Ghost Road Blues

Chapter 9

Tow-Truck Eddie made no move to get out of the cab. For fifteen minutes he just sat there, looking at the blood on his hands, amazed. Doubt had plagued him for most of the drive home, but as he sat there and stared at the blood, he could feel his fears fragment and fall away, leaving only a clean, shining belief.

“Thank you, God,” he whispered. The gratitude welled up so suddenly and fiercely in his breast that tears sprang from his eyes. “Thank you, my sweet Lord God!”

Finding that man back there by the wrecked car, deep in the corn…how wonderful it had been. He marveled at the subtlety of God’s intricate design, and how he — humble Eddie, the Sword of God — was guided in such sure but secret ways so that hints and clues of the great plan opened up to him bit by bit.

It had been years since his first epiphany, since that day years ago when God had first whispered to him. An actual voice in his head, not just words on the pages of a Bible. A real voice. The voice of God.

Eddie had been twenty when it happened. It was only days after Eddie’s first encounter with the Beast. Back then the Beast had taken a different form—Satan is the Father of Lies—and Eddie and a few men from the town — Vic Wingate, Jim Polk, Gus Bernhardt, and others — had tracked the monster down and killed him, ending the string of murders that had been destroying the town.

After that night the voice of God started speaking to him during his prayers. Not often, at least not at first, and there were long stretches of months when no matter how fervently Eddie prayed there was no response from heaven. Then a few weeks ago God had begun speaking to him almost daily, sometimes several times a day. Then this morning he had been shown the new face that the Beast wore, and Eddie was filled with such holy purpose and glory that he felt he would burst. He kept looking in the rearview mirror to see if light was coming from his eyes and nostrils and mouth. Not yet. Not yet.

He had been cruising A-32 looking for the Beast, unsure if he had actually been killed or not back there. When Eddie had gotten out of the cab to look, there was no sign at all of either boy or bike. Was that how it was when the Beast, in this guise, was killed? Would he just simply dissolve, returning to the corruption from which he was formed? Eddie wasn’t sure and God had not spoken to him to tell him. So, he was prowling the road just in case when either some instinct or perhaps the subtle nudging of God’s hand directed him to the spot near the Guthrie farm where a car had gone off the road. Eddie had immediately pulled over and gone to investigate. Was the Beast here? Had the car struck the Beast and then both of them gone off the road? That thought gave him a pang because he wanted to kill the Beast. He — not anyone else — was the Sword of God.

He checked the scene and could find no traces of a broken bicycle, no debris left from even a minor impact. Just skid marks sliding off the road and into the cornfield.

Eddie moved quietly down the lane of smashed-down corn stalks, his big hands held defensively. Though Eddie was now fifty, he was still in perfect health and his body — the temple of the Lord — was packed with muscle and finely toned from relentless exercise with free weights, jump rope, heavy bag, and speed bag. He kept his body a perfect offering to the Lord. He had begun to bathe three and even four times a day now, and he was constantly washing his hands at work, especially if he had touched a customer or one of the other mechanics. Those impure oils had to be cleansed from his flesh as quickly as possible, but he had had to do it in secret. The guys had started to notice his fetish for cleanliness, had begun to rib him about it, saying that Tow-Truck Eddie had a new lady friend who didn’t like grubby fingers on her tender flesh. He had laughed along with the jokes, choking down the rage and shame he felt at such suggestions. A lady friend indeed! As if he could allow himself to be distracted with carnal desires at a time like this. What a pack of dimwitted, shortsighted, unenlightened mud heads he worked with. Might as well be working with pigs. They had no idea, no clue, as to why he was preparing himself.

I am God’s predator, he thought, then chastised himself for the vanity of that concept. He rephrased it, I am the Sword of God, and left it at that.

The beam of the flash sparkled on the black metal of the open trunk of the car, and he walked calmly toward it, surveying the scene. The car was smashed, the ball joint broken; he could see that from fifteen feet away. Eddie swept his flashlight over everything, seeing the carnage, examining the pitiful leavings of some kind of adventure that had ended recently and badly. He paused briefly to shine the light in the trunk, saw the scattering of blood-soaked bills, the small mounds of white powder. He wrinkled his nose in disgust; if there was one thing Tow-Truck Eddie despised it was pollution of the body. Beer and the like were bad enough, but drugs were downright unholy. He clucked his tongue in disapproval and began scouting the rest of the car. He had approached from the driver’s side of the car, and everything looked deserted. Shining the light in through the open driver’s door revealed nothing but blood. Quite a lot of it, which sent a thrill of excitement coursing through him. The keys were still in the ignition. Tow-Truck Eddie frowned. Straightening from his inspection of the car, he swept his light over the rows of corn, seeing no one. Then he walked carefully around to the other side of the car, and there lay a man sprawled in the bloody mud. If he had shone his light down when he was peering into the trunk he might have seen him, but the man had fallen down by the passenger side of the car and lay entirely in shadow. The harsh white light of his flash made the scene look like a black-and-white photo: black for the man’s suit and tie, white for his face, black for the huge stain of blood that had entirely soaked his shirt.

Eddie had squatted down next to the man and looked him over, from death-pale face to bloodstained shoes. Odd how lifelike the dead can sometimes look, he thought, and then actually gasped as the man moved his mouth in an attempt to speak, though he made no actual sounds.

Tow-Truck Eddie was amazed that the man was still alive. He examined the man in the light, seeing that the dark stain of blood still glistened wetly. There were two ragged holes in the man’s shirt. He’d been gut-shot and was bled as white as the cocaine that had spilled all around him. What a mess, thought Eddie, who couldn’t stand disorder of any kind.

The smell of blood was thick in the air: blood from the man, blood from the birds. The smell was appealing, almost intoxicating, and for a moment Eddie just closed his eyes and let the smell wash over him and through him. He felt a little dizzy from it and had to blink his eyes clear for a few seconds.

He bent closer to peer at the man. Never in his life had he seen a man so close to death. He had seen sick people, sure, even badly wounded ones dragged from wrecks, and he’d seen corpses, but never a man hovering on that delicate point between life and death, his life essence fluttering like a lightning bug trying to work free from a child’s cupped hands. It was incredible to see. Beautiful and delicate and quite moving, and it did something to him. At first he wasn’t aware of it, of what was happening within him, but the realization crept into his consciousness as he watched the man continue his task of dying.

The man looked up at Eddie with pleading in his eyes; eyes that were aswirl with pain and fear, hatred and desperation. Tow-Truck Eddie crouched there, tasting the emotions overflowing from the man’s eyes. The flow of pain was exquisite. He licked his lips and sniffed in the scent of blood through both nostrils.

“You’re hurt,” he said, savoring the intense rush of blood scent and pain, of truly perfect suffering right here in front of him.

“I…I’ve been…shot.”

Tow-Truck Eddie pushed the man over onto his back so he could see the bullet holes more clearly. Fresh blood bubbled weakly from the wounds. He had a sudden and powerful urge to bend forward and drink from the wounds, but he knew that it wasn’t the time for that kind of thing, for that kind of…

He sought the right word.

Sacrament? Was that it? Yes, he thought dreamily. Sacrament. It wasn’t yet time for that kind of sacrament. Not yet. Everything had to be in its time and place, as it said in the Bible. He took the scent again and nearly cried out as the thick coppery smell of fresh blood shot through his nerves like a white-hot current of electricity. His eyes snapped wide and he rocked back on his heels as door after door blew open in his mind. Suddenly he understood! Suddenly — all at once — this all made sense. Everything made sense. Everything that he had thought about and dreamed about for the last few years made absolutely crystal-clear sense. He laughed out loud for the sheer joy of it.

He looked down at the man, staring at him with eyes that were still wide with amazement, seeing the man for who he was…for what he was! He laughed again, and he felt tears gathering in the corners of his eyes. Of course! This was no ordinary accident. How could it be? How could he even have thought that it was? How could anyone be so blind as to think that? It wasn’t even an ordinary crime scene. No, no, this was something far removed from all of that, and Tow-Truck Eddie could suddenly see it. This was something special, something meant only for him, something orchestrated solely for him, and yet something immensely powerful.

He touched the wounds and then looked at the blood on his fingers, glistening black in the light of his flash.

Tow-Truck Eddie’s mind went click! as that thought passed through him.

He was right. This was not the Sacrement in which the Lord had told him he would one day partake. This was…his baptism.

In his mind the voice of God very faintly whispered, Yesssssss.

Tears burned in Eddie’s eyes and he bent his head in humble thanks. All at once, here in this lonely place, amid all this carnage, he fully understood what he was and who he was. God, mysterious and subtle, had brought this man, this baptizer here. Just as surely as he had directed Eddie to come here. Amid all this violence and evil.

And did not God direct Jesus to the waters where John was baptizing the penitent? Was that not amid the oppression and violence of Rome’s crushing occupation of Judea? Not exactly the same, surely, but the pattern was there, clear as sunlight to Eddie.

This man…this dying man…the baptizer, and his blood was the purifying waters of salvation. A child could see it.

The man gasped and blood leaked from his mouth, dribbling down his chin. He would be dead soon, but Eddie wasn’t sure exactly what he was supposed to do. Was he supposed to care for this man? Was he supposed to rescue him?

No, that didn’t feel right to him. This man — baptizer or not — had been manifested to him in the form of a criminal, and Eddie could not believe that God would want his Sword to rescue the wicked. The time for that sort of thing had passed.

What then? Was he supposed to watch him die? Was there a message in that?

That felt closer to the mark, but Eddie still didn’t feel right about it. Letting the man’s life just slip away — an event that was imminent — seemed like a waste of some kind of opportunity.

He frowned for a moment, his triumph dimming instantly as doubt chewed at him. What if he interpreted it wrong? What if he misread the holy signs? So much hinged on his reading it right that he felt a wave of sickening uncertainty crash down on him. His smile faded and fell away and he looked from the man to the wreck to the dead birds and back again. What if the act of reading the signs was itself a test? A puzzle or a riddle of some kind? He wasn’t sure what would happen if he failed to solve the riddle. For a full minute he worried over that as the dying man passed in and out of a haze of delirium.

“No,” he said softly to himself, steeling himself. Doubt was a tool of the Beast, not of the Almighty.

In a ragged whisper, the dying man repeated what he had said: “I’ve been shot.”

“Uh-huh. I can see that,” Tow-Truck Eddie said softly, reveling in it. The pain in the man’s eyes was so finely tuned that it flickered like electricity; he could barely look at it without crying out for the sheer joy of it. His mouth was dry and he could feel his palms grow slick with sweat.

“Could you…help me?”

Oh my, how exciting this moment was! The man was actually begging him for help and that fast the answer came to him. It was not rescue, nor the passivity of standing by and doing nothing. This was a direct command from God presented in the form of a test.

“Who am I?” Eddie asked himself with the droning intonation of a litany, and he responded: “I am the Sword of God!”

His purpose was clear to him. A sword was forged for a single purpose, its nature clear to even the meanest intelligence.

“I am the Sword of God!” Eddie yelled and his declaration sent the lurking night birds screaming into the troubled sky.

He smiled, joy flooding his heart and swelling his massive chest.

“Did you come…to help me?” And the dying baptizer’s words became part of the holy litany, and Tow-Truck Eddie heard the laughter of the Beast buried deep beneath the human pain. This was the key to everything. Compassion and restraint were tools of the Beast and Eddie was being tested on that point right now. Everything hinged on this moment and how he would answer.

In his mind he kept repeating: I am the Sword of God.

Then another voice overlay his own, booming in his brain like heavenly thunder as God said, Do this for me and open the way to paradise!

Did you come to help me?

Tow-Truck Eddie smiled, tears brimming in his eyes. “No,” he said and with great reverence reached for the man. He took the man’s face in both of his hands, lifted it, kissed the sacred forehead, kissed the bleeding mouth, and then held the face close, almost nose to nose, as he looked deeply into those eyes, trying to reach down through the barriers of evil to the trapped human soul within. The man struggled feebly, a last attempt to deceive him, a last ruse to really test his faith, his resolve, but Tow-Truck Eddie was steadfast. He looked into those eyes, searching, searching. The demon resisted him, keeping the man alive, denying Tow-Truck Eddie that brief glimpse into the infinite, but he was not to be denied this most sacred of all rewards. Holding the man’s head with one hand, Tow-Truck Eddie reached down with his other hand and placed his fingertips over the ragged holes torn by bullets. The man felt the touch and his eyes flared with the dread, but Tow-Truck Eddie smiled mildly at him and then thrust his fingers as deeply as he could into the man’s body.

The man screamed with all the agony of man and all the rage of a demon as Tow-Truck Eddie tore out his bowels. Then, the screaming mouth shouted only silence, though the jaws still gaped wide and the throat worked and the chest heaved.

“Bless me,” Tow-Truck Eddie murmured softly, gently. “Bathe me in the waters of salvation so that I may be purified, for I am the Sword of God!”

He stayed with the man, creating with his body the rituals of the New Covenant. The new bond of blood and flesh that would be the cornerstone of the world to come.

Now, hours later, sitting there in the cab of his wrecker, staring at the dried blood, he thought about all that he had seen and experienced. The man’s death had been so exquisite, so enlightening, and afterward when he had done all that was required and ordained to the man, he had learned so much. He felt glutted with knowledge, and yet much of that knowledge had yet to be processed, to be held up to the light of his new insight and examined. He knew that even now, with his mind so profoundly expanded, it would still take him some time to understand what he had seen, and what it all might ultimately mean.

He mumbled his own name over and over again as he sat there.

He had killed the Beast and been baptized in blood all in one night. He was sure that he would meet other demons in the days to come, now that his own nature had been discovered and declared. Well, that was fine, just fine with him. He grinned and flexed his powerful hands, feeling the muscles ripple on his forearms. Let them come, he thought. He would be ready.

He smiled grimly, still muttering his own name over and over again.

“Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.”

“The mayor is in a meeting right now, may I take a message?”

“Ginny, it’s me. Crow.”

“Oh, hi, how are you?”

“I’m fine, I…”

“My God, do you know about all the stuff that’s happening around here?” Ginny asked in a low and conspiratorial voice.

“Some of it. Look, I’m calling from my cell and I don’t have much time. Reception sucks out here. I need to speak to Terry.”

“Oh, gee, Crow, like I said he’s in a meeting.” For effect she added, “With Philadelphia narcotics detectives,” as if they were something akin to angels with burning swords.

“I know that. It’s about that stuff that I’m calling. Or might be, anyway. Can you tell him I’m on the phone?”

“Oh, I don’t know—”

“Ginny, Terry deputized me tonight, so you can consider this official business.”

“You’re back with the department?”

“More or less. Look, Ginny, just get him for me, will you?”

Ginny thought about it for another exasperating few seconds, and then said, “Okay, Crow. I’ll just do that.”

“Thanks,” Crow said, and as soon as she put him on hold, he said, “Hallelujah.” Crow had never liked Ginny Welsh, though she never knew it. Ginny acted as if being the receptionist-cum-dispatcher-cum-secretary put her at the very heart of regional law enforcement.

While he waited, Crow looked over at Mike Sweeney, who sat in the passenger seat of his car. The boy’s bike was stowed in the trunk, the trunk’s hood held down with bungee cords. The kid looked very small and young as he sat there, and it made Crow feel really bad for him. Mike Sweeney, or Iron Mike as Crow had nicknamed him last year, was one of those bright but lonely kids with so much imagination that it almost, but not quite, made up for the fact that he had few friends. It was easy to see that the kid was on a totally different intellectual plane than his age-group peers, and whereas intellectuality would probably see him in good stead among the adult community of Pine Deep in later years, it was quickly turning him into an embittered loner as a teenager. Crow also knew that Mike’s home life was a little rough, and that was something he could relate to.

Mike saw him looking and offered a smile.

Iron Mike was a regular customer at the Crow’s Nest, converting his hard-earned newspaper route money into model kits, comics, and copies of Fangoria. The kid knew almost as much about classic horror films as Crow did, but was the master by far when it came to science fiction. Crow was introspective enough to know that the nature of his own store, as well as his extensive readings of horror fiction and folklore, was part of his personal escape route. To make a monster look less scary, shine a bright light on him — you get to see the zippers and spirit gum and latex. That — and the bottle — had been Crow’s way of not dealing with the events of the Black Harvest, and he was fully aware of that fact. His dissociation was entirely deliberate.

It appeared to him, though, that Mike on the other hand walked a very fine line between reality and fantasy and was far less aware of it. Crow knew that Mike called his bike the War Machine, and that he often drifted away in thought, visiting who knew what kind of interior landscape. Crow wondered if he would grow out of the fantasies, or would grow strong enough to confront them. Therapy rather than sour mash.

Crow knew Vic Wingate very well. Vic was older than Crow and had been a legend in Pine Deep for decades. He was known as a hitter. Totally fearless in a bar fight and just as tough as he thought he was, but a world-class asshole nonetheless. More than once Crow had seen Mike walking with that stiffness that only comes from a leather belt wielded with enthusiasm. It made Crow sick and furious, but also frustrated because there wasn’t anything he could do about it, as he knew from personal experience. His own dad had a hard hand and used it way too often. In his heart, Crow would love to invite Vic to step behind the proverbial woodshed and dance him a bit. Crow wasn’t entirely sure he could take Vic, but he would love to try. The problem there was that Vic was tight with Gus Bernhardt and Jim Polk, and he was too smart to accept a private challenge. Anyone who went up against Vic, or tried to sucker punch him, wound up first in the hospital and then in jail, or in court. Vic was as cunning as he was vicious.

So, not being able to do anything about the problem, Crow tried to tackle at least one of the symptoms and had befriended Mike, treating him like a real person, which was the case anyway, and once in a while trying to work into conversation some of the values Crow himself found useful in life. He had even shown Mike a few jujitsu moves, hoping the kid would get hooked on martial arts the way he had. It had helped Crow stand up to his own abusive father — maybe it would help Mike do the same. Predators generally don’t like prey that shows its own claws and teeth.

The kid was looking at him through the window, no longer smiling. Crow shrugged elaborately and pointed at the phone. Mike nodded. Crow had stepped out of the car to make the call, not wanting the boy to hear about the manhunt. The kid looked like he’d been through enough already.

“Crow?” Terry’s voice came over the phone with no warning, making Crow jump.

“Terry? Yeah.”

“Oh man, Crow, tell me nothing happened at the hayride.”

“Huh? Oh no, I haven’t gotten there yet.”

There was a brief silence on the line; then in a controlled voice, Terry said, “You, ah, haven’t even gotten there yet? I see.”

“No, you don’t. I’m not dodging it, it’s just that something else came up.”

Another silence. “Something ‘else’ came up? Crow,” Terry said, “you do remember we have a crisis going on around here?”

Crow walked another couple of paces from the car. “I have Mike Sweeney with me.”

“Who, may I ask, is Mike Sweeney?”

“Kid who delivers the paper.”

“Okay. And you’re what — learning his route?”

“No. Actually I almost ran him over. Don’t panic, it was just by accident, though…I wasn’t aiming for him.”

“I should hope not.”

“But someone else tried to do it intentionally.” Silence. Crow said, “Terry?”

There was a sigh at the other end of the line. “Tell me that again. Someone else tried to…”

“…Run him over, yeah. The kid was pedaling along A-32 when this tow-truck comes zooming down the road and tries to run him over.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Crow, the guy probably didn’t see him. Kid on a bike out on the highway. Like I said, the trucker probably never saw him. You just said you almost did the same thing.”

“Kid says that the tow-truck went out of its way to chase him down. The kid was in the oncoming lane, crowding the shoulder, and the truck swerved into the lane and accelerated toward him.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I believe he’s telling the truth, Terry.” For just a moment Crow thought about the incident from a different perspective. Mike’s stepfather was Vic Wingate, who was widely believed to be physically abusive to the kid; and Vic worked for Shanahan’s Garage, and Shanahan owned a tow-truck. Could it have been Vic behind the wheel? He thought about that for a second and then dismissed it as fanciful.

“Crow, we really do have more important fish to fry than some trucker, probably drunk, who may or may not have even seen the kid. I mean, really.”

“Kid got hurt.”

A pause. “Hurt? How bad? Do you need an ambulance?”

“No, nothing like that. Busted rib or two, some bruises. Got a bit of a knock on the head, though. I think he should go to the emergency room. At least have a doctor look at the rib and his head.”

“Where are you now?”

“On A-32, on the service pull-off near Shandy’s Curve. I can’t lug the kid all the way to the hayride with me, though, and if I take him over to the hospital, I won’t get to the hayride until well after eleven.”

“That’s too late.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Can’t you call his folks? Have them pick him up at the hayride?”

“Mm. I guess so….”

“Try it.”

“Maybe. Guess who is stepdad is? Vic Wingate.”

There was a thick silence on the line. “Oh. Great.”

“Uh-huh.” Everyone in town knew Vic Wingate. Those who weren’t downright afraid of him merely loathed him. “Because of the accident, the kid’s really late. Vic has this thing about being home on time….”

“Vic’ll probably give the kid a hiding for having the temerity to have his ribs broken.”

“That would be my call,” Crow agreed.

“So, what do you want me to do?”

“I want you to call him, actually. Tell him that Mike was run down by a reckless driver and is going to be needed as a material witness.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Sure you can.”

“We’ll never find whoever tried to run him down. The kid’ll never be called as a witness, you know that.”

“Sure. I know it, and you know it, but Vic Wingate doesn’t know it. But if he thinks that the cops are going to want to talk to Mike occasionally, he might be a little less likely to slap the kid around. At least for a little while.”

“I just don’t know….”

“Oh, come on, Terry. You’re a politician, lie to the man. It’s no skin off your nose, and it might keep the kid from having some of his skin belted off.”

“Oh…okay, okay. Whatever. Darn it, Crow, one of these days all that spillage from your bleeding heart is going to drown you.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ll make the call or not?”

“Yeah, I’ll make the call, but listen, Crow, you get your behind out to that hayride. We’ve got to get those kids out of there. The smelly stuff is really flying around here tonight.”

“They still haven’t caught the psychos yet?”

“No, and I’m hip-deep in Philly cops. It seems,” Terry said, dropping his voice, “that these psychos are the real deal. Not just some clowns running from a stickup at a Wawa. These are some serious bad boys, m’man.”

“What do you mean?”

Terry’s voice dropped even lower. “One of the guys is some madman named Karl Ruger.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Yes, you have.”

“No, I—”

“Ever heard of the Cape May Killer?”

“Yeah. Who hasn’t?”

Terry said nothing, letting Crow work it out. It didn’t take long. “Oh my God!”

“Uh-huh.”

“I mean…oh my God!”

“Yep.”

“Christ, Terry, are you sure?”

“He was ID’d by the Philly cops.”

“Oh. My. God.”

“Yeah. So,” said Terry, “did you remember to bring your gun?”

“Huh? Oh…yeah, I got it.”

“Is it loaded?”

“Of course it’s loaded.”

“Then keep it close, my brother, ’cause Halloween’s come to town early this year.”

“What d’you mean?”

“There are monsters out there tonight,” Terry said, but despite his flippant words, there was little humor in his voice.

Crow switched off the phone and frowned into the shadows for a few moments; then he hit speed-dial for Val’s cell phone, but it rang through to her voice mail. He left a message for a callback, ended the call, walked back to the car, got in, and sat behind the wheel staring out at the night for a long time. Beside him, Mike sat patiently, waiting in silence. Finally, Crow turned to him and said, “I just spoke with the mayor. He’s going to call your mom and, uh, Vic, and have them pick you up out at the Haunted Hayride.”

“At the hayride? How come?”

“Well, it’s complicated,” Crow began, “and I’m trusting you to keep your mouth shut about this. Okay?” Mike nodded and Crow gave him an abridged version of the facts. By the time he was done, Mike’s eyes were very large and for the moment he looked more like a kid than ever. He licked his lips nervously.

“Jeez-us!”

“My feelings exactly.”

“In Pine Deep?” Mike said wonderingly. “Did the mayor really make you a cop again?”

“Seems so.”

“Wow.”

“Mm.”

“Well,” said Mike.

“Well,” agreed Crow.

They looked at each other for a dark minute, and then Mike said, “Crow…there’s something else I have to tell you. But…I don’t want you to think I’m whacked or something.”

“Too late,” Crow said with a grin; then he caught the look on Mike’s face. The kid was serious. “Um, sure, Mike…fire away.”

So, Mike told him about his encounter with the white stag. He described the animal and how it moved, what it looked like — and how it had growled at him. The only part he forgot to mention were the skid marks, which was unfortunate.

Crow leaned against the car door and looked at him. A variety of thoughts ran through his head, chief among them a concern on whether Mike had hit his head hard enough to have caused some kind of hallucinations. The kid seemed pretty lucid, though, and even with his youth coloring the description it had been a pretty straightforward and orderly account.

Mike asked, “Have you ever seen anything like that? I mean…isn’t that pretty weird?”

This whole flipping night is pretty weird, thought Crow. He said, “Yeah, Mike, that’s off the hook.”

Mike winced and touched Crow’s arm. “Crow — the whole slang thing? Grown-ups never get that kind of thing right.”

Crow gave him a look. “Do you know what ‘precocious’ means?”

“No.”

“It’s Gaelic for ‘pain in the ass.’”

Mike grinned. “So, what do you think?”

“I think I haven’t a clue about that whole deer thing. I mean, if we were in the Middle Ages I’d say, okay, white stag or white hart — sign of impending doom. But we’re not in the Middle Ages and this is Pine Deep and I think you just saw an albino deer who was acting pretty funky.”

“Are deer supposed to act like that?”

“What am I, Animal Planet? I don’t know from deer. I sell rubber rats and fright masks. What I’ll do, though, is tomorrow I’ll call Nate Holland, he’s a park ranger, and I’ll ask him. Who knows? Maybe the deer is sick or something and that’s why it was acting so funny.”

“Maybe,” Mike said, but it was clear he didn’t agree.

Crow looked at his watch. “I really have to get out to the hayride, kiddo. You game to go with me, Iron Mike?” he said with a grin.

“Fire up the converters, R2, we’re about to make the jump to light speed.”

Crow chuckled. “Okay, but you’re R2D2, I’m Luke.”

“No way.”

“Hey, who’s driving?”

“Hunh. Well, if you’re Luke Skywalker, where’s your light saber?”

Crow’s smile dwindled slightly and his eyes took on a strange, distant quality. Then he leaned across the seat, thumbed open the glove compartment, and took out the Beretta. He eyed it to make sure the safety was on and then tucked it in his waistband, where it once again felt like a block of sinister ice against his skin.

“That enough of a light saber for you?”

Mike swallowed the watermelon in his throat. “It’ll do,” he said.

Crow turned the key and Missy sprang to life. With barely a squeal of tires he pulled the car back onto the road and headed toward the hayride at a sedate eighty-five miles an hour.

Terry hung up the phone with a sigh, knowing it was going to be a very long night. Around him, the station house was in full furor, with officers coming and going, phones ringing, chatter filling the air. For a stretch of moments, Terry just stood by the desk, fingertips still resting lightly on the curved back of the phone, lost in musings. He thought how odd it was that Crow had encountered Mike Sweeney. It bothered him for some reason that he couldn’t quite touch. There was something about that kid that had always bothered Terry. Every time he saw him pedaling down Main Street with his canvas bag of papers it always gave him a weird feeling in his gut. Not something he could put his finger on, just a little flicker of the creeps. Weird kid, he thought, then shook his head to clear his thoughts. He had enough things to worry about, primarily the organization of a real honest-to-God manhunt in Pine Deep. Lord, he thought, this is all I need, and Halloween just a month away.

