Read The Reapers: A Thriller-CP-7 for Free Online

glass, watching as they tore him apart methodically with their fists. They had taken him in his cabin near Lake Placid. There was a girl with him. He had asked them not to hurt her. They had bound and gagged her and left her weeping in the bathroom. It was a small mercy that they had not killed her, but no such mercy would be shown to him. He could no longer see properly. One eye had closed itself entirely, never to reopen, not in this world. His lips had split, and he had lost teeth. There were ribs broken: he had no idea how many. The punishment had been methodical, but not sadistic. They had wanted information and, after a time, he had provided it. Then the beating had stopped. Since then, he had remained kneeling on the soft earth, his knees slowly sinking into the ground, presaging the final burial that was to come.
    A van appeared from the direction of the house. It followed a well-worn track to the grave, then stopped. The back doors opened, and he heard the sound of machinery as a ramp was lowered. The kneeling man turned his head. An elderly, hunched figure was being pushed slowly down the ramp in a wheelchair. He was swaddled in blankets like a withered infant, and his head was protected from the evening chill by a red wool hat. His face was almost totally obscured by the oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, fed by a tank mounted on the back of the chair. Only the eyes, brown and milky, were visible. The chair was being pushed by a man in his early forties, who halted when the chair was feet from where the kneeling man waited. The old man removed his mask with trembling fingers.
    “Do you know who I am?” he asked.
    The kneeling man nodded, but the other continued as though he had not given an answer. He pointed a finger at the gravestone.
    “My firstborn, my son,” he said. “You had him killed. Why?”
    “What does it matter?” He struggled to enunciate.
    “It matters to me.”
    “Go to hell.” The effort made him lips begin to bleed again. “I’ve told them all that I know.”
    The old man held the mask to his face and drew a rasping breath before he spoke again.
    “It took me a long time to find you,” he said. “You hid yourself well, you and the others responsible. Cowards, all of you. You thought I’d lose myself in grief, but I did not. I never forgot, never stopped searching. I swore that their blood would be spilt upon his grave.”
    The kneeling man looked away and spat on the ground beneath the stone. “Finish it,” he said. “I don’t care about your grief.”
    The old man raised an emaciated hand. A shadow passed over the kneeling man and two shots were fired into his back. He fell forward onto the grave, and his blood began to seep into the ground. The old man nodded contentedly to himself.
    “It has begun.”
    CHAPTER TWO
    WILLIE BREW STOOD IN the men’s room of Nate’s Tap Joint and stared at himself in the battered mirror above the similarly battered sink. He decided that he didn’t look sixty. In the right light, he could pass for fifty-five. Okay, fifty-six. Unfortunately, he had yet to find that particular light. It certainly wasn’t in Nate’s men’s room, where the light was so bright that taking a leak felt like it was being performed under interrogation. Willie was bald. He had lost most of his hair by the time he was thirty. After that, he’d experimented with various ways of disguising his baldness: combovers, hats, even a wig. He’d gone for an expensive one, the kind made from realistic-looking fibers. He figured he’d picked the wrong color or something, because even little kids used to laugh at him, and the guys who hung around the auto shop when they had nothing better to do, which was most of the time, had opened a book on the various shades of red his head assumed as he passed through the light and shade of the garage. Willie had enough troubles without becoming an object of amusement for the seldom gainfully employed, like some Coney Island freak: