The Wrath of Angels

26





Davis Tate couldn’t get the smell of nicotine out of his mouth and nostrils. He felt as though he were coated in filth outside and in, even though by then the man in the corner was long gone from the bar. They hadn’t even seen him depart, and only the newspaper and the brandy – largely untouched – confirmed that he had ever been there at all. His presence had made Tate profoundly uneasy. He couldn’t have said why exactly, apart from that momentary pause in the tapping of the man’s fingers when Tate joked about his mortality, but he was certain that he and Becky had been the focus of the stranger’s attention. Tate had even gone so far as to corral their server while she was removing the empty brandy snifter from the booth and wiping the table clean with a cloth that stank of bleach. He could see Becky watching him, puzzled and unamused, but he didn’t care.

‘That guy,’ Tate said to the waitress, ‘the one who was sitting at this table: you ever see him in here before?’

The waitress shrugged. If she were any more bored, she’d have been horizontal.

‘I don’t remember,’ she said. ‘We’re midtown. Half the people who come in here I never see again.’

‘Did he pay cash or credit?’

‘What are you, a cop?’

‘No, I host a radio show.’

‘Yeah?’ She perked up. ‘What station?’

He told her. It didn’t register.

‘You play music?’

‘No, it’s talk radio.’

‘Oh, I don’t listen to that shit. Hector does.’

‘Who’s Hector?’

‘The bartender.’

Instinctively, Tate looked over his shoulder to where Hector was updating the food specials on the chalkboard. Even in the midst of his labors, Hector found time to wink at Tate again. Tate shuddered.

‘Does he know who I am?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the waitress. ‘Who are you?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Let’s get back to the question. The guy who was sitting here: cash or credit?’

‘I get you,’ said the waitress. ‘If he paid credit, you could ask to see the slip. Then you’d know his name, right?’

‘Right. You should be a detective.’

‘No, I don’t like cops, especially not the kind that come in here. You sure you’re not a cop?’

‘I look like a cop?’

‘No. You don’t look like anything.’

Tate tried to gauge if he’d just been insulted, but gave up.

‘Cash,’ he said deliberately and, he hoped, for the final time, ‘or credit?’

The waitress wrinkled her nose, tapped her pen against her chin, and did the worst impression Tate had ever seen of somebody pretending not to remember. He wanted to shove her pencil through her cheek. Instead he took ten bucks from his pocket and watched it disappear into the waitress’s apron.

‘Cash,’ she said.

‘Ten bucks for that? You could have just told me.’

‘You gambled. You lost.’

‘Thanks for nothing.’

‘You’re welcome,’ said the waitress. She picked up her tray, with the brandy snifter and the stranger’s copy of the Post on top of it. As she tried to pass him, he took her arm.

‘Hey!’ she said.

‘Just one more question,’ said Tate. ‘Hector, the bartender?’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s gay, right?’

The waitress shook her head.

‘Hector’s not gay,’ she said.

‘You serious?’ said Tate. He was shocked.

‘Sure,’ said the waitress. ‘Hector’s really gay.’

As he and Becky prepared to leave, Tate kept thinking about the kid, Penny Moss. Becky couldn’t be serious, could she? After all, she was talking about knowledge of a crime yet to be committed, about the abduction and murder of a girl, but to what end: to foment unrest, or to boost his ratings? Both?

‘You’re part of something much larger than yourself, Davis,’ Becky told him. She was paying their tab, the fag bartender chuckling to himself as he ran Becky’s credit card, the waitress leaning against the bar, whispering to Hector while he worked, a feral smile on her blunt, graceless face. They’d given up on trying to get her to come over to the table to take Becky’s card. Tate was sure that she was telling the bartender about his earlier conversation with her. He hoped that Hector wouldn’t think Tate was queer for him. He had enough problems.

The waitress giggled at something Hector said to her, and covered her mouth to reply as she saw Tate watching her. You’re trash, Tate thought. You were bred for this work, and you won’t be smiling when you see the tip. Not that he ever intended to set foot in this place again, with its stinking customers and its weird vibe, as though the bar were a portal to another realm, one in which men performed unsavory acts on one another and women degraded themselves by association with them.

Tate hated New York. He hated the smugness of the place, the apparent self-assuredness of even the poorest of its citizens, the minimum wage flunkies who should have kept their eyes low and their heads down but instead seemed to have been infected by the city’s absurd confidence in its own rightness. He’d asked Becky to look into the possibility of broadcasting the show from somewhere – anywhere – else. Well, maybe not just anywhere. Jesus, he might end up in Boston, or San Francisco. Becky told him that it wasn’t possible, that they had an agreement with the studio in New York, that if he moved then she would have to move too and she didn’t want to leave the city. Tate had responded by pointing out that he was the talent, and maybe his wishes should take priority over the matter of her own convenience. Becky had given him a curious look after he said it, equal parts pity and something close to hatred.

‘Maybe you could talk to Darina about it,’ she said. ‘You remember Darina, don’t you?’

Tate remembered. It was why he took pills to help him sleep.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I remember her.’

He knew then that he would remain exactly where Becky, and Darina, and the Backers wanted him to be, and they wanted him here in the city, where they could keep an eye on him. He’d made a deal with them, but he hadn’t been bright enough to examine the small print on the terms. Then again, what would have been the point? Had he turned them down, his career would have been over. They’d have seen to that, he was sure of it. He would never have progressed, and he would still be poor and unknown. Now he had money, and a degree of influence. The drop in ratings was a temporary glitch. It would be arrested. They’d make sure of it. They’d invested so much in him that they couldn’t just cut him loose.

Could they?

‘You okay?’ asked Becky, as they walked to the door. ‘You look ill.’

Like the bitch even cared.

‘I don’t like this shithole,’ said Tate.

‘It’s just a bar. You’re losing touch with your roots. That’s part of the problem we’re having.’