He went into the men’s room, closed the door, and locked it. From an inner pocket he took out his bottle of Xanax and popped one, washing it down with handfuls of water from the tap. His morning dose of clozapine had kicked in, and he could feel his bowels cement shut. Though he didn’t get the drowsiness his shrink had warned him of, he hadn’t had a good bowel movement since he’d started the antipsychotic. With the Xanax on top of the other drug he felt he might be able to get through the rest of the day.

He washed his face, pressing cupped hands full of cold water to his face for a long moment, patted himself dry, straightened his tie, and went back out to the squad room.

Detective Sergeant Ferro was talking earnestly with Gus Bernhardt, but the chief glanced up and waved him over. “D’you have a minute?”

“Sure,” Terry said, but as he began to move he caught sight of himself reflected in the large picture window across from the desk. The darkness without and the bright fluorescents within transformed the glass to a dark and opaque mirror. Terry saw himself reflected in the polished-coal surface, saw his own size and brawn, he saw his red beard and red hair, but the darkened glass distorted things, shaded his hair to black and deepened the wells of his eyes so that his reflection looked like that of a bearded skull without eyes or expression, a scowl devoid of humor or compassion. He stood and stared at the distorted reflection, remembering his dreams of the last few nights. The beast reflected in the store windows of a burning town. Then he made a face of self-disgust at his own ridiculous paranoia and turned away to join the others.

As he left, the mirrored glass surface of the window was wiped clean for a moment, but then another image gradually appeared. It seemed to come forward toward the light, like someone stepping out of deep shadows into pale lamplight. If anyone had been watching, the image might have just seemed like someone stepping out of the darkness beyond the glass to a point of nearness where the glass once more became transparent; but anyone on the other side of the glass would have known this wasn’t true: there was no one outside the chief’s office, no one in the street at all. Yet the image remained. Not a figure outside, not a reflection of anyone inside, for inside the station there was no little girl with bright red curly hair and bright blue eyes and a dark green dress. That image appeared only in the darkness of the glass. A pretty little girl, with an oval face and a stuffed rabbit clutched in the child’s hand. A lovely face, even though streaked with blood; a pretty dress once, but which hung now in blood-soaked tatters.

The little red-haired girl watched the big red-haired man move away, watched with troubled eyes as he went over to the policemen and began to talk. A tear like a single pear-shaped diamond appeared on her cheek. It paused for a moment, and then rolled slowly down her face, tumbling over the streaks of blood, becoming tainted with red, metamorphosing into a tear of blood as it wended its way down to her chin. By the time it reached the point of her chin, the image in the darkened window had faded and was gone.

Val Guthrie stared into the black eye of the pistol, her face blank except for a small half smile on her lips.

“What?” she asked softly.

Karl Ruger’s smile swelled like a hammer-struck thumb; his dark eyes fairly twinkled with wit and gentlemanly charm. He stepped forward and pressed the barrel into Val’s stomach and like a storm wind, pushed her backward into the house. Without looking he hooked a heel around the edge of the door and swung it shut. It closed with a mild click.

The absurdity and total shock of this man with the feeble-looking little gun still held Val in a bemused thrall. She looked down past her breasts to where the hard metal of the gun made a soft dent in her midriff.

“What…?” she asked again. Her mouth worked, trying to say more, but her brain possessed no adequate vocabulary for this kind of thing.

“Val? Who is it?” Her father’s voice floated from the kitchen with amiable curiosity, but it might have been the howl of a banshee for the effect it had on Val’s befuddled mind. As if a strong wind had blown sharply across her brain, her wits cleared and abruptly she was back in her own consciousness. There was a gun pressing against her stomach and the smiling man was pushing her backward into her own house.

“Dad!” she cried out in a sharp, shrill voice, and a moment later something struck her face so hard and fast that her newly returned awareness was swept from the saddle. She reeled away and slammed into the wall, only dimly aware that it was a hand that had struck her, not a bullet. The hand had been so fast that she hadn’t seen it even twitch, let alone have time to duck the blow. The whole right side of her face burned as if the man had splashed her with boiling water, and tears sprang into her eyes.

“Val?” she heard her father call. “Jesus Christ! Who the hell are—”

Val couldn’t see a thing; stars swirled with firework frenzy before her eyes, and before she could shake her head clear, something clawed at her hair and then wrenched her backward with horrible force. She staggered and fell back against a firm yet yielding surface. A body. She could feel fingers snarled in her hair and then something that was cold-hot pressed into the soft flesh below her right ear. Something very hard, small, and round.

A whispery voice spoke and all around her the world froze.

“Stop right there, old fella, or I’ll blow this bitch’s brains all over the wallpaper and all over you, too. You want that? No? Then just stand right there.”

Val’s eyesight cleared and she saw her father standing just inside the hallway, face shocked and pale, body held unnaturally straight. Behind him, farther down the hall, was the silhouetted form of Connie, standing with both hands pressed against her mouth.

“Who the hell are you?” demanded her father, his eyes blazing, fists balled at his sides.

“The bogeyman,” said Karl Ruger with his graveyard whisper voice. “Now shut the fuck up.”

Guthrie shut up, but he looked desperately at Val. Val’s eyes were streaming with tears of pain, and her heart felt as if it were going to kick its way out of her chest.

“Hey, you down there,” Ruger snapped. “Yeah, you…get in here. Right now.”

Connie did not move so much as an eyelash.

“I ain’t gonna tell you twice, woman. Get your ass in here right now. Don’t make me come and get you.”

“D…Dad?” Connie asked in a tiny voice.

Guthrie met Ruger’s eyes, read them. Understood. “Come on in, Connie. Do as he says.”

She still hesitated. Guthrie turned halfway around and hissed at her, “Get in here, for God’s sake!” That got her moving, and she scurried down the hall with mincing steps on legs that seemed to move like unbending sticks.

Ruger looked at her, all dolled up with a pearl choker and a full-skirted print dress. He chuckled. “Who the hell are you? Donna Reed?”

In other circumstances, the observation might have been as funny as it was accurate, but at the moment Ruger was his only audience. Still he gave himself a good chuckle at his bon mot. Giving Val a vicious jab with the gun barrel, he said, “Now, who else is here?”

Guthrie shook his head. “No one. Just us.”

“You better not be lying to me, old fella, it’s been a trying day, and I’m really not in the mood for fun and games.”

“Mister,” said Guthrie, “as long as you got that gun to her head, I am going to do whatever you say. I don’t want no trouble, and I don’t want no harm to come to me or mine. If you want money, I’ll give you what I got. Just please don’t hurt the girls.”

Ruger liked the speech, and said so. Guthrie said nothing, but his eyes were hard and steady. “Tell you what, Mr….?”

“Guthrie.”

“Guthrie. Fine. Tell you what, Mr. Guthrie, why don’t you and Donna Reed park your butts on the sofa over there?”

Guthrie nodded, and he guided Connie over with a flat palm on her back. Ruger turned to follow, keeping Val between them, but it was clear that Guthrie was not going to do anything stupid. Ruger relaxed a little. He knew that most people weren’t stupid or heroic enough to face down a gun. With all the crime nowadays, everyone handled these things like business transactions. Once Guthrie and Connie were seated, Ruger let go of Val’s hair and gave her a shove that propelled her stumbling all the way to the couch, where she collapsed onto her father. Ruger stood with the gun pointed at her while she got herself sorted out. Connie edged away from her to make room, moving as far away as possible as if she feared to touch the woman who had touched the man with the gun. Val settled in between Connie and her father, who wrapped one strong and comforting arm around her shoulders.

“You okay, pumpkin?”

“She’s peachy,” answered Ruger. “Now shut up.” He prowled quickly around the living room, peering down the hall and up the stairs and out the windows. Satisfied, he dragged a Shaker rocking chair over and sat ten feet in front of the couch, resting the gun on his thigh. He drew in a deep breath and let it drain out of him slowly, the way a smoker exhales the first long drag of a cigarette.

Val stared at him, fighting the numbness of shock, still dazed from the blow he had struck. She had never been hit that hard in all her life, but it was more the fact of the blow than the force that made her want to scream and cry. Who was this man? What could he possibly want? This was so far beyond her ordinary experience that she didn’t know how to react, except to crouch there in fear on the edge of the couch and wait for whatever was going to happen next to unfold. The moment stretched and the man did nothing for a while except sit and stare at them, jiggling the pistol and occasionally pursing his lips the way people sometimes do when they are thinking.

Val tried to get some measure of the man; she studied him without appearing to do so. He was no local man, that was for sure, and no farmer. He was dressed in a dark city suit that was stained with dried blood, and his shoes were caked with mud. The man was rather handsome in an oily sort of way, with a long thin nose and a strong jaw, but his lips were too thin and looked cruel, and his chin was so pointed that it gave him a saturnine countenance. He had very high, prominent cheekbones and an almost Shakespearean brow, except for the sharp dip of his coal-black widow’s peak. His hair was as dark and shiny as a magpie’s wing. But it was his eyes that disturbed her most: they were a strange charcoal gray and extraordinarily piercing, and despite the pretense at humor, there was no trace of humanity anywhere in those shadowy depths.

Ruger fished his cigarettes out of his pocket and fired one up one-handed, never relaxing his grip on the pistol, even though it appeared to rest casually on his leg.

“Okay, folks, it’s question and answer time,” he said after he had made them sit and stew in troubled silence for almost a minute. “The rules are simple. I ask questions, and you answer them. You get points for all correct answers, but let me warn you — you could lose some substantial points for wrong answers.” He jiggled the gun for emphasis. He fixed his gaze on Guthrie. “Okay, Mr. Guthrie, you are our first contestant tonight.”

Guthrie said nothing, but Val could feel him stiffen beside her. This was so outrageous and unreal that he didn’t even know how to think about it.

“Now, unless you are some kind of Mormon and these young darlings are your harem, I can assume that these are your daughters. In fact, did I not hear Donna Reed there call you ‘dad’?”

Guthrie hesitated for only a split second. “Yes, they are my daughters.”

“Good, you get one point. Now, tell me their names.”

“Val and Connie.”

“Uh-huh. Which is which? No…let me guess. That one looks like a Connie,” he said, nodding to Connie. “She looks like every Connie I’ve ever known. Prissy name, don’t you think?”

Guthrie didn’t think he was supposed to answer that question, so he kept his jaw clamped shut.

“I guess that means you’re Val?” Val nodded. “I’m sorry,” Ruger said, cupping a hand to his ear. “Didn’t catch that.”

“Y…yes. My name is Val Guthrie.”

“Ah, splendid.” Ruger looked as pleased as if Val had just won a spelling bee. “Now, ladies, hold up your hands. Mm-hm. No wedding ring on your hand, Val. Too bad. Shouldn’t let fruits like yours spoil on the vine. But…ooo, look at that, Connie’s got a nice fat gold band. Well, where is Mr. Reed?”

“What?” Connie asked, confused.

“Your husband. Don’t you ever watch TV Land? Where is he?”

Connie said nothing, looking too scared to even open her mouth beyond the permanent shocked O in which it was set.

“Connie,” Ruger chided, “you’re forgetting the rules.”

“He’s not home,” said Guthrie.

Ruger smiled, stood, walked over to the couch, and looked down at Guthrie. With another demonstration of his terrible speed he punched the old man in the face. Guthrie’s head rocked back as blood erupted from his torn eyebrow. It poured down his face in a shocking flood of brilliant red. Guthrie clamped his hands to his face, and Val seized him protectively in her arms, trying to stanch the flow of blood. Connie recoiled in horror and squeezed herself farther into the corner of the couch.

Ruger stood over them, looking down at them with all of the reptilian humor momentarily gone from his face. “Listen to me, you old fuck. If I ask you a question, you may answer. If I ask anyone else a question, shut the fuck up. Am I clear?”

Guthrie nodded slowly, his eyes blazing with pain and fury.

“I didn’t hear you.”

“Yes, goddamn it!” Guthrie snarled, and tensed for another blow. Ruger just let his smile return and backed up until he found the rocker and lowered himself into it.

“Okay then. Let’s try this again.”

Guthrie’s face was painted red and blood ran from between his fingers and down his forearms.

“Now, Connie. Where is your husband?”

Connie glanced at the blood still streaming down Guthrie’s face and in a choked, little girl voice said, “Mark went to a meeting after work.”

“A meeting of what?”

“Rotary Club.”

Ruger burst out laughing. “Oh man! That is just too precious! Fucking Rotary Club, and Donna-frigging-Reed to come home to. Tell me, Miss Perfect, does he drive a station wagon, too?”

“How did you know…?”

Laughter spewed out again. “American made?”

“Yes…a Ford.”

Ruger actually pounded the butt of the pistol on his thigh as he laughed. Val and her father exchanged a very brief glance; Connie just frowned in uncertain confusion and fear. Eventually Ruger sobered. “Okay, Mr. Guthrie, your turn again. How’s the face?”

“It’s fine,” Guthrie said coldly.

“Looks to me like it hurts like a bitch. Whatever. Okay, now, does anyone else live here besides Donna Reed and her husband, Val the Spinster, and your own self? Is there a Mrs. Old Lady Guthrie?”

“It’s just us.”

“What about farm hands? You can’t work this big old place by yourselves.”

“We have a few regular hands, and we have some day labor come in.”

“Wetbacks?”

“Some migrant workers, a few local boys.”

“Any of them getting any from Val over there?”

Guthrie ground his teeth and tried to find some kind of answer that would not result in a beating or a bullet, but Karl waved the question away. “Forget it. Trick question. What I meant to say, is there anyone else who’s likely to come sniffing around after her tonight?”

Val tensed, her fingers digging in to her father’s skin. “No,” she heard her dad say.

“What, no boyfriends?” Ruger asked Val.

“He lives in town,” said Connie, and then clapped her hands over her mouth, her eyes growing as wide as saucers as she realized she had spoken out of turn. With a weary sigh, Karl stood up and walked over to her.

“No, please don’t!” Guthrie said.

“Let her alone!” pleaded Val.

Ruger looked at them for a moment, considering. “She broke the rules. Loss of points. What can I do?”

“She’s just scared. She didn’t mean anything,” Val protested, half rising.

Ruger swung the gun around so fast it became a silvery blur. The edge of the barrel caught Val across the forehead just below the hairline and knocked her back against the armrest. Her father began lunging at Ruger, but the man was so frighteningly quick; Ruger twisted and drove his gun-hand elbow into Guthrie’s solar plexus as the old man struggled to stand. All the air and fight went out of Guthrie, and he collapsed against the dazed and bleeding Val. The two of them huddled in a bloody and motionless heap.

Ruger gave a world-weary sigh. “I can see this is going to be a long night after all, folks. Oh well, shit happens, huh?” As his irrepressible smile crept back onto his lips, he turned to Connie, who was so terrified that she was not even breathing. Both of her hands beat the air in front her, warding off imagined blows. Ruger bent down toward her and batted her hands out of the way. Connie squeezed her eyes shut and turned as far away as she could, her whole face twisted in expectation of the pain. Ruger kept leaning forward until his lips were only a couple of inches away from her face. He did not touch her, not so much as a hair on her head. Instead, he said in a sharp voice: “Boo!”

Connie screamed and fainted.

Chapter 10

Tow-Truck Eddie moved through the rooms of his house as if he were exploring a marvelous new country. Everything he looked at appeared fresh and mysterious and wonderful. He stood for a time in the dining room, listening to the old grandfather clock ticking out the seconds of his new existence, and he realized that with each passing moment new universes were being created and old suns were dying glorious deaths. All for him.

In the kitchen, he took tomatoes and crushed them in his strong fingers, and understood the message that they had always tried to tell him about the truths hidden in living blood; how could he have missed the meaning of this parable for so long? He licked the pulp from his hands and marveled in the taste, so like blood.

Upstairs in his bedroom, he picked up a five-pound plate from his weight set and pressed the flat side of it against his cheek, delighting in the coolness and roughness of the hard black iron.

Down in the laundry room, he stripped out of his soiled clothes and crammed them into his tiny washing machine. He poured a precise capful of Wisk over them and washed them in cold water. Naked, he inspected his body, astounded at the fineness of his skin, at the textural differences between the flesh of his stomach and that on the inside of each wrist; at the difference in sensation between the cool air of the cellar on his thighs and on his face. He inspected his flaccid penis and wondered what kind of seed it would dispense, now that he had become a true son of God. Would his children share his power? Would the act of inseminating a woman likewise bestow grace on her? The thought made his penis jump, begin to swell, but he forced those thoughts away. They were not proper for this moment; they were thoughts from before, and he would allow them only at the proper time, and with the proper ceremony, but not in the squalid laundry room of his house.

Still naked, he ran up the stairs, and the exertion felt so good he ran up and down the stairs twenty-five times. Sweat flowed from his pores and coated him with a fine sheen. When he walked into the living room and stood before the mirror, he saw how the sweat helped define each of his muscles. He turned this way and that, flexing his arms and chest, swelling his lats, flexing the bulky quadriceps and abdominals. Even with all the thousands of hours he had spent with weights, he had never fully realized just how perfect his body had become, especially for a man of his age. He looked thirty rather than fifty. His body was more superb than any Greek statue: each muscle rippling like bundles of bridge cable beneath the firm tautness of his skin. From the broad expanse of the pectoralis major to the tapering peroneus brevis he stood as a model of metahuman perfection, and a whole hour passed before he could tear himself away from his own image. What a perfect vessel, he thought. What a perfect temple for the Holy Spirit.

He wished that he could somehow clone himself so that he could always be able to look at that body, maybe even to hold it, kiss it, make reverent love to it.

What would it feel like, he wondered, to make love to one’s own body? Surely it must be the most perfect love anyone could ever experience.

Walking back and forth through the house, he watched the clock tick toward ten o’clock. He had been home for nearly an hour and a half, and still the level of energetic excitement hadn’t abated even one iota.

He laughed out loud, full of a pure delight, and turned a graceful pirouette in the middle of the living room.

Vic Wingate was turning the crank of his antique printer; yellow handbills zipped out from under the roller and settled down into the tray. A haze of blue cigarette smoke tinted the air of the cellar. It fascinated him to watch the blank sheets of paper go in one end of the roller and pop out of the other a second later filled with words and pictures. Even though it was a lot of work to do it this way, and though he could have done it far easier and much faster on his computer, Vic preferred the ink and the mess and the feel of doing it by hand.

The stack of blank papers dwindled down to nothing and Vic stopped cranking. Stubbing out his cigarette in a dented metal ashtray he’d stolen once from the only good hotel he’d ever stayed in, Vic picked up the top copy of the freshly printed handbills. His thick lips moved as he read his own words: WHY THE WHITE RACE HAS THE RIGHT TO RULE, and below that in smaller type: AND HOW THE JEWS ARE TRYING TO USURP THAT RIGHT.

Usurp. He liked the word. Vic always had a dictionary and thesaurus handy when he wrote up his handbills.

He let the handbill flutter back down atop the others and stretched. His muscles were sore from two really difficult transmission jobs at Shanahan’s Service Station, where he worked nine to five, five days a week. It was a hard job, but it paid well and Vic loved it. He loved everything about cars. If he had the money, he’d buy Shanahan out, though he’d still do his time in the pits. Then he smiled when he realized how dumb an idea that was. Come the day after Halloween there would be no Shanahan’s…and from that point on Vic wouldn’t be working for anyone. Well, except for Griswold. The Man would always be the Man.

He worked on his handbills for a while longer, musing now about how things were working out. It was all starting now, he knew that. The Man had a lot of pieces moving on the board, and though Vic knew most of what was in store, he didn’t know everything. He was a general, sure, but not the Man himself. That was okay with him. When the Red Wave hit on Halloween night, Vic would be nearly a king himself.

He bundled the flyers and stacked them, then massaged his neck muscles, which had grown stiff as he’d worked over the printer. Then a thought occurred to him and he looked at his wristwatch: 9:30 p.m.

“Well, well,” he murmured. A smile wriggled wetly onto his lips. “The little fucker’s late again. Oh boy.” He fingered his belt, wondering if tonight was a belt night or a hands-on night. Hands, he decided. You could never really get the feel of it with a belt. Kid felt it, sure as hell, but Vic wanted to feel it himself. He liked his hands to sting. It was no good if your hands didn’t sting, he mused, and you never got that with a belt. All you got with the belt was a jolt up the arm and the sound. The sound was good, but that sting was outstanding. With the thickness of the calluses on Vic’s hands, it took a lot of speed, a lot of impact for there to be any sting at all, and Vic always liked to challenge himself to see how many hits it would take until the sting was there, and there at just the right tingling level.

Vic figured that maybe it was time to amp up on the kid. If the Man’s other plan for getting rid of the little pussy didn’t work out, then it was up to Vic to accomplish his goal. If he upped the ante on Mike, made the beatings a bit worse — but not so bad that those cops that weren’t in his pocket would be forced to step in — then maybe the kid would finally get the fucking message and realize that, yes, life is hell so maybe it’d be better to jump off a fucking bridge. Or something. Vic had left razor blades on the side of the tub several times, but the little bastard was too damn dense to take a hint.

Not for the first time Vic wished he could just strangle the little fucker. That would feel so good! But the Man was very, very specific on that point. If Mike were to die from a corrupt or evil hand, then the Man’s whole plan would be in deep shit. Which sucked, because Vic ached to feel Mike’s throat collapse in his hands. Then he’d be free of Mike, and would be finally able to cut loose of that drunken whore, Lois. What a goddamn waste of human tissue she was. Couldn’t cook, lousy in the sack unless Vic beat the shit out of her first, and nowadays she was drunk all the time.

The things I do for the Man, Vic thought, feeling peevish.

Upstairs he could hear the phone ringing. He listened, counting the rings. Three. Four. Five. Five? Christ, how many times had he told that cow to get the phone by three rings at the most? Fucking five rings?

Vic closed his eyes and smiled with the first real pleasure of the day. If both Mike and Lois were going to defy him like this, then it might turn out to be a really interesting evening. Really interesting.

He was already heading toward the stairs when he heard Lois’s tentative knock on the door. In a hesitant, quavering voice she called, “Vic? Vic, honey?”

“What?” he growled, mounting the stairs two at a time.

“Phone call for you, honey.”

He jerked the door open. “So I heard. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but did I not hear the phone ring, what, five times?”

Lois stood there, her blue cotton bathrobe pulled tight around her body, the belt cinched and knotted around her slim waist. Her brown hair was tousled from sleep and her eyes were red and rheumy from vodka. Fear reeled drunkenly in her eyes.

“I’m sorry, honey. I was asleep. I didn’t hear…I mean…I got it as fast as I…”

He held up a warning finger and she shut up. “You go into the living room and wait for me. Don’t you dare sit down, either, Lois. When I’m done with my call, we’ll go over the phone rules again. Okay? Go on now.”

Lois shrank back, her mouth opening to form words of protest, to voice some kind of plea, but she did not dare make a sound. It would always be much worse if she tried to plead for tolerance, and horribly worse if she begged. She clutched the folds of her robe to her throat and cowered out of the room.

Vic waited until she was out of the kitchen until he let the smile form on his lips. He liked that color blue on her. He reached for the phone.

“This is Vic.”

“Mr. Wingate? This is Terry Wolfe.”

Vic tensed, instantly on the defensive. Why the hell would the mayor be calling him? “Yeah?” he asked cautiously.

“Mr. Wingate, I’m calling on behalf of your stepson, Mike?”

“Christ, what’s the little shit done now?”

“Oh, nothing like that. No, he was involved in an accident, Mr. Wingate.”

Equal amounts of hope and fear surged up in Vic’s heart. “Yeah? What kind of accident?”

“He was riding his bike on A-32 when someone, a trucker, ran him off the road near where Old Mill Road cuts over to the hayride. Now, he’s not badly hurt, but he is banged up a bit. A passing motorist took him to the Haunted Hayride, and the manager there called me and asked if I would notify you.”

“The hayride? That’s all the way the hell out—”

The mayor’s voice cut him off smoothly. “I know it’s a bit of a haul, Mr. Wingate, but as the boy’s health and welfare are involved, I’m sure you would want to go pick him up.”

Vic’s eyes were narrowed. The phone call had a weird, fishy smell to it, but there was nowhere to go with it except to agree. “Yeah. Sure. Whatever. I’ll go fetch him.”

“Thank you, Mr. Win—”

Vic hung up on him and stood for a moment, arms folded, lips pursed, staring at the phone. A trucker, he thought. A trucker running the kid off the road. He wondered if that driver had been at the wheel of a tow-truck.

He smiled slowly, believing his guess to be right. If the little punk had been run down by a tow-truck, then that would be perfect. That was what the Man had been trying to orchestrate for a while now, but Vic hadn’t known the plan was in full swing already.

He nodded and chuckled. “That’s cool.”

Then he remembered Lois waiting for him in the living room.

Definitely a hands-on kind of night, he thought as he strolled out of the kitchen.

“Does the mayor want you to arrest him?” Mike asked as Missy took curve after curve.

“Who — our guest psycho? Two words best express it. Hell no!” Crow shook his head. “I’m just an errand boy, and that’s all. I’m gonna go out, close down the hayride, wait for your folks to pick you up, and then I’m done with it.”

“But you’re a cop, aren’t you?”

“Kind of…well, not really. I’ve been reinstated just for tonight. Can’t have civilians doing official work.”

“You used to be one, though?”

Crow said nothing, his eyes watching the road.

“Crow? Didn’t you used to be a cop?”

“Once upon a time, young Jedi.”

“Why’d you quit?”

They drove on for almost half a mile before Crow answered that. He gave Mike a brief, searching look and then refocused on the road.

“Sometimes things don’t work out,” he said simply, then smiled. “Besides, if I was a cop, whom would you buy your comics from?”

“Probably Nick’s Comic Cave in Crestville. Or maybe at Waldenbooks in—”

“Mike…?”

“Yeah?”

“Shut up when grown folks are talking.”

Mike grinned. Outside the windows the black fields whipped by, beards of corn glowing with the cold moonlight. “Do you think the chief will catch him?”

Crow was about to suggest that Gus Bernhardt couldn’t catch the clap in a whorehouse, but thought better of it. He said, “I guess he might. He has a lot of help from Philly cops. By morning there’ll be more cops in town than tourists.”

“Won’t the tourists be scared off anyway ’cause of what’s happening?”

Crow snorted. “Hardly. We’ll probably have a banner day, once this gets out. People love blood and guts as much as they do a good five-alarm fire. Draws ’em like flies to sh…uh, garbage.”

“You were going to say ‘like flies to shit.’”

“Yes, but I didn’t, and you shouldn’t either.”

“Jeez, Crow, I’m fourteen!”

“Yeah, well, there’s some that think being fourteen is the same as being a kid. Kind of a popular notion, I hear tell.”

“Yeah, well. What do you think?”

Crow looked at him, looked past the smile at the Mike Sweeney whose father was dead, whose mother was a drunk, and whose stepfather was known to beat him so bad that he missed a dozen days from school a year.

He sighed. “Not everybody grows up at the same speed, I guess.”

Mike grunted.

“I still don’t want to hear you use bad language regardless.”

Mike smiled. “Okay, boss.”

“Okay then.” They looked at each other and grinned. Crow said, “How’re the ribs?”

“They hurt like a son of a bitch,” Mike said. Crow goggled at him, and then they both burst out laughing. Mike laughed, winced, and kept on laughing, clapping a hand to his aching side.

“You juvenile delinquent!” Crow gasped.

A half mile later they passed a massive billboard painted with witches and goblins and leering black cats. Written in dripping black and red letters it proclaimed:

They drove on.

