The Reapers: A Thriller-CP-7 (37 page)

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.

“We were told not to get involved,” said Curtis. “There were orders, orders from Mr. Leehagen’s son.”

“Yeah, well, nobody told those two assholes out there. Suppose Brooker did help them, or let them use his phone? Suppose there are people on their way up here right now? Hell, they might even have killed the old man and his family, and that’d be a regular tragedy. They’re killers, ain’t they? That’s what these people do. While we wait around for some ghost to get here and do a job that we could have done for nothing, they’re running free. Long as they end up dead on his land, Leehagen won’t object.”

Curtis wasn’t sure that this was a good idea. He tended to take Mr. Leehagen at his word, even if that word usually came through his son now that Mr. Leehagen couldn’t get around so good anymore, and it had been made clear to them that they were to restrain themselves when it came to the two men for whom they had been waiting. Confrontations—fatal ones, at least—were to be avoided. They just had to sit tight and wait. After the men had entered the Leehagen lands, they were to be contained there, and nothing more. All told, fifteen men had been entrusted with the task of ensuring that, once they entered the trap, they did not escape. Now Benton wanted to bend the rules. His pride had been hurt by recent events, Curtis knew. He wanted to make amends to the Leehagens, and restore his own confidence along the way. Benton drank some, it was true, but he was right more often than he was wrong, alcohol or no alcohol. The more Curtis thought about their situation, the more he saw Benton’s point about not waiting around for Bliss to take care of the two men. But then Curtis always had been swayed by the voice that was nearest and loudest. If a backbone could be said to have chameleonesque qualities, changing to suit its moral environment, then Curtis’s certainly qualified. His opinion could be swayed by a sneeze.

And so Quinn, Curtis, and Benton left the road and went in search of two killers who would soon be killing no more. They made one stop along the way, calling at the Brooker place to see what he could tell them. Curtis could see that Mr. Brooker thought as much of Benton as Benton thought of him, and even then Mr. Brooker’s feelings toward Benton were probably pretty charitable compared to his wife’s. She didn’t even try to be civil, and the sight of their guns didn’t seem to faze her at all. She was a tough old bitch, no doubt about it. Their son, Luke, leaned against a wall, hardly blinking. Curtis didn’t know if he could see out of his milky eye. Maybe he could, and the world looked as though it had been overlaid with a sheet of muslin, its streets populated with ghosts. Curtis couldn’t ever recall hearing Mr. Brooker’s son speak. He had never gone to school, not to any regular school, and the only time Curtis ever saw him away from the Brooker place was when he went into town with his father and the old man treated them both to ice cream at Tasker’s ice cream parlor. As for the little girl, Curtis had no idea where she had come from. Maybe Luke had managed to get lucky, once upon a time, although it didn’t seem likely. Screwing Luke Brooker would be like screwing a zombie. Mr. Brooker showed them the guns that he had taken from the two men, and Benton’s eyes lit up at the prospect of easy pickings. He slapped Brooker on the back and told him that he’d let Mr. Leehagen know how well he’d done.

When the three men had gone, Brooker sat silently at his kitchen table while his wife rolled dough behind him, and tried to ignore the waves of disapproval that were breaking upon his back.

Angel and Louis heard the truck before they saw it. They were in a trough between two raised patches of open ground, one of the grazing cuts, and it took them a moment to determine from which direction the sound was coming. Louis scaled the small incline and looked to the east to see the Ranger moving fast in their direction, following a dirt trail out of the forest from the direction of the old man’s house. It was still too far away to identify the men inside, but Louis was pretty sure that they weren’t friendly. Neither would Bliss be among their number. It wasn’t his style. The rules had changed, it seemed. It was no longer a matter of containment. He wondered if Thomas had made a call, fearful of what the trespassers on his land might do even without guns. Perhaps the news that they were no longer armed had tilted the balance against them.

Louis sized up their options. The cover of the forest was lost to them. To the southwest, meanwhile, was what appeared to be an old barn, the raised, domed structure of an aged grain elevator beside it, with more forest behind. It was an unknown quantity. Angel joined him.

“They’re coming for us,” said Louis.

“Which way do we go?”

Louis pointed at the barn.

“There. And fast.”

Benton came to the top of a slight hill. Almost directly opposite them, and on the same level, their prey was running. One of them, the tall black guy, took a second to look back over at them. Benton slammed on the brakes and jumped from the cab, grabbing his Marlin hunting rifle from the rack behind his seat as he did so. He went down on one knee, aimed, and fired at the figure across from him, but the man was already disappearing over the rise, and the bullet hit nothing but air. By now, Quinn and Curtis were behind him, although neither had bothered to raise his weapon, Quinn because he had a shotgun and Curtis because he hadn’t signed up to shoot at anybody, even though he’d brought along his father’s old pistol, just as Mr. Leehagen’s son had instructed him to do.

“Goddamn,” said Benton, but he was laughing as he spoke. “Bet nobody in his family has moved that fast since someone waved a noose at them back in the old South.”

“How’d you know he was Southern?” asked Curtis. It seemed like a reasonable question.

“A feeling I got,” said Benton. “A Negro don’t get into his trade unless he has a beef against someone from way back. That boy’s looking for a way to strike back against the white man.”

That sounded like bullshit to Curtis, but he didn’t disagree. Maybe Benton was right, but even if he wasn’t, it was good sense simply to nod along with him. Meanness ran through him like fat on marbled beef. It wouldn’t be beyond him just to leave Curtis out here in the rain, and with a broken nose—again—or some busted ribs as a reminder to him to keep his mouth shut in future.

“Come on,” said Benton, and led them back to the truck at a trot.

“Looks steep,” said Curtis, as Benton drove down the slope at a sharp angle.

“Four-liter V6,” said Benton. “Baby could do it on two wheels.”

Curtis didn’t reply. The Ranger was twelve years old, the treads were at 60 percent, and four liters didn’t make it a monster. Curtis braced himself against the dashboard. The Ranger might have made the climb on dry ground, but Benton hadn’t reckoned with the rain that had soaked into the dirt at the bottom of the depression. It had turned the earth to mud, and when the Ranger hit bottom the wheels struggled to grip, even as they began to climb up the opposite side. Benton gunned the engine, and for a moment they lurched forward before stopping entirely, the wheels churning uselessly in the soft ground.