The Wrath of Angels

30





Instead of traveling straight to Portland after arriving in Boston, I stayed at a cheap motel on Route 1 near Saugus and ate a good steak dinner at Frank Giuffrida’s Hilltop Steakhouse. When I was a boy, my father would treat my mother and me to an early dinner at the Hilltop when we were heading up to Maine to see my grandfather each summer, and I always associated it with the beginning of our vacations. We would sit at the same table every time, or as near as we could get to it. There would be a view over Route 1, and my father would order a rib steak as big as his head, with all the trimmings, while my mother tut-tutted good naturedly and fretted about his heart.

Frank had died back in 2004, and an investment firm now owned the Hilltop, but it was still a place where regular folk could go for a decent steak dinner without breaking the bank. I hadn’t been back there in about thirty years, not since my father took his own life. There was too much of him associated with it, but in recent times I had learned more about my father and the reasons for what he had done, and I had reached an accommodation with the past. It meant that places like the Hilltop were no longer tinged with the same sadness, and I was glad that it remained pretty much as I remembered it, with its illuminated sixty-foot Saguaro cactus outside, and its herd of fiberglass cows. I slipped the hostess ten bucks to give me my family’s old table to myself, and ordered the ribeye in memory of my father. The dinner salad was just a little smaller than before, but since the original salad would have fed a small family it meant that there was less to throw away. I drank a glass of wine, and watched the cars go by, and thought about Epstein, and Liat, and an airplane hidden by the woods.

And I thought about the Collector, because one matter had remained untouched upon between Epstein and me, although Louis had raised it before I left with Walter to catch my plane. What Louis suggested was that, if the Collector were in possession of a full or partial list of names, he would almost certainly begin targeting those on it. This begged the question: if my name was on it, would he then also choose to target me? For that reason alone it was necessary to arrange a meeting in Lynn with the lawyer Eldritch, to whom the Collector was linked in ways that I did not fully understand.

I finished dinner, skipped dessert for fear of busting my insides, and headed back to my motel room. I had just turned on the light when my cell phone rang. It was Walter Cole. Davis Tate, the toxic figure on talk radio whose name appeared on the lists, was dead. According to Walter, Tate had been shot in the head, but some knife wounds had been inflicted on him before he died. His wallet, containing his credit cards and 150 dollars in cash, was still in his jacket pocket, but his cell phone was missing and a tan line on his left wrist suggested that his killer might have taken his wristwatch. The theft of the wristwatch, which would later be revealed as a modestly expensive Tudor, puzzled the detectives investigating the killing. Why leave the money but take the watch? I could have told them why, and so could Walter, but we did not.

The man who killed Tate had magpie eyes.

The Collector had just added another trophy to his cabinet of curiosities.

Early the next morning, I drove to Lynn.

If the firm of Eldritch & Associates had been raking in big bucks in recent years, it hadn’t seen fit to pump them back into its offices. It continued to occupy the top two floors of a bleak edifice too dull to qualify as an eyesore but still sufficiently ugly to make the neighboring businesses look as though they would have upped foundations and moved if they could, and it wasn’t as if they were housed in architectural gems either. The unprepossessing exterior of Tulley’s bar, a prime example of fortress design, stood to the right of Eldritch’s building. On its left, a telecom store previously run by, and for, Cambodians had been replaced by a telecom store run by, and for, Pakistanis. Short of putting up a sign inviting the American wing of Al Qaeda in for coffee and cookies, it couldn’t have advertised itself more as a target for federal surveillance in the current mood of distrust between the US and Pakistan. Otherwise, this stretch of Lynn was still the same accumulation of gray-green condos, nail salons, and ethnic restaurants that I remembered from previous visits.

The gold lettering on Eldritch’s upper windows announcing the presence of a lawyer inside was more flaked and faded than before, a graphic representation of Eldritch’s own slow physical decline. The first floor of the building remained unoccupied, but its windows were now barred and the filthy old glass had been replaced with dark, semi-reflecting panes. I tapped on one with a finger as I passed. It was strong and thick.

The street-level door no longer opened to the touch. Beside it, a simple intercom panel was set into the wall. There was no visible camera, but I was willing to bet good money that one or more sat behind the dark glass of that first-floor window. As if to confirm my suspicions, the door buzzed before I even had a chance to press the intercom button. Inside, the building remained reassuringly musty, every intake of breath bringing with it the smell of old carpets, impacted dust, cigarette smoke, and slowly peeling wallpaper. The paintwork was a sickly yellow, and marked on the right of the narrow stairway by decades of traffic. On the first landing was a door marked Bathroom, and looking down on it, from the second floor, was a frosted glass door with the firm’s name written in the same style of gold lettering that adorned the street-facing windows.

