“That ought to do it,” Shanks said, sounding relieved.
“Yeah,” agreed Crow, but he didn’t relax. Patients were coming out of their rooms and demanding answers, nurses and orderlies were still colliding into one another, a few doctors were calling out orders that apparently no one was paying attention to.
Crow turned and called to Val’s room, “I’ll be right in, baby. We’re calling for backup.”
He started to turn back to Shanks and then paused, having not heard a reply. He took a step toward her room. “Val?”
Nothing.
Crow hurried over to the open door and peered into the gloom. Val was in bed, the sheets pulled up, turned away. Just a series of lumps in the darkness.
“Baby, you okay?” he asked as he entered the room.
She didn’t stir and he reached over to touch her shoulder and then he froze. Val was lying on her left side, turned away from him toward the window.
Her left side.
The injured side.
With a cry of terror bubbling on his lips he grabbed the sheet and pulled it down.
She turned toward him, her face and body edged with silver from the pale light from outside, and as she turned Crow felt his heart freeze in his chest and his guts turn to icy slush.
It was not Val at all.
The figure in the bed that grinned up at him with a jagged smile of broken teeth was Karl Ruger!
(2)
Detective Sergeant Frank Ferro had just finished brushing his teeth, had changed into pajama bottoms, and was about to sit down on the edge of his hotel bed when his cell phone rang. When you’re a cop, a call at midnight is never going to be good news. He picked his trousers off the bedside chair and pulled the cell from the belt clip.
“Ferro.”
“Frank?” It was his partner, Vince LaMastra, sounding tired but stressed. “Something’s happening at the hospital.”
“What?”
LaMastra told him.
“Shit,” Ferro said. “Lobby. Two minutes.”
He snapped the cover of his cell phone shut and reached for his pants.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
(3)
Crow’s mind was frozen in a black hell of panic. Ruger lay there in Val’s bed — Val was nowhere to be seen — and none of it was possible.
“Surprise, surprise,” Ruger said, and then without a flicker of warning cocked his foot and kicked Crow in the chest with shocking force. Crow flew backward against the wall of the bathroom cubicle, striking the back of his head with a heavy thud. Fireworks exploded everywhere and he felt his knees starting to go.
In a flash Ruger leaped out of the bed and caught him before he could fall, taking two bunched fistfulls of Crow’s robe and hauling him back to his feet. He pulled him close and Crow’s nose was assaulted by the smell of Ruger’s breath — like rot and sewage. It was just the same as it was in the dream he’d had earlier.
“Bet you’re wondering where your little bitch is, aren’t you, boy?” Ruger banged him back against the wall again and again. Crow was more than half dazed and his mind was spinning with a nauseous vertigo.
“Val…” he gasped.
Ruger stopped banging him off the wall long enough to lean close to his ear and whisper, “The bitch is mine, asshole. I’m going to enjoy splitting her right up the middle.” He slammed him back again and held him there. “But you…I just wanted to introduce myself again before I ripped your fucking heart out.” He let go of Crow for a second but before Crow could fall, Ruger closed one hand around his throat and pinned him once again to the bathroom wall. He raised the other hand, holding it flat, and simply slapped Crow across the face.
It was the hardest blow he had ever felt. It was like getting hit by a piece of board or a slab of stone. Ruger’s hands were icy cold and immensely powerful. Crow’s head shot to one side and his face felt mashed. Ruger backhanded him, catching the corner of his mouth this time, and the blow ground lip against tooth so sharply that blood splashed from Crow’s face onto Ruger’s.
Ruger stopped hitting him as he opened his mouth and his tongue — gray and dry — quested out like a hungry worm and found the droplets. He licked each one into his mouth, his eyes fluttering half closed for a moment as he savored the taste.
“Oh my God…” he breathed and he looked like a man in the throes of an orgasm. “Oh my God…”
Crow struggled to make his senses work and he shook his head like a drunkard. Ruger’s eyes snapped open again and the look in them — the appearance of them — nearly stopped Crow’s heart in his chest. Ruger’s eyes had changed. They were no longer a brown so dark that they looked black — now they were as red as the blood he’d just licked off his own lips.
