John Connolly - The Reapers

“‘They’?”

“Mr. Leehagen and his men.”

“You work for Leehagen?”

“Everyone around here works for Mr. Leehagen, one way or another. If he don’t pay you directly, then you live by what he pays others.” He looked down at the little girl. “Go to your grandma, honey.”

The little girl ran behind the legs of the younger man and danced her way to the shelter of the house, splashing through the puddles that were forming on the uneven ground. She climbed the steps to the porch and stood beside her grandmother, who put a protective hand around her granddaughter’s shoulders. The girl smiled up at the older woman, then clapped her hands once with pleasure and excitement. Angel wondered who her father was. It didn’t seem to be the younger of the two men, the pale creature with the washed-out eye. She was too pretty to be his, too vibrant. He looked like a corpse that hadn’t yet realized it was dead.

“Thomas,” said the woman at the door to the older man. There was a note of what might almost have been pleading in her voice. It struck Angel that she wasn’t intervening out of any great concern for the two men who had trespassed onto the property. She just didn’t want her husband to get into trouble by spilling blood.

“Just take her inside,” said Thomas. “We’ll deal with this.”

The woman grabbed the girl by the hand and pulled her into the house. The girl didn’t seem happy to miss the show, and it took an extra yank on her arm before she crossed the threshold and the door closed behind them. Even then, Angel could see her staring yearningly back at him, disappointment creasing her features.

“We don’t want any trouble,” said Angel.

“Really?” said the man named Thomas. He sounded skeptical, and tired. “It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”

“We just want to get out of here alive,” said Angel.

“I don’t doubt that, son. My guess is you’re going to have some problems on that score.”

“You could help us.”

“I could, that’s true. I could, but I won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because then I’d die in your place, assuming you managed to get out of this mess you’re in, which I don’t think is going to happen. Mr. Leehagen places a high premium on loyalty.”

“Those men out there are going to kill us.”

“You reap what you sow. I’m sure that’s in the Bible, somewhere. My wife could tell you. She reads on it some, when the mood strikes her. Never spoke much to me.”

He shifted his grip on the shotgun, and Louis tensed. Angel could sense him getting ready to spring, and Thomas seemed to sense it, too. The twin mouths of the shotgun steadied themselves on Louis. The wind changed direction, bringing the stink of whatever animals Thomas had transported to their doom in his truck to Angel, the smell of their dying as they voided themselves in fear.

“No,” said Thomas, simply. “You do, and I’ll be feeding your body to the hogs before day’s end.”

Hogs. Now Angel could hear them snuffling and grunting somewhere behind the house.

“You helped them make their movie,” he said.

Thomas shifted uneasily. “I don’t know nothing about that.”

“How did they do it? A model? They get someone to lie in the mud and pretend to be eaten, fix it all up later in an editing suite. You tell us: how did they do it?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” said Thomas. “I got nothing against you personally, and I don’t want to have to kill you here. Mr. Leehagen wouldn’t like it. He’s got other plans for you, I guess. Go on, now. You get away from here, and you don’t come back. Your guns can stay with me. I don’t trust you to keep your word when I let you go.”

Louis spoke: “Without weapons, we don’t stand a chance.”

“You didn’t stand a chance anyway.”

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

The old man smiled. It wasn’t a malicious smile. Instead, there was a measure of pity in it.

“You came up here all primed to cause some hurt, and now the tables have been turned on you. What did you think would happen? That there’d be some old man in a big house and you’d kill him without anyone even raising a finger to stop you? You listen to me: I got no love for that sonofabitch, and I think the world would have been a better place if he’d never been born into it, but you made a mistake coming up here, and you’ll live or die by that mistake. Like I said, you’ll reap what you’ve sown.” He gestured with the shotgun, indicating the woods through which they had come. “That way lies the road, and maybe your way out of here. Don’t come back here. You do, and we’ll kill you. I have my family to consider, Leehagen or no Leehagen.”

“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.