‘No,’ said Tate, as sure as he’d ever been about anything. ‘I’m talking about this city. These aren’t my people. They despise me.’

Somebody at the bar called an order from the stool nearest the entrance – ‘Hey, Hector, I’m dying of thirst over here!’ – and the bartender ambled toward him, keeping pace with Becky and Tate. Tate felt Hector staring at him. He tried to face him down, and Hector blew him a kiss.

‘One for all your listeners,’ said Hector. ‘You come back, I got something special for you too.’

Tate didn’t wait around to hear what it might be, although the way Hector grabbed his crotch and shook it left him with a limited number of possibilities. As they reached the door, his eye happened upon the newspaper rack. All of the papers were already tattered and stained from use, but the stranger’s copy of the Post stood out as it was cleaner than the rest, and appeared unread. Something had been written across the top of the front page with a black felt-tip. It read:

Hello, Davis

Tate grabbed the paper and showed it to the bartender.

‘Did you write this?’ he asked. He was shouting, but he didn’t care.

‘What?’ Hector appeared genuinely puzzled.

‘I asked you if you wrote these words on the newspaper.’

Hector looked at the paper. He considered it for a time.

‘No,’ he said. ‘If that had been my message, it would have read “Hello, Davis, you homophobic a*shole.” And I’d have added a smiley face.’

Tate tossed the paper on the bar. He felt very, very tired.

‘I don’t hate gays,’ he said softly.

‘You don’t?’ said Hector.

‘No,’ said Tate.

He turned to leave.

‘I hate everyone.’

He and Becky parted at the corner. He tried to discuss the writing on the newspaper, but she didn’t want to listen. She was done with him for the day. Tate watched her go, her tight black skirt clinging to her buttocks and thighs, her breasts high and round under her navy shirt. She was good-looking, Tate would give her that, but he no longer felt any attraction towards her because she scared him so much.

That was the other thing: she might nominally have been his producer, but he had always suspected that she was so much more. She had seemed to defer to Barbara Kelly on the occasion of their first meeting, but in the years that followed he had seen others defer to her, even Kelly herself. Becky had three cell phones, and even when she was in the producer’s chair, ostensibly keeping the wheels of the show oiled, one of those phones would be pressed to her ear. Out of curiosity he had followed her once from the hired studio after they had finished recording a show, keeping his distance, trying to blend in with the crowd. Two blocks from the studio he had watched as a black limousine pulled up at the curb beside her, and Becky got in. He had seen nobody else in back, and the driver had not emerged to open the door for her, instead choosing to remain invisible behind smoked glass.

Three times he had followed her, and on each occasion the same car had arrived to pick her up once she was out of sight of the studio. Producer, my ass, thought Tate, but in a way it had been strangely reassuring. It had confirmed that he was involved with serious people, and the wealth that had helped him to rise was not about to vanish any time soon.

Eventually he might even have a limo pickup of his own.

Now here he was, back in the safety of his apartment building but still feeling contaminated by the stink of the bar, both the taint of nicotine and the musky stench of debased sexuality, and tormented by his knowledge of what might be about to happen to Penny Moss. Maybe he could Google her name, or search for her on Facebook. He could send her a message. There had to be a way to do that kind of thing without revealing his identity. He could set up a temporary account under a false name, but wouldn’t he have to wait for her to friend him first? And how many Penny Mosses were out there?

It was the same problem with making a telephone call: where could he start? He could notify the police anonymously and tell them what he knew: that a girl named Penny Moss was going to be abducted and killed, except he couldn’t say where she lived, or who was going to do the abducting and killing, not without mentioning Becky and, by doing so, giving himself away. He would also lose everything for which he’d worked so hard: his money, his power, his nice apartment, even his life, because there was the small matter of Darina Flores. They’d send her after him, and that wouldn’t be good.

He got in the elevator and stared at his reflection in the glass as he ascended. The evening played itself out before him. He would sit in the dark and argue back and forth about the girl while knowing that, in the end, he wouldn’t do anything at all. Eventually he’d pour a drink and pretend to himself that nothing was going to happen, not really. No girl named Penny Moss would be abducted the next day, and no butcher’s knife with her blood on it would be found on the property of some halal-muncher, some religious fifth columnist who had cloaked himself in suburban normality while secretly hating everything that this country stood for. This would be no innocent, Becky had told him. They had selected a man who was a danger to all, and once attention was drawn to him there would be ample evidence of his involvement in all kinds of viciousness. They were doing the right thing here. And as for Penny Moss, well, it might be possible to achieve their ends without killing her. She didn’t have to shed blood, not really.

Or not much.

But Tate had seen the truth in Becky’s eyes, and he knew that this was just the latest step on the road to his own damnation, perhaps the final one. His progress along it had been gradual, slow at first, but he’d felt his feet starting to slide as soon as the vitriol he was spewing became directed at specific targets, as soon as he stopped caring about whether what he said was even partly true or not but simply served the purpose of setting Americans against Americans and rendering reasoned debate impossible, as soon as lives were ruined, and careers and marriages were forced into collapse.

As soon as George Keys killed himself, because that’s what the dumb bastard went and did. His mother died the week after the union cut him loose, and the combination of the two events broke him. He hanged himself in his mother’s bedroom, surrounded by her possessions. And here was the funny thing: George Keys was gay, but he was so tormented by his homosexuality that he’d been afraid to use the fact of it to defend himself against allegations that he’d slept with the Mexican whore-waitress. There were those who blamed Tate for what had happened, but mostly they did so quietly. Davis Tate was by then well on the way to becoming untouchable.

And damned.

Little steps, little increments of evil.

He put his key in the lock and opened his apartment door. He registered the nicotine stench just an instant too late, his reactions slowed by the beers he’d drunk and his senses dulled by the smell and taste of tobacco that he had carried back with him from the bar. He tried to retreat into the hallway, but a blow caught him on the side of the head, knocking him against the door jamb, and a blade pressed itself against his neck, its edge so sharp that he only realized he had been cut when he felt the blood flow, and with it came the pain.

