Crow looked at her and saw the truth of it in her eyes. Not shock, not delusion. He stood up and walked over to where Boyd lay, ignoring Dixie McVey, who was writing in his notebook. Crow squatted down and counted the bullet holes. Fifteen of them from Henry’s old .45. But it was worse than that, worse than even Val knew, and sometime soon he’d have to tell her. As Crow knelt there, using a Bic pen to lift the folds of Boyd’s clothing, he saw other bullet holes. Old ones. Nine of them. In belly and groin and chest. Nearly healed over. Nine shots. The number of bullets that had been fired from Jimmy Castle’s pistol. Nine. Nine and then Val’s fifteen, the last of which had been head shots. Twenty-four shots all told. It was, of course, impossible.
He looked at Boyd’s mouth, the jaw hung loose, twisted askew, the lips slack over the teeth. With hands that were starting to shake with a palsy of rising terror, Crow reached out and pushed back Boyd’s upper lip, looking at evidence of what he did not want to find; but the bullet had done too much damage and what was left of the teeth revealed no dark secrets. Crow got to his feet feeling no relief.
He turned and walked slowly back to Val and waved away the paramedic who was trying to usher her into the back of an ambulance. The paramedic must have seen something in his face; he held up his hands, palms out, and retreated to his vehicle.
Crow took Val in his arms, careful with her.
She leaned into him. “He was dead,” she said again.
He nodded. “I know.”
(2)
When they heard the shooting and saw Crow’s car pull into the driveway, Vic started his truck and he and Ruger drove without headlights down the farm access road all the way to the river, then Vic turned his lights on and headed first north then west until they had circled above the town proper. Most of the way they didn’t say anything.
Vic’s cell phone rang when they were just north of town. It was Jim Polk. Vic put it on speakerphone. “All hell’s breaking loose at the Guthrie place. Is that your stuff?” he asked.
Vic had to take a breath before he answered. All he said was, “Boyd.”
“Yeah, well that reporter from Black Marsh called in that Boyd was dead.”
Vic and Ruger exchanged a look. “What do you mean ‘dead’?” Vic said.
“I mean dead, what do you think I mean? I was the one that took the call,” said Polk. “Mark Guthrie’s dead, too, and someone else, some guy works at the farm.”
“What about Val Guthrie?” Vic asked hopefully. “She dead, too?”
“Not as far as I know.” He told Vic everything Newton had said. “What the hell happened out there?”
“None of your business.”
“There’s one more thing, Vic. We got a report that Terry Wolfe tried to kill himself.”
“What?” Vic yelled.
“Yeah. Threw himself out of a window…he’s in critical condition. They’re not sure if he’ll make it. Vic…what the hell’s happening?”
“I’ll get back to you. Keep me posted.” He hung up, slammed the cell phone down hard on the seat, and then punched the dashboard. “Shit!”
“Let me get this straight,” Ruger said in his whispery voice, “that bitch killed Boyd? How the hell did she manage that? I thought you said no one would know how to kill us. I mean…it’s not like that stake-through-the-heart shit actually works. So what happened?”
They stopped at a light and Vic pushed in the dashboard lighter and fished in his pocket for a cigarette. “I don’t know!”
“Oh, that’s just peachy. You got this great big master plan, you got wheels spinning within wheels, you own dozens of key people, and you can’t kill one woman?”
Vic stabbed the air in front of Ruger’s nose with his forefinger. “You can shove that up your ass, sport, because this was your plan, not mine. I should have just dragged her ass down to the swamp and fed her to the Man. But no, you gotta be some criminal mastermind and screw with their heads. This is your fault.”
Ruger turned away and looked out at the darkness. “This should have worked. With anyone else…it would have worked.” He turned back to Vic. “There’s something else going on here.”
The lighter popped and Vic pulled it, held it to his cigarette and the glow of it painted his face a hellish red. “Listen to me, sport,” he said. “These two are standing in the way of the Red Wave, and now they know that something hinky is going on around here.” He leaned close. “We can’t have that.”