Chapter 11

Terry drank the last of the reheated coffee, oblivious of its appalling taste, and set the cup down on Ginny’s desk. The Xanax was kicking in and he felt a little of the tension seep out of his muscles. Ginny quickly picked up the cup, put a pink Post-It sheet under it as a coaster, and set it down again. The mayor folded his arms, hiked one half of his rump onto the edge of her desk, and looked hard and long at Gus Bernhardt. “So, here we are.”

“Yeah,” Gus said. “Fine kettle of frigging fish.”

“Language, language,” Ginny said sotto voce.

“Frigging’s not a curse, you silly bitch,” Gus muttered under his breath as he went back to staring at the huge aerial-survey map of the town and its close neighbors covering the entire wall above Ginny’s desk.

Across the room Sergeant Ferro and Detective LaMastra were standing, heads together in conversation with officers from the first wave of Philadelphia cops. Every once in a while, LaMastra would look over at Terry and raise his eyebrows by way of sympathetic acknowledgment.

Terry glanced at the clock. It was just past ten, two and a half hours since he’d gotten the call at Crow’s shop. Most of that time had been spent laboriously trying to explain the peculiar geography of Pine Deep to the pinch-hitting cops. Geographically speaking, Pine Deep was an island, bordered completely by running streams of water: Pine River along the west and its estuary, Black Creek to the south, and then the thin and wandering northern line of the Crescent Canal and the broad Delaware River to the east. Between Black Marsh and the outlying houses of Pine Deep, A-32 rose up into a series of foothills and wannabe-mountains, taking gymnastic turns around sheer cliffs and doing roller-coaster rises and dips past the vast Pine Deep State Forest from which the town borrowed its name. The forest surrounded the farmlands and thrust tentative fingers back toward A-32 every few miles so that the long protrusions formed borders between some of the larger farms. The main body of the forest lay solidly westward, and sprawled as far over as Newton’s Reach, a tourist attraction town preserved intact from Colonial times, right down to the working blacksmith’s shop and the tours conducted by high school seniors wearing tricorns and three-button breeches.

Looking at the map, with the surrounding expanse of greenery from the forestland and the farms, the town of Pine Deep seemed small and remote. Certainly it was no metropolis. The population of the town, counting farmers from the most distant spreads, was just a little under twenty-five hundred, but considering how much square mileage the town covered, the people were pretty thin on the ground. Most of them lived in the town proper, on a handful of quaint cobble-stoned streets. Downtown, as it was apocryphally known, was actually situated on a high saddle between two higher peaks, and though the peaks made the town look like it was in a valley, it was nearly a thousand feet higher than some of the farms.

Downtown was where all the “action” was. That was where the tourists flocked in the thousands from the first moderately tolerable day in late March until after the Christmas sales. Antique buyers came from as far west as Ohio and as far north as Boston; rug merchants drove all the way up from Florida to sell truckloads of Seminole quilts, or mock Navajo blankets. Every fifth store sold Pennsylvania Dutch woodcrafts, from plain and sturdy tables to elaborate porch swings with amazingly delicate scrollwork. Amish baked goods from Lancaster scented the air by six o’clock each morning, and in the evening, the breeze blowing past Winifred’s Incense gave the place an aroma of magic. Almost everywhere were the delicate tinkles of wind chimes, the rattle of rain sticks, the clack-clickety-clack of hand-carved weather vanes. Windows were filled with rare books, exotic music from faraway places, crystals for healing, and crystal balls for seeing into any reality of choice, improbable varieties of cheeses, and the largest selection of family chateau wines in the region. One tiny store sold nothing but Pine Deep souvenirs and oddities such as the Fireballs, a kind of bright red pinecone unique to the area; countless books detailing, either in lurid prose or scholarly wordiness, the ghost stories of the region; calendars with twelve months’ worth of magnificent photos bursting with the incredible colors of Pine Deep in autumn, the wild freshness of spring, the deep green of the summer forests, or the stark and ancient beauty of the snow-swept winters; and the fifty-odd varieties of locally put-by jellies, jams, and preserves, including a famous spicy cinnamon-pumpkin butter that had been touted by the Frugal Gourmet one year and had caused a run on the local supply.

In all that vastness of land, with the millions of tall, full-leafed plants, the hedgerows and groves of fruit trees, the undeveloped forest land and the fields left fallow, the estates overgrown and gone wild, the cliffs and caves and hollows, there were three men and one car hiding from the eyes of the law.

Terry stared at the map and sighed, rubbing at his eyes and half smiling at the enormity of it all, wishing the three psycho-bastards had chosen somewhere else to ensconce themselves. He drew in a long breath, held it, and then sighed again. It was going to be a very, very long night.

Terry looked away from the map to see Sergeant Ferro and Detective LaMastra standing at his elbow. “Where do we stand?” Terry asked.

“Well,” the detective said, “with all of your people, sir, and with the officers loaned to this jurisdiction from the surrounding townships, we were able to put more than twenty cars on the road, each with two officers apiece. I split the teams up so that most of the cars that are actually patrolling within the town boundaries have at least one Philly officer. I felt that it would be unduly risky to require the local officers to try and apprehend Ruger and his buddies without experienced help.”

Terry nodded. He could tell from Ferro’s expression that he was trying hard not to give offense, but at the same time make clear the point that the local cops were rubes and this was work for real professional law enforcement. Had Terry lived in any other town in Bucks County he might have been offended, but in Pine Deep Ferro’s estimation was right on target. Gus Bernhardt was a rube, and because of him the police department was little better than the Keystone Cops. Terry loved his town, but he really had no opinion of the department Gus had built. Look at who Gus had hired. Shirley O’Keefe, who looked like a skinny twenty-two-year-old Meryl Streep, got sick to her stomach every time she had to help with a bad traffic accident. Officer Golub was smart but had no balls. Jim Polk was an alcoholic and was as likely to arrest pink elephants as criminals, and his crony, Dixie MacVey, was on the force just so he could pull traffic duty outside the high school, giving him a legal reason for watching all the teenage girls bounce along. The rest were just as useless.

Until now there hadn’t really been any desperate need to change that, which gave Gus his comfortable stranglehold on the job, but this whole thing had Terry thinking about initiating some changes around here. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought about putting up some money to try and attract one of these Philly officers to try their hand at rural law enforcement.

“So I think we’re as well deployed as we can be,” Ferro said. “Unfortunately for those of us here in the office it’s kind of a hurry up and wait situation. Until we have more to go on, there’s not a whole lot more we can do.”

“Fine, fine. That’s excellent, Sergeant.” Terry picked up the coffee cup, looked into its emptiness, sighed again, and set it down. “Is there any more of this, Ginny?”

“Well…” she said doubtfully. “I could make a new pot.” She made no move to do so.

Terry favored her with a smile. “Would you mind?”

“We do have some instant….”

“Why don’t you get the big urn and make enough for everyone?”

“The instant would be easier.”

“Yeah, but I think the officers would appreciate brewed coffee, what do you say?”

“Tastes the same to me.”

“Please?” Terry implored, manfully resisting the impulse to strangle her.

Gus tapped her chair with a thick toe. “Shift your ass, Gin. Make some coffee.”

Ginny stood up, and with all the self-sacrificing grandeur of Sydney Carton mounting the guillotine steps, she turned and headed for the kitchen.

The four men watched her go. When she was out of earshot, Terry said to Gus, “I’m telling you, Gus, one of these days I’m going to shoot her.”

“I’ll load your gun for you.”

“She’s a royal pain in my butt.”

“Mine too, but we’re stuck with her. Who else could do her job?”

“A trained monkey?”

“Maybe, but where you gonna find one that’ll work for what we pay her?”

LaMastra cracked up but, catching sight of Ferro’s unsmiling face, turned the laugh into a cough and then busied himself with adjusting his tie.

Reaching up, Ferro tapped the map with a knuckle. “The main idea is to go up and down A-32 in a kind of squeeze pattern, checking both sides of the roads for any place where they might have pulled off the main drag. You know, fire access road, farm road, that sort of thing.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Chief,” the sergeant asked, “how many officers are scheduled for the next shift?”

Gus looked at him with bovine blankness. “Well—” he began, but Terry cut him off.

“Sergeant, every officer we have is on the clock right now. Gus called in all the off-duty people before you guys even got here.”

Ferro’s face became wooden.

Gus nodded. “That’s right, sir. We only keep a couple of one-person cars rolling at a time.” He shrugged. “Don’t need more.”

“Haven’t until now,” Terry amended.

“Yikes,” said LaMastra quietly.

“Do you have any reserves?” Ferro asked.

“Not as such, no,” hedged Gus. “A lot of men in town, and a handful of women, have been local officers at one time or another, especially those who did co-op work while they were in law classes at Pinelands. Plus there was a town watch for a while, so a few of those guys had a basic course. Sometimes we’ll hire them on during the week of Halloween and all during the Christmas season, you know, to cut down on shoplifting and stuff like that, and make some extra pay.”

“More of a presence, you understand,” said Terry. “It helps everybody to see a warm body in a uniform. Shoot, I’ve even worn a badge a couple of times — back before I became mayor, of course.”

“I see,” said Ferro. He pursed his lips. “Any chance we could reactivate some of these people?”

“‘Reactivate’?” Gus echoed.

“Yes. If this manhunt goes on longer than twelve hours, the officers on shift now are going to get tired. We’ll need replacements for them so we can keep the net as tight as possible. If we slacken at all, then Ruger and company will slip right through.”

That would suit me, thought Terry. Aloud, he said, “Well, I more or less reinstated one fellow tonight. Malcolm Crow.”

Gus wheeled on him. “Crow? Now why’n hell’d you do that?”

Ferro and LaMastra exchanged a brief look. “Who’s he?” asked LaMastra.

“A local shopkeeper,” Terry said.

“He’s a drunken—” Gus began and Terry withered him with a glare.

“Crow has been sober for years, Gus, and you bloody well know it.”

“Once a drunk, always a drunk.”

“Maybe, but he isn’t drinking now. Come on, Gus, even you have to admit he was a darned good officer.” Terry almost said, Crow was the only good cop this town ever had, but didn’t want to appear unkind in front of the Philly cops.

Gus grunted.

Ferro did not want to involve himself in the matter, but LaMastra asked, “What’s the beef? Did he drink himself off the force or something?”

“No,” said Terry, still glaring at Gus. “He quit drinking before he ever even put on a badge.”

“So what’s the problem?”

Gus opened his mouth to answer that, but Terry cut him off. “There is no problem,” he said slowly, putting firm emphasis on each word. Then he looked at Ferro. “Malcolm Crow was a superb cop. He might even have run for chief,” he said, intending the barb to hook itself in Gus’s flesh. “He had some issues from when he was a kid and got into the bottle for a while and, all right, he made a fool of himself for a year or two, but he also got himself sober. Started going to meetings and really turned things around. Became a decorated officer. Gus was opposed to a drunk working as a cop, but I vouched for Crow then and I vouch for him now. He’s been sober for years, as I said, and nowadays he’s a well-respected businessman, a cornerstone of our community, and”—again he focused his eyes on Gus—“a close personal friend of mine.”

In truth Terry did have doubts about reinstating Crow and halfway regretted having done it on the spur of the moment. Had he been less overwhelmingly exhausted and less off-kilter he might not have done so. Crow had been a very good cop, and had been sober and going to AA meetings without a break for years, but it had also been a long time since he’d worn a badge and — as much as Terry hated to admit it to himself — Crow was so much of a goofball that it was hard to imagine him even taking what was happening right now with the proper seriousness. But he didn’t see what good admitting it would do now. Especially not in front of Gus and these other officers.

Turning back to Ferro, he went on, “I reinstated him just temporarily so that he could go shut down our Haunted Hayride. It gives him double authority as a contract employee for the hayride and a law officer. That way he’ll have the clout to handle any arguments or protests that result. Tourists can get touchy, you know.”

“Mm. We saw the signs on the way into town. Chief Bernhardt tells me that you own it.”

“Yes, and I’m proud to say that it’s the biggest in the East Coast,” Terry said with one of his few genuine smiles of the day, “but it’s full of kids, and I felt it was best to shut it up for the night and send the kids home.”

“Very smart thinking, sir,” said Ferro. “Is this Mr. Crow the man for the job?”

“Crow,” said Terry firmly, “is the man for any job. Believe me.”

Gus, it was clear, did not, but Ferro and LaMastra saw the look in Terry’s eyes, and they both nodded. “Fine,” Ferro said, “can we keep him on after he’s done that job? Help us out until this thing is over?”

“I think he can be persuaded.”

“Good, good, anyone else?”

Gus cleared his throat. “I suppose we could make some calls. I don’t think we have enough uniforms and sidearms to go around, but we could issue badges and shotguns. Or have the replacements borrow the sidearms of the team going off-duty.”

“Well, sir,” said Ferro, “I’ll leave you to work that part of it out for yourself. For my own part, if we don’t get some action in the next few hours, I’m going to call in a request for additional officers from Philly, and we may be hearing from the FBI soon.”

“Why would the FBI bother with this?” asked Terry.

“Well, sir, according to your map there, A-32 cuts back and forth over the Delaware River just here, and again here.”

“Yeah? So?”

“Well, that side of the river is New Jersey, this side is Pennsylvania.”

“Again…so?”

“Ah,” said Gus. “Something about interstate flight?”

“Uh-huh,” said LaMastra. “Interstate flight is a federal rap, and that means the FBI can be asked to step in. But we probably won’t ask.” He directed this last comment to Ferro, who nodded.

“Federal involvement is seldom a good thing. But that doesn’t matter right now. My captain has promised us at least a dozen officers.”

“Get all the help you need,” Terry said. “I said it twice already, and I’m not joking, call in the National Guard if it’ll help. Let me be clear, Sergeant, I surely do not need Jack the Ripper slicing people up in Pine Deep. It’s bad for business, and it’s bad for me personally because I am friends with darn near everybody who lives around here. Please, do whatever — and I mean whatever—it takes to nail these three guys and get them the heck out of my backyard.”

Ferro smiled a tiny smile, and gave Terry a curt nod. “We will do our very best, Mr. Mayor.”

Terry nodded. Turning to Gus, he said, “C’mon, let’s get on the phone and see if we can’t raise some kind of posse.”

“Hi-yo, Silver,” Gus muttered sourly and followed his boss over to the desks.

Ferro and LaMastra stood looking at them, and then turned to stare up at the map, at the immensity of area that had to be covered in order to run Karl Ruger to ground. It was staggering.

“What d’you think, Sarge?”

Ferro shrugged. “Honestly?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I think this town is hip deep in shit.”

“Yep. Pretty much how I would have put it.”

“Christ, you three look like a hockey team in the penalty box.”

It was true enough. Val sat with a dish towel full of ice cubes pressed to her forehead; her father sat next to her with a similar compress on his torn eyebrow, still flushed and slightly goggle-eyed from the blow to his solar plexus; and Connie was dabbing at her face with an antimacassar from the couch, sopping up the water Ruger had dashed in her face to wake her up.

Across from them, Ruger sipped a tall glass of Early Times.

“You do realize,” he said in his cold whisper, “that all of this was unnecessary. If you would just follow the rules of my little Q and A, we’d all get along. Can’t we all just get along?” he said, and laughed. The joke was lost on them, but he gave a fatalistic shrug and kept his own good humor. “So, I think by now the rules should be clear. I will ask each one of you a question, or perhaps questions, and that person will answer. No committees, no debating societies. Just questions and answers. That’s pretty simple, isn’t it?”

They stared at him, hating him, willing him death.

He said, “Isn’t it?” leaning into the words.

“Yes,” they each said.

“Nice.” He sipped the sour mash and hissed with pleasure at the burn. “Okay. Now, Miss Val, I believe you were about to tell me about your various boyfriends.”

Val swallowed what felt like a cantaloupe in her throat. “I…don’t have any boyfriends.”

“What? None at all? What about the one that lives in town?”

“No. That’s been over for weeks. There’s no one.”

Ruger smiled a slithery smile. “I find that kinda hard to believe, nice-looking piece like you. What’s the deal? Didn’t you give him enough?”

Val just looked at him.

“C’mon, I’m interested. Why’d you break up?”

She managed what she hoped was a casual and dismissive shrug. “Just didn’t work out.”

“Uh-huh.” Ruger’s dark eyes glittered like the glass eyes of a stuffed shark. “So nobody new, huh?”

“No.”

Val tensed, almost as afraid of more questions as she was of Connie blurting out the truth and screwing them all. She wasn’t entirely sure why she denied Crow’s existence, but some instinct had triggered her words when she had spoken. No boyfriend, no husband, no attachments that could somehow be used against her, or who could be hurt if she were to be used against them. Keep the man’s thoughts away from that kind of thinking. It was bad enough that Connie had mentioned Mark, Val’s brother, who was due home sometime soon.

“Okay, you get two points for answering all your questions.” He winked at her. “Okay, Pop. Your turn. What kind of car do you have?”

“A Bronco.”

“Oh yeah? What year?”

“Ninety-six.”

“Any good?”

For some reason, Guthrie felt a brief flash of cockiness. He said, “It gets lousy gas mileage in the city, the clutch sticks, and it has a shimmy when you get it above sixty.”

Ruger blinked, and then he laughed. “Well, well.” He raised his glass to toast Guthrie and took a heavy knock of the whiskey. “Where are the keys?”

“On a hook by the back door.”

“Where is it parked?”

“Right out back. Just outside the door.”

“What color?”

“Dark green.”

“Any vanity plates?”

Guthrie looked at him for a moment, uncomprehending.

“I mean do you have one of those stupid plates that say 2-FAST or BIG BUX or any of that shit?”

“No…no, just regular tags.”

“Registration and inspection up to date?”

“Of course.”

“‘Of course,’” Ruger repeated, shaking his head. “I break into your house, kick your ass, and am planning to steal your car, and you sound offended when I ask if your inspection is up to date.”

“The car’s fine. Why don’t you take it and go?”

“I will, I will, but not yet. There’s just a few things I got to do yet.”

The phone rang, but Ruger made no move to answer it. He merely let it ring itself out. He finished the drink and set the glass down primly on the side table. Val was amazed: he must have poured five fingers’ worth into the tall milk glass and he’d downed it all in six or eight gulps. How much whiskey was that? A quarter pint? What would he be like when the whiskey hit his system?

“Okay, next question, Mr. Guthrie,” Ruger said with no trace of a slur in his voice. “Do you have a stretcher?”

“A stretcher?”

“Yeah.”

“No. A stretcher? Why would I have a stretcher?”

“You got anything I could use as one?”

Guthrie frowned. “I guess you could take a door off its hinges and use that. Who’s hurt?”

“Hey, hey, now, I didn’t say you could ask any questions.”

“Okay,” Guthrie said in a soft, placating voice. “Sorry.”

“Okay then. How ’bout a wheelbarrow?”

“Sure. We have a couple of those.”

“Where?”

“In the shed. Small yellow building next to the barn.”

“Is it locked?”

“No.”

“No?” Ruger chuckled. “Aren’t you afraid of thieves?”

Guthrie looked at him coldly. “Not usually much of an issue way out here.”

Ruger just shook his head. “Okay, and how about rope? Or that gray tape, whaddya call it?”

“Duct tape?”

“Yeah, duck tape. You got any duck tape?”

Guthrie nodded. “Couple rolls.”

“Where?”

“In the cellar.”

“Rope?”

“Some in the barn. Washing line, bailing twine in the cellar.”

“Good, good.”

Ruger rocked in his rocker for a little while, again pursing his lips, the smile coming and going, and his reptile eyes staring blackly at them. “Okay, then,” he said at length, “here’s the plan. Val, you are going to go fetch me some rope and some of that duck tape. You go fetch it and come right back.”

Val’s heart hammered in her chest as she thought about all the things in the cellar. She stood up quickly and turned to go, but immediately Ruger was on his feet, too. He grabbed her shoulder, spun her around, and looked into her eyes. She didn’t know what he was seeing there, but his face seemed angry at first, and then his smile crawled back. He slowly shook his head. “Uh-uh, honey. You sit your pretty ass back down. I was born at night, darlin’, but it wasn’t last night. Sit down.”

She let her gaze fall away and slowly crept back to the couch and sat down. Her father handed her the ice pack she had dropped and she pressed it back it place. Connie was staring at her with a total lack of understanding.

“I think,” said Ruger, reaching out with the toe of his shoe and nudging Connie’s knee, “that I’ll let the Stepford Wife go.”

“M…me?”

“Y…yes,” Ruger mocked, “y…you.”

“Down the cellar?”

“No, I want you to run down to the drugstore and fetch me a bottle of baby aspirin. Yes, the fucking cellar. Don’t you pay any attention?”

“For rope?” Connie said in a five-year-old’s voice.

“And tape. You get them and then hustle your white bread ass right back up here. No tricks, no stalling. Just get the stuff and come right back.”

“By myself?” Connie seemed to be having a hard time grasping the specifics of her mission.

Ruger rolled his eyes. “Jeez, can you really be this fucking dumb?” He looked at Val and Guthrie, who were studying the pattern of the rug on the floor. He sighed. “Okay, so you probably are this fucking dumb. Whatever. Just go and get the stuff and come right back.”

Connie backed away from him, nodding numbly. She reached the entrance to the hallway, bumped against the door frame, half spun, and then fled down the corridor. Ruger saw her open the door at the far end and listened to her feet clattering on the wooden steps. He leaned against the door frame and called out, “Remember, darlin’, no games. Just find the stuff and hustle back.” Turning to Guthrie, he said, “She isn’t too bright, is she?”

“She’s just scared.”

“What about you?” he said to Val. “Are you scared?”

“Of course I am,” she said bitterly.

“Maybe, but you aren’t scared stupid like your sister.”

“I’m scared enough, mister.” The image of the EPT test kit upstairs in the medicine cabinet flashed into her brain, unbidden and immediate. Her eyes wavered and fell away, down to her hands twisting in her lap.

Ruger looked at her, measuring her. “Good,” he said after a slow moment.

In the cellar, Connie tramped down the last steps, walked blindly past the gun cabinet, past the workbench with its collections of awls and screwdrivers and utility knives, past the wall phone, and made a hectic beeline for the closet where the clothesline was kept. She snatched up two plastic-wrapped fifty-foot lengths, and from a lower shelf she took a huge roll of dark gray duct tape. For some reason she clutched them to her chest as if they were sacred objects, spun on her heel, and fled back upstairs. She turned off the light and bathed all of the actual objects of salvation in useless darkness.

“Good girl, now go sit down.”

Connie went obediently to the couch, turned, and sat down, smoothing her skirt around her. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, ankles together, eyes downcast. Ruger looked at her as if she were something from another planet, which, in a way, she was, if he was typical of the world that he came from. The bundles of rope lay on the coffee table, but Ruger held the roll of tape, tossing it lightly into the air and catching it one-handed.

Val glanced at Connie, feeling sorry for her sister-in-law. It was apparent to Val that Connie had retreated — fled — into herself. Beyond the last name she’d taken in marriage she shared absolutely nothing in common with Val. Connie had grown up wealthy, soft, and sheltered. She was middling intelligent, good-hearted, truly loved Mark, aspired to no heights beyond maintaining a household, and apparently spent very little time in her own thoughts. Generally her chatter was borderline inane and Val routinely tuned it out when she could, and for the most part didn’t really like Connie very much. Now, though, she loved her and wanted to hug her and shelter her.

She was also assessing Connie, wondering if maybe she had placed a 911 call downstairs, or had secreted a knife somewhere in her clothes, but as wonderful as that would be, Val doubted if it was true. Connie just wasn’t like that. As far as Val could see, if Connie had strength of any kind — either wit or courage — it was so deeply submerged that she was unaware of it.

“Now,” said Ruger, pouring another finger of bourbon, “anyone want to guess why I had Miss Polly Purebred fetch this stuff?” He took a sip, then knocked it back. “No guesses? Well, I can see it in your eyes. If you think that I’m gonna tie you up, that’s right. That should tell you something, shouldn’t it?”

Val shook her head.

“I think he means,” said her father, “that he wouldn’t bother tying us up if he meant to kill us.”

Val looked expectantly at Ruger. “You father’s on the ball, and he’s right, too. I didn’t come here to waste your sorry hillbilly asses. If I wanted to do that, I’d have done it already. So, maybe I’m not as much a bad guy as I seem, huh?”

Val almost let loose a derisive snort, but caught herself.

“I can’t have you running around loose, either. So, it’s hog-tying time on the old farmstead.”

“What if we have to go to the ladies’ room?” asked Connie, in what appeared to be a reasonable voice. It was such a reasonable and conversational voice that it chilled Val.

“Uh-oh,” said Ruger, showing mock horror, “I think Donna Reed is no longer with us. Wonder if I could wake her up some.”

“Leave her alone.”

Ruger wheeled on Val, his hand raised, but she quickly added, “Please.”

He considered her for a moment and then lowered his hand. “Yeah, whatever. Too much shit to do anyway.”

Guthrie said, “Is someone hurt?” When Ruger just looked at him, he added, “You wanted a stretcher. Is someone hurt?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. My — how should I put it? — my…‘associate’ is a trifle banged up. He’s out in the cornfield and I think he’d like to come in now.”

Val stared at him. “You left an injured man out in the field?”

“Yes, isn’t it shocking? On the other hand, what the fuck do you care?”

“He’s hurt….”

“So what? If I was hurt, would you give a shit?”

“Of course I would.”

Ruger laughed. “Oh, I’m sure!”

Val’s dark eyes glittered. “I’d help any animal that was hurt. Even a skunk or a rabid dog.”

Ruger shook his head ruefully. “Man oh man, you are something!” For a moment, it seemed as if he were about to say something more, but then the front door opened.

Nobody had even heard the car drive up, which was not surprising with the wind and the soft moist dirt of the road, but they all heard the click as the knob turned and the lock sprang open.

Val turned and screamed: “Crow! No! Run!”

Anything else she might have said was drowned out by the ear-shattering blast of the pistol as Ruger spun around and fired two shots through the door.

Chapter 12

The man in the road had a huge butcher’s knife driven into his chest and his white T-shirt was a mass of blood that bloomed a bright crimson in the glare of the headlights. Crow slowed to a halt and leaned out of the window.

“How’s tricks, Barney?”

Grinning through bloody teeth, the impaled man leaned his forearms on the open window frame of the Chevy and peered inside. “There’s a game tonight at the college, so it’s been kinda slow. How’s with you? Hey, is that Mike?”

“What’s up, Barney?”

“How’s it hanging, Mike?”

“I’m cool.”

Barney Murphy scratched his chest where the adhesive bound the fake knife to his skin. The handle wobbled. “Whatcha doing out here, man?” he asked Crow.

“Look, Barney, there’s some stuff going on in town, and we have to shut the place down.”

“Shut it down? You mean…for good?”

“No, just for the night. Where’s Coop?”

“He’s out with a bunch of customers in number four.” The hayride had four tractors that pulled stake-bed trailers full of tourists. Number two was at Shanahan’s for a cracked axle. The other three rotated, each pulling out with a load of kids about every twenty minutes.

“How many and how long?”

Barney considered. “Maybe thirty people. Been gone ’bout twenty minutes.”

“Shit…er, I mean shoot.” He cocked an eye at Mike, who was grinning. “You didn’t hear that, right?”

“Shit no.”

“Good,” Crow said, and in a mock under-his-voice tone he added, “Juvenile delinquent.”

“He’ll be done in another twenty, twenty-five,” said Barney. “Number one just came in five, ten minutes ago. Three’ll be out another ten.”

“I’m gonna take one of the ATVs and go fetch Coop. Anyone else shows up, turn ’em away. Except for Mike’s folks, they’re going to pick him up. His bike’s in my trunk.” Barney looked confused, and Crow elaborated. “He got run off the road by some dumb-ass trucker. Got banged up a bit.”