‘Time to talk,’ said a stinking voice in his ear. ‘Time, even, to die.’





27





Walter Cole drove me to the airport to catch the Delta shuttle flight to Boston. He’d been relatively quiet since we left Nicola’s. Walter was good at brooding.

‘You have something that you want to share?’ I asked.

‘I’d just forgotten what an interesting life you lead,’ he said, as LaGuardia came into view.

‘In a good way, or the Chinese way?’

‘Both, I guess. I like being retired, but sometimes I get twitchy, you know? I’ll read about a case in the newspaper, or see it on the news, and I’ll remember what it was like to be part of that, the rush of it, the sense of, I don’t know . . .’

‘Purpose?’

‘Yeah, purpose. But then Lee will come into the room, and she’ll have a beer in her hand for me, and a glass of wine for herself. We’ll talk, or I’ll help her to cook dinner—’

‘You cook now?’

‘God, no. I tried making stew once and even the dog got ill, and that dog eats deer shit and doesn’t blink. I help Lee by not trying to cook, and just making sure her glass is full. Sometimes one of the kids will join us, and the evening stretches into night, and it will be good. Just good. You know how many dinners I missed by being a cop? Too many; too many, and more. Now I get to make up for lost time. Contentment is a very underrated feeling, but you only learn that as you get older, and with it comes regret that it took you so long to realize what you’d been missing.’

‘So you’re telling me that you don’t want to trade your life for mine? You’ll forgive me if I’m not shocked.’

‘Yeah, that’s about the size of it. I listened to what was said in back of Nicola’s today and I felt the twitch again, but I also felt the fear. I’m too old, too weak, too slow. I’m better off where I am. I can’t do what you do. I wouldn’t want to. But I’m afraid for you, Charlie, and I get more afraid as the years go by. I used to think that maybe you could stop this, that you’d go to Maine and just be a normal guy doing normal stuff, but now I know that it isn’t in the stars for you. I just wonder how it’s going to end, that’s all, because you’re getting older, and so are those two lunatics who walk at your heels. And the people you go up against, they just seem to get worse and worse. You hear what I’m saying?’

‘Yes.’ And I did.

We were coming to the Delta terminal. Taxis crowded, and farewells were made. Now the time was for leaving, I wanted to stay. Walter pulled up to the curb, and placed a hand on my shoulder.

‘They’ll take you in the end, Charlie. Eventually there’ll be one who’s stronger than you, and faster, and more ruthless, or there’ll just be too many of them for even Angel and Louis to help you fight. Then you’ll die, Charlie: you’ll die, and you’ll leave your daughter with only the memory of a father. And the thing of it is, you just can’t do anything about it, can you? It’s like I can see it written already.’

In turn, I placed my hand on his left shoulder.

‘Can I tell you something?’ I said.

‘Sure.’

‘You may not want to hear it.’

‘It’s okay. Whatever it is, I’ll listen.’

‘You’re turning into a miserable old man.’

‘Get out of my city,’ he replied. ‘I hope they kill you slow . . .’





28





Grady Vetters opened his eyes and watched clouds scud across the moon. He had only intended to nap for thirty minutes, but somehow the day had slipped through his fingers. Not that it mattered: it wasn’t like he had a job driving an ambulance, or putting out fires. It wasn’t like he had any kind of job at all.

He sat up and lit a cigarette, and the paperback book that he had been reading fell to the floor. It was an old Tarzan novel with yellow page edges and a cover illustration that promised more than the book had so far delivered. He’d found it on the shelf in Teddy Gattle’s living room, along with a whole lot of other books that wouldn’t have chimed with the perceptions of those who didn’t know Teddy as well as Grady did. Teddy’s place was also a lot neater and cleaner than his yard might have led one to expect, and the bed in the spare room was comfortable enough. It had been good of Teddy to offer Grady a place to stay after Grady and his sister had argued. Grady wasn’t sure that, if the circumstances had been reversed, he would have done the same.

Grady’s head ached, although he had not been drinking. His head had been aching a lot lately. He put it down to stress, and the fact that he had already stayed too long in Falls End. The town had always had this effect on him, ever since he’d first returned after his initial semester at Maine College of Art in Portland. His mom had already been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s by then, although at that stage it was manifesting itself only as a mild disengagement from the world around her, but he knew he had an obligation to return home and see her. There was even a faint nostalgia for Falls End, having been away from it for the first significant period in his life, but then he’d arrived back, and he’d fought with his dad, and he’d felt the town begin to oppress him with its insularity and lack of ambition, the sheer mediocrity of it like a weight upon his chest. Just as with the misleading cover of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, the cheerful ‘Welcome to Falls End – Gateway to the Great North Woods!’ sign at the entrance to the town was the best thing about the place. On his last day in Falls End before returning to MeCA, he and Teddy had vandalized the sign by adding the word ‘You’re’, as in ‘You’re Welcome to Falls End’. They thought it was funny, or at least Grady did. Teddy had seemed ambivalent about the act, but he went along with it because he wanted to please Grady. Later he told Grady that the sign had been restored to its original state the next day, and the finger of suspicion for defacing it had continued to point at Grady and, by extension, Teddy for many years after. Small towns had long memories.

Facing Grady’s bed was a shelf of pictures, medals and trophies, relics of Teddy’s time in middle and high school. Teddy had been a pretty good wrestler back then, and there had been talk of scholarships being offered by a couple of colleges further south, but Teddy didn’t want to leave Falls End. Truth was, Teddy didn’t even want to leave high school. He liked being part of a group, being surrounded by people who, regardless of differences in looks, or academic ability, or physical prowess, shared a common bond, which was the town of Falls End itself. For Teddy, school days really had been the happiest days of his life, and nothing since could compare with them. Grady stared at the photographs. He was in a lot of them alongside Teddy, but he was smiling in fifty percent of them at most. Teddy was smiling in every one.

