Dead Man's Song

Chapter 1

(1)

The morphine should have kept him out for hours, down there in the darkness where there was no pain, no terror. After the doctors had stitched up his mouth and lip and the nurses had inserted replacement IV needles in his hand and shot the narcotics into his blood, Malcolm Crow should have just gone into that dark nowhere where there are no memories, no dreams. But that didn’t happen.

He only slept for a few hours while Officer Jerry Head—on loan from the Philly PD and part of the combined task force that had been formed to hunt down Kenneth Boyd, Tony Macchio, and Karl Ruger—sat in a plastic visitor chair and watched.

In his dreams Crow walked through the cornfields of the Guthrie farm, looking for Val, searching for her everywhere but finding nothing. As he hunted through the dreamscape he could hear a whispering echo of music buried beneath the hiss and rustle of the moving cornstalks—faint, but definitely there. He knew it was blues because it was always blues in his dreams; he knew that if he could get closer to it, if he could find its source, then he would be able to tell the name of the song. Somehow that mattered, though he did not know why. The dreamer never questions the logic of the dream.

Crow pushed through the corn, wincing now and then as the sharp blades of the leaves nicked his face and palms. He was barefoot; his hospital gown flapped open and the cold stung his ass. The ground was hard, his feet were blistered and bleeding, but he did not stop, did not even look down. The breeze stilled and for just a second he could hear the song more clearly. Damn, he did know it, but he just couldn’t pull the name out of his head. Something about a road. Something about a prison. What the hell was it?

He turned, orienting himself, and looked back the way he’d come. Behind him the corn was smashed down and broken aside as if his passage through the field had been like a bulldozer’s. He could see the trail leading in a twisted line going back so far that it vanished into the distance. The music was stronger now and he moved off to his right, humming as he went. It was in his head, in his mouth, and then he knew it. It was an old prison blues song, something someone had taught him long ago, back when he was a kid; and this time it came to him: “Ghost Road Blues.” A song from down South, something to do with prisoners suffering in Louisiana’s Angola prison and praying for release—even if it was the Angel of Death who unlocked their chains.

Crow stopped and listened to it, one ear hearing the song drifting along the breeze and the other listening to the song play inside his head from a long time ago. That had been on a warm early autumn afternoon on Val Guthrie’s porch, with Val sitting on the swing next to Terry and Terry’s little sister, Mandy. Crow’s brother Billy—good ol’ Boppin’ Bill—had a haunch propped on the whitewashed rail, tossing a baseball up into the air and catching it in his outfielder’s glove. Val’s dad was there—old Henry—and Henry’s wife, Bess. There were others, too—farm folks and field hands, brothers and cousins of the Guthrie clan, all of them smiling, clapping hands or snapping fingers, tapping their toes as the man with the guitar played his songs. Crow could see the guitarist so clearly: a stick-thin guy with a nappy Afro and dark eyes that sparkled with equal measures sadness and humor. Dark skin and loose clothes, skinny legs crossed with one work-booted foot jiggling in the air along with his music. A dime with a hole in it hung from a string tied around his brown ankle. Scars on his hands and face, shadows in his eyes, laugh lines around his mouth. Crow remembered the nickname he, Val, and Terry had given him because he was so skinny: the Bone Man.

On some level Crow knew that he was dreaming all of this, just as he was aware that he had dreamed of the Bone Man many times. Standing motionless now, adrift in sea of waving corn, Crow closed his eyes and listened to the gentle voice of the singer. The song was a lament for the prisoners in the infamous Red Hat House at Angola Prison in Louisiana who were imprisoned more for their skin color than for any real crime; they were beaten and humiliated by the guards, tortured, degraded—yet enduring. Then at the end of their days in that hellish place they stood tall and proud as they strolled that last mile to where Ol’ Sparky waited—knowing the other prisoners loved them for it and the guards hated that they could never truly break their spirits.

The song ended and the last mournful notes were sewn like silver threads through the freshening breeze, leaving Crow feeling lost and abandoned out there in the field. He opened his eyes and looked around. It was darker now, the sun hidden behind storm clouds as long fingers of cold shadow reached from the mountains in the north across the fields toward him. He clutched the inadequate hospital johnnie around himself, trying to conserve its meager warmth.

“Are you there?” he said aloud, and he wasn’t sure if he was calling for Val or for the Bone Man. As if in answer the corn behind him rustled and Crow spun toward it, his heart suddenly hammering. The Bone Man pushed aside the dry stalks like a performer parting the curtains to come onstage. He had his old guitar slung across his back, the slender neck hanging down behind his right hip. His skin was no longer dark brown but had faded to an ashy gray, and his eyes had a milky film over them, making him look dead.

“I heard you playing…” Crow said, his voice as dry as the Bone Man’s eyes. The Bone Man opened his mouth and said something, but there was no sound at all, not even a whisper. He smiled ruefully and gave Crow an expectant look, obviously waiting for an answer. “I…can’t understand you,” Crow said. “I mean…I can’t hear you.”

