“Hush,” she snapped, and he did hush. She tapped Weinstock’s chest with a stiff forefinger. “Tomorrow I’m moving back home. To my home. I can only do that, though, if I can safely carry and use a gun.”
“Val, I don’t think—”
“Yes or no, Saul?”
He folded his arms and sat back in his chair, glanced over at Crow, who held both hands up, palms out, and sighed. To Val he said, “Okay, here’s the situation and you do with it as you please. Can you fire a gun without doing further damage to your shoulder? My answer—probably. A pistol, small caliber. Shotgun—out of the question. No big-caliber pistols, either. A .25 or even a .22.”
“Sissy guns,” she said, flicking her hand dismissively.
“.22’s are the weapon of choice of your professional hitman,” Crow observed sagely, but they ignored him.
“Now,” she said, “if I were to use a heavier caliber, say Dad’s old .45, what would be the downside?”
“Well, two things…first, you might have trouble lifting it. The shoulder isn’t bad, but it’s not one hundred percent…and the recoil from something that heavy could—and probably would—exacerbate the injury to the rotator, in which case you’re looking at a far more invasive and extensive surgery.”
Val got up and walked across the room to the far window, and though her face was set and stern, she did trail her fingers lightly across Crow’s shoulders as she passed him. She chewed her lip for a minute, looking out at the leaves blowing around in the backyard, pushed by the early evening breeze. Without turning, she said, “I’ll risk it.”
(3)
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 time. 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, o
wns 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?”
“Isn’t that what we’re all about? Trying to expose the corrup—”
“No, it isn’t. What do you think this is? The Washington Post? We’re a small-town newspaper and that means we live and die on advertising dollars. The advertisers in small towns are almost exclusively local businesspeople, and in small towns the local businesspeople make up the entire body of local political power. Capiche? Not to mention the fact that our town, our sweet little burg of Black Marsh, can’t even sustain us—we get eighty percent of our advertising from Pine Deep. Now, do you really think it is prudent to run an article that attacks, even condemns, the mayor of Pine Deep, as well as the police department and the whole town in general? Especially when said mayor is being quoted and sound-bited by every media on God’s green Earth? Personally, I do not think that’s such a keen idea, Newt. I think that is one of the stupidest ideas I’ve heard in a long time.”
“But it’s the truth!”
“So what? Since when did the truth matter in journalism? We write slanted and biased drivel so we can sell papers.”
“We have a respon—”
“Oh, please! What are you, a Boy Scout? You working on your Walter Cronkite merit badge?” Hangood sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Newt, you are actually a pretty good reporter, better than the average hack working for our little rag, but you’re only good when you stay the hell away from politics. You start writing about politics and suddenly you’re Oliver Stone writing a movie script. Conspiracies, hidden meanings, secret arrangements, black ops, and shadow governments. Christ, Newton, has anyone ever told you that you live in a small town? The extent of corruption around here is that the more taxes you pay the less you have to worry about parking tickets. This is not D.C., this is not Philly or New York. This is Small Town, USA. In Small Town, USA, we do not try to sell papers by smashing down local government and—no, don’t you dare try to give me your patented speech about the truth and the public’s right to know! The public around here wants to know which antique dealer is having a sale on Shaker furniture and what the Corn Growers Commission is planning to do about the newest tax bill. Forget politics, Newton, you don’t have the disposition for it, and I say that for your own good. I know you like to write about politics, and sometimes you are even right in what you say, but you get too worked up about it.”
“This story is the natural extension of the feature on Ruger.”
“I know it is, but it is injurious to the financial welfare of both Pine Deep and Black Marsh. That is a fact, and don’t bother trying to make an argument for truth over money, because the publisher cares a lot more about how well this paper sells than what it says. Sad, maybe, but true, and he does sign our paychecks.” Newton made a rude sound. He knew Hangood owned half of the paper himself. “Anyway,” Hangood continued, “that article you wrote yesterday was a dandy, and it was quoted all across the country. You are the first writer on the Sentinel to have a piece picked up, word for word, by all the major wire services.”
“So, doesn’t that give me leverage to—”
“No, it doesn’t, but it does give you some consideration. The article you wrote about the corruption in Pine Deep is dead, gone, never existed. It’s not even a rumor in this office. Accept that or resign.” Hangood waited, puffing blue clouds. Newton said nothing, his silence providing his grudging answer. “Okay. We’re done with that. Let’s start clean on the next issue.”
“Pray, what is that?” There was enough frost in Newton’s voice to lower the temperature of the room several degrees.
