Bad Moon Rising (Pine Deep 3)

Jonatha stood in the doorway, her shotgun aimed and ready, the barrel moving back and forth like a viper searching for exposed flesh to bite.

Vic grabbed a young girl, a bald chemo patient, and wrapped a thick arm around her throat, laying his pistol arm on her shoulder to steady it as he backed away from Jonatha.

He squeezed off two shots; the girl screamed and the bullets hit the metal door frame and zinged off through the hallway.

Jonatha ducked back inside and everyone else dropped to the ground.

Newton took the only chance he could. If he could distract Vic, draw his attention—even if meant drawing his fire—then it would give Jonatha at least a chance.

So he took out the one solid object in his pocket and flicked it at the back of Vic’s head. It was small, just an old dime—scraped and faded, with a hole through it so that someone could wear it around their ankle on a piece of twine—

and it pinged off Vic’s skull doing no harm at all, but Vic spun that way, swinging the gun away from the girl and aiming it at Newton. There were two simultaneous blasts—one from Vic’s pistol, and his bullet punched a hole right into the wall an inch from Newton’s head, and the other was the deeper boom of Jonatha’a shotgun. The blast took Vic in the wrist and blew off half his arm.

A few of the birdshot peppered the arm of the chemo patient, and she cried out and fell, but Vic seemed painted into the moment, his body immobile, his face white with shock, his eyes bugging out at the ruin of his arm, which ended in a red tangle just below the elbow.

He opened his mouth to scream, to whimper, to say something . . . but nothing came out. Vic didn’t even seem to be registering the pain. He was frozen into a moment of total, horrified disbelief.

That gave Newton all the time he needed to pick up Weinstock’s heavy gun, steady his arm on the rail of the gurney, and aim.

“You’re Vic Wingate,” he said.

Vic’s eyes flicked to him. Tears burst from his eyes and rolled down his cheek. “I . . . I . . . please!”

“This is for Mike,” Newton said, and shot him four times in the face.

2

The Bone Man felt it happen. He felt Vic die. It sent an electric thrill through him that lifted some of the deadness from his heart. It was similar to what he had felt when Polk ate his gun, and when the vampires killed Gus Bernhardt.

He’d even felt some of it—less of it—when Eddie Oswald died.

Now, every single one of the men who had murdered him thirty years ago was dead. Since he’d come back he’d prayed for something like that, for the twisted release that came from rough justice. It made him feel more free, less tied to the blood and nerves of this goddamned town.

As he drifted down the hill behind Mike Sweeney, Val, Crow, and Vince LaMastra, the Bone Man felt even less substantial than he had since he’d risen.

I could leave now, he thought, I could go and rest. Without knowing how, or where that insight came from, he knew it was correct. His own murder was avenged, even if indi-rectly. He had saved Mike from Tow-Truck Eddie—several times in fact, whether by standing between the boy and the killer, or by whispering in the boy’s head at the right moment, or by drawing on all of his nearly exhausted reserves of energy in order to push Newton into the path of Oswald’s bullet. He’d done that; and as far as he could figure, that’s why he’d been brought back. Not to get justice, but to give justice some kind of fighting chance.

He’d tried to help Henry Guthrie’s family, but he certainly failed at that. On the other hand he’d stood between Crow and the roaches that day and

maybe that had saved his life.

Yeah, he mused, I could step out of this ball game and sleep.

With Vic dead, the Bone Man knew that all he had to do was want it bad enough and he’d be gone. Leave the living to fight the dead, even though that fight was probably lost anyway.

I could go . . . but what if I stayed?

The climbers were nearly down to the floor of the Hollow.

The end game was about to start, win or lose. It wasn’t his fight anymore. He’d already saved the town once, and died for it. Been damned for it.

This ain’t my fight no more.

Overhead, invisible against the sky, the crows were circling, circling.

The Bone Man looked at Mike, who was trying hard not to scream, trying hard not to run from this because who on earth would want to go forward and embrace that kind of heritage. And yet he kept going.

He looked at LaMastra, who had already lost a friend and who would probably be haunted by this every day of his life.