Ghost Road Blues pd-1

by Jonathan Maberry

  “What’d you do?” Polk sneered. “Cut yourself shaving?”

  “Holy shit,” murmured Stosh, who had apparently not noticed it until now.

  The Bone Man shook his head. “No, man, this is bullshit. I—”

  “Is it your blood?” asked Tow-Truck Eddie. He had a soft, deep voice. In other circumstances it would have sounded kind.

  “No, but—”

  “Then whose blood is it?” Bernhardt asked.

  Overhead, there was thunder. The Bone Man looked from face to face and then licked his dry lips. “Look…you gotta believe me….”

  “What is it you want us to believe?” the big man asked, his voice still mild.

  “It’s about the killer…I found out who it was been cutting those people up.” He licked his lips again. “I figured it out.”

  “You figured it out,” Bernhardt said. “You? A corn-picking nigger migrant worker figured it out when the whole police department hasn’t been able to find a single fucking clue?” He laughed. “Yeah, I’m ready to believe that shit.”

  Vic stepped closer, his fists balled at his sides and his eyes suddenly intense. In a tight whisper he said, “And just who do you think it is?”

  The Bone Man started to say Ubel Griswold. It got as far as his tongue, his lips had just started to form the first sound when Vic hit him with such shocking speed and force that the Bone Man flew backward against Tow-Truck Eddie’s chest. It was like hitting a brick wall.

  “Fuck you!” screamed Vic. “Whose blood is on your shirt? What the hell did you do?” He was screaming, totally out of control, as if someone had jabbed him with a hot wire. He stepped into the Bone Man and struck him again, and again.

  “Is that the piece of shit killed my boy?” Crow yelled, his expression of cruel delight giving way to real rage. “Give him to me, Vic…” But Vic was raining down blows on the Bone Man with an insane ferocity.

  “Stop!” the Bone Man screamed back, his mouth filling with blood. “Jesus, please make him stop!” He tried to cover his face with both arms the way a boxer does, tried to turn and twist to roll with blows, but even flipped out with rage, Vic Wingate was a good fighter. He used short hooks to claw the Bone Man’s arms away and fired straight jabs and crosses to the chest and face and throat. Vic’s hands were iron hammers and under the rain of blows the Bone Man could feel his face break and split.

  Tow-Truck Eddie wrapped his arms around the Bone Man and spun him away from Vic. The other men, shocked by Vic’s sudden rage, felt their own anger dampening down. They milled, confused and embarrassed. Vic threw one more punch and it just bounced off Eddie’s huge shoulder.

  The Bone Man felt his legs buckle, but he didn’t fall. Tow-Truck Eddie took bunched handfuls of the front of his shirt and held him up. He leaned in close, his pale eyes burning with a weird light.

  “Mr. Morse,” he said softly — so softly that only he, the Bone Man, and Vic could hear him. The Bone Man’s head lolled on a loose neck and sunbursts were exploding in his eyes. His ears rang like church bells. “Mr. Morse, tell me what you did tonight. Tell me whose blood this is.”

  The Bone Man stared through the fireworks and tried to focus on the big man’s kind eyes. He looked deep into those eyes, searching for hope, or maybe an ally. “Don’t hurt me,” he whispered and was immediately ashamed of his cowardice. An hour ago he’d chased a monster down and killed him, and now he was pleading for his life from a group of Pennsylvania rednecks.

  “Tell me, Mr. Morse.”

  “Damn it, Eddie, let me have him!” Vic snarled and tried to reach around the big man. Eddie turned again, blocking Vic’s reach with his broad back. He pushed the Bone Man up against the side of Vic’s pickup truck and leaned his face close.

  “Tell me and I’ll stop all of this, Mr. Morse,” whispered Eddie.

  The Bone Man thought he saw some kindly lights in the big man’s eyes. He turned his head and spat blood onto the gravel and then through a tight throat said, “It was Griswold.”

  The big man’s face didn’t change.

  “What’d he say?” shouted Bernhardt and Crow together.

