Ghost Road Blues pd-1

by Jonathan Maberry

  “And the third? You said there were three?”

  Gus Bernhardt looked uneasily at Terry and then at Ferro, and the cop’s dour face looked even more mournful and even more like Morgan Freeman’s. The grimmer Morgan Freeman, circa Seven, not the older, jollier Freeman from Bruce Almighty. “The third gunman is the real problem, Mayor Wolfe. He is one of the reasons we are going to be handling this situation very, very carefully.”

  Terry grinned. “Who is he? Jack the Ripper?”

  No one laughed; no one else so much as smiled.

  “We should be so lucky,” said Ferro.

  “What does that mean?” Terry asked, losing his grin. He didn’t like the shifty, scared looks everyone was covertly exchanging, and it wasn’t helping his stress level one little bit. The hammering in his chest was turning into an improvisational drum solo. He hoped he wasn’t visibly sweating.

  “His name,” continued Ferro, “is Karl Andermann Ruger.” He looked significantly at Terry, but he only shrugged and shook his head.

  Gus bent over and said, softly, “Cape May Lighthouse. Last Summer.”

  Terry stared at him and slowly, very slowly he felt the room turn as cold as a meat locker.

  Everyone in the room looked either stricken, or scared.

  “That’s who we think Karl Ruger is,” said Ferro quietly.

  “Oh my God,” Terry whispered.

  (5)

  Val left the soup on the stove to simmer and went up to her room to take a nap. For the last two weeks she’d been extremely tired. Not just from managing the farm — she had plenty of help for that — but just plain exhausted. And then there was this morning. After Crow had gone downstairs to have breakfast, Val had thrown up.

  It was the second time this week she’d done that and she was starting to worry. There was an EPT kit in her purse, but she hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to use it. She was on the pill, and she and Crow even used condoms. Surely she couldn’t be pregnant with that much birth control running interference.

  She took off her jeans and shirt and slid into bed in bra, panties, and socks, pulling the big comforter up to her chin. Val lay there and listened to the wind stir the corn. A storm was coming and the wind had freshened and the illusion of sea surf that the blowing corn made was even more pronounced. The steady rhythm of it lulled her to sleep within minutes.

  Her sleep was filled with dreams.

  The first dream was sweet and did nothing more than replay what had happened last night when Crow came by. Every delicious detail was there, starting with the long walk they’d taken down the winding lanes of cornstalks, hand in hand, stopping now and then to kiss. About a mile from the house, deep in the fields, they’d stopped at their favorite spot, a small clearing by the rail fence where Val and her brother, Mark, had erected a scarecrow when they were kids. The clearing was the spot where Val and Crow had first kissed, and the spot where they’d first touched each other with trembling and uninitiated hands. Crow had brought a blanket, draping it over one shoulder, and last night, as he had on so many nights over the years, he’d spread it on the ground. Above them the stars painted them with pale silver light as they kissed and undressed each other and then lay down on the blanket. Some nights were slow and tender and patient, and some nights were all about urgency. Last night it was a hammering need in their blood and they dropped their clothes rather than hang them on the fence rails. Crow lay down and pulled her down onto him. She stretched out on him, nearly his match in height and certainly his match in heat and need. Their kisses were hot and breathless and there was no time for words. She reached down to find him hard and familiar and she took him and guided him into her body and they both gasped as he entered and found her very wet and ready.

  A few minutes later she cried out as she came — a sound echoed strangely by a startled crow deep in the field — and then a few minutes after her he cried out as he rose to that crest where there is nowhere to go but over, and over he went, sailing into the golden intensity of his orgasm, and Val caught up and she came again.

  After that it had been time for tenderness and softness and slow kisses and the dream faded out like a love scene in a movie, dimming to black and then silence, and for a while she just floated in the darkness of sleep.

  Then she had the dream again.

