“This is bullshit,” he said aloud and left the office, locking it up nice and tight, crunched across the gravel to where Missy waited for him, and climbed in. He turned on the motor and then tugged the pistol out of his waistband and crammed it back into the glove compartment. Then he put the car into drive and in a spray of gravel, he spun wheels in the direction of the Guthrie farm.
(3)
Val ran as if all the evil things in the dark were at her heels.
Except for moments of crackling white light from the heavens, the darkness was absolute. Cornstalks stood up to whip at her, slapping her face, biting at her legs, tugging at her wrists. She fought them away as she ran, battering her way through the fields, running nowhere and anywhere.
She ran and ran and ran.
Her strong legs propelled her with great force, and her muscular arms crushed a path for her slim body as she surged forward. Then her sneakered foot came down on something wet and slippery and suddenly she was flying forward, hands coming up to meet the ground that rushed at her in the darkness. Her palms hit hard, sooner than she had expected, and the jolt raced up her arms and into her shoulders and something hot and white and loud seemed to detonate in her left arm just below the deltoid. The arm buckled, refusing to bear even an ounce of weight, and she twisted as she fell, landing with all her weight on the white-hot shoulder.
She didn’t want to scream, but she couldn’t help it. The pain was a storm of knives whirling around inside her. She had no idea how long she lay there, stunned to breathlessness by the sheer weight of the pain. She tried to roll off the arm, but the pain came with her. Her left arm absolutely refused to work. She could feel the fingers opening and closing, but from the elbow to the shoulder blade everything felt as if boiling oil had been poured over it.
“Crow!” she cried out into the swirling darkness. “Help me!”
But Crow wasn’t there. Only the darkness and the pain and the madman with the gun were in her part of the universe. The deep voice of the thunder mocked her pain. Val knew that she had to — absolutely had to — get up.
Get up and run or lie there and wait to be slaughtered.
That was when she heard the single sharp, cold gunshot. It was a small sound, almost lost in the moan of the wind.
It took half a second for her to process the sound, and then she screamed, “Dad!”
That got her up. How, she could never explain, but somehow she was on her feet. Her shoes were wet and sticky from the ears of corn she had slipped on, but she stayed steady on her feet, as steady as waves of nausea and vertigo would allow her to be.
“Dad…” she said, looking back into the utter blackness the way she had come.
She didn’t know what to do. Indecision born of terror polluted her resolve.
If she kept running, then the maniac might kill her father. Might already have killed him!
If she went back, she might be killed, too. What would happen to Mark and Connie?
Seconds burst around her like firecrackers and she didn’t know what to do.
She felt something brush against her cheek and she used her only living hand to try and brush it away. Her fingertips touched lips, a nose, a cheek.
Val screamed and spun, backpedaling and almost falling, flailing out with her good hand.
“Valerie…” said a soft voice.
Val froze. She had a vague impression of a shape, black against the blacker shadows of the field.
“Go back,” whispered the voice.
“Wh…what?”
Lightning flashed overhead, and Val had the briefest glimpse of a tall man, gaunt and sad, stooped beneath some terrible weight, dressed in dirty black clothes, gray face streaked with mud. A guitar was slung down his back, the strap crossing his chest.
“Go back,” he whispered.
She knew this man…but she couldn’t place where from.
The lightning flashed again and for just a second the small silver cross that she wore around her neck burned as if it somehow had suddenly flared with inner heat. Then as quickly as the sensation had come, it was gone.
Val was alone.
She stood there, head swimming with pain and shock and terror, her fingers touching the cross, the skin over her heart still tingling from the burn.
“Go back…” she murmured to herself.
Then she turned. Limping, her damaged arm swinging painfully, tears streaking her face, she started back toward the house.
(4)
At that same moment, eight miles away, Crow was tooling along the upper reaches of A-32. Jed Davenport was singing “Mr. Devil Blues” from a mix CD, and Crow was singing along, his voice leaping at the note but never quite grabbing it.