Teddy Gattle, always orbiting around the sun that was Grady Vetters; or looked at another way, Teddy was Grady’s squat shadow. He was the reality that dogged Grady’s dreams.

Grady wondered if he should try calling Marielle again. He’d left one vaguely conciliatory message on her machine, but she hadn’t replied, and he figured that she was still pissed at him. He’d woken up dazed and hungover after the latest party at Darryl Shiff’s place, Darryl being the kind of guy who felt that a week was wasted if it included only one party at his house. The hangover was bad enough. Worse was the fact that he hadn’t woken up alone: there was a girl sleeping next to him, and Grady couldn’t remember who she was, or how she got there, or what they’d done together. The girl didn’t quite have ‘skank’ written all over her, but that was mostly because there wasn’t much room on her skin to fit it in, what with all of the other stuff that adorned it. There seemed to be a disturbing number of men’s names – Grady counted two Franks, and wondered if they commemorated the same guy or two different ones – and when he pulled down the sheet he saw a devil’s tail tattooed across the girl’s ass, a tail whose origins were lost somewhere between her slim buttocks. Just below the nape of her neck was a wreath of green leaves with berries bright and red. Holly: that was her name. She’d even cracked a joke about the tattoo, he now recalled, something about guys remembering her name from behind.

He suddenly wanted to shower.

He rose to take a leak, hoping that when he returned the girl might have disappeared, but when he emerged from the bathroom Marielle was standing at the bedroom door while a naked, overly tattooed woman asked her for a cigarette, and then followed up by inquiring if Marielle was ‘the wife’, which suggested she had her priorities all wrong when it came to the possibility that she had just slept with a married man. It was about then that the shouting started, with the result that Grady moved out later in the morning and turned up on Teddy’s doorstep carrying his battered suitcase in one hand, his easel in the other, and his paints and brushes stored wherever he could fit them. He had no idea where Holly had disappeared to once she got dressed, but she had seemed pretty mellow about the whole business. Maybe she’d add his name to her list of conquests: possibly in her armpit, or between her toes.

Grady finished the cigarette and stubbed it out on an ashtray stolen from a bar in Bangor, back when bars still had their own ashtrays. He padded to the kitchen, found fresh bread on the table, and ham and cheese in the refrigerator. He made himself a sandwich and ate it standing up, along with a glass of milk. There was cold beer if he wanted it, but he’d fallen out of the habit of drinking beer in recent years, and the amount of it that he’d been putting through his system since he returned to Falls End was playing havoc with his digestion. He preferred wine, but Teddy only had one bottle, and that was the size of a mailbox and smelled like it had been made from a base of cheap perfume and dead flowers.

Once again Grady was feeling trapped in a way that reminded him of his youth, when all he lived for was to head south and leave his parents and his sister and every evolutionary dead-end cell of Falls End far behind. He’d wanted to go to art school in Boston or New York, but settled instead for Portland, where one of his aunts lived. She was his mother’s younger sister, regarded as dangerously bohemian by the rest of her family. She provided Grady with a room, and he got a summer job down at one of the tourist places on Commercial, serving up lobster rolls and fries, and beer in plastic glasses. He ate whatever the restaurant gave him, and apart from a few bucks a week to his aunt as a token gesture toward rent, and the occasional beer party in someone’s basement, he saved everything that he earned, and he was a good enough employee to be offered additional hours at another bar in town owned by the same guy, and so his first year at MeCA had passed comfortably.

MeCA had been the right choice for him, in the end. The college entrusted its students with a key to the premises so he could work any time that he liked, even sleeping there when he had projects due. He was marked as a student to watch right from the start, a young man with real potential. He’d even realized some of it. Perhaps he’d realized it all, and that was the problem. He was good, but he was never going to be great, and Grady Vetters had always wanted to be great, if only to prove to his family and the doubters up in Falls End how wrong they’d been about him. But the disparity between his desire and his ability, between his reach and his grasp, had quickly become apparent to him when he left the comforting embrace of MeCA and tried to make his way in the big, bad art world. That was when the trouble had started, and now having his picture on the wall of Lester’s looked likely to be the best independent testimony to his value as an artist that he was ever going to see.

He wandered back to the bedroom. The temptation to do a little weed was strong, but with it would come the urge to lie down on the couch and flick through the million and one channels on Teddy’s cable box. To distract himself, he set out his oils and continued working on the painting that he’d started the day before Marielle had kicked his ass out of her house. ‘My’ house: that was how she’d described it, and he’d been tempted to argue the point before he realized that she was right: it was ‘her’ house. Apart from her short-lived marriage, she’d lived there all her life. She loved it, just as she’d loved their father in a way that Grady never had, just as she loved Falls End, and the woods, those damned woods. Everything came back to them. They were the only reason anyone ever came here, the only reason the town thrived.

Grady hated those woods.

So Grady had stopped shouting at his sister, right there and then. He realized that it didn’t matter what happened with the banks, or how much the house might be worth and what his cut might be. He wasn’t about to put pressure on her to take out a loan that might endanger her hold on the place, not in this economic climate. She wasn’t earning much as a schoolteacher, even supplementing it with waitressing on weekends. He’d decided to tell her not to worry, and planned to go over and clear the air the next day. When, or if, the money came through, she could send it on to him. For now he’d stay with Teddy, and paint, and try to figure out where to go next. There were still houses in which he hadn’t worn out his welcome, couches and basements where he could crash. He’d put up some flyers offering to do murals, design work, whatever it took.

His old man was dead. What did it matter?

