Ghost Road Blues (Pine Deep 1)

“B…Boyd?”

“Yeah, man. ”

“Boyd?” Tony barely had a voice left, his words croaking out in a whisper not half as loud as Ruger’s slithery rasp, and lacking any trace of vitality. A voice muffled and warped by sinuses flooded with blood. “You gotta help me, man. I’m all fucked up. ”

“Well, yeah, you got shot and then you wrecked the car. You ought to be fucked up,” Boyd said, and then his face softened. “Can you walk?”

“I don’t…know. I can’t feel my legs, man. ”

Boyd looked over his shoulder at Ruger, who was lighting a Pall Mall. Thunder rumbled overhead, deep and sullen, and in the distance lightning flashed continuously.

“We might have to carry him, man,” Boyd said.

Ruger took a long drag on his cigarette and looked thoughtfully at Boyd, his cold eyes narrowed. “Tell me, Boyd,” he asked mildly, “do you really see either one of us carrying his sorry ass anywhere?”

“Huh?”

“What I said. Can you see us hauling his sorry ass out of that car and carrying it anywhere? Is that how you see things? ’Cause I sure as hell don’t. I see us taking the money and the coke and making ourselves scarce as shit, is what I see. I see us having enough troubles getting ourselves to some place safe without having to cart around a man that’s mostly dead anyway. ”

Boyd straightened and faced Ruger, half smiling. “You’re out of your fucking mind, Karl. We can’t just leave him here!”

“Why not?”

“It ain’t right, man. ”

Ruger took another long and thoughtful drag on his cigarette. Blue smoke leaked from his mouth and nostrils as he said, “‘Ain’t right’? Is that what you said, Boyd? It ‘ain’t right’? That’s precious, man. Now, why don’t you tell me what ‘right’ has to do with anything?”

“Hey, we’re a team, Ruger. We set this up together and we pulled it off together and we gotta stick together no matter what happens. ”

“Is that right? Then I suppose we should have stayed behind to fetch Nicky and Lester just so we could give them a decent Christian burial. Wouldn’t that have been the ‘right’ thing to do?”

“Boyd…?” Tony asked weakly, but when Boyd looked inside the car, Tony’s eyes had drifted shut again. Boyd straightened and looked hard at Ruger.

“Tony’s still alive. ”

“Not much, he ain’t. ”

“He ain’t dead yet, Ruger, and we just can’t leave him. ”

“What do you want to do? Wait here until he kicks? You know as well as I do he ain’t going to make it. He’s gut shot and busted up. It’s not like we can take him to a hospital or anything. There ain’t a hospital from here to Harrisburg that won’t be on the alert for us. Not that anybody’d keep shut about treating a gunshot wound anyway. So what do you suggest we do? Do you know how to treat a bullet wound? Since when are you Marcus-?fucking-?Welby?”

“We have to do something!”

“We have to save our own asses, Boyd, that’s all we have to do. Tony knew the risks, and if he hadn’t had his head stuck up his own ass he wouldn’t have taken one in the belly. But that’s too damned bad. I for one am not going to stand around here just to keep him comfortable till he dies. This is capital crime, my man, not male bonding, and Tony sure as hell ain’t family to either one of us. ”

Boyd shook his head stubbornly. “We’ll find a doctor somewhere, force him to fix Tony. Or bribe him. Hell, we got enough dough. ”

“If you think I’m going to waste any of my money on a dead man, then you are actually dumber than you look. I’m getting my money and my share of the coke and I’m getting the hell out of Dodge right now. ”

Ruger began to turn away but stopped as Boyd opened his coat, revealing the mother-?of-?pearl grip of his old Colt Commander. Ruger looked at the gun for just a moment, then slowly raised his eyes to meet Boyd’s. There was no trace of fear in Ruger’s eyes. His flat reptilian stare burned into Boyd’s, and Ruger’s smile slowly blossomed.

“We have to do something about Tony,” Boyd said in a voice that betrayed far more emotion than he wanted.

Ruger nodded slowly. “Uh-?huh. Okay, Boyd, we’ll play it that way. ” He took a last slow drag on his cigarette and flicked the butt into the corn, then brushed past Boyd and bent down into the open passenger side of the car.

“Yo…Tony?” he asked.

Tony’s eyelids fluttered for a moment and then opened.