The Wrath of Angels (35 page)

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 Adams, 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.

‘Better not let them hear you say that. They’ll kick your ass.’

‘They can barely lift their legs,’ said Ray. ‘It wasn’t for the poles, they’d fall over.’

This time the bartender scowled. ‘You want another drink, or what?’

‘Not unless it’s free,’ said Ray.

‘Then get your ass out of here.’

‘My pleasure,’ said Ray. ‘And tell your sisters to find another job.’

It turned out that the Mitsubishi ran pretty good, better than Ray had anticipated. It got him home without any problems, and he spent the weekend working on it, clearing the worst of the crap out of the engine and getting the smell out of the upholstery. He was all set to help Erik move the weed when he learned that Erik had been arrested by the Mounties when he was five miles shy of the border, and he and the weed were now likely to be staying in Canada for the foreseeable future.

So Ray picked up some bar work, and moved some stolen goods, and managed to keep up his payments to Perry Reed for four months, always paying in person and in cash, before he started to fall behind. When the calls began coming in from Reed’s people he tried to ignore them, but when they started getting insistent he decided that continuing to ignore them was inadvisable if he wanted to remain in the state of Maine with his limbs intact. He called the lot and asked to speak to Reed, and the big man duly came on the line, and they discussed the matter like gentlemen. Reed said he would find a way to make the loan more affordable for Ray, although it might mean spreading out the payments over two or three more years. Reed told him that he’d have new loan papers drawn up, and Ray could just come by and sign them so everything was above board. Figuring that he had nothing to lose, Ray drove up to the lot, parked outside the main showroom, and headed in to add his initials to whatever needed to be signed. As he took a seat to wait for Reed, a guy in overalls told him that he had to move the car as they were expecting a new consignment of vehicles, and Ray had tossed him the keys without thinking.

That was the last Ray saw of his car. It had just been repossessed.

When he asked to see Perry Reed, he was told that Mr Reed wasn’t around. When he started to get loud, four mechanics dumped him on the sidewalk. Ray’s mistake was to believe that Perry Reed was in the used car business, but he wasn’t. Perry Reed was in the finance business, and the more defaults there were, the better his business was. He could simply sell the same car over again at the same extortionate rates to people who needed a car and couldn’t convince anyone else to sell them one.

It was at that point that Ray Wray decided he was going to burn Perry Reed’s lot to the ground, along with his titty bar, but then he got sidetracked by the promise of a job in New York that never materialized, and he ate a bad Korean meal, and copped the city bullet, and by the time he got around to taking care of Perry Reed someone else had done it for him.

Which was good, as it saved Ray the trouble of planning and committing a major act of arson, and bad, because it denied Ray the pleasure of planning and committing a major act of arson.

The diner’s door opened and Ray’s buddy Joe Dahl strolled in, ordered a coffee, and joined Ray at his table. Joe Dahl was a big guy in his forties, which was how he got away with wearing a Yankees cap in Maine. You needed to be big to wear a Yankees cap this far north without someone taking it from your head, and maybe trying to take your head from your shoulders along with it. Dahl claimed that he wore the cap in memory of his late mother, who came from Staten Island, but Ray knew that was bullshit. Dahl wore the cap because he was ornery and peculiar, and because he lived for those times when someone tried to knock it from his head.

‘You see this shit?’ asked Ray.

‘Yeah, I saw it,’ said Joe.

‘I’d like to shake the hand of the guy that did it. First piece of good news I’ve had all week.’

‘I got some more,’ said Joe, as his coffee arrived. ‘I found you a job.’

‘Yeah? What is it?’

‘Guide work.’

‘Hunting?’

Joe looked away. He seemed uneasy. Scared, even.

‘Kind of. We’re going to look for something in the North Woods.’

‘Something? What kind of something.’

‘I think it’s an airplane . . .’

I
made one small detour before I headed north to Maine: I drove into Boston and found the headquarters of Pryor Investments in Beacon Hill. It occupied a relatively modest-looking, but still absurdly expensive, brownstone not far from the Charles/MGH T-station. There was no sign of activity, and I saw nobody pass in or out of the building while I was parked nearby. So far, Epstein had been unable to find out anything of note about the company, apart from one small detail: the name of Pryor Investments was on documents relating to the formation of a 501(c) body called the American League for Equality and Freedom, and one Davis Tate, now deceased, had been the principal benefactor of the funds channeled through the organization. It was a small thread, but a thread nonetheless. Still, now wasn’t the time to pull it and see what would unravel. I drove away from Beacon Hill, and it was only as I passed the Pryor building that I saw the camera systems discreetly mounted in the shadows on the wall, their watchful glass eyes taking in the details of the street and sidewalks surrounding it.

The meeting with Eldritch had not been particularly satisfying, but then meetings with lawyers rarely were. I had no great desire to renew acquaintance with the man who sometimes called himself Kushiel, but was mostly referred to as the Collector. Neither did I want him running loose, indulging his taste for divine justice, or his own interpretation of it, by killing anyone who appeared on his copy of the list, particularly if I was among them. I did not trust the Collector enough to imagine that, if he found my behavior wanting, he would not consider consigning me to his personal retinue of the damned. We had been uneasy allies in the past, but I had no illusions about him: I believed that he, like Epstein, had concerns about my nature, and the Collector tended to err on the side of caution in such matters. He surgically excised polluted tissue.

