Ghost Road Blues pd-1

by Jonathan Maberry

  Not after looking into the bathroom goddamn mirror again not five goddamn minutes ago.

  Terry sipped the scotch and winced. He really loved scotch, but right now it tasted like boiled socks. On the way back to the hospital from the meeting he’d stopped in the liquor store and laid down forty-four bucks and change for the bottle and would normally had savored every sip. Now he just drank it and hoped that it would either flush out his brain or knock him blind and senseless. Either one would work. He had even held out the reasonable hope that the drug interaction between the scotch and the Xanax would do the trick, but it didn’t. He couldn’t even passively kill himself.

  He had never felt so powerless in his life.

  No. That wasn’t true.

  Thirty years ago, almost to the day, he’d felt even more helpless, and that was a cold hard fact. That had been the day that Mandy had died and he had been nearly killed. He’d spent weeks in the hospital and even now, after cosmetic surgery and three decades, his chest and shoulder still looked like patchwork.

  Thinking about that made drinking more urgent, so he swallowed the whole cup and refilled it. The bottle was down about a third and he could feel the paint peeling on the walls of his brain, but he was still way too sober and he was still alive.

  He hefted the bottle and considered it, wondering how much of it he would have to drink before he succumbed to alcoholic poisoning, and then wondered if his system would rebel first and throw it up. Probably. His gut felt like an acid wash.

  It was all falling apart. Everything. The cops and the feds pretended to defer to him as if he were a person of some actual importance, but he could see in their eyes that he was just a figurehead in a pissant little town where the worst and most typical crime was overtime parking, and the local idea of a crisis was rain on Sidewalk Sale Saturday. His best friend was in the hospital. The town’s most prosperous farmer was dead. The selectmen were in a panic. Every night he had those horrible dreams — dreams that were now intruding into his waking life.

  And my little sister’s ghost wants me to kill myself.

  He raised the refilled cup in a toast. “Here ya go, Mandy. Maybe this one will do it.” He closed his eyes, tossed back the shot, hissed as the gasses burned his throat, and then opened his eyes again. Nope. Still alive, damn it.

  Terry closed his eyes for a moment, took in a deep steadying breath, held it for a moment, and then let it out as slowly as he could. Then he took his cell phone from his coat pocket and hit speed-dial. It rang four times before a woman answered. “Hello?”

  “Hello, sweetheart,” Terry said in a softer tone than anything he’d managed for days.

  “Terry?” His wife’s voice was instantly concerned. “Where are you? You haven’t called all day and I’ve left a dozen messages—”

  “Sarah…things are really bad right now.”

  She paused, then said, “Yes, I know. Rachel Weinstock called me and told me some of what was going on. She said Saul was pretty rattled about an autopsy he had to perform.”

  “Pretty bad right now,” Terry said again. He could feel his eyes filling with tears.

  “Are you okay, honey?”

  God didn’t save you, either. God won’t save this town, Terry.

  “I’m…”

  And you know what he wants from you. You see that, too. You see that every time you look in the mirror.

  “Terry?”

  Terry, the only way to not be like him is to be like me.

  “I’m just tired, Sarah.”

  “Can you get away? Can you come home?”

  Tears were running freely down his face now. He took the full bottle of Xanax from his pocket, popped the lid off with his thumb, and poured the pills out onto the table next to his chair. Twenty-two pills. More than enough.

  “Terry,” she repeated, “can you get away?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered softly. “Maybe. Maybe there’s a way I can get free.”

  “Please come home, Terry,” Sarah begged. “You can’t run yourself into the ground like this.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Will you try?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll wait up.”

  Terry squeezed his eyes shut against a wave of grief and pain. The image of Sarah’s face burned in his mind — dark eyes flashing, thick fall of straight black hair just touched by a few strands of gray, a laughing mouth — and he fought not to sob out loud.

  Terry, the only way to not be like him is to be like me.