Even with a hand clamped around his throat, Crow screamed.
Ruger’s lips were peeled back like a feral dog’s as he leaned in toward Crow’s throat and they were less than an inch away when Norris Shanks yelled, “What the fuck are you doing?”
Hissing, Ruger turned toward the cop who stood in the doorway. Shanks held his flashlight to one side and was reaching for his handgun when Ruger grabbed Crow with both hands and threw him across the room. Yelling in pain and fear, Crow spun through the air and crashed into Shanks with a teeth-jarring impact that slammed them both against the far wall. Shanks slid to the floor and Crow landed hip-first in the officer’s lap, mashing his testicles and tearing loose all the stitches on both sides of his hips. Shanks shrieked with pain and Ruger took two quick strides toward him and kicked him in the forehead, knocking his head back with a crunch that silenced the scream at once.
Crow rolled off Shanks and spun around on his hands and knees. Despite the searing pain in both hips, with the hand removed from his throat Crow’s oxygen-deprived brain was working better now and adrenaline was starting to pump through his system.
“Cr…Crow…?”
He turned and saw Val’s head and shoulder appear from the far side of the bed, silhouetted against the window. She was alive!
Ruger reached for him but Crow launched himself forward, surprising the killer and driving his right fist into Ruger’s crotch; then as he bent over the pain Crow reached up with both hands, grabbed his hair, and yanked him downward. Ruger hit chest-down on the floor with a crash that sent a shock back up through Crow’s arms. Crow lifted his head and slammed it down again — and again. He could hear bones break.
He lifted a third time and Ruger’s icy hands shot out and caught his wrists like two vises. After those three blows it was an impossible move, something no man, not even Ruger, could have done. But there was no loss of strength in those hands and Ruger held them, pulling Crow’s fists away from his scalp so forcefully that Crow could feel hair and scalp tearing. He still held them as he rose to his feet while keeping Crow in a kneeling position, arms raised as if in surrender.
Crow looked up at Ruger and even in the darkness he could see those fiery red eyes — those impossible eyes — and see the cuts and lacerations on the killer’s face. Even the worst one barely bled a drop.
Crow knelt there, held by overwhelming strength, looking up at Ruger, trying to make sense out of what he was seeing. None of this was possible. Was he still dreaming? Was he lost somewhere in a nightmare? For one wild moment Crow wondered if he had really been shot worse than he thought back there on Val’s farm. Could everything that had happened since then be part of some trauma-induced coma?
Ruger’s fists were tightening and the pressure was making Crow’s arm bones grind together. He had to do something, dream or not, impossible or not.
Using Ruger’s iron grip as a support, Crow picked up both of his legs at once, poised for the split part of a second like a gymnast hanging from the rings, and then pulled his knees up to his chest so his feet could clear the floor as he brought them up and kicked out with every ounce of strength he could manage. He tried to break Ruger’s knees, but the angle was bad and instead his heels struck Ruger in the hard muscle of both thighs.<
br />
It was enough. Ruger howled in pain — the first concession to humanity that he had made — and dropped Crow. Ruger staggered back with bad balance and had to grab the footrest of the bed to keep from falling.
Instantly Crow made a dive for Shanks’s pistol and had it out when Ruger lunged at him again, howling with rage. Crow swung the gun up but Ruger swatted it out of his hand and the gun flew across the room where it struck the window, creating a vast spiderweb fracture. Ruger again reached down for Crow but Crow threw himself backward and kicked upward, catching Ruger under the chin. Once more Ruger was staggered backward, but again he somehow managed to shake it off.
“What’s going on?” someone yelled and Crow was vaguely aware of shapes in the doorway — nurses, patients.
“Get the cops!” Crow yelled, but he had no idea if anyone went to get help. Ruger reached over and swung the door shut with such force that Crow could hear cries of surprise and pain as it struck faces and hands.
Then Ruger turned and leered at Crow, showing the uneven row of teeth — the teeth Crow had shattered after they’d fought in the rain — and his grin looked like the mouth of a shark. All of those jagged teeth seemed unnaturally sharp and unnaturally long.
