Dead Man's Song

Chapter 11

(1)

Terry arrived at the hospital at the same time as Gus, Saul Weinstock, and Frank Ferro, the four of them converging in the parking lot and then heading downstairs to where Jerry Head was standing vigil on one side of a streamer of yellow crime scene tape that was stretched across the doorway. Other cops thronged the hall, and from the inside of the room there were flashes as the criminalists took photos and documented the scene. “What the hell happened here?” Terry snapped before Ferro could open his mouth.

“Pretty much what I told you on the phone, sir.” Head looked as tired as Terry felt. “The night patrol was making its regular sweep of the back lot, where deliveries and such are made. It was supposed to be closed and locked at eleven. They said that they noticed that the chain on one of the gates looked funny and—”

“Funny how?” asked Ferro.

“They said it wasn’t hanging the same way that they had left it. They stopped to investigate and found that the chain had been cut, probably with bolt cutters, and that it was just looped through the bars. They called it into the head of security—”

“Brad Maynard,” Weinstock provided.

“—and Mr. Maynard came out to investigate, verified what the security guys said, and they did a full sweep of the parking lot. At first they didn’t see anything out of place, then when they went around and tried every door they found that one of them was unlocked.” He tilted his head toward the left end of the corridor. “That’s the door right there. Where bodies are wheeled out by funeral directors and such.”

“Was the door unlocked,” asked Ferro, “or had it been forced?”

“Unlocked,” Head said, and there was a moment of silence while everyone digested the implications of this. Terry rubbed his eyes and he suddenly looked about ten years older.

Weinstock was shaking his head. He was wearing sweats and sneakers—the easiest stuff to jump into after he’d gotten the call. “That door is always locked and there’s a security alarm on it that goes off if it’s opened without a key. There are only a few keys, and they’re registered and numbered.”

“That’ll help,” Ferro said. “Go ahead, Jerry.”

“Well, as you know most of us out-of-town cops have been using the hospital cafeteria as a kind of mess hall during all this stuff, so when the break-in was noticed they sent someone to see if there were any of us there. I was just sitting down to eat but I came down here right away to check it out and secure the scene, which is when I called it in to Pine Deep PD. While I was waiting for them to show, I verified that the door was, in fact, unlocked, and from what I can tell there’s no sign of forced entry. No scratches on the lock, nothing bent out of place. Door and lock are sound, just unlocked. I saw some footprints, kind of muddy, coming in from outside. They kind of fade out halfway down the hall, and I have them taped out and Dixie McVey’s standing over them to make sure no one scuffs them up.”

“Good job. What else?”

“By this time Jim Polk showed up and he and I began checking all of the rooms on this level. When we found that the morgue door was unlocked, we investigated and found that someone had definitely been in there. Like the exterior door, there were no signs of forced entry. We checked it out and saw that most of the doors to those drawers where the bodies are kept were standing open, and three of the drawers had been pulled out.”

“Whose?” Weinstock demanded.

Head looked at him. “Well, Ruger’s of course, and the two officers, Castle and Cowan.”

“Son of a bitch!” Gus said. “Was Ruger’s the only body missing?”

Head nodded. “The only way we even knew it was his was because of the toe tag. It had been ripped in half and the pieces were lying on top of the rubber sheet that I guess had been over the body.”

“Isn’t there supposed to be video surveillance of this room?” Ferro asked, turning to Weinstock.

“Yes, there is, but—”

Head cut him off. “Excuse me, sir, but Mr. Maynard went up to the security office and did a playback. He said that the camera does a slow pan back and forth every sixty seconds, so the picture changes and it’s fixed focus so the resolution is crap, but even so we have pretty clear video images of what appears to be Kenneth Boyd opening the drawers and bending over all three bodies. Then the camera pans away and when it comes back Boyd’s got Ruger slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and he’s limping out of the room.”

“You’re sure it’s Boyd?” Terry and Gus asked at the same time.

“No question. I’ve got that asshole’s face burned into my brain. Mind you, the guy looks really messed up, but it’s him. He was all filthy, covered in mud and stuff like he’s been hiding out in the woods, like we thought. Stringy hair, lot of visible cuts, and something’s wrong with his right leg. It was all twisted and if he hadn’t been carrying Ruger I’d had bet the leg was broken.”