“I am going to offer you a very plum assignment. I talked it over with the publisher, and we’ve decided to assign you to writing a feature.”
“Oh no! No you don’t! Not another Daffodil Festival piece—”
“Shush! I am talking about a major feature, not some puff piece. A front-page feature with as many interior pages as you can fill.”
“On what?” Newton asked bitterly. “The secrets of how to make corn dollies?”
“Actually, no. I want you to write an extensive feature on the haunted history of Pine Deep and surrounding towns.” Newton stared at him, not believing what he was hearing. “Hear me out, Newton, hear me out. You’ve only lived here for about eight years, so you probably don’t know much about the history of the area.”
“Who cares about the history of the area?”
Hangood’s flat stare silenced him. “If you would like to try and be a reporter for a moment, I’ll explain. Good. Now, Pine Deep is the oldest town around here, much older than Black Marsh, Crestville, or any of the other burgs. It was settled way back in the Puritan days. Since it was settled there have been a series of weird and unexplainable events that have earned the town its reputation for being Spooksville, USA. Now, you may think that’s just boring stuff, and normally you would be right, but I have a little fact that just might whet your appetite.”
“Pray tell.”
“I’ll bet you didn’t know that there was another series of brutal murders in Pine Deep, long before this one. The reports differ, but the general consensus is that there were seventeen or eighteen savage murders in and around Pine Deep.”
“The Pine Deep Massacre, The Reaper Murders, the Black Harvest, whatever—I know this stuff already, Dick, the other papers have already played that card. Big deal. That was, what, thirty years ago?”
Hangood smiled. “There’s more.”
“More?”
“Oh yeah. Vigilantes, hidden bodies…that sort of thing. They even have a legend about the killer from those days.”
“A legend?”
“Yeah. He’s become the local bogeyman in Pine Deep. They use his name to scare little kids.”
“The Bone Man!” Newton cried. “You’re talking about the Bone Man. That’s the other name they use for the Reaper.”
“The Bone Man indeed. He was blamed for the murders and somehow accidentally got himself beaten to death. Some folks say his ghost still haunts the back roads of town, looking for the men who killed him. Some folks say that he was wrongly accused and is looking for the real killer, and can’t rest until he finds him. Some say he was the Pine Deep Reaper. Lots of local legends, real juicy stuff. I’m thinking of getting Grace McCormick to illustrate
it. She’s the one does all those spooky calendars. My publisher wants me to try and sell it to Parade.”
“Parade?” Newton asked. A sale to the color Sunday supplement was huge.
Seeing that Newton was swimming around the lure, Hangood jerked the line to set the hook. “Here’s the kicker…among the families involved in that original massacre were the Guthries, the Wolfes, and the Crows.”
Newton could only stare, though his mouth kept forming words that had no sound.
Hangood knocked more ash off his cigar, smiling blandly. “Interested?”
(5)
He opened his eyes in the darkness, unsure for a moment where he was. It was cold and the darkness was total, without the slightest trace of light. There was no sound, either. He could have been adrift in the farthest reaches of space, or at the very bottom of the ocean. It took him a moment to realize where he was, and then another moment to realize that he had been asleep and dreaming. It surprised him. He didn’t know he could sleep. Or dream. Somehow the thought that he could reassured him, made him feel stronger.
He lay there, reviewing his dreams, trying to remember the pieces and assemble them into something coherent, but the harder he tried, the more elusive the fragments became until they were all gone, leaving him with just the awareness of the cold and the dark.
Then there was a sound. It was the first he had heard in hours. Or was it days? A muffled sound, like a footfall, but then it was followed by a scraping sound. It came again. A muffled thud and then a scrape. Thud and scrape. Rhythmic, orderly, and getting gradually louder. Not very loud, but louder, or perhaps closer. Or, he wondered, was it that he was hearing it more clearly because he was trying to.
Thud…scrape. Thud…scrape.
Then silence. He lay there and tried to hold his breath, then realized that he was not breathing at all. He didn’t do that anymore. Did not need to. He smiled, liking that.
Silence.
Suddenly his world was filled with light and noise. The light was muddy and indistinct, but it was there and he stared at it, wondering why it was so unfocused and just as he grasped why the light changed as the rubber sheet that covered him was pulled down and then he felt movement as the table he lay on rumbled out into brightness over welloiled rollers. He blinked once, twice, then his eyes focused, adapting unnaturally fast from utter darkness to the harshness of fluorescents. He looked up and the first thing he saw were the banks of lights on the ceiling, and the second thing he saw was the face of the man who had pulled him out of darkness.
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