Ghost Road Blues (Pine Deep 1)

“Then we try to patch him up. ”

“You said he broke his leg?” Guthrie asked.

Ruger laughed. “Oh yeah. Stepped in a hole and broke the living shit out of it. He has one of those…whaddya call it when the bones are sticking out?”

“Compound fracture,” murmured Val.

“Uh-?huh. A real motherfucker of a compound fracture. I set it, more or less, and splinted it up, but he needs someone else to check it out. I don’t suppose any of you are doctors?”

“I know some first aid,” said Val.

“Well, well. That’s handy. ”

“Just some basic stuff, though. ”

“Well, beggars can’t be choosers. ”

Mark held up a finger and in his formal, pedantic voice said, “Let me get this straight. If we help you, that is, if we bring your friend back here, patch him up as best we can, and let you take the car, then you’ll just go away and not hurt us? Is that it?”

“In a nutshell. ”

“How do we know that we can trust you?”

“I guess you just have to,” Ruger said, and then he smiled his serpent’s smile, white teeth gleaming, eyes twinkling like cold and distant stars. “Besides, why would I lie?”

4

“Hey, what’s that?”

Officer Rhoda Thomas slowed the cruiser and rolled to a stop. She flicked on the searchlight and directed it where Officer Head was pointing. The black stretch of A-32 glowed a dark charcoal in the harsh white light, and the yellow lane divider gleamed, but cutting right through the dividing line and across the road itself were long black smears, intensely black even in the light’s glow. “Just skid marks,” observed Rhoda. “Nothing. ”

“No, wait, they look pretty fresh. ”

“So?”

“So, let’s check ’em out. ” Head jerked the door handle and stepped out. Puzzled and reluctant, Rhoda followed suit. They walked over to where the skid marks began and stood looking at the road. With a totally reflexive action, Head unsnapped his pistol and jiggled the butt to loosen it in its leather holster. Rhoda watched, copied the movement though it was the first time she had ever performed that particular ritual, but she didn’t want to appear as raw as she knew she was. She was fascinated by him. She thought he looked like Samuel L. Jackson with more muscles and a shaved head.

They were an incongruous pair: the petite Rhoda in her pale gray chief’s department uniform with the six-?pointed star gleaming as brightly as all her buttons and fittings; and Head, older, bigger, heavier, though not at all fat, in his blue Philadelphia Police Department rig, numbered shield on his breast and all of his equipment showing signs of eleven long years of hard use on big-?city streets. Rhoda looked like an extra in a cheap movie, and Head looked unpretentiously real. He had hard eyes that had seen it all, a harder mouth that was drawn tight, and the posture of a predator. Beside him, Rhoda looked like a child. It wasn’t a sex thing: Head’s partner, Maddie, was as serious and seasoned a cop as he was, and she was buddied up with Officer Jim Polk farther up A-32. No, this was a reality check for Rhoda, and she knew it.

“These are from tonight,” he said, squatting down and running his fingertips along the smear of burned rubber. “Take a look. They veer right off the road. ” He clicked on his own long-?handled flash and swept the beam along the path of the skid marks. “See? Right there, they leave the road and go off into the field. ” He moved to the very edge of the verge and shone his light into the corn. The light showed them the smashed-?down corridor of stalks. “Bingo. ”

Rhoda came up behind him. “You think they had an accident?”

“Be nice if it was that easy,” he said, then smiled thinly and added, “Be really nice if they totaled the car and themselves. ”

“You think that’s likely?”

His smile became a grin and he shook his head. “Nah. Accident, maybe, but if they wrecked their ride, then they probably hightailed their asses out of here hours ago. ” He stood and rubbed the skid mark with the toe of his shoe. “Could have been a blowout, who knows?” He turned and shone the light up and down the road, reading the scene. “Looks like a big car traveling in one hell of a hurry went off the road here and right into that field. ”

She lo

oked from the tracks to his face and then into the cornfield. The flash struck small splinters off chrome and glass way back in the field. “Oh, shit. ”

“Yeah,” he agreed and drew his sidearm, laying his gun arm across the wrist of the hand holding the flash so that the beam and the barrel tracked together.

“You think they’re still in the car?” Rhoda whispered.

“I doubt it. ” He listened to the night. Distant rumbling thunder, the caw of a night bird, traffic on the highway miles away. Head sucked his teeth.