Ghost Road Blues (Pine Deep 1)

“Whaddya think?” he asked Mike.

“Is it real?”

“Duh!”

“Wow! Are you going to propose to her? I mean—here? In the hospital and all?”

Crow grinned. “Ever heard of distraction therapy?”

“No. But I get the idea. ”

Crow closed the box and hid it in his bedside table. “Look, Mike, there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about. ”

Mike tensed, and Crow could see it, but he gave the boy an affable smile. “Rumor has it that I’ve been shot. As a mortally wounded person I can’t be expected to manage the daily affairs of a business as critical and cutting edge as mine. I mean—if a kid needs a tube of vampire blood, how is someone in my condition supposed to get it for him? The whole industry would come crashing down. ”

Grinning, Mike said, “Can’t have that. ”

“So, as the proprietor of the town’s most prestigious boutique for the gruesome and horrific I thought it might be time to hire myself an Igor. You appear to have an appropriate hump…what do you say?”

Mike’s face beamed with happiness. “You’re offering me a job?”

“Well, if you can call hours of endless toil and drudgery for little pay and occasional scorn and derision from a heartless taskmaster a job, then yes. ”

Mike jumped to his feet, then froze, wincing and gasping. “Ouch!” he said, standing hunched over in pain, then immediately followed it with, “I’m in! Oh my God! Thanks!”

Crow held up a cautionary finger. “I will have to call you Igor, though, you understand this?”

“I believe,” said Mike, laughing, “that it’s pronounced Eye-?gor. ”

4

Mayor Terry Wolfe sat in the doctors’ lounge drinking Glenkinchie from a Dixie cup, his elbows resting on his knees, the cup held lightly in his big hands. Head low between hunched shoulders, he stared moodily at the irregularities of the wax coating on the cup, breathing through his nose and sighing every eighth or ninth breath.

He had just spent an unproductive hour in a late meeting with the town selectmen, trying to calm them, cajole them, make them believe that everything was under control, when it was quite clear that not one damn thing was under control. Somehow during the last two days, Pine Deep had sunk up to its ass in shit. That’s how he thought about it. No more silly euphemisms for it, no more Sunday school expletives like “darn” or “heck. ” Not today. Nope, not for Terry Wolfe. Not after that little elevator ride. Not after the things he’d seen last night. Not after the nurse hearing a roar coming from this very room while he was sleeping. Not after what happened to the arms of the leather chair.

Not after looking into the bathroom goddamn mirror again not five goddamn minutes ago.

Terry sipped the scotch and winced. He really loved scotch, but right now it tasted like boiled socks. On the way back to the hospital from the meeting he’d stopped in the liquor store and laid down forty-?four bucks and change for the bottle and would normally had savored every sip. Now he just dra

nk it and hoped that it would either flush out his brain or knock him blind and senseless. Either one would work. He had even held out the reasonable hope that the drug interaction between the scotch and the Xanax would do the trick, but it didn’t. He couldn’t even passively kill himself.

He had never felt so powerless in his life.

No. That wasn’t true.

Thirty years ago, almost to the day, he’d felt even more helpless, and that was a cold hard fact. That had been the day that Mandy had died and he had been nearly killed. He’d spent weeks in the hospital and even now, after cosmetic surgery and three decades, his chest and shoulder still looked like patchwork.

Thinking about that made drinking more urgent, so he swallowed the whole cup and refilled it. The bottle was down about a third and he could feel the paint peeling on the walls of his brain, but he was still way too sober and he was still alive.

He hefted the bottle and considered it, wondering how much of it he would have to drink before he succumbed to alcoholic poisoning, and then wondered if his system would rebel first and throw it up. Probably. His gut felt like an acid wash.

It was all falling apart. Everything. The cops and the feds pretended to defer to him as if he were a person of some actual importance, but he could see in their eyes that he was just a figurehead in a pissant little town where the worst and most typical crime was overtime parking, and the local idea of a crisis was rain on Sidewalk Sale Saturday. His best friend was in the hospital. The town’s most prosperous farmer was dead. The selectmen were in a panic. Every night he had those horrible dreams—dreams that were now intruding into his waking life.

And my little sister’s ghost wants me to kill myself.

He raised the refilled cup in a toast. “Here ya go, Mandy. Maybe this one will do it. ” He closed his eyes, tossed back the shot, hissed as the gasses burned his throat, and then opened his eyes again. Nope. Still alive, damn it.

Terry closed his eyes for a moment, took in a deep steadying breath, held it for a moment, and then let it out as slowly as he could. Then he took his cell phone from his coat pocket and hit speed-?dial. It rang four times before a woman answered. “Hello?”