  The other one, the one she had been having for weeks now. In her dreams the pale man was always there. Val had dreamed about him for years, but now he was always there, waiting at the edge of sleep. Sometimes this dream was just a collection of quick flash images like unexpected lightning between longer and less frightening dreams; sometimes the dream was longer and complex, and when it was one of those kinds of dreams she felt panic because she didn’t think she would ever find her way out. On nights like that, waking up was like a reprieve from the electric chair.

  Now, as evening settled over the farm, she had one of those darker and more complex dreams and its intensity washed away the happiness and tenderness of the previous dream.

  First she dreamed of the tall man with black hair and pale skin and no features at all that she could make out, as if his face were a blur, as if someone had tried to take his picture and he’d turned away too fast, but as he moved through her dreams his face remained smeared like that. The only part of his face that she could see clearly was his mouth.

  He had a red, smiling mouth and lots of jagged white teeth.

  In that first dream she walked through the darkened rooms and hallways of her family’s big, rambling farmhouse. She was not fleeing through the rooms — not at first — but there was some indefinable sense of urgency. Every once in a while she’d look behind her and she’d see the tall pale man step back out of sight.

  Then suddenly the dream changed and she was running through the cornfields as cold rain hammered down on her. She was naked and streaked with blood and mud and icy rainwater. In one hand she held a sodden fistful of twenty-dollar bills wrapped in bank tape. In her other hand she held a gun. The gun stank of cordite, the barrel still smoking.

  She ran through the fields, vulnerable, helpless, and afraid. And the tall pale man followed her.

  It was like one of those chase scenes in the old horror movies: she ran fast and ran well and the pale man walked with slow deliberate steps as if in time with a metronome, but somehow he still managed to keep up with her…and whenever she cast a terrified look over her shoulder he seemed to be catching up.

  She ran and ran.

  Once she stopped, spun around, and fired the gun at the man, squeezing the trigger and feeling the shock as the bullet exploded from the gun and her gun hand was jerked into the air. The bullets all hit the pale man.

  She might as well have been throwing stones at a statue for all the good they did. The pale smiling man never slowed and he never stopped, and each time a bullet struck him — and passed straight through — his smile grew. It grew and grew until it was an alligator’s smile, huge and full of sharp teeth. The smiling mouth was absurd and too big for the rest of the face.

  He came on through the rain and Val turned and ran on.

  The smiling man kept walking but he got closer and closer and closer, and just as he was reaching out to close his bone-white fingers around her naked shoulder…

  …Val woke up.

  She shuddered and shook her head and crawled up until the knobs of her spine were pressed against the wooden headboard. Her face and throat and breasts were wet with sweat and for just a moment the sweat smelled like rainwater.

  Chapter 6

  (1)

  “ Boyd!”

  The cry clawed its way out of the car and fled away across the tops of the corn. A few crows stirred and flapped uneasily, casting lifeless black eyes suspiciously around. They sat on the crossbar of a scarecrow perch, but there was no scarecrow here, just the faded old wood of the perch. The birds waited, listening.

  There was silence, except for the swaying of the corn.

  “Oh…Jesus…” A whisper now: pale an
d bloodless, too weak to even rustle the feathers of the crows.

  Silence again. Longer this time. The birds fidgeted.

  Then a new sound. A creak and then a mild protest of metal. The birds hopped and turned to look. The broken car squatted below them, half buried in toppled stalks of corn. The crumpled metal skin of the car looked like cloth thrown over a pile of rocks; there was no moon and no starlight to give it a metallic sheen. The car simply hunched there on its crippled wheel, abandoned and desolate.

  The crows waited. They were hungry crows. They knew.

  With ancient black eyes they watched as the door of the car was pushed slowly, heavily open. Its hinges squealed with piglike protest, but the door finally opened.

  There was more of the expectant silence again. Nearly ten minutes passed before there were any further movements from within the car. The crows rustled their feathers and tried not to think about their empty bellies. One crow opened its beak as if to utter a loud cry, but closed it again without making a sound.

