Dead Man's Song

Chapter 17

(1)

“They want to keep us one more day,” Mark said, his frustration and tension clear all the way down the phone lines. “Seems they wanted to have another counseling session with Weeping Beauty.”

“Mark! Do you have to be like that?”

Silence for a few heartbeats. “It’s not like I said it in front of her.”

“You shouldn’t have said it all.” She expected him to say something else, peevish or defensive, but there was nothing. She said, “What time tomorrow should we pick you up?”

“You don’t need to bother,” he snapped. “Buck Franklin from the Rotary is coming by.”

“I’d like to be there anyway,” Val said, “for Connie.”

“Don’t bother,” Mark said, and hung up.

She set down the phone and looked at it thoughtfully for a while, lips pursed, twin vertical frown lines between her brows. Crow would have had something witty and biting and funny to say, even to the silent phone, but he wasn’t here and the best Val could manage was, “ass,” which was appropriate enough.

Around her the house was huge and silent, filled with brown shadows. She knew that every door was locked and every window shut and pinned. Crow had seen to that before he had left for town to put in some hours at the store. He wouldn’t be back until the middle of the afternoon, and then at four a reporter was coming over to interview Crow about the events of thirty years ago. That should be loads of fun, she thought.

She went downstairs to her father’s room, hesitated in the doorway for a while, steeled herself, and went into the room, past the bed that was now empty of both her mother and father, to the big oak wardrobe. The doors swung open quietly. She knelt down and dug around until she found a old shoe-box tied with a piece of hairy twine. Val brought this over to the desk by the window and sat down. Though her left arm still ached it was better each day. She untied the twine, set the lid aside, and removed a bundle wrapped in an oil-stained cloth. Val unwrapped it and stared at the contents for a long while, frowning.

There was a small cleaning kit in the box, which she opened to the smell of gun oil. Val slowly and methodically stripped and cleaned the .45 Colt Commander. When she was finished, she loaded the magazine and slapped it into place. These motions hurt her shoulder, but not that much, and even if the pain had been intense Val would not have cared. When she closed her eyes she saw the dead face of Karl Ruger—but with his eyes open and his wet lips curled into a leering grin. Now, with the pistol, when she saw that face in her mind it would be at the far end of a steel gun sight. And if Boyd came calling, well…that would be too bad for him.

(2)

Three times yesterday and twice today Tow-Truck Eddie drove past the Crow’s Nest and slowed to peer in the window. After that first try, when all he could see was a blurred face, he’d circled back an hour later, but this time all he saw was Crow moving around the store. No one else. He tried it late in the day, near closing, and again all he saw was Crow. No sign of the Beast. Doubt chewed at him. This morning he parked his wrecker in a side street and walked past the store as surreptitiously as he could, pausing to peer inside. Again, just Crow, though this time he was with customers, all of who were adults. No sign of a teenage boy anywhere.

Could he have changed his appearance? This thought wormed its way into his thoughts and wouldn’t go away, even though the great booming voice of his Father told him that the Beast in boy skin was there. Right there. Right now.

Eddie could not see him at all. Not even the blurred outline of him. Nothing.

He would keep coming back, though, he promised his Father that. Nothing on earth would stop him. Yet deep inside him, far down in the soil of his heart, the first real seeds of doubt were beginning to take root.

The Bone Man felt desperately weak, but even though he kept having to dip into the shallow well of his strength to hide the boy from those penetrating blue eyes he did not feel any weaker than he had earlier. Perhaps he had bottomed out somehow, had dropped as far as he could drop. Well, he thought, if that was so then it was so, and it was something he could—well live with was not quite right, and for once he smiled ruefully at the perversity of his condition—even so it was something he could endure.

The crucial thing for him was that this was something he was actually able to accomplish, and for once he truly felt that he understood why he had been brought back. If he could save the boy, at least until Halloween, then his life and death and whatever the hell this was would all be important. It would matter…and more important to him, it would make sense. He stood there invisible in the sunlight and watched the wrecker drive away, and despite the agonizing weariness the Bone Man felt good.