The painting was coming together quickly. It showed the house, and his parents, and was reminiscent of Grant Wood’s American Gothic except that the couple were happy, not dour, and in the background two children, a boy and a girl, pressed their faces against the inside of their bedroom windows, waving at their parents below. He intended to give it to Marielle as an apology, and as a token of what he felt for her, and their mother and, yes, their father too.

‘He went to your show!’ Marielle had said, screaming the words at him as the tattooed girl pulled on her jeans, realizing that she was in the middle of a serious domestic meltdown and there was no percentage in her hanging around to see how it all panned out.

‘What?’ He wished he hadn’t drunk so much at Darryl’s. He wished he hadn’t smoked that second blunt. He wished he’d never even spoken to the Fabulous Tattooed Lady. This was important, but he couldn’t get his head clear.

‘Your show, your lousy New York show, he went to it,’ said Marielle, and she was crying now, the first time he’d seen her cry since the funeral. ‘He took the bus to Bangor, and from there to Boston and on to New York. He went in the first week. He didn’t want to go on the opening night because he didn’t think that he’d fit in. He thought you’d be ashamed of him because he lived out by the edge of the woods, and he couldn’t talk about art and music, and he only owned one suit. So he went to your show, and he looked at what you’d done, what you’d achieved, and he was proud. He was proud of you, but he couldn’t say it and you couldn’t see it, because you were too out of it to understand, and when you weren’t out of it you were just angry. And it was all f*cked up, all of it. You and him, the way it could have been, it was all lost over nothing but pride and booze and drugs and . . . Ah, Christ, just get out. Get out!’

I didn’t know, he wanted to say; I didn’t know. But the words wouldn’t come, and ignorance was no excuse. It wasn’t even true. He had known that his old man was proud of him, or suspected as much, because how many times had his father tried to reach out to him in his way, and how many times had he been rebuffed? Now it was too late, because it was always too late. Some revelations only came with the sound of dirt falling on a coffin: the ones that mattered, the ones that made for regrets.

So he was painting a picture for his sister, and maybe for himself too. It would be the first such offering he had made to her since they were children, and the most important. He wanted it to be beautiful.

He heard the sound of a vehicle slowing down, and headlights raked the house as Teddy’s truck pulled into the drive. Grady swore softly. Teddy had a heart of gold, and there was nothing that he wouldn’t do for Grady, but he liked background noise in his home: the sound of the TV, or the radio, or music on the stereo, usually something from the sixties or seventies sung by men with beards. Grady thought that it came from living alone for too long while being uncomfortable with his own company. Now that Grady was around, Teddy liked being in his presence as much as possible. He’d insist that Grady watch old sci-fi movies with him, or smoke some weed while listening to Abbey Road or Dark Side of the Moon or Frampton Comes Alive.

The engine died. He heard the doors of the truck opening and closing, and footsteps approaching the house. The front door was unlocked. Teddy always left it that way. It was Falls End, and nothing bad ever happened in Falls End.

Doors, Grady realized: Teddy had brought company. Hell, that meant that any small hope Grady had of working for an hour or two had just gone right out the window. Grady put down his brush and walked to the living room.

Teddy was kneeling on the floor, his head bowed and his hands clasped behind his back. He looked like a man bobbing for apples.

‘You okay, Teddy?’ asked Grady, and Teddy looked up at him. His nose was broken, and his mouth was bloody. Grady wasn’t sure, but even through the blood it looked as if some of Grady’s teeth were missing because there were gaps where there had not been gaps before.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Teddy. ‘I’m so sorry.’

A boy jumped from behind the couch, like this was all just a big game, a game whose main purpose was to scare Grady Vetters to childhood and back, which the sight of the boy had pretty much done. He had the swollen, unhealthy pallor of a cancer sufferer, and his hair was already thinning. There was bruising around his eyes, his nose was swollen, and his throat was distended by an ugly purple mass. Under other circumstances Grady might almost have pitied him, except the boy wore an expression that was simultaneously blank and malevolent, the way Grady had always imagined concentration camp executioners looked after their victims grew too many to count. The boy was holding a pair of blood-stained pliers in his right hand. He made a throwing motion in Grady’s direction with his left, and four teeth landed at Grady’s feet, roots and all.

Grady wondered if this was a nightmare. Perhaps he was still asleep, and if he willed himself awake none of this would be happening. He’d always dreamed vividly: it came with being an artist. But he felt the night air on his face, and he knew that he was not dreaming.

A woman appeared in the doorway behind Teddy, her face partially marred by what at first might have been mistaken for a roseate birthmark but was quickly revealed as a terrible, blistered burn. A patch of gauze covered her left eye. All of these details were incidental, though, next to the gun that she held in her right hand, and the plastic cable ties that dangled from her left.

She pointed the gun at the back of Teddy’s head and pulled the trigger. There was an explosion that made Grady’s ears ring, and Teddy was no more.

Grady turned on his heel and ran back into the bedroom, slamming the door behind him. There was no lock, so he pushed his bed against the door before he began opening the window. He heard the sound of the doorknob turning, and the bed moving across the floor, but he did not look back. The window was stiff, and he had to punch the frame to force it open. He already had one foot on the windowsill when he felt a weight land on his back and a small arm snake around his neck. He tried to pull himself forward and out, but he was off balance and the boy’s full weight was hanging from him. Grady teetered on the windowsill, his arms straining against the frame, and then there were more hands on him, stronger hands, and his fingers lost their grip. He fell back and landed awkwardly on the floor, the boy rolling away from him so that he would not be trapped under the weight of Grady’s body. The woman spread herself across Grady’s chest, one knee on either side of his body pinning his arms to the ground, and she leveled the gun at the center of his face.

‘Stop moving,’ she said, and Grady obeyed. There was a sharp pain in his left forearm, and he saw that the boy had injected him from an old metal syringe.

Grady tried to speak, but the woman placed a hand over his mouth.

‘No. No talking, not yet.’