“Ruger told Val that Boyd’s leg was broken,” Terry observed.

“Apparently Ruger was not a doctor,” Weinstock said. “You have a broken leg you don’t carry a full-grown man around over your shoulder, and before you ask, being hyped on coke wouldn’t make a difference, it’s a matter of structural integrity.”

“Point is,” said Ferro, “he has some kind of injury to his leg—which our criminalists will be able to tell us more about once they’ve had a chance to look at the footprints in the hall—but it isn’t serious enough to have prevented him from breaking in here and stealing Ruger’s body.”

“Didn’t slow him up from attacking those cops either,” Terry said bitterly.

“Or maybe it happened during that attack,” Ferro said. “Anything else, Jerry?”

“No, once we determined that Boyd was not in the morgue, I sealed the scene and made some more calls. The rest you know.”

Gus said, “What the Christ does he want with Ruger’s body? I mean…Ruger is actually dead, right?” Weinstock just gave him a look. “They why risk breaking in here to steal a corpse?”

“Gus,” Ferro said wearily, “I am so far beyond understanding what’s going on in this psycho son of a bitch’s head that I don’t know what to think. First he leaves town, gets clean away, and then comes back to kill a couple of cops and steal his accomplice’s body. If there is a logic to any of that, then it escapes me.”

“I’m with you on that,” Weinstock said.

“Jerry, I want to see the shift roster for tonight,” Ferro said. “No one goes home before I get a chance to talk to them, and that means everybody had better be able to account for every second of their shift. Somebody unlocked that door, so maybe we can pin down who it was and find out why they’d be helping a meltdown like Boyd.”

“Are you suggesting that someone in town has a connection with Ruger and Boyd?” Gus asked.

“I’m open to other suggestions if you have them, Chief.” His eyes were hard. “Okay, let’s go take a look.”

The morgue was just as Head had described it, with many of the cold-storage drawers opened and three of the tables pulled out. The sheets that had been on Castle and Cowan were hanging off, the ends trailing to the floor, and the bodies of the officers left in horrid display, their torn and bloodless flesh wretchedly exposed. The eyes of the officers were partially open, lids uneven, dead stares empty and disturbing. Ruger’s drawer was empty, the rubber sheet heaped on the floor. The two halves of the toe tag that Head had found on the sheet had been placed in plastic evidence bags, their locations noted with flagged markers. The lead criminalist, a state cop named Judy Sanchez, came over to greet Ferro and the others. She had worked the double murders at the Guthrie farm and already met everyone. She was about five-six, with kinky dark brown hair cut short and a spray of dark freckles across her nose that did nothing at all to make her look girlish. She had flat black eyes and a hard mouth and gave the men a curt nod as she stripped off a pair of latex gloves. “What do you have, Judy?” Ferro asked.

“Not a lot, Frank. The videotape is the real find. Pretty much tells us what we need to know. Brad Maynard is dubbing a copy right now. We’ll leave the dub here and take the original and dump it to digital so we can use the filters on it to clean it up for court, in case it gets that far.”

“Any doubt that it was Boyd?” Gus asked.

“Oh, hell, no,” she said. “Regardless, I’d like Dr. Weinstock to look at it. There are some anomalies.”

“I told them about the leg,” Head told her.

“I watched that tape five times, and unless I’m beginning to lose it that leg definitely looks broken, though how in hell he’s walking on it is beyond me. I’ll let you form your own opinions, though. As for this,” she jerked her chin toward the empty table. “This is kind of odd. Looks like Boyd started at one end and kept opening doors until he found Ruger, and he clearly pulled out the drawers of Castle and Cowan, pulled the sheets back, and there is some indication that he did some damage to each body.”

“What?” all of the men said it in a shocked chorus, even Head, and she held up a hand.

“From what I can see—and Dr. Weinstock will have to verify this in a postmortem—it looks like Boyd may have intentionally damaged the already torn flesh on the throats of both corpses.”

Terry blanched. “But…why?”

Sanchez shrugged. “My guess? He may have been trying to disfigure the bodies to make identification of the murder weapon more difficult.”

“You’ve lost me,” Terry said.

Weinstock was nodding. “All weapons, even very sharp knives, leave trace elements in the wounds, and by manipulation of the wounds we can often get a fairly clear picture of the type of weapon used in the murder—smooth-edged knife, serrated knife, garden trowel, what have you. Microscopic traces will tell metal from plastic from wood, and so on.”

