Ghost Road Blues

Epilogue

Midnight came and went in Pine Deep and no one took notice as September died and a cold October was born amid shadows and sirens and flashing lights.

Detective Sergeant Frank Ferro took charge of the investigation and cleanup at Pinelands Hospital and slowly the story unfolded. The hospital lights had been shut off at the source by the simple act of the main breakers being thrown, and the auxiliary generator had been disabled with lines and wires cut. The maintenance supervisor, Carl Wilkerson, was found unconscious in the electrical shed behind the building — alive but badly injured with a cracked skull. The weapon was a pair of bolt cutters; the same cutters had been used to gain entry to the shed and disable the generator. The main breakers were turned back on and by morning the backup had been repaired as well. Wilkerson was admitted to the hospital in guarded condition, though when he regained consciousness two days later he had no memory at all of the event. “Traumatic amnesia,” diagnosed Saul Weinstock.

Weinstock met with Ferro, LaMastra, and Gus in the doctors’ lounge around two in the morning, as things were beginning to settle down. Over cups of coffee — Ferro’s fourteenth of the day — Weinstock gave them a status report.

“Officer Shanks has a hell of a lump on his head and a very sore set of testicles — about which we can all sympathize — but will be fine. We’re keeping him overnight for observation.”

“How’s Ms. Guthrie?” LaMastra asked. “She really came through in there.”

Weinstock grinned. “Yeah, never leave Val out of the equation. She’s known for rising to the occasion. And as far as her injuries go, we put two stitches in her cheek and in the morning we’ll be doing a CT scan of her eye socket. X-rays showed that she has a hairline crack of the right orbit, but we need to rule out trauma to the eye itself.”

“Jeez,” said Gus. “She said all he did was backhand her.”

Ferro shook his head. “And Crow?”

“I had to disappoint him about getting kicked loose tomorrow. He won’t be going anywhere for at least two, three days. Fourteen stitches in his mouth. Both cheeks. Three loose molars. His left wrist has the weirdest compression bruise I’ve ever seen, like it was caught in a vise.”

“He said Ruger just squeezed his wrists.”

Weinstock shook his head. “No. He had to have caught it in a door or something. The human hand can’t generate the kind of PSI needed to do that. But with all the jolts he took I doubt he remembers things clearly.”

“Yeah,” said LaMastra, “he also said Ruger’s eyes turned red for a while.”

“As I said, he’s disoriented.”

Ferro sipped his coffee. It was horrible. Reheated, probably, though that wasn’t why his face was sour. “And our boy Ruger?”

“Karl Ruger’s body was taken to the morgue where an autopsy will be performed tomorrow by yours truly. Though I’d rather just run him through a composter and let it be.”

“Amen to that,” said Gus and LaMastra at the same time.

“Here’s the part I don’t get, gentlemen, and maybe there’s some new street drug that can turn someone into Superman, but cursory examination showed that Ruger had been shot over two dozen times,” Weinstock said, pausing to let that sink in. “There were five original wounds, which had all started to close. Yes, you heard me. They were healing. Since the day before yesterday. And then there were all of the shots collectively fired by Crow and Val. You want to tell me how a man with five bullets in him eludes your police manhunt for two days and then breaks in here, knocks out our maintenance guy, knocks out a cop and beats the living shit out of two more people, and then only goes down after they empty two guns into him from a range of about six feet?” He looked at them, his mouth smiling but his eyes very hard and, perhaps, a little afraid. “You want to tell me how that’s possible, guys, and I’ll get us all on the cover of the Journal of the American Medical Association ’cause it’ll be the medical miracle of the century.”

Gus just looked into his coffee cup. LaMastra was staring at Ferro, and Ferro was meeting the doctor’s flat stare, but after a few seconds all he could do was shake his head.

“He is dead, though, right?” asked Gus.

“Oh yes. Karl Ruger is very, very dead. He’s wrapped in plastic and in the fridge. But to tell you the truth, fellas,” Weinstock said, “I’m not even sure I want to do the autopsy on this guy. I’m not sure I know enough medicine to go in there and figure this out, and no, that’s not a joke.”

Vic Wingate listened to the news late into the night, then called Jim Polk for the inside word.

Polk said, “Yeah, he’s dead. Crow and Val Guthrie shot the living hell out of him.”

“Good,” Vic said. “Good.”

There was silence on the line for a moment and then Polk asked, “Vic?”

“Yeah?”

“Is this part of…you know? The thing?”

Vic laughed. “Everything’s part of it, Jimmy. Everything.”

“But — maybe I was reading this wrong, but I kind of had the impression that this Ruger clown was supposed to be on your side. I mean…our…side.”

“He is.”

“Not no more he ain’t.”

Vic just laughed and hung up.

He sat back in his lounger and crossed his ankles. The house above him was quiet. Lois was passed out on the couch and Mike had gone to bed on time. Vic had let him be tonight — there had been too much going on. Tomorrow he’d start working on some way to steer Mike back into Tow-Truck Eddie’s path, but that could wait. There was still a whole month before Mike absolutely had to be killed. Plenty of time.

For now Vic could relax and revel in the fact that everything the Man had said would happen had happened. It was a shame Ruger hadn’t managed to take Crow and Val Guthrie out of the equation, but there was still time for that. There was, he thought, time for the whole plan to unfold just the way Griswold wanted it to. Right up to Halloween night and the beginning of the Red Wave.

Happy, content, Vic Wingate drifted off to sleep.