(3)

“I’m going to throw some punches at you,” Crow said, raising his hands and settling his body into a boxing posture—knees flexed, chin tucked into his right shoulder, hands high, fists tight. “What I want you to do is block anything you see.” Mike’s eyes were a little glassy, and Crow thought he saw the beginnings of tears forming. The kid’s bruises looked a lot better today, but his eyes were still spooked. “You ready?” Crow asked, though it was clear the only thing Mike was ready for was a mad dash down the alley.

“Um…yeah. Sure.”

Crow nodded and threw a light jab with his good arm, aiming four or five inches to the right of the kid’s face and stopping three inches short. Throwing the punch hurt, but Crow kept it off his face. Mike made a clumsy swipe at it that missed and jerked back so fast it looked like somebody had pulled him with a rope. Crow took a shuffle step in and looped a big, wide roundhouse right that had no chance at all of making contact. Mike squeezed his eyes shut and wrapped his arms around his eyes.

“Okay,” Crow said, lowering his hands, “that lets me know you’re not ready for Golden Gloves.” Throwing the punch without power only tugged at his stitches. It didn’t really hurt, and he was glad about that. He’d had a good night’s sleep last night, curled up in Val’s arms, the both of them sleeping long and without dreams. Over breakfast Val had remarked on it.

“I feel almost human today.” Her black hair was glossy and damp from the shower and there was the first trace of a sparkle in her eyes, something he hadn’t seen in days. It had lifted Crow’s heart and made him feel better, too.

Now, scuffling around the backyard with Mike, Crow felt ever closer to his old self—though he still didn’t throw any punches with the arm Ruger had squeezed.

Mike, on the other hand, looked sheepish and ashamed, blossoms of red flaring in his cheeks as he continued to back away from Crow’s approach. Finally, raising his hands palms outward, Crow said, “What was Crow’s Rule Number One?”

The kid shrugged. He was still covered in bruises on every visible inch of his skin. By comparison he made Crow look uninjured and whole.

“Sorry, kid, that was my I-didn’t-hear-shit ear.”

“Never let the assholes win,” Mike snapped irritably.

“Damn right.” They were in the small yard behind Crow’s shop and apartment. The yard was walled in by other stores except in the back and had a fine view of the hills, the distant farms, and the long snaking line of A-32. “Come on now, let’s work on some moves.”

Mike flapped a hand. “It’s just that I hate that I have to learn this stuff.”

“Would you rather just be Vic’s punching bag forever?”

Mike gave him a nasty look. “Just get on with it.”

“Okay, lesson one is going to be about how to evade and parry. The best block is to not be there. You follow me?”

“Yeah,” Mike said. “Yeah, I do.”

(4)

Crow’s phone rang just after they were back in the store and he snatched it off the wall. “Crow’s Nest.”

“Crow? It’s Saul—are you alone?”

“I can talk. Mike’s with a customer. What’s up?”

“Crow, look, I don’t want to sound paranoid, but ever since the other night there have been some pretty strange things happening here in town.”

“You mean besides insane serial killers and body-snatchers?”

“I’m not joking around, Crow. I did the autopsies on—”

The bells above the door jangled and five people came in, laughing and chattering. Tourists. “More customers. Let me take care of them and call you right back.”

“No, look…I’ll talk to you tomorrow at the funeral. This will be better in person.”

“Um, okay. See you then.”

