Dead Man's Song (Pine Deep 2)

Vic’s pickup truck was dark blue and in the shadows cast by the east wing of the hospital it was invisible, snugged back as it was between the two massive air-conditioner fan units. The engine was idling quietly but the lights were off. Vic had picked up a pack of Tiparillos and had one of the cheap cigars, unlit, between his teeth. His tongue constantly flicked the open end of the plastic stem as he watched the part of the parking lot that he could see from where he had parked. The east wing was mostly labs, the morgue, maintenance, and storage. There were two truck bays for deliveries, closed and locked now. There was a wire fence with two gates, one for entry, the other for exits. The entry gate was closed and locked. The exit gate was still open and there was a single vehicle parked just inside of it. Hospital security staff in their little putt-putt golf cart. Two men in it. Denny Sturges and Al Antowiak. Vic knew them both. Couple of mouth-breathers who would never amount to anything more than night shift at the ass end of a hospital. Both of them wore guns, but Vic was sure neither had ever fired them, and if they ever tried they’d probably blow each other’s dicks off. He smiled. Beyond the fence a Pine Deep police unit shot by, lights flashing but no siren. Vic didn’t give it much thought. The whole bunch of them—local cops as well as the crews from other towns that had come in like gunslingers to help with the manhunt—were chasing their own asses. They’d never find Boyd, Vic was sure of that, and his smile thinned, went colder.

Behind him, in the bed of the truck, there was a soft, heavy sound as something turned over. He glanced in the utter blackness of the rearview and saw nothing but could imagine the heavy tarp tenting as something shifted under it. Impatient asshole, Vic thought. Well, that’s okay. He pressed a stem on his watch and the time glowed in green LED digits: 10:58. If Polk’s intel was correct, then the Two Stooges over there in the golf cart would lock up the parking lot in two minutes. After that they’d drive by once every half hour and check that the locks on both gates were still engaged. Half an hour was plenty of time. Vic figured it would take maybe half that ti

me. Plenty of room for error.

He waited out the two minutes patiently. At the stroke of eleven the guards drove their cart outside the gate and Sturges hopped out, looped the chain through the poles, hung the big Yale in the links, clicked it, and climbed back into the cart. By 11:02 they were gone. Vic nodded, appreciating efficiency and good timing, even in wetbrains like those two. As soon as the golf cart vanished around the corner, he jerked open the door of his truck—no light came on, he’d taped the button down—got out and walked to the tailgate.

“Rise and shine, cupcake,” he said, tapping the metal rim of the truck bed softly. By the time he’d lowered the tailgate, the thing under the tarp had crawled down from its nest behind the cab. Vic grabbed a corner of the tarp and whipped it back as Kenneth Boyd lumbered down off the bed, eyes glaring rat-red in the darkness. “Jeez, you stink!” Vic said, wincing and waving a hand in front of him. He pulled a small plastic tub of Vicks VapoRub from his pocket, unscrewed the cap, and daubed a little under his nose.

Boyd wrinkled his nose at the smell. Maggots wriggled in the deep cuts on his face and three layers of dried blood were caked around his mouth. He was as tall as Vic, and heavier, and could have ripped Vic’s arm right out of his body, but when Vic took a single step toward him, Boyd recoiled. When Vic had returned the Vicks to his pocket with one hand he’d drawn his Luger with the other. He pointed it at Boyd’s head. Boyd’s eyes were feral and wary. Vic saw that Boyd recognized the danger in that gun, and nodded.

“I guess you really are getting smarter in your old age, Boyd ol’buddy, ’cause you’re not giving me any of that snarl and hiss shit. Good, because now is not the time for me to be getting into a pissing contest with Night of the Living Dead, you dig? The Man’s been in my head just like I’m sure he’s been in your head—such as it is—and you know what we got to do. Clock’s running, so get to it. ”

He lowered his pistol and stepped to the door that was set into the wall between the compressors. It should have been locked and it should have been attached to an alarm, but the knob turned without protest and the door opened with no sound at all except a faint creak of hinges.

“C’mon, boy,” Vic said. “Fetch!”

With only a hungry growl Boyd shambled past him into the bowels of the hospital. Vic glanced at his watch, then settled back against the cold hospital wall to watch the gate.

(4)

“So, what does that mean?” demanded Willard Fowler Newton. “How exactly am I overdoing it? This morning I was your ace reporter. Now I’m a leper?”

Dick Hangood chewed his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other, and continued to stare silently at Newton. Noxious blue fumes from the cigar polluted the room, giving it a London fog appearance. “Newt, I don’t know how to answer that question exactly,” he said, “because it seems no matter what I say about that damned article of yours, you do a rewrite on it, add about ten column inches of editorial, and try to sell it back to me…and it’s really starting to piss me off. ”

“Oh?”

“Do you want to know why?” Hangood tapped an inch of ash into a ceramic tray. “I’ll tell you. You see, the way it works around here is that I am the editor and you are the reporter. With me so far? Good. My job, in case you never had a chance to review the office handbook, is to decide which reporter should be assigned to which story, and then make some informed decisions on what they should write about those stories. Still with me?”

“Well, I—”

“As editor, I have the additional responsibility of reading each and every story that crosses my desk and making decisions on the correctness of the grammar, the completeness of the information, and…”

“Yes, but—”

“And…to decide if anything should be added or cut. ” Hangood puffed blue smoke at him. “So if, just for the sake of argument, one of my reporters hands me an article that I think may be…shall we say…too biased, or too incendiary, or perhaps even a little unfair in certain regards, it is my job—my job, you understand—to either rewrite the piece, or ask the reporter to rewrite it. That’s clear enough, isn’t it?”

“Sure, but I—”

“However, there is another aspect to my job, one that I don’t always relish, but one that I am bound by both because of my job description and my obligations to the publisher—who, need I remind you, owns this paper—and that sometimes requires me to order either a total rewrite of the piece, reassign it to another reporter, or, in the case of this particular article, shit-can it. ” With that he picked up Newton’s article on the deception and political games playing in Pine Deep and dropped it with great precision into his wire-mesh wastebasket.

“You can’t!” Newton cried, leaping to his feet.

“Ah, but I just explained that I, indeed, can. ”

“You…you…”

Hangood held up a warning finger. “Watch your adjectives, sonny-boy. What you say now can affect your next paycheck, meaning that it will affect whether you will be getting one. ”

Newton clamped his mouth shut but tried to telepathically project the long string of astonishingly descriptive vulgarisms that tingled like pins and needles on his tongue. Hangood smiled benignly around the stump of his cigar, then raised his hand again and stabbed the air with a thick finger, indicating Newton’s vacant chair. “Sit!”

Newton sagged back into the chair, his lungs emptying the unspent words as a long sigh of defeat.

“Good. Now listen to me. ” Hangood leaned forward and rested his hairy elbows on the desk. “You are the golden boy of the moment, and I am fully aware of that. You’ve just given the Sentinel the biggest story we’ve ever had, and the sales have gone through the roof. The publisher and I are happy with you, and I think you’ll see an expression of our pleasure come payday. But that, as the saying goes, is yesterday’s news. Today you are sitting on the fence between continuing to be the golden boy and getting your ass bumped down to writing about dog shows and town fairs. ”

“What’s going on, Dick? That article is—”

“Is what? Libelous? Incendiary? Needlessly provocative?”