A great tiredness came over Grady, but he did not sleep, and when the woman’s questions commenced, he answered them, every one.





29





Davis Tate had been forced to secure himself to the heavy radiator in the living room. The intruder had already attached one cuff to the pipe before Tate’s arrival, so now only Tate’s left hand remained free. At least the radiator wasn’t on, which was something, and the mild weather meant that the apartment wasn’t too cold. The fact that Tate could joke about his situation, even to himself, suggested that either he was braver than he thought, which seemed unlikely, or he was going crazy from fear, which was more probable.

The man from the bar sat in a chair beside Tate, flicking his butterfly knife open and closed, each snick of the blade making Tate wince at the further pain that it promised. The cut on his neck had stopped bleeding, but the sight of his shirt stained red made him queasy, and the smell of nicotine at close quarters had become so strong that it felt as though his nose and tongue were burning.

And the intruder terrified him. It wasn’t just the knife in his hand, although that was bad enough. The man conveyed a sense of implacable malice, a desire to inflict hurt that was beyond reason. Tate recalled an evening in a club in El Paso at which he’d been introduced by a mutual friend to some men who claimed to be fans of his show, nondescript figures with sunburned skin and the glassy eyes of dead animals who were either on their way to, or coming back from, the conflict in Afghanistan. As the night wore on, and more alcohol was consumed, Tate worked up enough courage to ask them what it was they did, exactly, and was informed that they specialized in the interrogation of prisoners: they waterboarded, and starved, and froze, and tormented, but they made one thing clear to him: there was a purpose, an end to what they did. They did not torture for the pleasure of it, but to extract information, and once the information was extracted, the torture stopped.

Most of the time.

‘We’re not like the other guys, the bad guys,’ said one, who told Tate that his name was Evan. ‘We have a set goal, which is the acquisition of information. Once we’re certain that this been achieved, our work is done. You want to hear what’s really terrifying? Being tortured by someone who has no interest in what you know, someone for whom torture is an end in itself, so that no matter what you tell him, or who you betray, there’s no hope that the pain will stop, not unless he decides to let you die, and he doesn’t want to do that; not because he’s a sadist, although that’s probably part of it, but out of professional pride, like a juggler trying to keep the balls in the air for as long as he can. It’s a test of skill: the louder and longer you scream, the greater the vindication of his abilities.’

Tate wondered if here, in his own apartment, he was now looking at just such an individual. His suit was wrinkled and stained, the collar of his shirt as yellowed as his fingers, his hair slick with grease. There was no military bearing to this man, no sense of someone who had been trained to do harm.

But this man was also a zealot. Tate had met enough of them in his time to recognize one when he saw him. In his eyes burned a fierce light, the fire of righteousness. Whatever this man did, or was capable of doing, he would not view as immoral, or an offense against God or humanity. He would hurt, or kill, because he believed that he had the right to do so.

Tate’s only hope lay in the man’s use of a single word: perhaps.

Time, perhaps, to die.

Or, perhaps, to live.

‘What do you want?’ asked Tate, for what must have been the third or fourth time. ‘Please, just tell me what you want.’

He felt and heard the sob catch in his throat. He was getting tired of posing the question, just as he had tired of seeking the man’s name. Each time he asked a question the intruder just gave the blade a double flick in reply, as if to say ‘Who I am doesn’t matter, and what I want is to cut.’ This time, though, Tate received an answer.

‘I want to know how much you got for your soul.’

His teeth were yellow, and his tongue was stained the dirty white of sour milk.

‘My soul?’

Snick went the blade. Snick-snick.

‘You do believe that you have a soul, don’t you? You have faith? After all, you speak of it on your radio show. You talk about God a lot, and you speak of Christians as though you know the inner workings of each and every one. You seem very certain about what is right and what is wrong. So what I want to know is, how can a man who has sold his soul speak of his God without gagging on the words? What did they offer you? What did you get in return?’

Tate tried to calm himself, still clinging to the precious perhaps. What answer was this man seeking? What answer would keep Tate alive?

And suddenly the intruder was upon him, even as Tate tried to kick out and keep him at a distance. The knife was back at his throat, and this time the snick was followed by the drawing of more blood from behind his right ear.

‘Don’t calculate. Don’t think. Just answer.’

Tate closed his eyes.

‘I got success. I got syndication. I got money, and influence. I was a nobody, and they made me somebody.’

‘Who? Who made you this somebody?’

‘I don’t know their names.’

‘Not true.’

Snick! Another cut, except this one was lower, slicing through his earlobe. Tate shrieked.

‘I don’t know! I swear to you I don’t know. They just told me that the Backers liked what I did. That’s what they call them: the Backers. I’ve never met them, and I’ve had no contact with them, only with the people who represent them.’

Still he tried to keep back the names. He was scared of this man, scared near to death, but he was more frightened of Darina Flores and the desolation he had experienced as she spoke of all that would follow if he crossed those who were so anxious for him to succeed. But now it was the intruder who was whispering. He held Tate’s face in his hand as he spoke, and breathed a fug of fumes and filth and rotting cells into his face.

‘I am the Collector,’ he said. ‘I send souls back to their creator. Your life, and your soul – wherever it may lie – hang in the balance. A feather will be enough to shift the scales against you, and a lie is the weight of a feather. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ said Tate. The manner in which this man spoke left no room for misunderstanding.

‘So tell me about Barbara Kelly.’

Tate knew then that there was no point in lying, no point in holding anything back. If the man knew about Kelly, then how much else did he know? Tate didn’t want to risk another cut, maybe a fatal one, by being caught out in a lie, and so he told the Collector everything, from his first meeting with Kelly, through the introduction of Becky Phipps and the destruction of the vocation and life of George Keys, right up to the meeting earlier that day concerning the fall in his ratings. He sniveled and wheedled, and engaged in the kind of shameless self-justification that he believed himself to be duty bound to shoot down when his opponents tried to rely on it.

