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

“Come see the Wig Guy: A Modern Marvel. All the Colors of the Rainbow…” He’d thrown away the wig after six months. Now he was just happy if his head didn’t shine too brightly in public. He tugged at the skin below his cheekbones. There were deep-set wrinkles around his mouth and eyes that might have passed for laughter lines if Willie Brew was the kind of guy who did a whole lot of laughing, which he wasn’t. Willie did a brief count of the lines and wondered just how funny someone would have to find the world to build up that many wrinkles. Anyone who found the world that amusing was insane. There were broken veins on his nose, relics of his troubled middle years, and a few of his teeth felt loose. Somewhere along the path of life, he had also picked up a couple of extra chins.
    Perhaps he did look sixty after all.
    His eyesight remained good, although this merely enabled him to see more clearly the effects of the aging process upon him. He wondered if people with bad eyesight ever saw themselves as they truly were. Bad eyesight was the equivalent of those soft filters they used to take pictures of movie stars. You could have a third eye in the center of your forehead and, as long as it didn’t see any better than the other two, you could fool yourself into believing that you looked like Cary Grant.
    He stepped back and examined his paunch, supporting it with his hands like an expectant mother showing off her bump, an image that made him quickly release his grip and wipe his hands instinctively on his pants, as though he’d been caught doing something dirty. He’d always had a paunch. He was just one of those guys. From the time he came out of the womb, he’d looked like his diet consisted entirely of pizza and beer, which wasn’t true. Willie actually ate pretty well for a single man. The problem was that he led what Arno, his assistant, described as a “classic indolent lifestyle,” which Willie took to mean that he didn’t run around in Spandex like a moron. Willie tried to picture himself in Spandex, and decided that he’d already had too much to drink if that was the kind of thing he was imagining alone in a men’s room on his birthday night. He had changed out of his bib overalls for the occasion, which had been traumatic in itself. Willie was a guy born for overalls. They were loose fitting, which was important for a man of his age and girth. They gave him useful pockets in which to keep things, and a place to store his hands when he wasn’t using them without looking like a slob. Out of overalls, everything felt too tight, and he had too much stuff and too few holes in which to keep it. Tonight, he bulged in places where a man shouldn’t bulge.
    Willie was wearing black Sta-Prest trousers, a white shirt veering toward yellow due to age, and a gray jacket that he liked to think of as a classic of tailoring but was, in fact, just old. He was also sporting the new tie that Arno had handed to him that morning with the words, “Happy birthday, boss. You gonna retire now and leave me the place?” It was an expensive tie: black silk embroidered with thin strands of gold. This wasn’t the kind you picked up in Chinatown or Little Italy from a guy selling do-rags and knockoff watches on the side of the street, everything wrapped in plastic and bearing a name like “Guci” or “Armoni” for rubes who couldn’t tell the difference, or who figured that nobody else could. No, the tie was pretty tasteful, given that Arno had bought it. Willie figured that maybe he’d had a little help in choosing it since, as far as Willie could recall from a funeral that they had attended together earlier in the year, Arno only had one tie in his wardrobe, and that one was maroon polyester and stained with axle grease. The thing about it was, Willie didn’t feel sixty. He’d lived through a lot—Vietnam, a painful divorce, some heart trouble a couple of years back—and it had certainly aged him on the outside