“I’m okay,” Mike said bravely.

Crow said, “Busted a rib or two and cracked his head on a rock. No, don’t look like that, he’s not going to die on you. His folks are going to take him over to the hospital for some X-rays.”

“That sucks,” he said, but Mike just shrugged. Carefully.

Crow said, “Look, Barney, there’s something serious going on. There are three assholes from Philly, bank robbers or something, who may be hiding out somewhere around here. The mayor wants everybody who belongs in town back in town, and all the kids at home.”

“What? That’s it?”

“That’s it, as far as I know.”

“Well, that’s not so much.”

“Yeah, but you know how Terry Wolfe is.”

“Yeah. He’s scared of his own shadow. I mean he never even comes out here, not even during the day.”

“Mr. Wolfe’s okay, Barney. He’s just a busy guy. He owns a lot of things. He’s always busy. That’s why he pays me to manage this joint.” There was just the faintest edge to Crow’s voice, and Barney caught it.

“Cool, man.”

“Anyway, if you see anyone you don’t know — any adults I mean — or if anything weird happens, call me on my cell.”

“Weird? Dude…this is a haunted hayride, you know.”

Crow smiled and winked at him and put the car into gear. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, nodding to the knife handle, “you ought to have that looked at.”

“Yeah,” said Barney, “this thing is killing me.”

The night was stretching forward into darkness, racing toward the dead hours that are forgotten by the light. All across Pine Deep, hearts were beginning to beat just a bit faster, minute-by-minute; lungs were gulping in air and gasping it out. In just a few hours the pitch and pulse of the night had changed, accelerated, jumped toward haste and action and frenzy.

There was the scent of blood on the dark winds, and the promise of much, much more; a perfume of destruction and pain carried to every part of the town, even to the darkest and most remote of places. The scent seemed to sink into the rich earth of the town, seeking out those who craved that aroma.

Deep in the darkness, someone became aware of that perfume; someone laid bare his senses and absorbed the scent of death, the energy of fear, the electricity of hate. He filled himself with the essence of hurt and dread, and he smiled. Teeth long caked with wormy soil, and lips withered to dry tautness peeled into a grin that betrayed the pernicious delight of the smiler. Above and around him the black tons of earth trembled as he laughed.

Ruger’s tiny automatic made lightning flashes and thunderstorm booms that crashed off the living room walls. Two black holes appeared high on the top panel of the door and cordite burned the air. Val screamed and lunged frantically for the doorknob, but Ruger sprang to his feet, knocking the rocking chair over, and with a ferocious sweep of his arm he sent her reeling back into her father’s arms. Guthrie fell back onto the couch with Val sitting down hard on top of him; he grunted in pain and the breath whooshed out of him for the second time. Connie screamed, too, but she made no move at Ruger: she just sat there on the couch covering her face with both hands and screaming shrilly through her fingers.

Ruger grabbed the knob and with a violent jerk whipped the door open, bringing his gun up high and steady as he did so. Outside, on the wide plank porch, Mark Guthrie stood in a frozen posture of absolute and uncomprehending shock: half crouched, stock-still, wide-eyed, and staring with dinner-plate eyes at the gun in the hand of a man he didn’t know. The bullets must have missed his face by inches and there were tiny splinters on his cheek, standing up like needles in a pincushion.

“Welcome home,” hissed Ruger and grabbed a handful of Mark’s shirt, pulled him close, and kneed him savagely in the crotch. Mark let loose with a high whistling shriek and folded in half at the waist. Connie and Val screamed, but Ruger ignored them and dragged the man into the house and flung him the length of the living room. Mark was a knotted cannonball of agony and he caromed off the wall and collapsed onto an occasional table that splintered under him. Mark, table, a vase of dried flowers, and some small picture frames collapsed onto the floor.

Val lunged up again and Ruger backhanded her down onto the couch; again she sprawled across her father’s lap and he caught her as she started to roll off onto the floor. Ruger turned to Val’s brother and kicked him viciously in the thigh and as Mark opened his mouth to scream, Ruger jammed the barrel of his pistol under his nose. “Just fucking lie there.” The scream died in his throat.

Connie, however, had started screaming as soon as Ruger had fired his gun and was still screaming, yelling, “Mark!” over and over again. Ruger spun and leveled the gun at her. “Shut your mouth, you stupid cunt!”

Like her husband’s, Connie’s screams turned to ice in her throat, but as if the desperate forces in her needed to escape in some way her body snapped into action and she hurled herself off the couch and flew like a bird to Mark, who was shaking his head stupidly, brushing at dried roses and baby’s breath and bits of broken crockery. Ruger stepped back and let her go, allowing her to flutter around her husband like a flight of nervous sparrows, touching and probing and kissing and stroking with darting nervous hands. All of it amused Ruger, who smiled. In as loud a voice as his mangled larynx could manage, he said, “Now, everyone just shut the fuck up!” He spaced the words out to give them maximum weight and effect.

The Guthrie house became as quiet as a tomb in less than one second, and Ruger actually sighed with pleasure. He looked at Val, who was gripping the armrest of the sofa with white-knuckled fingers. She had managed to disentangle herself from her father, who looked gray and sweaty. “Who’s the geek?” he asked, jerking his head in the direction of the young man. “Your brother-in-law?”

Val frowned in confusion. “What? Uh…no, he’s my brother. Mark.”

Ruger also looked confused. “Brother? Hey, I know this is the sticks and all, but I didn’t think brothers and sisters actually married out here.”

Val shook her head, not getting the point.

“Isn’t Donna Reed there your sister?”

“Huh? Oh! Oh, no,” said Val, understanding now, “she’s my sister-in-law. She’s married to Mark, my brother.”

“Ah,” Ruger said again.

By this time, Connie had helped Mark sit up and had brushed all the debris off him while constantly whispering, “He’s got a gun, he’s got a gun. Are you hurt? Don’t do anything, he’s got a gun.”

Mark looked up at Ruger, his face lined with pain and glistening with a patina of new sweat. “What the hell’s going on here?” Mark demanded, but with the pain the question carried no authority and came out as a wheeze.

“Are you okay?” Guthrie asked tightly.

“I…” Mark began, and then stopped, frowning deeply and looking quizzically at Ruger. “Who the hell are you? And…did you shoot at me?” he asked in a voice that betrayed his total amazement at such a possibility.

“No,” whispered Ruger. “If I had you’d been fucking well dead.” He smiled. “I shot at the door.”

Val saw the moment when Mark’s shock was overtaken by the first moment of clarity and then she saw the fear take hold. His eyes were wide and he stared at Ruger and at the gun.

Mark snapped his head around to where his father sprawled half on and half off the couch. He saw the blood on his father’s face and Mark’s own face went white. “Dad? What’s going on?”

“Be still, Mark…don’t do anything. Just do what he says.”

Ruger kicked the foot on one of Mark’s outstretched legs. “You’re Mr. Rotary Club, am I right?”

“I’m…who did you say?” He was not following any of this. “What the hell is—”

“It’s okay, Mark,” said Val. “Just listen.”

Staring at her and then back at his father, Mark said, “My God! Val? Dad? What happened to you? What happened to your faces? Did he do this?”

“They’re fine,” said Ruger. “Everybody’s fine.”

“Did you do that to them?”

Ruger shrugged as if to say these things sometimes happen.

“Do you want to tell me what the hell this is all about?” His words promised a demand that his tone of voice could not back up. It came out somewhere between a growl and a squeak, like a teenage boy whose voice was breaking.

“Sure,” Ruger said affably, “but first, why don’t you and your little wifey just go and join everyone else on the couch?”

Mark looked about to say more, but the black eye of the pistol stopped him, and the black eyes of the gunman withered his will. He let Connie help him up and they moved slowly, and very carefully, over to the couch, hissing occasionally at the pain in his groin. With the four of them it was a very tight fit. Val sat on the left end next to her father, and Connie did her best to try and vanish between the elder and younger Guthrie men. Mark examined his father’s face. “That’s a pretty bad cut, Dad.”

“Leave it be,” Guthrie murmured.

“But, Dad—”

“Leave it be.”

To Ruger, Mark said, “Who the hell are you? Some kind of tough guy? Beating up on women and old men.”

“Blow me,” Ruger said. He set the rocker back on its runners, turned it to face them, and sat down. “Now…the only reason I’m going to bother to recap tonight’s game is because if you understand the rules, then I probably won’t have to shoot you. Capiche?”

Mark stared for a long moment, then slowly nodded.

“Good, good.” Ruger lit himself a cigarette. “Here’s the deal, Marky-boy. I am not here exactly by choice — God knows. My car broke down and I need a new one. Renting one ain’t an option right now. Also, I got a friend out there in the cornfield with a busted leg. You bozos are going to help me get him back here so we can patch him up, and then he and I are going to get the fuck out of this episode of Green Acres in your pop’s Bronco, which, I must admit, I am going to steal.”

Mark blinked several times in rapid succession.

“As I see it, Marky, this can go one of a couple of ways. The ideal way would, of course, involve you four helping me and then putting up no fuss as I tie you up and drive off in the car. I think I speak for all of us when I say that that’s the way we’d all like it to go. On the other hand, if you folks don’t want to cooperate, then I can just simply pop all four of you, take the car anyway, and still be on my merry way. You see, it really doesn’t matter all that much to me except that it would be more work for me if I had to do it alone, and work always makes me kind of cranky.”

“‘Pop’ us? You mean you’d shoot us? You’d actually shoot us?”

“Deader’n shit,” Ruger agreed.

“Holy Jesus.”

“Mm-hm. So what’s it gonna be?”

“I can’t believe you’d actually just…shoot us. I mean, what have we ever done to you?”

“Mark…” Val whispered.

“To me?” said Ruger. “You folks have never done anything to me. If my car hadn’t crashed, you’d have never even known I existed, and vice versa. Just luck of the draw, Marky.”

“But — shoot us?”

Ruger rolled his eyes. “Yes! What part of ‘shoot you’ don’t you understand, farm boy?”

“Why?”

“Mark, be still,” Guthrie said in a quiet but very firm voice.

“No…Dad, he’s talking about murdering all of us.”

Guthrie reached over and clamped a strong hand on his son’s wrist. “Yes, and if you don’t shut your mouth he just might! Now be still!”

Mark shut his mouth.

Ruger nodded in appreciation. “Your old man is sharp, Marky-boy. You’re the kind of fella that could let his mouth get his ass in trouble.”

“I’m just trying to understand this,” Mark muttered.

“What’s not to understand? Don’t you ever watch TV? I’m a bad guy on the run, and you all are the innocent saps who get tied up and robbed. End of scene. There’s nothing to understand. There’s no meaning to it.”

“What is it you want us to do?” asked Val, trying to steer the conversation back to a straightforward business negotiation. She eyed Ruger carefully as he took a long drag on his cigarette, wondering why he was stretching this whole thing out. What was he really waiting for? He could have tied them up, taken the Bronco, and been gone half an hour ago, but instead he was dragging this out for some reason she could not work out. More than once she saw him tilt his head to one side as if listening to a voice outside, or perhaps inside his head.

Ruger licked his lips and said, “Well, two of you are going to be stretcher bearers for my buddy. He’s out in the field waiting on us.”

“Where in the field?” asked Guthrie.

“By a big post with a scarecrow. Good half mile from here.”

Guthrie nodded, and to Val he said, “By the new section of fence.”

Her stomach turned at the thought of monsters like Ruger and his friend polluting the spot where she and Crow had made love just last night. Her mouth was a thin line as she asked, “And then?”

“Then we try to patch him up.”

“You said he broke his leg?” Guthrie asked.

Ruger laughed. “Oh yeah. Stepped in a hole and broke the living shit out of it. He has one of those…whaddya call it when the bones are sticking out?”

“Compound fracture,” murmured Val.

“Uh-huh. A real motherfucker of a compound fracture. I set it, more or less, and splinted it up, but he needs someone else to check it out. I don’t suppose any of you are doctors?”

“I know some first aid,” said Val.

“Well, well. That’s handy.”

“Just some basic stuff, though.”

“Well, beggars can’t be choosers.”

Mark held up a finger and in his formal, pedantic voice said, “Let me get this straight. If we help you, that is, if we bring your friend back here, patch him up as best we can, and let you take the car, then you’ll just go away and not hurt us? Is that it?”

“In a nutshell.”

“How do we know that we can trust you?”

“I guess you just have to,” Ruger said, and then he smiled his serpent’s smile, white teeth gleaming, eyes twinkling like cold and distant stars. “Besides, why would I lie?”

“Hey, what’s that?”

Officer Rhoda Thomas slowed the cruiser and rolled to a stop. She flicked on the searchlight and directed it where Officer Head was pointing. The black stretch of A-32 glowed a dark charcoal in the harsh white light, and the yellow lane divider gleamed, but cutting right through the dividing line and across the road itself were long black smears, intensely black even in the light’s glow. “Just skid marks,” observed Rhoda. “Nothing.”

“No, wait, they look pretty fresh.”

“So?”

“So, let’s check ’em out.” Head jerked the door handle and stepped out. Puzzled and reluctant, Rhoda followed suit. They walked over to where the skid marks began and stood looking at the road. With a totally reflexive action, Head unsnapped his pistol and jiggled the butt to loosen it in its leather holster. Rhoda watched, copied the movement though it was the first time she had ever performed that particular ritual, but she didn’t want to appear as raw as she knew she was. She was fascinated by him. She thought he looked like Samuel L. Jackson with more muscles and a shaved head.

They were an incongruous pair: the petite Rhoda in her pale gray chief’s department uniform with the six-pointed star gleaming as brightly as all her buttons and fittings; and Head, older, bigger, heavier, though not at all fat, in his blue Philadelphia Police Department rig, numbered shield on his breast and all of his equipment showing signs of eleven long years of hard use on big-city streets. Rhoda looked like an extra in a cheap movie, and Head looked unpretentiously real. He had hard eyes that had seen it all, a harder mouth that was drawn tight, and the posture of a predator. Beside him, Rhoda looked like a child. It wasn’t a sex thing: Head’s partner, Maddie, was as serious and seasoned a cop as he was, and she was buddied up with Officer Jim Polk farther up A-32. No, this was a reality check for Rhoda, and she knew it.

“These are from tonight,” he said, squatting down and running his fingertips along the smear of burned rubber. “Take a look. They veer right off the road.” He clicked on his own long-handled flash and swept the beam along the path of the skid marks. “See? Right there, they leave the road and go off into the field.” He moved to the very edge of the verge and shone his light into the corn. The light showed them the smashed-down corridor of stalks. “Bingo.”

Rhoda came up behind him. “You think they had an accident?”

“Be nice if it was that easy,” he said, then smiled thinly and added, “Be really nice if they totaled the car and themselves.”

“You think that’s likely?”

His smile became a grin and he shook his head. “Nah. Accident, maybe, but if they wrecked their ride, then they probably hightailed their asses out of here hours ago.” He stood and rubbed the skid mark with the toe of his shoe. “Could have been a blowout, who knows?” He turned and shone the light up and down the road, reading the scene. “Looks like a big car traveling in one hell of a hurry went off the road here and right into that field.”

She looked from the tracks to his face and then into the cornfield. The flash struck small splinters off chrome and glass way back in the field. “Oh, shit.”

“Yeah,” he agreed and drew his sidearm, laying his gun arm across the wrist of the hand holding the flash so that the beam and the barrel tracked together.

“You think they’re still in the car?” Rhoda whispered.

“I doubt it.” He listened to the night. Distant rumbling thunder, the caw of a night bird, traffic on the highway miles away. Head sucked his teeth.

“What do you want to do? Should we go check it out?”

“Uh-uh, honey. I’m not going anywhere near that car until we get some backup.” He nodded at her sidearm. “You any good with that?”

“I suck,” she said.

“Swell.”

“I’m better with a shotgun,” she said hopefully. “Can’t miss with a shotgun.”

“Yeah. Got one in the unit?”

“In the trunk.”

“Get it.” Together they backed up to their unit. Rhoda popped the trunk and Head kept the barrel of the pistol trained on the smashed corridor of cornstalks.

Rhoda removed the pump-action shotgun from the clips that fastened it to the underside of the hood. It was a Mossberg Bullpup 12 with a pistol grip and thirty-inch barrel. With a hand that even in the darkness was visibly shaking, she worked the pump and blew out a puff of air that had soured in her lungs.

Head glanced at it out of the corner of his eye and his eyebrows went up. “That’s a lot of shotgun for a small town.”

“The chief likes ’em.”

“How about you?”

She shrugged. “As long as it doesn’t knock me on my behind, I don’t much care one way or another.”

Nodding, Head indicated the crash site with his pistol. “Point that cannon right there. I’m going to call for backup.” He reached into the unit and lifted the handset. “What’s your call number?”

“Unit Two.”

“What’s the call-in protocol?”

“Just ask for Ginny.”

Head smiled and shook his head. Gotta love small-town America. Clicking on the mike, he said, “Unit Two to, um, Ginny. Unit Two to Ginny. Over.”

“Who’s this?” a woman’s voice demanded sharply.

“Officer Jerry Head. I’m in Unit Two with Officer Thomas.”

“Oh, okay. What can I do for you?”

“Is Detective Sergeant Ferro there?”

“Yes. He’s having coffee.”

“Can you put him on the line, please?”

“He’s in the conference room with…oh, well, really, Mr. Wolfe, I didn’t say that…. I was just about to…no, I…” The conversation on the other end suddenly became agitated as Ginny and at least two other voices lapsed into an argument. Then a new voice came on the line. “Unit Two, this is Ferro. Over.”

“Sergeant, this is Jerry Head. Officer Thomas and I are on A-32, approximately fourteen miles from the center of town, on the eastern stretch.”

“Copy that.”

“We’re Code Six investigating skid marks indicating a vehicle recently gone off the road and into some cornfields. It looks like a single-vehicle accident, possibly a blowout, though the tracks are clean with no rubber debris.”

“Have you located the vehicle itself?”

“Negative. Request backup so we can check it out.”

“That’s affirmative. Hold for backup en route.”

“Copy that.”

“Ferro out.”

“Out.” Head tossed the mike onto the seat and turned to Rhoda. “You heard that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“We’ll wait. You know who we’re after. I didn’t wake up this morning as John Wayne and you probably aren’t Annie Oakley.”

“I have no idea who Annie Oakley is, but I get the point.” She grinned. “Waiting here is good.”

They stood on the far side of their unit, using it as cover. Head took a foil pack of Orbit gum out of his pocket and popped one through the blister; he offered the pack to Rhoda but she shook her head. His dark brown eyes had a gunslinger squint to them that Rhoda found intimidating.

She said, “You must think we’re a bunch of backwoods dumb-asses.”

He chuckled as he chewed the gum. “Actually, no. Just be happy you don’t deal with this kind of freak every day. It juices you for about the first year on the job but it damn sure gets old after a while.”

She nodded, cradling the shotgun in her arms.

Head grinned. “Tell you the truth, I’d switch jobs with you in a heartbeat. I love this town. I bring my kids up to the hayride every year. We were up here two weeks ago, and I’m probably going to bring my youngest and his Cub Scout pack up here closer to Halloween. My wife, Tracy, and I come up here Christmas shopping every year. Kind of a ritual. We always have breakfast in that place on Salem Street, what’s the name…? Auntie Ems?”

“Yeah, that’s a great place. I waitressed there some when I was still in high school.”

“Yeah? Be funny if maybe one of those times you waited our table.”

“Could have. The place is always packed.”

“Yeah, but man, they make the best breakfasts. I love that one they do, the omelet with Granny Smith apples and cheddar cheese? With a little cinnamon on top.”

“The Scarecrow.”

“Right, right. Man, I love that one. And Tracy really likes the Irish oatmeal with honey and milk.”

“Yeah, all their stuff’s good.”

He blew a stream of blue smoke into the night.

In the far distance they could see red and blue lights racing along A-32.

“That’s them,” he said.

They stood in silence, their guns still pointing at the darkened field, but their eyes flicking toward the approaching lights.

“Officer Head?”

“Jerry.”

“Jerry. Does this stuff — everything they’re saying about the suspect, about Ruger — doesn’t that scare you?”

“Me? Naw. He chopped up some defenseless old folks. I’ve faced down his kind before.”

“So…you’re not scared? Really?”

“Hell no!” Head laughed. “This guy scares the living piss out of me.”

Relief flooded her face. “God! Me too. You know, we only have a couple of full-time officers here in town. Most of us are law students doing this part-time as a kind of co-op thing. I mean, we get some academy training, but they know that we’re not career, so they don’t really drum it into us. And stuff like this never happens.”

“So that’s why we are going to do this just exactly the way Sergeant Ferro said, by the numbers and very tight, like professional law enforcement officers. No John Wayne shit. If that is Ruger’s car back there, and if he’s there, we are going to handle him as if he is armed, dangerous, and every bit as crazy as they say he is.”

“Jeez,” she said softly.

Head thought, If it is Ruger and he so much as farts too loud I’m going to send his evil ass home to Jesus quick as think about it.

The second unit pulled up to a fast stop as both doors popped open at the same time and two officers stepped out. Jimmy Castle, tall and slim, with straw-colored hair and smiling eyes, stepped out from behind the wheel, and from the shotgun sidestepped Coralita Toombes. She was a stocky black woman with a face as harsh and unsmiling as Jimmy’s was lighthearted. She wore a Philadelphia P.D. uniform and had a Glock in her strong right fist, barrel pointed to the sky.

“Where do we stand, Jerry?” she asked as the four officers drew together in a huddle by flashlight.

Head filled them in and together the four officers moved to the shoulder. “Toombes, you and me’ll take point. One of you two can watch our asses.”

Toombes said, “Jimmy here used to be on the job in Pittsburgh.”

“Street or clerical?”

“Street,” said Castle. “Four years. Then my wife’s company transferred out here, so—”

Head cut him off. “Cool. Okay, let’s do it this way. Rhoda, you stay back here by the unit. I want you actually holding the mike the whole time. Give Sergeant Ferro regular reports, even if it’s to say that there’s nothing to report. Okay with you?”

“Fine with me,” she said meaningfully.

“Keep that shotgun handy,” he said, then added, “But be careful where you point it.” He turned to Castle. “You have a vest?”

“Yeah. First time I’ve worn it since Pittsburgh, though.” He rapped his knuckles on his chest.

“Let’s do it like a dark-house search,” murmured Toombes. “Check, call, and clear.”

Head nodded. “Everyone cool with that?”

“Cool as a Popsicle,” said Castle, but he wasn’t smiling anymore. His usual open and ingenuous face had taken on that hard cop look as he drew his Glock and slowly worked the slide.

Toombes also drew her weapon. “Let’s do it.”

They did it.

Chapter 13

It didn’t take long for Ruger to get things rolling. He had Val tie Mark and Connie up, overlapping the multiple turns of rope with strips of duct tape to keep them from wriggling the knots loose, and Ruger checked the knots to make damned sure she hadn’t pulled any fast ones. The two of them sat side by side on the couch, glaring fear and impotent hatred at Ruger. Meanwhile he had ordered Guthrie to knock the pins out of the hinges on the kitchen door and drag it into the living room. It was a lightweight panel, but sturdy and would serve well enough as a stretcher. Throughout this phase Val made occasional eye contact with her father, trying to see if he was planning something, but the elder Guthrie’s face was careworn with concern for his children and when he finally caught Val’s look, and her cocked eyebrow, he gave a single terse shake of his head.

Twice since Ruger had arrived she felt her cell phone — always set to vibrate — start shivering in her jeans pocket, but as before she couldn’t do anything about it. It had to be Crow calling to say he was on his way, and she prayed that he would hurry.

“Okay, kids,” Ruger said as Val and her father stood with him by the front door, “now here’s the way it’s going to go. First we’re going to fetch a wheelbarrow, and then you two are going to come with me and help me fetch my friend and some of our gear from the field, and bring him back here. Then I’ll watch as Val ties you up, Mr. Guthrie. Once that’s done, you, my little broken-nose chickie, will do your Florence Nightingale on my buddy. Then I’ll tie you up and me and my buddy will be out of your lives. Except for fixing your front door and filing an insurance claim for your Bronco, you won’t be much worse for wear. How’s that sound? Fair enough? This is a simple one-two-three sort of thing. Anyone gets creative and everyone comes out losers. Everyone but me, that is.” He looked at them each in turn. Val nodded first, then her father. Mark and Connie, bound and gagged, could only stare. “Cool. Then let’s go. I’m getting a little tired of this Early American decor anyway. Christ.”

Guthrie bent and picked up one end of the door, and Val the other, and together they hefted it. Ruger carried his pistol in one hand and a heavy flashlight in the other, with the length of the clothesline slung over his shoulder. They left the house and descended the porch steps.

“Okay, set it down,” Ruger said and they laid the door on the ground. “You,” he said to Val, “go get the wheelbarrow.” Val felt her pulse jump when she thought of all the bladed tools in the barn — and the phone — but Ruger placed the barrel of his pistol against the back of her father’s skull. “Just the wheelbarrow, sweet cheeks. You read me?”

“Yes,” she said in a voice that was barely above a whisper but well below freezing.

“Okay. Down on your knees, Pops, until our gal Val gets back.” Guthrie slowly lowered himself to his knees, and at Ruger’s direction, laced his fingers together on top of his head. Ruger closed his strong white hand over Guthrie’s gnarled sun-browned fingers and squeezed mildly, but even so the grinding of his fingers made Guthrie wince. Val saw the flicker of pain on her father’s face, as Ruger had intended. “Yes, indeed, it hurts,” said Ruger. “It’ll keep hurting until you get your ass back here with the wheelbarrow. C’mon, bitch, time is money.”

Val turned and ran for the utility shed. True to his word, Ruger kept the painful pressure up until Val came running back behind a bright red wheelbarrow that was spattered with mud. Her father’s face was pinched and his lips drawn thin and tight against his teeth.

Nodding with appreciation, Ruger released Guthrie’s hands and stepped back.

Guthrie rose, opening and closing his hands to restore blood flow. His fingers rang with pain.

“Pick up the door and let’s get rolling.” He had procured a flashlight from the house, and shone it on the backs of father and daughter as they walked along the path that ran beside the vast cornfield. The Guthries laid the door sideways across the wheelbarrow and Val hefted the handles while her father steadied the door. Ruger walked three paces behind them, gun in one hand, flashlight in the other.

As they retraced the route he’d taken since leaving Boyd, Ruger watched them with something approaching pleasure. He actually liked the old fart and his daughter. They were both tough and Ruger respected tough. He was on the fence as to whether he would kill them or not. Probably not, he mused. What would be the point? Identifying him to the cops wouldn’t exactly be a news flash.

Ruger did wonder how Val would be in the sack, though. Feisty. Probably very feisty, and if things weren’t so damned pressing he might have taken the time to get to know her. See if he could tame the filly — not that it would be easy, he thought. Val didn’t seem the type to get a case of the vapors. She’d fight him all the way, and he just didn’t have that kind of time.

Now the Stepford Wife on the other hand. Yeah, she was a sweet piece. Stacked in a country sort of way, and certainly pretty enough. He might just have the time to show that one a thing or two. Just a quickie, but it would set him up right and ease some of the tension that had been knotting his neck muscles all day. Ruger liked the idea and it made him smile. He didn’t believe that Connie was as completely inane or prissy as she appeared — Christ, who could be? — and he wondered what kind of fire lay beneath the surface. Maybe all she needed was a little incentive to make her show her true colors. Her stick-up-his-ass husband probably didn’t have what it took to get much mileage out of her.

