The Reapers: A Thriller-CP-7 by John Connolly Read Free Book Online

they didn’t know how to service for themselves. People drove their cars until the wheels came off, and then came to Willie looking for a way to get another three, six, nine months out of them, just until things improved, until there was a little cash to spare. There were cops being shot on the streets, and turf wars, and protection money to be handed over, even if it was paid in kind by carrying out repairs for free, or by not asking questions when someone required a quick spray job on a car that was so hot it ticked. Elmhurst and Jackson Heights became Little Colombia, and Queens was the main entry point for cocaine shipments into the United States, the money laundered through check-cashing businesses and travel agencies. Colombians were dying every day in Willie’s neighborhood. He had even known a couple of them, including Pedro Méndez, who campaigned for the antidrug president Cesar Trujillo and took three in the head, chest, and back for his troubles. Willie had serviced Pedro’s car the week before his death. It was a different city then, almost unrecognizable from the one that existed today.
    But then Queens had always been different. It wasn’t like Brooklyn, or the Bronx. It was disparate. It sprawled. People didn’t write affectionate books about it. It didn’t have a Pete Hamill to mythologize it. “Someplace in Queens”: if Willie had a buck for every time he’d heard someone use that phrase, he’d be a wealthy man. For those who lived outside the borough, everywhere within it was just “someplace in Queens.” To them, Queens was like the ocean: big and unknowable, and if you dropped something into it, it got lost and it stayed lost. And, despite it all, Willie had loved almost every minute of his life there. Then his wife had tried to take it away from him, and even with Arno adding to the fund the money that he had saved there still wasn’t enough to pay her off. To cap it all, the landlord had put the building up for sale, so even if Willie managed to satisfy his old lady’s demands he still wasn’t sure that he would have a business once the premises were sold. He had been left with forty-eight hours to make a decision, forty-eight hours to write off nearly twenty years of effort and commitment (he was thinking of the garage, not the marriage), when a tall black man in an expensive suit and a long black overcoat arrived at the door of the little office in which Willie tried, and usually failed, to keep track of his paperwork, and offered him a way out. The man knocked gently on the glass. Willie looked up and asked what he could do for him. The man closed the door behind him, and something in Willie’s stomach tensed. He might have been a mechanic in the military, but he’d learned how to fire a gun, and he’d had to use it more than once, although as far as he knew he’d never managed to kill anybody with it, mainly because he hadn’t really tried. Mostly, he had just done his best to avoid getting his own head shot off. He wanted to fix things, not break them, didn’t matter if they were jeeps, helicopters, or human beings.
    In turn, he’d been surrounded by other men who were like him, and some who were not, the kind who were willing and able to kill if push came to shove. There were the ones who did so reluctantly, or pragmatically, and there were a couple who were just plain psychotic, who liked what they did and got off on the carnage they wreaked. And then there were those—and he could have counted them on his thumbs—who were naturals, who killed cold-bloodedly and without remorse, who derived satisfaction from the exercise of a skill with which they had been born. They had something quiet and still inside them, something that could not be touched, but Willie often suspected that the thing inside them was hollow, and it contained a raging maelstrom that they had either learned to accommodate or declined to acknowledge, like the great protective frame that houses a nuclear