“No, we can’t.”
“If Boyd’s really dead, then we have to get his body before they can do an autopsy. Let’s call that Priority One. I mean, if we have to burn down the shitting hospital, then that’s what we do. Accidents happen.”
“We can work something out,” Ruger said. “There are a lot of us now.”
“The thing is…Crow and that reporter were at the house. They were in the Hollow. How or why the Man couldn’t stop them I don’t know, but they were there, they got away, and they have a story to tell. Plus, that Guthrie bitch saw Boyd—she had to see what he was. All of them now know more than they should. Shutting them up or shutting them down is Priority Two. Problem is…with Wolfe out of action we can’t actually kill the son of a bitch anymore. Damn it.”
“Then we’re screwed.”
Vic sat in silence while the light turned yellow and then red again. A smile grew on Vic’s face like the slow spread of a disease. “Maybe not,” he said softly.
The light turned green again and Vic drove them both back home.
(3)
Crow’s cell rang while the paramedics were examining Val. He saw that it was Saul Weinstock and flipped it open. “Saul—thank God it’s you. I guess you heard…”
“I know, it’s horrible,” Weinstock said, sounding ragged. “I just can’t believe I didn’t see this coming.”
Crow hesitated. “What do you mean? How could you have foreseen something like this?”
“Well, come on, Crow,” Weinstock said, “we’ve all been watching him come apart for weeks now and—”
“Saul—what the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Terry. What are you talking about?”
Crow told him.
“Holy shit!” Weinstock yelled. “My God. I didn’t know—I’ve been in the ER for the last hour working on Terry.”
“Terry? What the hell happened to him?”
“Crow…about ninety minutes ago Terry Wolfe threw himself out of his bedroom window. I’ve got a team of residents picking glass out of him, and he has forty broken bones, including a skull fracture.”
Crow took a wandering sideways step and sat down hard on the fender of his car. He looked wildly across the driveway to where Val was being tended to, and over at the bodies that crime scene investigators were examining. And at the thing that Val had shot fifteen times. Then he looked up at Newton, and all of that hit him, too.
“Crow? Crow—are you there?”
“Y-yeah, Saul…it’s just all…it’s too much.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“Believe me—I think I do.”
“Believe me,” Weinstock insisted, “I think you don’t. We have to talk.”
“Not now, Saul…Val…I—”
“No, not now—but soon, Crow, as soon as we can. I need to talk to someone about what’s happening around here. I was going to tell you tomorrow morning. Crow, I’ve never been this scared before in my life!”
“I have,” Crow said hoarsely. “But not recently.”
“Crow—Pine Deep’s in real trouble,” Weinstock said softly.
“Yeah,” Crow agreed. “I think so, too.” Crow cleared his throat. “Look, they’re getting ready to bring Val in. I’m going with her. I’ll…see you at the ER.”
“Okay,” Weinstock said, and hung up.
Crow tried to walk calmly, normally, over to Val, but every third or fourth step he staggered, just a little. The paramedic was reaching down to help her up, but Crow gently pushed him to one sid
e. “I got it,” he said and drew Val to her feet and then pulled her close, wrapping his arms around her. “Let’s go.”
There was a look of hurt and panic in her eyes. “Mark—”
But Crow shook his head. “Sweetie, they’ll take care of him. We can’t do anything here, and Connie’s going to need us at the hospital when she wakes up.”
She searched his face with her one good eye; the other was once again wrapped in gauze. “What’s happening, Crow? Everything’s gone crazy.” Tears ran down her face and he bent and kissed her forehead, her cheek, and then her mouth, and as he did so a sob broke in his chest. They clung together, both of them crying as the paramedic fidgeted nearby looking greatly embarrassed.
Epilogue
(1)
Midnight. Little Halloween was over. The night around the hospital was immense, painting the windows a featureless black. Crow sat in the guest chair of what would become Val’s hospital room once she was finished in the ER. Crow had seen Weinstock for only a few seconds. Not enough time to talk as Weinstock ran alongside the gurney team that was wheeling José into surgery. Crow knew that he wouldn’t see him at all, probably not until tomorrow.