  “Call you later, sweetheart,” he said, when he could master himself enough to keep everything out of his voice.

  “I love you, Terry.”

  “I love you, Sarah. With all my heart.”

  He disconnected and dropped the phone on the floor. With a growl of mingled anger and fear and heartbreak he swept all the pills into his hand and held the closed fist above his upturned mouth.

  His upraised fist trembled with a palsy born of a dreadful inner conflict and slowly, as if moving against an almost irresistible force, he lowered his hand down to the level of his lips…and then down farther, past chin and chest until the clenched fist lay in his lap. Tears ran down his cheeks and his lips trembled with sobs.

  “No!” he said in a hoarse and alien voice that was filled with a rage of passion.

  Sarah had said, Please come home, Terry.

  He sat there for many minutes, still holding the Xanax, feeling them grind and crunch in his fist. Beside him the bottle wafted its own perfume of escape.

  Please come home.

  He struggled to his feet and shoved the fistful of Xanax deep into his jacket pocket. He almost — almost — went to the bathroom to flush their temptation away, but did not. Ultimately could not. In order not to embrace the option he needed to know it was still there. The same with the bottle. He capped it and put it in his briefcase. He did go to the bathroom, though, and there he ran cold water and splashed it on his face by the handful for over a minute, then patted his face dry. It was still clear that he’d been crying, but there was nothing more he could do to repair that.

  Turning, he went back into the lounge and stopped still. There, by the chair in which he’d been sitting, stood Mandy. His face was still streaked with blood, but tears now ran down and cut paths through the caked red. She looked at him with a mixture of horror and reproach.

  Terry stood there in the bathroom doorway, gripping the sides of the frame with both hands, his nails digging into the wood. What could he say? How could he defend against the accusation in her eyes?

  “I can’t do it!” he hissed. “I can’t! I have Sarah! I have my friends…my town! You can’t ask this of me.”

  Mandy lifted her eyes to his and the look in them changed from one of horror to a look of total hopeless defeat. She shook her head from side to side, closing her eyes and finally hanging her head.

  “It will all be worse now,” she said, but her voice was a ghostly whisper that he could barely hear. Between one teary blink of his eyes and the next she was gone.

  Terry stood there, unable to move, for a long time as his heart hammered in his chest and icy sweat pooled at the base of his spine. When he could finally make himself let go and walk out of the room and through the hospital hallways he moved with the unnatural stiffness of the condemned walking the ghost road to the chair.

  (5)

  Mike was nearly dancing with happiness when he left Crow’s room. All the way down the hall and in the elevator he kept breaking out into grins. Working for Crow at the Crow’s Nest would be the coolest! He could quit his paper route, which was okay money but a real pain in the ass, especially in bad weather. And he’d get his comics at a discount. Crow said that he could start at eight dollars an hour, which was huge! Anything he wanted to buy from the store would be at cost. Crow even said that they could maybe do a little jujitsu when things got slow. If Mike wasn’t in so much pain he would have thought he was dreaming.

  His face was locked into a br
oad happy grin as he exited the elevator and headed across the broad hall to the exit doors, passing nurses who saw his smile and returned it automatically. Mike passed two police officers who were heading into the hospital — one medium-sized and skinny and one huge and muscular. The skinny one grinned at him, but the big one gave him a flat, wide-eyed stare and as Mike passed he craned his head all the way around to watch him go. Mike barely noticed the cop’s attention as he pushed through the doors and jog-limped over to his bike.

  In the lobby, the cops stopped and the bigger officer stood staring with total intensity out through the glass.

  His partner said, “What’s up? You know that kid?”

  Temporary Officer Edward Oswald stared slack-jawed, not even hearing his partner. His heart had suddenly started hammering in his chest.

  His partner, Norris Shanks, tapped him on the arm. “Yo! Tow-Truck. What the hell’s with you?”

