The Wrath of Angels

received stab wounds to her back and legs. But she had fought hard, and the Collector was still bleeding profusely from his damaged scalp. Nevertheless, she was dying and he was not. Worse, she had told him most of what he wanted to know. Most, but not all. Her only consolation was that, just as he had moved against them, so they would move against him. The thought might have made her smile, had she still been capable of using her mouth.

‘Darina Flores,’ said the Collector. ‘It’s good to put a voice to a name, and eventually I’ll add her face. I take it that she killed Barbara Kelly? You don’t have to speak. Just nod. Actually, a flicker of your eyelids will do.’

Becky blinked once, slowly.

‘There was a child with her, wasn’t there?’

Becky didn’t blink this time. The Collector knelt before Becky, and showed the blade to her. Either Becky didn’t know about the child, or even the threat of the blade was not enough to make her acknowledge its existence. No matter: he would discover the truth for himself, eventually.

‘And Kelly’s copy of the list, does she have it?’

Again, a blink. Becky was not reluctant to confirm this fact. She wanted to point the Collector toward Darina, because Darina would kill him.

‘So what is on that plane is an older version? Older, but still dangerous to you if it fell into the wrong hands?’

Blink.

‘My hands, for example.’

Blink.

Behind him, Becky saw movement at the window, pale faces pressed against the glass. A gust of wind blew the door open and shapes appeared on the porch. They poured into the house like smoke, these thin, spectral figures.

Hollow Men. She had thought them a myth, even though she had knowledge of matters equally strange. Then again, it was hard for the living to confirm the existence of entities that only the dying could see.

‘Only one thing confuses me, Becky,’ said the Collector. ‘Who was the passenger that Darina mentioned? Who was on that plane? Someone like you? One of the Backers? Should I start trying names?’

Becky managed to shake her head slightly. This, like the child, she would not give him.

‘Never mind,’ said the Collector. ‘I’m sure that it will all become clear in time.’

A look of sorrow crossed his face, and the soulless Hollow Men crowded around him in expectation of another joining their ranks. Tears welled up in Becky’s eyes. She tried to speak, her tongue beating weakly inside her ruined mouth like the flutterings of a trapped moth.

‘Hush, hush, Becky,’ said the Collector. ‘There’s no more to say.’

With the tip of his blade, he lifted the simple gold chain from around her neck. It had been given to her by her mother, and was her favorite item of jewelry. She watched as it was dropped into a pocket of his overcoat.

‘For my collection,’ he said. ‘Just so that you won’t be forgotten.’

The blade came close to her again.

‘You have been found wanting,’ said the Collector. ‘For your sins, I adjudge your life, and your soul, to be forfeit. Goodbye, Becky.’

And slowly, almost tenderly, he cut her throat.

32

Ray Wray was eating breakfast at Marcy’s Diner on Oak Street in Portland. He was also reading a copy of the Portland Press Herald that someone had kindly left on the next table, minus the sports section, which annoyed Ray Wray more than somewhat. It meant that he was forced to make do with the main paper and the local section, and, in general, Ray Wray couldn’t give a damn what happened in Portland. Just because he was a native of the state didn’t mean he had to like its principal city or show any interest in its activities. Ray came from the County, and County folk regarded Portland with suspicion.

Ray did like Marcy’s Diner, though. He liked the food, and the fact that it was comfortable without being kitsch, and played WBLM, the classic rock station. He liked the fact that it opened early and closed early, and only accepted cash. This suited Ray Wray down to the ground as he had a credit history so bad that he sometimes wondered if he was personally responsible for the collapse of the economy. Ray Wray owed more money than Greece, and whatever cash he had was usually in his pocket. He got by, but only just.

This was his first week back in Maine since taking a ‘city bullet’ down in New York: eight months on Rikers Island for felonious assault arising out of a disagreement with a Korean restaurateur who believed that Ray should have complained about the quality of the food on his plate before he’d eaten it all instead of after, and disputed Ray’s right to refuse payment for the meal. There had been some shouting, and a little pushing, and somehow the little Korean lost his balance and banged his head on the corner of a table, and the next thing Ray knew there were Koreans all over him, closely followed by cops and the judiciary of the state of New York. The sentence didn’t bother Ray much – he was flat broke anyway, and had been facing the prospect of living on the streets – but the food really had been terrible in that Korean place, and he’d only eaten it because he was so damn hungry.

Now here he was back in Maine with the hunting season almost over, and he hadn’t picked up any guide work worth talking about. He’d been forced to stay in Portland, where an ex-girlfriend had an apartment off Congress, not to mention a tolerant attitude to Ray Wray. She’d made it clear to him that her tolerance only extended so far, though, and didn’t involve him sharing her bed, or staying in her place beyond the end of November. She worked as a nurse over at Maine Medical so she wasn’t around much, which suited him just fine. There was a reason why she was his ex-girlfriend, and he remembered what it was after only a couple of days in her company.

He couldn’t stand her, was why.

His inability to secure guide work rankled. He was no longer a registered guide, but he knew those woods as well as anyone, and he still had contacts in some of the lodges and hunting stores. He’d spent time in the warden service before his temper and his drinking combined to have him thrown out on his ass, as that combination is wont to do to a man in any walk of life. Ray had learned his lesson: he didn’t drink so much anymore, but it was hard to shake off his history in a state like Maine where everyone knew everyone else, and bad reputations spread like a virus. It didn’t matter that Ray was a changed man, his penchant for socking people who crossed him largely excepted, or that he stuck to beer now, not liquor. Coffee had replaced whiskey as his main vice, so that he was rarely without a to-go cup in his hand, and lived off cheap refills at Starbucks. There was a Starbucks at the corner of Oak and Congress, and Ray planned to head over there and fill up once he was done with breakfast. He’d take a seat while no one was looking, stay there for a while, then go to the counter and claim that this was his second coffee, not his first. Nobody ever contradicted him. Say what you liked about Starbucks, but you couldn’t fault their staff for their manners. Still, Ray didn’t care for those little breakfast sandwiches they sold. For the same price he could get a good meal at Marcy’s, which was why he was sitting there now, flicking through his free copy of the Portland Press Herald while chewing on egg-smeared toast and wondering just what a man had to do to get a decent break in this life.

He was about to toss the paper aside when an article on the front page, below the fold, caught his eye. He had left the front page until last owing to the half-assed way the paper’s previous reader had reassembled it, and because Ray tended toward the view that whatever was in newspapers had already happened, and therefore there wasn’t much point in worrying about what they contained, or getting all het up about the order in which you flicked through the pages, except, of course, that sometimes you ended up reading the second half of articles before the first, which could be confusing if you were dumb. Ray Wray was a lot of things – undisciplined, an addictive personality, borderline autistic in his capacity to absorb and recall information – but dumb wasn’t one of them. He got into trouble because he was too clever, not because he wasn’t clever enough. He was angry at the world because he had never managed to find his place in it, so he lashed out whenever the opportunity arose, and accepted the resulting bruises with equanimity.

He carefully balanced the newspaper against a ketchup bottle and read and reread the front page article, his smile widening as he did so. It was the first piece of good news he’d received in a long time, and he felt that it might presage an upturn in his fortunes.