  “It was Ubel Griswold!” the Bone Man said, his voice a faint babble of desperation and pain. “It was him, man, swear to God. That farmer who owns the beef ranch down on the other side of the hollow.” The Bone Man licked his pulped lips. “He’s the one been killing all them kids.”

  His voice was only a whisper, and only Tow-Truck Eddie heard it. He stared into the Bone Man’s eyes for a long time, his face thoughtful. Hope soared in the Bone Man’s chest. Then the big man shook his head.

  “No,” he said.

  “Wh…what?”

  “I said no. That isn’t possible. Mr. Griswold goes to my church. He’s a righteous man. He believes in God.” His eyes searched the broken landscape of the Bone Man’s face. “I’ve never seen you at church, Mr. Morse. Tell me…what is it that you believe in?”

  “Please…”

  “Satan is the Father of Lies.” Tow-Truck Eddie’s eyes were as pale as ice, and looking into them the Bone Man saw that in thinking that salvation lay in the big man’s hands he had been terribly wrong. Eddie’s face almost looked sad as he said, “Vic’s right, it must be you did all those things.”

  “But I—”

  “You’re the devil, Mr. Morse, you are the Beast,” he whispered. “God have mercy on you.”

  Tow-Truck Eddie hit him. He let go with his right hand, drew it back just eight inches, and punched the Bone Man in the face, turning into the punch with all the massive power of muscle and speed and torque.

  The blow exploded in the Bone Man’s brain and everything went white as a big bell broke in his mind. His limbs turned to jelly and Eddie let him fall. The Bone Man collapsed onto the gravel by the side of the truck. He flopped there, dazed, unable to speak. His nose was broken, and so was his jaw. The punch had herniated three disks in his neck and upper back, and his throat was filling with blood.

  Tow-Truck Eddie turned to Vic and the others. Vic was the closest one and their eyes met and held.

  Vic licked his lips in much the same way as the Bone Man had. “Eddie…what did he say?”

  Their eyes held for a long time. Finally Tow-Truck Eddie’s softened and he gave Vic a sad smile. “Only lies, Vic. All he had to say were the devil’s own lies.”

  There was a strange flush of relief in Vic’s eyes and he took a second to set his features before he turned to the others. He looked at Jimmy Crow.

  “Jimmy,” he said, pitching his voice to sound grave, “I hate to tell you this, man, but…he’s the one killed your Billy. He just told me.”

  Eddie flicked a glance at Vic and almost said something, but then closed his mouth and stepped away. The eyes of every other man fell on the Bone Man. Eyes that had been confused a minute ago now hardened with purpose. They stared at the bleeding man for nearly fifteen seconds in silence, and then there was the cold rasp as Gus Bernhardt slid the hickory baton from its metal ring.

  As Tow-Truck Eddie stepped out of their way, they suddenly rushed past him. After that, it was just a matter of doing the killing.

  (5)

  No one ever took either blame or credit for the murder of Oren Morse. His body was found tied to a scarecrow post at the crossroads of A-32 and Dark Hollow Road with a piece of paper stuffed in his shirt pocket that had the names of the sixteen people who had been killed that autumn. It was the end of the Black Harvest of 1976, and nearly everyone accepted the fiction that the Bone Man had been the killer. After all, who was he? A migrant farm worker who had told more than one person that he had been dodging the law since he’d dodged the draft in 1970. That made him a criminal already, and few of the farmers saw it as a far leap from being un-American enough to flee from his responsibilities to the war effort to being a killer. Logical progression of thought didn’t seem to enter into it.

  The body of Ubel Griswold, a farmer and landowner who had settled in Pine Deep eight years before, was never
found and was generally believed to have been the last victim of the Reaper, the lurid nickname given to the mass-murderer by one of the local papers.

  Henry Guthrie — who owned the farm on whose outermost corner the grisly scarecrow was placed, and who had employed Morse as a migrant field worker — took the body down. He was one of the few who did not believe that Oren Morse was the Reaper. Guthrie kept it to himself, though. He had lost a cousin during the massacre, but he didn’t believe for a moment that Morse had done the killings.

