The bushes at the top of the drop-off trembled, the dry leaves shivering and flickering with silver moonlight, and then a man stepped up onto the flat ground of the Passion Pit. He was covered with mud and blood and his right leg was twisted askew, though he walked with no flicker of pain on his mushroom-white face. The man’s eyes were dark, hostile pits and his mouth hung open, revealing teeth that were caked with blood and strings of raw meat. He saw Vic’s truck and snarled, baring those filthy teeth in a mask of pure hatred.
Vic relaxed and clicked the safety back on.
“Over here, asshole,” he said. “Get the fuck in, we’re wasting time.”
The snarl lost some of its venom as the man shambled toward the truck. Vic reached over and jerked the handle, pushing the door open so Kenneth Boyd could climb in.
(2)
“Jesus!” Terry’s eyes snapped wide as he jerked awake from his doze as if he’d been slapped. The abruptness of waking had thrust him forward and he crouched on the edge of his chair, gripping the armrests with spiked fingers, his big body leaning forward as if to vomit. Thunder boomed in his chest and lightning flashed in his eyes and his pores rained icy sweat. Around him, the doctors’ lounge was quiet, softened with evening shadows, and very still.
Terry looked around, trying to understand what had shocked him awake — but there was nothing. For one horrible moment he feared that his sister’s bloody ghost had returned to torment him with her desperate pleas. No. Nothing.
Nothing, except the vague and fading feeling that something horrible had just happened. A terrible feeling of dread seemed to be clustered around his heart, like moths around a light. The sensation, or awareness, or fading dream — whatever it was — eased gradually. His heart stopped hammering, the rhythm slowing as minutes passed.
He heard heels clicking along the floor outside, coming closer very quickly, and then the door opened. A nurse leaned into the room, her face wearing a quizzical smile.
“Sorry,” she said. “I thought I heard—”
Terry looked at her with his red-rimmed eyes, a false smile nailed to his rigid lips, his fingers clutching the arms of his chair.
“Is everything okay?” the nurse asked.
“Um…yes. Everything’s fine. I was, um, taking a nap.”
“Sorry to bother you, Mr. Wolfe. It’s just the strangest thing. I thought the TV was on.” She glanced at the dark screen. “Guess I’m hearing things.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
She laughed self-consciously. “You’ll think I’m a loony-tunes, but I thought — just for a moment — that I heard a…well, a roar.”
“A roar?” His voice was tight in his throat.
“Isn’t that silly? I thought I heard a roar. Like a lion, or a bear. Or something.”
“In here?”
“I know, I know…I’m too young for Alzheimer’s!” She laughed. “Sorry to have bothered you.” Her head vanished and she pulled the door shut.
Terry sat stock-still, staring at the door, feeling under his fingers the jagged tears in the leather upholstery. Stiffly, he bent forward and looked down, first at one arm of the chair and then the other. The tough leather was slashed in long lines, as if dull knives had been viciously racked across them. Several sets of tears, four lines to a set.
“God save me!” he whispered, and in the back of his mind he could hear Mandy’s voice whisper to him.
God didn’t save me, Terry.
“No!”
God didn’t save you, either. God won’t save this town, Terry.
“Get out of my head!” he cried, beating at his skull with both fists.
And you know what he wants from you. You see that, too. You see that every time you look in the mirror.
He bent forward and put his face in his hands and wept for his sanity, and his soul.
(3)
Officer Jim Polk lay on his back and blew cigarette smoke up at the ceiling. On the radio, Jerry Garcia was insisting that any friend of the devil was a friend of his. Beside him, Donna Karpinsky moaned softly in her sleep and turned away. Polk turned and looked at her back. She was a pretty girl, half his age, with lots of black hair, almost no ass, and eyes that were often pretty but could turn as hard as fists when she was in one of those moods. Polk understood the look. It was the whore look, old as time and as uncompromising as a hammer. She had given him that look when he had flagged her down two hours ago, thinking that he was rousting her or looking for a freebie, but the look had dissolved when he had waved a fistful of long green at her, and after that she got all dewy-eyed and as willing to please as a twice-kicked dog. Polk knew he could have gotten her to do him for free, just by flashing his badge, but it felt good to have her full and unreserved attention, with no resentment to spoil the mood.