“It helps in court,” Ferro added. “If the suspect is found in possession of a weapon and that weapon can be matched to the wounds…well, there you go.”

“Okay, I get it.” Terry looked at Sanchez. “So you’re saying that Boyd messed with the wounds to disguise the weapon he might have used? Wouldn’t he just have tossed the weapon away by now if he was concerned with that sort of thing?”

“Mr. Mayor,” Sanchez said, “I’m no forensic psychologist, but I don’t think we’re dealing with a rational mind here. There’s also some indication of ritual, and we might need a psychologist to take a look at that.”

“What do you mean by ‘ritual’?” Terry asked.

“Boyd apparently dribbled blood onto the faces and throats of both corpses. There’s no pattern I can see except that there are a few drops of blood on the lips of each and more on the throats of each.”

“Holy Mother of God,” Gus whispered and his face went gray.

Ferro grunted. “Sounds like Boyd’s really lost it. Extreme violence, apparently senseless acts such as stealing Ruger’s body, and now blood rituals.”

“I’ll back you up on that,” Weinstock said. “In purely clinical terms I think it’s safe to say that this Boyd character is a total freak-job.”

Sanchez nodded. “That part of it will be up to you to sort out, Doc. For my part, I also took some measurements of footprints and such.”

“The ones in the hall?” Head asked doubtfully.

She shook her head. “No, there was some water on the floor and he walked through it. Clear limp evidenced by the gait and spacing, and a step-scuff pattern that suggests he was partially dragging his right leg.”

“And yet he carried a two-hundred-pound man out of here over his shoulder?” Terry asked skeptically.

“If we hadn’t had that tape, sir,” Sanchez said, “I’d have argued pretty strongly for an accomplice, but the tape is the tape. You should watch it.”

They did, crowding into the small morgue office. Brad Maynard came down with a copy and they played it half a dozen times. On the sixth replay Vince LaMastra joined them, his face still puffy from sleep, his square jaw rimed with yellow fuzz. He watched the tape over Ferro’s shoulder and when Boyd, disheveled and very clearly limping on a twisted right leg, staggered out with Ruger’s body slung over his shoulder, he said, “That’s sick. He looks dead.”

“He is dead,” Terry snapped. “That’s why he was in the damn morgue.”

“No,” LaMastra said, reaching out to tap the screen. “Him. Boyd. He looks dead. It’s weird.”

They watched the tape a seventh time, and Boyd looked dead that time, too. No one said anything for a while. Finally Gus murmured, “I wish to hell he was dead, the bastard.”

Later three of them—Ferro, LaMastra, and Gus met in the doctors’ lounge. Terry left for home, and Weinstock was overseeing the post-forensic restoration of his morgue. Gus made a pot of coffee and they settled down with cups, looking over the staff rosters for that evening. “Most of the staff don’t have access to the door keys and security codes,” Gus said. “That leaves the maintenance staff, the security people, a few of the top docs, and the officers eating in the cafeteria—Head and Chremos from Crestville. And Jim Polk, who was here visiting Rhoda Thomas.” He consulted a chart. “Call it twelve people in all who were here at the time of the break-in.”

“Okay, then we need to interview each one,” Ferro said.

Each person with potential access was brought in separately and interviewed by the three of them, with Ferro taking point on most of the interrogations. No one admitted to having tampered with the codes, and when asked to turn out their pockets—a request that was met with flat hostility by almost everyone except Head, who understood the drill—no keys turned up that shouldn’t be there. Each person was made to write out a detailed list of where they were all night and who they spoke with. “So where does that leave us?” LaMastra asked in disgust as the last of the interviewees left.

“Nowhere,” Ferro said with a sigh.

“God,” murmured LaMastra, “I love police work.”

(2)

When the car passed Vic rose up out of the tall weeds and continued moving down the bank to where the iron leg of the bridge was fitted into its massive concrete boot. He paused for a moment and took set down his backpack, unzipped it, and then removed first a pair of 12-power binoculars and then a high-resolution Nikon digital camera with a telephoto lens. He sat down with the weeds above shoulder height and put the binoculars to his eyes so he could study the old bridge that linked Pine Deep to Black Marsh. The bridge was a two-lane affair with close-fitted railroad ties stuffed between steel I-beams. It was sturdy enough, and though it rattled and shook, it would probably not even need rebuilding for another decade. That thought caused Vic to smile. He set the binoculars down and picked up the digital camera. It was very expensive, with a two-gigabyte memory card that took ten-megapixel images. Vic rested his elbows on his knees to study the camera and then took over fifty ultra-close-up photos of the bridge and each of its supports. The morning sun was clear and bright, perfect for high-res photography.