  He and his brother, George, took the body to the old Presbyterian cemetery out by the canal bridge and buried it. The church had burned down forty years ago and no new Presbyterians had moved in to care for the graveyard. No one would know or care if there was a new grave there. The Guthrie brothers didn’t tell anyone about it, though; nor would the two children who stood by the brothers during the unbeneficed service. Guthrie’s ten-year-old daughter, Val, and her best friend, Malcolm Crow. Malcolm’s brother, Billy, had been one of the first townies killed, and though the boy would never know it, his father, Jimmy Crow, had helped stomp Morse to death. Malcolm, of everyone in town, knew for sure that the Reaper hadn’t been the bluesman, but his voice had been silenced forever. Weeks later, Morse — or “the Bone Man” as the kids had called him because he was so skinny — had saved Malcolm’s life in an incident that had revealed to just those two who the real killer had been.

  The kids had loved the Bone Man. They’d worked alongside him in the fields, had learned about the blues from him, and had begged Guthrie to let them go with him to the lonely funeral, promising to keep the secret always.

  There had been a lot of evenings during that long summer and longer autumn when the Bone Man had sat on the porch steps and played acoustic blues to keep back the night and the night terrors. The young man had told tall tales of the road, and of unlikely meetings with legendary bluesmen such as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Guthrie hadn’t known or cared if the stories were true, but the music he played was beautiful and sad and somehow it helped everyone get through the worst season they’d ever had. The Black Harvest, which had started out with a vicious crop blight that had turned half the crops into bug-infested garbage, and then with the series of brutal murders. Somehow the blues and the magic of that guitar were a charm against evil. Now the man was dead and God only knew where his guitar was.

  Guthrie bought a stone in another town and set it on the grave, and he read a prayer over the young man’s grave, and then he left and never returned. Years later Malcolm Crow would try to find that grave, but he never could remember just where it was.

  The blight ended but the sky turned dark and bruised and they had months of heavy rains.

  The next year’s harvest was normal and the corn was tall and green and the blight was lifted. In time the Reaper faded from everyday conversation; though when the stories were told about it over the following years, the name of “Bone Man” came to replace that of “Reaper,” and all of the evil was ascribed to him.

  Down in Dark Hollow, the devil’s bones lay in the earth like seeds of hate, waiting for another year’s harvest.

  Part I

  Down at the Crossroads

  I went to the crossroads, fell down on my knees I went to the crossroads, fell down on my knees Asked the Lord above, have mercy now, save poor Bob if you please.

  Robert Johnson, “Crossroads Blues”

  Out there at the crossroads, molding the Devil’s bullets.

  Tom Waits and William Burroughs, “Crossroads”

  Demons they are on my trail I’m standing at the crossroads of the hell I look to the left I look to the right There’re hands that grab me on every side.

  Tracy Chapman, “Crossroads”

  Chapter 1

  Modern Day

  (1)

  Malcolm Crow pretended to be asleep because that was the only way he could get to see Val naked. He kept his breathing regular and his eyes shut until she got out of bed and headed into the bathroom. Then he opened his eyes just a fraction, until he could see her standing there at the sink, as naked and uninhibited as could be. If she knew he was watching she’d have put on a T-shirt or robe.

  It drove him bonkers. She had no problem with nudity when they made love at night, where the shadows hid her — though she underestimated his night vision, which was excellent — but if they made love during the day, even here in her room, she always wore something, even if it was a camisole.

  Crow couldn’t understand it. At forty Val was gorgeous, tall, tanned and toned from the daily rigors of farm life, even farm life from the point of view of the farm manager. She was strong and slim, with lovely breasts only lightly touched by the gravity of early middle age. Her belly was flat, her thighs, though not thin like a runway model’s, were slender and deceptively muscular. Her ass was, according to Crow’s intense lifelong study of these particular aesthetics, perfect. She had black hair that was just long enough for a bobbed ponytail, which she usually shoved through the back of a John Deere ball cap. Her pubic thatch was trimmed into a heart — a Valentine gift from earlier that year that Crow had begged her to maintain even though he only got glimpses of it in the dark. The only thing she was currently wearing was a small silver cross on a delicate chain.

