Ghost Road Blues pd-1

by Jonathan Maberry

  Not for the first time Vic wished he could just strangle the little fucker. That would feel so good! But the Man was very, very specific on that point. If Mike were to die from a corrupt or evil hand, then the Man’s whole plan would be in deep shit. Which sucked, because Vic ached to feel Mike’s throat collapse in his hands. Then he’d be free of Mike, and would be finally able to cut loose of that drunken whore, Lois. What a goddamn waste of human tissue she was. Couldn’t cook, lousy in the sack unless Vic beat the shit out of her first, and nowadays she was drunk all the time.

  The things I do for the Man, Vic thought, feeling peevish.

  Upstairs he could hear the phone ringing. He listened, counting the rings. Three. Four. Five. Five? Christ, how many times had he told that cow to get the phone by three rings at the most? Fucking five rings?

  Vic closed his eyes and smiled with the first real pleasure of the day. If both Mike and Lois were going to defy him like this, then it might turn out to be a really interesting evening. Really interesting.

  He was already heading toward the stairs when he heard Lois’s tentative knock on the door. In a hesitant, quavering voice she called, “Vic? Vic, honey?”

  “What?” he growled, mounting the stairs two at a time.

  “Phone call for you, honey.”

  He jerked the door open. “So I heard. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but did I not hear the phone ring, what, five times?”

  Lois stood there, her blue cotton bathrobe pulled tight around her body, the belt cinched and knotted around her slim waist. Her brown hair was tousled from sleep and her eyes were red and rheumy from vodka. Fear reeled drunkenly in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry, honey. I was asleep. I didn’t hear…I mean…I got it as fast as I…”

  He held up a warning finger and she shut up. “You go into the living room and wait for me. Don’t you dare sit down, either, Lois. When I’m done with my call, we’ll go over the phone rules again. Okay? Go on now.”

  Lois shrank back, her mouth opening to form words of protest, to voice some kind of plea, but she did not dare make a sound. It would always be much worse if she tried to plead for tolerance, and horribly worse if she begged. She clutched the folds of her robe to her throat and cowered out of the room.

  Vic waited until she was out of the kitchen until he let the smile form on his lips. He liked that color blue on her. He reached for the phone.

  “This is Vic.”

  “Mr. Wingate? This is Terry Wolfe.”

  Vic tensed, instantly on the defensive. Why the hell would the mayor be calling him? “Yeah?” he asked cautiously.

  “Mr. Wingate, I’m calling on behalf of your stepson, Mike?”

  “Christ, what’s the little shit done now?”

  “Oh, nothing like that. No, he was involved in an accident, Mr. Wingate.”

  Equal amounts of hope and fear surged up in Vic’s heart. “Yeah? What kind of accident?”

  “He was riding his bike on A-32 when someone, a trucker, ran him off the road near where Old Mill Road cuts over to the hayride. Now, he’s not badly hurt, but he is banged up a bit. A passing motorist took him to the Haunted Hayride, and the manager there called me and asked if I would notify you.”

  “The hayride? That’s all the way the hell out—”

  The mayor’s voice cut him off smoothly. “I know it’s a bit of a haul, Mr. Wingate, but as the boy’s health and welfare are involved, I’m sure you would want to go pick him up.”

  Vic’s eyes were narrowed. The phone call had a weird, fishy smell to it, but there was nowhere to go with it except to agree. “Yeah. Sure. Whatever. I’ll go fetch him.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Win—”

  Vic hung up on him and stood for a moment, arms folded, lips pursed, staring at the phone. A trucker, he thought. A trucker running the kid off the road. He wondered if that driver had been at the wheel of a tow-truck.

  He smiled slowly, believing his guess to be right. If the little punk had been run down by a tow-truck, then that would be perfect. That was what the Man had been trying to orchestrate for a while now, but Vic hadn’t known the plan was in full swing already.

  He nodded and chuckled. “That’s cool.”

  Then he remembered Lois waiting for him in the living room.

  Definitely a hands-on kind of night, he thought as he strolled out of the kitchen.