They walked down the lane between the tall walls of ripe corn, the beam of the flashlight keeping the Guthries in a globe of dancing yellow.

Ruger — you are my left hand!

The memory of those words and that voice came again and he missed a step and almost tripped. All the time he was in the house it had kept echoing in his head.

What the hell was it? It was driving him batty because he felt he ought to know that voice — that he did know it, but he just couldn’t put a name to it.

Yet the voice was compelling, insistent, and somehow…comforting.

Ruger — you are my left hand!

He took a deep breath and adjusted his grip on his pistol and focused his attention ahead. It didn’t take them very long to retrace the route Ruger had walked since leaving Boyd with his broken leg. Idly, he wondered how Boyd was doing, not that he cared a whit. If Boyd kicked it, then he’d just find someone else who could get him out of the country; there were enough travel agents in the circles he was used to gliding through. He had enough unmarked cash and enough saleable product to grease the wheels of such bureaucracy. With even moderate luck he’d be in Brazil before the weekend was out; or if things were too hot he could get into Canada for a while, hide out with a woman he knew in Montreal, and use her connections to pick up a new passport and visa and fly to Africa. Maybe pick up some mercenary work.

If Boyd was dead…then maybe he would linger here at the ol’ homestead for the night. Maybe do a comparison study of both of the gals, and then head north in the morning, blending into the tourist traffic and following the Poconos up into New York State.

Ruger — you are my left hand!

He grinned in the darkness with a wet shark’s smile, and reconsidered whether he would leave anyone here alive when he left.

The old 9mm Glock 17 felt light and comfortable in Jerry Head’s hand. He had a.32 Smith and Wesson strapped to his right ankle, just in case. Not as a throw-down, but as a true backup piece. Twice in the line of duty Head had experienced handgun disasters. The first time his old S&W 439 had jammed, and the other time he’d lost his gun during a chase that required him to jump from a garage roof into a Dumpster. His sidearm had gotten buried in Hefty bags of old pizza, used Pampers, and empty cereal boxes. In both cases the little.32 had saved his ass. Though lacking the stopping power of the heftier 9mm, and carrying far fewer rounds, the little wheel gun had the grace of never jamming, and being there when otherwise he would have had to try and return fire armed only with harsh language. It was a comfortable weight on his ankle. He knew Toombes had a similar backup piece; he doubted Jimmy Castle did. The man may have been big city once upon a time, but why would he have needed a little guardian angel out here in Stickville?

Head moved as quietly as he could down the corridor created by the out-of-control car, but each footfall on the dried corn leaves crackled and crunched. There was no way to move in silence. Behind him and to either side he heard Toombes and Castle making the same noise, and he knew that they would be just as nervous about all the noise as he was. Couldn’t sneak up on a dead man making noise like that.

Behind him, Head could hear Rhoda checking in with Detective Sergeant Ferro, heard the squelch of the radio.

They didn’t have far to go before all three of them saw the gleam of moonlight and flashlight on metal and glass. It was a big, black four-door sedan and it stood in a small clearing of smashed-down cornstalks. The trunk lid was up and the right front of the car seemed to be pitched unnaturally low. Head turned to the others, and very quietly said, “We go in together. Toombes, you go right, Castle you go left, and I’ll go up the pipe. Remember, check and clear.”

They nodded and set themselves. Guns poised, fingers sliding into the trigger guards, they stepped into the clearing at the same time, moving quickly but with maximum caution. Castle came up on the driver’s side keeping the muzzle of his revolver focused so that it tracked the light.

“Police officers!” they all shouted. “Freeze!”

Castle shone his flash into the car. “Clear!”

“Clear!” Head called as he checked inside the open trunk and under the car.

He waited for Toombes.

She said nothing.

Rising from a shooter’s crouch, Head peered around the end of the car. Toombes was standing just inside the clearing, facing the passenger side of the car, which was still out of sight to both Head and Castle. Toombes stood stock-still, her flashlight trained forward, but her service automatic was pointing limply and forgotten at the dirt by her feet.

“Toombes!” called Head. “Are you clear?”

Toombes didn’t even look at him.

“Toombes!”

She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

Head motioned to Castle to circle around the front of the car, and together they converged fast on the passenger side.

Time seemed to freeze.

Officer Jerry Head stared down at the ground by the side of the car. He stared at the blood-soaked ground. He stared at the blood-splattered corpses of half a dozen crows that had been peppered with buckshot. He stared at the man that lay there.

At least, he thought it was a man.

Had been a man.

Once.

Not anymore, though. Now it was…unspeakable.

Head felt his brain go numb and somewhere off to the right of his sanity, he heard Jimmy Castle loudly throwing up.

Terry stood over Gus Bernhardt as he made the long string of calls to former part-time officers, listening to the chief plead, cajole, entice, and even bully as he tried to pressgang the honest citizenry of the town into some kind of actual police force. In any other circumstance, the whole thing would be kind of funny. At that moment, however, nothing seemed even remotely amusing. Gus was sweating, and Terry could feel his own pores yielding their store of icy perspiration. He turned away and strolled across the office, focusing on Detective Ferro and his beefy sidekick, LaMastra. They were once again in a hushed, intense confabulation.

Terry didn’t join them, didn’t even linger; instead he moved restlessly around the room. Technically he was the senior official here, a mayor supposedly outranking out-of-town cops, but he felt like a kid who had accompanied an adult to the office. Everyone was busy with their own jobs, saying things he didn’t quite understand, doing things he could not help with, trying to accomplish things in which he could not actually participate. It was frustrating, but moreover, it was intimidating.

A phone rang on one of the desks as he passed it, and Terry glanced around to see if anyone was going to pick it up. No one so much as even turned to acknowledge this addition to the cacophony. Shrugging, Terry reached for the handset and picked it up.

“Pine Deep chief’s department,” he said in an official voice.

A voice said, “Terry?”

The connection was bad, making the voice sound distant and pale. It wasn’t a matter of static, for the line was clear, but there was a hollowness to the sound, as if the caller were at the far end of a long tunnel.

“Hello? Who is this, please?”

“Terry?” repeated the voice. “Is that you, Terry?”

It was a female voice, a little girl. Crisply, he said, “This is Mayor Terry Wolfe. Who is calling, please?”

“Terry…” the voice said, and for a moment the connection faded almost to nothingness.

“Who is this? We have a very bad connection, so please speak up.”

“Terry, he’s back!” said the voice, and that was quite clear.

“I’m sorry, who’s back? Who is this?”

“Terry. You have to do something.”

“Listen to me,” he said loudly and clearly, “you’ve reached the chief’s department in Pine Deep. Are you hurt or in trouble?”

Nothing but the hiss of an open line.

“Little girl…? Can you hear me?”

Across the room Detective Sergeant Ferro and his cronies were looking at him.

“Little girl? Are you still there?”

“Terry?” The voice was plaintive, sounding scared, but still distorted as if by a vast distance. “He’s back, Terry. He’s back and he’s going to hurt people again.”

“Hurt who? Little girl…who’s going to be hurt?”

“He’s back….”

“Little girl, tell me your name.”

Nothing.

“This is the mayor. Please tell me your name and where you’re calling from.”

Still nothing. Gus Bernhardt was lumbering across the room toward him, a deep frown on his florid face.

“You have to stop him, Terry,” whispered the tiny voice.

“Where are you calling from? Little girl? Little girl?” He kept calling for her to answer, but the sound on the phone had changed. Now there was just dead emptiness. Gus reached out for the phone, held it to his own ear for a moment, then set it back on the cradle.

“What gives?” he asked.

“Weird call,” said Terry, shaking his head and scratching his red beard. “Some little kid called.” He knew that voice, too, but he didn’t dare say it, and unconsciously tapped his pocket to make sure the pill case with the antipsychotics and the Xanax was still there.

“You heard a kid on that phone?” Gus asked, half smiling.

“Yeah, and she was going on about—”

“Uh, wait a minute, Terry, let me get this straight…you got a phone call on that phone and it was some little kid?”

“A little girl, yeah.”

“On that phone?”

“No, on two other phones,” snapped Terry viciously. “Yes, of course on this phone. What, are you deaf? You saw me talking to her.”

“Well, I’m not deaf, but you must have the greatest set of ears in the Western world if you got a phone call on that line.”

“What the heck are you talking about…?”

Still half smiling, Gus bent and snatched up the cord that came out of the back of the receiver. He reeled it up, speaking as he did so. “Since we cut back on staff, we don’t use these desks back here much,” he said. “These phones have all been disconnected.”

“Not this one, for Pete’s sake. I was just talk—”

His voice went flat and fell silent as Gus pulled up the end of the cord and presented it with a flourish. The plug stood up between his thick fingers.

Terry looked at it and then bent low and looked under the desk at the wall. He could see no wall jack, and eventually had to shift the desk and move a trash can before he found one. Slowly he straightened and looked at the plug.

Gus said, “No way this was even plugged into the wall. The cord was just coiled up under the desk.”

“I’m telling you, Gus…I heard that phone ring and I heard that kid talking.”

Gus stared at him for a long five count, then shrugged. “What can I say, Terry?”

Terry snatched the plug out of Gus’s hand and glared at it. He opened his mouth but couldn’t manage to say anything. He had heard the voice. Her voice.

Mandy’s voice.

The room started spinning around him and he almost turned and ran when Detective Sergeant Ferro’s voice cut through all the chatter in the room.

“It’s the officers at the wreck site,” he said tersely. “They found something!”

“Yo! Boyd — shift your ass!” called Ruger as he rounded the bend and followed Val and Guthrie into the clearing.

They stood still, bearing the white kitchen door between them. Val was staring fixedly at the many scattered pools of dark blood that glistened like black pools of oil in the moonlight; Guthrie stood looking up at the scarecrow’s post, which was also streaked with clawed finger-trails of blood just below where the straw-filled dummy’s shoes stood on their perpetual post.

At the edge of the clearing, Karl Ruger stood with his jaunty smile cracking and flaking away in the freshening night breeze.

“So much blood…” Val whispered.

Ruger’s face underwent a slow change. The reptilian smile had given way to surprise and confusion, but now his features darkened with all the rage of a storm front moving over a troubled sea. Lightning flashed from his eyes and his lips furled back from white teeth as he ground them in mounting, boiling rage. Like a wolf at the moment of the kill, his nose wrinkled and his eyes were slashed to slits as the rage in him built and then burst forth.

“Boyd!” he bellowed, his voice rising like a roll of heavy thunder. “Boyd!”

His voice changed, the words tangling into a steady and inarticulate growl of fury as he tore across the clearing, kicking aside cornstalks, poking into rows of plants, leaning over fences, searching, searching, searching…

Boyd, however, was gone. The bags of money and cocaine were gone.

Only the blood remained.

The blood and a single bloodstained fifty-dollar bill stuck fast to the bottom of the scarecrow’s shoe, held by the tacky gore, fluttering in the breeze.

Ruger howled in rage and dropped to his knees, beating the ground with the flashlight and the butt of his pistol. The lens of the flashlight shattered and the light flared and then burst into darkness and splintered glass.

“Boyd!” Karl yelled. “Boyd, you rotten motherfucker!”

Val dropped the wheelbarrow handles and shrank against her father’s side; they both cringed back from the towering rage and animal ferocity that burst forth from Ruger.

“Boyd! Where’s my goddamned money!”

Ruger tossed away the broken flashlight, balled his left fist into a mallet of gristle and bone, and punched down at the ground, and again, and again. The shock raced up his arm, flaring with pain as the fragments of the broken lens tore his skin, but the pain only stoked his rage. He kept punching the ground, over and over and over.

“Where’s my goddamned money, you spineless piece of shit!” His words were whipped into the sky by the fierce winds of the coming storm.

Guthrie suddenly grabbed Val by the upper arm, pulled her close, and said in a fierce whisper, “Run!”

He didn’t allow her the chance to object, but turned and shoved her toward the path that led away from the farmhouse, the access trail that went down to the main road. She staggered for two steps, and almost pitched forward, but then she bent low, dropping her center of gravity like a sprinter, and brought her weight back to the balance point. Off she went like a shot, her toes digging into the soft earth, and she was so fast that fifty yards were unreeling behind her before Karl Ruger was even aware of her flight.

Guthrie didn’t waste any time himself. Even as he shoved Val in one direction, he wheeled and made a dash for the house. He was old, but he could run a half mile if the devil was on his heels, which indeed he was.

It took just two seconds for Ruger to understand what was happening, for him to claw himself out of his web of rage and realize that his captive birds had flown.

“Shit!” he growled and leaped to his feet. He started after Val, but before he’d even taken a full step he realized that he’d never catch her. She was already around the farthest bend and running like the wind.

“Bitch!” he growled, and then turned and pointed at the retreating back of old man Guthrie, taking aim with a two-hand grip. Lightning flashed continuously, illuminating the man with enticing clarity, and the ghost of his old smile flickered on his lips as Ruger pulled the trigger.

Chapter 14

Terry Wolfe and the detectives made it to the crime scene in less than ten minutes. Their late-model dark Ford rocketed along, leaving Chief Bernhardt’s five-year-old police unit far behind. Terry sat in the back, gripping the door handle with one hand and the back of Ferro’s seat with the other. His face was pasty with terror, but most of his dread came from his memory of that phone call. It couldn’t have been Mandy, he thought, clinging to his denial, needing to be certain that reality was reality and no matter what he thought he’d heard he had been mistaken. That’s impossible.

The car leaped and skidded and tore like a demon wind along the blacktop and it jolted him back to the moment.

“God!” he whispered as the car took a curve on fewer wheels than Henry Ford had intended, then bounced down onto all fours and swooped hawklike down a long hill. They rounded another, wider curve and saw two revolving dome lights in the distance. LaMastra actually accelerated down the hill and then screeched and slewed the car to a sideways stop that sent up curls of rubber smoke from all four wheels. “Oh my Lord!” Terry gasped, his finger still digging into the upholstery. “Where did you learn to drive like that?”

LaMastra grinned at him in the rearview mirror. “Old Steve McQueen movies.”

“My heart stopped beating miles back,” Terry complained.

Ferro looked faintly amused. “You’ll have to forgive the detective. He lives for this kind of thing. It’s what he does in lieu of having an actual life.”

LaMastra chuckled and leaped out of the car; Ferro followed, bringing with him a large, heavy briefcase.

Terry slowly unstuck his fingers and reached for the door handle. He stepped out of the car in the same shaky way that novices depart a particularly aggressive roller-coaster ride, placing his feet on the ground as if uncertain that it would hold him.

Officer Rhoda Thomas came jogging over to them, pale and uncertain. She carried a huge shotgun at port arms.

“Okay, Officer, what’s going on?” Ferro asked, cutting right to the chase. “The radio reports were, shall we say, a little disjointed?”

Rhoda looked up into Ferro’s cold eyes. “The others are still down there by the suspect’s vehicle. They wouldn’t let me go down and take a look.”

“Why’s that?” asked LaMastra.

“Well…Officer Head said that there was a body down there.”

“Uh-huh. And?”

“Well,” Rhoda said, licking her lips, “they didn’t say for sure, but I got the impression that it was in a pretty bad state. They wouldn’t say exactly what condition it was in, but when they first came back, they looked really upset. You know…shaken? Then all three of them got sick.”

“Oh, come on,” said LaMastra, laughing. “Jerry Head and Coralita Toombes getting sick? Get real.”

Rhoda just looked at him.

Ferro tapped LaMastra on the shoulder. “Let’s go have a look.”

“What should I do?” Rhoda asked.

“Just stay here. Stay by the radio. Your chief and additional units are just behind us. Send them on down once they get here.”

“Okay.”

To Terry, Ferro said, “Do you want to come with us?”

“Not particularly.” But he went anyway.

When they were within a dozen yards of the crime scene, Ferro called out, “Coming in!”

“Who is it?” Toombes’s voice called tersely.

“Ferro, LaMastra, and Mayor Wolfe.”

“It’s clear,” the woman called. “Kind of.”

They entered the clearing and saw the black car squatting there, dottled with dirt and corn pollen and blood. Jimmy Castle sat on the ground, his back against the bumper, smoking a cigarette. He didn’t even look up at them, but the three newcomers each exchanged a glance. They moved around the car to where Toombes and Head stood. Both officers held flashlights, but the beams were pointed at the ground to lead the way for the detectives. The side of the car, where the body lay, was in a dark bank of shadows.

Head stepped forward, clearly intending to block the way so they couldn’t see past him. His face looked strained, lined, and sick; it had paled from a deep brown to a sickly ashen gray. Beads of perspiration jeweled his forehead. He nodded at them. In a soft funeral parlor voice he said, “Sir, the crime scene is still pristine. Also, gentlemen, you really better hike up your balls before you take a look because this is some sick, sorry shit. I mean…I have never seen anything like this.” He looked at them, his eyes hard and deep. “Never nothing like this.”

“Let’s just get on with it,” said Ferro sharply, clearly annoyed at Head’s melodramatics.

Head just nodded and stepped aside. He turned and lifted his flashlight, training the powerful beam on the side of the car.

“Oh…” gasped Ferro.

“…my…” breathed LaMastra.

“…God,” murmured Terry.

Terry wiped the sweat from his face and looked at LaMastra, who had turned an unwholesome green. Ferro’s face was set and stony, but there was sweat on his upper lip. Head had joined Castle for a smoke at the back of the car, and Toombes was staring up at the moon as if she’d suddenly discovered a passion for astronomy.

“Get out the camera,” Ferro said, and his voice was hoarse. “We don’t have time to wait for a forensic unit.” He looked up at the sky. Clouds were racing in from all sides and the air smelled like rain and ozone. “It’s going to rain soon and we’ll lose the entire site.”

Nodding mutely, LaMastra knelt and placed the big briefcase on the ground. Opening it, he removed a big digital camera with a powerful flash unit. He checked to make sure it was adjusted for the bad light.

“Take a complete set.”

“Balls,” LaMastra breathed, but he did what he was told. Approaching cautiously, he came to within ten feet of the scene and raised the camera. He looked at it through the viewfinder, but he didn’t…couldn’t press the Release button. He just stood there, one index finger tapping nervously and unconsciously on top of the camera body.

“Vince,” a voice said quietly, and LaMastra turned, lowering the camera. Ferro’s eyes were kinder than he had ever seen them. “If you don’t want to do this, Vince…”

LaMastra inhaled through his nose, then shook his head. “No, Frank. I can do it. It’s just that…” He let it trail off. The English language didn’t really have a proper set of adjectives for describing the scene. Ferro nodded and clapped the younger man reassuringly on the shoulder. LaMastra raised the camera once again, drew in a deep, steadying breath, and began recording horror.

Flash!

Tony Macchio, former felon. Former low-level mob muscle. Former enforcer. Former confederate of Karl Ruger. Tony Macchio, former human being.

Flash!

A mouth thrown wide in the absolute extremity of pain and outrage. Not just the pain of dying, but the pain of violation on an inhuman scale.

Flash!

Eyeless sockets, weeping red-black tears onto bloodless cheeks. Eyeless sockets that saw into the darkness of the soul, a darkness unlighted by any autumn moon or camera flash.

Flash!

A chest raped of its secrets. Heart and lungs and life’s breath and soul torn out.

Flash!

A pair of clutching, armless hands, fingers spread out like the legs of dead spiders held fast to the doors of the car with long nails. And a pair of handless arms, folded uselessly across the spill of organs from deep within the invaded stomach.

Flash!

Two legs, broken and rebroken and twisted in puppet directions.

Flash!

Flesh, torn and lacerated, rent and bitten, bruised and gouged so that barely an inch of skin remained unblemished by the leprosy of violence. A destruction so total that it was only by an inventory of all the sundry parts that a puzzle of a man could be made.

Flash!

Flash!

Flash!

The flash kept popping, recording image after hideous image of the charnel house scene, until the film was gone and the Release button refused to yield even one more time to the horror there on the ground.

Once again Ferro laid his hand on LaMastra’s shoulder. “Okay, Vince, that’s good enough.”

LaMastra lowered the camera and looked at it, amazed that so simple and unassuming a machine could record and contain such things. He knelt down and put the camera in the briefcase, squinting up at Ferro. “You know, Frank, I saw the crime scene photos of the lighthouse.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Same sort of stuff, man. Just ripped apart.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Like it was a pack of dogs did it rather than a person.”

Ferro pulled in a chestful of air through flared nostrils. “Yeah,” he said.

LaMastra shifted around and sat down on the ground, only dimly aware of the crushed stalks and smashed ears of corn under his rump. He was also only vaguely aware that Chief Bernhardt had come down from the road, taken a single look, and then rushed past him to throw up into the cornfield. LaMastra turned and watched him with a strange, vague distance.

Ferro stood by silently pulling on thin latex gloves. “If the weather holds we’ll get a lab crew in here and see if they can lift prints. If not we have to spread a tarp…preserve as much as we can.”

LaMastra just sighed and looked up at the lightning. It was going to rain soon, but he knew there wasn’t enough rain in heaven to wash away this horror.

After a minute or two, Terry Wolfe joined them. His face was the color of sour milk, and he stood so that his back was to the car. He tried several times to form articulate words, failed each time, and then paused to take in a couple of long, slow breaths. Finally, he managed to say, “Is this one of the men you were looking for?”

Ferro snorted. “Well, that’s the car, sure enough. And there is plenty of evidence of cocaine and money in the trunk. As for the identity of the deceased? A pathologist is going to have to make that decision for us. As you can see…well, no, don’t bother to look, but there isn’t enough of a face to make a clean ID, and the fingertips have been, uh, chewed…so I don’t know if we can get…”

But Terry had clamped a hand to his mouth and staggered away to fall to hands and knees beside Bernhardt. They took turns retching and coughing. Ferro tried on an amused and superior smile, but it tasted wrong, so he spat it out.

Terry shambled back, wiping his mouth and looking even paler, if that was possible.

Ferro looked at him. “Are you okay, sir?”

“What do you think!” Terry gulped some air. “You figure that this Karl Ruger did this?”

“Well, I sure as hell hope so.”

Terry gave him a quizzical look. “You ‘hope so’?”

Nodding, Ferro said, “You should hope so, too, Mr. Mayor. That, or you’ve got two incredibly dangerous homicidal maniacs running around in your quiet little town.”

“Oh no…” Terry breathed.

“Relax,” said Ferro, “what are the odds of that?”

Crow closed his cell phone and slid it back into his pocket. He was beginning to get the first tingling of unease. He’d called Val’s cell twice and got no answer, and had called the house and gotten nothing. He wanted to get this job done and get over there.

The ATV was a chunky little three-wheeled Kawasaki with puffy low-pressure tires and motorcycle handlebars. Every time Crow used one, he felt as if he were in the jet-speeder chase in Return of the Jedi. The ATV growled to life, hinting at more muscle in its belly than one might guess, and as Crow gave her some gas, it kicked out a cloud of dust and leaped forward.

“Hi-yo, Silver,” Crow yelled, “away!”

Barney and Mike watched him go, standing side by side: the eighteen-year-old with the fake knife in his chest, and the fourteen-year-old with the broken rib and the marks of a near-fatal encounter with madness flickering in his eyes. They watched until Crow’s taillights vanished around a bend in the road.

“Crow’s a friggin’ goof,” Barney said, scratching at the adhesive bandage that held the knife.

Iron Mike considered for a moment. “Yeah, he’s just about weird enough.”

Just a minute or two after Crow vanished into the night, a pair of headlights cast the parking lot in whiteness. Barney and Mike turned to see a station wagon pull into the lot and crunch across the gravel toward them. Mike hesitated for a moment, then smiled and waved.

The station wagon rolled to a stop and the driver’s door opened. Vic Wingate unfolded himself from behind the wheel. He was a big man, just over six feet tall and very muscular, with a military-style blond crew cut and a Marine Corps jawline. That jaw was set as he walked over to meet Mike.

“Hi, Vic!” Mike said, forcing his voice to sound pleased to see the man. “I guess they told you what happened. My bike’s in the—”

Vic hit him.

It was a savagely fast, stunningly hard blow. Not a slap, but the full rock-hardness of Vic’s fist. It caught Mike in the stomach and seemed to smash back every bit of flesh between shirtfront and backbone. All of the air whooshed out of Mike’s mouth along with a strangled cry of surprise; after that Mike had no breath even to scream. The pain was worse than anything he had ever felt. Worse than the broken rib, worse than all the bruises from when he’d gone off the road. Worse than any pain from any punishment Vic had ever given him. It was the first time in his life Mike had ever been punched by an adult. Before that it had been slaps, hard slaps with Vic’s hard hands, but just slaps. The punch was so crushingly hard, and so unexpected, that Mike felt as if his entire body had shrunk down into a single twisted knot of white-hot pain. He lay on the gravel in a fetal position and tried to breathe.

“Yo! mister!” Barney called in alarm, stepping forward. Vic wheeled toward him and pointed a finger at the kid’s nose. The finger was like a steel dagger and it stopped Barney in his tracks.

“You got something to say, shit bag?”

Barney’s stood there, speechless, powerless, shocked, and scared beyond action. He watched in horror as Vic jerked open the rear passenger door, then bent and caught Mike by the belt and the hair, hoisted him off the ground, and literally threw him into the backseat. Mike slid across the seat and thumped against the opposite door.

All the time Mike’s mom just sat in the front passenger seat and looked down at the floor. Barney tried to catch her eye, to make some kind of appeal, but she wouldn’t look at him. Barney wished Crow was still there, though what Crow could do against a guy like Wingate he didn’t know.

“Where’s his fucking bike?” Vic demanded, closing on Barney.

All Barney could do was point. Vic stalked over and yanked it out of the back of Crow’s trunk. He didn’t bother to close the hood. He crammed the bike roughly into the bed of the station wagon, slammed the rear door, and then stalked around to the driver’s side. Over the top of the car he again leveled a finger at Barney. “This is a family matter, do you understand me?”

Barney nodded.

“Good, then keep your mouth shut or it won’t be a plastic knife you’re gonna find sticking out of your chest. Now get the fuck out of the road.”

Barney retreated and watched in mute horror as Vic made a screeching turn and left the lot in a spray of kicked-back gravel.

Crow bounced along the road, following the path he knew so well. The Haunted Hayride covered a huge area, spread out over parts of three different farms, two of which were now owned by Terry Wolfe, one of which leased acreage to the mayor for his attraction. It was wrapped like a horseshoe around the north end of the Pinelands College campus and was itself wrapped in the arms of the vast Pine Deep State Forest. Most of the land was given over to pumpkin patches, cornfields, and wheat fields, but since the harvest had begun in earnest for most of the town, much of the crop had already been cleared. Some of the corn stood unpicked, it having been planted later for a late fall harvest. A lot of the local farmers staggered their harvests so they could keep sending fresh produce to the markets up until the very edge of winter.

Crow loved the place. Even though he had designed every part of it, and knew all of its theatrical ins and outs, he loved the feeling of supernatural dread that he always sensed when he was covering these dark lanes. For a lark, he’d even spent a couple of nights as one of the monsters, scaring the bejesus out of the ten-dollar-a-head tourists.

The hayride was set up so that one main path led through all of the traps. The traps were the spots where costumed staffers waited to leap out and, in their own scripted or improvisational way, go “Boo!” Some of the traps were set scenes, such as a witch trial that showed a poor wretch being crushed beneath planks weighted with rocks, or tied to a chair and dunked into the creek; or where a line of victims were led up to a chopping block where a burly headsman (the defensive lineman for the Pine Deep Scarecrows) waited to shorten them by a head. Some of the traps were shockers, which had either mechanical or human monsters leaping unexpectedly out at the customers during lulls in the ride. There were a few interactive traps as well, such as Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre rushing at the flatbed with his chainsaw buzzing. The chain on the saw was totally blunt, so when he tried to cut through the planks on the side of the flatbed, he really got nowhere, but Crow had added plastic bags of sawdust taped to the outside of the planks that would burst as soon as the chainsaw was pressed against them. The swirling sawdust and the buzz of the saw made it really appear as if Leatherface was really cutting his way through the wood and was actually going to dismember the paying customers.

