Ghost Road Blues pd-1

by Jonathan Maberry

  He crossed Wolfe Lane, glancing by reflex down the winding path to where his family had lived since Colonial times. Nearly one hundred and twenty years ago, Mordechai Wolfowitz had laid the cobbles on which the heels of Terry’s expensive Italian shoes clicked as he hurried to the chief’s office. Mordechai’s great-grandson, Aaron — the one who changed the family name to Wolfe — had planted the long line of brooding oaks that stood like dour sentinels along the south side of the street. As he stepped up on the far curb, Terry slowed his pace just a fraction, imagining as he often did that he could see his little sister, Mandy, running up the lane to meet him, her red curls bouncing as she ran, her green eyes alive with humor and mischief and laughter on her lips.

  The memory was brief, as it always was; and it hurt, as it always did.

  There were only empty shadows on Wolfe Lane, broken here and there by the glow drooping from antique lampposts and the lights of his house at the far end. Still, he could almost hear the small and gentle sound of Mandy’s laughter….

  Then the edge of the first store on the next block obscured his vision, and the display window full of the confections of AHHHH — FUDGE! filled his awareness. His frown became a brief smile and then an acknowledging murmur as the owner waved a fudge-smeared spatula at him. Terry moved on up the hill, whisking through light and shadow, heading for the chief’s office. Behind him, the now forgotten darkness at the mouth of Wolfe Lane seemed to swirl and roil, becoming vaguely thicker. Nearby, Terry’s marmalade tabby, Party Cat, crouched by the roots of the lane’s first towering oak hunkered down over a dead starling; he pawed at the broken wings playfully and bent forward to bite — and abruptly froze, eyes snapping wide, hairs springing up straight along his spine. Party Cat stared at the boiling darkness, arching his back and laying his chest low to the ground as something slowly emerged from the blackness of the shadows. The cat’s throat vibrated with a feral growl, half of defiance and half of fear.

  The shape seemed to be part of the shadows rather than merely in them, but as it moved it became defined, seeking form and structure as it stepped into the spill of pale streetlight. Party Cat hissed, baring his fangs, glaring up at the form with intense yellow eyes. The shape turned toward him, eyes meeting eyes. The cat’s wrinkled and snarling lips trembled, the intensity of the challenge ebbing, mouth becoming gradually relaxed, the furry lips sagging down over the fangs slowly and with uncertainty. The shape just stood there, green eyes watching the cat, making no move. Party Cat sniffed the air, searching for a scent, then meowed plaintively at the odor he smelled: staleness, an earthiness mixed with a sharp coppery tang.

  The figure stirred, turned away from the cat, and stepped farther out of the shadows into the lamplight. It was a small shape, not even four feet tall. The chilly wind stirred the tatters of dark green cotton that hung vaguely in dress-shape disarray on the tiny form, and the wind teased and tossed the red curls that framed the pale, pale face. Pale except where streaks of dark red cut slashes through the purity of the flesh.

  The figure watched Terry’s broad back retreating up the hill.

  After a moment, it followed.

  (3)

  Iron Mike Sweeney was the Enemy of Evil.

  It was an awesome responsibility for one his age, but it was his special secret that within that shell of a teenage human male dwelled the mind of a thousand warriors from all times and dimensions, drawn together and focused through him, through his perfectly developed muscles and sinews. He was the perfect weapon, the ultimate warrior.

  He rode through the streets of Pine Deep on the War Machine, a device of such cunning design that to mortal eyes it appeared to be nothing more than a twelve-speed Huffy mountain bike. The glittering black tubes of its frame were crammed with cutting-edge microtechnology that channeled unbelievable power through the bike and into every cell of Iron Mike’s body, filling him with raw power and healing him when he was slashed or cut or burned in his deadly duels with the Agents of Destruction. The handlebars were tightly wrapped with antiradiation insulation simulating black electrical tape, and these power bars threw up crackling energy shields through which no amount of laser fire could ever hope to penetrate. The mother-box of twelve hyperaccelerating gears was fashioned from alien technology Iron Mike had salvaged from the wreck of an old spacecraft. When Iron Mike mounted the War Machine and gripped its handles, he became as one with the machine, and his cyborg system drew energy from it, just as his mind drew knowledge from its interface with the InfinityMind uplink he wore on his belt. Disguised as a mere Sony Walkman, the InfinityMind was simply the projection into this reality of an omnidimensional supercomputer built by the same race that had made the alien spacecraft. The InfinityMind shared its limitless data with Iron Mike, the Enemy of Evil, giving him specialized knowledge that had many times saved his life.