  It was a hand that first appeared. Dark with blood, it reached out of the car and hooked trembling fingers over the frame. The fingers slipped on the smooth metal, but finally the tips caught in the depression of the rain gutter above the door. The hand curled, tensed, tried to be strong. Tendons stood taut on the back of the hand and in the wrist, the forearm muscles swelled with effort as the bloody hand tried to haul its body out of the car. It was a problem in physics, and it should have be an insoluble one; the arm should never have been able to collect enough strength to pull the body from its seat, there wasn’t enough blood or life in its veins to carry strength to its muscles. Even adrenaline should not have been enough to allow that engineering feat to come to fruition. But as the crows watched, Tony Macchio pulled himself slowly, carefully, and painfully out of the car.

  The nearest crow squawked very quietly as if ironically cheering the performance. The other crows watched with more evident annoyance. Death was sometimes too slow, slowest when the belly was empty.

  It took Tony all of five minutes to get himself into a reasonably upright position, but then he sagged into the V formed by the car and the open door. His legs refused to be part of this mad venture and simply buckled, but his arms spread and he hung in bleeding cruciform on the apex of the doorway. He coughed once, sharply, and then again more softly. His ruined nose was swollen and purple. Blood dottled his lips and dripped onto his chest, but each drop was lost against the immensity of the stain that drenched him from sternum to crotch. The two bullet holes in his gut leaked sluggishly, the flow diminishing from a simple lack of hydrostatic pressure. He was bled white and should by all accounts have been dead, but even though his body was dying it lingered at the point of death and life, sustained by a single thread. That thread was the wire of hatred sewn through Tony’s soul.

  His bloody lips formed a single word.

  “Karl!” He said it without sound, but it had all the force of a curse screamed at the top of furious lungs. Just saying the name funneled power into his dying muscles. It wasn’t a lot of power, but it was a cold and determined power. It made his legs assume the abandoned duty of supporting him, and with slow deliberation he pushed himself away from the door and stood. More or less. He had to grab the edge of the roof to keep from falling face-forward into the dirt. He couldn’t let that happen, he knew. If he fell, he would die. If he could stand, he could find Ruger. If he could find him, then he could kill the evil son of a bitch.

  That was the plan and he reviewed it in his jumbled mind. It seemed like a good plan, it seemed like the only plan he would ever need. Simple, direct, and very satisfying. Find Karl Ruger and cut out his black heart. Maybe shoot his way up and down the man, like the Sicilians used to do: put one in each foot, then in each ankle, then through the knees, and keep working up. Firing his gun dry and reloading, making sure not to hit any arteries, keeping Ruger alive for a long time and making it last until Karl was begging and crying for one right through the brain. No…maybe Tony wouldn’t finish him off at all. Maybe he would just sit there and watch Ruger bleed, maybe have a race, just the two of them, to see which one died first. At that moment, despite the sea of blood that he had lost, Tony believed that he could outlast Ruger. It didn’t matter a damned bit if he died a single second later. That was fine. He’d chase Ruger all the way down to hell.

  Rotten bastard!

  Tony inched his way along the side of the car toward the trunk. He needed something to use as a bandage, something to keep the last little drops of blood within him until he could find Ruger. Maybe there was a towel or something in the trunk. Even a greasy one would be fine; Tony didn’t much care about infection. He knew he was going to die, but just needed to stay alive a little while longer. Just a little while longer.

  His feet stumbled clumsily over the clots of dirt thrown by the car’s violent entry into the field, but he didn’t fall. Once or twice he staggered, but both times his hands had managed to find purchase on the car and pull him back to balance.

  The trunk was open, and when Tony finally crept far enough along the side of the car to look inside, he could see that the big bags of coke and cash were gone. Well, what did he expect? Of course they would be gone. That’s why Ruger had shot him: to take his cut. Boyd must have been in on it, too.

  Tony ground his teeth even as he felt tears well up in his eyes. Boyd was supposed to have been his friend, and yet he hadn’t done a fucking thing to stop Ruger. He just went along with it.