The nicest touch this season, though, was the Valley of the Living Dead trap. This was a new one, and was Crow’s pride and joy. Just past the halfway point of the hayride, the tractor would pull the flatbed through a patch of mud. The mud was only surface muck kept wet by a sprinkler system, but in the darkness it looked real enough to create the illusion that the tractor had become hopelessly mired. Coop, or whoever was driving, would ease the tractor into neutral and just gun the engine, growling and swearing (in a thoroughly PG manner, of course) at the predicament. While all this was going on, dark shapes would begin to move in the bushes near the flatbed. These dark shapes would slowly — very slowly — advance on the flatbed. They were white-faced, decaying corpses, slouching and shuffling with all the gracelessness of reanimated bodies. It would be a race to see if Coop could unmire the tractor and get them on their way before the legions of walking dead could reach the flatbed.

Of course, timing was everything. Coop would get “unstuck,” but just a moment too late. The ghouls would manage to reach the flatbed and would, amid a chorus of ungodly screams, drag one poor soul off into the bushes. The screams would be truly terrifying, and as the flatbed was towed away, the stricken survivors would look back and see ghouls staggering away nibbling on an arm or a leg or a string of intestines.

As a set piece, it was a corker. The tourists, especially the ones who had never been to a haunted hayride before, were stunned to a stricken silence. Until, of course, the next monsters leaped out at them. The “victim” was a staffer posing as a tourist, and the victim was changed almost every day so that repeat customers could never tell who was going to fall prey to the living dead.

There were other traps as well, but the Valley of the Living Dead was the star attraction on the Hayride, and had even been written up in Sci-Fi Universe and Fangoria magazines, as well as every newspaper on the East Coast. When it came to producing genuine horrible thrills, Crow was a genius, albeit a twisted one with a penchant for very dark humor.

Now that twisted genius was skimming along on his ATV. He stopped periodically to tell the staffers that the ride was closing down. He told the Creature from the Black Lagoon to cut across the swamp and let the Pod People know. He sent the Wolfman and the Brainiac down through the gully to bring in the Mole People, the Headsman, and the Flying Monkeys. He had Jack the Ripper go back to the shed for another ATV and sent him heading backward along the path of the ride to tell the Vampire Children and the Bog Beasts to stand down.

Ten minutes later he caught up with the tractor just as Henry Pitts was being dragged into the bushes by the ghouls. Crow honked his horn and flashed his headlights off and on. The ghouls straightened from their bloody feast, and Henry sat up, too, amazingly unhurt despite the entrails dripping from the mouths of the zombies.

Coop killed the engine of the tractor and the Valley of the Living Dead grew quiet except for a faint buzz of inquiring voices.

Dismounting, Crow walked over to the tractor and looked up at Coop.

“Hey…what’s going on?” Coop asked. He was a middle-aged man with a paunch, loose jowls, and a look of almost total stupidity.

Crow turned to face the mass of confused and semifrightened tourists. “Folks, I have some bad news. Because of severe technical difficulties beyond our control, we are going to have to close down the Haunted Hayride for tonight.” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the chorus of groans. “Everyone will receive a full refund, plus a free coupon good for any night you wish to return. Mr. Wolfe regrets having to do this, but as I said, it is beyond our control.”

“What’s the deal, man?” someone asked.

Relying on the speech he’d rehearsed all the way over, Crow said, “There is a bridge just a half mile ahead. It has buckled and won’t take the weight of the tractor. We are going to have to turn around and go back. There’s just no way that the tractor can go any farther forward in safety. I’m sure you all understand.”

From the moans, groans, and curses, it seemed they not only didn’t understand, they damned well didn’t like it, but they were also resigned. Crow had affected the attitude of “someone in charge” and it really left no room for argument.

Thunder rumbled overhead and lightning danced through the clouds. A few wet raindrops fell, not many, but enough to dampen any further arguments.

Crow called Coop down from the tractor seat and climbed up himself, and with very little to-do, he pulled the tractor free from the “mud,” angled over onto the clearing near the road, and turned around. The tourists, some of them still standing in postures of indignation or disappointment, continued to grumble, but said nothing directly to Crow. The Ghouls, and the late Henry Pitts, stood to one side and waited, then climbed up onto the flatbed as it passed. Coop, looking disconsolate, followed on the ATV.

Crow gave the tractor some gas and picked up speed. Usually the ride through the dark farmlands and forest was done at little more than a walking pace, slow enough for the spooky shadows under the trees to get the customers in the proper frame of mind for the beasties to scare the hell out of them every couple hundred yards. Crow tooled along at a respectable thirty miles an hour, slowing only to embark a few wandering creatures of the night.

The job, the great and important mission assigned to him by Terry Wolfe, had been accomplished so quickly and easily that Crow almost felt a twinge of disappointment. Not that he wanted any kind of trouble, but the thought of real-life monsters out there had pumped him full of adrenaline, and now he was fidgety.

Back in the office, he supervised the return of the cash and the handing out of rain checks. He also found a moment to take Coop and some of the older monsters aside and tell them about what was happening in town. They were all suitably impressed.

“Okay,” he summed up, “here’s what I want to happen. Rigger, you and Bailey make sure all of the customers get to their cars. Give the usual spiel about keeping windows and doors locked, not picking up strangers, and driving with headlights and seat belts on. Tom and Del, you two work the road with flashlights and make sure everybody gets onto the right side of the road. Not like last October. We don’t want any fender benders tonight. Okay? The rest of you, close down the buildings, lock everything up, and report back to Coop. Coop, I want you to do a roll call. No, don’t look at me like that. I want everyone accounted for before you leave. Everyone goes on the buddy system. Even if you have to take a leak, bring your buddy to shake it for you. No one, and I mean no one, works alone or drives home alone. If you came in separate cars, then follow your buddy home. These are really bad guys out there, kids, so let’s not get stupid. Let’s shut ’er down and go home.”

Which is exactly what they did.

While all of this was happening, Crow strolled over to the main office, where Barney was helping count the cash.

“Hey, where’s Mike Sweeney?”

Barney looked up and Crow could see the residual shock in the young man’s eyes. “His, um, folks came and got him right after you left.”

Crow searched his face. “What happened?”

Barney looked around to make sure no one else was close enough to hear, then in a hushed voice told Crow what had happened.

Crow stared at him, eyes hard and angry, mouth a tight line. He said nothing.

Barney shook his head. “And people come here to see monsters.”

Chapter 15

Vic pulled into the driveway in front of his house and then killed the station wagon’s engine. Inside the car the only sound was Vic’s steady breathing, in and out through his nose like a bull. Lois Wingate had her hand over her mouth and her face turned away, ostensibly staring out the side window but actually looking at nothing. She hadn’t said a single word since Vic had pulled into the hayride.

In the back, Mike was sprawled in a heap just staring at the roof of the car, nearly lost in a world composed entirely of pain.

Never in his life had he been hit so hard. Mike would remember those moments at the Haunted Hayride for as long as he lived. It was the very first time Vic had ever punched him, and the fact of it, far more than the force, had numbed his brain. It had come out of nowhere and exploded a big white bell in Mike’s head, then darkened his skies and his thoughts for a long moment. He had been beaten before, but it had always been an open hand or a belt. Never a fist. Vic had just taken him down one level to a lower place of darkness. From now on the beatings would be different. Vic had crossed a line, and Mike knew that there was never any way to go back. Lying there in the back of the car, Mike knew it with a dreadful clarity.

Vic got out, slammed his door, and jerked open the back door.

“Get out.” His voice sounded incongruously mild, and for a moment Mike’s optimism flared. Maybe that punch was all there would be. Maybe it was enough.

Moving as if his stomach and ribs were made out of fragile glass, Mike peeled himself up off the seat and got out of the car. He flinched away from Vic as his stepfather swung the door shut.

“Get in the house.”

Mike fled into the house and was starting up the stairs when just behind him Vic said, “Where do you think you’re going?”

The moment froze in time, and if Mike had a button somewhere that he could push and end his life right there, he’d have pushed it. He had one hand on the banister and one hand on the wall, his left leg raised to step up. His stomach was a fiery ball of pain greater by far than the steady ache in his ribs.

Then there was his mother’s voice, thin and wavering, but still there in the doorway. “C’mon, Vic, don’t you think that’s enough?”

It was the longest moment of Mike’s young life as he waited for what Vic would say. He turned and looked down at Vic, who stood halfway between where Mike’s mother was framed in the open doorway and the foot of the steps. Vic raised his finger and pointed to her the same way he had pointed to Barney at the hayride. “If you open your fucking mouth one more time — just once more — so help me God, I’ll beat you so hard you’ll shit blood for a month. You know I’ll do it, too, Lois.”

His mother had paled at the threat and snapped her mouth shut. She came in, closed the door, edged past Vic, and fled into the living room, snatching the bottle of Tanqueray off the wet bar as she went. A second later Mike heard the TV come on.

Mike’s gaze drifted across the wasteland of his optimism to where Vic stood smiling. A powerful and implacable figure at the foot of the stairs.

“Come down here,” Vic said. “Right now.”

Mike debated his chances. He might be able to make it up the stairs and into his room before Vic caught him, but what then? Vic could easily kick down the door, and an open act of defiance would be like throwing gasoline on a fire.

His legs moved before his mind was aware that he’d surrendered, and he came down into the living room.

Vic never stopped smiling as he beat Mike from one end of the house to the other.

Mike didn’t remember all of it; maybe he passed out once or twice, or maybe the mind can only contain just so much, but large parts of it were gone, just vague blurs of hard hands and harder words and Vic’s smile as Mike recoiled from each punch, peering down at Mike as he waited for flesh to puff.

When the beating had started Mike had pleaded, and begged…and wept. Usually the tears stopped the beatings, as if it was a prize Vic sought and was satisfied with. This time there was no stopping, and if anything the tears made Vic hit harder.

The beating had started in the foyer but when Mike’s mind was able to take some sort of stock of what was happening he found that he was crammed into the corner of the kitchen with no clear memory of having crawled there, squeezed as far back as he could into the narrow slot between refrigerator and cabinet, his forearms crossed over his face. Vic stood over him, chest heaving from his exertions, sweat running down his face.

“You little piece of shit. Do you have any fucking idea how much trouble you put me to? Do you have any fucking idea how embarrassing it was to have to come out and fetch you like that? Do you have any fucking idea how embarrassing it was to have the fucking mayor of the fucking town call us up to tell us to go get you? It makes your mom and me look like bad parents. Letting you out till all fucking hours of the night. Do you know how much fucking trouble you are, you pissant little turd?”

“Please…” Mike whimpered. Tears streamed from his eyes.

“What the hell are you crying for, you little pussy? I ain’t begun to hit you yet!”

It began anew. Vic dragged Mike out of the corner and rained down punches and kicks and slaps until that was all that existed in Mike’s world.

But then something happened.

One minute his mind was filled with pain and terror and shock, and as if some hand had punched a button on a remote control everything switched. All at once Mike’s mind stepped out of itself. It was the weirdest feeling in his life, and he was fully aware of it. He could feel an actual physical shift as his consciousness just lifted and moved to another place. Not far off, but not in the body that was being beaten. It was like the out-of-body experiences Mike had read about in articles on people who had died and were later revived. He could see Vic standing there, straddling the body that Mike’s consciousness knew was his own, but he was just not in that body. Somehow — impossibly — he’d left. Just got up and left.

He didn’t know how, and he didn’t know why, but without meaning to his thinking mind had stepped out of the body. None of the blows that rained down mattered now. He didn’t feel them — at least he didn’t care about them. He was aware of a kind of sensation, almost like a vibration, or an echo, as if when each blow landed it sent a tremor through his flesh that only vibrated against his separate self, but it was just that. A vibration without the corresponding pain. Like the tremble from the TV speakers when something in a movie blew up. Only that and nothing more.

Mike had one brief moment of panic when he thought that this meant that he was dead, that one of Vic’s punches had done something to him. Burst something, knocked something loose, and that his body was dying as he floated there watching. Was he having a near-death experience? If so, there was no team of doctors waiting to zap him with a defibrillator unit.

The fear faded, though, as if his spirit could not hold such an intense emotion for very long. Or, perhaps, emotion was merely chemical, as his science teacher said it was. Out of the body there were no chemicals to mix to provoke or sustain emotions.

Mike felt the panic quickly replaced with a kind of bland peacefulness. Or, perhaps, a lack of caring.

He watched Vic and saw the man’s muscles bunch and roll, saw his hands move up and down, saw him shift to put power behind each blow. It was fascinating, like watching a machine, and he could study it with a total lack of emotional involvement. The hands rose and snapped down, sometimes as slaps, sometimes as punches.

As he watched, Mike saw something else, too. He saw Vic’s face grow steadily more red, saw sweat burst from his pores, saw his hands redden with tissue damage each time a blow struck one of Mike’s elbows or his forehead, saw the labored heave of his chest as the beating took its toll of Vic.

That was very, very interesting. It was a revelation that focused his mind like a laser passing through crystal. In that moment he was able to think more clearly, reason more incisively that his mind burst open with new possibilities. He could look at Vic and see him more clearly and more completely than he ever had before. In that moment, for the very first time, he was seeing the man Vic Wingate. The man. It was something that Mike, for all his intelligence, had never once really considered, and it was something that was of immeasurable importance. Even without a body or muscles or lips, Mike smiled. His spirit smiled.

Vic, it turned out, was human.

He was flesh, and blood, and breath. He was meat and bone and muscle. He could be hurt, he could tire. He was merely human and because of that it was not possible for him to be either invincible or invulnerable.

Mike had always believed that Vic was both, but Vic was really only human.

Despite the lack of chemical triggers Mike’s spirit was becoming supercharged by this amazing knowledge. It was the most important thing that Mike had ever learned, so obvious and yet Mike had never seen it. Never even suspected it.

Vic was human.

Mike considered this. Vic was forty-seven years old. Vic was middle-aged. No matter how strong he was, no matter how much he worked out, he was middle-aged and every day forward would take him a day further from his youth and peak strength. Mike was fourteen. In ten years Mike would be twenty-four and Vic would be fifty-seven.

Unless Vic actually killed Mike — and even Mike did not believe that Vic would go that far — then one day Mike would be a fully grown adult man and Vic would be—old.

All Mike had to do was endure.

Vic was human.

Mike felt pain. Instant and overwhelming. It was everywhere in his body, and in that flash of awareness he realized that he was back in his body. He was no longer a hovering spirit, no longer detached from the bruised flesh and violated nerve endings. No longer a bystander witnessing horror but the subject of it. His mouth and nose were bleeding. One eye was puffed nearly shut — the other peered through a red haze of blood. Mike’s broken ribs were worse now, and every muscle felt mashed and ruined. He tasted blood on his thick tongue.

Vic stood above him, impossibly tall and powerful, his arms knotted with muscle, his hands clenched in fists. Gasping for air from his exertions he stared down at Mike, a smile of triumph half formed on his mouth.

But only half formed.

Above the crooked smile Vic’s eyes were slowly clouding with doubt, and double vertical lines deepened between his brows.

“You had enough, you little shit?”

On the floor Mike lay like a smashed bug, his limbs sprawled, his skin bloody and bruised, his face a ruin. The pain was everywhere, in every cell of his body, and Vic was there, ready to give him more of it.

And Mike Sweeney did not care.

He lifted his battered head, opened his puffed eyes, parted his split lips…and smiled up at Vic.

There must have been something in that smile beyond Mike’s joy in knowing that he could outlast this man. That he had taken the worst beating of his life and had endured it. There must have been something there, flickering in his bloodshot eyes or trembling in his mashed lips, that Vic read differently, or read wrong — or read correctly — because he took a single involuntary step backward and Mike saw something in Vic’s face that he had never expected to see. Something he didn’t believe he could see in Vic’s face.

He saw a flicker of fear.

Not much, just a touch, but it was there.

Vic was human after all.

Vic was just a human being, and Mike — well, Mike would endure him. And Iron Mike Sweeney, the Enemy of Evil, would outlast him.

The fear that had flickered in Vic’s eyes for the briefest of moments was gone and his usual dark intensity returned. He held his ground, but he lowered his hands.

“Now get up and get your sorry ass to bed. Go on — get out of my sight!”

It took Mike a while to get his arms and legs to work well enough to turn his aching body over onto hands and knees, and then to fingertips and toes, and then, swaying, to his feet. He took a couple of wandering sideways steps before orienting himself.

At the doorway to the kitchen he stopped, holding on to the frame, and turned for a moment to look back at Vic, and once more he gave his stepfather a bloody-toothed smile.

Vic didn’t say another word as Mike tottered away and then slowly clawed his way upstairs.

Standing in the parking lot, Crow watched the last of the tourists and staff go and then heaved out a long sigh of mingled relief and weariness. He was tired, and what he really wanted was to go home and crawl into bed, but…he smiled as the thought sprang into his mind, someone was waiting with a late dinner for him.

He walked back into the office to switch off the lights, but before he did he reached for the phone.

Mark Guthrie heard two sounds almost at once.

The first was the first ring of the telephone, and there was a split fraction of a second in which he realized that whoever was calling could send help if only he could manage to get over to the phone, to knock it off its cradle, to make some kind of sound that would let the caller know that there was trouble, but in the second part of that fractured second of time he heard a single sharp report. A gunshot.

Through the gag and through his fear, Mark tried to scream his father’s name, his sister’s name, and the name of God.

The phone kept ringing.

Crow set the phone down in disappointment, but at the very last moment, just as the handset was touching the plunger, there was a sound. It was just a muffled and inarticulate sound, and Crow tried to catch himself in time, but when he whipped the handset away from the cradle, the connection had already been broken.

“Shit!”

He pushed down on the plunger to clear the connection, got a dial tone, and punched in Val’s number again. Busy.

He tried again. Busy.

Once more. Still busy. Crow made a rude sound and hung up the phone. He stood there and looked around, assessing the place. Everything was locked up and dark.

“Okay then,” he said to nobody in particular, and started for the door. Just as he touched the knob he stopped, turned, and walked back to the phone, murmuring, “Once more for luck.”

He punched in the numbers. Busy. “Shit balls,” he observed. He called Val’s cell. No answer except voice mail.

“This is bullshit,” he said aloud and left the office, locking it up nice and tight, crunched across the gravel to where Missy waited for him, and climbed in. He turned on the motor and then tugged the pistol out of his waistband and crammed it back into the glove compartment. Then he put the car into drive and in a spray of gravel, he spun wheels in the direction of the Guthrie farm.

Val ran as if all the evil things in the dark were at her heels.

Except for moments of crackling white light from the heavens, the darkness was absolute. Cornstalks stood up to whip at her, slapping her face, biting at her legs, tugging at her wrists. She fought them away as she ran, battering her way through the fields, running nowhere and anywhere.

She ran and ran and ran.

Her strong legs propelled her with great force, and her muscular arms crushed a path for her slim body as she surged forward. Then her sneakered foot came down on something wet and slippery and suddenly she was flying forward, hands coming up to meet the ground that rushed at her in the darkness. Her palms hit hard, sooner than she had expected, and the jolt raced up her arms and into her shoulders and something hot and white and loud seemed to detonate in her left arm just below the deltoid. The arm buckled, refusing to bear even an ounce of weight, and she twisted as she fell, landing with all her weight on the white-hot shoulder.

She didn’t want to scream, but she couldn’t help it. The pain was a storm of knives whirling around inside her. She had no idea how long she lay there, stunned to breathlessness by the sheer weight of the pain. She tried to roll off the arm, but the pain came with her. Her left arm absolutely refused to work. She could feel the fingers opening and closing, but from the elbow to the shoulder blade everything felt as if boiling oil had been poured over it.

“Crow!” she cried out into the swirling darkness. “Help me!”

But Crow wasn’t there. Only the darkness and the pain and the madman with the gun were in her part of the universe. The deep voice of the thunder mocked her pain. Val knew that she had to — absolutely had to — get up.

Get up and run or lie there and wait to be slaughtered.

That was when she heard the single sharp, cold gunshot. It was a small sound, almost lost in the moan of the wind.

It took half a second for her to process the sound, and then she screamed, “Dad!”

That got her up. How, she could never explain, but somehow she was on her feet. Her shoes were wet and sticky from the ears of corn she had slipped on, but she stayed steady on her feet, as steady as waves of nausea and vertigo would allow her to be.

“Dad…” she said, looking back into the utter blackness the way she had come.

She didn’t know what to do. Indecision born of terror polluted her resolve.

If she kept running, then the maniac might kill her father. Might already have killed him!

If she went back, she might be killed, too. What would happen to Mark and Connie?

Seconds burst around her like firecrackers and she didn’t know what to do.

She felt something brush against her cheek and she used her only living hand to try and brush it away. Her fingertips touched lips, a nose, a cheek.

Val screamed and spun, backpedaling and almost falling, flailing out with her good hand.

“Valerie…” said a soft voice.

Val froze. She had a vague impression of a shape, black against the blacker shadows of the field.

“Go back,” whispered the voice.

“Wh…what?”

Lightning flashed overhead, and Val had the briefest glimpse of a tall man, gaunt and sad, stooped beneath some terrible weight, dressed in dirty black clothes, gray face streaked with mud. A guitar was slung down his back, the strap crossing his chest.

“Go back,” he whispered.

She knew this man…but she couldn’t place where from.

The lightning flashed again and for just a second the small silver cross that she wore around her neck burned as if it somehow had suddenly flared with inner heat. Then as quickly as the sensation had come, it was gone.

Val was alone.

She stood there, head swimming with pain and shock and terror, her fingers touching the cross, the skin over her heart still tingling from the burn.

“Go back…” she murmured to herself.

Then she turned. Limping, her damaged arm swinging painfully, tears streaking her face, she started back toward the house.

At that same moment, eight miles away, Crow was tooling along the upper reaches of A-32. Jed Davenport was singing “Mr. Devil Blues” from a mix CD, and Crow was singing along, his voice leaping at the note but never quite grabbing it.

A state police car came rocketing up behind, lights flashing, siren tearing holes in the night. Crow sighed and slowed down to something near the speed limit as the unit changed lanes and pulled abreast. The officer riding shotgun dazzled him with a flashlight for a moment, then clicked it off. The patrol car accelerated and passed, taking charge of the lane and barreling way ahead.

Crow was impressed with the speed of the unit. He felt he could top it with Missy, but getting into a pissing match with the state police held little attraction for him. He let them zoom out of sight before he let the speedometer climb back up into the low eighties.

Muddy Waters was now “Screaming and Crying,” and Crow sang along.

He only slowed long enough to turn onto Johnson Wells Road, the old farm track that led around the huge cornfields and would take him right to Val’s back door. The road was badly rutted and bumpy and not even Missy could safely take it at anything like her best speed. Crow slowed to fifty and grimaced with the teeth-rattling jolts.

The racing cop car stayed in Crow’s mind. Where was it going? What the hell else was out here this far down on A-32?

If a thousand volts of electricity had shot up through the seat into his spine he could not have more instantly snapped to a straighter position.

There was only one thing this far down on A-32.

“Val!” He shouted her name and kicked down on the gas. Bumps and ruts be damned. Missy hurtled forward. No answer to any of his calls. What a fucking fool! he thought.

The car shot along the old farm road, high beams plowing a path before him. Thunder rumbled again, way over beyond the Guthrie farm.

In the back of his mind he kept hearing one word over and over again: Hurry!

“Oh my God!” he said out loud. “Val…”

Ferro carefully unwrapped a stick of Beechnut and laid it on his tongue until the surface sugar melted, then chewed it very slowly. He folded the wrapper neatly and stuffed it in his shirt pocket. For long minutes he had just stood there staring at the devastation, letting the horror burn into him and then burn out, letting the fires burn away all of the sensationalism and emotion until all that was left was a crime scene. Facts, data, evidence, and leads: nothing more.

Ferro looked up, not surprised to see that the moon had vanished behind featureless black storm clouds. “Yeah, Vince, we’re going to lose the scene before the lab crew can get here from Philly. I’m going to run through the preliminaries. You up to helping?”

LaMastra hoisted himself up off the ground, slapped dirt and crushed corn from the seat of his pants, and gave Ferro a vague nod.

“Good,” said Ferro. “Chief?” Bernhardt, who by now was standing on the far side of the car, well out of sight of the body, looked up. “Chief, can you arrange to get some kind of tarp? We need to protect the site as much as possible.”

Bernhardt made an inarticulate sound that Ferro took as an assent and set off back to the road in a wobbling Clydesdale canter.

Ferro knelt down by the opened briefcase and set to work. First he removed a folded sheet of white plastic, opened and spread it out to form a kind of pristine picnic blanket, weighing it down with ears of corn. On top of this he quickly and deftly lined up several items from the case: a small stack of clear plastic bags of various size, from those only large enough to hold a few pennies to some as large as lunch bags; clear glass vials and disposable eyedroppers in sterile plastic sleeves; paper bags; a gunpowder trace kit; tweezers; scissors; evidence tags; and a small battery-powered tape recorder with a voice-activated microphone.

Ferro took one of the eyedroppers and one of the vials and walked toward one of the pools of blood. Over his shoulder, he said to LaMastra, “I’ll collect, you catalog and tag.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Terry left them to it. He walked away from the scene and climbed back up to the road. Chief Bernhardt was chain-smoking Camels as he talked into the handset of Rhoda’s unit; he looked like he was a short step away from a stroke. His bald head was bright red and beaded with sweat and he kept mopping it out of his eyes with the back of his chubby paw. The effect made it look as if he were a sniffling kid wiping tears from his eyes.

Gus finished with the radio and came over to stand with Terry. “This is some shit, huh?”

Terry nodded mutely.

“What I don’t get is why on earth this Ruger guy would do that to one of his buddies.”

“A difference of opinion over the division of spoils perhaps? Who knows? Ruger is supposed to be a super-freakazoid, as Crow would say. Me, I’m amazed at the guy’s chutzpah. He has every cop on the East Coast after him, and he stops and takes the time to do something like this. He must be totally whacked out.”

“Jesus.” Gus finished his cigarette and crushed it out under his toe.

“You think they’re still around here, Gus?”

“Christ, I hope not.”

“They can’t have gone far without the car, and they can’t have been gone long if Ruger stopped to do all that. Two men on foot, hauling all the drugs and money Ferro was talking about — they have to still be somewhere close. We have some serious hills around here, not to mention some very thick fields that aren’t easy to wade through. I can’t see how they could have gotten more than a few miles away.”

“Ain’t much around here,” Gus said thoughtfully. “The road to Dark Hollow’s not far, but there’s nothing back there. And what else? A couple of back roads. Farm roads.”

“Whose farm is this?”

Gus frowned and peered up and down the road, assessing. “You know, I can’t quite tell if this is the north end of Henry Guthrie’s place, or the south end of Hobie Devlin’s.” He cupped a hand around his mouth. “Rhoda! Whose farm is this?”

“I think it belongs to Mr. Guthrie.”

“Yeah, I thought so.”

Terry tensed. “Guthrie…You’re right. This must be their big field, the one Henry calls the far field, ’cause it’s furthest from the house.” His eyes snapped wide. “Gus…can you get a unit out to Henry’s house? I mean right now!”