  Iron Mike Sweeney was ready for the coming battle. He was more ready than he had ever been. His fighting skills had been refined by a thousand battles, and through the teachings of his Zen master, Shinobi, his mind was cool, detached, receptive.

  Upon the War Machine he sat at the top of Corn Hill, watching the town below him. Night had come upon the town, and Iron Mike, Enemy of Evil, was ready. Energy hummed through the War Machine’s circuitry. Across Iron Mike’s chest was the strap supporting his satchel of fusion bombs. Each was rolled tightly to compress its charge, and bound with a single unbreakable strand of a rare natural material similar in appearance to rubber bands. Iron Mike had disguised the bombs to look like copies of the Evening Standard and Times. He smiled thinly, amused at his own cleverness. None of the Evil Ones would ever suspect that they were under attack. He would ride down among them, heaving fusion bombs onto their very doorsteps, and then he would go to warp drive and soar to a minimum safe distance of one thousand kilometers before he remote-detonated the bombs. Then the whole of Corn Hill, that wretched hive of scum and villainy, would become one huge mushroom cloud of cleansing nuclear fire. Not even the minions of the Evil One could survive that. Then the rest of Pine Deep could sleep in peace for another night, the lives and souls of all the true humans protected yet again by Iron Mike Sweeney, the Enemy of Evil.

  Perched atop the hill like a huge predator bird, he looked at his transtemporal chronometer strapped to his muscular wrist.

  It was time.

  Very carefully he removed his cerebral-interface from his pocket and placed it on his head, adjusting the earpieces so that the data flow would be perfect. Then he touched the keypad of the InfinityMind uplink. Immediately coded data flowed into him. The InfinityMind was in one of its playful moods, Iron Mike noticed with a wry smile; it fed him his battle data in a kind of strange musical encryption that, to anyone else but a cyborg warrior of justice, sounded much like the Beastie Boys.

  “Let’s do it,” Iron Mike said with a cold voice. It was in fact what he always said right before battle.

  He touched an invisible button on his handle-grips, releasing the engines from station-keeping. Another button put the battle engines online. They purred like great cats. With his thumb he activated the forward shields. He never used the aft shields. He was Iron Mike Sweeney: his back would never be toward the enemy. They would always see him coming right at them, cramming justice right down their throats!

  “Let’s do it,” he said again, lips curling back into a warrior’s smile, revealing gritted teeth.

  The War Machine leaped forward, accelerating smoothly as it shot down the steep decline of Corn Hill. As he swooped down toward the first of the Evil Ones’ lairs, Iron Mike thrust a hand into his satchel and gripped the first fusion bomb.

  “Eat this, alien scum!” he snarled and threw the bomb with perfect precision. It cut through the black shadows and the miserable spray of light from the streetlight and arced over the hedges. Iron Mike knew that they weren’t really hedges but holographic projections designed to disguise the front of the alien encampment. He wasn’t fooled. The fusion bomb soared past the holograms and struck
with a ringing thud on the red-painted front portal. The bomb dropped to the ground and lay there, destruction hidden in Iron Mike’s own deceptive covering.

  The Evil Ones are going to get a lot of bad news tonight, he thought, and grinned wolfishly.

  He sped on, zeroing in on his next target. Target acquired, he delivered his next “special edition” and rode on, laughing with righteous triumph. Above and beyond the town, dark clouds loomed and the gods threw lightning to mark his way.

  Iron Mike Sweeney, the Enemy of Evil, rained destruction as he soared down Corn Hill, the warp nacelles on the War Machine channeling limitless power into every atom of the attack craft.

  The battle to save mankind had begun!

  (4)

  “Okay, gentlemen,” Terry said as he breezed into the office, “someone want to bring me up to speed?”

