Ghost Road Blues pd-1

by Jonathan Maberry

  What the hell was it? It was driving him batty because he felt he ought to know that voice — that he did know it, but he just couldn’t put a name to it.

  Yet the voice was compelling, insistent, and somehow…comforting.

  Ruger — you are my left hand!

  He took a deep breath and adjusted his grip on his pistol and focused his attention ahead. It didn’t take them very long to retrace the route Ruger had walked since leaving Boyd with his broken leg. Idly, he wondered how Boyd was doing, not that he cared a whit. If Boyd kicked it, then he’d just find someone else who could get him out of the country; there were enough travel agents in the circles he was used to gliding through. He had enough unmarked cash and enough saleable product to grease the wheels of such bureaucracy. With even moderate luck he’d be in Brazil before the weekend was out; or if things were too hot he could get into Canada for a while, hide out with a woman he knew in Montreal, and use her connections to pick up a new passport and visa and fly to Africa. Maybe pick up some mercenary work.

  If Boyd was dead…then maybe he would linger here at the ol’ homestead for the night. Maybe do a comparison study of both of the gals, and then head north in the morning, blending into the tourist traffic and following the Poconos up into New York State.

  Ruger — you are my left hand!

  He grinned in the darkness with a wet shark’s smile, and reconsidered whether he would leave anyone here alive when he left.

  (2)

  The old 9mm Glock 17 felt light and comfortable in Jerry Head’s hand. He had a.32 Smith and Wesson strapped to his right ankle, just in case. Not as a throw-down, but as a true backup piece. Twice in the line of duty Head had experienced handgun disasters. The first time his old S&W 439 had jammed, and the other time he’d lost his gun during a chase that required him to jump from a garage roof into a Dumpster. His sidearm had gotten buried in Hefty bags of old pizza, used Pampers, and empty cereal boxes. In both cases the little.32 had saved his ass. Though lacking the stopping power of the heftier 9mm, and carrying far fewer rounds, the little wheel gun had the grace of never jamming, and being there when otherwise he would have had to try and return fire armed only with harsh language. It was a comfortable weight on his ankle. He knew Toombes had a similar backup piece; he doubted Jimmy Castle did. The man may have been big city once upon a time, but why would he have needed a little guardian angel out here in Stickville?

  Head moved as quietly as he could down the corridor created by the out-of-control car, but each footfall on the dried corn leaves crackled and crunched. There was no way to move in silence. Behind him and to either side he heard Toombes and Castle making the same noise, and he knew that they would be just as nervous about all the noise as he was. Couldn’t sneak up on a dead man making noise like that.

  Behind him, Head could hear Rhoda checking in with Detective Sergeant Ferro, heard the squelch of the radio.

  They didn’t have far to go before all three of them saw the gleam of moonlight and flashlight on metal and glass. It was a big, black four-door sedan and it stood in a small clearing of smashed-down cornstalks. The trunk lid was up and the right front of the car seemed to be pitched unnaturally low. Head turned to the others, and very quietly said, “We go in together. Toombes, you go right, Castle you go left, and I’ll go up the pipe. Remember, check and clear.”

  They nodded and set themselves. Guns poised, fingers sliding into the trigger guards, they stepped into the clearing at the same time, moving quickly but with maximum caution. Castle came up on the driver’s side keeping the muzzle of his revolver focused so that it tracked the light.

  “Police officers!” they all shouted. “Freeze!”

  Castle shone his flash into the car. “Clear!”

  “Clear!” Head called as he checked inside the open trunk and under the car.

  He waited for Toombes.

  She said nothing.

  Rising from a shooter’s crouch, Head peered around the end of the car. Toombes was standing just inside the clearing, facing the passenger side of the car, which was still out of sight to both Head and Castle. Toombes stood stock-still, her flashlight trained forward, but her service automatic was pointing limply and forgotten at the dirt by her feet.

  “Toombes!” called Head. “Are you clear?”

  Toombes didn’t even look at him.

  “Toombes!”

  She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

  Head motioned to Castle to circle around the front of the car, and together they converged fast on the passenger side.