Newton came in and sat in the other chair, and they sat there in silence for five minutes, watching the black night beyond the glass. Finally, Crow said, “You file your story?”
Newton shot him a cautious glance. “Yeah. You mad?”
“I should be, but—screw it. It’s your job.” He made a face. “After all…this is news.”
Newton cleared his throat. “Crow…I only called in the basic stuff. The shootings. Val’s brother and the guys who work for her. I—left out some stuff.”
Crow digested that. “The Hollow?”
“Yeah.”
“Just that?” Newton was quiet for so long Crow turned to look at him. “Newt?”
“Crow—I saw that man’s body. I was looking over your shoulder. I saw what you saw.”
“And what did I see?”
A pause. “I saw something that can’t be real.”
Crow drew a breath, let it out, said nothing.
Newton said, “I heard what Val told you, too. I heard her tell you how many times she shot him. I read the police reports on Castle, too, and I know that he fired off nine shots. Crow—you found every single one of those bullet holes. Every one. I was there, I saw you. I saw them.”
“Okay.”
“No—no, it’s not okay. We both know it’s not frigging okay.” Newton looked at Crow. “And I know what you’re thinking.”
Crow gave him a crooked smile. “What is it that I’m thinking, Newt?”
“You’re thinking that Boyd was like him. That somehow, impossibly somehow, Boyd was like him. Like Griswold.” Crow was silent. “That somehow Boyd was a—” Newton stopped and turned away, unable to say the word.
So, Crow said it for him. “That somehow Boyd was a werewolf?”
“Yes. Jesus—this is impossible. I can’t wrap my head around it.”
“You’re wrong, Newt.”
The reporter swiveled around to stare at him. “What?”
“I said that you’re wrong. I don’t think that Boyd was a werewolf. That’s not at all what I think.”
“But—the gunshots. He—”
“What I think, Newt,” Crow said, his eyes reflecting the great dark nothingness beyond the window, “is that Kenneth Boyd was a vampire.”
To that, Newton had nothing to say.
“I think Ruger was, too. I don’t know how, I don’t know why. I just know what I saw.” And Crow told him everything. The attack in the hospital, Ruger’s eyes, his unnatural strength. Newton kept shaking his head throughout, but it wasn’t that he thought Crow was wrong. He just did not want to believe it.
They sat there in silence for a long time, oblivious to the hospital sounds close at hand or the traffic sounds outside. Newton sniffed, wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “We’re all going to die,” he asked, “aren’t we?”
Crow had no answer for him. None at all.
(2)
He sat on the rooftop, legs folded Indian fashion, old guitar laid across his bony knees, singing blues to the night. The wind had turned cold and fierce and it blew around him and through him. On that gale he could hear the voice of the creature in the swamp. The wind was filled with his rage.
The Bone Man smiled. He felt great sadness that Henry’s boy had died, but he also felt great pride that Henry’s daughter, Val, had stood up and stood tall. Henry would be proud of her. She’d done what no one—certainly not him, and probably not Griswold—had thought anyone could do with just an ordinary gun. She’d brought down one of them. One of his soldiers. Griswold’s fury filled the air around him, and it tasted just fine to the Bone Man.
He strummed his guitar. So much pain downstairs. So many folks hurting and dying. So many folks changing, in good ways and bad. So much death.
Yet it wasn’t all dark, not even up here in the wind, and he ran his fingers over the strings, picking out a tune. Val had taken her stand, and now for the first time in thirty years the thing down there in the wormy dark was not so sure, not so cocksure by a long mile, and that was good. Now there was a little more hope mixed in with all that hate and rage on the wind. Not much, maybe, not enough almost for sure, but some—and for tonight that was going to have to do.