A state police car came rocketing up behind, lights flashing, siren tearing holes in the night. Crow sighed and slowed down to something near the speed limit as the unit changed lanes and pulled abreast. The officer riding shotgun dazzled him with a flashlight for a moment, then clicked it off. The patrol car accelerated and passed, taking charge of the lane and barreling way ahead.
Crow was impressed with the speed of the unit. He felt he could top it with Missy, but getting into a pissing match with the state police held little attraction for him. He let them zoom out of sight before he let the speedometer climb back up into the low eighties.
Muddy Waters was now “Screaming and Crying,” and Crow sang along.
He only slowed long enough to turn onto Johnson Wells Road, the old farm track that led around the huge cornfields and would take him right to Val’s back door. The road was badly rutted and bumpy and not even Missy could safely take it at anything like her best speed. Crow slowed to fifty and grimaced with the teeth-rattling jolts.
The racing cop car stayed in Crow’s mind. Where was it going? What the hell else was out here this far down on A-32?
If a thousand volts of electricity had shot up through the seat into his spine he could not have more instantly snapped to a straighter position.
There was only one thing this far down on A-32.
“Val!” He shouted her name and kicked down on the gas. Bumps and ruts be damned. Missy hurtled forward. No answer to any of his calls. What a fucking fool! he thought.
The car shot along the old farm road, high beams plowing a path before him. Thunder rumbled again, way over beyond the Guthrie farm.
In the back of his mind he kept hearing one word over and over again: Hurry!
“Oh my God!” he said out loud. “Val…”
Chapter 16
(1)
Ferro carefully unwrapped a stick of Beechnut and laid it on his tongue until the surface sugar melted, then chewed it very slowly. He folded the wrapper neatly and stuffed it in his shirt pocket. For long minutes he had just stood there staring at the devastation, letting the horror burn into him and then burn out, letting the fires burn away all of the sensationalism and emotion until all that was left was a crime scene. Facts, data, evidence, and leads: nothing more.
Ferro looked up, not surprised to see that the moon had vanished behind featureless black storm clouds. “Yeah, Vince, we’re going to lose the scene before the lab crew can get here from Philly. I’m going to run through the preliminaries. You up to helping?”
LaMastra hoisted himself up off the ground, slapped dirt and crushed corn from the seat of his pants, and gave Ferro a vague nod.
“Good,” said Ferro. “Chief?” Bernhardt, who by now was standing on the far side of the car, well out of sight of the body, looked up. “Chief, can you arrange to get some kind of tarp? We need to protect the site as much as possible.”
Bernhardt made an inarticulate sound that Ferro took as an assent and set off back to the road in a wobbling Clydesdale canter.
Ferro knelt down by the opened briefcase and set to work. First he removed a folded sheet of white plastic, opened and spread it out to form a kind of pristine picnic blanket, weighing it down with ears of corn. On top of this he quickly and deftly lined up several items from the ca
se: a small stack of clear plastic bags of various size, from those only large enough to hold a few pennies to some as large as lunch bags; clear glass vials and disposable eyedroppers in sterile plastic sleeves; paper bags; a gunpowder trace kit; tweezers; scissors; evidence tags; and a small battery-powered tape recorder with a voice-activated microphone.
Ferro took one of the eyedroppers and one of the vials and walked toward one of the pools of blood. Over his shoulder, he said to LaMastra, “I’ll collect, you catalog and tag.”
“Yeah, okay.”
Terry left them to it. He walked away from the scene and climbed back up to the road. Chief Bernhardt was chain-smoking Camels as he talked into the handset of Rhoda’s unit; he looked like he was a short step away from a stroke. His bald head was bright red and beaded with sweat and he kept mopping it out of his eyes with the back of his chubby paw. The effect made it look as if he were a sniffling kid wiping tears from his eyes.
Gus finished with the radio and came over to stand with Terry. “This is some shit, huh?”
Terry nodded mutely.
“What I don’t get is why on earth this Ruger guy would do that to one of his buddies.”