  A dozen men and women were scattered around, standing, sitting backward on chairs, lounging against filing cabinets; some held cups of coffee in Pine Deep Police Department plastic mugs. A dozen heads turned in his direction; eight of them he recognized, the others were strangers. Of the first batch, Gus Bernhardt dominated the place, not with any sense or aura of command, but with sheer physical size. He was approximately the size of a panel truck, as bald as an egg, and as red as a twenty-dollar lobster. Chief Bernhardt was a massive, sloppy Buddha figure in an ill-fitting gray uniform that was all decked out with whipcord and buttons and polished fittings. His accoutrements were the only neat part of him; the rest of him looked like he’d spent the night in the backseat of his patrol car, which might have been a fair guess. Terry knew that Gus was a lousy chief, but he was related to practically everyone in town and no one else really wanted the job. To be fair, the job rarely entailed anything more capital than ticketing speeders on A-32, citing overtime parking, discouraging kids from shoplifting baseball cards from the drugstore, and rousting the teenagers who went out to Dark Hollow to get drunk and screw. Terry knew that Gus spent much of his shift time eating, reading old dog-eared Louis L’Amour paperbacks, and sleeping.

  Gus’s crew of officers ranged from subpar to not bad. Jim Polk and Dixie MacVey were longtimers like Gus, career cops in a town that hadn’t much use for serious law enforcement. Shirley O’Keefe and Rhoda Thomas were law students from Pinelands State College who took part-time police coop jobs just to get some vague idea of what the whole cops and robbers thing was all about, though they had quickly discovered there were no robbers, as such, in Pine Deep, and the cops were not exactly NYPD Blue. The remaining three officers, Golub, Brayer, and Shanks, were local boys, fresh out of college, who took the job because it was a job and because they hadn’t had anything better lined up; but they were decent, intelligent, and conscientious young family men, and they worked their shifts with something approaching dedication if not actual competence. Terry nodded to a couple of them and shook Gus’s beefy mitt. The four strangers regarded him with neutral expressions, their faces registering nothing because he wasn’t in uniform and that meant that he was a civilian. The wall between the cops and the rest of the world was typically palpable.

  Gus made the introductions, waving a hand at the closest of the four, a tall, middle-aged, balding black man with a lugubrious expression wearing a dark blue nylon windbreaker with POLICE stenciled on the breast and back in crisp white letters. Terry thought that he looked like Morgan Freeman without the sense of humor.

  “Terry, this is Detective Sergeant Frank Ferro with the Philadelphia Narcotics Division. Detective, this is our mayor, Terry Wolfe.”

  The narc’s eyes registered the information and his attitude softened just a little, accepting the mayor as more or less “one of us.” He extended a thin but surprisingly strong hand and they shook.

  “A pleasure, sir. This is my partner, Detective Vince LaMastra.” A cheerful-looking and very tan young man with a buzzed head of blond hair extended his hand and gave Terry a wrestler’s handshake. He was one of those athletic types who are so superbly muscled that his tanned face looked like a leather bag full of walnuts with each angular muscle in cheek and jaw sharply defined, but the bright blue eyes and the youthful smile offset the effect. Like Ferro, he was wearing a blue windbreaker over a white shirt and dark tie. Having cast Ferro as Morgan Freeman in his mind, Terry cast LaMastra as Howie Long. Matching everyone he met to actors was a trick Terry had always used to remember people in business. It had long ago become automatic, though oddly he had never been able to figure out which actor could play him.

  Gus nodded to the other two, both wearing ordinary police uniforms. “Officer Chremos down from Crestville,” Gus said, and Terry shook hands with a Greek-looking man in his midforties in starched black and white.

  The last man stood and offered his hand before Gus could make the introduction. “Jimmy Castle.”

  “One of Black Marsh’s finest,” Gus said wryly.

  “Absolutely,” said Castle with a grin. He had sandy blond hair and freckles and an instantly engaging manner. The other Pine Deep cops just nodded and kept to the background, clearly intimidated by the big dogs from Philly.

  “Okay then,” said Terry, looking around at the faces. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, where do we stand?”