It was almost a relief to open the door and discover that the wooden counter remained in place, and behind it the big wooden desk, and behind that the heavily kohled and otherwise cosmeticized presence of Eldritch’s secretary, a woman who, if she had a last name, preferred not to share it with strangers, and, if she had a first name, probably never allowed it to be used, even with intimates, assuming anyone was foolhardy or lonely enough to attempt some form of intimacy with her to begin with. Her hair was currently dyed a gothic black, and rose from her head like a pile of coal slack. She had a cigarette burning in the ashtray beside her, smoking away in a pond of butts, and all around her rose teetering piles of paper. She added to the nearest ones as I entered, yanking two sheets from her old green electric typewriter and carefully separating the carbon copy from the original before placing each on the top of its respective tower. She then picked up the cigarette, took a long drag on it, and squinted at me through the smoke. If the memo about the illegality of smoking in the workplace had reached her, I guess she’d burned it.

‘Good to see you again,’ I said.

‘Is it?’

‘Well, you know, it’s always nice to see a friendly face.’

‘Is it?’ she repeated.

‘Maybe not,’ I conceded.

‘Yeah.’

There was an uncomfortable silence, but it was still less uncomfortable than actually trying to conduct a conversation. She continued to puff on her cigarette and view me through the fug of the smoke. She produced a lot of smoke, so there was a limit to how much of me she could see through it. I suspected that she liked it better that way.

‘I’m here to see Mr Eldritch,’ I said, just before I threatened to lose sight of her entirely.

‘You have an appointment?’

‘No.’

‘He doesn’t see people without an appointment. You ought to have called ahead.’

‘I would have, but nobody ever answers the phone.’

‘We’re real busy. You could have left a message.’

‘You don’t have an answering service.’

‘You could have written. You can write, can’t you?’

‘I wasn’t thinking that far ahead, and it’s urgent.’

‘It always is.’ She sighed. ‘Name?’

‘Charlie Parker,’ I said. She knew my name. After all, she’d let me in without the aid of the intercom to identify me.

‘You got some ID?’

‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘I look like a kidder to you?’

‘Not really.’ I handed over my license.

‘It’s the same picture as last time,’ she said.

‘That’s because I’m the same guy.’

‘Yeah.’ She made it sound as though that represented a regrettable lack of developmental ambition on my part. My license was handed back to me. She picked up the receiver on her beige phone and dialed a number.

‘That man is here again,’ she said, even though it had been years since my presence had dampened her day. She listened to the voice on the other end of the line, and put the phone down.

‘Mr Eldritch says you can go up.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Wouldn’t have been my choice,’ she said, and commenced feeding another double sheet of paper into her typewriter, shaking her head and scattering cigarette ash across her desk. ‘Wouldn’t have been my choice at all.’

I headed up to the third floor, where an unmarked door stood closed. I knocked, and a cracked voice told me to come in. Thomas Eldritch rose from behind his desk as I entered, a pale, wrinkled hand extended in greeting. He was dressed, as usual, in a black jacket and pinstripe trousers with a matching vest. The gold chain of a watch extended from a buttonhole on his vest to one of the pockets. The bottom button of the vest remained undone. Eldritch adhered to tradition in his modes of attire as in so many other matters.

‘Mr Parker,’ he said. ‘It is a pleasure, as always.’

I shook his hand, expecting it to crumble to pieces in mine. Shaking hands with him was like grasping quail bones wrapped in rice paper.

His office was less tidy than before, and some of those piles of documents from his secretary’s lair below had begun to colonize it. Names and case numbers were handwritten on the front of every file in glorious copperplate, the quality of the lettering consistent throughout, even as some of the writing itself had faded over time.

‘You seem to accumulate a lot of paper for someone with such a limited client base,’ I said.

Eldritch looked around his office as if seeing it for the first time, or perhaps he was just trying to view it as a stranger might.

‘A slow, consistent trickle that has grown to form a lake of legalese,’ he said. ‘It is the lawyer’s burden. We throw away nothing, and some of our cases drag on for many, many years. Lifetimes, it often seems to me.’

He shook his head sadly, clearly regarding the propensity of individuals to lead long lives as a deliberate attempt to complicate his existence.

‘I suppose a lot of these people are dead by now,’ I said, in an effort to provide some consolation.

Eldritch minutely adjusted the neatly ordered stack of files on his desk, flicking the little finger of his left hand along their spines. The finger was missing a nail. I had not noticed its absence before. I wondered if it had simply fallen out, a further manifestation of Eldritch’s disintegration.

‘Oh yes, very much so,’ said Eldritch. ‘Very dead indeed, and those that are not dead are dying. They are the dead who have not been named, you might say. We are all walking in their ranks, and in time each of us will have a closed file with our name written upon it. There is great pleasure to be had in closing a file, I find. Please, take a seat.’

The visitor’s chair in front of his desk had recently been cleared of paperwork, leaving a clean, rectangular patch in the center of the dust on the leather cushion. It had obviously been some time since anyone had been offered a seat in Eldritch’s office.

‘So,’ said Eldritch, ‘what brings you here, Mr Parker? Do you require me to prepare your will? Do you feel the imminence of your mortality?’

He chuckled at his joke. It was the sound of old coals being raked on a cold, ash-laden fire. I didn’t join in.

‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘but I have a lawyer.’

