Ghost Road Blues (Pine Deep 1)

One farmhouse, older than the others, more battered by time and cold winds and disinterest, stood at the edge of a vast cornfield and overlooked a couple of acres of flat ground enclosed by a low stone wall. The ivy-?covered stone wall embowered a small and disheveled cemetery in which the rows of shadow-?painted tombstones stood in snarls of bracken and pernicious weeds. Wailing again, the night bird flew low over the cracked and wind-?sanded headstones, circling and circling. No lights shone in the window of the old house. No lights had shone there in months, nor might ever show there again. Only shadows lived there, stirred now and again by the frigid breath of old ghosts. The night bird wailed yet again and flapped noisily toward a tree where it settled on a twisted and gnarled branch that reached out toward the tombstones. In daylight the fading colors of the leaves would have made the promise of beauty, but by starless night the leaves were a uniform and featureless black, forming nothing more than an amorphous bulk against which the night bird disappeared entirely.

The night bird turned a single black eye toward one headstone that leaned drunkenly just below the tree. It had been pushed off-?balance by the roots of the tree but was held fast to the ground by one sunken corner and its own ponderous weight. It was a simple tombstone, blocky and gray and cheap, thirty years old and unkindly worn by each of those thirty winters. Chiseled into its face was a name: OREN MORSE.

Below that, a single word had been cut into the lifeless stone: REST. No date, no other inscription. The wind blew brambles and fallen leaves across the grave and one dry leaf, propelled by the vagaries of the breeze, skittered upward to the top of the gravestone and then tumbled over and off into the shadows beyond. Except for the murmuring wind and the whisper of the cornstalks, there was no sound. Even the night bird held its tongue.

Then a man was there.

He stepped out of a shadow and was abruptly there. The night bird let out a startled cry and fluttered its wings, but did not fly away. The man stood quietly looking down at the headstone, his gray lips moving as he read the name. He was scarecrow thin and dressed in a cheap black suit that was smeared with dirt. He wore no topcoat, no hat. His skin was as gray as the gravestones around him, but there was no moon now to shine on it. Still, that pale skin seemed to cast its own weird light. He held his hands loosely at his sides, and every once in a while those long fingers twitched and clutched as if grasping something, or desiring to.

Then he reached down into the shadows behind the tombstone and when he straightened he held the long neck of a battered old blues guitar in his hand. He looped the strap over his shoulder and drew his slender fingers along the silver strings. The friction made a sound like old door hinges creaking open.

Abruptly the whole graveyard was caught in the harsh white glare of headlights as a car crested one of the small hills and rushed down the other side toward the graveyard. The lights shimmered through the trees and danced along the tips of the corn, casting weird capering shadows. The gray man turned, watching as the car drew near, passed, and drove on. The car was moving very fast and swerving as if the driver was drunk. Three shadowy figures hunched in the car’s seats, two in the front, one in the back. Tires squealed as the car careered along the road, sashaying from one lane to the other and back, and then finally settling on a course dead center, as if the grill were devouring the single yellow line. The machine roared past a large billboard that read:

THREE MILES TO PINE DEEP, THE MOST HAUNTED TOWN IN AMERICA…WE’LL SCARE YOU SILLY !

If the men in the car noticed the sign, they gave no indication. Their shadowed heads didn’t turn as they passed the sign, the engine never slowed. The car clawed its way up the far hill, and in a few minutes the taillights were gone, fading first to tiny red dots, like rat’s eyes, and then vanishing altogether. A minute later the sound of the engine was gone as well.

The man in the graveyard stared into the distance, his eyes squinting as if he could still distantly see the car, though it was impossible in those deep shadows. His eyes lingered briefly on the billboard and the irony was not lost on him.

Again lightning flickered behind the clouds. In the tree, the night bird shivered its wings and uttered its strange wailing cry.

With a final lingering glance at the tombstone, the thin man tugged on the strap so that the guitar hung behind him, with the neck hanging down low behind his right hip; then he turned and began walking. He walked slowly and without haste, his long legs maintaining a steady, deliberate pace, like that of a pallbearer. He stepped onto the road and began walking in the direction taken by the car and its three passengers. His shoes made no sound on the blacktop. Lightning flashed again and again, a deception of a storm, but the storm was elsewhere. The lightning cast brief but bold shadows across the road, the wall of the graveyard, the gnarled tree, the night bird…everything starkly cast its shadow onto the blacktop. Everything except the man who walked without making a sound.

With slow and measured steps, he climbed the long hill and was soon lost in darkness. The night, and the night bird, followed after.

