Free The Reapers: A Thriller-CP-7 by John Connolly Page A

some scarring just above the collar of the guy’s shirt, like he’d been in a fire once. Thought he saw some at his right wrist as well.”
    “Lot of people get burned.” Louis said the words with a strangeness to his tone. It might almost have been called dispassionate, had there not been the sense that behind it a great depth of feeling lay hidden.
    “But not all of them go on to take someone like Billy Boy with a knife. You think it’s him?”
    “A blade,” said Louis thoughtfully. “They find it in the body?”
    “No. Took it with him when he left.”
    “Wouldn’t want to leave a good knife behind. He was a shooter, but he always did prefer to finish them up close.”
    “If it’s him.”
    “If it’s him,” echoed Louis.
    “Been a long time, if it is.”
    Louis’s right foot beat a slow, steady cadence upon the floor.
    “He suffered. It would have taken time for him to recover, to heal. He’d have changed his appearance again, like he did before. And he wouldn’t come out of hiding for a standard job. Someone must have been real pissed at Billy Boy.”
    “It’s not only about the money, though, right?”
    “No, not if it’s him.”
    “If he’s back, Billy Boy might just be the start. There’s the small matter of you trying to burn him alive.”
    “There is that. He’ll still be hurting, even now, and he won’t be what he was.”
    “He was still good enough to take Billy Boy.”
    “If it’s him.” It sounded like a mantra. Perhaps it was. Louis had always known that Bliss would come back some day. If he had returned, it would be almost a relief. The waiting would be over.
    “It’s because he was so good to begin with. Even with a little shaved off, he’d still be better than most. Better than Billy Boy, that’s for sure.”
    “Billy Boy’s no loss.”
    “No, he ain’t.”
    “But having Bliss back in the world isn’t so good either.”
    “No.”
    “I’d kinda hoped that he was dead.” Much of this had been before Angel’s time, before he and Louis had met, although he and Louis had encountered Billy Boy once, out in California. It was an accidental meeting at a service station, and Louis and Billy Boy had circled each other warily, like wolves before a fight. Angel hadn’t thought much of Billy Boy as a human being then, although he accepted that he might have been prejudiced by what Louis had told him. Of Bliss, he knew only of what he had done to Louis, and what had been done to him in return. Louis had told him of it because he knew that it was not over.
    “He won’t be dead until someone makes him dead, and there’s no money in that,” said Louis.
    “No money, and no percentage.”
    “Unless you knew he had your name on his list.”
    “I don’t believe he sends out notifications.”
    “No, I guess not.”
    Angel tossed back half of his brandy, and began to cough.
    “You sip it, man,” said Louis. “It ain’t Alka-Seltzer.”
    “A beer would have been better.”
    “You have no class.”
    “Only by association.”
    Louis considered for a moment.
    “Well,” he said, “there is that…”

    The apartment shared by the two men was not as those who knew the couple only casually might have imagined it to be, given their disparate dress codes, attitudes to life, and general demeanor. It occupied the top two floors of a three-story over-basement building on the farthest reaches of the Upper West Side, where the gap between rich and poor began to narrow significantly. The apartment was scrupulously tidy. Although they shared a bedroom, each had his own room in which to retire and in which to pursue his particular interests, and while Angel’s room bore the unmistakable signs of one whose skill lay in the picking of locks and the undermining of security systems—shelves of manuals, assorted tools, a workbench covered with both electrical and mechanical components—there was an order to it that would have been apparent to any craftsman. Louis’s room was