  (3)

  “Does the mayor want you to arrest him?” Mike asked as Missy took curve after curve.

  “Who — our guest psycho? Two words best express it. Hell no!” Crow shook his head. “I’m just an errand boy, and that’s all. I’m gonna go out, close down the hayride, wait for your folks to pick you up, and then I’m done with it.”

  “But you’re a cop, aren’t you?”

  “Kind of…well, not really. I’ve been reinstated just for tonight. Can’t have civilians doing official work.”

  “You used to be one, though?”

  Crow said nothing, his eyes watching the road.

  “Crow? Didn’t you used to be a cop?”

  “Once upon a time, young Jedi.”

  “Why’d you quit?”

  They drove on for almost half a mile before Crow answered that. He gave Mike a brief, searching look and then refocused on the road.

  “Sometimes things don’t work out,” he said simply, then smiled. “Besides, if I was a cop, whom would you buy your comics from?”

  “Probably Nick’s Comic Cave in Crestville. Or maybe at Waldenbooks in—”

  “Mike…?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Shut up when grown folks are talking.”

  Mike grinned. Outside the windows the black fields whipped by, beards of corn glowing with the cold moonlight. “Do you think the chief will catch him?”

  Crow was about to suggest that Gus Bernhardt couldn’t catch the clap in a whorehouse, but thought better of it. He said, “I guess he might. He has a lot of help from Philly cops. By morning there’ll be more cops in town than tourists.”

  “Won’t the tourists be scared off anyway ’cause of what’s happening?”

  Crow snorted. “Hardly. We’ll probably have a banner day, once this gets out. People love blood and guts as much as they do a good five-alarm fire. Draws ’em like flies to sh…uh, garbage.”

  “You were going to say ‘like flies to shit.’”

  “Yes, but I didn’t, and you shouldn’t either.”

  “Jeez, Crow, I’m fourteen!”

  “Yeah, well, there’s some that think being fourteen is the same as being a kid. Kind of a popular notion, I hear tell.”

  “Yeah, well. What do you think?”

  Crow looked at him, looked past the smile at the Mike Sweeney whose father was dead, whose mother was a drunk, and whose stepfather was known to beat him so bad that he missed a dozen days from school a year.

  He sighed. “Not everybody grows up at the same speed, I guess.”

  Mike grunted.

  “I still don’t want to hear you use bad language regardless.”

  Mike smiled. “Okay, boss.”

  “Okay then.” They looked at each other and grinned. Crow said, “How’re the ribs?”

  “They hurt like a son of a bitch,” Mike said. Crow goggled at him, and then they both burst out laughing. Mike laughed, winced, and kept on laughing, clapping a hand to his aching side.

  “You juvenile delinquent!” Crow gasped.

  A half mile later they passed a massive billboard painted with witches and goblins and leering black cats. Written in dripping black and red letters it proclaimed:

  PINE DEEP HAUNTED HAYRIDE

  Biggest in the East Coast

  5 miles

  WE’LL SCARE YOU SILLY!

  They drove on.

  Chapter 11

  (1)

  Terry drank the last of the reheated coffee, oblivious of its appalling taste, and set the cup down on Ginny’s desk. The Xanax was kicking in and he felt a little of the tension seep out of his muscles.
Ginny quickly picked up the cup, put a pink Post-It sheet under it as a coaster, and set it down again. The mayor folded his arms, hiked one half of his rump onto the edge of her desk, and looked hard and long at Gus Bernhardt. “So, here we are.”

  “Yeah,” Gus said. “Fine kettle of frigging fish.”

  “Language, language,” Ginny said sotto voce.

  “Frigging’s not a curse, you silly bitch,” Gus muttered under his breath as he went back to staring at the huge aerial-survey map of the town and its close neighbors covering the entire wall above Ginny’s desk.

  Across the room Sergeant Ferro and Detective LaMastra were standing, heads together in conversation with officers from the first wave of Philadelphia cops. Every once in a while, LaMastra would look over at Terry and raise his eyebrows by way of sympathetic acknowledgment.

