‘Can I help you with anything else today, Agent Ross?’
‘No,’ said Ross. ‘I think that’ll be all. I appreciate your time. And the cookie was very good. My compliments to the baker.’
‘My wife,’ said Morland.
‘You’re a fortunate man,’ said Ross.
He stood and buttoned his coat before heading out. There was still a chill in the air.
‘And this is quite a town. Quite a town indeed.’
Thirty minutes later, Morland received a call from Pastor Warraner.
Ross had been out at the church.
49
At first Angel and Louis believed the missive from the Collector to be little more than a taunt. It was delivered by a bike messenger, and consisted of a padded envelope containing a single final bearclaw from the necklace that had once belonged to their friend, the late Jackie Garner, and a business card from the Lexington Candy Shop and Luncheonette on Lexington, the old Soda-Candy store that had been in operation at that location since 1925. It was only when Louis turned over the card and saw a date – that same day – and a time – 11 AM – written on the back that they understood this might be different, although whether it would prove to be an olive branch or a trap they were not certain.
Even the Collector’s choice of a location for the meeting was not without resonance: the Lexington Candy Shop was where Gabriel, Louis’s late master, would hold his meetings with clients, and sometimes with the operatives for whom he acted as a middleman, Louis among them. Perhaps, thought Louis, the distance between Cambion and Gabriel was not as great as Louis might have liked to believe. Gabriel was merely Cambion with a more highly developed moral sense, but that wasn’t saying a whole lot. There were things breeding in petri dishes with a more highly developed moral sense than Cambion. By extension, the distance between Louis and Cambion might well have been significantly less than it was comfortable to imagine. The difference was that Louis had changed while Cambion had not. Cambion did not have a man like Angel by his side, but then a man like Angel would never have allied himself to one such as Cambion to begin with. It made Louis wonder if Angel had seen the possibility of redemption in Louis long before Louis himself had recognized it. Louis found this simultaneously flattering and slightly worrying.
The Collector’s decision to nominate the Lexington Candy Shop as the venue for their meeting was his way of telling Louis that the Collector knew all he needed to know about Louis and his past. It added another layer of peculiarity to the Collector’s invitation. This was not the action of a man laying a trap, but of a man willingly walking into one.
The only other customers at the diner when Angel and Louis entered were two male Japanese tourists excitedly taking photographs of the interior, with its gas-fired coffee urns and ancient signage. The Collector sat at the back of the diner, near the door marked no admittance. staff only. His hands lay fat on the table before him, resting on either side of a coffee cup. He was dressed as he nearly always was, in a long dark coat worn over dark pants, a dark jacket and a tieless shirt that had once been white but now, like his nicotine-stained fingertips, had more than a hint of yellow about it. His hair was slicked back from his forehead and hung over the collar of his shirt, adding touches of grease to the yellow. He was, thought Angel, even more cadaverous than when last they’d met. Being hunted will do that to a man.
Once Louis and Angel were inside, a middle-aged woman moved from behind the counter, locked the door and turned the sign to closed. She then unhurriedly poured two cups of coffee and left through the private staff door without looking at them or the man who sat waiting for them, stinking of cigarette smoke.
The two Japanese tourists laid down their cameras and turned to face the Collector. The younger of the men signaled almost imperceptibly to a pair of his countrymen watching from the southeastern corner of Lexington and 83rd. One of them now crossed the street to cover the front of the store while the other watched the side.
‘You think I didn’t notice them?’ said the Collector. ‘I spotted them before they were even aware of my presence.’
Louis sat at the table facing, but to the right of, the Collector, and Angel took a similar position to the Collector’s left, forming a kind of lethal triangle. By the time they were seated the guns were in their hands, visible to the Collector but not to anyone glancing in casually from the street.
‘We’ve been looking for you,’ said Louis.
‘I’m aware of that. You must be running out of houses to burn down.’
‘You could have saved us a lot of gas money by just showing up here months ago.’
‘And maybe I could have marked the spot on my forehead for the bullet to enter.’
‘You should have been more careful about your choice of victims.’
Louis reached into his coat pocket with his left hand and withdrew Jackie Garner’s bearclaw necklace. The claws rattled like bones as he fed them through his fingers. In his right he held the final claw, broken from the necklace and included with the Collector’s invitation.
‘I might say the same about your late friend,’ said the Collector.
Slowly, precisely, so as not to cause the men before him to react, he picked up his cup and sipped his coffee.
‘We can, if you choose, play the blame game until the sun starts to set, but none of us is that naïve,’ he said. ‘Mr Garner miscalculated, and someone close to me paid the price. I reacted in anger, and Mr Garner died. You’ll forgive me if I refuse to allow someone like you, a man with the blood of both the innocent and the guilty on his hands, to admonish me about the appropriateness or otherwise of killing. Hypocrisy is a particularly galling vice.’
Angel inclined slightly toward Louis.
‘Are we being lectured by a serial killer?’
‘You know, I do believe we are.’
‘It’s a novel experience.’
‘Yes, it is. I still won’t miss him after we kill him.’
‘No, me neither.’
The Collector’s hands were, once again, resting on the table. He showed no sign of unease. It might have been that he was not aware of how close he was to death, or he simply might not have cared.
‘I hear that your friend, the detective, is dying,’ he said.
‘Or still living,’ said Angel. ‘It’s a matter of perspective.’
‘He is an unusual man. I don’t claim to understand him, but I would prefer it if he survived. The world is more colorful for his presence. He draws evil to him like moths to light. It makes the practitioners easier to dispose of.’
‘You come here to deliver a get well soon wish?’ said Louis. ‘We’ll be sure to pass it on. And if he does die, well, you may just be in a position to express your regrets to him personally.’
The Collector stared out the window at the two Japanese men, then took in the second pair in the diner.
‘Where do you find these people?’ he asked.
‘We attract them,’ said Louis. ‘Like moths to light,’ he added, appropriating the Collector’s metaphor for himself.
‘Is that what you are now? The force of light?’
‘In the absence of another.’
‘Yes, I suspect yours is only reflected light,’ said the Collector. ‘You’re looking for the ones who shot him. I can help you.’
‘How?’
‘I can give you their names. I can tell you where to find them.’
‘And why would you do that?’
‘To cut a deal. Eldritch is ill. He needs rest and time to recuperate. The strain of the hunt is telling on him. As for me, it’s interfering with my work. While I try to stay one step ahead of you, vicious men and women go unpunished. So I will give you the names, and as part of the bargain you will abandon the hunt. You must be tiring of it as much as I, and you know that your Mr Garner did wrong. If I had not killed him, he would be spending the rest of his days in a cell. In a way, I did him a favor. He would not have lasted long in prison. He was not as strong as we are.’