The Wrath of Angels

  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 e
x-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 fucked 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 fucking 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 fuck 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 Adam
s, 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.