Alone, Ferro and LaMastra looked down at the corpse.
“Jesus H. Christ,” LaMastra breathed.
They said nothing for a couple of minutes, letting time pass, sorting things out, keeping their cop faces intact despite what was going on behind their eyes.
“Ruger,” LaMastra said, needlessly.
“Yeah. ”
“Bastard. ”
“Yeah. ”
“Now he’s killed a cop. ”
“Yeah,” Ferro said in a dead voice.
LaMastra’s jaw muscles kept clenching.
A moment later a uniformed officer came sprinting around the corner of the warehouse. “Sarge!”
Ferro and LaMastra turned. “What is it?”
“It’s Ruger…he’s been spotted!”
2
Vic Wingate fell asleep in his Barcalounger in front of the TV, his feet up and ankles crossed, one hand closed limply around a long-?necked bottle of beer that had gone tepid, the other lying palm down on his crotch. He wore a pair of faded blue boxers and a Pine Deep Softball T-?shirt. He’d never played softball in his life; the shirt was a leftover from Lois’s first husband, Big John Sweeney.
Vic slept and dreamed and his faced was bathed with a greasy sheen of cool sweat. Behind his eyelids his eyes jumped and twitched and every once in a while his hand closed around his balls….
Vic stood in the forest, deep in the shadows in the bowels of Dark Hollow, the toes of his work boots sinking into the muddy fringe at the edge of the swamp as he leaned forward and whispered.
“It’s almost ready,” he hissed. “Everything’s just about in place. ” There was silence except for the incessant drone of the mosquitoes and the hoot of a scraggly old owl in the branches of a blighted sycamore.
Vic knelt, almost losing his balance, and for a moment he windmilled his arms as he fought for balance. Much as he loved that which lay beneath the mud and muck, he did not want to touch it. It was not time for that kind of embrace.
“I’ve done everything you wanted,” Vic said as he crept farther back up the bank and onto firmer ground. He licked his lips and then smiled. “Everything…and a few more things. Stuff I thought up. ”
A crow cawed loudly and flapped down through the branches and landed on the far side of the swamp. It cocked its head and fixed him with an eye that was as black and expressionless as a bead of polished onyx.
Vic stared at it for a moment and then dropped his eyes to the leaf-?strewn surface of the swamp. He reached out a hand and just glided his fingers along the surface debris. “The world’s changed a lot,” he said. “There’s stuff I had to do that we hadn’t thought of before. ”
The bird rustled its feathers and he looked hard at it, squinting in the gloom.
“A lot of things have changed. ”
The bird stared back.
Vic looked back down at the mud. “I’ve taken care of everything. ” He paused and a slow, cold smile wriggled onto his thin lips. “Everything. ”
In his sleep, Vic shifted, a faint smile on his mouth. Beneath his hand he grew hard.
3
Ruger saw it happen just in time to save his own life. That he saved the others, too, was inconsequential to him. He saw it because he was waiting for it, because he wanted it to happen. He needed it to happen, knew it would happen. He’d know that ever since he’d seen the name of the town and heard the voice speaking in his head. He didn’t know exactly what would happen, in fact could never have predicted the exact event that caused the wreck, but he knew the wreck—or something like it—was inevitable.
For weeks now he had felt that Death was dogging his heels and that sooner or later it was going to jump him. That, or maybe he’d find some way to turn it around and spit in Death’s eye. He found himself taking outrageous risks lately, risks like letting a dying man drive his getaway car. Instead of dreading the nearness of death, Ruger had started to groove on it, getting an almost erotic high from the nearness to total blackness. It jazzed him higher than a spike in the vein, and he’d been running on that high for days now, first planning the drug scam with the Jamaican posse, then forcing the deal to go sour by mouthing off to the chief of the Jamaican crew, then the shoot-?out at the warehouse, and now this doomed flight.