He slipped his bottleneck out of his coat pocket and fitted it over the forefinger of his left hand, sliding the smooth glass down the strings as he plucked a note and then another. Downstairs they were doing their trying and their dying, their sewing and their praying. The Bone Man was no sage, he didn’t know who was going to make it through this night, or who was going to make it through till the coming of Griswold’s Red Wave. He didn’t know if anyone would be able to take another stand, like Val did tonight. Maybe Crow would, but that was something the Bone Man would have to see. Crow…and maybe Mike. He played some notes, finding his way into a song. The old one that he used to play on Henry’s porch. The one about prisoners walking that last mile to Old Sparky down in Louisiana. The one he played on that long ago summer. “Ghost Road Blues.” He played it and then he started to sing the words in a voice no one could hear.
As the wind shrieked its fury around him, the dead man sang his song.
EXCERPT FROM
BAD MOON RISING
(1)
The Bone Man was as thin as a whisper; he was a scarecrow from a blighted field. He stood on the edge of the hospital roof, toes jutting out over the gutter, his pant legs fluttering against the stick slimness of his legs. His coat flaps snapped vigorously but silently around his emaciated hips. The only sound the wind made as it whipped by him and through him was a faint plaintive whine as it caressed the silvery strings of the guitar slung behind his back.
Far below the parking lot faded back from the glow of the emergency room doors, spreading out in a big half circle that had been cut acres-deep into the surrounding sea of pines. Even this late there were dozens of cars down there, dusted with moonlight but asleep. All around the town there was a ring of black clouds that were invisible against the night, but above the Bone Man the stars flickered and glimmered by the thousand.
For three hours he had sat cross-legged on the roof, playing his songs, humming and sometimes singing, coaxing the sad blues out of the ghost of an old guitar that Charley Patton had once used to play “Mississippi BoWeavil Blues” at a church picnic in Bentonia, Mississippi. Another time the Bone Man’s father, old Virgil Morse, had used that guitar to play backup on a couple of Sun Records sides by Mose Vinson. The guitar had history. It had life, even though it was no more real than he was. A ghost of a guitar in a dead man’s hands, playing music almost no one could hear.
He’d sat there and played and listened to the whispers and cries and moans from inside the hospital; hearing the beep of the machine that breathed for Connie Guthrie. Hearing the sewing-circle whisper of needles and thread as the doctors sewed stitches in Terry Wolfe�
�s skin, and the faint grinding sound as they set his bones. He heard the whimper of hopelessness from the throat of José Ramos as the doctors stood by his bed and explained to his mother that his back was broken; and then the scream as the enormity of that drove a knife into his mother’s heart. He heard the dreadful terror as Doctor Weinstock murmured, “Dear God,” over and over again as he knelt alone in the bathroom of his office, hands on either side of the toilet bowl, his face streaked with tears and his lips wet with vomit.
He heard all of these things while he played, and then he heard the hospital slowly fall quiet as drugs or shock or alcohol took each of them into their private pits of darkness. That’s when the Bone Man had stopped playing and rose to stand on the edge of the roof, staring across blacktop and car hoods and trees at the moon.
It was an ugly quarter moon, stained yellow-red like bruised flesh, and its sickle tip seemed to slash at the treetops. The sky above the trees was thick with agitated night birds that flapped and cawed, hectoring him like Romans at the Circus.
(2)
“Where are you now?”
Jim Polk cupped his hand around his cell and pitched his voice to a whisper. “At the hospital, like you said. Back loading dock.”
“Anyone see you?”
“Jesus, Vic, you think I’m that stupid?”
Vic’s voice tightened a notch. “Did anyone see you?”
“No, okay? No one saw me.”
“You’re sure?”
Polk almost mouthed off again, but caught himself. A half beat later he said, “I’m sure.”
“Then open the door. We’re here.”
The hallway was still dark and empty. He’d already disabled the alarms and the video cameras, permanently this time per Vic’s instructions. He pocketed his cell and fished for his keys, his fingers shaking badly. His nerves were shot and getting worse every time Vic asked him to do something like this. There was no letup, always some other shit to do, always something that was tightening the noose around his neck. The McDonald’s fish in his stomach felt like it was congealing.
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