The Reapers: A Thriller-CP-7 (24 page)

Alderman—nobody ever called him Rector, as though his Christian name had become the title that would always be denied him—was five-ten and so thin that he looked almost mummified, his high-yellow skin tight against his bones, with little flesh to suggest that Alderman was anything more than an animated corpse. His eyes were sunk deep in their sockets, and his cheekbones were so pronounced that they threatened to shred his skin when he ate. His hair grew out in soft, dark curls that were turning to gray, and he had lost most of the teeth on the lower left side of his mouth to a bunch of crackers in Boone County, Arkansas, so that his jaws didn’t sit right, giving him the ruminative expression of one who had just been burdened with a piece of unsettling information. He was always softly spoken, forcing others to lean in closer to hear him, sometimes to their cost. Alderman might not have been strong, but he was fast, intelligent, and unflinching when it came to doing injury to others. He kept his fingernails deliberately long and sharp in order to do maximum damage to the eyes, and thus he had blinded two men with his bare hands. He kept a switchblade beneath the band of his watch, the band just tight enough to keep the knife in place but loose enough to allow it to be released into Alderman’s hand with a flick of his wrist. He preferred small guns, .22s mostly, because they were easier to conceal and lethally effective up close, and Alderman liked to do his killing where he could feel the breath of the dying upon him.

Alderman was respectful to women. He had been married once, but the woman had died and he had not taken another wife. He did not use prostitutes or dally with women of low character, and he disapproved of others who did so. For that reason, he had only barely tolerated Deber, who had been a sexual sadist and a serial exploiter of women. But Deber had a way of insinuating himself into situations that provided opportunities for enrichment, like a snake or a rat squeezing itself through cracks and holes in order to reach the juiciest prey. The money that came Alderman’s way as a result enabled him to indulge his sole true vice, which was gambling. Alderman had no control over it. It consumed him, and that was how a clever man who occasionally pulled off some low-to medium-sized jobs came to own only two stained suits that were once the property of other men.

Griggs, by contrast, was not intelligent, or not unusually so, but he was loyal and dependable and possessed of an unusual degree of strength and personal courage. He wasn’t much taller than Alderman, but he had fifty pounds on him. His head was almost perfectly round, the ears tiny and set fast against his skull, and his skin was black with a hint of red to it in the right light. Deber had been his second cousin, and the two men would trawl for women in the towns and cities through which they passed. Deber had charm, even if it didn’t run deep enough to drown a bug, and Griggs was handsome in a meaty way, so they did okay together, and Griggs’s adoration of his cousin had blinded him to the more unsavory aspects of Deber’s dealings with women: the blood, the bruising, and, on the night that he had killed the woman with whom he was living, the sight of a body lying broken in the alleyway behind a liquor store, her skirt boisted up around her waist, her lower body naked, violated by Deber even as she was dying. The final fight was just about to start when Griggs arrived at the old potato shed that housed the pit. It was August, almost at the end of the season, and the birds that had survived bore traces of their earlier fights. There were no white faces to be seen. The interior of the shed was so warm that most of the men present had dispensed with their shirts entirely, and were drinking cheap beers from buckets filled to overflowing with ice in an effort to cool themselves down. It smelled of sweat and urine, of excrement and the cock blood spattered around the inside of the pit and soaking into its dirt base. Only Alderman appeared untroubled by the heat. He was seated on a barrel, a thin roll of bills in his left hand, his attention fixed on the pit below. Two men finished sharpening the gaffs on their birds’ legs and entered the pit. Instantly, the pitch and volume of the spectators’ voices altered as they sought some final betting action before the fight began, exchanging hand signals and shouts, seeking confirmation that their wagers had been recorded. Alderman did not join them. He had already placed his bet. Alderman left nothing until the last minute.

The breeders crouched at either side of the pit, their roosters pecking at the air, sensing that combat was imminent. The birds were introduced to each other, their hackles rising in instinctive hatred, and then they were released. Griggs worked his way through the crowd as the birds fought, catching occasional glimpses of flashing spikes, of blood spatter landing on arms, chests, faces. He saw a man instinctively lick the warm blood from his lips with the tip of his tongue, his eyes never moving from the combat below. One of the birds, a yellow-hackled rooster, got spiked in the neck and began to flag. The breeder withdrew it temporarily, blowing on its head to revive it, then sucking the blood from its beak before returning it to the fray, but it was clear that the rooster had had enough. It went cold, refusing to respond to the attacks of its opponent. It was counted out, and the fight declared over. The losing breeder picked up the distressed bird in his arms, looked at it sadly, then wrung its neck.