  Time seemed to freeze.

  Officer Jerry Head stared down at the ground by the side of the car. He stared at the blood-soaked ground. He stared at the blood-splattered corpses of half a dozen crows that had been peppered with buckshot. He stared at the man that lay there.

  At least, he thought it was a man.

  Had been a man.

  Once.

  Not anymore, though. Now it was…unspeakable.

  Head felt his brain go numb and somewhere off to the right of his sanity, he heard Jimmy Castle loudly throwing up.

  (3)

  Terry stood over Gus Bernhardt as he made the long string of calls to former part-time officers, listening to the chief plead, cajole, entice, and even bully as he tried to pressgang the honest citizenry of the town into some kind of actual police force. In any other circumstance, the whole thing would be kind of funny. At that moment, however, nothing seemed even remotely amusing. Gus was sweating, and Terry could feel his own pores yielding their store of icy perspiration. He turned away and strolled across the office, focusing on Detective Ferro and his beefy sidekick, LaMastra. They were once again in a hushed, intense confabulation.

  Terry didn’t join them, didn’t even linger; instead he moved restlessly around the room. Technically he was the senior official here, a mayor supposedly outranking out-of-town cops, but he felt like a kid who had accompanied an adult to the office. Everyone was busy with their own jobs, saying things he didn’t quite understand, doing things he could not help with, trying to accomplish things in which he could not actually participate. It was frustrating, but moreover, it was intimidating.

  A phone rang on one of the desks as he passed it, and Terry glanced around to see if anyone was going to pick it up. No one so much as even turned to acknowledge this addition to the cacophony. Shrugging, Terry reached for the handset and picked it up.

  “Pine Deep chief’s department,” he said in an official voice.

  A voice said, “Terry?”

  The connection was bad, making the voice sound distant and pale. It wasn’t a matter of static, for the line was clear, but there was a hollowness to the sound, as if the caller were at the far end of a long tunnel.

  “Hello? Who is this, please?”

  “Terry?” repeated the voice. “Is that you, Terry?”

  It was a female voice, a little girl. Crisply, he said, “This is Mayor Terry Wolfe. Who is calling, please?”

  “Terry…” the voice said, and for a moment the connection faded almost to nothingness.

  “Who is this? We have a very bad connection, so please speak up.”

  “Terry, he’s back!” said the voice, and that was quite clear.

  “I’m sorry, who’s back? Who is this?”

  “Terry. You have to do something.”

  “Listen to me,” he said loudly and clearly, “you’ve reached the chief’s department in Pine Deep. Are you hurt or in trouble?”

  Nothing but the hiss of an open line.

  “Little girl…? Can you hear me?”

  Across the room Detective Sergeant Ferro and his cronies were looking at him.

  “Little girl? Are you still there?”

  “Terry?” The voice was plaintive, sounding scared, but still distorted as if by a vast distance. “He’s back, Terry. He’s back and he’s going to hurt people again.”

  “Hurt who? Little girl…who’s going to be hurt?”

  “
He’s back….”

  “Little girl, tell me your name.”

  Nothing.

  “This is the mayor. Please tell me your name and where you’re calling from.”

  Still nothing. Gus Bernhardt was lumbering across the room toward him, a deep frown on his florid face.

  “You have to stop him, Terry,” whispered the tiny voice.

  “Where are you calling from? Little girl? Little girl?” He kept calling for her to answer, but the sound on the phone had changed. Now there was just dead emptiness. Gus reached out for the phone, held it to his own ear for a moment, then set it back on the cradle.

  “What gives?” he asked.

  “Weird call,” said Terry, shaking his head and scratching his red beard. “Some little kid called.” He knew that voice, too, but he didn’t dare say it, and unconsciously tapped his pocket to make sure the pill case with the antipsychotics and the Xanax was still there.

  “You heard a kid on that phone?” Gus asked, half smiling.

  “Yeah, and she was going on about—”

  “Uh, wait a minute, Terry, let me get this straight…you got a phone call on that phone and it was some little kid?”