(5)

Clouds had come up suddenly from the southwest and in the course of half an hour the sky went from a hard clear blue to a nearly featureless gray that was beginning to swell to a threatening purple. Val Guthrie was deep in the cornfields on the east side of her property, her father’s big .45 tucked into the waistband of her jeans, snug against the small of her back, hidden by a red-checked thermal jacket. She was walking the fields with Diego, a short, barrel-chested East Texan who had worked for her father for almost twenty years, doing spot tests of the soil pH. It was still a clean 6.54, far above the range of any of the surrounding farms, whereas most of the other farms had shown pH drops well below 5.0 and even lower. Val’s soil remained solidly in the 6.0 to 7.0 range, even in the places where all that separated her fields from her neighbors was a wood-railed fence. Her closest neighbor, Charlie Kendall, had shown her the analysis of his samples and the levels of soil phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium, sulfur, magnesium, and calcium had all dropped, even when a sample was taken five inches from a healthy sample taken along Val’s property line. “I don’t get it,” Val said. “It doesn’t make any kind of sense. It’s too weird to be an accident of nature, and if there is something in our soil that’s making a difference, then it has to be something that was deliberately put here.”

“Like reverse ecoterrorism,” Diego said, trying for a joke.

“If it was something different in our soil it would show,” she said, shaking her head in frustration, “but it doesn’t.”

“Nope,” Diego agreed. After twenty years he still had that East Texas drawl. “I was talking to Spence the other day,” he said, referring to Todd Spencer, his counterpart on the Kendall farm, “and he was saying that there was not one single stalk that didn’t show signs of root worm. Not one. They’re going to have to burn the whole crop, and this is weird because as you know they’re growing that Mon 863, that insect-resistant corn from Canada. Shouldn’t be even a small percentage of root worm over there.”

“And we have no traces at all of them.” Val shivered in the freshening breeze. “That’s really weird, Dee.”

“No joke,” Diego agreed. There was a rustle behind them and they turned to see the stalks snapping back over the passage of something that moved quickly through the rows. “Deer,” he said, shrugging it away. He went back to collecting soil samples, but Val continued to stare at the spot where they’d heard the rustle, frowning. Then she took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and let it out through he nose as if to cleanse herself of her jumpiness. Her cell phone rang, startling her.

“Hey, baby,” Crow said and the day seemed to brighten for her.

“Hey yourself. I was going to call you soon. I need an insanity break.”

“You mean a sanity—”

“You heard me.”

“Nice to be appreciated for one’s talents. Anyway, honey-chile, I just called to check in. Mike and I finished his first lesson in Kickass 101.”

“How’d he do?”

“Metza-metz. Started off by fighting me tooth and nail about even discussing it, let alone giving it a try, but he came around. Kid is seriously spooked, though. Vic Wingate has really done a number on him.”

“Uh-oh, I’m hearing that Captain Avenger tone in your voice,” she warned.

“Me? I wouldn’t lay a finger on him,” Crow said, then in a stage whisper added, “the slimy shit-eating bastard.”

“Tch-tch,” Val said, but in her heart she agreed with Crow. “Well, maybe one of these days karma will drop a transmission on him at the shop.”

“From your lips to Kali’s ears. On the upside, we did have a good session after he got into gear. Kid has some good reflexes. Really good, actually.”

“Honey…do you think you can teach him enough to do any good?”

Crow made a noncommittal noise. “Time will tell,” he said, and then changed tack. “So, how are you doing?”

“Okay, I guess. I’m out in the fields with Dee. Taking samples and such.” She sighed. “And this afternoon I’ll be setting up for the funeral tomorrow. God, this is so weird. I’m doing ordinary farm stuff one minute and the next I’m planning how to memorialize my dad.”

“I’m meeting that reporter out there at four. You want me to be there earlier?”

“No. I’ve got Diego and the guys.” She told him about the plans, finding a strange sort of calm in the mundane details.

“Well, if you need me there today, sweetie, I’m there. You sound pretty wired.”

“Thanks, but it’s just that I…I keep seeing him everywhere.”

“I understand, baby. Your dad’s spirit is all over that—”

“No,” she interrupted. “Not daddy…I keep seeing him everywhere.”

“Oh,” he said after a moment.

“No matter what I’m doing I always get the feeling he’s right there, watching me from around a corner or peeking through the blinds, or following me through the corn. I can’t seem to shake it. I mean…just now there was a deer walking through the corn and my first thought was him.”

“Val…this is all still pretty raw. It’s just been a week, it’s going to take some time.”