  Gus opened his mouth to speak, but Sergeant Ferro beat him to it. “If I may? Your Honor, the situation is this — we have three suspects, part of a small team that had worked out a drug buy with your generic Jamaican heavies. Nothing unusual, usually no hitches in an operation like this. A standard midvolume buy staged in an empty warehouse, happens all the time, every day of the week. These things generally don’t get messy because that interrupts the regular flow of trade. The product has to flow smoothly in order for everyone to get rich. It’s all business.”

  “Okay, I’m with you so far,” Terry said as he settled his muscular rump on the corner of Gus’s desk and listened attentively. He composed his face into a stern, slightly superior frown but raised his eyebrows to show that he was ready to hear their report. It was a tactic that worked pretty well on the town council, and seemed to work well enough with Ferro. Inside, Terry’s heart was hammering against his chest, beating out a rhythm of excitement and apprehension. He just didn’t let it show.

  The cop said, “The buy was set up in Philly, which is why Detective LaMastra and I were in on the case. Our narcotics unit is a division of East Detectives, and we sometimes work with state and federal narcotics offices to stop interstate flow of drugs. Now, since there was a shoot-out and one of our officers was killed, we would like to be actively involved in this investigation.” His eyes were hard as he said this and the room was very quiet. “I’ve asked Chief Bernhardt if he would mind if I called in some Philly blues with their units to help with the search. They’ll be here within the half hour. If…that is acceptable to you, sir.”

  Terry almost asked if Pine Deep would have to foot the bill for the overtime the Philly cops would be working, but thought the questions would be both in poor taste and poorly timed. “Of course,” he said, softening his frown to a helpful smile. “Bring in the National Guard if it’ll help. Anything that’ll clean this up and get it off my streets.”

  “Thank you, sir. Anyway, we weren’t expecting this to go down…it was pure coincidence that our team had this particular band of Jamaicans under surveillance for the last few months. I won’t bore you with all the details, but the Reader’s Digest version is this — we’ve been tracking a pipeline from the islands to Miami and from there to Philly. Coming up I-95 on what we call Cocaine Alley. They use family cars, you know, station wagons and such, driven by clean-cut regular-looking folks who pony the stuff to Philly, and then use the parking lots of strip malls just off the interstate to offload.”

  Detective LaMastra spoke up for the first time. “We were backtracking from the street and thought we could tag a couple of the ponies.” He gave a fatalistic wave of his hands. “But that’s for shit now.”

  Ferro nodded. “We had a team, just two guys in a van a block
from the site, and another officer outside with a fiber-optic camera and portable recorder. We had audio and video plants in the warehouse where the buy was going down, but we didn’t have a full team there because we weren’t expecting to make any arrests. We just wanted pictures, data, hoping to tail some of the players back to whomever they worked for, going up the food chain. So our team was unprepared for what went down.”

  Detective LaMastra snorted. “No shit.” Ferro shot him a brief look, which LaMastra appeared to ignore.

  “In any case,” Ferro continued, “the buyers were a car full of local boys. Five South Philly thugs, low-level tough guys. I had a chance to look over the videotape with a couple of other detectives and we managed to ID all five. The odd thing was that these boys are not part of the drug game. They usually do roughhouse stuff, like collections for loan sharks and that sort of thing. The drug buy was a new career venture for them, and they completely screwed it up. The buy started to go down, business as usual, but then the South Philly boys pulled some guns and suddenly everyone was shooting.”

  “You should have seen the video,” LaMastra said with a twisted smile. “Looked like a Quentin Tarantino film.”

  “Jesus,” breathed one of the law students. Terry glanced at her. At twenty-one and five feet four, she looked like a scared kid dressed up for Halloween in a cop uniform and gun belt. He wondered if she had ever even fired the heavy automatic strapped to her young hip. He wondered if any of Gus’s people ever had.

  Ferro pulled a notepad out of his pocket and consulted it. “The suspects were identified as follows. One Nicholas Scilini, thirty, and Lenny DiCavellio, twenty-eight, both dead of multiple gunshot wounds. The three that got away included Kenneth Boyd and Tony Macchio, both relatively small fish and barely worth the effort it would take to yank the switch on them.”