‘Yes: Ms Price up in South Freeport. You must prove quite a handful for her. After all, you do get up to all sorts of mischief.’

He wrinkled his nose, and blew the last word at me as if it were a kiss. In the right light, and the right mood, he might have resembled an indulgent, avuncular figure, except that it was all a pose. Throughout our exchange, not once had an unsettling steeliness left his eyes, and, for all of his obvious ongoing decrepitude, those eyes remained remarkably clear, and bright, and hostile.

‘Mischief,’ I echoed. ‘The same observation might equally be made about your own client.’

I chose the singular carefully. Whatever impression Eldritch’s practice gave of even the slightest interest in conventional legalities, I believed that it existed for only one true purpose: as a front for the work of the man who occasionally went by the name of Kushiel, but was more commonly known as the Collector. The law firm of Eldritch & Associates targeted putative victims for a serial killer. It was engaged in an ongoing discourse with the damned.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr Parker,’ said Eldritch. ‘I do hope that you’re not implying some knowledge of wrongdoing on our part.’

‘Do you want to search me for a wire?’

‘I doubt that you would be so crude in your methods. I suspect that it simply amuses you to make accusations you can’t possibly prove about suspicions on which you lack the courage to act. If you have questions to ask about the behavior of this “client”, then you should put them to him yourself.’

‘We’ve had words about it, but infrequently,’ I said. ‘He’s a difficult man to find. He tends to hide under rocks, waiting to pounce on the unwary and the unarmed.’

‘Oh, Mr Kushiel usually hides much deeper than that,’ said Eldritch, and any pretense of goodwill vanished. The office was very cold, much cooler than the morning outside, but I could find no sign of an air-conditioner. There wasn’t even a window to be opened, and yet, as Eldritch spoke, his words found form in plumes of condensation.

And just as my use of the singular about his client had been carefully chosen, so too was his use of his client’s name at that particular point in our discussion. I was aware of the derivation of that particular identity.

In demonology, Kushiel was Hell’s jailer.

The first time I had approached Eldritch, his client had been waiting for me outside when I left. If that was going to be the case again, I wanted to know. There was an entente between us, but it was delicate, and far from cordiale. The existence of the list was likely to complicate that relationship further, especially if the Collector had begun to target those on it.

‘Where is he now?’ I asked.

‘Abroad in the world,’ came the reply. ‘There is work to be done.’

‘Is he a fan of talk radio?’

‘Somehow, I doubt it.’

‘Did you hear that Davis Tate died?’

‘I didn’t know the man.’

‘He was a minor cheese on right-wing radio. Someone shot him in the head.’

‘Everyone is a critic nowadays.’

‘Some more than others. Usually a bad review on the Internet suffices.’

‘I don’t see how this concerns me.’

‘I believe that you and, by extension, your client, might have been in contact with a woman named Barbara Kelly. She provided you with a document, a list of names.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

I ignored him, and continued. ‘Your client may be tempted to act upon that information. In fact, I think he may already have started with Davis Tate. You need to tell him to keep his distance from the people on the list.’

‘I don’t “tell” him anything,’ replied Eldritch acidly. ‘You should not presume to do so either. He will do as he sees fit, within, obviously, the limits of the law.’

‘And what law would that be, exactly? I’d like to see where serial killing has been enshrined as a legal act.’

‘You’re baiting me, Mr Parker,’ said Eldritch. ‘It’s uncouth.’

‘Your client is more than uncouth: your client is insane. If he is beginning to take action against the individuals on that list, he’ll alert others on it, and those who control them, to the fact of its existence. We’ll lose them all just to satisfy your client’s bloodlust.’

Eldritch’s limbs stiffened in anger. It brought out the excessive politeness that was his lawyer’s training.

‘I would contest your use of the word “bloodlust”,’ he said, enunciating each syllable slowly and clearly.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘It implies an emotional capacity to which he can’t even aspire, but we can have a semantic discussion about the best definition of his mania on another occasion. For now, all he has to know is that there are larger interests at stake here, and other parties involved.’

Eldritch’s hands gripped his desk as he leaned forward, the scrawny tendons in his neck extending so that he looked like a turtle deprived of its shell.

‘Do you think he cares about some old Jew squatting in New York, fingering his tassels as he prays for his lost son? My client acts. He is an agent of the Divine. There is no sin in his work, for those whom he chooses to confront have forfeited their souls through their own depravity. He is engaged in the great harvest, and he will not, cannot, stop. Files must be closed, Mr Parker. Files must be closed!’

Spittle flecked his lips, and his usually bloodless features had bloomed with an unexpected rush of sanguinity. He seemed to realize that he had overstepped his usual boundaries of decorum, for the tension eased out of his body, and he sank back into his chair, releasing his grip upon his desk. He took a clean white handkerchief from his pocket, patted it against his mouth, and looked with distaste at the marks on the material. It was spotted with red. He caught me staring at it, so he folded it quickly and put it away.

‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘That was uncalled for. I will pass on your message, although I can’t promise that it will do any good. He seeks and finds, seeks and finds.’

