these men pause in their tracks. It would be like firing marshmallows at a trio of charging elephants.

“Relax,” said the Detective. “They’re with us.”

He didn’t sound particularly happy about it.

The truck came to a halt barely five feet from where they were. Until that point, it had been traveling so fast that Willie wasn’t sure it was going to stop at all. Seen from up close, the two big guys looked mad as hell, and it seemed for a few crucial seconds that they were just going to drive right over the Mustang, crushing it beneath the wheels of their truck as they proceeded in the direction of whomever had incurred their wrath. Willie rated that particular individual’s chances of survival at somewhere between minimal and extinct.

The Detective got out of the Mustang. Willie did likewise. The two big men climbed out of either side of the cab, using a footplate behind the wheels to jump down. Willie couldn’t be certain, but he thought he felt the ground shake when they landed.

“Meet Tony and Paulie Fulci,” said the Detective softly. “The guy in the middle is Jackie Garner. He’s the sane one, although it’s a relative term.”

Willie hadn’t heard of Jackie Garner, but he’d heard of the Fulcis. Angel had spoken of them in the tones usually reserved for forces of nature like hurricanes or earthquakes, the message being that, in common with such meteorological and seismic events, it was a pretty good idea to stay as far away from them as possible. As things stood, Willie was not far away from the Fulcis at all, and therefore had somehow entered a mobile disaster zone.

“What happened to your truck?” asked the Detective.

“Some guys happened,” said Paulie. He jerked a thumb in Jackie’s direction. “He didn’t help, though.”

“We’ve been through all this,” said Jackie. “It was a misunderstanding.”

“Yeah, well…” said Paulie. Clearly, the whole affair still rankled.

“Where are the guys in question?” asked the Detective.

There was some awkward shuffling of feet.

“One of them ain’t doing so good,” said Tony.

“How not good?”

“He’s out cold. I ain’t so sure he’s going to wake up again either. I hit him kind of hard.”

“And the others?”

“Other,” corrected Jackie. “There were two of them.”

“He ain’t doing so good either,” said Tony. His embarrassment deepened. “Actually, he ain’t never going to do good again. It was kind of an accident,” he concluded lamely.

To his credit, Willie thought, the Detective maintained an impassive façade.