“I’m going to kill you and everything you love,” Ruger hissed. He was not even breathing hard as he closed in again, bone-white fingers reaching to grab.
Crow kicked up again and caught Ruger in the chest, but it was like kicking a tree trunk. It didn’t even slow him down. He tried it again and Ruger caught his ankle and dragged him forward like a fisherman reeling in a marlin. Crow tried every trick he knew to disengage his foot, but all he did was tear the skin on his ankle and twist his knee.
Ruger reached down to grab Crow’s throat again when the loudest sound Crow had ever heard seemed to rip the whole room apart. Ruger was knocked forward and almost fell, but took a broad step to clear Crow and somehow remained on his feet. He turned and Crow looked up and there was Val on her knees, leaning against the far corner of the bed, holding Shanks’s gun out as smoke curled up from the barrel.
With effort Ruger pulled himself erect and faced Val. He hissed at her like a snake and started to reach for her when she shot him again. The bullet caught him in the shoulder and spun him around. Crow covered his head with both arms and ducked out of the way as the bullet punched through Ruger’s upper chest and struck the TV mounted on brackets above the bed. Metal and glass fragments showered down on Ruger, but he did not fall.
“You killed my father!” Val was screaming over and over again. She fired again, catching Ruger on the other shoulder and he did a wild pirouette before careening off the bed.
Crow reached over to Shanks and frantically patted down his legs until he found the backup pistol in a small holster strapped to his ankle. Above him Val fired again and Ruger was slammed back against the wall.
“You fucking bitch!” he screamed, but still he didn’t go down.
Crow tore open the Velcro and clawed the pistol out of the holster. It was a.38 snub-nosed Smith and Wesson, and Crow rolled onto his back and raised the pistol with both hands and just as Val fired a shot into Ruger’s stomach Crow opened fire and hit him again and again and again.
Caught between two fires, Ruger was a puppet dancing in the darkness, being jerked back and forth, either unwilling or unable to fall as Val hit him in the stomach and chest and groin and Crow hit him in the back and kidneys and shoulders.
Crow fired five times and the hammer clicked dry on the sixth chamber, which had been left empty. Val fired twice more and then there was the audible metallic snap of the breech locking open.
Ruger was chest-forward to the wall, and as Crow watched his legs buckled and he slid slowly down to his knees, lingered there for a second, and then toppled over onto his back. Mouth slack, eyes shut, muscles slack.
As Val knelt there her arm sagged to the floor and she dropped the gun. “You killed my father, you son of a bitch.” She looked at Crow with dark and wild eyes and he could see the fresh dark bruise on her face where Ruger must have hit her when he’d slipped into the room during the blackout.
“Val…wait…I have to check.” Holding the gun high, ready to use it as a club, Crow wormed his way over and with his other hand felt for a pulse in Ruger’s throat. Nothing. He tried another spot. Absolutely nothing.
Crow bowed his head.
Karl Ruger was dead.
“Jesus Christ,” Crow said, and then he struggled to his knees and reached across the corner of the bed toward her just as her eyes lost their focus and rolled up in their sockets. With a soft sigh she passed out and sagged down on the bed. Whimpering in fear, Crow crawled over the bed to her and pressed his ear to her chest, not breathing at all until he heard the steady thump-thump-thump of her heart.
“Thank God!” he breathed and kissed her over her heart and then kissed her sweet face. “Thank God….”
Outside, there were yells and an official voice — Frank Ferro, Crow thought — was yelling, “Police! Police! Out of the way!” Footsteps were hurrying, getting louder, coming closer.
A hand clamped around his wrist with implacable force and Crow turned in absolute horror to see Karl Ruger leering up above the footrest, his eyes wide and red and hellish.
With irresistible force he pulled himself up and pulled Crow close and whispered in his graveyard voice, “Ubel Griswold sends his regards.” Then he laughed the coldest laugh Crow had ever heard and the red light went out of his eyes and Karl Ruger sank back to the floor.
Crow was frozen there, his eyes wide and unblinking, his heart beating painfully in his chest, mouth agape as the horror of those five words plunged his entire world into madness.