‘There’s another risk involved in his actions,’ I said.

‘Which is?’

‘He will force them to act against him, but he’s hard to pin down. You’re much easier to find.’

‘That could almost be interpreted as a threat.’

‘It’s a warning.’

‘To borrow your expression, that’s a matter of semantics. Will there be anything else?’

‘I do have one last question,’ I asked.

‘Go on.’ He did not look at me, but began writing on a yellow legal pad in that elegant copperplate. Already he had dismissed me in his mind. I had forced him to shout. I had seen the blood on the handkerchief. He wanted me gone from his presence.

‘It concerns the list that you were sent.’

‘List, list.’ A drop of blood fell from his lips and exploded upon the paper. He continued writing, so that blood and ink combined. ‘Again, I know of no such list.’

I ignored him.

‘I was wondering if my name was on it.’

The nib of the pen stopped moving, and Eldritch peered up at me like some old, malicious imp.

‘Worried, Mr Parker?’

‘Interested, Mr Eldritch.’

Eldritch pursed his lips.

‘Let us speculate, then, since you seem so convinced of its existence, and my knowledge of it. If my name were on such a list, I might well be worried, for what could one have done to justify one’s place upon it?’

He wagged the bloodied nib of his pen at me.

‘I think that perhaps you will be meeting my client sooner than you anticipate. I’m sure that the two of you will have a great deal to discuss. If I were you, I would begin preparing my defense now.

‘And perhaps,’ he added, as I rose to go, ‘you might like to think again about that will.’

Eldritch’s secretary was standing at her door when I left her boss’s office, looking anxiously up the stairs, alerted by the earlier shouting. Despite her concern, a cigarette still dangled securely from her lips.

‘What did you do to him?’ she asked.

‘I endangered his blood pressure a little, although I was surprised he had enough blood in him to manage it.’

‘He’s an old man.’

‘But not a nice one.’

She waited for me to come down before she started up the stairs to check on her employer.

‘You’ll get what’s coming to you,’ she said, and she practically hissed the threat. ‘You’ll vanish from the face of the earth, and when they search your home for clues, they’ll find something is missing if they look hard enough: a photograph in a frame, or a pair of cufflinks inherited from your father. It will be an item that had meaning for you, a cherished heirloom, a memory enshrined in a possession, and it will never be found again, because he will have added it to his collection, and we will close and burn the file with your name written on it, just as you too will burn.’

‘You first,’ I said. ‘Your dress is smoldering.’

One of her feet was on a higher step than the other, and her dress had formed a neat basket for the cigarette ash that was burning a hole through the fabric. She brushed at it with her hand, but the damage was already done. It was all relative, as the dress had been horrible to begin with.

‘Let’s talk again soon,’ I said. ‘You take care now.’

She whispered some obscenity, but by then I was already heading for the door. The night before, I had taken the precaution of removing my gun from the locked box under the spare tire in my car, and I was now armed. Before I left Eldritch’s building I took off my jacket, and used it to conceal the gun in my right hand. I kept it there as I walked back to my car, making a slow turn in the middle of the street to make sure that there was nobody at my back. Only when I was driving out of Lynn did I begin to feel even remotely secure, but it was a temporary, compromised thing. My meeting with the old lawyer had unnerved me, but the certainty and venom with which his secretary had spoken had given me the confirmation that I was seeking.

The Collector was in possession of the same list as Epstein.

And my name was on it.





31





Grady Vetters lay unconscious on the floor of Teddy Gattle’s living room. The boy had given him a second, stronger dose of sedative after they had finished questioning him, and he would remain out cold for many hours. Darina had closed the drapes and pulled the blinds, and she and the boy had fed themselves from the contents of the refrigerator. Eventually the boy had drifted off to sleep, curled up on the couch with his mouth open and one small fist curled against his chest. One might almost have mistaken him for an innocent.

Darina did not sleep, not yet. Her face hurt, but she made do with swallowing Advil at regular intervals, and watched television with the volume turned down low. Daylight came, but she was not afraid of being discovered. Both Vetters and his friend had confirmed that the house received few visitors during the day, and Vetters’ recent argument with his sister meant that even she would be unlikely to trouble her brother until he framed some apology for his actions.

Darina now knew the story of the airplane in the woods, or as much of it as Harlan Vetters had chosen to share with his son, but she was certain that he had told his daughter more. It was clear from what Vetters had said that his father regarded him as untrustworthy, a disappointment. The old man had placed his faith in the sister, Marielle. She had looked after him in his last illness, and who knows what they had spoken of together over those final weeks and months? Darina had been tempted to confront Marielle Vetters immediately, but she and the boy needed to rest. The pain of her burns had debilitated her, and anyway, it would be easier for them to move around once darkness fell. Her ravaged face would attract attention in daylight, and there were those in this town who might remember her from before, when she was still beautiful.