The Bone Man licked dry lips with a gray tongue and tried again. Still no sound at all, but Crow could at least read the man’s lips well enough to make out two words. Little Scarecrow. He understood that. Little Scarecrow was what he had once been called, years ago—a nickname given him by a man he’d given a nickname to in turn. Tit for tat. The Bone Man and Little Scarecrow. What he was called when he was nine.

Thunder rumbled far away to the northeast, and they both turned to look. There was a flash of lightning beyond the fields, over past the lover’s lane by the drop-off that led down to Dark Hollow. Crow saw the Bone Man nod, apparently to himself, and when the gray man turned his milky eyes were filled with a fear so sharp that it bordered on panic.

“I knew someone who lived down there once,” said Crow, and he was amazed to hear that his own voice had changed. It was the voice of a child. Maybe nine or ten. “There was a bad man who lived down there a long time ago.”

Narrowing his eyes, the Bone Man peered at him. Apparently he, too, heard the change in Crow’s voice. Little Scarecrow’s voice.

“He killed my brother, you know. He killed Billy and ate him all up.”

Now even Crow’s body had changed. He was nine years old, wearing pajamas and holding a tattered stuffed monkey. The Bone Man towered over him and little Crow—Little Scarecrow—looked up at him. “He ate Billy all up. He did it to my best friend’s sister, too. He made her all dead and ate her up. He does that, he…eats people all up.”

A tear broke from the dust-dry eye of the Bone Man and cut a path down his cheek.

“The bad man wanted to eat me all up, too…and he was gonna, but you stopped him! You came and stopped him and he went running off.” Little Scarecrow shuffled his feet and hugged his monkey tight to his chest. “Val’s dad said that you killed that man. Did you? Did you kill the bad man?”

The Bone Man opened his mouth, tried to say something, but the thunder boomed overhead and both he and the boy jumped. Red lightning veined the clouds, souring the breeze with the stink of ozone. The storm was centered over the drop-off to Dark Hollow, but it was coming their way fast with thunder like an artillery barrage. Without thinking he reached out and took the Bone Man’s hand. It was dry and cold, but it was firm, and after staring down at the boy in apparent shock for a long minute, the gray man returned a reassuring squeeze. Little Scarecrow looked up at him—and deep within the morphine dreams the adult Crow felt the surreal quality of the moment as he saw a dead man through his own youthful eyes. It was like watching a movie and being a part of it at the same time.

Officer Jerry Head looked up from his copy of Maxim as Crow shifted uneasily, twisting the sheets around his legs. “Bad dreams,” he murmured, then grunted. “No surprise there.” He went back to the article he was reading. Outside the window, in a totally cloudless sky, there was a flicker of distant lightning that Head did not consciously notice, but as he read his right hand drifted down and he absently began running his thumbnail over the rubber ridges of his holstered pistol’s grip.

In the cornfield, Little Scarecrow and the Bone Man stood hand in hand, watching the storm; it was a big, angry thing—flecked with red and hot yellow and sizzling white, lumped with purple and black. A cold wind came hard out of the northeast, heavy with moisture and smelling of decay. Above them a cloud of black night birds flapped and cawed their way toward the southwest, racing to outrun the storm, but the lightning licked out and incinerated three of the birds. They fell, smoking and shapeless, into the corn.

Tugging the Bone Man’s hand, Little Scarecrow looked up at him, puzzled and frightened. “I thought you killed the bad man. That’s what Val’s dad said…that you killed the bad man.”

There was a final terrible explosion of thunder and a burst of lightning so bright that it stabbed into Little Scarecrow’s eyes like spikes and he spun away, clamping his hands over his face—

—and woke up with a cry of real pain and genuine terror.

“Griswold!” he screamed as he woke and then there was a big dark shape looming over him and hands on his shoulders. Crow was blind with sleep and morphine and he tried to see, tried to fight, but the hands were too strong.

“Whoa, man,” said the voice of the man standing over him. “You’re gonna pop your stitches you keep that shit up.”

Abruptly Crow stopped fighting, blinking his eyes clear to see the big cop standing there. Broad-shouldered with a shaved head and an easy grin. It took Crow a second to fish his name out of the dark. “Jerry…?”

“Yeah, man, it’s just me.” Head smiled at him, but there was concern in his eyes. “You were having one hell of a nightmare there.”

“Christ,” Crow muttered, “you don’t know the half of it.”

Head helped Crow settle himself and he arranged the sheets and plumped his pillow as tidily as any nurse, gave him a sip of water through a straw, and settled back in his chair, scooping his magazine from off the floor where it had fallen.

Crow rubbed his eyes. “What time is it?”

“Almost six. Sun’ll be up in a bit. You weren’t out more than a few hours, though. You want me to get the nurse to bring you something, help you sleep?”

“God, I don’t think I ever want to go to sleep again.” With the tip of his tongue he probed the stitches inside his mouth, wincing. He sighed and settled back against the pillow but there was no getting comfortable. Everything hurt. Even his hair felt like the ends of brittle pieces of straw stuck into his scalp. “You on shift all night?”

