I pulled up a seat. “I know how you feel.”
He got really quiet for a while. This was hitting him worse than me. “Man, it’s been so long. . . . Carl was always there for me. I don’t know if I ever told you, but when I met you guys . . . I was really scared.” He said that as if it were some kind of revelation, and maybe to him it was. “I was all alone. I didn’t know where to go, and you gave me a job, gave me a mission. You know, I never fit in back home.”
I nodded, as if that were a surprise. “Me, either.”
“Okay, this might come as a shock, but I wasn’t as tough when I was a kid. I was kind of a nerd,” he said, like he was admitting something shocking. “I got picked on a lot. I was always the smartest kid, but I was so much younger than everybody else, so I was like a weirdo.”
“You were like Doogie Howser.”
“Except straight. Totally straight,” he corrected me. “Then my mom got remarried, and my stepdad was like this super tough-guy fucking lumberjack or something, and my step-brother was Johnny Football Hero, and he got all the chicks, and there I was, this little scared dork weakling. . . . I could never live up to their standards. I hated them.”
I wondered if this was how some of the genius super-villains from the comic books started out. I just kept nodding.
“So I showed them. I’d be way more bad-ass than they could ever be. It was time to Fear the Reaper, you know what I’m saying? I had skills, man.”
“Two hundred felony counts is pretty damn impressive for a teenager.”
“Well, I wasn’t as clever as I thought I was back then.” Reaper smiled sadly. “I scared the shit out of the government, though! I crashed a bank and turned off all the lights in Boston, just because I could. They wanted to make an example out of kids like me. Mom was heartbroken, and you know what the weirdest thing was? My stepdad, the asshole, he’s the one that helped me the most. He gave me a plane ticket to a place with no extradition and told me it was ‘time to be a man’ . . . that was the nicest thing anybody had ever done for me.”
Shit. If Reaper started crying, I wouldn’t know what to do.
He started crying. “You guys took me in after that. You were my family. Family . . . But now? First Train, now Carl. They were my brothers. We’re all that’s left, and look at me. They almost got me. I’ve never been shot before.” He blinked the tears away. “This shit just got real. Eddie’s going down. Eddie and that fat fucker in the white suit, both. I’m gonna kill them, Lorenzo, I swear to God, I’m gonna kill that fat bastard if it’s the last thing I do. I’m gonna wipe that smile off his fucking face.”
I patted him on the arm. I had a hard time with emotions, but revenge, that I could understand. “That’s the spirit.”
“They’re gonna fear the Reaper,” he vowed.
VALENTINE
Quagmire, Nevada
June 21
1500
The Nevada sun blazed overhead as I hiked up the road from the Greyhound bus station. Quagmire’s bus station wasn’t really a bus station. It was a tobacco shop and party store that the Greyhound bus occasionally stopped at. Hawk knew I was coming, but he didn’t know what time I was getting in. No one was waiting for me.
I thought about calling him. I had a prepaid phone that I’d purchased after I landed in the States. I decided I’d just walk. I was probably being paranoid, but I was very leery about using a cell phone still. It was a good hike to Hawk’s ranch, but I knew the way. I shouldered my duffel bag and started down the road.
I was walking up Main Street in Quagmire when a big Ford pickup, adorned with an NRA and a US Marine Corps window sticker, slowed to a stop next to me. The driver, a crusty old guy wearing a NASCAR hat, rolled down his passenger-side window and got my attention. I immediately tensed up. I was unarmed, save a pocket knife I’d bought at a Wal-Mart. My left hand slid down to my pants pocket, where the knife was tucked away.
“You need a lift, son?” he asked. I had a big green military duffel bag, and my hair was still buzzed short. He probably thought I was a vet coming home. Close enough.
I relaxed some and moved my hand away from my pocket. “If it’s no trouble,” I said, stepping closer to the pickup.
“Where ya headed?”
“You know the Hawkins place? It’s on the north end of town.”
“Oh hell,” the man said, grinning. “I know Hawk. C’mon, get in. Toss your bag in the back. I’ll give you a lift. It’s no trouble.” I thanked the man, threw my heavy bag into the back of his truck, and jumped in.
We rolled past the limits of the town, following a well-worn dirt road. About half a mile down it, we passed through a gate that had been left open, ignoring the NO TRESPASSING signs that were fading in the desert sun. The truck left a cloud of fine dust in its wake as we neared the house at the end of the road.
It was a modest-looking two-story ranch house, very unassuming and unremarkable in appearance, just like its owner. There was more than immediately met the eye.
The old man stopped his truck by a well-used, dusty Dodge turbo diesel pickup. I thanked him and got out. As soon as I grabbed my bag, the old man turned around and headed up the road again, leaving me standing in his dusty wake.
The sun was intense overhead. I squinted even through my sunglasses. I slowly walked toward the house, bag in hand. On the porch, in the shade, Hawk sat in a rocking chair, reading a newspaper and sipping ice water.
“Hawk,” I said, stepping onto the porch. He didn’t get up, but I knew he recognized me. If he hadn’t, I’d have been staring down the barrel of a .44 Magnum before I even got close.
Hawk folded his newspaper and set it aside. “Good to see you, kid,” he said simply. “I was glad to hear from you. I kind of figured you were dead.”
“You were almost right,” I said levelly.
“Where’s Tailor?”
“I don’t know,” I replied truthfully. “He was alive last time I saw him. It’s a long story.”
Hawk nodded and stood up. “C’mon in.” He led the way into his house. It was air-conditioned and mercifully cool inside. I was immediately greeted by a pair of big mutt dogs that wanted to be petted. Their tails wagged back and forth as they sniffed me. I smiled and set my duffel bag down.
Hawk shooed the dogs away and led me to his kitchen. He motioned for me to sit down and went to the refrigerator.
“Want a beer?” he asked.
“No thanks,” I said quietly.
“Ah,” he said thoughtfully. “Didn’t think you would. Here.” Hawk turned around and placed a ice-cold can of Dr. Pepper in front of me. The man knew me well. He then pulled out another chair and sat down, popping open a can of beer. “So, where ya been?”
I didn’t answer at first. I took off my baseball cap and sunglasses. Hawk got a good look at the scars on my face for the first time. He just nodded.
“Start talking, kid.”
I sat in Hawk’s kitchen and told my story for more than half an hour. Where I’d only told Ling a little bit about what had happened, I poured my guts out to Hawk. I knew I could trust this man. I told him everything. Gordon Willis. Project Heartbreaker. Zubara. The fighting, the killing, the loss, all of it.
My voice wavered a little as I recounted the night Sarah died. He sat back in his chair, rubbing his chin when I told him about the man called Lorenzo that had showed up in my room. He raised an eyebrow when I told him about how I’d first encountered him, and nearly captured a woman named Jillian Del Toro, but he didn’t say anything.