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

right there. Better to go in with a reputation for having taken another man’s life. At least that bought some respect. Wooster wasn’t even interested in seeing the boy go to the chair. It would be enough for him to have proven others wrong: the state cops, his own people who had laughed at him behind his back for believing that a Negro boy could have committed a crime of such sophistication. Wooster wondered if he could bait a hook for the boy. There were one or two men in the town who wouldn’t be above offering themselves up for the chance of a little dark meat. All it would take would be an agreed location, a specific time, and Wooster’s fortuitous arrival on the scene. The older man would be allowed to walk, but the boy would not. It was a possibility.
    As things happened, though, Wooster’s day was about to worsen considerably, despite his own convictions to the contrary, and any plans for entrapment would soon turn to dust.
    “Chief?” It was Seth Kavanagh, the youngest of his men. Irish Catholic. Mick through and through. There had been issues with some of the people in the town when Wooster hired him, and he’d even had a friendly visit from Little Tom Rudge and a couple of his fellow pillow-casewearers, suggesting that he might want to reconsider hiring Kavanagh given that this was a Baptist town. Wooster listened to their pitch, then gave them the bum’s rush. Little Tom and his kind made Wooster’s skin crawl, but more than that, he felt incipient guilt whenever they came his way. He knew about the things that they had done. He knew about Negroes being beaten for still being within the town limits at sundown, even if those town limits seemed to change according to how much the local crackers had drunk at the time. He knew about unexplained fires in Negro cabins, and rapes that were brushed away as a little fun that had gotten out of hand.
    And he knew about Errol Rich, and what had been done to him in front of a great many of the very people who praised God alongside Wooster in church every Sunday. Oh, yes, Wooster knew all about that, and he had enough self-knowledge to recognize his complicity in that act, even if he had been nowhere near the old tree from which Errol had been hanged and burned. Wooster hadn’t cemented his grip on the town, not at that point, and by the time he heard about what was happening it was too late to do anything to stop it, or so he told himself. He’d made it clear, though, in the aftermath, that such an act was never to take place again, not in this town, not if he had any say in the matter. It was murder, and Wooster wouldn’t condone it. It also got the Negroes all steamed up for no good cause. It overstepped the mark to the point where their anger threatened to overcome their fear. Furthermore—and it was this point, more than any other, that got shitbags like Little Tom thinking—it had the potential to bring the feds down on their heads, and they weren’t understanding of the way things were done in small towns like this one. They didn’t understand, and they didn’t care. They were looking to make an example of people who didn’t appreciate that the times they were a-changin’, as that folk singer fella liked to put it.
    And that was another reason for making sure that the boy Louis was punished for what he had done to Deber. If he got away with murder this time, then what would follow? Maybe he might take it into his head to move on to the men who had killed Errol Rich, the ones who had driven the car out from underneath his feet so that he kicked at dead summer air; the ones who had doused him in gasoline; the ones who had lit the torch and applied it to his clothes, turning him into a beacon in the night. Because there were whispers about Errol Rich and the boy’s mother, too, and you could be certain that the boy had heard them. A man’s father dies like that, and it could be that he would take it upon himself to avenge him. Damn, Wooster knew that