  Terry glanced at the clock. It was just past ten, two and a half hours since he’d gotten the call at Crow’s shop. Most of that time had been spent laboriously trying to explain the peculiar geography of Pine Deep to the pinch-hitting cops. Geographically speaking, Pine Deep was an island, bordered completely by running streams of water: Pine River along the west and its estuary, Black Creek to the south, and then the thin and wandering northern line of the Crescent Canal and the broad Delaware River to the east. Between Black Marsh and the outlying houses of Pine Deep, A-32 rose up into a series of foothills and wannabe-mountains, taking gymnastic turns around sheer cliffs and doing roller-coaster rises and dips past the vast Pine Deep State Forest from which the town borrowed its name. The forest surrounded the farmlands and thrust tentative fingers back toward A-32 every few miles so that the long protrusions formed borders between some of the larger farms. The main body of the forest lay solidly westward, and sprawled as far over as Newton’s Reach, a tourist attraction town preserved intact from Colonial times, right down to the working blacksmith’s shop and the tours conducted by high school seniors wearing tricorns and three-button breeches.

  Looking at the map, with the surrounding expanse of greenery from the forestland and the farms, the town of Pine Deep seemed small and remote. Certainly it was no metropolis. The population of the town, counting farmers from the most distant spreads, was just a little under twenty-five hundred, but considering how much square mileage the town covered, the people were pretty thin on the ground. Most of them lived in the town proper, on a handful of quaint cobble-stoned streets. Downtown, as it was apocryphally known, was actually situated on a high saddle between two higher peaks, and though the peaks made the town look like it was in a valley, it was nearly a thousand feet higher than some of the farms.

  Downtown was where all the “action” was. That was where the tourists flocked in the thousands from the first moderately tolerable day in late March until after the Christmas sales. Antique buyers came from as far west as Ohio and as far north as Boston; rug merchants drove all the way up from Florida to sell truckloads of Seminole quilts, or mock Navajo blankets. Every fifth store sold Pennsylvania Dutch woodcrafts, from plain and sturdy tables to elaborate porch swings with amazingly delicate scrollwork. Amish baked goods from Lancaster scented the air by six o’clock each morning, and in the evening, the breeze blowing past Winifred’s Incense gave the place an aroma of magic. Almost everywhere were the delicate tinkles of wind chimes, the rattle of rain sticks, the clack-clickety-clack of hand-carved weather vanes. Windows were filled with rare books, exotic music from faraway places, crystals for healing, and crystal balls for seeing into any reality of choice, improbable varieties of cheeses, and the largest selection of family chateau wines in the region. One tiny store sold nothing but Pine Deep souvenirs and oddities such as the Fireballs, a kind of bright red pinecone unique to the area; countless books detailing, either in lurid prose or scholarly wordiness, the ghost stories of the region; calendars with twelve months’ worth of magnificent photos bursting with the incredible colors of Pine Deep in autumn, the wild freshness of spring, the deep green of the summer forests, or the stark and ancient beauty of the snow-swept winters; and the fifty-odd varieties of locally put-by jellies, jams, and preserves, including a famous spicy cinnamon-pumpkin butter that had been touted by the Frugal Gourmet one year and had caused a run on the local supply.

  In all that vastness of land, with the millions of tall, full-leafed plants, the hedgerows and groves of fruit trees, the undeveloped forest land and the fields left fallow, the estates overgrown and gone wild, the cliffs and caves and hollows, there were three men and one car hiding from the eyes of the law.

  Terry stared at the map and sighed, rubbing at his eyes and half smiling at the enormity of it all, wishing the three psycho-bastards had chosen somewhere else to ensconce themselves. He drew in a long breath, held it, and then sighed again. It was going to be a very, very long night.

  Terry looked away from the map to see Sergeant Ferro and Detective LaMastra standing at his elbow. “Where do we stand?” Terry asked.

  “Well,” the detective said, “with all of your people, sir, and with the officers loaned to this jurisdiction from the surrounding townships, we were able to put more than twenty cars on the road, each with two officers apiece. I split the teams up so that most of the cars that are actually patrolling within the town boundaries have at least one Philly officer. I felt that it would be unduly risky to require the local officers to try and apprehend Ruger and his buddies without experienced help.”