“One of the local blues is supposed to relieve me at six-thirty.” He hesitated. “I can stick around if you want, though—”

Crow waved it off. “Thanks, man, but it’s cool. Tell me, though, did, um, anything else happen last night? I mean, after…”

Last night had been the second chapter in a nightmare that had begun two days before, on September 30. The whole thing had started when a trio of Philadelphia mobsters had forced a drug deal to go sour so they could make off with both the money and the cocaine, and had left behind a warehouse littered with dead men—their own cronies, a posse of Jamaicans, and at least one cop. Karl Ruger led the crew, and if there was ever a sicker, more violent, more vicious son of a bitch on planet Earth, then Crow had never heard of him. Ruger had been the directing force behind the buy, and he had made it go south because he needed enough money to flee the country—not just to elude the police manhunt, but to escape the wrath of Little Nicky Menditto, the crime boss of Ruger’s own outfit. Rumor had it that Menditto had learned that Ruger was the man hunted nationwide as the Cape May Killer—a psychopath who had slaughtered a group of senior citizens at the lighthouse on the Jersey Shore. Little Nicky’s grandparents had been on that tour.

The slaughter had been a bizarre by-product of a mob war in Philly, but Ruger had gone way past his instructions of “doing something to hurt Little Nicky.” Ruger had committed atrocities that were being written about in books and made into movies. Ruger was the kind of real-world killer than made Ted Bundy look like a genial neighbor. His identity had remained hidden for years, but then the whisper stream had started and Ruger knew that he had to run or die. The mob was never known for understanding or forgiveness.

How or why Ruger’s crew had crashed their car was something neither Crow nor the interjurisdictional police task force had been able to determine, and the ensuing manhunt was massive. Unfortunately their car had crashed on a remote edge of the Guthrie family farm. Every time Crow thought about how Ruger invaded the Guthrie house, brutalized the family, and nearly killed Val—his Val!—Crow felt his guts turn to ice.

It burned Crow that he hadn’t been there in time to stop Ruger before he moved like a killer storm through the lives of Val and her family. Crow’s best friend, Terry Wolfe, mayor of Pine Deep and owner of the country’s largest Haunted Hayride, had begged Crow to drive out to the attraction and shut it down, fearing what would happen if Ruger and his men showed up there. Crow had wasted way too much time getting that job done, and not really taking the job all that seriously. Mobsters and police manhunts just didn’t seem real in Pine Deep, and violence on that scale was something safely buried in the town’s past, not its present. Not now.

So, while Crow was tooling around, taking his time, Karl Ruger was beating the hell out of Val, her father Henry, her brother Mark, and Mark’s wife, Connie. Ruger tied everyone up except for Val and Henry and forced them at gunpoint to go out into the fields to help him fetch one of his injured men, Kenneth Boyd. By the time they got back to where Ruger had left Boyd, there was no trace of him, the cash, or the drugs. Boyd had split and taken Ruger’s lifeline with him. Ruger went totally off his rocker at that point, and, as Val later told Crow, Henry had seen just one chance to save his family. He shoved Val away from him, urging her to run while he ran the other way to draw Ruger away from the house. Ruger, snapping out of rage and into cold efficiency, simply shot Henry in the back as he ran and left him to die out in the rainy darkness. It was so callous that Crow felt bile in his throat.

Ruger headed back to the farmhouse, but Val wasn’t there. So he vented his anger on Mark—beating him, knocking his teeth out, totally humiliating him—and then forcing him to lie there on the floor and watch as he set about raping Connie. If Val had been even two minutes later it would have been too late for Connie, but Ruger was just starting to tear at her clothes when Val snuck in and tackled him, then immediately fled, taking a cue from her father’s sacrifice by tricking Ruger into chasing her. She had hoped to outrun him, to lose him in the darkness of her farm and then circle back to the house and get one of her father’s guns, but Ruger was as fast as he was sly and he caught her before she had taken a hundred paces. He was strangling her, trying to crush her throat to satisfy his dark need to hurt, to destroy, when Crow finally arrived. Too late to save Henry, almost too late to save the others.

The only thing that had gone right that night was that Ruger had underestimated Crow. Ruger was a big man, two hundred pounds of sinewy muscle packed onto a wiry six-foot frame. He had incredibly fast hands and he had never lost a fight in his life because there was nothing in his psychological makeup that could accept any reality except one in which he dominated. When Crow stepped out of his car, what Ruger saw was a short, thin man who looked about as threatening as a shopkeeper, which what Crow currently was. What he did not see were the years upon years of jujutsu training; what he did not see were the years on the Pine Deep police force as one its most decorated officers—all of that in the past, but not long past. Ruger made one of the worst mistakes anyone can make in a fight: he underestimated his opponent, and it had cost him.

They fought in the rain and the mud and it was the most vicious fight of Crow’s life. No mercy, no rules, no hesitation. It was eye-gouging and groin-kicking and throat-crushing. It was a life-or-death back-alley brawl between two men who had to win. Quitting or surrender were impossible concepts for both of them because to lose the fight was to lose absolutely everything.