  “A little girl, yeah.”

  “On that phone?”

  “No, on two other phones,” snapped Terry viciously. “Yes, of course on this phone. What, are you deaf? You saw me talking to her.”

  “Well, I’m not deaf, but you must have the greatest set of ears in the Western world if you got a phone call on that line.”

  “What the heck are you talking about…?”

  Still half smiling, Gus bent and snatched up the cord that came out of the back of the receiver. He reeled it up, speaking as he did so. “Since we cut back on staff, we don’t use these desks back here much,” he said. “These phones have all been disconnected.”

  “Not this one, for Pete’s sake. I was just talk—”

  His voice went flat and fell silent as Gus pulled up the end of the cord and presented it with a flourish. The plug stood up between his thick fingers.

  Terry looked at it and then bent low and looked under the desk at the wall. He could see no wall jack, and eventually had to shift the desk and move a trash can before he found one. Slowly he straightened and looked at the plug.

  Gus said, “No way this was even plugged into the wall. The cord was just coiled up under the desk.”

  “I’m telling you, Gus…I heard that phone ring and I heard that kid talking.”

  Gus stared at him for a long five count, then shrugged. “What can I say, Terry?”

  Terry snatched the plug out of Gus’s hand and glared at it. He opened his mouth but couldn’t manage to say anything. He had heard the voice. Her voice.

  Mandy’s voice.

  The room started spinning around him and he almost turned and ran when Detective Sergeant Ferro’s voice cut through all the chatter in the room.

  “It’s the officers at the wreck site,” he said tersely. “They found something!”

  (4)

  “Yo! Boyd — shift your ass!” called Ruger as he rounded the bend and followed Val and Guthrie into the clearing.

  They stood still, bearing the white kitchen door between them. Val was staring fixedly at the many scattered pools of dark blood that glistened like black pools of oil in the moonlight; Guthrie stood looking up at the scarecrow’s post, which was also streaked with clawed finger-trails of blood just below where the straw-filled dummy’s shoes stood on their perpetual post.

  At the edge of the clearing, Karl Ruger stood with his jaunty smile cracking and flaking away in the freshening night breeze.

  “So much blood…” Val whispered.

  Ruger’s face underwent a slow change. The reptilian smile had given way to surprise and confusion, but now his features darkened with all the rage of a storm front moving over a troubled sea. Lightning flashed from his eyes and his lips furled back from white teeth as he ground them in mounting, boiling rage. Like a wolf at the moment of the kill, his nose wrinkled and his eyes were slashed to slits as the rage in him built and then burst forth.

  “Boyd!” he bellowed, his voice rising like a roll of heavy thunder. “Boyd!”

  His voice changed, the words tangling into a steady and inarticulate growl of fury as he tore across the clearing, kicking aside cornstalks, poking into rows of plants, leaning over fences, searching, searching, searching…

  Boyd, however, was gone. The bags of money and cocaine were gone.

  Only the blood remained.

  The blood and a single bloodstained fifty-dollar bill stuck fast to the bottom of the scarecrow’s shoe, held by the tacky gore, fluttering in the breeze.

  Ruger howled in rage and dropped to his knees, beating the ground with the flashlight and the butt of his pistol. The lens of the flashlight shattered and the light flared and then burst into darkness and splintered glass.

  “Boyd!” Karl yelled. “Boyd, you rotten motherfucker!”

  Val dropped the wheelbarrow handles and shrank against her father’s side; they both cringed back from the towering rage and animal ferocity that burst forth from Ruger.

  “Boyd! Where’s my goddamned money!”

  Ruger tossed away the broken flashlight, balled his left fist into a mallet of gristle and bone, and punched down at the ground, and again, and again. The shock raced up his arm, flaring with pain as the fragments of the broken lens tore his skin, but the pain only stoked his rage. He kept punching the ground, over and over and over.

  “Where’s my goddamned money, you spineless piece of shit!” His words were whipped into the sky by the fierce winds of the coming storm.

  Guthrie suddenly grabbed Val by the upper arm, pulled her close, and said in a fierce whisper, “Run!”