  Tow-Truck Eddie Oswald blinked, becoming aware of his partner. He cleared his throat and forced himself to turn away from the sight beyond the glass doors of the Beast — the very much alive Beast — unchaining his bike.

  “No…” he said absently. Then recollecting himself, he said, “No. It’s nothing.”

  Inside his brain the voice of God was telling him: Wait! Wait until you are alone!

  “Yes,” he murmured.

  “What?” asked Shanks.

  “Nothing,” Tow-Truck Eddie said and moved on into the hospital.

  (6)

  Val was awake when Crow came in and she felt her heart lift when he poked his head through the doorway.

  “You order a pizza?”

  She held her good arm out to him. “Come here and kiss me this instant, you idiot.”

  With as much consideration for their mutual injuries as he could manage, Crow gathered her in his arms and showered her face with kisses. Val could feel his heart beating against her chest as he held her close, and she leaned into him, kissing his neck, inhaling the scent of him — sweat, anesthetic, a hint of chocolate — and the reality and familiarity of him, even in so unfortunate a place as this hospital, made her feel more human than she had all day.

  Val touched his hand, where the nub of the IV port was still taped to the skin. “You playing copycat?”

  “Yep. I waited until they started a new IV bag, popped it out, tied a loop in the plastic thingee, and snuck out. The cop on duty is Norris Shanks and he’s an old bud. He played lookout for me while I snuck in. If we get caught, though, we have to say he was on a bathroom break.”

  He settled himself on the side of the bed and his eyes were searching her face. “I’m okay,” she said, forcing a smile. “No more bad dreams.”

  “Did you sleep much?”

  “For a bit. They must have really knocked me out, because I don’t remember anything. If I dreamed it wasn’t—”

  “It wasn’t about him?”

  She nodded. “No, thank God.”

  “Me neither. I had just that one about him sneaking into my room. I wonder if everyone who goes through stuff like this has these kinds of dreams.” He kissed her forehead. “Well, whether or no, I don’t think we’ll need to worry about him for real.”

  He told her about his conversation with Head, and how the officer confirmed that he had seen Ruger take several hits.

  “Most likely he’s dead out there in the fields, or at best made it across the road to the Passion Pit.”

  Val’s eyes were hot but her voice arctic as he said, “I hope he fell over the edge of the pit all the way down into Dark Hollow and is lying down there in great pain, bleeding to death.”

  The venom in her words did not shock Crow in the least; he couldn’t help but agree, but it was a conversation stopper and for a while they held each other and thought ugly thoughts of revenge as the bedside clock ticked closer to midnight. In half an hour it would be October 1. Maybe the season of bad luck would end with September and the Halloween winds would blow their usual good fortune into the town.

  “I had a long talk with Saul,” Crow said at last. “He said that we could both get out of here tomorrow. Connie and Mark, too.”

  Val nodded, said nothing. Crow could imagine how little she wanted to go back to that farmhouse now. The whole place would probably have the feel of violation and grief about it. While Val had slept Crow had called her farm foreman and instructed him to replace the front door — the one with the bullet holes was to be turned over to the cops if they wanted it or otherwise burned — and the living room put back to rights. Crow had been very clear when he said that there were to be no signs at all of the events of the night before, including the removal of all of the crime-scene tape and any mess left by the hordes of officers and lab technicians who had been swarming over the place all day. The foreman, a smart and capable fellow, had entirely agreed and said that he would see to everything.

  Even so, Crow had no intention of taking Val there when they were released in the morning.

  “I have a plan,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “The cops say we can’t go back to the farm yet,” he lied. “So instead I’ve booked a room at the Harvestman for Mark and Connie. It’s where the cops are staying, so they’ll be safe, and it’ll be easier for them to come back here for treatment and, um…therapy.”

  Val just nodded. Saul Weinstock had explained to her the kind of treatment Connie would need. Mark, too, in all probability.

  “What about us?”