He had given her two hundred bucks, which was four times the rate for a half-and-half, and he’d paid for the motel room and the bottle of Napoleon brandy that stood half-empty on the bedside table. Polk would have been happy just to have her be nice to him while they did it, but she must have been really psyched by the extra cash, and for over an hour they had made out like high school kids, kissing and touching and making it feel like something tender for a change. Then it had gotten down to business and she had properly hauled his ashes for him. Even so, he thought, she had been nice about that, too. She had made it seem like two people doing it, not just a half-drunk cop and a motel hooker.
Polk sucked on his cigarette and thought about the money that had bought him that evening’s pleasure. Vic’s money. Polk felt his insides twitch every time he thought about Vic and his money. In the past Polk had done a lot of things for Vic. Things that sometimes weren’t so bad, and sometimes made him sick to his stomach. Only once over those years had Polk ever tried to tell Vic that he wasn’t into it anymore. Only once, and then he had been out of work for four weeks because of the way Vic took the rebuff. Four weeks in which he pissed blood and tried not to breathe too deeply and had to eat only soft foods. He told Gus Bernhardt that he’d taken a bad tumble off his motorbike. No way Polk was ever going to tell Gus, or anyone else, that Vic had stomped him nearly unconscious and then stuffed a handful of dog shit in his mouth and held him at gunpoint until he’d swallowed it.
Lying there in bed, Polk thought back to that day, more than eighteen years ago, and the hand holding the cigarette began to shake.
He took three slow pulls on the cigarette to steady himself, and he blinked repeatedly until the tears of shame dried up. Eighteen years ago and it still felt the same. As Vic had stomped him, he had told Polk over and over again that he was getting off light. Polk believed him with a whole heart. Over the years, the little jobs for Vic had dwindled down to a trickle, just something here and there, usually for small change. But now he had a wad of bills so thick they wouldn’t even fit into his pants pocket.
What the fuck was Vic going to want him to do to earn that kind of scratch?
He had always been afraid that Vic would one day ask him to kill someone, and after that beating, Polk was not so sure that he wouldn’t do it. No devil in hell terrified Polk more than Vic Wingate, and no court or jail came close to intimidating him half as much.
It was a lot of money — a whole lot of money — and Vic always wanted every penny’s worth for his buck.
Please, God, Polk silently prayed. He coughed unexpectedly and sat up, his gut tightening as the spasm shook his whole body. He jammed a fist against his mouth to stifle the sound, and all Donna did was turn over and begin snoring. Polk felt a hot wetness on his hand and when he looked at it, he was confused and scared to see a splatter of dark droplets on his skin. It looked like tar, or like the black goo you find under compost heaps, but it smelled like…
He frowned, feeling sweat burst from his pores.
It smelled like blood.
Polk stared at it, absolutely unsure of what to do, say, or think next. He blinked a few times, and as he did so the light values in the room seemed to change. H
e angled his hand to let more light fall on the black goo, and suddenly it wasn’t black at all. That must have been the shadows cast by his own face as he bent down over it. No, this was clear, probably just spit, or…
He sniffed it again. A frown touched his mouth. He tasted it with his tongue, and his smile broadened. It wasn’t spit at all. It was brandy. Napoleon brandy. A short laugh bubbled from his throat as he licked up the brandy.
After a moment, Polk slowly lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, a contented smile on his face. When he had coughed, when he had seen the stain on his hand, not as brandy, but as some kind of black goo, the doubts and fears about what Vic was going to ask of him had vanished from his thoughts. Now all he thought about was the last few tasty drags of his cigarette and the sleeping girl next to him who was not going to be getting a full night’s sleep. Not with two hundred dollars to earn.