In the end, Crow had won the fight, though he looked like he’d been trampled by horses. He was bloodied, winded, nearly blind with pain, but he was on his feet and Ruger was down. Which is when Crow had made his mistake, and it was every bit as foolish and dangerous as Ruger’s. Crow had not finished Ruger off. He left him there, down and apparently unconscious, and had run straight to Val to see if she was okay. It was around that time that the first patrol car had arrived, with Jerry Head at the wheel and a young local cop, Rhoda Thomas, riding shotgun. Head had gone into the house to check on Mark and Connie, Rhoda stayed in the yard to help Crow and Val. No one paid enough attention to Ruger. No one saw him struggle to his knees, no one saw him fish in the mud for the gun Crow had dropped at the beginning of the fight, no one saw him wash it clean in the heavy downpour. Only luck, or perhaps a little bone thrown to them by providence, gave Crow just enough warning to react when Ruger opened fire. Rhoda went down with a bullet in her shoulder and Crow was grazed by two bullets, one on each side of his torso, as he scrambled to pull Rhoda’s sidearm. He returned fire and emptied the Glock’s entire magazine into Ruger, watching as the bullets knocked the man into a weird puppet dance. Head appeared on the porch and added his fire and Ruger went down in a storm of bullets.

Val went down a moment later, the damage to her throat blending with shock and dragging her down into darkness. Crow tried to stay conscious, but after the beating he had taken, and the two bullet wounds, he had nothing left. He dropped.

His next memory was of waking up in the hospital, with Terry Wolfe telling him that Henry was dead but Val was alive. Mark and Connie were deeply hurt, both physically and psychologically, by Ruger’s sick games. Rhoda was in surgery, but was expected to make it. And Karl Ruger…well, somehow, with all the commotion as cops and paramedics flooded the place, he crawled off and vanished. A dozen bullets in him, Crow was sure of that, and yet he crawled away and simply dropped off the face of the world.

That should have been it. Crow assumed that it was it, that Ruger’s bones would one day be found out there in the woods beyond the Guthrie farm. Yeah, we all know about assumptions. Ruger was far from dead. Last night—could it be just a few hours ago?—just shy of midnight, Karl Ruger broke into the hospital. He attacked and nearly killed the facilities engineer, shut down the main and backup generators—plunging the hospital into total darkness—and while everyone was screaming and staggering in blind panic, the killer made his way to Crow’s room, beat the shit out of Crow’s police guard, and attacked Crow again, looking for serious payback. Val had been with Crow in the room, and Ruger struck her a terrible blow to the head, fracturing the bone above her eye socket.

Crow was sewn together with stitches and badly bruised from their last fight, but even with all that he should have been able to defeat Ruger a second time because Ruger should have been a short step away from dead, but Ruger was not a shambling hulk, he was not dying on his feet. Instead he faster than before, and far stronger. Unnaturally strong, like nothing Crow had ever seen. He threw Crow from one end of the room to the other and was a heartbeat away from crushing his throat when Val—dazed and bleeding—crawled over and got the pistol from the fallen officer’s duty belt. She opened fire, and that gave Crow a tiny window of opportunity to scuttle over and grab the small throwdown strapped to the cop’s ankle holster. From point-blank range they emptied both guns into Ruger, and this time there was no doubt—every shot went home.

In a bizarre encore of the night before Ruger went down, almost immediately followed by Val.

And still it wasn’t over. In the brief period between Val’s collapse and the arrival of doctors, nurses, and a lot of cops, there had been a moment of complete insanity when something impossible happened, and no one but Crow had witnessed it. He had bent to reach across Ruger’s dead body toward Val when Ruger opened his eyes and grabbed Crow’s wrist with unbelievable force, pulling him close long enough to whisper five words. Just five, but they had punched holes in Crow’s mind.

“Ubel Griswold sends his regards.”

Then Ruger had laughed the coldest laugh Crow had ever heard, the light went out of his eyes, and he sank back to the floor. Dead for sure this time.

From that moment to this those words kept echoing through his mind. All through the process of being stitched, bandaged, moved to another room, Crow kept hearing that icy voice.

There was no way Karl Ruger could have known that name, Crow was sure of that. Griswold was thirty years dead, killed by the Bone Man and left to rot down in the wormy swamps of Dark Hollow. No one in Pine Deep even mentioned his name anymore, and yet Karl Ruger had used his dying breath to speak the name of the only person to have shed more blood, done more harm, destroyed more lives, than Ruger himself had.

Ubel Griswold sends his regards.

Jerry Head said, “No, after all that shit, what else could happen?” He laid his magazine on his thighs. On the cover Eva Longoria was wearing next to nothing and looking happy about it. Crow nodded and they both sat there for a moment watching the second hand on the wall clock tick its way around from 5:54 to 5:55.

“Jerry? Are they sure Ruger’s dead?”

“You kidding me?” Head asked, grinning; then he saw that Crow wasn’t kidding. “Yeah, that evil son of a bitch is dead for sure. You and your lady popped enough caps in him to kill him five times over.”

“You’re sure? I mean really sure?”