Careful not to wake the boy, she walked to the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror. Her wounds glistened beneath their layer of ointment, and her damaged eye resembled a drop of milk in a pool of blood. She had loved being beautiful because it was a reminder of her true nature, but she would never be beautiful again, not in this form. She would be scarred forever, even if she consented to grafts. Perhaps she would shed this skin, just as the boy had done, and wander for years before cocooning herself in another body, there to await her emergence.

In time, though, in time. The plane was important. The list had to be secured.

Grady Vetters stirred, and moaned from where he lay beside the cold fireplace. They had only been forced to injure him a little. The sodium thiopental had made him more malleable, but he had still instinctively tried to protect his sister. The boy had been forced to crush the tips of two of Vetters’ fingers with a pair of pliers, and after that he had told them everything.

What he could not tell them, though, was whether his sister had spoken to anyone else about the plane. Grady Vetters had been foolish enough to share the story with Teddy Gattle, and Gattle, believing that he was doing his friend a favor, had made the call to Darina. Apparently, Vetters had been reluctant to contact Darina himself. He had been smart enough to realize that it might draw unwanted attention to himself and his sister. Teddy Gattle, unfortunately, had not been quite so smart, which was why he was now dead. Marielle Vetters, according to both her brother and his late friend, was smarter than both of them, but Grady Vetters admitted to Darina that his sister had recently raised the possibility of seeking some professional advice on their situation. Her brother had been less than supportive, and his sister had not brought up the subject again, but she was strong willed, and Grady Vetters knew that she was more than capable of going behind his back if she believed it was the right thing to do. If she had sought counsel, that made finding the plane all the more urgent.

And there was also the matter of the passenger. If what Harlan Vetters had told his children was true, the passenger had survived the impact, as otherwise his body would have been found handcuffed to his seat. Darina wondered if he had caused the crash by escaping from his cuffs while the plane was in flight. He was certainly capable of it, and strong enough to survive anything but the worst of impacts. She believed that he was still alive. She would have known if he was not, would have sensed his pain as he was wrenched from the world, but there had been no communication with him, no contact. She could not understand why. That mystery, too, could be investigated once the plane was found.

Tonight they would speak with Marielle Vetters, and find out all that she knew. They would bring her brother with them, for Darina had learned that the threat of harm to another was often more effective than the threat of harm to oneself, particularly if the individuals in question were linked by bonds of love and blood. Grady Vetters had made it clear to them that he loved his sister. He had even begun painting a picture for her, a picture that neither of them would see completed.

She went back to the living room, glancing down at Teddy Gattle’s body as she passed it. He was starting to smell. She dragged him into the main bedroom, and closed the door when she was done. There was no point in making their surroundings any more unpleasant than they had to be while they recovered their strength.

She swallowed two more Advil, then took out her cell phone and dialed a number. A machine picked up, and she left a brief message detailing where she was and what she had discovered so far. She followed it with a second call. She didn’t know these woods, and help would be required in finding and securing the plane. The man on the other end of the line didn’t sound pleased to hear from her, but people rarely did when their debts fell due. When she was done she lit a cigarette, and let the images on the television screen wash over her. She waited until the boy woke up before she herself slept, and her dreams were filled with visions of beauty lost, and angels falling from the heavens.

Becky Phipps sat on the floor of the safe house in New Jersey. It was little more than a cabin, and sparsely furnished, although it had a land line. She listened to Darina Flores leave her message, and realized that Darina had not been alerted to the latest threat. She did not know that the Collector had begun to hunt them down.

Unfortunately there was little that Becky could do to rectify that situation. Her jaw was broken, and she had received stab wounds to her back and legs. But she had fought hard, and the Collector was still bleeding profusely from his damaged scalp. Nevertheless, she was dying and he was not. Worse, she had told him most of what he wanted to know. Most, but not all. Her only consolation was that, just as he had moved against them, so they would move against him. The thought might have made her smile, had she still been capable of using her mouth.

‘Darina Flores,’ said the Collector. ‘It’s good to put a voice to a name, and eventually I’ll add her face. I take it that she killed Barbara Kelly? You don’t have to speak. Just nod. Actually, a flicker of your eyelids will do.’

Becky blinked once, slowly.

‘There was a child with her, wasn’t there?’

Becky didn’t blink this time. The Collector knelt before Becky, and showed the blade to her. Either Becky didn’t know about the child, or even the threat of the blade was not enough to make her acknowledge its existence. No matter: he would discover the truth for himself, eventually.

‘And Kelly’s copy of the list, does she have it?’

Again, a blink. Becky was not reluctant to confirm this fact. She wanted to point the Collector toward Darina, because Darina would kill him.

‘So what is on that plane is an older version? Older, but still dangerous to you if it fell into the wrong hands?’

Blink.

‘My hands, for example.’

Blink.

Behind him, Becky saw movement at the window, pale faces pressed against the glass. A gust of wind blew the door open and shapes appeared on the porch. They poured into the house like smoke, these thin, spectral figures.

Hollow Men. She had thought them a myth, even though she had knowledge of matters equally strange. Then again, it was hard for the living to confirm the existence of entities that only the dying could see.