(4)
Iron Mike Sweeney was throwing up. With each spasm of his chest the broken rib exploded with agony, and fresh tears of pain sizzled in his eyes. He knelt by the side of the road, knees on the macadam, hands braced on the curb, head bowed, vomiting pints of a thick, black, viscous liquid into the gutter. It tasted hot and salty, like tears, or blood.
Mike had been halfway home from the hospital after his aborted attempt to visit Crow, and the ensuing lengthy third degree by that shrimpy little reporter, Mr. Newton. He was just crossing Mayfair Street when suddenly his stomach convulsed in such a powerful cramp that his knees had buckled and he’d slumped down over the handlebars of the War Machine and slowed to a stop hard against a curb. He stepped off the bike and let it fall into the street and then sagged against a parking meter, holding it with one hand and pressing his other hand to his stomach. His knees suddenly buckled and he sagged down to the pavement, sitting down onto the curb with a thump. The first spasm faded and for a moment his brain cleared of the greasy mist that had formed as soon as the sick wave of pain had hit, but then a second wave, bigger, darker, far more powerful slammed into him and he fell forward onto hands and knees and vomited into the street over the iron grill of a culvert. It was so sudden, and so unexpected, that it scared him, and when he saw what it was he was throwing up, the fear had blossomed into total terror.
He thought he was hemorrhaging, throwing up blood from some ruptured part of him. The thought that Vic had finally done it, finally beat him so bad that he was dying tumbled through his brain. The vomiting gradually stopped and he coughed and gagged and choked, eyes squeezed shut against the pain that twisted his guts and closed his throat. For almost two minutes he knelt there on the empty street, eyes still pressed shut, waiting for the spasms to start again. Gradually, very gradually, the awful tension in his stomach faded and went away. He could still feel the stricture in his throat and the searing pain of his rib, but his stomach no longer felt like a bubbling cauldron of sewage.
Slowly, afraid to look at the blood he’d puked out, he opened his eyes.
There was nothing in the gutter. Just a drop or two of spit glistening on the bars of the culvert grill. Nothing else.
Mike stared down, trying to understand. He had seen the blood, damn it, black as paint and as searing as raw whiskey. He had felt it as it flooded out of him. It had happened. Except — apparently, it hadn’t happened.
Mike Sweeney stared down at the gutter and felt a powerful wave of terror of some vast and unidentifiable kind sweep over him.
(5)
Officer Coralita Toombes and her temporary partner, Dixie MacVey, cruised along the winding stretch of A-32 under a haphazard scattering of stars overhead. The edges of the sky were black as a ring of cloud cover was moving in to cover the region again. The road shook itself out in front of them as they swept southeast toward the Pine Deep — Black Marsh border. By now it was a familiar circuit for Toombes and MacVey, one they’d been covering for nearly seven hours. They had a loop that started at the intersection of A-32 and Old Mill Road, dropped south as directly as the winding A-32 would allow, past the Guthrie farm, then down to the bridge that spanned the Delaware to Black Marsh in New Jersey, and there they would jag west on Peddler’s Trail, which looped past the rusty stretch of Swallow Hill Bridge and turned northeast again until it once more hit the Extension by Old Mill. The whole loop ate up an even thirty miles, though as a crow might fly it the trip could have been done in just over ten, but there wasn’t a straight road to be had anywhere in or around Pine Deep.
Toombes and MacVey drove in silence, partly from tiredness, partly from boredom, and partly because they couldn’t stand each other. From MacVey’s point of view, Toombes was a know-it-all big-city bitch cop who thought that she had seen it all, done it all, and had it all under control. MacVey saw Toombes as one of those cynical and dismissive types who had no time for small-town cops because they weren’t “real cops” and hadn’t tangled with “real criminals” and therefore didn’t rate much, if at all. MacVey was also clearly intimidated by Toombes for these very same reasons.