A farm truck came along the road and Vic just lay back in the weeds, invisible. His pickup was parked fifty yards up a curving access road that was almost never used. When the truck had passed, Vic sat up and then stowed his gear back in his bag. He rose, leaving the bag in the weeds, and moved farther down the bank to the closest iron leg, keeping a weather eye on the road. Confident that no one was coming, he pulled a Stanley tape measure off his belt and spent the next few minutes measuring both the concrete base and the steel leg of the bridge support, pausing to jot some numbers down in a notebook. The last measurement done, he pocketed the book, clipped the tape measure onto his belt, and climbed the hill to recover his bag. He checked the road carefully and then headed up the access lane to his truck.

Pine Deep was completely surrounded by water, with the Delaware on its eastern flank and the Pine River on the west; the Crescent Canal bordered it in the north, and a hooked arm of Pine River swooped down to meet the Delaware again in the south. In colonial days, before the town was officially organized it was generally called Pine Island on old maps. There were four bridges connecting the town to its neighbors: Crescent Bridge, Old Corn Bridge, Swallow Hill Bridge, and this one—the Black Marsh Bridge.

Vic glanced at his watch. It was just 7:00 A.M. He smiled. There was plenty of time to quietly measure all of them and still have most of the day left to do some other chores. At home he could download the digital pics onto his computer and make a closer study of stress points to pick just the right spots to plant the dynamite.

After that he could settle down and have a nice long conversation with his new houseguest. That should be enlightening. He was whistling a happy tune when he pulled his pickup off the access road and headed north up A-32.

(3)

Karl Ruger sat in darkness while Vic was out. There were basement lights he could turn on, but he preferred the darkness. It was less dark to him, he knew, than to others, and that knowledge pleased him. It made him feel like a cat. Not a little housecat, but a big hunting cat. A leopard slinking through the jungles, eyes seeing all the way through the shadows. Like that.

Ruger used the time alone to prowl through Vic’s library, and what he read was enlightening. Such as the fact that it didn’t matter that it was bright sunshine outside. There were no windows in the cellar, and all he needed was to stay out of direct sunlight, out of the heavy UV. That was just one of the things he learned in his first hour of browsing, his searches through the pages nudged along by the voice in his head. The voice of his god; the same voice that had spoken in his thoughts moments before Tony had crashed their car the other night. Tony and Boyd hadn’t heard anything—the message wasn’t for them. Ruger, you are my left hand. While Griswold had whispered to him time had seemed to slow, to revolve around Ruger’s need to hear the message of his god. Vic Wingate has been my John the Baptist…he has paved the way; but you, Karl…you will be my Peter, my rock, and on this rock I will build my church.

“Yeah, you’re damn right,” he said to the darkness, and there was great love in his voice. Dark and twisted, but as passionate as any monk who whipped himself by night in the darkness of his cell.

He wondered how much of the Plan Vic really knew. He knew a lot, sure, had laid the groundwork, and even Ruger had to admire the attention to detail as Vic had outlined it all a few hours ago. When the Red Wave hit the poor bastards in this town wouldn’t have a chance. Not a prayer. Props to Vic on that. And Vic seemed to know a lot about what Ruger was, and what his limits were, pro and con. He kept that pistol with him all the time, with its special loads. Another point for Vic. Vic had even drawn up a list of the locals who were least likely to be missed while the Man’s army grew—loners, families in isolated farms, unpopular assholes who wouldn’t be missed under any circumstances. Vic called it his Greatest Hits, which Ruger found funny; it was the only time he and Vic had laughed together. Boyd had started the recruitment, but now that Ruger was in the game the whole process would accelerate so that they would be completely ready on Halloween.

