Ghost Road Blues (Pine Deep 1)

Still, he thought with false cheer, that meant Vic’s beating would be that much delayed. Cold comfort, he mused, knowing that the longer Vic had to wait the angrier he would get. And like the Incredible Hulk, the madder Vic got the harder he hit.

A few cars passed him, and each time he saw the glow of headlights he tensed…but the tow-?truck did not return and after a while Mike didn’t even bother to stop when he heard an engine or the whine of tires on the blacktop.

Mike had given up on his futile attempt of not thinking about everything that had happened to him. It was a stupid thought anyway. How can you not think about someone trying to kill you? Or about a deer that had done the things that big white one had done? So, instead of denial he decided to apply logic to the matter. It gave him something to think about other than the pain in his ribs or Vic’s impending fury. Mike was smart, he was very well read for his age, and he knew the rudiments of deduction, and as he labored up another of the long hills he tried to apply what he’d learned from Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, from Spenser and Elvis Cole. He remembered Holmes’s axiom that once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth. The problem was that he had two inexplicable mysteries to unravel, and in neither case could he simply eliminate the impossible. The thing with the big white deer made no sense at all. He twisted that into all sorts of shapes in his mind and it just stayed as weird and impossible as it had been when it happened. A big deer had jumped out of the woods by the site of the car wreck and when Mike had tried to edge past it the deer had simply chased him off. There was no other way to look at that. The deer had frickin’ growled at him. Then it had run him off. Make something of that, Sherlock, he thought. Mike lived in Pine Deep. He’d seen a zillion deer, from little fawns to big bucks, seen them by ones and twos and seen them by the dozen, but never had he seen a pure white one, and never had he heard of one chasing anyone. It was always the other way around. Sure, he’d heard stories of a buck or doe chasing off a dog that was sniffing after a fawn…but this was completely different. This was a buck chasing a person off. From the scene of a car wreck. What the hell did that mean? His inner Sherlock Holmes was at a loss for words.

Then there was the tow-?truck. That didn’t seem to make much sense either. After all, the driver of the tow-?truck had tried to run him over, had swerved and gone out of his way to do so. Try as he might, Mike just could not see it any other way, but that was ridiculous. Why would someone do that? Not even Vic had ever tried to kill him and Vic really hated him.

Suddenly an icy hand closed around Mike’s heart and he stopped pedaling for a moment. He leaned over onto one foot, motionless by the side of the road, and stared into the darkness as he reviewed what he’d just thought. Vic really hated him. That was true enough. But how much did he hate him? Vic was a mechanic and he worked for Shanahan’s Auto. Shanahan probably owned a tow-?truck. Mike swallowed a lump the size of a fist and turned back the way he’d come, looking at the stretch of road until it vanished into shadows behind him.

Had that been Vic in the tow-?truck?

The late September wind blew cold across his face, chilling his sweat to ice. Eliminate the impossible and whatever remains must be the truth.

Could that have been Vic?

“Jesus Christ…” he said, and the wind snatched at his words, pulling them from his mouth like an Inquisitor pulling teeth. Terror welled up in him, and he wasn’t sure what scared him more: the thought that Vic might want him dead, or the fact that the concept didn’t really shock him. He turned to face the road ahead. Home lay at the end of that road. Home and a belting. Still, if Vic was the driver of that tow-?truck, would that beating turn into something more? His stomach turned to greasy slush.

Mike licked his lips and got back on his bike, started to pedal slowly up the hill. His heart was hammering now and the sweat on his face turned to ice. The bike wobbled as the first wave of the shakes shuddered through him. Around him the comforting darkness—his longtime friend—seemed suddenly full of invisible threat. He looked at the rustling waves of corn that flanked the road for as far as the eye could see and had the sudden and irrational fear that they were watching him. The stalks swayed hypnotically in the breath of the storm, and when the lightning flashed overhead its white fire danced on the razor-?edged leaves of each swaying stalk. He was surrounded by an army of shadowy creatures armed with knives and panic welled up in him. His legs pumped faster on the pedals and the War Machine gained speed up the hill.

He was nearing Shandy’s Curve, one of many hairpin turns on A-32, and he slowed because there was no light to see the road and he didn’t want to go sailing off the side down onto the rocks. Shandy’s Curve was the one place Mike hated to pass, especially when there was traffic, because the thick brush on either side of the curve hid the glow of oncoming headlights until way too late. If the local legends about ghosts haunting the site of fatal car crashes were true, then the area around the curve was populated by enough specters to fill a graveyard. Mike’s own father had died there, though Mike did not know that. John Sweeney had been coming home late from his second job and drowsed at the wheel at just the wrong place. He and his battered old Malibu had gone sailing off the edge and had fallen forty feet down into the gully between the Maplewhites’ cornfield and the lower thirty of the Andersens’ garlic farm. All Mike knew of his father was that he had died in a car crash.