  Well, Tony thought bitterly, we’ll just have to settle his hash, too. Yes, sir, settle Boyd’s fucking hash. Right along with Ruger’s. Shoot them both. Or maybe play Spartacus and give them knives and hold them at gunpoint while he made them fight it out. Fight to the death. That would be a real pisser. Fucking Spartacus. Thumbs down, fellows, thumbs-fucking-down.

  He leaned on the edge of the trunk and peered in. The trunk light glimmered faintly off the metal edge of a jack handle, a can of Fix-a-Flat, the barrel of a shotgun, and…

  …the edge of a twenty-dollar bill.

  Tony grinned. The edge of the bill stuck out from under the cloth cover usually draped over the spare. Tony reached in and pulled away the cover. His grin widened.

  Ruger had missed some.

  Eight packs of twenties lay in a sprawl. Each pack was banded with paper and initialed by whoever had counted it. Each pack was badly stained with blood, but it was all good money. Well, well…what was this? Tony’s grin became even broader, stretching his bloodless skin over his yellow teeth. Dusted all around the money was a thick white powder. There was a lot of it, maybe as much as a pound. One of the glassine bags must have ruptured and a fine white snow had fallen in the trunk of the car.

  Well, well…

  Tony reached down into the trunk and lifted out one of the bundles of twenties, looking at it with fascination. If he could have seen his own eyes just then they would have frightened him. The lights that flickered in them were not fires so much as weird neon glowing and blinking and twisting to form bizarre shapes. Holding the bills up to his nose, he snorted some of the cocaine off them, drawing the white fire deep into his body. The anesthetic quality of the coke began to work its magic on him almost at once.

  Continuing to grin, he pulled his sodden shirt open and slid the money down under his belt as a compress. The crisp bills brushed across the ragged edges of one of the bullet holes, but Tony was beyond normal pain. He took another stack of bills and roughly applied a five-hundred-dollar bandage to the second entry wound. The cocaine on the money would provide some mild topical anesthesia as well, should the pain come calling, but Tony really didn’t care. It tickled him to think about his expensive bandages. He adjusted his belt, drawing it tighter to hold the compresses firmly in place. He had begun to chuckle now, thinking about Boyd and Ruger slicing each other up as he watched, each of them hoping that the winner might be allowed to live. The chuckle was low, mean, and wet.

  Again Tony reached into the trunk, but this
time he pulled up a loose handful of cocaine. “Finest kind,” he said aloud, and then buried his snout in the snow and inhaled. The rush was incredible.

  He coughed a little, gagging on the coke, but then the cough turned into another nasty chuckle. With a careless flick of his hand he let the rest of the coke flutter down to blanket the inside of the trunk.

  Then he picked up the shotgun. He knew it was loaded, because he was the one who had carried it during the job. One shell in the pipe and four up the ass. His chuckle bubbled into a laugh as he pushed himself away from the open trunk and turned to begin his search for Ruger and Boyd.

  “Wait for me, fellas,” he said jovially, “I’ll be right with you.”

  He took one decisive step toward the cornfield and fell flat on his face. The shotgun discharged as his finger spasmodically jerked the trigger, and the blast swept the crossbar clear of crows. Black and bloody feathers swirled in the night air and then fluttered down to become lost in the ranks of corn.

  Tony lay with mud in his nose and eyes and laughed until he vomited blood into the dirt.

  He didn’t move at all until the beam of a flashlight suddenly seared into his eyes and he winced and turned away. He heard footsteps approaching slowly, and through the distorted dimness that settled over his brain, Tony thought he could hear the rumble of an engine somewhere off to his left, way over on the road. It took most of his remaining strength to open his eyes, and he could just make out the thick, hulking shape that towered over him. As he watched, the shape moved toward him, following the beam of the flashlight. It was a strange shape: man-shaped, but gnarled and apelike, too much bulk on the shoulders and arms, and a simian gait to the long, bowed legs.