—A. L. Sirois, Ghost Road Blues
Chapter 1
(1)
The morphine should have kept him out for hours, down there in the darkness where there was no pain, no terror. After the doctors had stitched up his mouth and lip and the nurses had inserted replacement IV needles in his hand and shot the narcotics into his blood, Malcolm Crow should have just gone into that dark nowhere where there are no memories, no dreams. But that didn’t happen.
He only slept for a few hours while Officer Jerry Head—on loan from the Philly PD and part of the combined task force that had been formed to hunt down Kenneth Boyd, Tony Macchio, and Karl Ruger—sat in a plastic visitor chair and watched.
In his dreams Crow walked through the cornfields of the Guthrie farm, looking for Val, searching for her everywhere but finding nothing. As he hunted through the dreamscape he could hear a whispering echo of music buried beneath the hiss and rustle of the moving cornstalks—faint, but definitely there. He knew it was blues because it was always blues in his dreams; he knew that if he could get closer to it, if he could find its source, then he would be able to tell the name of the song. Somehow that mattered, though he did not know why. The dreamer never questions the logic of the dream.
Crow pushed through the corn, wincing now and then as the sharp blades of the leaves nicked his face and palms. He was barefoot; his hospital gown flapped open and the cold stung his ass. The ground was hard, his feet were blistered and bleeding, but he did not stop, did not even look down. The breeze stilled and for just a second he could hear the song more clearly. Damn, he did know it, but he just couldn’t pull the name out of his head. Something about a road. Something about a prison. What the hell was it?
He turned, orienting himself, and looked back the way he’d come. Behind him the corn was smashed down and broken aside as if his passage through the field had been like a bulldozer’s. He could see the trail leading in a twisted line going back so far that it vanished into the distance. The music was stronger now and he moved off to his right, humming as he went. It was in his head, in his mouth, and then he knew it. It was an old prison blues song, something someone had taught him long ago, back when he was a kid; and this time it came to him: “Ghost Road Blues. ” A song from down South, something to do with prisoners suffering in Louisiana’s Angola prison and praying for release—even if it was the Angel of Death who unlocked their chains.
Crow stopped and listened to it, one ear hearing the song drifting along the breeze and the other listening to the song play inside his head from a long time ago. That had been on a warm early autumn afternoon on Val Guthrie’s porch, with Val sitting on the swing next to Terry and Terry’s little sister, Mandy. Crow’s brother Billy—good ol’ Boppin’ Bill—had a haunch propped on the whitewashed rail, tossing a baseball up into the air and catching it in his outfielder’s glove. Val’s dad was there—old Henry—and Henry’s wife, Bess. There were others, too—farm folks and field hands, brothers and cousins of the Guthrie clan, all of them smiling, clapping hands or snapping fingers, tapping their toes as the man with the guitar played his songs. Crow could see the guitarist so clearly: a stick-thin guy with a nappy Afro and dark eyes that sparkled with equal measures sadness and humor. Dark skin and loose clothes, skinny legs crossed with one work-booted foot jiggling in the air along with his music. A dime with a hole in it hung from a string tied around his brown ankle. Scars on his hands and face, shadows in his eyes, laugh lines around his mouth. Crow remembered the nickname he, Val, and Terry had given him because he was so skinny: the Bone Man.
On some level Crow knew that he was dreaming all of this, just as he was aware that he had dreamed of the Bone Man many times. Standing motionless now, adrift in sea of waving corn, Crow closed his eyes and listened to the gentle voice of the singer. The song was a lament for the prisoners in the infamous Red Hat House at Angola Prison in Louisiana who were imprisoned more for their skin color than for any real crime; they were beaten and humiliated by the guards, tortured, degraded—yet enduring. Then at the end of their days in that hellish place they stood tall and proud as they strolled that last mile to where Ol’ Sparky waited—knowing the other prisoners loved them for it and the guards hated that they could never truly break their spirits.
The song ended and the last mournful notes were sewn like silver threads through the freshening breeze, leaving Crow feeling lost and abandoned out there in the field. He opened his eyes and looked around. It was darker now, the sun hidden behind storm clouds as long fingers of cold shadow reached from the mountains in the north across the fields toward him. He clutched the inadequate hospital johnnie around himself, trying to conserve its meager warmth.
“Are you there?” he said aloud, and he wasn’t sure if he was calling for Val or for the Bone Man. As if in answer the corn behind him rustled and Crow spun toward it, his heart suddenly hammering. The Bone Man pushed aside the dry stalks like a performer parting the curtains to come onstage. He had his old guitar slung across his back, the slender neck hanging down behind his right hip. His skin was no longer dark brown but had faded to an ashy gray, and his eyes had a milky film over them, making him look dead.
