Ghost Road Blues (Pine Deep 1)

“We all saw the corpse, Saul,” said Terry quietly. “We know. ”

“No,” Weinstock said emphatically, setting down his coffee cup with a thump. “No, you don’t know. You don’t even know the half of it. ” He looked at them each for a moment, then said, “For starters, I pulled two slugs out of his abdomen, both of different calibers. One was a nine millimeter and the second bullet wound was a thirty-?two caliber—delivered hours later from comparisons of bruising and clotting, but almost in the same spot. ”

“He was shot at least once during the drug buy, in Philly,” said Ferro. “That was probably the nine, and Ruger has a thirty-?two caliber belly gun. Raven Arms automatic. ”

“Okay. The first shot was from a distance, the hole was clean and there were no powder burns, no tattooing, just a clean hole. But the other was a classic near-?contact entry wound, possibly even on-?contact, fired through clothes. The entry wound had a clear burn-?rim, so your boy Ruger must have jammed that thirty-?two-?caliber pistol into his gut and popped him. Neither, gentlemen, was a fatal wound, and Mr. Macchio would have been far better off if it had been, but no. From the amount of bruising and so on I can make a good guess that he lived another half hour, maybe a little longer, and it’s what happened in that half hour that scares the hell out of me. ”

“We know he was tortured, Dr. Weinstock,” said Ferro.

Weinstock tilted his head to one side. “Is torture the right word for it, I wonder? Torture almost seems, I don’t know, too clean a word for what happened. The perpetrator inserted something into Macchio’s two bullet wounds, possibly his own fingers, and literally tore the front of his stomach out. Then he pulled his intestines out, unraveling them like a tangled rope. Next, he…uh…bit the skin around the wound. ”

“Bit?” Terry said softly, his face paling, and suddenly he was back thirty years and something big and powerful was clawing at him, biting his shoulder…. He had to shake himself to break free of the memory and stay focused.

“Bit. Chewed. Ate! We found clear impressions of teeth marks all around the wound. He bit the fingers, actually chewing off the man’s fingertips. He bit his face, tearing off most of the nose, the lips, the eyebrows, the ears…” The doctor’s eyes were glassy. “You all saw the dismembered hands? Well, at first we thought they had been hacked off crudely, perhaps with a small knife or dull hatchet, but when we examined the edges of the bones, we discovered that the hands had been bitten off, the muscle and bone chewed clean through by very strong, very sharp teeth. ”

“Holy shit,” breathed Gus.

“We were able to lift saliva from the wounds and the lab is doing a workup on it now. There were bite marks on other parts of the body as well. Thighs, groin, neck, and, uh, so on. If you ever catch this guy I can guarantee you a perfect set of dental impressions. ”

Ferro’s face was as drawn, and he mumbled, “Uh, well, thank you for your report. ”

“There’s more,” Weinstock said quietly.

“More?”

“Yeah. From the amount of bleeding and the remaining lividity, I’ve been able to determine that somehow—and don’t ask me how—Tony Macchio was alive for almost all of this. ” They all just stared at him. “So the actual cause of death was when this sick, murderous son of a bitch reached up into Macchio’s body and literally tore his heart out of his chest. ”

The words battered them all into silence. After a while, Ferro asked quietly, “Is that even possible? To tear a man’s heart out?”

Weinstock looked at him. “If you had asked me that question this morning, I’d have laughed at you. The heart is pretty securely anchored in the chest. It has to be to do what it does. To actually rip it loose from all that internal structure…well, that’s a new one on me. Now, here’s one last little tidbit for you gentlemen. ” They tensed, almost cringing, waiting. “Whoever did this…took the heart with him. ”

4

The TV in Crow’s room didn’t work and he’d whiled away some of the interminable evening reading a seven-?month-?old copy of Good Housekeeping that a nurse had given him, it being the only thing on hand. Val was still sedated, they said, and couldn’t have visitors. There was a police guard outside his room, and that kept traffic to a crawl, but by ten o’clock he would have been ready to invite Ruger and his cronies in for a few hands of old maid just to keep from screaming. Partly it was the utter boredom—and Crow was never one of those types who could be quiet and alone and still for more t

han five minutes. He always had to have music playing, preferably very loud blues or some avante-?garde stuff, like Tom Waits’s later albums, or the punk covers of Leonard Cohen. He loathed the echoes in his head, and the memories they provoked. And partly it was a gnawing need to see Val, to hold her hand, to be there for her the instant she woke up and had to face the towering grief.

On top of all that, he believed that at that moment he would have sold his soul to the devil for a drink. Or, maybe for a whole lot of drinks. He brooded over it for a while, wondering if maybe he should call his AA sponsor tomorrow. The ache for a drink was getting stronger the longer this craziness went on.

Even with those thoughts, the flaccid writing of the article on how to make centerpieces for the Easter dinner table worked on him like a dose of codeine and he drifted off. His eyelids slid down, his chin dropped onto his chest, and he began to snore like a tired bear as the shadows outside the hospital windows grew thicker and the wheel of night turned slowly.

He felt the hand on his shoulder. Light, tentative, gentle. A ghost of a touch, and in his sleep he smiled, knowing that the touch was Val’s. Crow was way down in the darkness and he moved upward against the current of his dreams, rising toward the touch, wanting to break the surface of sleep so he could open his eyes and see her. He rose, rose…

The hand touching his arm splayed its fingers and wrapped around his biceps. Firm, strong.

Crow, still more asleep than awake, felt a pang. What was wrong? Was Val hurt?

He moved faster through his dreams, upward to where she waited.

Then the grip changed again. The fingers flexed, contracted, tightened.

Pain instantly shot through Crow’s bruised arms and he sprang awake, his eyes snapped wide, gasping and calling out: “Val!”

And he stared straight into the black reptilian eyes of Karl Ruger!

The sight of the killer wrenched Crow’s mind into disjointed shapes. It was impossible. He couldn’t be here!

Ruger’s face was as white as moonlight and he was smiling a thin-?lipped smile. Crow opened his mouth to yell, to call for the cop outside the door, but Ruger’s other hand shot out and clamped like an icy vise around Crow’s throat.