‘Only one thing confuses me, Becky,’ said the Collector. ‘Who was the passenger that Darina mentioned? Who was on that plane? Someone like you? One of the Backers? Should I start trying names?’

Becky managed to shake her head slightly. This, like the child, she would not give him.

‘Never mind,’ said the Collector. ‘I’m sure that it will all become clear in time.’

A look of sorrow crossed his face, and the soulless Hollow Men crowded around him in expectation of another joining their ranks. Tears welled up in Becky’s eyes. She tried to speak, her tongue beating weakly inside her ruined mouth like the flutterings of a trapped moth.

‘Hush, hush, Becky,’ said the Collector. ‘There’s no more to say.’

With the tip of his blade, he lifted the simple gold chain from around her neck. It had been given to her by her mother, and was her favorite item of jewelry. She watched as it was dropped into a pocket of his overcoat.

‘For my collection,’ he said. ‘Just so that you won’t be forgotten.’

The blade came close to her again.

‘You have been found wanting,’ said the Collector. ‘For your sins, I adjudge your life, and your soul, to be forfeit. Goodbye, Becky.’

And slowly, almost tenderly, he cut her throat.





32





Ray Wray was eating breakfast at Marcy’s Diner on Oak Street in Portland. He was also reading a copy of the Portland Press Herald that someone had kindly left on the next table, minus the sports section, which annoyed Ray Wray more than somewhat. It meant that he was forced to make do with the main paper and the local section, and, in general, Ray Wray couldn’t give a damn what happened in Portland. Just because he was a native of the state didn’t mean he had to like its principal city or show any interest in its activities. Ray came from the County, and County folk regarded Portland with suspicion.

Ray did like Marcy’s Diner, though. He liked the food, and the fact that it was comfortable without being kitsch, and played WBLM, the classic rock station. He liked the fact that it opened early and closed early, and only accepted cash. This suited Ray Wray down to the ground as he had a credit history so bad that he sometimes wondered if he was personally responsible for the collapse of the economy. Ray Wray owed more money than Greece, and whatever cash he had was usually in his pocket. He got by, but only just.

This was his first week back in Maine since taking a ‘city bullet’ down in New York: eight months on Rikers Island for felonious assault arising out of a disagreement with a Korean restaurateur who believed that Ray should have complained about the quality of the food on his plate before he’d eaten it all instead of after, and disputed Ray’s right to refuse payment for the meal. There had been some shouting, and a little pushing, and somehow the little Korean lost his balance and banged his head on the corner of a table, and the next thing Ray knew there were Koreans all over him, closely followed by cops and the judiciary of the state of New York. The sentence didn’t bother Ray much – he was flat broke anyway, and had been facing the prospect of living on the streets – but the food really had been terrible in that Korean place, and he’d only eaten it because he was so damn hungry.

Now here he was back in Maine with the hunting season almost over, and he hadn’t picked up any guide work worth talking about. He’d been forced to stay in Portland, where an ex-girlfriend had an apartment off Congress, not to mention a tolerant attitude to Ray Wray. She’d made it clear to him that her tolerance only extended so far, though, and didn’t involve him sharing her bed, or staying in her place beyond the end of November. She worked as a nurse over at Maine Medical so she wasn’t around much, which suited him just fine. There was a reason why she was his ex-girlfriend, and he remembered what it was after only a couple of days in her company.

He couldn’t stand her, was why.

His inability to secure guide work rankled. He was no longer a registered guide, but he knew those woods as well as anyone, and he still had contacts in some of the lodges and hunting stores. He’d spent time in the warden service before his temper and his drinking combined to have him thrown out on his ass, as that combination is wont to do to a man in any walk of life. Ray had learned his lesson: he didn’t drink so much anymore, but it was hard to shake off his history in a state like Maine where everyone knew everyone else, and bad reputations spread like a virus. It didn’t matter that Ray was a changed man, his penchant for socking people who crossed him largely excepted, or that he stuck to beer now, not liquor. Coffee had replaced whiskey as his main vice, so that he was rarely without a to-go cup in his hand, and lived off cheap refills at Starbucks. There was a Starbucks at the corner of Oak and Congress, and Ray planned to head over there and fill up once he was done with breakfast. He’d take a seat while no one was looking, stay there for a while, then go to the counter and claim that this was his second coffee, not his first. Nobody ever contradicted him. Say what you liked about Starbucks, but you couldn’t fault their staff for their manners. Still, Ray didn’t care for those little breakfast sandwiches they sold. For the same price he could get a good meal at Marcy’s, which was why he was sitting there now, flicking through his free copy of the Portland Press Herald while chewing on egg-smeared toast and wondering just what a man had to do to get a decent break in this life.

He was about to toss the paper aside when an article on the front page, below the fold, caught his eye. He had left the front page until last owing to the half-assed way the paper’s previous reader had reassembled it, and because Ray tended toward the view that whatever was in newspapers had already happened, and therefore there wasn’t much point in worrying about what they contained, or getting all het up about the order in which you flicked through the pages, except, of course, that sometimes you ended up reading the second half of articles before the first, which could be confusing if you were dumb. Ray Wray was a lot of things – undisciplined, an addictive personality, borderline autistic in his capacity to absorb and recall information – but dumb wasn’t one of them. He got into trouble because he was too clever, not because he wasn’t clever enough. He was angry at the world because he had never managed to find his place in it, so he lashed out whenever the opportunity arose, and accepted the resulting bruises with equanimity.