And as he spoke he felt as if he were engaged in a process of confession, even though confession was for Catholics, and they were barely above Muslims, Jews and atheists on the list of folk for whom he reserved a particular hatred. He was listing his crimes. Taken individually they seemed inconsequential, but when recited as a litany they seemed to assume an unstoppable momentum of guilt; or was he merely reflecting the feelings of the man seated opposite him, for although his interrogator’s expression never varied – rather it seemed to grow gentler and more encouraging as Tate’s lanced conscience spewed out its poison, rewarding him for his honesty with something that might have been mistaken for compassion – there was no escaping the knowledge that Tate’s soul was still being weighed against a feather on the Collector’s scales, and found wanting.

When he was done, Tate sat back against the wall, and hung his head. His earlobe ached, and his mouth tasted of salt and sour things. For a time there was only silence in the dim room. Even the sound of the traffic outside had faded, and Tate had a sense of the boundlessness of the universe, of stars racing away into the vacuum, colonizing the void, and of himself as a fragment of fragile life, a fading spark from a vital flame.

‘What are you going to do?’ he finally asked, when his own insignificance threatened to unman him.

A match flared, and another cigarette was lit. Tate smelled the vileness of the smoke, the odor that had first alerted him to the intruder’s presence, except now the word ‘intruder’ had become inappropriate. Somehow, this man belonged: here, in this room, in this apartment, on this street, in this city, in this world, in this great dark universe of dying light and distant, spiraling galaxies, while Davis Tate was merely a temporary fault in nature, a stain upon the system, like a mayfly born with one wing.

‘Would you like a cigarette?’ asked the Collector.

‘No.’

‘If you’re concerned about ruining your health, or becoming addicted, I wouldn’t worry.’

Tate tried not to think about what that might mean.

‘I asked you what you’re planning to do with me,’ said Tate.

‘I heard you. I’ve been thinking about the question. Barbara Kelly is dead, so her fate is already decided.’

‘Did you kill her?’

‘No, but I would have, given the opportunity.’

‘So who did kill her?’

‘Her own people.’

‘Why?’

‘Because she was turning against them. She was sick, and frightened, and she feared for her soul, so she set out to make recompense for her sins. By betraying their secrets, she believed that she might save herself. But then there is Becky Phipps . . .’

On the table beside the man lay Tate’s cell phone. With the cigarette clamped between his teeth, the Collector flicked through the list of contacts until he found the name that he wanted. A forefinger pressed itself against the screen, and the number was dialed. Tate heard it ringing. The call was answered on the third ring, and Tate knew from the echo that the recipient’s phone was on speaker.

‘Davis,’ said Becky Phipps’s voice. She didn’t sound particularly pleased to be hearing from him, Tate thought. Bitch. You think you have problems. ‘This isn’t a good time. Can I call you back later, or tomorrow?’

The stranger indicated to Tate that he should speak. He swallowed. He didn’t know what he was supposed to say. In the end, he settled for honesty.

‘It’s not such a good time for me either, Becky. Something’s come up.’

‘What now?’

Tate looked at the Collector, who nodded his assent.

‘There’s a man here with me, in my apartment. I think he wants to talk to you.’

The stranger took a long drag on his cigarette before leaning close to the phone.

‘Hello, Ms Phipps,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we’ve had the pleasure, although I’m sure that we will in the near future.’

Phipps took a couple of seconds to reply. When she did, her tone had changed. She was cautious, and her voice trembled slightly. It caused Tate to wonder if she knew the identity of the caller already, despite her next question.

‘Who is this?’ she said.

The man leaned yet closer to the phone, so that his lips were almost touching it. He frowned, and his nostrils twitched.

‘Is there someone there with you, Ms Phipps?’

‘I asked you a question,’ said Phipps, and her voice became even less steady, belying her attempt at bravado. ‘Who are you?’

‘A collector,’ came the reply. ‘The Collector.’

‘A collector of what?’

‘Debts. Regrets. Souls. You’re stalling for time, Ms Phipps. You know who I am, and what I am.’

There was a pause, and Tate knew that the Collector was right: there was someone else with Becky. He could picture her looking to the other for guidance.

‘That was you in the bar, wasn’t it?’ she said. ‘Davis was right to be worried. I thought he was just jittery, but it seems that he was more sensitive than I gave him credit for.’

Tate didn’t like his producer’s use of the past tense in association with his name.

‘He is remarkably sensitive in more ways than one,’ said the Collector. ‘He screamed very loudly when I sliced through his earlobe. Thankfully, these old brownstones have thick walls. Will you scream when I come for you, Ms Phipps? It won’t matter either way, so don’t be too concerned. I always bring earplugs. And I really do believe that there is someone with you. That’s my particular sensitivity. Who is it? One of your ‘‘Backers’’, perhaps? Put him on. Let him speak. It is a “he”, isn’t it? I can almost see the price tag on his suit. Be sure, whoever you are, that I’ll find you too, and your associates. I’ve learned a great deal about you already.’

There was an intake of breath before Phipps started shouting.

‘What did you tell him, Davis? What did you tell him about us? You keep your mouth shut. You keep it shut or I swear, I swear we’ll put you—’

The Collector killed the connection.

‘That was all very amusing,’ he said.

‘You warned her,’ said Tate. ‘She knows you’re coming now. Why would you do that?’

‘Because in her fear she’ll draw out the others, and then I can take them too. And if they choose to remain hidden, well, she’ll give me their names when I find her.’

‘But how will you do that? Won’t she hide from you? Won’t she be protected?’

‘I find your concern for her very touching,’ said the Collector. ‘One would almost think that you liked her, rather than merely being obligated to her. You really should have examined that contract more closely, you know. It made clear your obligations to them, while leaving them with none to you. It is in the nature of their bargains to do so.’