“A difference of opinion over the division of spoils perhaps? Who knows? Ruger is supposed to be a super-freakazoid, as Crow would say. Me, I’m amazed at the guy’s chutzpah. He has every cop on the East Coast after him, and he stops and takes the time to do something like this. He must be totally whacked out.”
“Jesus.” Gus finished his cigarette and crushed it out under his toe.
“You think they’re still around here, Gus?”
“Christ, I hope not.”
“They can’t have gone far without the car, and they can’t have been gone long if Ruger stopped to do all that. Two men on foot, hauling all the drugs and money Ferro was talking about — they have to still be somewhere close. We have some serious hills around here, not to mention some very thick fields that aren’t easy to wade through. I can’t see how they could have gotten more than a few miles away.”
“Ain’t much around here,” Gus said thoughtfully. “The road to Dark Hollow’s not far, but there’s nothing back there. And what else? A couple of back roads. Farm roads.”
“Whose farm is this?”
Gus frowned and peered up and down the road, assessing. “You know, I can’t quite tell if this is the north end of Henry Guthrie’s place, or the south end of Hobie Devlin’s.” He cupped a hand around his mouth. “Rhoda! Whose farm is this?”
“I think it belongs to Mr. Guthrie.”
“Yeah, I thought so.”
Terry tensed. “Guthrie…You’re right. This must be their big field, the one Henry calls the far field, ’cause it’s furthest from the house.” His eyes snapped wide. “Gus…can you get a unit out to Henry’s house? I mean right now!”
Gus blinked in surprise for a second; then he got it. “Oh, Jesus, you’re right! It’s the only place they could have gone.” Gus spun around and waddled quickly over to Rhoda and the other officers.
Watching him, Terry felt icy fingers close around his heart. Guthrie’s farm. Val Guthrie was Crow’s ladylove. And Crow was supposed to be going over there after his job at the hayride.
“Dear Jesus…” he breathed.
(2)
The thunder growled loud enough to wake the storm. Lightning flashed along its belly, burning the sky, burning the lands below, bursting trees and searing lines into the firmament. The rains came weeping in, angry tears spilled by troubled clouds.
Val Guthrie staggered out of the cornfield amid a crash of thunder that actually shook the dirt beneath her feet. Lightning danced and spun in the air above her, an almost continuous curtain of bright blue white.
She clutched her sprained arm to her body with all her strength, trying to keep it from swinging, but with each step the injured muscles and tendons twitched and spasmed, sending new and sharper spikes of pain. She didn’t know how much more of it she could bear. Nausea washed over her in waves, bubbling up in the back of her throat, dimming her tear-streaked eyes, stoking the shock-induced fever burning in her veins.
“Dad!” she cried as she stumbled through a curtain of rain and into the clearing.
The kitchen door lay where she’d dropped it, and the wheelbarrow stood empty, the red paint washed to brightness by the rain.
The madman with the gun was nowhere to be seen.
Val stood there, swaying, uncertain, not even remotely sure of what to do next.
Thunder broke above her so loudly she screamed, thinking the man had crept up behind her and shot her. She spun — but there was no one there.
Then in the flash of lightning, she saw the ragged form that lay crumpled in the lane only a few dozen yards away. The wind fluttered the sodden work clothes as it blew over outstretched legs and arms.
“Dad!”
She ran, shoving the pain down inside her mind, seeing nothing but the battered figure. Skidding, slipping in the mud, she tripped and landed on her knees in the mud and with her one good hand, she reached for her father’s shoulder. He lay on his stomach, his face pressed into the muck. One hand lay stretched out in front of him. In the brightness of the lightning, Val could see the neat round hole burned high in his back, nearly between the shoulder blades, the cloth washed clean of blood by the downpour.
“No!” she screamed and pulled at him.
His big old body resisted her, fighting her with limpness and weight and sopping clothes, but eventually Val found the strength to turn him onto his back. She wasn’t even sure if it was the right thing to do, or the wrong thing, or if she should do anything at all. She was beyond ordinary thinking.