“I heard you playing…” Crow said, his voice as dry as the Bone Man’s eyes. The Bone Man opened his mouth and said something, but there was no sound at all, not even a whisper. He smiled ruefully and gave Crow an expectant look, obviously waiting for an answer. “I…can’t understand you,” Crow said. “I mean…I can’t hear you. ”
The Bone Man licked dry lips with a gray tongue and tried again. Still no sound at all, but Crow could at least read the man’s lips well enough to make out two words. Little Scarecrow. He understood that. Little Scarecrow was what he had once been called, years ago—a nickname given him by a man he’d given a nickname to in turn. Tit for tat. The Bone Man and Little Scarecrow. What he was called when he was nine.
Thunder rumbled far away to the northeast, and they both turned to look. There was a flash of lightning beyond the fields, over past the lover’s lane by the drop-off that led down to Dark Hollow. Crow saw the Bone Man nod, apparently to himself, and when the gray man turned his milky eyes were filled with a fear so sharp that it bordered on panic.
“I knew someone who lived down there once,” said Crow, and he was amazed to hear that his own voice had changed. It was the voice of a child. Maybe nine or ten. “There was a bad man who lived down there a long time ago. ”
Narrowing his eyes, the Bone Man peered at him. Apparently he, too, heard the change in Crow’s voice. Little Scarecrow’s voice.
“He killed my brother, you know. He killed Billy and ate him all up. ”
Now even Crow’s body had changed. He was nine years old, wearing pajamas and holding a tattered stuffed monkey. The Bone Man towered over him and little Crow—Little Scarecrow—looked up at him. “He ate Billy all up. He did it to my best friend’s sister, too. He made her all dead and ate her up. He does that, he…eats people all up. ”
A tear broke from the dust-dry eye of the Bone Man and cut a path down his cheek.
“The bad man wanted to eat me all up, too…and he was gonna, but you stopped him! You came and stopped him and he went running off. ” Little Scarecrow shuffled his feet and hugged his monkey tight to his chest. “Val’s dad said that you killed that man. Did you? Did you kill the bad man?”
The Bone Man opened his mouth, tried to say something, but the thunder boomed overhead and both he and the boy jumped. Red lightning veined the clouds, souring the breeze with the stink of ozone. The storm was centered over the drop-off to Dark Hollow, but it was coming their way fast with thunder like an artillery barrage. Without thinking he reached out and took the Bone Man’s hand. It was dry and cold, but it was firm, and after staring down at the boy in apparent shock for a long minute, the gray man returned a reassuring squeeze. Little Scarecrow looked up at him—and deep within the morphine dreams the adult Crow felt the surreal quality of the moment as he saw a dead man through his own youthful eyes. It was like watching a movie and being a part of it at the same time.
Officer Jerry Head looked up from his copy of Maxim as Crow shifted uneasily, twisting the sheets around his legs. “Bad dreams,” he murmured, then grunted. “No surprise there. ” He went back to the article he was reading. Outside the window, in a totally cloudless sky, there was a flicker of distant lightning that Head did not consciously notice, but as he read his right hand drifted down and he absently began running his thumbnail over the rubber ridges of his holstered pistol’s grip.
In the cornfield, Little Scarecrow and the Bone Man stood hand in hand, watching the storm; it was a big, angry thing—flecked with red and hot yellow and sizzling white, lumped with purple and black. A cold wind came hard out of the northeast, heavy with moisture and smelling of decay. Above them a cloud of black night birds flapped and cawed their way toward the southwest, racing to outrun the storm, but the lightning licked out and incinerated three of the birds. They fell, smoking and shapeless, into the corn.
Tugging the Bone Man’s hand, Little Scarecrow looked up at him, puzzled and frightened. “I thought you killed the bad man. That’s what Val’s dad said…that you killed the bad man. ”
There was a final terrible explosion of thunder and a burst of lightning so bright that it stabbed into Little Scarecrow’s eyes like spikes and he spun away, clamping his hands over his face—
—and woke up with a cry of real pain and genuine terror.
“Griswold!” he screamed as he woke and then there was a big dark shape looming over him and hands on his shoulders. Crow was blind with sleep and morphine and he tried to see, tried to fight, but the hands were too strong.
“Whoa, man,” said the voice of the man standing over him. “You’re gonna pop your stitches you keep that shit up. ”
Abruptly Crow stopped fighting, blinking his eyes clear to see the big cop standing there. Broad-shouldered with a shaved head and an easy grin. It took Crow a second to fish his name out of the dark. “Jerry…?”