Gus blinked in surprise for a second; then he got it. “Oh, Jesus, you’re right! It’s the only place they could have gone.” Gus spun around and waddled quickly over to Rhoda and the other officers.

Watching him, Terry felt icy fingers close around his heart. Guthrie’s farm. Val Guthrie was Crow’s ladylove. And Crow was supposed to be going over there after his job at the hayride.

“Dear Jesus…” he breathed.

The thunder growled loud enough to wake the storm. Lightning flashed along its belly, burning the sky, burning the lands below, bursting trees and searing lines into the firmament. The rains came weeping in, angry tears spilled by troubled clouds.

Val Guthrie staggered out of the cornfield amid a crash of thunder that actually shook the dirt beneath her feet. Lightning danced and spun in the air above her, an almost continuous curtain of bright blue white.

She clutched her sprained arm to her body with all her strength, trying to keep it from swinging, but with each step the injured muscles and tendons twitched and spasmed, sending new and sharper spikes of pain. She didn’t know how much more of it she could bear. Nausea washed over her in waves, bubbling up in the back of her throat, dimming her tear-streaked eyes, stoking the shock-induced fever burning in her veins.

“Dad!” she cried as she stumbled through a curtain of rain and into the clearing.

The kitchen door lay where she’d dropped it, and the wheelbarrow stood empty, the red paint washed to brightness by the rain.

The madman with the gun was nowhere to be seen.

Val stood there, swaying, uncertain, not even remotely sure of what to do next.

Thunder broke above her so loudly she screamed, thinking the man had crept up behind her and shot her. She spun — but there was no one there.

Then in the flash of lightning, she saw the ragged form that lay crumpled in the lane only a few dozen yards away. The wind fluttered the sodden work clothes as it blew over outstretched legs and arms.

“Dad!”

She ran, shoving the pain down inside her mind, seeing nothing but the battered figure. Skidding, slipping in the mud, she tripped and landed on her knees in the mud and with her one good hand, she reached for her father’s shoulder. He lay on his stomach, his face pressed into the muck. One hand lay stretched out in front of him. In the brightness of the lightning, Val could see the neat round hole burned high in his back, nearly between the shoulder blades, the cloth washed clean of blood by the downpour.

“No!” she screamed and pulled at him.

His big old body resisted her, fighting her with limpness and weight and sopping clothes, but eventually Val found the strength to turn him onto his back. She wasn’t even sure if it was the right thing to do, or the wrong thing, or if she should do anything at all. She was beyond ordinary thinking.

There was no exit wound on his chest, she saw that right away, and in some dim part of her mind, she remembered how small a gun the man had carried.

Oh, please, God! she prayed and she bent her face to her father’s.

“Daddy…Daddy…?”

His face was totally slack, streaked with mud that clumped on his mustache and caught in his bushy eyebrows.

Val wiped the mud off his face and shook him very gently.

“Daddy…please…”

Henry Guthrie raised his hand just a few inches, all he could manage, and touched her arm.

“Daddy!” Val’s heart leaped and she felt tears break and spill as her father slowly opened his eyes, squinting against the stinging rain.

“Get…get me…my sweater, pumpkin,” he murmured dreamily, “I’m feeling…a chill…”

“Oh, Daddy…”

Guthrie’s eyes opened wider and for a moment clearer lights burned within them. “Val?”

“I’m here, Daddy. I’m here. It’s going to be okay. I’m here.”

In a whisper, he asked, “Where is he?”

Val shook her head. “I think he’s gone. I don’t see him anywhere.”

Guthrie closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. The lights had already dimmed perceptibly. “Val…”

“Yes, Daddy?”

“You’ve got to warn…” he began, but suddenly a terrible coughing fit made him leap and jerk. Blood bubbled out of his nose and he gagged. It took a long time, and a lot of his dwindling supply of strength to speak, and even then it was in a faint whisper, barely audible beneath the roar of the storm. “Val…you’ve got to warn…Mark and…Con….”

Then his mouth lost the words and he slumped limply against Val’s lap. His hand fell away and slapped bonelessly into the mud.

Val screamed. She bent her head to his chest and listened, listened…

It was there, the faintest of beats, a feeble fist beating on the window of a burning building. It beat once, paused long…too long, beat again.

It grew fainter, and she felt her own heart slowing with it, but it kept on beating. Trying to live. Trying.

Val tried to pull him, to drag him to the house, but she was a battered and exhausted woman with a torn shoulder all alone out in a storm. Half a mile from the house. The enormity of it broke her, and she collapsed back down onto her knees.

She held her father for a brief moment — almost more time than she could spare — and then laid his head down, kissing his forehead and cheeks before climbing to her feet. She turned toward the house and as she did so her lips curled back into a snarl of feral hate that had no trace of humanity left in it. Clutching her bad arm to her body, she set out toward the house at a tearing run.

Mark Guthrie lay on the floor and strained with every muscle in his body. Sweat burst from his pores and blood was singing in his ears as he fought against the ropes and tape that held him.

As soon as he had heard that single awful gunshot, he’d thrown himself off the couch and had wormed his way across to the ringing phone. It felt as if the effort took twenty years, but he actually made it on the eighth ring, shoving his shoulder against the low table with a dynamic effort. The table toppled neatly over and the phone crashed to the floor. Mark rolled over to it and pressed his ear to the receiver just in time to hear the click as the call was disconnected from the other end.

He bellowed as well as the duct tape would allow.

Connie sat on the couch, watching him with wide, desperate eyes, and he turned to her, trying his best to convey a look of hopeful confidence. He knew it probably looked pitiful, bound and gagged and sweaty as he was.

Since then, he’d tried to hang the phone up by pushing it with his chin. No luck. He did manage to press the plunger down long enough to get a dial tone, but the phone was an old rotary: no way he was going to dial it, not even 911.

Still, he kept trying, using the tip of his nose to try and turn the dial. The labor seemed to take forever, and by the time he would have the dial start to move, the phone would begin signaling that it was off the hook and he would have to push the plunger down again to get a fresh dial tone. It was tedious, frantic, frustrating work.

Karl Ruger made it a pointless exercise as well.

Mark didn’t even know that the man was in the house until he saw the shadow that washed over him. He turned quickly, saw the man standing over him, tall and powerful, soaked from the rain, holding the tiny automatic in one hand.

“Howdy, campers,” Ruger whispered. “Are we having fun yet?”

Mark tried to squirm away, twisting violently like an arthritic snake, but Karl laughed and kept pace with him, continuing to straddle him until Mark thumped against the couch and could go no farther.

Ruger leaned over and picked up the phone’s handset, weighing it thoughtfully in his hand. “You know, when I got up this morning I had no idea how much of a total fuck job this whole day was going to turn out to be. My team gets shot up, we get chased by the cops, crash our car. Tony buys it. Boyd busts his fucking leg. I get stuck here in Green-fucking-Acres. And now, you know what’s happened? Should I tell you?” Ruger’s eyes were wide and unblinking, like those of an alligator; Mark’s eyes were wide and staring, the eyes of a trapped rabbit. “Well, first,” Ruger said, tapping Mark on the chest with the phone, “I go to all the trouble to fetch a stretcher for my friend Boyd, lug it all the way out there, and you know what? Do you fucking want to know what?” he demanded, thumping the phone with greater force with each word. “Somehow my busted-leg friend, my own buddy Boyd, splits with my fucking stash! Isn’t that just fucking precious?”

Mark stared up at Ruger, afraid to even breathe. Stale air burned in his lungs.

Ruger sighed and considered the phone. “Some days just blow…” he murmured. “To top it all off, your shit-head old man decides to get all cute and ballsy. Decides he wants to run out on ol’ Karl. Now, don’t you think that’s rude?”

Mark just stared, dreading what Ruger was saying, remembering the gunshot.

“And your broke-nose sister lit out, too. Fast little bitch. Never could catch her. Pity. I’d have liked to show her some city manners.” Ruger smiled and winked. “I’m sure you know what I mean.” He squatted on his haunches, still straddling Mark’s bound legs, still jiggling the phone lightly in his hand. “But old Dad…well, he can’t run for shit, can he? No, sirree. Can’t run worth shit.”

Mark’s heart was pounding so loud he wanted to scream.

“So, ol’Karl just reaches out and…” Ruger extended the pistol and touched Mark’s cheek with it. “Poof! No more dad.”

Mark tried to scream. The shriek tore its way up from his gut, ripping the flesh of his soul, rending his hammering heart. Even the muffling gag couldn’t stop all of it.

Ruger laughed. His appetite fed on just that kind of exquisite pain; it was a far, far better drug than any cocaine or heroin, and after the way things had been spiraling downward all night, he needed a fix to set his mind, to get back onto the edge.

Mark thrashed and bucked and howled. Tears burned in his eyes and then broke and spilled down his cheeks.

Connie whimpered, and Ruger suddenly glanced at her. His smile changed. Something shifted and squirmed behind his dark eyes and his lips seemed to writhe like wriggling worms.

“Well, well,” he said softly, “at least I won’t come away empty-handed. Hell, I ought to have something for my troubles. Only right, wouldn’t you say? Hardly seems fair else.”

Shrieking, Mark rolled back and kicked up with both bound ankles, catching Ruger in the rump, dislodging him, but Ruger twisted and caught his balance and as Mark raised his legs for a second kick, he bent forward and jammed the pistol into Mark’s shoulder. Mark froze and the world froze around him.

Ruger just smiled again and shook his head.

“Oh no, m’man. Not that easy. No, I ain’t gonna pop you. Not yet, anyway. You, m’man, are going to get a front-row seat for my little R and R with Donna Reed here.”

Mark began cocking his legs for the kick, but Ruger was much, much faster. With that terrible speed of his he lashed out with the phone handset and cracked Mark across the cheek. It was a hard blow, but not a killing one, not even a crippling one. He didn’t want Mark unconscious. That would spoil the fun. It was just enough of a blow to send Mark reeling and twisting over onto his face so hard he struck his head against the hardwood. Fresh tears sprang into his eyes and he could taste blood in his mouth, gagging him.

Ruger stood up, tossing the handset onto the floor. He bent down and set his pistol carefully on the coffee table, his black eyes fixing on Connie as his smile grew and grew.

“Oh, Daddy…” Val whispered, but only the wind could hear her.

The rain beat down on her, and as best she could with a useless arm and a broken heart, she tried to shelter her father from the storm. She had done her best to patch the bullet hole in his back, but there was so much blood pooled between his shirt and coveralls. So much. Too much.

The lightning never stopped, and the thunder bellowed insanely. A freak eddy of wind brought a sound to her, rolling in muted echoes across the tops of the corn. The high, lonely wail of a police siren.

Val raised her head, listened to the sound, straining to understand it, to locate it, but the wind whipped it away again. Still, she thought she could tell where it was coming from. The farm road. The one that connected A-32 with their front yard.

A police siren. Cops! Coming this way. Far away, but definitely coming this way.

“Oh, God, please help us!” she cried and staggered to her feet. She looked down at her father. “Daddy, I have to leave you. Just for a little bit. I’ll get help and come back. Please…wait for me, Daddy.” Her eyes were jumpy with madness. “Don’t you dare go away, Daddy. You just wait here.”

She turned and ran back toward the house.

Mark kept screaming, kept trying to break the ropes that no human strength could break, to part the layers of cloth-reinforced tape. His wife’s screams drowned his out, and polluted his mind and soul.

Ruger had pulled out his wickedly sharp knife and with quick, deft movements had slashed the ropes on Connie’s legs. She had tried to kick him, she had that much sanity left, but he slapped her and punched her and tore at her and left her beaten in spirit as well as body. Then the real horror had begun.

He had torn at her clothing, revealing her in the cruelest way, robbing her of what shreds of dignity still clung to her. The knife either cut at fabric or pressed threateningly into the soft flesh of her throat, but it was always there, a constant ugly extension of Ruger’s violent lust.

Mark screamed throughout.

Ruger laughed out loud as he stood over her, slowly unbuckling his belt, blowing kisses at Connie, dragging it out.

There was no warning at all when the thunderbolt slammed into him.

One moment Ruger was reaching for the metal tab of his fly and the next he was bowled off his feet, driven away from Connie, driven into the backrest of the couch by something that screamed in a continuous high-pitched wail of inhuman fury. The knife went flying out of his hand, vanishing behind an overstuffed chair. He almost fell, but his knees hit the seat and it doubled him over. He collapsed awkwardly onto the couch, still bearing the weight of whatever had struck him. Most men would have sat there, stupid and dazed, shaking their heads, disoriented.

But Karl Ruger was not so vulnerable a creature.

Hissing like a cat, he turned, lashing out with his elbow even before he could see his attacker. As the elbow struck, there was a howl of agony and Val Guthrie toppled away, clawing at her left arm. Ruger’s elbow had slammed into the already sprained tendons and muscles with terrible force.

“You fucking bitch!” he snarled and reached down and grabbed her by the hair, hauling her to her feet. He cuffed her across the face, bruising the spot he’d struck earlier. Val was far beyond the reach of that kind of pain. She lashed out with her foot, aiming for his groin, but Ruger turned and took it on the hip. Still, the kick had enough desperate force to stagger him. He lost his grip on her, backpedaled a step, and came within reach of Mark, who lashed out with his bound feet and knocked Ruger sprawling.

Val spun and ran for the door, hoping to lure Ruger out into the fields, away from the house, away from Connie, to make him chase her long enough for those blessed sirens to arrive.

Ruger was up in an instant. He didn’t waste time punishing Mark but set out after Val like a bird dog, growling in pain and fury. He went after her barehanded, forgetting his knife, forgetting his automatic. He wanted to hurt her with his naked hands.

Leaping off the porch, cradling her arm as best she could, Val ran straight up the road. Through the thunder and the rain, she couldn’t hear how close he was.

She ran.

Twice he almost caught her, twice she faked and darted and changed direction, drawing away from him while he was skidding in the mud.

“You bitch!” he howled.

Val ran back toward the house, dodged around a tree, past a parked tractor, then ran along the side of the house toward the backyard, where her father’s Bronco was parked. There was a shovel in the back. If she could get to it…

She screamed when she felt the tips of Ruger’s fingers scrabble at her hair.

Dodging, darting left and then right, she rounded the corner of the house and burst into the backyard.

Bright lights dazzled her, stopping her in her tracks with all the power of a force field. She slipped and fell.

Ruger caught her by the hair even as he skidded to a halt, startled by the intense brightness of the headlights of Crow’s car.

Chapter 17

Karl Ruger closed his hand tightly, knotting it in Val’s hair as he stood tall, facing the harsh white lights. He reached down and around her and clamped his viselike left hand on her windpipe as the driver’s door clicked and opened.

Through the lights and the driving rain he could only just make out the figure of a man, a small thin man, rising from the car. The car door slammed, but the man didn’t move.

“Val…?” the man called. His voice was distorted as he shouted over the wind.

“Cr—” Val started to yell a name but Ruger’s fingers squeezed the sound from her throat and allowed nothing more to pass.

“Just move along, sonny-boy,” called Ruger. “This is just a little domestic disturbance. You be on your way.”

The slim man shifted uncertainly, again calling out, “Val?”

“I said fuck off! And I mean now!”

“I don’t know who the hell you are, pal, but I want you to let the lady go. Right now.”

“Fuck you,” sneered Ruger.

The slim man reached into the car and flicked off the headlights, and then took a long step forward, raising his right arm as he did so. Lightning made flames dance along the barrel of the Beretta.

“No,” said Crow, “fuck you.” He took two more steps forward. “Now let her go!”

Val saw his face, clear in the lightning flashes, and her heart leaped in her chest. She tried to pull away, wanting to run to him, to take that gun and turn it on Ruger, but Ruger held her fast, pressing her knees into the mud and choking her throat completely closed. She scrabbled at his hands with her one remaining hand, but she might as well have been trying to chip away at a rock. Her lungs wanted to breathe, but he allowed her nothing, not even a cupful of air.

Ruger stared at the gun, not believing what he was seeing. He almost smiled. How could so many fucked-up things happen all in one day? With a snarl he yanked Val to her feet and pulled her in front of him. “Go ahead and shoot, sonny-boy, but you better be a good goddamn shot or you’re liable to blow a hole in this young lady.”

“As it happens,” Crow called, “I am a good goddamn shot.” He fired the pistol. The bullet burned the air a foot from Ruger’s ear. He jumped and jerked out of the way far too late, but the bullet hadn’t been aimed to hit flesh, just pride.

“Now let her go.”

Ruger’s fingers were digging so tightly into Val’s throat that she saw sparks dance in her eyes and the world was taking on a drunken, swimmy feel to it. She was vaguely aware that it was Crow there, but her shocked and oxygen-deprived brain was losing its ability to care.

Crow fired another shot, closer to Ruger’s head. Ruger didn’t even flinch this time; instead he pulled Val’s head up level with his, lifting her onto her toes, using her battered, weeping, strangling face to block his own.

Crow took another step forward, steadying the gun with both hands. Now he was no more than ten feet from Val and Ruger. “That was the last warning shot, Bozo. This baby carries fifteen shots. The next one’s going to go up your nose.” Even with Val as a shield, Crow knew he could clip the man in the arm or leg, but he didn’t want to gamble. He read the darkening of her face and saw the horrible tension in the hand that was clamped around her throat and felt fear and fury lash at him from within. Fear churned his gut into a greasy mush and despite the rain his mouth was bone dry. He swallowed, trying to lubricate his throat.

“I said, let her—”

At that moment, Ruger lunged forward and shoved Val right at Crow. He shoved her with all his force and she went flying. Crow barely had time to bring the gun up, to wrench the barrel away from her. He tried to step forward to catch her, but just as forcefully as Ruger had shoved her he had also thrown himself forward. He used her as a ram as well as a shield, and slammed into Crow with freight-train force. Val’s released throat opened as the two bigger male bodies caught her in the press and she screamed.

Suddenly Crow had too much to do. He tried to catch Val as she crumpled, screaming, to the mud; he tried to pull her away from the madman; he tried to bring his pistol to bear; he tried to evade the man’s rush.

In all of these things, he failed utterly. Fear of hitting Val and fear of the man himself made Crow hesitate a fraction of a second too long.

Ruger was on him with all of his terrible force and speed and rage bursting forth. He trampled Val as he leaped at Crow, fists swinging. Ruger knew he had no time or chance to wrestle the gun out of this man’s hand, so he swatted it away, sending it sailing end over end into rain and muddy darkness. It struck the side of the car with a muffled metallic clunk! His forward rush sent Crow tumbling backward, and Ruger rode him down like a surfer setting for a wave. Crow landed on his back and slid, and before the slide had spent itself, Ruger was smashing him with rock-hard fists.

Karl Ruger had only lost one fight in his life. He had been eleven at the time and a sixteen-year-old kid had plain whipped the tar and tears out of him. The teenager had beat him so bad that young Ruger had lain in the street, crying, peeing in his pants, trying to stanch the bright red blood that blossomed from his nose. The older kid had laughed at him and kicked him when he was down, and other kids, most of them older, but some of them his own friends, had watched and laughed.

That was the only fight Ruger had ever lost.

A week later he pushed the sixteen-year-old under the iron wheels of the elevated train, watching with bruised eyes as the bully’s body was torn and reduced to red rags.

Since then, no one had ever beaten Ruger. No one had ever even stood up to him for very long. It was the ferocity of his attack. He went into a fight at full speed, not building to it like most people do. Every blow was backed with a deep knowledge of how to hit, and where, and how to hit hard and fast and often. He’d learned that in South Philly bars, in a dozen jails, in back alleys, and in a score of fights he himself had started just to test himself, to learn how good he was. It mattered to him that he was good enough to survive anything that came down the pike. Anything. If a person stood up to him, no matter how tough, how big, how well armed, Ruger took him down. All the way down. Down to blood and death and closed coffins.

He went after Crow like that, and tonight he had all his frustrations and disappointments boiling inside him, putting more steel in his fists, stoking the fires of his rage.

Crow toppled under him, and Ruger straddled his waist, locking his legs around Crow’s hips for balance, and began the work of beating this man to death. Blood burst from Crow’s eyebrow and nose, his cheek ruptured and tore, and the fists never stopped. They kept hitting and hitting.

Then suddenly Ruger was falling!

Crow had brought his knees up, planting his shoes flat on the muddy ground, and then with all his strength and speed, had arched his back and twisted. Ruger was lifted like a rodeo rider on a bucking bull, and as Crow twisted, Ruger’s weight pitched him sideways. As they fell, Crow balled up his right fist so that the secondary knuckle of his forefinger protruded, and as they landed he punched Ruger once, twice very hard in the very top of his thigh.

The pain was so intense that it made Ruger howl.

Snarling in pain and surprise, Ruger kicked himself free and rolled catlike to his feet, and Crow came up off the ground at him. Crow faked high with both hands as if to tackle Ruger around the middle and then dropped suddenly to one knee and hooked a sharp uppercut into the tender flesh on the inside of Ruger’s thigh, missing his groin by half an inch. Ruger’s leg buckled and twisted, and he went back down.

Crow leaped at him, but Ruger kicked out as he fell and the thick heel of his boot caught Crow in the chest and using his leg like a strut, he threw Crow over his head.

Crow tucked and rolled and was on his feet first, spinning and crouching to face Ruger.

Ruger staggered to his feet, ignoring the pain in his leg. His hands opened and closed, opened and closed as if he were squeezing something that would scream.

Ruger’s eyes narrowed as he moved. Suddenly it had become a different fight. From a murderous attack — the kind of attack that had worked for him so many times in the past — he now found himself in a real fight. Whoever this guy was, he could fight, and in a twisted way Ruger was actually enjoying it.

They circled each other for a few seconds, making tentative half lunges, feinting, dodging half-thrown blows.

It was Ruger who made the move, and he made it as fast as the lightning that lit the sky. He used a variation on Crow’s trick and faked high, then dipped and dove for Crow’s legs. The move was an old favorite of his: wrap the legs just above the knees and bear forward. The poor sap goes down hard on his coccyx with two sprained knees to boot.

Crow stepped into the rush, and as Ruger’s arms closed like a crab’s pincers around his legs, he punched downward in as hard and true a vertical line as a drill press, driving the two big knuckles of his right hand between Ruger’s shoulder blades, dropping all his body weight with it to try and break the man’s back. It was a devastating blow, but the mud was soft and Ruger was hard. Still, the air went out of his lungs for a moment and he tasted mud in his mouth.

Crow stood over him for a moment, chest heaving, heart hammering from fear as much as from exertion. He had never seen anyone move so fast or hit so hard or fight with such animal ferocity. He risked a glance at Val, who was on her knees, one hand massaging her throat, he face slack with dizziness and nausea. He tried to give her a reassuring smile, and even opened his mouth to say something, but Ruger abruptly reached up and punched him right in the balls.

Crow screamed and staggered back, cupping his testicles, yet backpedaling to give himself room.

Ruger got to his feet, covered in mud like a golem, and he smiled with muddy teeth. “I’m going to fuck you up so bad they’ll have to bury you in installments.”

“Talk is cheap, dickhead,” Crow wheezed. His groin felt as if it were on fire.

Ruger hurled a handful of mud at Crow’s face, and followed it with another rush.

Crow was not as hurt as he pretended. A strike to the groin, even a hard one, does little actual damage. It’s just pain, and it is the pain that stops most people, but some people don’t care as much about pain. They know it, they’re used to it; it may not be an old friend, but it is an old companion. Crow was long acquainted with pain, even the pain of a hard punch in the balls. It hurt him, but hurt can be dealt with.

He waited in his half crouch, looking done-in, letting Ruger close the distance, letting Ruger provide the force.

Then he slid in between Ruger’s reaching arms and turned half away, catching one of his arms with one hand, and cupping the back of his neck with the other and then pivoted his body as fast as he could. Ruger’s force, plus the speed and arc of the turn, plucked Ruger right off the ground and sent him flying right into the driver’s door of the big brown Impala. The back of Ruger’s head slammed into it and he rebounded with a grunt, leaving a deep dent in Missy’s door. He slid down to the ground shaking his head, tried to get to his feet, and fell back again against the door, head lolling.

Crow stepped forward and grabbed him by the hair, hauled him ten inches away from the car so he could look at the man’s face, snarled in disgust, and then literally threw him backward into the same dented spot on the fender, ringing his skull off the crumpled metal. Ruger sagged bonelessly to the ground by the tire and lay there in the rain, blood running from his scalp.

Crow looked down at him, watching for signs of trickery. Ruger didn’t flicker so much as an eyelash. Just to be sure, and because his battered face was really starting to hurt like a bastard — and because the dread of this man still turned an icy knife of terror in Crow’s guts — Crow kicked him in the mouth and shattered all of the man’s front teeth.

Ruger fell over sideways, face forward into the mud.

Crow stood there, swaying, feeling his knees wanting to buckle. Fireworks were going off at the corners of his vision and there was something wrong with his head — it felt as if it had been badly broken and poorly taped back together. He wanted to vomit, or collapse. Instead, gasping, holding one hand to his streaming nose, he turned and slogged through the rain and the mud to Val. He swooped down on her, gathering her in his arms, aware of her hurt, her dangling arm, her bruised face, but needing to feel her solidity, her realness in his arms. He showered kisses on her mud-streaked face, kissed her hair and her eyes. She was crying with big, painful sobs, and each one stabbed into Crow as surely as a needle.

“Baby, baby, baby,” murmured. “What happened here? What did he do to you? My sweet baby…”

Her voice was a strained croak, the vocal cords bruised beyond normal speech. She was still half conscious, swimming on the edge of a big waterfall that wanted to take her over and down into the blackness.

Somewhere, half drowned by rain, the wail of police sirens could be heard, coming, coming…The sirens made her remember.

“Daddy!” she cried. “Oh my God, Crow…Daddy’s out there!”

“What? Where?”

“In the cornfield. He needs help. I tried to help him, but I couldn’t, Crow, I couldn’t…” she rambled, hysterical, almost inarticulate with trauma. It was all catching up to her now, overwhelming her. The iron determination that had kept her steady earlier was crumbling now as grief and injury took hold.

“Val,” Crow said sharply, trying to steady her. “What about your dad? What’s wrong with him? Where is he? What the hell happened here?”

The sirens were louder, closer.

“In the cornfield. We were helping the hurt man. We tried to run. I heard a shot. Daddy…he…”

“Jesus Christ! Did that son of a bitch shoot your father? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“I tried to help him. I did. But I couldn’t…my arm…I just couldn’t.”

“Shh, shh,” he soothed. “It’ll be okay. Just tell me where he is. I’ll go get him. And see? See there? Cops. There are cops coming. They’ll help, too.”

“Help?” she asked in a little girl voice that broke Crow’s heart.

“Yes, baby, they’ll help. Now tell me where your dad is. Tell me so I can go help him.”

The police cars screeched as they slid to a halt outside the front of the house, sirens dying away, but the lights swirling red in the storm. Crow could hear doors opening and slamming. He turned and in as loud a voice as he could manage, he yelled, “Hey! Back here! We need help!”

The sloshy sound of footsteps drew near, and Crow could see flashlight beams dancing. Two officers, still silhouetted behind the lights, came racing toward them, guns drawn.

“Mr. Guthrie?” one of them called.

“No, it’s me. Malcolm Crow. And Valerie Guthrie. Call for an ambulance, she’s hurt.”

One cop peeled off and ran back to the car, the other came and shone a light on them. Close up, Crow recognized Rhoda Thomas, one of the younger officers.

“Oh my God,” Rhoda gasped. “What happened?”