“Man, if he ain’t then I’m going to get myself a hammer and pound a stake through his heart.” There must have seen something in Crow’s face—in his lack of a responding smile—because he spread his hands and said, “Just kidding, man. You want me to go ask a doctor to double-check on Ruger, be more than happy.”

“No…no,” Crow said, letting it go. “No, it’s cool, man. I guess after everything that’s happened I’m just paranoid, you know?”

The cop looked at Crow for a moment, the nodded, and smiled a bit more gently. “Yeah, I guess you are. I been on the job eleven years and I never had a run-in with anyone like Ruger. Met some pretty bad dudes, but this Ruger guy was somethin’ else—and you had to take him down twice. Must have scared the living shit out of you.”

You have no idea, Crow thought. He said, “Guess I’m still a bit twitchy.”

“Shit, you got every right to be. I know a lot of tough guys—and I’m no pussy myself—but I don’t know anyone could have taken Ruger down like you did.”

“Hooray for me,” Crow said dryly and twirled one finger over his head.

“No, I’m serious, man. Some guys go their whole life never knowing what it’s like to really be tough, but you know, man. No one can take that away from you.”

However, in Crow’s mind Ruger’s voice whispered Ubel Griswold sends his regards, and there was no part of him that felt either heroic or tough.

“Thanks, Jerry. That means a lot.”

“Look…why don’t you try to get some sleep.”

Sleep was an unappetizing concept, but Crow faked a yawn anyway. “You’re right, Jerry…I’m roadkill. Let me see if I can catch a few hours.” He closed his eyes and turned away and pretended to fall asleep. After a few minutes he could hear the officer shift uncomfortably in his chair, sigh heavily, and then begin turning the pages of his magazine. The minutes crawled by as Crow lay there, eyes shut, staring at the inner walls of his brain, trying not to see Karl Ruger’s face grinning at him. Ubel Griswold sends his regards. By the time Head went off shift and a stone-faced Tow-Truck Eddie Oswald took up the post in the guest chair, Crow was feeling like he wanted to rip out his IV and go screaming down the halls.

Crow opened his eyes to bare slits and saw that the hulking part-time police officer was hunched over with his elbows on his knees reading the Bible, his lips moving and his face alight. Crow didn’t feel like a sermon from the village religious nut, so he closed his eyes and really tried to sleep. That didn’t work. So to pass the time he tried to catalog the damage to his body without actually moving. He could feel the stitches in his mouth, and by probing with his tongue he could feel three loose molars. The two bullet grazes on his sides—improbably one on each love handle—itched more than they hurt, but the rest of his body made up for it by hurting quite a lot. He felt like he’d been run over by a trolley.

Crow lay there in bed, in the false darkness of closed eyes, and relived all that Ruger had done. So much wreckage, so much harm. He heard a faint rustle as Tow-Truck Eddie turned the page of his Bible. Ubel Griswold sends his regards. Dear God, Crow thought.

(2)

Tow-Truck Eddie read and reread the same page and not one word registered. None of the elegant and symbolically complex phrases of St. John’s Revelations made a lick of sense to him even though he’d read every one of those pages over and over again to the point that his lips formed the words before his eyes even scanned them, but his conscious mind was not dwelling on the End Times or the opening of the Seals. Instead of Bible or page or word, what he saw was the face of the Beast. Not as he first saw it in a holy vision—disguised as it was in a costume of flesh with curly red hair and freckled apple-red cheeks and a child’s body—nor as he had seen it the other night on the road, a figure in hooded sweatshirt and jeans pedaling a bicycle along the black curves of Route A-32. No, the image that swam before Eddie’s eyes was the image he had seen just yesterday, right there in Pinelands Hospital, walking bold as the devil—and why should he not be as bold as that?—right out of the front doors just as Eddie and his partner, Norris Shanks, were coming in to sit a guard shift. The Beast had walked right past him, within reach, within arm’s length. Eddie could have killed him right there. Should have killed him.

I am the Sword of God, he thought, and was it not the very truth? Yet he had not done anything, had not acting out his own holy purpose because God Himself had spoken in his head and stayed his hand. Wait! Wait until you are alone! And he had stayed his hand, though it burned him that the end of his most sacred mission had been right there. What did it matter that there were other people around? Surely once the Beast had been killed his true nature and face would be revealed to all. Wasn’t that the point? To reveal the Beast so that the righteous would see and understand?

He wanted to drop to his knees while Malcolm Crow slept and beat his head on the floor seven times, to beg his Father to explain why his hand had been stayed. Could he risk it? Tow-Truck Eddie looked at the man in the bed and wondered if he was really asleep. A few minutes ago he had moved, but that could have just been shifting in his sleep. He was supposed to be drugged. Surely, he wouldn’t wake if Eddie went to his knees to pray. The nurse had already done her rounds and wouldn’t be back for an hour. He’d only need a few minutes, just a simple abasement and then his prayers.

There was the sound of footsteps and then a voice spoke in greeting just outside the door followed by a response. A conversation started, muffled by the closed door, but it was right outside. No, he thought, don’t risk it, too dangerous. Just wait, just wait, Father will speak to me. He will make His will known. Wait. You were told to wait. Be a good son. Wait. Wait. Then, like the taste of water on a parched tongue he heard his Father’s voice.