  He didn’t allow her the chance to object, but turned and shoved her toward the path that led away from the farmhouse, the access trail that went down to the main road. She staggered for two steps, and almost pitched forward, but then she bent low, dropping her center of gravity like a sprinter, and brought her weight back to the balance point. Off she went like a shot, her toes digging into the soft earth, and she was so fast that fifty yards were unreeling behind her before Karl Ruger was even aware of her flight.

  Guthrie didn’t waste any time himself. Even as he shoved Val in one direction, he wheeled and made a dash for the house. He was old, but he could run a half mile if the devil was on his heels, which indeed he was.

  It took just two seconds for Ruger to understand what was happening, for him to claw himself out of his web of rage and realize that his captive birds had flown.

  “Shit!” he growled and leaped to his feet. He started after Val, but before he’d even taken a full step he realized that he’d never catch her. She was already around the farthest bend and running like the wind.

  “Bitch!” he growled, and then turned and pointed at the retreating back of old man Guthrie, taking aim with a two-hand grip. Lightning flashed continuously, illuminating the man with enticing clarity, and the ghost of his old smile flickered on his lips as Ruger pulled the trigger.

  Chapter 14

  (1)

  Terry Wolfe and the detectives made it to the crime scene in less than ten minutes. Their late-model dark Ford rocketed along, leaving Chief Bernhardt’s five-year-old police unit far behind. Terry sat in the back, gripping the door handle with one hand and the back of Ferro’s seat with the other. His face was pasty with terror, but most of his dread came from his memory of that phone call. It couldn’t have been Mandy, he thought, clinging to his denial, needing to be certain that reality was reality and no matter what he thought he’d heard he had been mistaken. That’s impossible.

  The car leaped and skidded and tore like a demon wind along the blacktop and it jolted him back to the moment.

  “God!” he whispered as the car took a curve on fewer wheels than Henry Ford had intended, then bounced down onto all fours and swooped hawklike down a long hill. They rounded another, wider cur
ve and saw two revolving dome lights in the distance. LaMastra actually accelerated down the hill and then screeched and slewed the car to a sideways stop that sent up curls of rubber smoke from all four wheels. “Oh my Lord!” Terry gasped, his finger still digging into the upholstery. “Where did you learn to drive like that?”

  LaMastra grinned at him in the rearview mirror. “Old Steve McQueen movies.”

  “My heart stopped beating miles back,” Terry complained.

  Ferro looked faintly amused. “You’ll have to forgive the detective. He lives for this kind of thing. It’s what he does in lieu of having an actual life.”

  LaMastra chuckled and leaped out of the car; Ferro followed, bringing with him a large, heavy briefcase.

  Terry slowly unstuck his fingers and reached for the door handle. He stepped out of the car in the same shaky way that novices depart a particularly aggressive roller-coaster ride, placing his feet on the ground as if uncertain that it would hold him.

  Officer Rhoda Thomas came jogging over to them, pale and uncertain. She carried a huge shotgun at port arms.

  “Okay, Officer, what’s going on?” Ferro asked, cutting right to the chase. “The radio reports were, shall we say, a little disjointed?”

  Rhoda looked up into Ferro’s cold eyes. “The others are still down there by the suspect’s vehicle. They wouldn’t let me go down and take a look.”

  “Why’s that?” asked LaMastra.

  “Well…Officer Head said that there was a body down there.”

  “Uh-huh. And?”

  “Well,” Rhoda said, licking her lips, “they didn’t say for sure, but I got the impression that it was in a pretty bad state. They wouldn’t say exactly what condition it was in, but when they first came back, they looked really upset. You know…shaken? Then all three of them got sick.”

  “Oh, come on,” said LaMastra, laughing. “Jerry Head and Coralita Toombes getting sick? Get real.”

  Rhoda just looked at him.

  Ferro tapped LaMastra on the shoulder. “Let’s go have a look.”

  “What should I do?” Rhoda asked.

  “Just stay here. Stay by the radio. Your chief and additional units are just behind us. Send them on down once they get here.”