3

“Jesus Christ, Tony!” Boyd yelped, gripping the back of the driver’s seat with his one good hand. “Watch it!”

Tony Macchio wrestled the wheel and pulled the car back into the right-?hand lane, missing the oncoming milk truck by inches. The car swayed drunkenly on its springs as Tony fought to steady it with clumsy hands. His fingers were caked with dried blood, and they felt cold and weak. He could barely even feel the knobbed arc of the steering wheel.

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” snapped Boyd as the car finally settled into balance and began accelerating again, climbing a long hill.

Tony coughed once but didn’t say anything. His stomach felt hot and acidy, and he had too much phlegm in his throat. He just shook his head. Next to him, looking casual in spite of the wild ride, Karl Ruger watched Tony. Ruger’s eyes were cold slits, but he was smiling. The smile and the eyes seemed as if they belonged to two different faces: the smile seemed warm and pleasant and affable, but above the smile Ruger looked at Tony with the expressionless eyes of a reptile. Eyes the color of dusty slate, like a blackboard from which all the writing had been forcefully erased. Ruger had a long, thin nose that arced over the mouth like the blade of a very sharp knife, a pointed chin, and a sharp, strong jaw-?line. His cheekbones hung like ledges over the concavity of hollow cheeks, and Ruger’s brow was high and clear but cut by the black dagger-?point of a widow’s peak. He took off his hat and smoothed his greased hair flat against his skull. If he had had a kinder face, he could have looked like a stage magician, and he did have the air of magic about him; but it was a dark magic, and it clung to his soul and to his face, and to his fate. The dark magic was there in his long white fingers and in the shadows of his black, black heart.

Karl Ruger looked at Tony and smiled as he watched the man slowly die.

He found it fascinating to watch as Tony tried to cling to consciousness, tried to deny the coiled snake of pain in his gut where the Jamaican’s bullet had capped him. Gut shots were agonizing, Ruger knew, and he marveled at the manner in which Tony tried to bull his way through what must be searing pain. Idly, Ruger wondered if the loss of blood was providing Tony with some kind of insulation against the pain. God knows he’d lost a lot of it. Tony was sitting in a lake of it, and more of it was pooled around his feet. The fresh-?cut copper smell of blood teased Ruger’s senses, and he wondered, not for the first time, why no one had ever made an aftershave that smelled like fresh blood.

The car rolled past a sign that read: WELCOME TO PINE DEEP! Ruger felt a cold wind blow through his chest. It was scary, but he liked it. He mouthed the name of the town, silently tasting it. Pine Deep. Yes. He closed his eyes and for just a moment he thought he heard a voice say: Ruger, you are my left hand. But no one had spoken. He opened his eyes and stared at the unfolding black road, feeling the prickle of expectant excitement in his chest, but at a loss to understand why it was there or what it meant.

Boyd asked again what the fuck was wrong with Tony, and Ruger watched as Tony tried to say something but only managed to blow a small bubble of viscous red between his purple lips. Ruger was fascinated by the bubble as it expanded, filled with Tony’s ragged breath, and then popped. A mist of tiny droplets dotted the windshield.

“Yo! Tony!” Boyd snapped.

“Shut up, Boyd,” whispered Ruger. He always spoke in a whisper. It was all he could manage since a spic in Holmesburg Prison had stabbed him in the throat during a small dispute between Ruger’s own Aryan Brotherhood and the brown-?skinned critters on the Block. The spic had wanted to kill him so bad he had a hard-?on, an actual hard-?on, as he drove a sharpened spoon into Karl’s throat. Ruger could feel the hard length of the man’s dick when he had grabbed the spic’s groin and squeezed it. Makeshift knife in the throat or not, Ruger had all but ripped the man’s pecker off before one of the other Aryan Brothers had stepped in and cut the spic’s throat with a sliver of sheet metal that he’d stolen from the machine shop. The other Brother had taken the rap for the kill, which was fine for Ruger because he didn’t get any time added to his stretch. The spoon had not really done him much harm, just a nick on the larynx and a bit of pain. Big deal. Pain didn’t mean a goddamn thing to Ruger. Pain was just a “thing” that sometimes happened. And if his voice was now a hoarse and ghostly whisper, well, that was fine. It scared the shit out of a lot of people, and it made them listen closely to whatever he had to say.

“What the hell, Karl? He almost wrapped us around that truck!”

“He’s doing fine,” Ruger whispered. “Just fine. ”

Tony turned and looked at Ruger for a moment, his brows knitted together and gl

istening with cold sweat.

“Fine, my ass!” Boyd said. “He took one back there. ”

“So did you. So what?”