  “We’ll be moving into the Pine Manor Inn for the next night or two.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “Wow!”

  “A little elegance won’t hurt us, baby. Sunken tub, Jacuzzi to massage away our aches and pains. Great food. A nice bottle of wine for you and an equally nice bottle of Pepsi for me.”

  She closed her eyes and leaned against him. “God, it sounds wonderful, but—”

  “No buts, sweetie. I ran it by Saul and he approved, so this is on the level of doctor’s orders.”

  “But the Pine Manor costs an arm and a leg! That’s too much to—”

  “Not at all, not at all,” he said smoothly. “Nothing’s too good for my fiancée.”

  He felt her stiffen against his chest as she processed the words. Then she opened her eyes and raised her head, staring with puzzled uncertainly into his eyes. “What did you…?”

  Then she saw what he had taken out of his bathrobe pocket while her eyes were closed. He held it flat in the palm of his hand. A square blue-velvet box.

  Val’s eyes were as wide and huge as any painting by Keene, and her mouth formed a perfect O.

  Since she had only one arm free, Crow opened the box for her and showed her the diamond ring.

  “I wanted to do this over dinner at some fancy restaurant in New Hope, but things got a little crazy and…well…I want this whole thing to end on a happy note. For me it would be the happiest note of my life, Val, if you would agree to be my wife. I love you more than anything in the world and if you say yes I’ll be the happiest man who ever walked the planet.”

  “Oh my God!” she said…and she said it several times.

  “Can I take that as a yes?” He cleared his throat. “I…hope?”

  Val’s eyes filled with tears and with her one good arm she clung to him with incredible strength, showering his battered faces with kisses by the dozen, saying, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” over and over again.

  He steered through the deluge of kisses until he found her lips with his and then kissed her as deeply and as sweetly as he could, feeling his own tears flow and mingle with hers. He came up for air only long enough to slip the ring on her finger, and then pulled her close again.

  “I love you!” they both said at the same time, speaking the words into each other’s panting mouth.

  And at that moment all of the lights went out.

  Chapter 26

  (1)

  “Crow! What’s happening?”

  He pulled away from her, turning toward the open doorway, but all he c
ould see through the darkness were vague forms hurrying about, sometimes colliding with one another.

  “I don’t know,” he said, rising. “Power failure, maybe.” He moved to the window and parted the heavy curtains. “Lights are on in the parking lot.” He pulled the curtains back and faint light spilled into the room. “Must be a generator. The emergency lights should come on any second.”

  A full minute passed and the backup lights did not so much as flicker.

  “That’s weird,” Crow said. He was standing by the doorway looking at the confusion in the hall. He saw the police officer assigned to guard him standing by the nurses’ station and called out, “Norris! What’s happening?”

  Norris Shanks turned around and shone a flashlight beam full in his eyes. “Crow? Go back into your room. We have a power outtage.”

  “Really? Never would have guessed.” He went out into the hall.

  “Hey, Shanks,” he said, batting the flashlight gently to one side. “You sure that’s all it is? I mean…aren’t the back-up lights on a different generator or something?”

  He couldn’t read the cop’s face in the dark, but he saw Shanks stiffen for a second and then snatch the microphone from its clip on his shoulder.

  “Base, this is Officer Shanks at Pinelands Hospital on guard duty with Crow and Val Guthrie.”

  “What is it, Norris?” Ginny’s bored voice answered.

  “We have a total lights-out here at the hospital. Mains and backup generator. Requesting backup.”

  “All the lights?”

  “Yes,” he snapped, and Crow could hear that Shanks was actually afraid. “This may not be a technical issue. Please roll all available units. Now.”

  His tone was such that for once Ginny didn’t argue. “All units, this is Base. Officer needs assistance at Pinelands College Teaching Hospital. Hospital lights are out, repeat hospital lights — main and backup — are out. All units respond.”

  There was a flurry of voices calling in to report their whereabouts and say they were on their way.