  There was nothing about Val Guthrie that wasn’t perfect, an assessment he reaffirmed as he watched her brushing her teeth, the motion of her arms making her breasts bounce a little and which in turn made Crow’s pulse quicken. He felt himself growing erect under the heaped quilts and hoped that he wouldn’t be pitching a visible tent, should she look.

  Crow knew that Val was self-conscious about her scars, no matter how much Crow tried to convince her that, in the first place who cared? and in the second, he thought they were kind of sexy. Fifteen years ago Val had wrecked three motorcycles in as many years, each time taking some dents. She had a four-inch scar across her stomach, a few minor ones on knees and elbows, and a whole bunch of jagged little ones dotting the curved landscape of her left shoulder, left breast, and the upper ribs. Those scars were linked by a few patches of healed burns. The third and last crash had been bad and Val had given up on Harleys and moved on to the relative safety of four metal walls and a roof in the form of a Dodge Viper.

  Val finished brushing, rinsed, spat, and then washed her face and hands in the basin. Crow was fully erect now and wished she would come back to bed so he could contrive to wake up out of an erotic dream of her, or something along those lines. He knew he had to wait until she was back in bed before he affected to awaken.

  She switched off the bathroom light and paused there in the doorway, checking to see if Crow was still asleep before coming back into the room. Crow did some of his best acting during the next few moments as she assessed, decided the coast was clear, and quickly crossed the broad stretch of hardwood floor to the giant king-sized bed. With smooth and practiced efficiency she slipped under the covers, turned her back, and nestled back against him until her rump encountered his thighs.

  And then stopped as she felt something other than the flaccid thigh muscles of a sleeping person.

  Crow held his breath, waiting for her to tell him to go take a cold shower or, worse, to just ignore it and go back to sleep herself.

  Without turning toward him Val said in a low voice, “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” It was supposed to be à la Mae West but it sounded more like Minnie Pearl.

  Crow pretended to wake up, but Val elbowed him lightly in the ribs.

  “You’re a lousy actor, Crow.”

  “Damn it, Jim, I’m a lover, not an actor.” He was convinced he sounded exactly like Dr. McCoy. He was equally mistaken.

  Smiling, Val rolled over toward him and kissed him. Chastely. On the forehead. “You were spying, weren’t you?”

  “Who?” he said. “Me?”

  She reached down under the blankets and closed her hand around him. “This is an official lie detector.”

 
“Yikes…what’d you do, wash in cold water?”

  “Aha! You were watching, you complete sneak!” She was smiling. Her eyes were a brilliant dark blue, darker now under the overhang of the covers. Behind the curtain windows dawn was brightening to a golden intensity and there were late-season birds singing. Crow could hear the rustle of the cornstalks in the fields beyond the window, and it sounded like waves rolling up onto the beach.

  Val’s hand was still there.

  “You caught me, Sheriff!” he confessed. “I throw myself on the mercy of the court.”

  Val’s smile changed from sleepy to devilish. “Sorry, pal, but no mercy for the condemned in this court.” And she hooked a warm leg over him and climbed on top. Even then she had the presence of mind to pull a sheet up around her left shoulder.

  “If you don’t come down for breakfast in the next minute I’m feeding this to the cows!” The voice boomed up from two flights below just as Crow was lacing up his sneakers. Val was still in the shower.

  “Your dad’s calling,” he yelled in through the now closed bathroom door. “Again.”

  “You go. I’ve got to dry my hair.”

  “Love you, baby!”

  “Love you, too!”

  Grinning, Crow headed out of the bedroom and jogged down the stairs, humming Lightin’ Hopkins’s “Black Ghost Blues.” The song had been in his head for days now and he meant to see if he could download it off the Net later on.

  Malcolm Crow was a compact man, only an inch taller than Val’s five-seven and built slim without being skinny. He had the springy step of a kid half his age, and when he played basketball he was up and down the court so fast he just wore out the bigger and better players. His black hair was as smooth and black as his namesake’s, and it gave him a Native American look that was at odds with his Scottish ancestry. Crow had a lot of white teeth and he smiled easily and often, as he was now as he bounded into the vast kitchen of the Guthrie house.