You are my son and in you I am well pleased.

Tow-Truck Eddie nearly cried aloud. He wanted so much to throw himself down on his face and weep, to tear at his clothes and hair, to beg forgiveness for his weakness and failure. His hands trembled and he almost dropped his Bible. “Father…” he whispered in his softest voice. “Forgive a sinner his transgressions.”

You are my beloved son. The voice rang in his head. You are my faithful servant, and you are my holy instrument on Earth. Do you know this? It was part of their litany and he knew it so well that tears filled his eyes.

“I—failed you, my Lord, my Father…”

You are the Sword of God. Do you know this? The words hit his brain as if the fist of God had punched right through his skull. Eddie had to bite his tongue to stifle the cry that rose like a boiling bubble in his chest. He dropped the Bible on his lap and clamped both hands over his mouth, staring at Crow, who stirred briefly and then settled. After a long minute while he watched to see that Crow was going to remain asleep and as the searing agony of God’s displeasure ebbed away like a reluctant tide, Eddie remained frozen there on the edge of his chair.

More gently now, God said, You are the Sword of God. Do you know this?

“Yes…yes, my Lord!” Eddie said in the tiniest of whispers.

When the Hand of Righteousness beholds the Beast, what is thy holy purpose?

“To destroy him, my Lord! I am the servant of God!”

And to this holy purpose do you dedicate yourself?

“I am the instrument of the Lord and His will is as my own. With my body, my heart, and my immortal soul shall I serve the will of the Lord.”

Then in my servant I am well pleased. But be ever vigilant for the Beast is clever and the Beast is quick, and to destroy him will be a test and a trial to you. Be not overconfident, be not complacent even in your power. The Sword of God is patient and he is strong.

“I will be patient as well as powerful, my Lord.”

The servants of the Beast are many and they are strong. Be silent, be secret. Be patient, and do not be deceived. The Beast may wear a child’s flesh but it is the Son of Perdition. There was a pause and Eddie tensed, certain that some great truth was about to be imparted. It is not death, not blood that will destroy the Beast. It is ritual.

Joy blossomed in Eddie’s chest as he finally, completely understood. Now he knew why God had stayed his hand yesterday. He could have killed the skin-suit the Beast wore, but unless he performed a blood ritual then the Beast’s spirit would simply find a new host. He closed his eyes against the welling of his joyful tears, nodding as understanding rose like a new sun in his heart. No, he had to take the Beast to some quiet place and then perform the ritual to its utmost conclusion, to the point where he tore the Eucharist from the Beast’s chest and tasted it, sealing the Final Covenant.

God whispered silkily into his mind. You are the Sword of God, and in you I am well pleased. Gratitude flooded through Eddie and he wept silently, his face in his hands.

(3)

Crow kept his eyes closed and listened to the faint mumblings as Tow-Truck Eddie spoke to himself. Is he praying? Of course he is, he told himself.

Then a few minutes later he thought, Is he crying? He listened and after a while he could clearly make out Eddie’s nearly silent sobs. Oh, that’s just peachy, Crow thought.

(4)

Mike Sweeney was fourteen years old. In eighty-eight days, on December 28, he would be fifteen, but he wasn’t entirely sure he would ever live that long. Until recently Mike seldom thought about the future because the future had always seemed like an impossible concept—the future was something that people got to if they had a sane life. There was nothing about Mike Sweeney’s life that was sane. Or safe.

He wasn’t a handsome kid, though others thought he would grow into it. He had the makings. Curly red hair that was garish now but would darken to reddish-brown if he lived into his twenties, good bones, a splash of freckles, blue eyes. Those eyes were his best point, and certainly the thing that Anna Marie Hellinger, who was in his English class, thought made him look brooding and mysterious. She wasn’t wrong. Mike knew a thing or two about brooding. He did it well, he did it often, and he had reason.

When Mike was still in diapers, his father, Big John Sweeney, had gone sailing through the guardrail up on Shandy’s Curve and had been cooked in his car at the bottom of the ravine. Before grass had started to grow on Big John’s grave, Mike’s mom, Lois, had let local mechanic Vic Wingate move in, and shortly after that they were married. Though Mike was never aware of it, this was a major town scandal. Big John was well liked and there was always a little suspicion surrounding the crash—the official report was that he had fallen asleep at the worst possible place on Route A-32, but the expression “Oh, horseshit!” was thrown in the face of almost anyone who said that, especially if it was said over beers at the Harvestman Inn, where Sweeney’s friends still hung. Suspicion even fell briefly on Vic Wingate, but that was something folks kept to themselves, even at the Harvestman, because Vic was not the kind of guy you made comments about, not unless you wanted to eat puréed food through a wired jaw. Vic Wingate, you see, was a hitter.