‘I don’t read Latin,’ said Tate glumly.

‘Very remiss of you. It’s the lingua franca of the law. What kind of fool signs a contract written in a language that he can’t read?’

‘They were very persuasive. They said it was a one-off deal. They told me that if I turned it down, there were others who would accept.’

‘There are always others who will accept.’

‘They told me I’d have my own TV show, that I’d get to publish books. I wouldn’t even have to write them, just put my name to them.’

‘And how did that work out?’ the Collector asked, and he seemed almost sympathetic.

‘Not so good,’ admitted Tate. ‘They said I had a face made for radio. You know, like Rush Limbaugh.’

The Collector patted him on the shoulder. The small gesture of humanity increased Tate’s hope that the word ‘perhaps’ had become less a piece of driftwood to which he might cling than a life boat to keep him safe from the cold waters that currently lapped at his chin.

‘Your friend Becky has a bolt-hole in New Jersey. That’s where she’ll run to, and that’s where I’ll find her.’

‘She’s not my friend. She’s my producer.’

‘It’s an interesting distinction. Do you have any friends?’

Tate thought about the question. ‘Not many,’ he admitted.

‘I suppose that it’s difficult to keep them in your line of work.’

‘Why, because I’m so busy?’

‘No, because you’re so unpleasant.’

Tate conceded the point.

‘So,’ said the Collector. ‘What should I do with you now?’

‘You could let me go,’ said Tate. ‘I’ve told you all that I know.’

‘You’ll call the police.’

‘No’, said Tate, ‘I won’t.’

‘How can I be sure?’

‘Because I know that you’ll come back for me if I do.’

The Collector appeared impressed with his reasoning. ‘You may be smarter than I thought,’ he said.

‘I get that a lot,’ said Tate. ‘There’s something more that I can give you, to convince you to let me go.’

‘What would that be?’

‘They’re going to abduct a girl,’ said Tate. ‘Her name is Penny Moss. They’ll blame whatever happens to her on some raghead.’

‘I know. I heard you discussing it.’

‘You were right at the other end of the bar.’

‘I have very keen hearing. Oh, and I placed a cheap transmitting device on top of your booth as I passed.’

Tate sighed. ‘Will they hurt the girl?’

‘There is no girl.’

‘What?’

‘It was a test to see how you’d respond. After what happened with Barbara Kelly, they’re worried. Repentance is contagious. They’ll administer many such tests in the days and weeks to come. I think they probably figured that they were safe with you, though. After all, you never displayed any signs of being principled before. You were hardly likely to start now.

‘The pressing question remains, Mr Tate, what is to be your fate? You’ve been a bad man: you’re a corruptor, a proselytizer for ignorance and intolerance. You thrive on fear, and finding easy enemies for the weak and bitter to hate. You fan the flames, but plead innocence when the ugliness of the consequences becomes apparent. The world is a poorer, more benighted place for your presence in it.’

The Collector stood. From beneath his coat he removed a gun, an old .38 Special, its grips worn, its metal dulled, yet still handsomely lethal. Tate opened his mouth to shout, to scream, but no sound emerged. He tried to worm his way into the corner, covering his face with his arm as though it might shield him from what was to come.

‘You’re panicking, Mr Tate,’ said the Collector. ‘You haven’t let me finish. Hear me out.’

Tate tried to calm himself, but his heart was beating and his ear throbbed with renewed vigor, and he welcomed the pain of it because he could still feel it, because he was still alive. He peered over his forearm at the man who held his life in his grasp.

‘Despite all of your manifest failings,’ the Collector continued, ‘I feel reluctant to pass final judgment upon you. You are almost damned, but there is room for doubt: only a little, a scintilla. You do believe in God, don’t you, Mr Tate? What you talk about to your listeners, hypocritical and untruthful though it may be, has some roots in a blasted version of faith?’

Tate nodded sharply, and consciously or unconsciously, joined his hands as if in prayer.

‘Yes. Yes, I do. I believe in the risen Lord Jesus. I was born again in Christ when I was twenty-six.’

‘Hmmmm.’ The Collector made no effort to disguise his doubt. ‘I’ve listened to your show, and I don’t think your Christ would recognize you for one of His own if He spent an hour in your company. But let’s leave it up to Him, as you’re such a believer.’

The Collector ejected all six bullets from the gun into the palm of his right hand before carefully reloading three of the chambers.

‘Ah Jesus, you got to be kidding,’ said Tate.

‘Taking the Lord’s name in vain?’ said the Collector. ‘Are you sure that’s how you want to start off your greatest test before God?’

‘No,’ said Tate. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m sure the deity will put it down to the stressful nature of the situation.’

‘Please,’ said Tate. ‘Not like this. It’s wrong.’

‘Are the odds too generous?’ suggested the Collector. ‘Too ungenerous?’ He looked perturbed. ‘You drive a hard bargain, but if you insist.’

He removed one of the bullets, leaving two rounds in their chambers, and spun the cylinder before pointing the gun at Tate.

‘If your God wills it,’ he said. ‘I say “your” God, because He’s nobody that I recognize.’

The Collector pulled the trigger.

The clicking of the hammer on the empty chamber was so loud that Tate was convinced for a moment he had heard the bullet that was to kill him. His eyes were screwed so tightly closed that he had to concentrate just to force them open again. When he did so, the Collector was looking with a puzzled expression at the gun in his hand.

‘Strange,’ he said.

Tate closed his eyes again, this time as a prelude to a prayer of gratitude.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Jesus Lord, thank you.’

When he finished, the gun was again pointing at his forehead.

‘No,’ he whispered. ‘You said. You promised.’

‘It always pays to be certain,’ said the Collector, as his finger tightened on the trigger. ‘Sometimes, I find that God’s attention wanders.’

This time, Davis Tate heard no sound, not even God’s breath in the exhalation of the bullet.