For all that, it wasn’t Vic who was seeing the most important part: Vic, blackhearted son of a bitch though he was, couldn’t turn anyone, couldn’t make more soldiers for the Red Wave. Vic could kill people, true enough, but only Ruger, and to a lesser degree Boyd and the ones that brainless jackass already recruited, could make a kill and then turn that kill into a recruitment. It didn’t matter that there were already twenty soldiers out there like him because in truth none of them were quite like him. The Man had told him so. He was special. A general, a king among them, just as the Man was a god to their kind. This was the pecking order. Vic thought it was the Man then him and then everyone else on their bellies below him, but that was bullshit. Ruger knew different because the Man has whispered inside his head while Ruger was doing time in the morgue drawer. Ruger was key to the ongoing success of the Man’s agenda. So, once the Red Wave hit, what good would Vic really be to the Man? Either he’d have to be made into a soldier himself, and Ruger didn’t like that idea, or Vic would have to be someone’s lunch.

That thought made Ruger smile in the darkness.

Vic must know that his usefulness was limited, too, otherwise he wouldn’t be holding back so much information from him. He clearly knew more about what Ruger was than he let on. Maybe even more than was in the books. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out why. Vic wanted to have an edge over Ruger and his recruits even after the Wave came and passed, and Vic needed to be seen as a valuable resource just in case Ruger ever exceeded him in the estimation of the Man.

Ruger looked down at the clipboard that lay on his lap. Once Vic had gone out for the day Ruger had started making a list of things he did, and did not, know about who and what he was. He was wasting no time. When Vic came home Ruger would hide the list. There was almost a month to go before Halloween. Plenty of time to poke around, read a book or two, and maybe do some experimentation. It was always better to be more in the know that the mooks you had to deal with. Not that Vic was really a mook—he was smart and he was sharp, but he wasn’t as smart or sharp as he thought he was, Ruger was sure about that.

He looked down at his list. The word “blood” was written near the top and he considered that point. Yeah, he could feel the urge, but it wasn’t at all like he expected. It wasn’t an ache in the stomach like a starving man would get, or even a burn in the veins like a junkie. This was way deeper than that—more like a stirring in the groin, something sexual. Ruger knew all about that and he knew that only a total idiot let his dick drive the bus. That kind of thing could be controlled. Maybe, he thought, even refined. That would take some thinking, maybe a little practice.

He heard muffled footsteps echoing from upstairs. Vic’s wife, Lois. Ruger hadn’t met her yet, but he could smell her, even all the way down here. Gin and perfume, nervous sweat and fear. A nice combination. She might be worth practicing on one of these days when Vic was out. He’d have to think about that.

Lower down on his list was the word “sunlight.”

“Go outside and you’ll burn, sport,” is the way Vic put it. Ruger saw that a lot in the books, too, and he’d seen it in movies. The thing was, that it wasn’t in all of the books. Not the older ones, anyway. He had to wonder about that and thought of ways to test it.

“No time like the present,” he murmured as he got up. The back door was closed and locked and Vic had the key, but that didn’t mean jack shit to Ruger. He took the door-knob in one hand and closed his left hand around the dead-bolt assembly and pulled. It resisted his pull, but only for a second, and then the screws Vic had sunk into the oak just tore loose with a screech of protest and the door jerked inward.

“Well kiss my ass!” Ruger breathed, impressed. It was far easier than he had thought it would be. Good to know. Outside the sunlight filled the entire alleyway and by instinct Ruger lunged back away from its touch as it painted the door with clear light, but then he stopped, just on the safe side of the line of the glare, still in shadows. He licked his dry lips and stared at the light outside for a full minute, counting the seconds. Looking at it was no problem, and that was good. Then he raised his left hand and tentatively reached out, coming right up to the dividing line between shadow and sunlight, and then crossed it with just the tips of his fingers. His hand was shaking as he felt the warmth wrap itself around each black nail, around the paper-white skin.

It hurt. It hurt a lot, but he did not catch fire. His skin didn’t blacken, didn’t even turn red. Even when he leaned forward and let the golden morning light bathe his face and hair. Not a whiff of smoke. Only pain, and what was pain to him but an old friend?

Ruger closed the door and went back to his chair. It took over two hours for the pain to subside, and for a while he had to grit his teeth together to keep from yelling. Time passed slowly, and while it did Karl Ruger learned a lot about himself, and about what he was. It was stuff he was certain Vic would not want him to know.