Vic was forty-seven years old and except for his eyes—he had the cold and patient eyes of an old crocodile—he could have passed for a fit thirty-five. He was rawboned and flat-bellied, with arms and shoulders that held a promise of quick and ugly power though not bulky muscles like Tow-Truck Eddie, nor the sculpted physique of Terry Wolfe, the town’s charismatic and handsome mayor. Vic Wingate had wrestler’s muscles and boxer’s hands. Vic was battlefield tough and would take a bad hit just to land a crippling blow, though very few hits ever got past him. Vic chose his fights with care, he hit first and hardest, and knew where to hit. Since Mike was four Vic had used him to practice the art of hitting, flicking out with apparent laziness to knock Mike sprawling, or rapping him hard enough on the top of the head to drop him to his knees. If Mike had a dime for every time he’d felt Vic’s hand he could have saved all the struggling farms in the borough of Pine Deep.

Until last night, all of those blows—blows beyond counting—had been slaps. Hard, yes, painful, yes, but open-handed. Now all that had changed. Last night Mike, at the ripe old age of fourteen-going-on-never-grow-up, had graduated to the fist.

It had started after Mike had been late delivering the last of his newspapers and had been hurrying home along the darkened stretch of A-32 when a monstrous wrecker had come barreling down the road and had very nearly run him down. To save himself from being ground to roadkill under the twenty-four-inch wheels, Mike had swung his bicycle off the road with an agility and speed that was a surprise to him even while it was happening. The wrecker had missed him by inches and Mike had gone ass-over-heels into a pumpkin patch, cracking a rib, bruising his skin, and banging his head. It wasn’t the most graceful landing, but it was a landing, and you know what they say about landings you walk away from.

By the time Mike had peeled himself up from the ground and struggled his wheezing way to the road, the wrecker had gone and Mike was even further behind Vic’s curfew. He’d been picked up (actually, almost run down again) by Malcolm Crow, the guy who owned the store where he bought his comics and model kits, and had tooled around with him for a while, winding up all the way out at the Haunted Hayride. Crow had called his friend, Mayor Wolfe, who had in turn called Vic to come pick him up. Vic drove out to get him and when Mike had opened his mouth to greet Vic, his stepfather had silenced him with a punch to the stomach that was so hard—so shockingly hard—that Mike thought that his guts were being smashed against his spine. Then Vic grabbed him by the hair and the back of his belt and had flung him into the car and driven home. That alone would have been bad enough, but once they were inside the door, Vic had really gone to work on him. That first blow to the stomach was followed by an encore of punches to just about every part of Mike that Vic could reach. He beat him from the front hallway all the way into the kitchen and when Mike was tucked into a corner Vic had dragged him out into the open and continued beating him.

It was right about that point where something very odd had happened to Mike, and in the space of a heartbeat Mike felt everything change. It was as if he just stepped outside of his body and stood apart, indifferent to the blows that rained down on him, separated from the pain and terror as surely as he was separated from the flesh and nerve endings that were under assault. It was the weirdest feeling in his life. He was aware of an actual physical shift as his consciousness lifted and moved to another place, just a few feet away, watching Vic as he grunted and sweated and hit. He watched Vic and saw the man’s muscles bunch and roll, saw his hands move up and down, saw him shift to put power behind each blow. It was fascinating, like watching a machine on an assembly line, and he found that he could study it with a total lack of emotional involvement. The hands rose and snapped down, sometimes as slaps, sometimes as punches, and as he watched, Mike saw something else, too. He saw Vic’s face grow steadily more red, saw sweat burst from his pores, saw his hands redden with tissue damage each time a blow struck one of Mike’s elbows or his forehead, saw the labored heave of his chest as the beating took its toll on Vic. Mike saw Vic, the forty-seven-year-old man, not Vic the indestructible machine.

As revelations went, it was a monster. All night long Mike worked it out. Vic was forty-seven. Mike was fourteen. If he lived—if—then in ten years he would be twenty-four and Vic would be fifty-seven. Vic was getting older and from now on he wouldn’t be getting stronger; Mike, on the other hand, would. Though Mike often doubted that he would really live to be twenty-four, knowing that he could outlive and outlast Vic was enough. Of course, the thought that he might die was an equal comfort, because Vic couldn’t do much to him then, either. The key was that if he lived long enough, he would outlast Vic Wingate. One day Mike would be a fully grown adult man and Vic would be—old. All Mike had to do was endure. Vic was human. It was Mike’s version of a win-win scenario.

That was the first part of the revelation and it wasn’t until dawn this morning that Mike had gotten the second wave of the revelation, which was equally comforting but in an entirely different way. Or, perhaps it was comforting to an entirely different part of Mike Sweeney—for, truth to tell, there were a lot of different parts to that boy.

At dawn he’d gotten up and had staggered on wobbly legs into the bathroom to piss blood. He didn’t bother to turn the light on. There was a faint dawn glow coming in through the frosted glass of his bathroom window, but he knew the smell. Uric acid mixed with copper. It wasn’t the first time he’d pissed blood strong enough to smell it. Vic was a treat to live with. He finished urinating, washed his hands, and as he turned to go back to bed he rubbed his hand across his stomach, probing at the mound of the massive hematoma that had blossomed from Vic’s punch. It was gone. His probing fingers pushed into the pale skin of his belly and found no hard swelling at all. He stopped in the doorway and pressed harder. Ah, yes, it was there, but smaller, deeper. An older pain, like a wound that was going away.