There was no exit wound on his chest, she saw that right away, and in some dim part of her mind, she remembered how small a gun the man had carried.
Oh, please, God! she prayed and she bent her face to her father’s.
“Daddy…Daddy…?”
His face was totally slack, streaked with mud that clumped on his mustache and caught in his bushy eyebrows.
Val wiped the mud off his face and shook him very gently.
“Daddy…please…”
Henry Guthrie raised his hand just a few inches, all he could manage, and touched her arm.
“Daddy!” Val’s heart leaped and she felt tears break and spill as her father slowly opened his eyes, squinting against the stinging rain.
“Get…get me…my sweater, pumpkin,” he murmured dreamily, “I’m feeling…a chill…”
“Oh, Daddy…”
Guthrie’s eyes opened wider and for a moment clearer lights burned within them. “Val?”
“I’m here, Daddy. I’m here. It’s going to be okay. I’m here.”
In a whisper, he asked, “Where is he?”
Val shook her head. “I think he’s gone. I don’t see him anywhere.”
Guthrie closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. The lights had already dimmed perceptibly. “Val…”
“Yes, Daddy?”
“You’ve got to warn…” he began, but suddenly a terrible coughing fit made him leap and jerk. Blood bubbled out of his nose and he gagged. It took a long time, and a lot of his dwindling supply of strength to speak, and even then it was in a faint whisper, barely audible beneath the roar of the storm. “Val…you’ve got to warn…Mark and…Con….”
Then his mouth lost the words and he slumped limply against Val’s lap. His hand fell away and slapped bonelessly into the mud.
Val screamed. She bent her head to his chest and listened, listened…
It was there, the faintest of beats, a feeble fist beating on the window of a burning building. It beat once, paused long…too long, beat again.
It grew fainter, and she felt her own heart slowing with it, but it kept on beating. Trying to live. Trying.
Val tried to pull him, to drag him to the house, but she was a battered and exhausted woman with a torn shoulder all alone out in a storm. Half a mile from the house. The
enormity of it broke her, and she collapsed back down onto her knees.
She held her father for a brief moment — almost more time than she could spare — and then laid his head down, kissing his forehead and cheeks before climbing to her feet. She turned toward the house and as she did so her lips curled back into a snarl of feral hate that had no trace of humanity left in it. Clutching her bad arm to her body, she set out toward the house at a tearing run.
(3)
Mark Guthrie lay on the floor and strained with every muscle in his body. Sweat burst from his pores and blood was singing in his ears as he fought against the ropes and tape that held him.
As soon as he had heard that single awful gunshot, he’d thrown himself off the couch and had wormed his way across to the ringing phone. It felt as if the effort took twenty years, but he actually made it on the eighth ring, shoving his shoulder against the low table with a dynamic effort. The table toppled neatly over and the phone crashed to the floor. Mark rolled over to it and pressed his ear to the receiver just in time to hear the click as the call was disconnected from the other end.
He bellowed as well as the duct tape would allow.
Connie sat on the couch, watching him with wide, desperate eyes, and he turned to her, trying his best to convey a look of hopeful confidence. He knew it probably looked pitiful, bound and gagged and sweaty as he was.
Since then, he’d tried to hang the phone up by pushing it with his chin. No luck. He did manage to press the plunger down long enough to get a dial tone, but the phone was an old rotary: no way he was going to dial it, not even 911.
Still, he kept trying, using the tip of his nose to try and turn the dial. The labor seemed to take forever, and by the time he would have the dial start to move, the phone would begin signaling that it was off the hook and he would have to push the plunger down again to get a fresh dial tone. It was tedious, frantic, frustrating work.
Karl Ruger made it a pointless exercise as well.
Mark didn’t even know that the man was in the house until he saw the shadow that washed over him. He turned quickly, saw the man standing over him, tall and powerful, soaked from the rain, holding the tiny automatic in one hand.
Ghost Road Blues pd-1 Page 28