Alderman had not moved from his barrel, and Griggs could tell that the night had not gone well for him.

“Bullshit, man,” said Alderman, his voice like that of a mourner whispering prayers for the dead, or a soft brush sweeping ashes from a stone floor. “That was all bullshit.”

Griggs leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette, in part to get some of the smell of the pit out of his nostrils. Griggs had never been much for cockfighting. He wasn’t a gambler, and he had grown up in the city. This wasn’t his place.

“Got some news for you,” he said, “something might ought to cheer you up.”

“Uh-huh,” said Alderman. He did not look at Griggs, but began counting and recounting his money, as though hoping that the act of moving it through his fingers might multiply it, or reveal a previously unseen twenty among the fives and ones.

“The boy that done Deber. Could be I know where he’s at.”

Alderman finished counting and slipped the bills into a scuffed brown leather wallet, then placed the wallet carefully in the inside pocket of his jacket and closed the button. They had been searching for the boy for ten weeks now. They had tried intimidating the women at the cabin, pulling up outside it in their big old, beaten-up Ford, all false smiles and implied threats, but the boy’s grandmother had fronted them right there on her porch, and then three men had appeared from the trees, locals looking out for their own, and he and Griggs had moved on. Alderman figured that even if they did know where he was, the women wouldn’t tell them, not even if they took a knife to one of them. He could see it in the matriarch’s eyes as she stood there before her open door, her hands on her hips as she cussed them softly for what they were trying to do. Like Chief Wooster, Alderman knew something of the woman’s reputation. They weren’t ordinary cuss words she was using against them. It made no nevermind to Alderman, who didn’t believe in God or the devil, but he admired the woman’s demeanor, and was respectful of her even as he tried to communicate to her the level of damage he and Atlas were prepared to inflict in order to find the boy.

“So where he at?” he asked Griggs.

“San Diego.”

“Boy’s a long way from home. How’d you come by it?”

“Friend told a friend. Met a man in a bar, they got talking, you know how it is. Man heard we was looking for a young nigger, heard there might be money in it. Said a boy like ours showed up in San Diego looking for work about two months back. Got him a job as a kitchen boy in a diner.”

“This man have a name?”

“White guy, didn’t give no name. Heard about the boy from some redneck owns a bar in the boy’s hometown. But I made some calls, got someone out there to take a look at the boy at his place of work. It’s him, sounds like.”

“Long way to go to be wrong.”

“Got Del Mar out there. Not far to Tijuana neither. It’s him, though. I know it.”

Alderman got up from the barrel and stretched. There wasn’t much to keep them here, and he did owe that boy: Deber had been close to setting up a score, and his death had fucked that up royally. Without Deber, he and Atlas had been struggling. They needed to hook up with someone new, someone with juice, but the rumors about what the boy maybe had done to Deber had spread, and now he and Atlas weren’t getting the respect that they ought to have. They needed to fix things with the boy before they could start making money again. That night, they hit a mom and pop store and netted seventy-five dollars from the register and the safe. When Griggs put a knife to the woman’s throat, her husband had come up with $120 more from a box in the storeroom. They left them tied up in the back of the store and turned the lights out, tearing the telephone from the wall before they departed. Alderman had been wearing an old gray overcoat over his suit and both he and Griggs had cloth sacks over their heads to hide their faces. He had made sure that they parked out of sight of the store before they went in, so their car couldn’t be identified. It had been an easy takedown, not like some of the ones they’d done with Deber back in the day. Deber would have raped the woman at the store out of spite, right in front of her husband.

They stopped near Abilene at a bar owned by an old acquaintance of Griggs’s, and where a man named Poorbridge Danticat, who knew of Alderman and Griggs and Deber, made a joke about Deber losing his head. Alderman and Griggs had waited for him in the parking lot afterward, and Griggs had beaten Poorbridge so badly that his jaw was re moved almost entirely from his skull and one ear hung crookedly from a flap of skin. It would serve as a message. People needed to learn some respect.

