The Reapers

“Tony, as far as I can tell, none of these things worked.”

“Yeah, on us. He could be different. Here: flurazepam. That’s a sedative, and there’s some eszopiclone, too. Cocktail those.” He produced a fifth of Jack Daniel’s from his jacket pocket and handed it to the Detective along with four pills.

“That looks like a lot,” said Jackie. “We don’t want to kill him.”

Willie looked at the dead men lying in the bloodstained cab, then back at Jackie.

“What?” said Jackie.

“Nothing,” said Willie.

“It’s not the same,” said Jackie.

“What isn’t?”

“Shooting someone, and poisoning them.”

“I guess not,” said Willie. He was now wishing he had never come. More blood, more bodies, a wounded man lying in agony on the grass. He had heard what Eddie Fry said: he wasn’t a killer, he was just a farmhand pressed into service. Maybe Fry knew what others were trying to do, and for that he bore some responsibility, but he was out of his depth with men like the Detective. Fry and his friends were lambs to the slaughter. Willie hadn’t expected it to be like this. He wasn’t sure what he had expected, and he realized, once again, how naive he had been. He didn’t belong in this situation any more than Fry did. Willie hadn’t signed up to kill anyone, but men were dying now.

The Detective handed the tablets to Fry, then held the bottle steady so that he could wash them down with the Jack Daniel’s. He left the bottle with the wounded man and walked over to the cab of the crashed truck. He opened the passenger door and removed the weapons, then found one of the radios. It appeared intact, but when he lifted it up the back came off and the ruined i

“They’re in there somewhere,” he said. “The question is: how do we find them?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

THE MAN LEANING ON the roof of the Ford Ranger was very wet. His name was Curtis Roundy, and if there was a stick being waved in his direction then five would get you twenty that Curtis would always find a way to grab the shitty end of it, or that was how it seemed to the man himself. No matter what lengths he went to in order to avoid getting himself into situations where his own personal comfort and satisfaction would have to be sacrificed for someone else’s idea of the greater good, Curtis would inevitably end up holding a fork when soup fell from the sky, or experiencing the gentle trickle of urine down his back amid assurances that it was, in fact, rain. At least, he thought, as he stood with the binoculars pressed to his eyes and his feet squishing in his boots, this was just rain, and his poncho was keeping out some of it.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t much consolation. He would have been a lot happier sitting in the cab instead of standing outside exposed to the elements, but Benton and Qui

Edgar Roundy, Curtis’s father, had worked in Mr. Leehagen’s talc mine, and even though he had died riddled with tumors, he had never once blamed his employer for what had occurred. Mr. Leehagen had put food on his table, a car in his drive, and a roof over his head. When the cancer took him, he put it down to bad luck. He wasn’t a stupid man. He knew that working in a mine wasn’t likely to lead to a long, happy life, didn’t matter if it was talc, salt, or coal that was being dug out of the ground. When people started talking about suing Mr. Leehagen, Edgar Roundy would simply turn and walk away. He kept doing that until he could no longer walk at all, and then he died. In return for his loyalty, Mr. Leehagen had given Edgar’s son a job that did not involve ingesting asbestos for a living. Edgar, were he still alive, would have been moved by the gesture.

Curtis was smart enough to know that he’d dodged a bullet when the mine closed and Mr. Leehagen had still seen fit to offer him some alternative form of employment. There were a lot of folk out there who had once worked for the Leehagens and were getting by on the kind of pensions that meant KFC family buckets and sawdust hamburgers were a dietary staple. He wasn’t sure why fortune should have smiled on him and not on others, although one reason might have been the fact that old Mr. Leehagen, when his health was considerably better than it was now, had paid Mrs. Roundy an occasional recreational visit while her husband was sacrificing his life in the mine, cough by hacking cough, surrounded by filth and dust. Mr. Leehagen was lord of all that he surveyed, and he wasn’t above invoking a version of droit de seigneur, that age-old perk of the ruling classes, if the mood struck him and there was an accommodating woman around. Curtis wasn’t aware of Mr. Leehagen’s former daytime visits, or had convinced himself that he wasn’t, although men like Benton and Qui

Right now, Benton and Qui

The sound of the rain on the hood of his poncho was starting to give him a headache. He removed the binoculars from his eyes to rest them, shifted position in a vain effort to find a more comfortable way to stand, then resumed his vigil.