He carefully balanced the newspaper against a ketchup bottle and read and reread the front page article, his smile widening as he did so. It was the first piece of good news he’d received in a long time, and he felt that it might presage an upturn in his fortunes.

One Perry Reed, who was facing charges of possession of a class A drug with intent to supply, possession of child pornography, as well as being wanted for questioning in New York in connection with his possible involvement in at least two murders, had been refused bail by a county Superior Court and would remain in custody until his trial began. More to the point, someone had burned Perry’s piece-of-shit auto dealership to the ground, along with one of Perry’s titty bars. This was a cause for celebration.

Ray Wray raised his coffee cup in salute.

Sometimes, the world just upped and f*cked over the right guy.

So this was how Ray Wray come to hate Perry Reed . . .

The car was a piece of shit. Ray knew it, Perry Reed knew it, even the f*cking squirrels collecting nuts in the parkland behind the lot knew it. The ’02 Mitsubishi Gallant looked like it had been used to transport troops in Iraq, it had so much dust in the engine, and it smelled of dog food, but it wasn’t as if automobile salesmen were lining up to offer someone like Ray Wray a credit option. He’d been told that, if he couldn’t get Perry Reed to cut him a deal, he might as well resign himself to being the white guy on the bus for the rest of his life, so he convinced his buddy Erik to drive him up to Perry Reed’s place and see what could be negotiated. Erik had dropped him off at the entrance to the lot and headed on to Montreal, where he was cutting his own deal for some prime weed that Ray planned to help him offload. The downside was that, if Ray couldn’t get Perry Reed to sell him a car, he’d have a long walk home. He would also miss out on a sweet deal with Erik, since pretty much a prerequisite for distributing drugs was the ability to get them from point A to point B, and Ray couldn’t see himself getting far on a bicycle with five pounds of cannabis in the basket. Securing a set of wheels was, therefore, a priority if he wasn’t to live in penury for the foreseeable future.

Perry Reed came out personally to deal with Ray, which might have been flattering if Reed hadn’t been such a nasty fat stocking of shit: brown eyes, brown hair, yellow shirt, brown suit, brown shoes, brown cigar, and a brown nose, just as long as he thought that he might be able sell you something. Ray shook his hand and had to resist the urge to wipe it clean on his jeans. He knew Perry Reed’s reputation: the man would f*ck a keyhole if there wasn’t already a key in it, and it was common knowledge that he had only avoided trial way back on charges of unlawful sexual conduct with a minor because the statute of limitations had been exceeded, hence his nickname of ‘Perry the Pervert’. But even a pervert had his uses, and in desperate times people learned to hold their noses when dealing with lowlifes like Perry Reed.

It turned out that Perry Reed had yet to meet a man who didn’t meet his less-than-strict customer criteria, which could be summarized as having a down payment and a pulse, although for a time it seemed that Ray Wray might be the man who made even Perry the Pervert think twice about cutting a deal. Ray had scraped together $1,200 to put down, but Reed wanted $3,000 up front, and another $399 per month for the next four years. Ray calculated the interest rate at somewhere around twenty percent, which was mob vig, but he needed that car.

So Ray dug around for the emergency money that he’d been holding back and put a further $300 on the table, and Reed adjusted the monthly payment up to $500 a pop over four years, which made Ray’s eyes water, but the deal was struck and Ray drove off the lot in a car that coughed and spluttered and stank but somehow kept moving. Ray figured that with his share of the proceeds from the sale of the weed he could more than cover his payments for the months to come, with enough left over to reinvest with Erik in the wholesale end of the business. He had no intention of stiffing Perry Reed, though. Reed might have looked like a turd squeezed out by a dying dog, but he had a reputation as a man not to be crossed. People who welched on deals with Perry Reed ended up with broken bones, and worse.

As a goodwill gesture, Reed had thrown in free admission to the titty bar next to the lot, which Ray had heard that he owned as well, and a free beer to help make the time pass more pleasurably. Generally speaking, Ray wasn’t a man for titty bars. The last time he’d been in one, which must have been a decade before, he’d found himself sharing bar space with his former geography teacher, and Ray had been depressed for a week after. The 120 Club didn’t exactly promise good times, resembling as it did the kind of pillbox the Germans had defended during the D-Day landings, but a free beer was a free beer, so Ray pulled up at the side of bar, presented his admission ticket to the bored brunette at the door, and headed inside. He tried to ignore the uric stink, the damp carpets, and what he was pretty sure was the odor of stale male seed, but it wasn’t easy. Ray wasn’t a fussy guy, but he thought the 120 Club might be as low as a man could sink without licking up spilled beer from cracks in a floor.

