John Connolly - The Reapers

“I do try to avoid getting shot up whenever I can,” said the Detective.

How’s that working out for you, Willie was tempted to ask. The Detective exerted a seemingly irresistible force of attraction over bullets, knives, fists, and just about anything else that could potentially do a body harm. Even sitting this close to him made Willie nervous.

The coffee and toast arrived, distracting him for a time from his concerns for his personal safety. The coffee tasted good, and he could feel his brain responding to the rush of sugar and caffeine.

“Is it okay to talk here?” asked Willie.

“I wouldn’t. We can talk in the car. I take it they haven’t called, though?”

“No.” Suddenly, Willie’s cell beeped. He found it in his overalls and felt his hopes rise, until he saw the message welcoming him to Canada.

“We’re not in Canada, right?” he said.

“Not unless they’ve invaded quietly.”

“Fucking Canadians,” said Willie, turning his disappointment to anger and aiming it north. “Be just like them.”

He went back to nibbling at his toast. He had a lot of questions he wanted to ask, not least of which was if they were up here alone. The Detective was good at what he did. Angel and Louis had said so often enough, and Willie had no reason to doubt their word, but he wasn’t sure if two men would be able to handle whatever they were about to face. Much as he loved Angel and Louis, Willie had no pressing desire to throw himself on their pyre for no good reason. Suddenly, the gravity of the situation impacted upon him fully. He put down his piece of half-finished toast. What little appetite he had disappeared. He excused himself and went to the men’s room, and there he doused his face and neck with cold water and dried himself with a wad of paper towels, then went back outside.

The check had been paid, and the Detective was waiting for him at the door. If he knew what Willie was feeling, he gave no indication of it.

“You need anything from your car?” the Detective asked.

“No. I got all I need here.”

Instinctively Willie patted the Browning once again, and instantly felt ridiculous. He sounded like a gunfighter: a smug gunfighter, the kind that got shot at the end of the third reel. The Detective looked at him quizzically.

“You okay, Willie?”

“I didn’t mean that to sound the way it did,” said Willie apologetically. “You know, like I was Dirty Harry or someone. I’m just not used to this kind of thing.”

“If it’s any consolation, I do this a lot, more than I’d like, and I’m not used to it either.”

They both got into the Mustang, and the Detective pulled away from the curb. He drove for about a mile until he came to a deserted lot, then pulled in and killed the engine. The Detective produced a series of pages. They were satellite images, printed in high resolution from a computer. One showed a large residence. The second showed a town. On others there were roads, streams, fields.

“Where’d you get these, the CIA?” asked Willie.

“Google,” said Parker. “I could plan an assault on China from a home computer. Arthur Leehagen has a compound south of here; that’s the main house by the lake. It looks like there are two roads in and out, both heading roughly west. They cross a stream, which means Leehagen’s land is almost entirely surrounded by water, except for two narrow tracts to the north and south where the stream comes close to the lake before veering away. The southern road veers northwest, and the northern road southwest, so they come close to meeting near Leehagen’s house. Two other roads intersect them, running north to south, the first near the stream, the second about a mile or so in.”

As he spoke, the Detective pointed out the details on one of the images. Willie didn’t own a computer. He figured it was too late in life to worry about these things, and he had little enough spare time as it was. He had a vague notion of what a Google might be, but he couldn’t have explained it to anyone in a way that made sense, not even to himself. Still, he was impressed by what the Detective was showing him. Wars had been fought with less detailed information in hand than this. Hell, he’d fought in one of them.

“You okay with the gun you’ve got?” asked the Detective.

“Louis gave it to me.”

“It should be good, then. You fired a weapon recently?”

“Not since Vietnam.”

“Well, they haven’t changed much. Show me the gun.”

Willie handed the Browning to the Detective. It weighed less than two pounds fully loaded, and had a blued finish. It was a pre-1995 model, as the magazine had a thirteen-round capacity, not a ten. The chamber was unloaded, according to the indicator on the extractor.

“Nice and light,” said Parker. “Not new, but clean. You got a spare clip?”

Willie shook his head.

“With luck, you won’t have to use it. If we have to empty clips, then we’re probably outnumbered, so it won’t matter too much either way.”

Willie didn’t find this entirely reassuring.

“Can I ask you something?” he said.

“Sure.”

“Is it just us? I mean, no offense meant, but we ain’t exactly Delta Force.”

“No, it’s not just us. There are others.”

“Where are they?”

“They went on ahead. In fact-” Parker checked his watch. “-we ought to be joining them about now.”

“I had another question,” said Willie, as the Detective started the engine.

“Go ahead.”

“Is there a plan?”

The Detective looked at him.

“Not getting shot,” he replied.

“That’s a good plan,” said Willie, with feeling.

The Detective kept the headlights on as they drove. Willie thought they might be a little high, but he said nothing. He could worry about headlights another day. Getting shot was on his mind. He’d been shot at in Nam, but no bullets had even come close to him. He was kind of hoping to keep things that way. Still, it paid to know what to expect. He’d been around men who’d been shot, and the range of reactions had startled him. Some screamed and cried, others just stayed silent, holding all the pain inside, and then there were those who acted like it was a minor thing, as though the wind had just been taken out of them a little by a shard of hot metal buried deep in their flesh. Finally, he felt compelled to ask the question.

“You’ve been shot, right?” he asked the Detective.

“Yeah, I’ve been shot.”

“What was it like?”

“I don’t recommend it.”

“You know, I’d figured that out for myself.”

“I don’t think mine was your typical experience. I was in freezing water, and I was probably already in shock when I got hit. It was a jacketed bullet, so it didn’t spread out on impact, just passed straight through. It got me here.” He pointed to his left side. “It was mainly fatty tissue. I don’t even remember too much pain at first. I got out of the water and started walking. Then it began to hurt like hell. Bad, really bad. A woman-” Here, the Detective paused. Willie didn’t interrupt, merely waited for him to continue. “-a woman I knew, she had some nursing experience. She sewed it up. I kept going for a couple of hours after that. I don’t know how. I think I was still in shock, even then, and we were in trouble, Louis, Angel, and I. It happens that way, sometimes. People who’ve been injured find a way to keep going because they have to. I was running on adrenaline, and there was a girl missing. She was Walter Cole’s daughter.”

Willie knew about this. He had heard some of the story from Angel.

“A couple of days after it was over, I collapsed. The doctors said it was a delayed reaction to all that had happened. I’d lost some teeth, and I think what they did to repair that damage hurt almost as much as the gunshot. Anyway, it seemed to precipitate everything that followed, like my body had decided enough was enough. They tried to put me in the hospital, but I rested up at home instead. Took a while for the gunshot wound to stop hurting. When I turn a certain way, I think I can still feel a twinge. Like I said, I don’t recommend it.”