But there was no reason to believe that the Collector knew about the plane in the Great North Woods, and it was important to secure it before any hint of its existence reached him. Better that Epstein should have the list that Harlan Vetters had seen than have it fall into the hands of the Collector, for Epstein was essentially a good man. Yet even about Epstein I had doubts: I didn’t know enough about those who worked alongside him, beyond the fact that the younger ones liked waving guns around, to be certain of their capacity for self-restraint. Epstein appeared to be a moderating influence, but he kept much about himself hidden.

It seemed obvious to say it, but knowing the identity of your enemies was the first step toward defeating them. With their names in his possession, Epstein could begin the task of monitoring their activities, and undermining them when necessary. He would also learn if there were traitors among those whom he had previously trusted, although the list would inevitably be incomplete, dating as it did only to some period prior to the crash of the plane. Who knew how many others had been added to it since then? Nevertheless, obtaining it would be a start. But was there not the possibility that, in some cases, Epstein and his people might choose to act as the Collector had done, and remove from play those on the list who were deemed most threatening?

Those were my thoughts as I drove up to Scarborough, an alternative music station playing in the background on Sirius radio: some Camper Van Beethoven, a double-play of the Minutemen which lasted about three hundred seconds in total, including the DJ’s intro, and even a little Dream Syndicate, but I felt compelled to run for cover when some bright spark requested Diamanda Galas, and, in a rush of blood to the head, the DJ obliged.

When I was in my early twenties, and getting to know the kind of girls who would ask you back to their place for coffee and mean it, although with the promise of more than coffee at a later date if you didn’t turn out to be a freak, I learned that a surefire way to understand a woman, as with a man, was to flick through her record collection. If she didn’t have one then you could largely give up on her right there, because a woman who didn’t listen to any music at all didn’t have a soul, or anything worthy of the name; if she was loaded up on English alternative music like The Smiths or The Cure, she was probably trying a little too hard to be miserable, but it wasn’t likely to be terminal; if she was a fan of hair metal like Kiss, and Poison, and Mötley Crüe, you were faced with the dilemma of staying with her for a while because she might put out, or ditching her before you were forced to listen to any of her music; but if she had Diamanda Galas on her racks, maybe alongside Nico, Lydia Lunch, and Ute Lemper for the quieter moments, then it was time to make your excuses and leave before she dumped powdered sedatives in your coffee and you woke up chained in a basement with the girl in question standing over you, holding a kitchen knife in one hand, a creepy doll in the other, and screaming the name of some guy you’d never met but apparently resembled in psychic form.

So I ditched the alternative station, switched to the CD player, and listened instead to the only album ever released by Winter Hours, which was more tuneful and less frightening, and put me in a better mood as I drove home.

As I parked outside my house, I saw that I had missed a call from Epstein. I returned it from my office phone. The death of Davis Tate was on Epstein’s mind.

‘Do you believe it was the work of this man, the Collector?’ he asked.

‘When I heard that he was shot, I thought it might have been your people. The Collector usually prefers to work with a blade.’

‘What convinced you otherwise?’

‘It seems that there were cuts on Tate’s body. He’d lost part of an earlobe. Whoever killed him also took his watch but left his wallet untouched. The Collector likes to acquire souvenirs from his victims. In that sense, he’s pretty much your common or garden serial killer. It’s the added self-righteousness that makes him special.’

‘You spoke to the old lawyer?’

‘I did. I got the feeling that Barbara Kelly sent him the same version of the list that you received.’

‘With your name on it?’

‘So it seems. His secretary was very certain that I was going to get whatever was coming to me.’

‘Are you concerned?’

‘A little. I like my throat the way it is, and I don’t need a smile cut in it. But I think the Collector has the same doubts that you had about me. He won’t act until he’s certain.’

‘And in the meantime, he will continue working through the names on that list. He will bring their protectors down upon himself.’

‘I imagine that’s what he’s hoping.’

Epstein’s voice grew muffled for a minute. He had covered the receiver with his hand as he spoke to someone else nearby. When he came back on the line, he sounded excited.

‘I have a theory about that plane,’ he said. ‘The date of the newspaper in the cockpit is close to the date when a Canadian businessman named Arthur Wildon disappeared.’

The name seemed familiar to me, but I couldn’t place him. It was left to Epstein to place it for me.

‘The Wildon twins, Natasha and Elizabeth, eight years old, were kidnapped in 1999,’ he told me. ‘A ransom was demanded, and secretly paid: a simple drop-off on a remote road, the driver instructed not to stop or the girls would be killed. The location of the twins was subsequently communicated by way of a note left by the shore of the Quebec river, its position marked with a rock painted black and white. The note claimed that the girls were being kept at a cabin outside Saint-Sophie, but when the rescue team got to the cabin it was empty, or appeared to be. Five minutes after they arrived, Arthur Wildon received a telephone call. The caller, who was male, gave him a single instruction: “Dig.”

‘And so they dug. The cabin had a dirt floor. The girls had been bound and gagged, then buried alive together in a hole three feet deep. The medical examiner estimated that they had been dead for days, probably killed within hours of their abduction.’

I held the phone away from my ear for a moment, as though its proximity were somehow causing me pain. I recalled closing a trapdoor on a young girl in an underground cell so that her cries would not alert the man who had put her there, and I heard again the terror in her voice as she had begged me not to leave her in the dark. She had been fortunate, though, because she had been found. Most of them were never found, or not alive.