The reason for the club’s name became apparent to Ray as soon as he looked up at the small mirrored stage, 120 being the combined age of the two women who were currently doing their best to make pole dancing as unerotic an activity as possible. Half-a-dozen men were scattered around the place, trying not to catch one another’s eye – or catch anything else, given the standards of hygiene in the place. Ray took a seat at the bar and asked for a Sam Adams, but the bartender told him his voucher was only good for a PBR or a Miller High Life. Ray settled for the PBR, although not happily. He’d never much cared for drinking beer out of cans.

‘Perry give you this?’ the bartender asked, holding the beer voucher between his fingertips like it might be infected.

‘Yeah.’

‘You buy a car from him?’

‘Mitsubishi Gallant.’

‘The oh-two?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Jesus.’ The bartender poured Perry a bourbon from the well, and put the can of PBR beside it. ‘You can have the liquor on me. Go ahead, drown your sorrows.’

Perry did. He knew he’d been screwed, but he didn’t have much choice. He watched the women gyrate, and wondered how often the poles got cleaned. He wouldn’t have touched those poles without a hazmat suit. The bartender came back to him.

‘You want, I could arrange for you to spend some time with one of those ladies in a private booth.’

‘No thanks,’ said Ray. ‘I already got a grandmother.’

The bartender tried to look offended on their part, but couldn’t put his heart into it.

‘Better not let them hear you say that. They’ll kick your ass.’

‘They can barely lift their legs,’ said Ray. ‘It wasn’t for the poles, they’d fall over.’

This time the bartender scowled. ‘You want another drink, or what?’

‘Not unless it’s free,’ said Ray.

‘Then get your ass out of here.’

‘My pleasure,’ said Ray. ‘And tell your sisters to find another job.’

It turned out that the Mitsubishi ran pretty good, better than Ray had anticipated. It got him home without any problems, and he spent the weekend working on it, clearing the worst of the crap out of the engine and getting the smell out of the upholstery. He was all set to help Erik move the weed when he learned that Erik had been arrested by the Mounties when he was five miles shy of the border, and he and the weed were now likely to be staying in Canada for the foreseeable future.

So Ray picked up some bar work, and moved some stolen goods, and managed to keep up his payments to Perry Reed for four months, always paying in person and in cash, before he started to fall behind. When the calls began coming in from Reed’s people he tried to ignore them, but when they started getting insistent he decided that continuing to ignore them was inadvisable if he wanted to remain in the state of Maine with his limbs intact. He called the lot and asked to speak to Reed, and the big man duly came on the line, and they discussed the matter like gentlemen. Reed said he would find a way to make the loan more affordable for Ray, although it might mean spreading out the payments over two or three more years. Reed told him that he’d have new loan papers drawn up, and Ray could just come by and sign them so everything was above board. Figuring that he had nothing to lose, Ray drove up to the lot, parked outside the main showroom, and headed in to add his initials to whatever needed to be signed. As he took a seat to wait for Reed, a guy in overalls told him that he had to move the car as they were expecting a new consignment of vehicles, and Ray had tossed him the keys without thinking.

That was the last Ray saw of his car. It had just been repossessed.

When he asked to see Perry Reed, he was told that Mr Reed wasn’t around. When he started to get loud, four mechanics dumped him on the sidewalk. Ray’s mistake was to believe that Perry Reed was in the used car business, but he wasn’t. Perry Reed was in the finance business, and the more defaults there were, the better his business was. He could simply sell the same car over again at the same extortionate rates to people who needed a car and couldn’t convince anyone else to sell them one.

It was at that point that Ray Wray decided he was going to burn Perry Reed’s lot to the ground, along with his titty bar, but then he got sidetracked by the promise of a job in New York that never materialized, and he ate a bad Korean meal, and copped the city bullet, and by the time he got around to taking care of Perry Reed someone else had done it for him.

Which was good, as it saved Ray the trouble of planning and committing a major act of arson, and bad, because it denied Ray the pleasure of planning and committing a major act of arson.

The diner’s door opened and Ray’s buddy Joe Dahl strolled in, ordered a coffee, and joined Ray at his table. Joe Dahl was a big guy in his forties, which was how he got away with wearing a Yankees cap in Maine. You needed to be big to wear a Yankees cap this far north without someone taking it from your head, and maybe trying to take your head from your shoulders along with it. Dahl claimed that he wore the cap in memory of his late mother, who came from Staten Island, but Ray knew that was bullshit. Dahl wore the cap because he was ornery and peculiar, and because he lived for those times when someone tried to knock it from his head.

‘You see this shit?’ asked Ray.

‘Yeah, I saw it,’ said Joe.

‘I’d like to shake the hand of the guy that did it. First piece of good news I’ve had all week.’

‘I got some more,’ said Joe, as his coffee arrived. ‘I found you a job.’

‘Yeah? What is it?’

‘Guide work.’

‘Hunting?’

Joe looked away. He seemed uneasy. Scared, even.

‘Kind of. We’re going to look for something in the North Woods.’

‘Something? What kind of something.’

‘I think it’s an airplane . . .’