Val’s eyes were swimmy with growing shock and all she could do was shake her head. Crow said, “I don’t know what all went on. When I got here, Val was running from some maniac. He caught her and all but strangled her. I think he must have done something to her arm, be careful with it.”

“Where is he?”

Crow jerked his head toward Missy.

Rhoda looked at the slumped figure and frowned. “What happened to him?”

“We had words.”

“Who is he?”

“How the fuck should I know? I think he might be one of the assholes you people are looking for. Who knows? Look, we got to check something out. Val said that this clown shot her father. At least I think that’s what she said. Out in the cornfield somewhere. We have to find out what’s happened.”

“Rhoda!” a voice called, and she and Crow turned toward the house. A cop Crow didn’t know stood by the side of the house, pointing toward it. “There are two people in here. Man and woman. Man’s tied up, and I think the woman’s been assaulted. I called for an ambulance.”

“Jesus,” Rhoda breathed.

“Oh my God! Connie!” Crow looked from Val to the house to the cornfield and back to Val, trying to decide what to do. He bent his face close to Val, kissed her, and whispered in her ear, “Val, baby. I need to find your dad. You’ve got to tell me where he is. C’mon, baby, try to think.”

Val’s eyelids fluttered and her eyes went in and out of focus, and slowly, slowly came back to focus. The pain came with the clarity, and she hissed through gritted teeth.

“Shh, shh, just breathe, just breathe,” Crow soothed. “Now, baby, where’s your dad?”

With her strained vocal cords, and wincing with the waves upon waves of pain, Val told him which path to take, but her voice dwindled and finally failed. Her eyelids fluttered shut and she went down into darkness. Crow held her, kissing her eyes, and then carefully laid her down on the muddy ground. Blood dripped from his torn face onto her lips, but he brushed it away. He raised fierce red eyes to Rhoda. “I’m going to see if I can find Mr. Guthrie. You stay here. Watch over her. And, Rhoda…”

“Yes?”

“Don’t let anything happen to her, you got me?”

“Yes. I promise.”

Crow stood up slowly, hissing and wincing as he rose. Every inch of him hurt abominably. “You’d better cuff that son of a bitch before he wakes up. Be careful, though — he’s one tough bastard.”

Rhoda looked past him to where Ruger lay. Crow was looking past her at the house, but in his peripheral vision he could see her eyes snap wide.

“Watch out!” she cried and shoved at him with one hand as she fumbled with her gun with the other. The sound of the Beretta was like summer thunder, and as Crow dove to the ground, he could see blood blossom on Rhoda’s chest, seeding the air with bright red petals. She pirouetted away from him, her own gun firing uselessly into the mud, but as she spun the gun came up and around in a fast arc and the heavy pistol crunched into the side of Crow’s head.

Crow fell hard and the world seemed to be made of white lightning and thunder and all of it was inside his head. He fought to clear his vision, and saw with horrified eyes the muddy gun — his own gun — clutched in Ruger’s bloody fists. The madman stood there, covered in blood, pieces of broken teeth sliding from between his pulped lips, holding the familiar gun. Something burned along Crow’s left side and half the air was knocked out of him. He couldn’t tell if he had been shot or grazed. His mind froze. He felt like he was facing something that just couldn’t be whipped. How could the bastard get up after that beating? How could he have found the gun in all that rain and mud? How could he be stopped? The gun exploded again. Firing, firing.

Crow rolled away, trying to dodge the bullets, and as he turned one hand slapped mud and the other slapped down on Rhoda’s wrist. He fumbled, felt the fist, felt the slack fingers releasing from the butt of her gun, felt the gun itself. It all happened in a bizarre slow motion as thunder boomed above him and a smaller, deadlier thunder boomed across the rain-swept yard. Crow clawed the gun into his own hand, swept it up as he rose to a crouch, slipped his finger into the trigger guard. Something hit him on the belt line on his right side, punching hard against the hipbone and spinning him all the way around and flinging his arms straight up in the air as if he were surrendering. The pistol almost flew from his grip. Now both sides of his body were on fire. There wasn’t enough air in the world and black fireworks burst in the corners of his eyes. Howling with rage and pain, Crow wheeled around and brought the gun down into a two-handed shooter’s grip and even as his knees started to buckle he squeezed hard on the trigger and fired, fired, fired. Ruger danced backward in a crooked jerking series of steps as Crow’s bullets hammered into him.

But he did not go down.

Then he heard shouts and saw an oblong of light at the front of the house and a silhouette burst out onto the porch, a gun held in both hands. He, too, fired, but Ruger was moving now, fading back out of the spill of light, staggering in a drunken zigzag toward the vast rolling sea of cornstalks. The officer on the porch kept firing and one of the shots blew Missy’s windshield into glittering fragments, but if any of the bullets hit Ruger it was impossible to tell.

Crow’s head was spinning and he lurched two steps toward the cornfield before his legs gave out and he dropped heavily onto both knees, the gun still in his right hand, the barrel now pointed straight upward. His eyes rolled up white in their sockets and he sagged onto his back, Rhoda’s gun firing up into the night sky, firing at the storm, firing itself dry, and then falling from his hands as darkness swarmed over him and smothered all light.

Chapter 18

Its work completed, the storm ended.

Snickering and sated, the bruise-dark clouds slouched away into the west, leaving behind wreckage and an awful stillness. Cold and dispassionate, the moon was merely an observer in the sky, vaguely amused at the debris of hurt and suffering below; indifferent to the things that still crept and capered in the deeper shadows of the cornfields.

The flocks of night birds boiled out in their ragged flocks from under dripping trees, littering the sky, their ironic calls lost within the long and desperate wails of the hastening police sirens.

Cars began skidding to a stop along the big curved driveway in front of the Guthrie farmhouse. One after another, lights slashing red and blue and white swords through the shadows. Doors opened and people erupted from the vehicles, swarming in and clustering around the fallen bodies, shining lights, opening emergency kits, searching for signs of life, trying to fight the blood that seemed to flow like fountain water from too many wounds.

Sergeant Ferro pushed brusquely past the gathering crowd of assorted police officers and squatted down by Rhoda, shoulder to shoulder with Jerry Head, who was pressing his fingers against her throat. Head held his breath and watched, exchanging a worried glance with Ferro.

“She’s alive.”

Ferro turned and shouted, “Get a paramedic over here. Now!”

“Right here, sir,” someone said briskly, right at his elbow. “Please step back and give me room.”

Head touched Ferro’s arm. “Ruger was here, Sarge. I saw him and we exchanged some shots. Positive ID. It was him.”

“Where?”

“He ran into the corn.”

“You hit him?”

“I…think so. Not sure, though. Looks like the guy who was driving that Chevy hit him, though. Ruger shot him as well, I think.”

Ferro looked at him, searching his face.

The officer shook his head. “It was really confusing out there. The storm and all…”

Terry came slogging through the mud, his face stricken by all the blood and bodies. Everyone looked so damned dead. He didn’t know where to look, or how to feel. It was like being in a war.

He spotted Crow and ran to his side. “Medic!” he bellowed as he reached for his friend, touching his throat as he had seen Head do with Rhoda.

Finding nothing.

He turned away in despair and saw Val looking at him. She lay on her side, curled into a tight fetal position, her slim body battered almost beyond recognition, but her eyes were open. She looked into Terry’s eyes and read his anguish.

And screamed.

It was bloody work, and bloody awful.

Time shambled along, dropping discarded minutes as it stumbled toward midnight. The storm buried itself in the distant west, but now a cold, sharp wind blew in from due north, a wind with biting teeth and scratching claws. The workers labored on, shivering with the cold.

Three bodies were lifted off that stretch of muddy ground, carried gingerly by police officers and paramedics. A pair of female officers, Coralita Toombes and Melanie White, helped get Connie Guthrie dressed and took her to the hospital in the back of a police unit; the male officers gave them space, knowing that their presence, their maleness would do more harm to the sobbing woman than their badges would do to reassure her. Mark and another officer followed the ambulance. He was dazed and in shock, and lacked even the presence of mind to ask about his father and sister. His entire mind — what little was left on line — was focused on his wife.

More patrol cars arrived. More ambulances arrived. The population of the Guthrie farm swelled, and a crop of flashing lights grew all along the road.

Terry Wolfe tried to organize it all, tried to be the mayor, but he felt beaten up and so far beyond weary that he couldn’t remember feeling anything else. After a while the tide of events seemed to swirl around and eddy away from him, and he just drifted along, watching, letting the professionals do their work. He bummed a cigarette off Jimmy Castle and LaMastra lighted it for him, offering him a tight, meaningless smile before hurrying away to help Sergeant Ferro. Smoking in deep, steadying lungfuls, Terry walked around the house, walked in and out of the house, walked up and down the drive past the vehicles, trying to be noticed in case he was needed, but hoping that no one would need him for anything.

The three stretchers lay side by side near the ambulances as paramedics made fast the straps and officers moved their vehicles out of the way. Terry stood over them, and then watched as each person was lifted carefully into the back of one of the medivac units.

Rhoda went first, her face gray and still, eyes sunken. A ventilator was fitted over her mouth and huge compresses were taped to the bullet wounds in her stomach and chest; medics had started an IV of Ringer’s and were giving rapid-fire medical assessments via microphone to a trauma doctor at Pinelands E.R. Looking at her, Terry felt so sad. She looked like a child, no more than fourteen or fifteen. A law student who just wanted to do some routine police work in a quiet arts community, just to get a feel for that side of the law. Well, he reflected bitterly, how does it feel, kid? Like a nightmare, I imagine.

They loaded her into the ambulance and closed the door.

Valerie Guthrie was next. She was swathed in bandages, her left arm taped firmly to her body, eyes lightly closed. Every once in a while those eyes would twitch as if she were watching some scary movie in there, and the monsters kept jumping out. Terry hadn’t been able to get a single coherent word out of her, and from what the paramedics said, it was probably more shock than injury. Terry wondered why. He didn’t much care for Val as a person, had always thought her too hard-shelled, too forthright, but knowing that Crow loved her — and she loved him — made his heart soften toward her. She didn’t seem too badly injured, so what the hell could have happened out here to have broken her down like this? He drew deeply on his cigarette as they carried her past and handed her into the ambulance.

The last to be moved was Crow.

His face was crisscrossed with gouges and cuts, dark with bruised flesh and as waxy as a mask. Terry felt tears burning in his eyes as he looked at his friend. He would, he thought, forever relive that dreadful moment when he had searched for the pulse and not found it, and heard Val scream. He wondered if maybe that had pushed her over the edge, and if so, then he was partly responsible for her present situation. How was he to know that he was feeling for the pulse in the wrong place? He was a politician, not a paramedic.

When the real medics had come over and dug their fingers into the carotid arteries and reported that Crow was still alive, Terry felt at once massively relieved and abominably stupid. He had pressed the wrong spot on Crow’s neck and had, of course, felt no pulse. He tried to tell Val, to explain and apologize for his mistake, but she had passed out. In shock, the medics told him. Comatose. Out of it for now, and better for it. Terry wondered if that was true. Knowing that Crow was still alive would probably do her a power of good.

Terry touched Crow’s face, feeling the iciness of the skin, the slickness of sweat.

“Jesus, Crow…” he murmured.

“Bullet graze on the left side,” paramedic had reported after a quick examination. “And another on the right of him. Looks like it glanced off his belt.”

“Is he going to die?” Terry had asked, dreading the sound of his own words.

The paramedic gave a philosophic shrug and said, “Maybe of old age. Two hits and neither of them much of anything. Damn lucky guy. But he has lost some blood and somebody kicked the living piss out of him. Nice gouge on his head, looks like it might have been a pipe or something. Now, sir, if you’ll just step back…”

Terry had let them get to work, and now here Crow was, all trussed up and ready to be carted away to the hospital and the surgeon.

“Okay, Jack, we’re ready for him,” called one of the medics from inside the ambulance. The medic that had first diagnosed Crow as being among the living came over and double-checked the buckles on the straps.

“Okay down here.”

The two medics squatted, grabbed either end of the stretcher, and as one lifted Crow with great care and practiced ease.

“Take good care of him,” Terry said in his mayor’s voice. The medics swapped a quick glance. They heard that sort of thing fifty times a week, as if they would take less care if someone didn’t tell them to do it in an officious voice.

“Ouch!” said someone in a loud, complaining voice.

Terry stared.

Crow opened his eyes, looked around, then closed them and sighed. “Oh, shit,” he said groggily. “Now what?”

Unbelieving, delighted, Terry crowded the stretcher, touching Crow’s arm. “You bloody idiot,” he said.

“I love you, too,” Crow mumbled hoarsely. He blinked a couple of times. “Christ, was I that drunk?”

“No, you numbskull, you were shot.”

Crow’s eyes snapped wide and his face hardened as everything came rushing back. “Val!” He tried to sit up but he hit a brick wall of pain and collapsed back down, aided by the hands of the paramedics.

“Shh, shh, she’s okay,” said Terry. “She’s in the other ambulance. They’re taking good care of her. She’ll be fine.”

Breathing out a heavy sigh, Crow said, “Oh, thank God.” Darkness welled up in Crow’s mind, and he could barely form words. After several false starts, he managed to say, “Terry…did I…do it?”

“Do what? Did you do what?”

“Did I…kill the rotten son of a bitch?”

Terry patted Crow’s arm. “From what one of Sergeant Ferro’s men said, you two were standing there shooting at each other, you fell down, and when the officer joined in and started to shoot, Ruger ran off.”

“Ruger?” Crow’s eyes widened. “That was really…him?”

“Yeah…are you impressed with yourself?”

“Damn, Terry, but he was one tough bastard. Almost…couldn’t take him…”

“You fought him?”

Crow licked his split lips and then quickly — but disjointedly — told Terry everything that had happened. “We beat the living shit out of each other…and then he shot me. Shot that poor girl, too. Rhoda.” He grabbed Terry’s sleeve. “She dead?”

“No, but she’s hurt pretty bad. They took her to the hospital.”

“You sure Val’s okay?”

“She’ll be fine,” Terry said, though he felt that he was lying.

Crow saw dark shapes materialize out of the confusion and there were two men standing there. One tall and black and middle-aged, the other taller, white, and younger. They had the cop look about them.

“Mr. Crow?” the black man said.

“What’s left of him.”

“Do you know what happened here tonight? We can’t seem to get a clear picture of the events of—”

“I just got here a few minutes ago, man. Drove up, saw some asshole attacking my girlfriend, and jumped right in. I…don’t know much of what else happened.”

“You didn’t go into the house?”

“No,” Crow said and then felt a hand clamp around his heart. “Val’s family—”

“Her brother and sister-in-law are on their way to the hospital. Nothing serious.”

Crow was relieved for a second, and then realized that the cop hadn’t said anything about Val’s father.

“What about Henry — Val’s dad?” His head was pounding as he tried to remember something Val had tried to tell him. “Jesus Christ! I think he’s out in the cornfield. I think he’s hurt!”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes! No…oh, Christ, I don’t know…send some fucking guys out there!”

The cops looked at him for a moment and then melted away. He heard them shouting orders.

Crow’s body felt like a single huge bruise and his head was swimming. As much as he was trying to keep it together he felt himself fading fast.

He still had Terry’s sleeve caught in his fist, and he gave it a shake. “Terry—”

Bending close, Terry said, “Yeah…?”

“Find…Henry!” And then the darkness wrapped itself completely around him and he passed out.

Terry leaned back and sighed in frustration and disgust. “Okay, fellas, take him away. When you get to the hospital, tell them that the township is picking up the tab for all this. Oh, and tell Dr. Weinstock that I want him to call me the moment — and I do mean the very moment — that Mr. Crow comes out of surgery.” He glared at the ambulance driver, looking every inch of his muscular six-four. “You boys got that?”

They nodded curtly.

“Good, now get a move on.”

The ambulance left in as much of a hurry as safety would allow, and Terry watched them go. Then he spun on his heel and called for Detective Sergeant Ferro. The detective was speaking in low, fast tones with LaMastra and looked up as Terry hurried over.

“How’s your friend?” Ferro asked.

“He passed out and they’re taking him in,” Terry said.

“He say anything more about what happened?”

“More or less. He and one of your bad guys went toe-to-toe. Crow says he beat the man in a fight, though from what he said and the way he looks, it was a close call.”

“Then it must have been Boyd who Jerry Head saw run off into the corn,” LaMastra said. “If your buddy had gone up against Ruger we’d be scraping him up with a spatula.”

Terry half smiled. “Maybe, and maybe not. Don’t underestimate Crow. He may be a little guy, but he’s just about as tough as they come.”

“Good fighter, is he?” asked LaMastra.

“Very. I could tell you stories—”

“Maybe later,” Ferro interrupted. “What else did he say?”

“Oh, he said that he shot the other man. He was surprised when I told him that Ruger — or whoever — had run off into the fields. He thinks the guy was hit four or five times.”

Ferro grunted. “Officer Head also fired at the suspect but isn’t sure if he hit him at all. He said he gave him a cursory look, and it appeared that the suspect fit the description of Karl Ruger.”

“Nah, had to have been Boyd,” LaMastra repeated, shaking his head.

“Either way,” Ferro said glumly, his face as lugubrious as an undertaker’s, “the man left a lot of wreckage and at the moment we’re no closer to catching him than we were an hour ago.”

“Mr. Crow must have only thought he’d hit him that many times,” offered LaMastra. “In the dark, in the rain, and having taken some hits himself, Mr. Crow wouldn’t have been able to really tell. And Jerry was firing from the porch…that’s what, seventy, eighty feet?”

“More likely he was wearing body armor of some kind,” Ferro said. “Anyone can get hold of it these days. The shots might had knocked the wind out of him, knocked him down — but he could have gotten up and run off.”

Reluctantly, Terry had to agree.

The three men looked at each other for a while and then looked away into the moonlit fields.

“That means both Boyd and Ruger are still out there,” Terry said softly. “And so is Henry Guthrie.”

Ferro sniffed and pointed his chin at the darkened corn. “We’re combing those fields now. If Mr. Guthrie — or anyone else — is out there, we’ll find him.”

They stood there in silence for a while as the cops and crime scene investigators and paramedics swarmed around them, and neither they nor all of the dozens of cops, techs, or EMTs saw the slim form of a man with pal gray skin, a dark suit, and a blues guitar slung over one shoulder standing by the edge of the cornfield. Every time the lightning flashed, the shadows it cast of the tall corn fell not on him, but through him.

Chapter 19

He lay dying in the dark.

The blood wormed its way out of him, soaking through his clothes, seeking the earth below his back, letting the hungry soil feed on him. Overhead the moon looked down at him with typical cold intensity, and stars littered the fringes of the sky. A night bird cawed plaintively somewhere in the corn; other sounds troubled the darkness: sirens, men shouting, car engines roaring as vehicles came and left.

He knew he was still too close to the house, safe only with the cover of darkness and the fact that they didn’t know in which direction he’d gone. He couldn’t linger here. Soon they would be finished with those assholes back at the house. Soon they would be after him with flashlights and maybe even with dogs.

“Fuck!” he growled softly.

He had to get up, he knew that.

But lying there was better for now.

It wasn’t the pain that kept him from rising: Karl Ruger knew everything there was to know about pain, and he’d kicked pain’s sorry ass too many times to sweat that now.

No, it was the hate. Hate had put the steel in his legs that let him stagger away from that mean little bastard he’d gone toe-to-toe with, bullet holes and all. Hate had driven him at least this far away from the cops and all the activity. Hate had kept him awake when the damage and the spigot-flow of blood wanted to lull him down into a drowse that he knew would kill him.

Hate made him patient, too.

The hate wanted him to live, not die. The hate wanted him to find some way of staying awake, staying strong, staying alive long enough to get help, to force help. It was only hate that had given him the patience to stuff his torn shirt into the bullet holes, and kept him from screaming while he did so. That hadn’t stopped the flow of blood, but it had slowed it.

The hate was wise, too. It knew that if he didn’t rest, just for a while, then he would die on his feet and the bastards would win. The bastards would prove that they were stronger than he was. There was no way in hell that Karl Ruger was going to let that happen. His hate was the power that had always kept his black heart beating. It was what kept the vinegar that pumped through his veins cold and fast. It was what made his mouth smile and his tongue water whenever he saw the fear of him that was always there in other people’s eyes. The hate was Ruger’s secret self, defining him, completing him. Now it protected him, teaching him the secret of how to survive this long and nasty bitch of a night.

More than all of this, his hate was his one and only god. A dark god that nightly listened to his blasphemous prayers, offering not absolution, but permission, encouragement, enticement.

Lying there, dying, bleeding, trying to gather together the power to rise once more and move, he prayed in his own way for strength.

He prayed for the strength to live long enough to find that little bastard and kill him. Slowly, painfully. Artfully. He prayed for the strength to find that broken-nose country bitch and teach her some big-city manners. His own kind of manners. He prayed for the strength to hurt them all. Hurt them so bad and so deep that even if they did somehow live past his revenge, they would beg for no new tomorrows. He prayed for the strength to find Boyd, and his money, and to make Boyd sorry that his father had ever fucked his mother. To make him sorry that the thought of betraying Karl Ruger had ever wormed its way into his tiny brain. To make Boyd sorry that he hadn’t been simply killed during the drug buy back in Philly.

He prayed for the strength to be all things in all ways to them that were as dark as the utter darkness in his heart.

Above him the cloud-free sky rumbled with improbable thunder, like an old echo of the storm come rolling round again.

Ruger, you are my left hand.

The words rang suddenly in his head, clear and strong as if someone had spoken them aloud.

Karl Ruger lay there in the cornfield, feeding the soil with his life and his hate and his black prayers.

In the vastness of the night that overhung the cornfields, something stirred. Something that heard Ruger’s secret murmurings and the rage-filled screaming of his soul; something that had been given life by the same force that had crash-landed Karl Ruger in Pine Deep. The thing rose from where it had crouched, dragging horror with it, and slouched through the fields toward the place where Ruger lay, a missionary of hell coming in answer to those prayers.

Where was Val? Hadn’t she been there a while ago? Henry thought she had, but now he couldn’t remember. Maybe it had been a dream.

Where was Mark? Mark would help him. Mark was strong, he could carry him back to the house, get an ambulance for him.

Mark…? he thought he called out, but the word echoed only in his head and he knew that he hadn’t found the power to say his son’s name out loud.

Henry Guthrie closed his eyes again, the lids pressing tears out from under the lashes.

Please, God, he prayed. Please, God…

He wanted to say the words out loud. Maybe they would have more power that way, but he was slipping away from that, or any other, ability, sliding down into a long and formless darkness. He tried to conjure images of Val and Mark and Connie, but his mind was going blank, and it broke his heart.

Please, God, he begged. Help them.

Something rustled the corn near where he lay, and Guthrie managed to open his eyes; it was like jacking up a truck. He searched the shadows with his failing vision, hoping, hoping…

But it was not Val come back to help him; it wasn’t Mark. It was a stranger. The man walked slowly toward him and stopped, standing over him. He had a face as gray as the mist that was starting to form in among the cornstalks. His cheap suit was soaked and rainwater glittered like diamonds in his kinky hair.

Guthrie tried to speak, and found he could manage, just a single word: “Who…?”

The man lowered himself slowly to the ground, sitting cross-legged by Guthrie’s side.

“I won’t hurt you, Henry,” said the gray man.

“…who?” Guthrie croaked.

“Just an old friend. I just come to wait with you awhile.”

“…need…help…”

The Bone Man shook his head sadly. “No, Henry, no. It’s too late for that. I’m sorry.”

Guthrie closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the emptiness overwhelm him.

When he opened his eyes, he expected the man to be gone, a phantom conjured by his dying brain. The gray man sat there still.

“Val…?” Guthrie forced the word out past all weakness. He needed to know, but dreaded the answer.

“She’s alive.”

“Mark?”

“Mark, too. And Connie. All of them. Alive.”

“Thank…” Guthrie began, but it took him a long time to finish. “…God.”

The Bone Man had no response to that, but his face looked so much sadder. He pulled his guitar around and laid it across his thighs.

Guthrie tried to raise a hand, tried to touch this man. Seeing the feeble attempt, the gray man took his hand and held it. His long fingers were even colder than Guthrie’s numb and bloodless skin.

“Who…are…you…?” Guthrie asked. “Do I…do I know…you?”

A small sad smile drifted across the Bone Man’s lips. “You did. A long, long time ago,” he said in a distant voice. “You were kind to me once. You were kind to me when no one else was.”

“I…don’t remember…”

“Maybe you will. Soon. But right now, just rest, Henry.” The gray man’s face looked so sad, and a single silver tear gathered in the corner of his eyes. “It’s time to sleep now. Just let it all be. You’re done with it now. Just go to sleep, Henry. Just go to sleep.”

Guthrie’s eyes had been drifting shut and his hand sagged loosely in the Bone Man’s grip. Guthrie seemed to sigh and then he settled back against the ground, the tension of fighting for words and breath easing.

The Bone Man sat with him for a while, still holding the slack hand. Then he bent forward and kissed Henry Guthrie on the forehead. The tear that had gathered in his eye spilled and a single silvery drop splashed down on Guthrie’s face. The Bone Man touched the spot where the tear had landed and then he picked up his guitar and began to play softly.

“Good night, Henry,” he whispered as the long, cold wind of the void blew past them both and lifted the sound of the blues up to heaven.

Karl Ruger felt the darkness closing in, and he cursed it.

But this darkness wasn’t to be cursed; it was the answer to the curses his soul and his hate and his rage had invoked.

The darkness was not formless. It shambled out of the shadows and stood over him, looking down on him, immensely powerful against the distant moon.

Ruger gasped as he looked up at the thing, trying to calculate its outline, silhouetted against moon and stars. Arms, legs, the body of a man — but the head was all wrong. The head had nightmare proportions, and as the thing bent toward him, Ruger could see it had a long and crooked mouth, a mouth that smiled and smiled. It was the misshapen head of a jack-o’-lantern, carved with a wicked grin and burning eyes.

Ruger looked into the eyes that he could finally see: eyes that burned like coals, eyes that knew things. The creature reached for him, clamping iron fingers around Ruger’s arms and lifting him bodily off the ground. Pain shot through him, but Ruger didn’t care, didn’t even notice. His whole mind was fixed on the face of horror that leered at him out of the darkness, the face of horror that bent close to his own until he could feel the hot breath of hell blown sourly into his own mouth, up his nose. The thing’s body seemed to writhe and ripple, the clothes bulging and stirring. As Ruger watched, a few insects crept out from between folds of the old suit, and then scuttled back inside. The hands that held him did not feel like human fingers: they were strong, but something was wrong with them. They also rippled in a way Ruger could not understand, as if what was inside was not skin and bone but was instead composed of thousands of separate parts that writhed and scuttled under the cloth. Even he — dissipated, dying, and evil as he was — shuddered at the creature’s touch.

Yet Ruger did not fight against the thing that held him; wouldn’t, even if he had the power. This was not something he could fight, his rage told him that, but more importantly, this was not something he should fight. Not this thing.

Ruger, you are my left hand. Again he heard those words echo in his brain.

Perhaps it was in that moment that Ruger began to understand why he had delayed leaving the Guthrie farm, and why he had let Tony drive the car. Those choices had worked to bring him to Pine Deep, and to keep him here. As the tide of events had swept along tonight he had sensed that some stronger purpose was having its way with him, that some will — stronger even than his — was putting things in motion.

Ruger, you are my left hand.

Now Ruger thought he understood, and he accepted what was happening. Welcomed it. The thing that held him in the darkness bent to his accepting ear and whispered terrible secrets in his dying ear.

After a long time, the night birds were driven to startled flight by the sound of Karl Ruger’s wild laughter.