John Connolly - The Reapers

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 Quinn weren’t above bringing it up when they needed some amusement of their own. The first time they had done so, Curtis had responded to their goads by taking a swing at Benton, and had been beaten to within an inch of his life for his trouble. Strangely, Benton had respected him a little more as a consequence. He had told Curtis so, even as he was punching him repeatedly in the face.

Right now, Benton and Quinn were stink-ass drunk. Mr. Leehagen and his son wouldn’t be pleased if they knew that they were drinking on the job. Michael Leehagen had stressed how important it was that the two men who were coming should be contained. Everyone needed to be alert, he had said, and everyone needed to follow orders. There would be bonuses all round once the job was done. Curtis didn’t want to see his bonus jeopardized. Every cent mattered to him. He needed to get away from here: from the Leehagens, from men like Benton and Quinn, from the memory of his father withering away from the cancer yet refusing to listen when people criticized the man who chose to deny the reality of the disease that was killing him. Curtis had friends down in Florida who were making good money in roofing, helped by the fact that every hurricane season brought fresh calls for their services. They’d let him come in as a partner, just as long as he had some capital to bring to the table. Curtis had almost $4,000 saved, with another thousand owed to him by Mr. Leehagen, not counting any bonus that might come his way from the current job. He had set himself a target of $7,000: $6,000 to buy into the roofing business, and a thousand to cover his expenses once he got to Florida. He was close now, real close.

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.

There was movement at the edge of the woods to his south: two men. He rapped on the roof, alerting Quinn and Benton. The passenger window was rolled down, and Curtis could smell the booze and the cigarette smoke.

“What?” It was Benton.

“I see them.”

“Where?”

“Not far from the Brooker place, moving west.”

“I hate that old bastard, him and his wife and his freak son,” said Benton. “Mr. Leehagen ought to have run them off his land a long time ago.”

“The old man won’t have helped them,” said Curtis. “He knows better.” Although he wasn’t sure that was true. Mr. Brooker was ornery, and he kept himself and his family apart from the men who worked for Mr. Leehagen. Curtis wondered why Mr. Brooker didn’t just sell up and leave, but he figured that was part of being ornery, too.

“Yeah,” said Benton. “Old Brooker may be a pain in the ass, but he’s no fool.”

A hand emerged from the window. It held a bottle of homemade hooch and waved it at Curtis. This was Benton’s own concoction. Quinn, who was an expert on such matters, had expressed the view that, as primitive grain alcohol went, it was as good as any that a man could buy in these parts, although that wasn’t saying much. It didn’t make you blind, or turn your piss red with blood, or any of the other unfortunate side effects that drinking homemade rotgut sometimes brought on, and that made it top-quality stuff in Quinn’s estimation.

Curtis took it and raised it to his mouth. The smell made his head spin and seemed instantly to exacerbate the pain in his skull, but he drank anyway. He was cold and wet. The hooch couldn’t make things worse. Unfortunately, it did. It was like swallowing hot fragments of glass that had spent too long in an old gasoline tank. He coughed most of it back up and spat it on the metal at his feet, where the rainwater did its best to dilute it and wash it away.

“Fuck this,” said Benton. The engine started up. “Get in here, Curtis.”

Curtis jumped down and opened the passenger door. Quinn was staring straight ahead, a cigarette hanging from his lips. He was just over six feet tall, four inches taller than Curtis, and had short black hair with the consistency of fuse wire. Quinn had been Benton’s best buddy since grade school. He didn’t say much, and most of what he did say was foul. Quinn seemed to have picked up his entire vocabulary from men’s room walls. When he opened his mouth, he talked fast, his words emerging in an unbroken, unpunctuated stream of threats and obscenities. While Benton had been doing time in Ogdensburg Correctional, Quinn had been down the road in Ogdensburg Psychiatric. That was the difference between them. Benton was vicious, but Quinn was nuts. He scared the shit out of Curtis.

“Hey, move over,” said Curtis. He climbed into the cab, expecting Quinn to scoot, but he didn’t.

“Fuckyouthinkyoudoing?” said Quinn. It came out so quickly that it took Curtis a couple of seconds to comprehend what had been said.

“I’m trying to get in the cab.”

“Sitinthedamnmiddlenotmovingsumbitchkickyourass.”

“Quit fooling, man,” said Benton. “Let the kid through.”

Quinn moved his knees a fraction to the left, allowing Curtis just enough room to squeeze past.

“Gotmeallwetmankickyourasskickyourassgood.”

“Sorry,” said Curtis.

“Betterbesorrymakeyousorrykickyourassman.”

Yeah, whatever, you whacko, thought Curtis. He briefly entertained visions of kicking Quinn’s ass instead, but forced them from his mind when he turned and saw Quinn regarding him unblinkingly through light brown eyes flecked with points of black like tumors in his retinae. Curtis didn’t believe Quinn was telepathic, but he wasn’t about to take any chances.

“What are we going to do?” asked Curtis.

“What we should have done after we wrecked their car,” said Benton. “We’re going to take care of them.”

Curtis shivered. He recalled the sight of the dead woman, and the weight of her in his arms as he and Quinn had placed her in the trunk, Benton and Quinn giggling at the little twist they had added to the job. Willis and Harding had done the killing during the night, and Benton had been left to bury the bodies, another punishment for his failures earlier in the week. Instead, he had decided to stuff them in the trunk of the car, and now Curtis couldn’t seem to get the smell of the woman’s perfume off his hands and clothes, even in the rain.