Epilogue
(1)
Midnight came and went in Pine Deep and no one took notice as September died and a cold October was born amid shadows and sirens and flashing lights.
Detective Sergeant Frank Ferro took charge of the investigation and cleanup at Pinelands Hospital and slowly the story unfolded. The hospital lights had been shut off at the source by the simple act of the main breakers being thrown, and the auxiliary generator had been disabled with lines and wires cut. The maintenance supervisor, Carl Wilkerson, was found unconscious in the electrical shed behind the building — alive but badly injured with a cracked skull. The weapon was a pair of bolt cutters; the same cutters had been used to gain entry to the shed and disable the generator. The main breakers were turned back on and by morning the backup had been repaired as well. Wilkerson was admitted to the hospital in guarded condition, though when he regained consciousness two days later he had no memory at all of the event. “Traumatic amnesia,” diagnosed Saul Weinstock.
Weinstock met with Ferro, LaMastra, and Gus in the doctors’ lounge around two in the morning, as things were beginning to settle down. Over cups of coffee — Ferro’s fourteenth of the day — Weinstock gave them a status report.
“Officer Shanks has a hell of a lump on his head and a very sore set of testicles — about which we can all sympathize — but will be fine. We’re keeping him overnight for observation.”
“How’s Ms. Guthrie?” LaMastra asked. “She really came through in there.”
Weinstock grinned. “Yeah, never leave Val out of the equation. She’s known for rising to the occasion. And as far as her injuries go, we put two stitches in her cheek and in the morning we’ll be doing a CT scan of her eye socket. X-rays showed that she has a hairline crack of the right orbit, but we need to rule out trauma to the eye itself.”
“Jeez,” said Gus. “She said all he did was backhand her.”
Ferro shook his head. “And Crow?”
“I had to disappoint him about getting kicked loose tomorrow. He won’t be going anywhere for at least two, three days. Fourteen stitches in his mouth. Both cheeks. Three loose molars. His left wrist has the weirdest compression bruise I’ve ever seen, like it was caught in a vise.”
“He said Ruger just squeezed his wrists.”
Weinstock shook his head. “No. He had to have caught it in a door or something. The human hand can’t generate the kind of PSI needed to do that. But with all the jolts he took I doubt he remembers things clearly.”
“Yeah,” said LaMastra, “he also said Ruger’s eyes turned red for a while.”
“As I said, he’s disoriented.”
Ferro sipped his coffee. It was horrible. Reheated, probably, though that wasn’t why his face was sour. “And our boy Ruger?”
“Karl Ruger’s body was taken to the morgue where an autopsy will be performed tomorrow by yours truly. Though I’d rather just run him through a composter and let it be.”
“Amen to that,” said Gus and LaMastra at the same time.
“Here’s the part I don’t get, gentlemen, and maybe there’s some new street drug that can turn someone into Superman, but cursory examination showed that Ruger had been shot over two dozen times,” Weinstock said, pausing to let that sink in. “There were five original wounds, which had all started to close. Yes, you heard me. They were healing. Since the day before yesterday. And then there were all of the shots collectively fired by Crow and Val. You want to tell me how a man with five bullets in him eludes your police manhunt for two days and then breaks in here, knocks out our maintenance guy, knocks out a cop and beats the living shit out of two more people, and then only goes down after they empty two guns into him from a range of about six feet?” He looked at them, his mouth smiling but his eyes very hard and, perhaps, a little afraid. “You want to tell me how that’s possible, guys, and I’ll get us all on the cover of the Journal of the American Medical Association ’cause it’ll be the medical miracle of the century.”
Gus just looked into his coffee cup. LaMastra was staring at Ferro, and Ferro was meeting the doctor’s flat stare, but after a few seconds all he could do was shake his head.
“He is dead, though, right?” asked Gus.
“Oh yes. Karl Ruger is very, very dead. He’s wrapped in plastic and in the fridge. But to tell you the truth, fellas,” Weinstock said, “I’m not even sure I want to do the autopsy on this guy. I’m not sure I know enough medicine to go in there and figure this out, and no, that’s not a joke.”
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