She made an ambiguous noise. Crow said, sounding startled, “Heck with the store. Let me tidy up a few things around here and then I’ll be over. Want me to pick up some Chinese?”

“That sounds good.”

“See you soon, my love.”

“Crow…?”

“Yeah, baby.”

“I really do love you with all my heart.”

“Me too, Val. See you soon.”

She punched the OFF button and snugged the phone back down into her jeans, waved good-bye to Diego, and strolled back toward the house. As if in reflection of her mood, the sky was a weary gray with a sadness of clouds drooping low over the distant trees and a sigh of a cold breeze. A few birds flew overhead but they were hungry and lonely birds, flying fast to find other places where warmth and hope still prospered. Far above the clouds an invisible plane flew from some distant somewhere to another place, whisking by over the grayness of Pine Deep, the intermittent drone of its engine sounding like the moan of some sleeping person dreaming of pain.

As she walked, she came to the spot where her father had died and stopped. There was no sign of it now except for tattered streamers of yellow police tape tied to the fence posts. She climbed onto the fence and sat there in the cold, her short hair snapping in the wind, her dark eyes filling with tears, her mouth tight with cold anger, trying to grasp the impossibility of it all. Her father had died there. Right there, on that tiny stretch of earth that looked no different than any other soil anywhere in the world, and yet it was there, right there, that he had bled to death alone in the rainy darkness on that terrible night last week. The thought that his blood was still trapped within the soil made her feel at once totally repulsed and yet at the same time oddly comforted. It was a stupid thought, she told herself, but somehow she felt as though it meant that something of her father’s spirit remained here, too, as if some trick of geomancy had allowed him to linger. With a certainty as if of ancient ritual Val knew that day after day, probably for the rest of her life, she would come out here and feel for her father’s spirit in the air and in the soil. The thought that such a spirit, such a person who had been filled with so much vitality, so much love and gentle strength could simply end was just too horrible, and it made her feel terribly mortal. If Henry Guthrie could be snuffed out with no more than the flex of a finger on a trigger, then her own life, Crow’s life, and the life of their baby were all equally transient.

She thought also of another Guthrie who had died there, just a few feet from where Daddy had been killed. Young Roger Guthrie, on leave from the Air Force, Val’s handsome cousin who looked more like Henry than Mark did. Rog had been home just a week, but had picked a bad time for it. That was the year of the Black Harvest, three decades ago. A lot of folks had died that year, some from diseases born of the blight—but Rog had not caught any disease. He had been one of the victims of the Pine Deep Reaper. Right here, right at this spot. This place was awash in Guthrie blood, and the thought of it fueled Val’s rage.

Val wiped her eyes, feeling the wind back and freshen. There was a hint of moisture in the air, and the tang of ozone; it smelled like snow but was too early in the year for that. A storm smell, she judged. Another storm. God. The last storm had come on like this, growing in the afternoon, building all through the evening and then exploding in the deep of night with a force that had shattered her life. If there could be a worse storm—or a storm whose power could do more damage—than the one that had blown Karl Ruger into Pine Deep, Val hoped that she would never live to see it. The very thought of it made her stomach take a sickening lurch.

Or was that morning sickness? She tugged her right hand out of her pocket and placed her palm and spread fingers over her stomach. She was forty and had never been pregnant before. When Ruger had broken into the house he’d punched her in the stomach and Val had been terrified that her baby—her baby, she was not used to even thinking that word—had been harmed. But Weinstock had examined her. She hadn’t miscarried. Her baby was one thing about her life that Ruger hadn’t been able to lay his hard hands upon.

Val stopped and turned, looking up at the clouds. They were not yet so dense as to be featureless and while she stared at them, at the shapes and shadows formed by the slowly changing billows, she imagined that she saw a face up there. His face. Just for a moment—a pale face with flashing dark eyes and heavy features. It was there for just a moment, for a heartbeat, and then it was gone, blown by cold winds into some other disguise and then to nothing as the skies darkened. Shivering with the cold, Val turned and headed home while above and around her the storm drew back its fist.