John Connolly - The Reapers

That was, in part, why they had remained close to Charlie Parker over the years. Angel owed a debt to the private detective, who had done his best, as a cop, to protect Angel from those who would have harmed him while he was in prison. Angel had never fully understood why Parker had chosen to do that. Angel had helped him with information from time to time, as long as it didn’t involve naming too many names, and he was sure, although they had never spoken of it, that Parker knew something of Angel’s past, of the abuse that he had endured as a child. But there were a lot of criminals out there who could point to troubled childhoods, some of them even worse than Angel’s; pity or empathy were not enough to explain why Parker had chosen to help and, ultimately, befriend him. It was almost, thought Angel, as though Parker had known what was to come. No, not known. That wasn’t it. There were things about Parker that were unusual, even downright spooky, but he wasn’t a seer. Perhaps it was just something as simple as meeting another human being and understanding, immediately and deeply, that this was an individual who belonged in one’s life, for reasons readily apparent or yet to be revealed.

Louis had found difficulty in understanding that, at least at the start. Louis did not want cops or ex-cops in his life. Yet he knew what Parker had done for Angel, knew that Angel would not be alive were it not for the strange, troubled private detective who seemed about to break under the weight of his grief and loss, yet somehow refused to do so. In time, Louis had seen something of himself in the other man. They began by respecting each other, and that had developed into a kind of friendship, albeit one that had been tested on more than one occasion.

But what Louis and Parker had in common more than anything else, Angel believed, was a kind of darkness. A version of Louis’s fire burned in Parker; a stranger yet more refined form of Louis’s hunger gnawed at him. In a way, they used each other, but each did so with the knowledge, and consent, of his peer.

Things had changed, though, in recent months. Parker was no longer a licensed PI. He felt that he was being watched by those who had taken his license away, that a wrong move could put him in jail, or draw attention to his friends, to Louis and Angel. Angel wasn’t certain how they had managed to avoid that attention until now. They had been careful and professional, and luck had played a part at times, but those factors in themselves should not have been enough, could not have been enough. It was an enigma.

But with Parker out of commission, Louis had been denied one of the outlets for his urges. He had begun to speak of taking on jobs again. The move against the Russians had been inspired less by the immediate threat to Parker than by Louis’s desire to flex his muscles. Now it seemed that he and Angel were under attack from forces they had not yet fully identified. And what most disturbed Angel was the suspicion that Louis was secretly pleased at this development.

Then there was Gabriel, who bore some responsibility for their current situation, since, if what Hoyle had told them was true, it was he who had dispatched Louis to kill Leehagen’s son to begin with. Angel had never met the old man, but he knew all about him. The relationship that existed between Gabriel and Louis was ineffably complex. Louis seemed to feel that he owed some debt to Gabriel, even though Angel believed that Gabriel had manipulated and, possibly, corrupted Louis for his own ends. Now Gabriel was, however peripherally, back in Louis’s life, like a hibernating spider spurred into motion by the warmth of the sun and the vibrations of insects close to its dusty web. It suggested to Angel that aspects of Louis’s past, his old life, were now leaching into the present, and poisoning them as they came.

If Louis sometimes frightened Angel, then Angel remained frustratingly unknowable to his partner. Despite all that had happened to him, there was a gentleness at the heart of Angel that might almost have been construed as a weakness. Angel felt things: compassion, empathy, sorrow. He felt them for those who were most like him, troubled children in particular, for Louis knew that every adult who was abused as a child holds that child forever in his heart. That did not make his emotions any less admirable, and Louis recognized that he himself had been colored and changed by the years he had spent in the company of this odd, disheveled man. He had been humanized by him, yet what was a virtue in Angel had become a chink in Louis’s armor. But then the moment he began to have feelings for Angel he had sacrificed a crucial element of his defenses. His forces, in a sense, had been divided. Where once he had only to worry about himself-and that concern was tied up with the nature of his profession-he now had to contend with his fears for another. When Angel had almost been taken from him, held to ransom and mutilated by a family that had no intention of ever releasing him alive, Louis had seen, for an instant, what he would become without his partner: a creature of pure rage who would be consumed by his own fire.

What he did not tell Angel was that part of him devoutly wished for such a consummation.

Parker, too, had altered him, for in the detective Louis saw elements of both Angel and himself combined: he had Angel’s compassion, his desire not to let the weak be ground down by the strong and the ruthless, but also something of Louis’s willingness, even need, to strike out, to judge and to inflict punishment. There was a delicate balance between Parker and Louis, the latter knew: Parker held the worst of Louis back, but Louis allowed the worst of Parker to find an outlet. And Angel? Well, Angel was the pivot around whom the other two moved, a confidant of both, containing within himself echoes of both Louis and Parker. Yet wasn’t that true of all of them? It was what bound them together, that and an emerging sense that Parker was moving toward a confrontation of which they, too, were destined to be a part.

He had never imagined that he would end up tied to such a man as Angel. In fact, for many years he had chosen not to acknowledge his sexuality to himself. It was a shameful thing when he was young, and he had suppressed it so well that any expression of it had proved difficult for him as he grew older.

And then this strange person had tried to burgle his apartment. He hadn’t even done it particularly well, the proof being that he had ended up under Louis’s gun while attempting to get his television out of a window. Who, Louis often wondered, enters an apartment that is clearly tastefully decorated, with some small, easily transportable objets d’art, and then tries to steal a heavy TV set? It was no wonder that Angel had ended up in jail. As a thief, he was a spectacular failure, but as a lockpicker, well, that was where his true genius lay. In that, he was gifted. It was, Louis suspected, God’s little joke on Angel: he would give him the skills required to gain access to any locked room, but would then deprive him of the guile required to make practical use of those skills, short, of course, of actually becoming a locksmith and earning an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, a concept that Angel found repugnant.

Almost as repugnant to Louis was his partner’s distinctive fashion sense. At first, Louis thought it was an affectation; that, or pure cheapness. Angel would scour the bargain racks at Filene’s, TJ Maxx, Marshalls, anywhere that primary colors were gathered together in unlikely combinations. He didn’t care much for outlet malls, unless their stores, too, had a rail that had been discounted so much that the stores were pretty much paying customers to take stuff away. No, outlet malls were too easy. Angel liked the hunt, the thrill of the chase, that moment of pleasure that came from unexpectedly finding a lime-green Armani shirt reduced to one tenth of its original price, and a pair of designer jeans to match, assuming by “matching” one meant “clashing unbearably.” The thing about it was, Angel would be immensely, genuinely proud of his purchases, and it had taken years for Louis to realize that, every time he commented unfavorably on his partner’s choice of attire, something inside Angel cringed, like a child that has tried to please a parent by cooking a meal, only to get all of the ingredients wrong and find himself chastised instead of praised for his efforts. It didn’t matter that, when it came to clothing, Angel seemed to be colorblind. This was designer clothing. It had cost him next to nothing, but it was good quality and had a label that people would know. As a child, Angel had probably dreamed of wearing nice clothes, of owning expensive things, but as an adult he could not justify to himself the expense of such items. They were meant for others, not for him. He did not consider himself worthy of them. But he could cheat by buying them for next to nothing, since no justification would be required if they were cheap.