Reapers Are the Angels Read Online Free PDF Page B

night and strolls the silent corridors of the buildings feeling her insomnia like a disease.
    When the silence becomes too much, she walks over the footbridge to building four, where she finds the men playing cards for pills. They are on the sixth floor, gathered in a large space that takes up two floors and amplifies in echoes all their sharp laughter and gravel voices. The lobby of some company headquarters, she supposes, some monolithic company that used to occupy multiple floors in the building.
    At first the men look at her begrudgingly, as though she were an augur of their own embarrassment for themselves. The boisterous laughter dies down quickly as they, one by one, notice her. Then she says:
    Go on. I can’t sleep is all. I ain’t here to gum up the works.
    So the game goes on, tentatively at first, then building in volume and vulgarity as they lose their suspicion and forget her presence altogether. She likes the smell of their cigarettes and the clink of their liquor bottles and the crude language that tumbles like quarry stones from their hairy lips. New men arrive, coming in from night patrols, and she watches them go through a metal reinforced door off to the side carrying pistols and AR-15 rifles and 20 gauges and come out again with their hands empty. Then they go to a table set up like a bar where a man with an apron pours them drinks.
    Louis, the patrol leader, finds her.
    How do you like the game? he asks.
    I’m studyin it up, she says. It’s like poker with a little pooch mixed in.
    Pooch?
    It’s a game I used to play when I was little.
    You following it?
    Like I say, I’m studyin it up. What’s in the pot?
    Uppers. Sleeping pills. Some painkillers. Speed mostly.
    Uh-huh. Where’s a girl get some currency like that?
    You want to play?
    I could go a hand or two.
    Louis laughs, a big friendly laugh. Then he digs into his pocket and takes her hand and slaps three blue pills into it.
    Hey, Walter, he says to one of the men at the table. Why don’t you take a break. Shorty here wants to sidle up.
    The men laugh and she takes her seat, saying, I don’t know what’s so sidesplittin. Any moron can turn a card.
    Oooh, they say.
    She loses one of her blue pills on a bad first hand, but ten hands later they give her a Ziploc baggie to carry away her winnings. Three Nembutals, five Vicodins, twelve OxyContins, seven Dexedrines—and four Viagras she uses to repay Louis for fronting her.
    What’s your name again? Louis asks.
    Sarah Mary.
    Well, Sarah Mary, I’m impressed. I’m impressed as hell.
    All right, then how bout lettin me patrol with you all tomorrow?
    He laughs again, jolly and warm.
    You’re something else, he says. But why don’t you let us handle the dirty work?
    From what I seen, you keep pretty clean.
    Sarah Mary, let me buy you a drink.
    He sits her at the bar and gets her an ice Coke, and she stays there awhile watching the game until that skinny rodent of a man, Abraham, comes in and sits down on the other side of her and begins getting his eyes all up under her clothes again. And he’s with someone big who he introduces as his brother Moses, and Moses shakes her hand and nearly breaks her knuckles in his big fist—and the two of them together look like the before and after of some kind of growth serum. Moses isn’t interested in talking. He sits at the bar and drinks and looks straight ahead like he can see through to the ugly other side of everything. He’s no man to be dallied with, she knows. She’s seen men like him before, dangerous because they’ve already come back from places these other, convivial men have never been, and the souvenirs they bring back from those places exist everywhere in them, intheir wet ruddy eyes and under their fingernails and in the dark patina on their very skin.
    Moses just sits and stares, but his brother Abraham wants to talk, starts telling her about this girl that one of the other men nearly choked to death because she teased him and got him