  Terry nodded. He could tell from Ferro’s expression that he was trying hard not to give offense, but at the same time make clear the point that the local cops were rubes and this was work for real professional law enforcement. Had Terry lived in any other town in Bucks County he might have been offended, but in Pine Deep Ferro’s estimation was right on target. Gus Bernhardt was a rube, and because of him the police department was little better than the Keystone Cops. Terry loved his town, but he really had no opinion of the department Gus had built. Look at who Gus had hired. Shirley O’Keefe, who looked like a skinny twenty-two-year-old Meryl Streep, got sick to her stomach every time she had to help with a bad traffic accident. Officer Golub was smart but had no balls. Jim Polk was an alcoholic and was as likely to arrest pink elephants as criminals, and his crony, Dixie MacVey, was on the force just so he could pull traffic duty outside the high school, giving him a legal reason for watching all the teenage girls bounce along. The rest were just as useless.

  Until now there hadn’t really been any desperate need to change that, which gave Gus his comfortable stranglehold on the job, but this whole thing had Terry thinking about initiating some changes around here. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought about putting up some money to try and attract one of these Philly officers to try their hand at rural law enforcement.

  “So I think we’re as well deployed as we can be,” Ferro said. “Unfortunately for those of us here in the office it’s kind of a hurry up and wait situation. Until we have more to go on, there’s not a whole lot more we can do.”

  “Fine, fine. That’s excellent, Sergeant.” Terry picked up the coffee cup, looked into its emptiness, sighed again, and set it down. “Is there any more of this, Ginny?”

  “Well…” she said doubtfully. “I could make a new pot.” She made no move to do so.

  Terry favored her with a smile. “Would you mind?”

  “We do have some instant….”

  “Why don’t you get the big urn and make enough for everyone?”

  “The instant would be easier.”

  “Yeah, but I think the officers would appreciate brewed coffee, what do you say?”

  “Tastes the same to me.”

  “Please?” Terry implored, manfully resisting the impulse to strangle her.

  Gus tapped her chair with a thick toe. “Shift your ass, Gin. Make some coffee.”

  Ginny stood up, and with all the self-sacrificing grandeur of Sydney Carton mounting the guillotine steps, she turned and headed for the kitchen.

  The four men watched her go. When she was out of ear
shot, Terry said to Gus, “I’m telling you, Gus, one of these days I’m going to shoot her.”

  “I’ll load your gun for you.”

  “She’s a royal pain in my butt.”

  “Mine too, but we’re stuck with her. Who else could do her job?”

  “A trained monkey?”

  “Maybe, but where you gonna find one that’ll work for what we pay her?”

  LaMastra cracked up but, catching sight of Ferro’s unsmiling face, turned the laugh into a cough and then busied himself with adjusting his tie.

  Reaching up, Ferro tapped the map with a knuckle. “The main idea is to go up and down A-32 in a kind of squeeze pattern, checking both sides of the roads for any place where they might have pulled off the main drag. You know, fire access road, farm road, that sort of thing.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Chief,” the sergeant asked, “how many officers are scheduled for the next shift?”

  Gus looked at him with bovine blankness. “Well—” he began, but Terry cut him off.

  “Sergeant, every officer we have is on the clock right now. Gus called in all the off-duty people before you guys even got here.”

  Ferro’s face became wooden.

  Gus nodded. “That’s right, sir. We only keep a couple of one-person cars rolling at a time.” He shrugged. “Don’t need more.”

  “Haven’t until now,” Terry amended.

  “Yikes,” said LaMastra quietly.

  “Do you have any reserves?” Ferro asked.

  “Not as such, no,” hedged Gus. “A lot of men in town, and a handful of women, have been local officers at one time or another, especially those who did co-op work while they were in law classes at Pinelands. Plus there was a town watch for a while, so a few of those guys had a basic course. Sometimes we’ll hire them on during the week of Halloween and all during the Christmas season, you know, to cut down on shoplifting and stuff like that, and make some extra pay.”