Yet, even without that unsavory bit of knowledge, Mike still feared the curve, and with his terror already swollen with thoughts of Vic, the hairpin turn looked like the path to hell. He slowed even more, pedaling at little better than walking speed as he entered the far side of the curve, seeing only shadows, hearing nothing but the constant growl of thunder overhead. He thought he heard something behind him and flicked a glance over his shoulder, but the road vanished into total blackness behind him. He swung his head around as he reached the beginning of the sharpest point of the curve and suddenly intense bright whiteness stabbed his eyes and the world was filled with the roar of a big engine as something hurtled around the curve at him.

The tow-?truck! Mike thought and froze…this time there was nowhere to dodge. Harsh light stabbed his eyes as gleaming metal came ripping around the curve right toward him.

5

Ruger wasn’t gone twenty minutes before Boyd began to shiver. He thought it was just the coolness of the breeze, but when he wiped his fingers absently across his forehead they came away glistening with sweat.

“Oh, shit,” he said.

As if on cue, a fresh wave of chills raced right through him, entering through his spine and seeming to wriggle up his neck and out his ears. Gooseflesh pebbled his arms. He didn’t know much about shock except that everybody always tried to loosen tight clothing and throw blankets on someone who was in shock. Was that what was happening to him? He didn’t know, but the thought scared the hell out of him. The only other thing he knew about shock was that it was dangerous. He didn’t know if it could kill, but it was supposed to be really bad for you. He loosened his belt and huddled deeper into his suit coat, which failed utterly to warm him. Boyd sat there, shivering and gradually becoming aware of the immensity of the terror that had built up inside him. He was alone out here…alone and abandoned. Ruger had left him for dead.

“Fucking bastard!” he yelled out loud. Then something caught his eye and he closed his mouth. Beside him were the knapsacks of coke and cash and he bit down on that fact. Karl couldn’t have just abandoned him. Not without the junk and the take. Karl wouldn’t double-?cross him and leave him alive as a witness. Not Karl. Not Cape May Karl, who absolutely had to skip the country or wind up twenty kinds of dead. That thought made Boyd shiver even worse. Karl didn’t know that he knew about Cape May, but Boyd kept his ear pretty close to the ground and he was nearly certain that the rumors were true. He’d always known Karl was a sick bastard, but what had happened in Cape May was right out

of a horror movie. If Boyd could have gotten to a phone before Karl had bundled him and the others into the car and headed off to the cluster fuck at the warehouse, Boyd would have made just one call and right now Karl would be screaming as Little Nicky cut pieces off him.

There hadn’t been time to make that call, and Karl absolutely had to get out of the country, and only Boyd could swing that for him. No, he thought, he’s not going to cap me.

That fact calmed him a little, but he was still afraid. Afraid of being abandoned. Afraid of what was happening in his own body. The gunshot wound to his left arm wasn’t bad, but it was probably a long way to being infected by now. Might have some bits of cloth from his sleeve in the wound. He wondered how long it took for a wounded arm to develop gangrene. It made Boyd physically sick to think about it and he nearly puked in his own lap.

He shivered again, the shudder actually making his body spasm. He felt as if his hair was standing on end, rustling and waving like the stalks of corn that stood tall and black around him.

Flutter .

The sound made Boyd jump, and he craned his head around so violently that it jolted his arm and his leg. The pain that welled up in that one instant didn’t give a fuck for the painkilling effects of cocaine; it kicked and clawed at him until he cried aloud. Blinking back tears, Boyd looked up, fully expecting to see Ruger standing there, grinning, and holding his gun out at arm’s length.

It took a lot for him to even look.

A ratty-?looking crow stood on the fence, inches from his head. It was silhouetted against the corn, just a paleness glinting on its feathers to define its shape. It cawed very softly at him, cocking its head to one side as it stared at him. Boyd looked at the bird for a long time, and then laughed a little. It was a hollow, impotent little laugh, but it was better than the scream that had wanted to come out.

“Fucking bird,” Boyd said. The crow cawed again, just as softly as before. “Nevermore,” Boyd said mockingly, “never-?fucking-?more. ”

The black eyes of the bird just watched him with the infinite patience of its kind.

Boyd felt warmth on his leg and he peered down. Fat droplets of blood hung pendulously from the slats of the splint, and as he watched, one broke loose and splashed onto the dirt.

“Oh, that’s just fucking great!” Boyd snarled. He probed the rough bandages Karl had wound around the shattered leg, and his fingers came away black with wetness. Boyd glared at his bloody fingers for a long time, seething one moment, shivering with fear and fever the next. He half turned and swung his good right arm at the crow. “See what you made me do, you worthless piece of shit!”