As Toombes saw it, MacVey was just another one of those NRA types who collected big guns because they were disappointed by the size of their own dicks, and had wet dreams about real honest-to-gosh shoot-outs with real honest-to-gosh criminals. The kind of small-town rube (though Toombes had to admit that there were plenty of them in the city, too) that had a yard-high stack of Soldier of Fortune and American Handgunner magazines next to his bed, watched every episode of COPS, and could recite the specs and stats of every high-caliber gun made since 1950. Toombes, in short, thought MacVey was an adolescent ass wearing a cop’s disguise, and having him as a partner made her miss Jerry Head, her own partner from back in the city, and it also made her uneasy, because one thing a cop needs for peace of mind is the knowledge that her backup is a professional and not likely to shoot her instead of the bad guy. Toombes figured that if push ever really came to shove, MacVey would probably shoot his own balls off while trying to remember how to get that monster Blackhawk.44 out its fancy breakaway holster.
As partnerships went, it was something less than a roaring success.
There is an old cop belief that under the right circumstances, given the proper negative stimulus, even the best law enforcement officer will sink to the level of an incompetent partner. Stupidity, as the saying goes, is catching. So is clumsiness. As they cruised along the road, they were both so caught up in mentally psychoanalyzing each other that they forgot to pay attention to what they were about. They forgot to look for Kenneth Boyd, who was walking alongside the road, knee deep in withered onion grass, heading in a straight line toward the Black Marsh Bridge.
If the officers had been driving more slowly, if they had been shining their spotlights along the side of the road, if they had not been fuming about being partnered with each other, then they would very probably have seen him, but they didn’t. Instead, they sped right past him, made the left that put them on Peddler’s Trail, and headed east. In minutes the unit was nearly lost in dust and distance, and then swallowed whole as they dropped over a hillock.
From his vantage point twenty yards up a darkened side road, Vic Wingate stared as the cruiser passed Boyd.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” he growled. “How thick can you get?” He fired up the truck and pulled out onto the road until he was just ahead of Boyd and then pulled to a stop in front of him.
“Get the fuck in!”
Boyd stopped and stared at him with intense hatred and naked hunger.
“I said get in! C’mon, we don’t have time to waste. And don’t get any maggots on the seat this time.”
The creature climbed in beside Vic and pulled the door shut.
“So much for getting a couple of trained observers to spot you leaving town. I mean, Jesus, how far up your own ass do you have to be not to spot an ugly fucked-up piece of shit like you right there by the side of the road? Maybe I should have put some neon friggin’ lights on you.”
Boyd just glared at him.
“Okay, new plan,” Vic said,
putting the truck in gear. “I’m going to drive you over to Black Marsh and drop you off somewhere. Make sure you’re seen by at least two or three people. Make a scene…break a window or something — but don’t fucking bite anyone and don’t get fucking caught! You hear me? You have to be seen — clearly seen — but you have to get away. Do whatever you got to do to make it back across the river. Hide in the fields until you hear from me or the Man.” He reached over and smacked Boyd on the forehead. “Hey! You listening to me?”
Boyd’s eyes were red torches in the dark pits of his eye sockets. He opened his mouth, his gray tongue flicking over his lips. The hands in his lap twitched and spasmed, wanting to grab, to rend.
Vic pulled onto the bridge and the wooden beams rumbled beneath the wheels. Watching Boyd out of the corner of his eye, Vic said, “You’d just love to rip my throat out, wouldn’t you?” He laughed. “Go ahead and try it…and see what the Man will do to you. That’s providing I don’t kick your sorry dead ass first.”
The creature’s torn and bloodless lips formed a single word, Griswold, but there was no sound.
“That’s right — Griswold. You know you don’t want to fuck with the Man. Don’t think being dead would save you if you fucked with him. The Man would eat your soul!” Vic’s voice was thick and heavy and he leaned into the words, his smile gone now. Boyd’s hands gradually stopped their twitching. “Yeah, there are worse things than death, Boyd, and trust me when I say you don’t want to find out what they are.” There were fires in Vic’s eyes now, and Boyd slowly recoiled from them. “You don’t want to find out what they are,” he repeated softly as the truck rolled off the bridge and he headed southeast to Black Marsh.
Ghost Road Blues pd-1 Page 40