All this because of Deber, thought Alderman, as they drove west. I never even liked him, and now we have to travel for days to kill a boy just cause Deber couldn’t control himself with his woman. Well, they’d make the boy pay, make an example of him so that folk would know that he and Atlas took these things seriously. There was no other way. Business, after all, was business.

The diner stood on National Boulevard, not far from the X-rated Pussycat house. The Pussycat had started life as the Bush Theater in 1928, then became, at various stages in its history, the National, the Aboline, and the Paris, before finally joining the porn mainstream in the 1960s. When Louis arrived for work each morning shortly after five, the Pussycat was silent and sleeping, like an old harlot after a hard night’s whoring, but by the time he left, twelve hours later, a steady stream of men had already begun to make use of the Pussycat’s facilities, although, as Mr. Vasich, the Yugoslav owner of the diner, would often remark, “Ain’t none of them staying longer than a cartoon.”

Louis’s job at Vasich’s Number One Eatery, as a pink and yellow neon sign announced it, was to do whatever was required to keep the place functioning, short of actually cooking the food himself or taking money from its patrons. He washed, shucked, peeled, and polished. He helped carry in deliveries and carry out garbage. He made sure that the restrooms were clean and there was paper in the stalls. For this he was paid the minimum wage of $1.40 an hour, from which Mr. Vasich deducted twenty cents an hour for room and board. He worked sixty hours each week, with Sundays off, although he could, if he chose, come in and work off the books for a couple of hours on Sunday morning, for which Mr. Vasich paid him a flat five dollars, no questions asked. Louis took the extra hours. He spent little of the money that he earned, apart from treating himself to an occasional movie on a Sunday afternoon, since Mr. Vasich fed him well at the eatery and gave him a room on the second floor with a bathroom across the hall. There was no access to the diner itself from where Louis stayed, and the rest of the rooms were given over to file storage and a collection of mismatched and broken furniture, only some of it connected to the business below.

After two weeks had gone by, he took the bus down to Tijuana and, having walked the streets for two hours, eventually bought a Smith & Wesson Airweight alloy .38 and two boxes of ammunition from a store close to Sanchez Taboda. The man who sold it to him showed him, using a combination of broken English and simple, hands-on demonstration, how to release the cylinder and push back on the ejector rod to access the central ejector plate. The gun smelled clean, and the man gave Louis a brush and some oil to keep the weapon that way. When he was done, Louis tried to get a sandwich but all the bakeries and bread stores had been closed, apparently because a pesticide had been stored alongside the ingredients for making bread in a government warehouse in Mexicali, resulting in the deaths of a number of children, so he settled for half a chicken on a bed of wilted lettuce before returning to the United States. He found an old bicycle in one of Mr. Vasich’s storerooms and paid to have the tires repaired and the chain replaced. The following Sunday, he filled a bag with a bottle of water, a sandwich from the diner, a doughnut, some empty soda bottles, and the .38, and biked west until he had left the city behind. He stowed his bike in some bushes and walked away from the road until he came to a hollow filled with rock and scree. There he spent an hour firing at bottles, replacing them with rocks when only broken shards were left. It was the first time that he had held and fired a revolver, but he quickly got used to its weight and the sound that it made. Mostly, he fired from a range of not more than fifteen feet from his targets, figuring that, when it came down to it, he would probably be using the gun up close. Once he was satisfied with himself and his knowledge of the weapon, he buried the pieces of broken glass, carefully collected the spent cartridges, and biked back to the city.

The waiting came to an end on a warm, still August night. He woke to the sound of boards creaking outside his room. It was still dark outside, and he did not feel as though he had slept for long. He did not know how they had managed to get so close without being heard. The secondfloor rooms were reached by way of rickety wooden stairs to the right of the building, and Louis always kept the main door locked at Mr. Vasich’s insistence. Yet he was not surprised that they had found him at last. Gabriel had told him it would happen, and he had known it himself to be true. He slipped from beneath the sheets, wearing only his boxers, and reached for the .38 just as his bedroom door was kicked in and a fat man with a round head appeared in the doorway. Behind him, Louis could see another, smaller man hovering.