While the pain was at its worst, Ruger used the agony to focus his mind, used it like a whip to keep his train of thought on its tracks. As he endured the misery of it, he thought of Malcolm Crow, and of all the things he would like to do to him. Crow, and that black-haired Guthrie bitch. Twice he had tried to kill them, and twice he’d had his ass handed to him. There would have to be a third time, and he didn’t know if he could wait until the Red Wave to see it done. No, by the time the Wave hit he wanted them both broken and dead. Or better yet…recruited. Yeah, that had a nice feel to it.

A fresh wave of pain hit him and he kept the hiss of suffering inside as a plan began to form in his brain. Yeah, he mused, maybe recruit Val Guthrie and then use her against Crow. First break his heart, then break him down, and when he had nothing left, maybe Ruger would let Val send him on with a big, red kiss. He closed his eyes and with that thought in his mind the pain transformed from agony to true ecstasy, and he reveled in it, allowing the pain to be both his teacher and his mistress. There was a lot to learn from pain, and how one handled pain; Karl Ruger had learned a lot over the years, but right now he was learning its deeper secrets. Boy, would Vic be surprised.

(4)

Three hours later Vic was in his lounger, his face showing more anger than he wanted as he watched Ruger continue to stare out the backdoor’s peephole. His phone rang and when he saw it was Polk he flipped it open. “Make it brief,” Vic snapped.

“Just got home from the hospital. I got grilled by that nigger cop, Ferro, but it’s cool. After I let you in I went out a service entrance and came back and visited Rhoda, so I was in her room when everyone started making a fuss. I’m in the clear. All they know is that someone let Boyd in, but they don’t know who. They just know it wasn’t me.”

“Good work, Jimmy boy.” He closed his phone without saying good-bye and called to Ruger. “You thirsty?”

“Of course I am.”

“You have any idea what to do about that?” Ruger was standing at Vic’s cellar door, peering through the peephole at the empty street. He didn’t answer the question, so Vic said, “You deaf?”

“I heard you,” Ruger whispered. “If you’re hoping to get some jollies by seeing me jones for some O-positive, then too bad. It’s not like the movies, asshole. I can wait.” He touched the wood of the door with the tips of his long white fingers and as he watched the street he drew his fingertips slowly down the length of the door, from head height to waist level. Each black fingernail left a visible groove in the oak and little curls of wood fluttered to the cement floor. “When I need to feed, I’ll feed.”

Vic heard the faint screech as the nails grooved the wood. There was no visible change in his face, but his hand moved with apparently casualness from the armrest to the butt of the pistol tucked down between thigh and cushion. “I just fixed that shit, so don’t go messing with it.” In truth he had been furious—and visibly shaken—when he’d come home and found that Ruger had torn the lock open. At the time he had wheeled on Ruger and had given him a searching, accusing glare. “Did you try to go out?”

Ruger kept his face bland while he said, “Do I look like a Crispy Critter? I’m not stupid, you know.” Then because he knew more explanation would be needed, he contrived another lie. “I was getting antsy and wanted to take a look outside and just tore open the door, forgetting what time of day it was.” He was pretty sure Vic bought that, and thereafter Ruger changed the subject.

Vic lit a cigarette. “You know, sport, everyone in town is talking about how Malcolm Crow and Val Guthrie bitch-slapped you. Twice. That cockup at the hospital was a real mess.” Ruger answered with silence. “What am I supposed to think about that, sport? What’s the Man supposed to think about that?”

That far end of the cellar was mostly in shadows and Vic’s face was a pale vagueness in the gloom. Even so, Vic could see—or thought he saw—the red burn of Ruger’s eyes.

“News flash, asshole—when you come back from the dead there’s no how-to manual. I was barely turned when I hit the hospital.” He licked his lips. “Times are changing, though. Every minute I keep learning more about what I am. I’ll bet I know some shit that you don’t know.”

Vic snorted. “Don’t put too much down on that bet, sport, and don’t try and pussy out of this. Own it like a man. You screwed up.”

“If you think I’m a screwup, then cap me, Wingate,” Ruger said quietly. “Otherwise go stick it up your ass.”

Vic picked up the pistol. “You think I won’t?”