Mike stopped and turned, reaching out for the light switch, flooding the bathroom with a blue-white glow that made his mirrored image look as pale as a ghost. He closed the door and stood before the full-length mirror on the inside of the door, squinting at his reflection. In pajama bottoms and no shirt, he was a mass of bruises, to be sure, and the ones on his face were the worst. One eye was puffed nearly closed and there were blood crustings under both nostrils, more of it under his left earlobe that had been torn by a punch, and a ridge of knuckle marks on his jaw and lips. He turned and looked at his side, where he’d landed on a pumpkin, and the bruise glowed a fierce purple over the cracked rib. All of that was as it should be, as he expected. Nevertheless the bruise on his stomach, which was the worst of all the injuries, was now nothing more than a faintness of red, like a blush, not even as scarlet as the red from a belly flop into a pool. Last night—not eight hours ago—it had been a swelling mound, a volcano about to blow with a dark purple fist-size core surrounded by every shade of blue and red. Now it was almost gone.

Mike Sweeney stared at the bruise—at the absence of a bruise—and then looked into the mirror image of his own blue eyes. He looked and looked, searching for answers in those familiar eyes—and then just like that flick of a switch that had made him step out of his body last night, those eyes were not familiar at all. One second he was looking into the eyes of Mike Sweeney, fourteen going on fifteen, teenage paperboy and favorite punching bag of the town’s meanest son of a bitch and the very next second he was looking into the eyes of someone he didn’t know at all. These new eyes were older, deeper, stranger. The blue was the same shade but it was flecked with red as if tiny drops of blood were sprinkled throughout each iris. The pupils were huge, like a cat’s at night, and the whites were veined with red. The face was different, too. Still bruised, but now the bruises looked superimposed over a different face, which was also older, with a stronger jaw and skin that was gaunt and stretched over brow and cheekbones. The lips of this stranger’s mouth were thin and hard as if he was fighting a grimace of pain, and the upper lip was cut by a thick white scar. The hair had, indeed, turned reddish brown.

Mike Sweeney stared at this face for a long time and the longer he stared the clearer the image in the mirror became, and the less clear the look in the flesh-and-blood face was. Those eyes, his real eyes, dulled into glass as if they were the eyes of a mannequin. Anyone looking at those eyes would have said that there was no one home.

At fourteen, Mike had never heard the expression fugue state before. Had he been in any way cognizant of what was happening at that moment—which would be a paradoxical impossibility—he would have seen a true fugue state. For the moment, however, Mike Sweeney was indeed not home. At that moment there was no Mike Sweeney. There was something else. Call it a chrysalis.

He turned and went back to bed, his body functioning with reflexive efficiency even to the point of turning out the bathroom light. He climbed into bed, pulled the covers up, and lay there, staring up at the ceiling and seeing absolutely nothing. Certainly he didn’t see the ghostly figure of a gray-skinned man with a guitar sitting on the chair of his computer table.

When he woke later that morning, he would remember nothing at all about what he had seen in the mirror, and the thought that the bruise on his stomach had healed too fast would not even enter his mind.

As the boy slept, the figure sitting on the chair sat and stared at him, leaning forward, elbows on knees, eyes intent on the lines of the boy’s face, wondering if he should be filled with hope or despair.

It was a toss-up.

(5)

Detective Sergeant Frank Ferro of the Philadelphia Police Department’s narcotics division was a tall middle-aged man with dark hair going gray, dark brown skin, and a face that generally looked as dour and lugubrious as a funeral director’s. Exhaustion was painted on his features and evident in the droop of his broad shoulders. It had been a long couple of days since he and his partner, Vince LaMastra, had followed Ruger’s trail to Pine Deep and had stayed to oversee the manhunt. Hours of grueling work as well as exposure to the killer’s grotesque handiwork had burned Ferro down to a weary, shambling shadow of himself. He had only recently come back to his hotel room after the incident at the hospital, and was heading into the bathroom to take a shower, when his cell phone rang. When you’re a cop, a call before dawn is never going to be good news, and he paused for just a moment, giving the cell phone an accusatory glare as if it was a friend who had kicked him when he was down; then he bent and scooped up the phone from the bedside table and flipped it open. “Ferro.”

“Frank?” It was Vince LaMastra, sounding tired but stressed. “I just got a call from Chief Bernhardt…those two officers we left at the Guthrie Farm to maintain the crime scene…?” He ended it like a question.

“What about them?”

“Frank…they’re dead. Both of them.”

“What?”

“I don’t have the details, Frank. Got to be Boyd, though. There’s no one else…”

“No…” he breathed, squeezing his eyes shut against the immensity of the news and against his own tottering weariness. He took a deep breath. “Two minutes, Vince. In the lobby.” He disconnected and stared at the middle distance for a long moment.

“Jesus Christ,” he said and reached for his gun.