Ruger smiled and Vic could definitely see that. Rows of jagged white teeth. Crow had kicked his front teeth out, but already they were starting to grow back—though they were keeping their jagged ridges. It made Ruger look like a cannibal. “If the Man wanted me dead he could reach out and snuff me out just like that. You know it and I know it.” Now it was Vic’s turn to be silent. “So, if I’m still alive—and if he sent you and my ol’ buddy Boyd to go and hijack me from the hospital—then I’m thinking the Man doesn’t think I’m all that much of a screwup.”

“Maybe,” Vic said grudgingly, “but it sure doesn’t mean that you’re employee of the month, either. To me you’re as useful as Gertie here.” He waggled the pistol. “And I think we can get along fine without you.”

Ruger gave a short, cold bark of a laugh. “You think you’re king shit, but you’re no more on the policy level than I am. We’re all fingers on the Man’s hand, and we should bow down and kiss the ground every time we even think of his name. Instead you’re second-guessing him. I find that very interesting.”

“Smooth talk for a screwup, sport.” But Vic shifted in his seat as he said that.

“By dawn tomorrow I’ll have done more for the Man than you’ve managed in thirty years, so the next time you want to blow smoke about something, just blow it up your own ass.” He took a small step forward. “Remember—there’s a lot more of us now than there are of you.” He jerked his chin toward the pistol. “I’ll bet you don’t even take a shit without that next to you these days. Getting scary out there, isn’t it?”

“Don’t try that Bela Lugosi crap on me, sport. I was running with the Man before you figured out which hand to use to jerk off with.” He sat back against the leather cushions. “I’m still waiting to hear this grand plan of yours for Crow and that Guthrie bitch. You pretty much blew your chance to make it look like an act of vengeance from a man on the run—which was the plan as I recall—so you’d better not be planning something too crazy. We want tourists in town, not more cops, you dig?”

“I have something low key in mind for them. Y’see, I planted a seed.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“At the hospital, I put a worm in Crow’s brain and I think the little bastard is going to come to us. Well…he’s going to come to the Man.” Ruger’s smile faded but there was still laughter in his red eyes. He turned away and bent to the peephole again. “And that should be a real treat.” He grinned at Vic. “Something the Man suggested. You don’t need to worry about it. The thing you got to do is figure a good way for us to introduce Val Guthrie to my ol’ buddy, Boyd.”

“Boyd? Why, you afraid to do it yourself?”

“Time’s not right for me to risk being seen around the Guthrie place, or don’t you agree? I mean, hell, you went to such great pains to get me out of the hospital—made sure Boyd was seen hauling my ass out of there. Everyone knows I’m dead, but Boyd’s in the catbird seat right now. He’s the man of the hour. I think we need to have him pay the Guthrie slut a visit, maybe give her the standard recruitment speech.”

Vic thought about it, then gave Ruger a grudging nod. “You want to fry Crow’s grits for him. Make him hurt first, am I right?”

“That’s exactly what I want. Nice to be on the same page.”

“It’s nasty and devious—much as I hate to say it, I like it. Be careful, though. Boyd going after those cops wasn’t any part of the Plan. He was supposed to get lost until those Philly cops left town, and I even drove his ass out of town, but he went off the reservation and came back to where he last saw you. Who the hell knows why. Guy’s brains are mush, so, even though the man gave him a tune-up, I think you’d better have a talk with him, too, just to be sure he follows the playbook. You want to turn Guthrie, not have Boyd scatter her pieces all over the county. That’s no good to us. That’s shock, not hurt, and if you want to hurt Crow that won’t get you the best bang for the buck.”

“I’ll handle Boyd.”

“Point is, because of Boyd’s screwup the Plan is starting to change. We have more police attention than we need, and we have the wrong kind of media buzz. We need to do everything on the sly now, especially as far as Crow goes. Now we have to be more careful about how and when we take him off the board. He’s one of the only two people who can keep all the big Halloween celebrations going at full tilt. Him and Terry Wolfe. Wolfe’s looking pretty shaky lately—and we both know what that’s about—so if he has a breakdown, or turns, then Crow will have to stay alive and in play. So…hands off him until we know what’s happening with Wolfe.”

“What about Guthrie?”

“It’s a good plan, but let it wait a couple days. Maybe save it for Little Halloween. Hurrying’s not going to help us right now. Besides, you’ve got plenty of other work to do.”

Ruger looked at the wall clock and his body shuddered as if in climax. “Sundown. Time to go out and play.”