Malcolm Crow lay in his bed and stared at the ceiling, eyes wide despite the pull of the morphine, cold sweat beading on his face. Everything was quiet now. Val was safe and protected. Even though Ruger was gone, there was now an officer stationed in her room, just as Jerry Head was now parked in his room.

Weinstock had let Crow stay with Val all the way up until the drugs knocked her out, and then he’d kissed her — kissed his fiancée! — and then allowed himself to be gently urged into a wheelchair and taken back to his room. Despite the painkillers, he hurt, but he didn’t really care. Val was safe.

And Val was going to be his wife.

His wife!

Before she had drifted off to sleep Val had clutched his hand with hers — a small but strong hand now stained with powder burns — and in a desperate voice had asked, “Is it over, Crow?”

Crow had kissed her hand and her lips. “Yeah, it’s over, baby. He’s dead.” His mouth was full of stitches and it hurt to talk, but that was something they both needed to hear aloud. “He’s dead. Gone.”

Her lip curled as she said, “And I hope his soul burns in hell!” There was still fear in Val’s eyes, but there was steel there, too, and Crow loved her for the strength he saw there. His heart swelled to the breaking point.

“For all eternity,” Crow agreed heartily. He caressed her hair. “We did it, Val — we stopped him. You and me, baby. Your dad can rest now, Val. It’s over.”

“It’s over,” she echoed, and closed her eyes for so long Crow thought that the drugs finally had her, but then she opened her eyes and lifted her hand, looking at the engagement ring sparkling on her finger. “It’s so beautiful…” she murmured and drifted off to sleep.

Crow kissed her forehead and her eyes and her lips and then let the orderly help him back to his wheelchair. His body felt ancient and badly used, but his heart was young. All the way back to his room joy at the prospect of a future with Val kept leaping up inside him, but it was like something on one end of a seesaw. As it peaked and dropped back down, another intense emotion soared up.

A total, abject, and penetrating terror. While he had been with Val he had forced it down into the recesses of his mind, but nothing would compel it to stay there. Ruger’s last words kept echoing in his brain.

Ubel Griswold sends his regards.

How the hell had Ruger known about Griswold? How could he have found out about that killer and how had he known to use Griswold’s name like a hammer to hit him? How? It made no sense at all.

Ubel Griswold sends his regards.

Griswold was dead — thirty years dead. At least, everyone thought he was dead. He had vanished off the face of the earth at the end of the Black Harvest. The Bone Man had been killed for his murder. Griswold couldn’t be alive. It was impossible. So…how had Ruger known about him, and why had he said what he said?

Ubel Griswold sends his regards.

Only two people in all of Pine Deep knew what kind of man Griswold had been — himself and Terry. Griswold had nearly killed Terry, and had in fact murdered Crow’s older brother, just as he had murdered little Mandy Wolfe, and so many others. He had tried to kill Crow, but the Bone Man had been there. Had just chanced to be there, and had come after Griswold swinging a shovel and yelling fit to wake everyone in the neighborhood, and everyone had come running. Maybe Griswold could have killed them both, but when all the neighbors had come running — a mass of people who had been filled with grief and impotent rage all through that horrible season — Griswold had fled.

All those years ago young Malcolm Crow had seen Griswold very clearly in the bright spill of moonlight. He had seen Griswold’s face, had seen it change. Had seen it become the true face of Griswold. He had told his father what he’d seen, and had been whipped for lying.

The Bone Man had seen it, too, and had gone hunting for both the man and the monster. Had he really killed him before the mob had beaten him to death and strung him up on the scarecrow post? Crow had always believed that…but now he wondered.

Ubel Griswold sends his regards.

Griswold had been a monster. So had Karl Ruger, and Crow had seen a change in him, too. The image of Ruger’s eyes turning from brown to red would not leave Crow’s mind. He hadn’t imagined it. No way. Was it the same kind of change? Was Ruger the same kind of monster as Griswold? Or…was he something else? Something different? He thought about Ruger lying on a slab in the morgue down in the basement, and he wondered. Did the morgue drawers have locks? Was the morgue itself locked?

His stitched and battered mouth hurt abominably but he didn’t want more painkillers. They’d just put him to sleep, and Crow was not sure he ever wanted to go to sleep again. Yesterday he had dreamed of Karl Ruger and last night Ruger had shown up. Not exactly the same as his dream, but so close as to be terrifying. If he let himself sleep now, what would he dream? His skin crawled at the thought.

Crow looked over to where Jerry Head sat slumped in the chair leafing through a magazine.

“Hey…Jerry…?”

The officer looked up. He was bleary with lack of sleep, but his eyes were still cop eyes. “Yeah?”

“You…you won’t fall asleep on me now, will you?”

For a moment Head looked surprised, and then a small compassionate smile formed on his lips. He sat up straighter in his chair. “Naw, man. I got your back. You get some sleep. I’ll be here for another hour and then we got one of your local boys, Eddie Oswald, coming on and he’ll sit with you until morning.”

Crow felt relieved. Head was big and tough, and Tow-Truck Eddie was even bigger and tougher. “Thanks, man.”

The morphine was taking him now and the edges of the room were getting hazy.

Ubel Griswold sends his regards.

Before the darkness closed in entirely, Malcolm Crow did something he had not done since he’d been a little boy. He crossed himself and said a bedtime prayer. For himself…and for Val.

As he faded off to sleep he heard, or dreamed that he heard, a sweet guitar playing sad old blues. It comforted him, and the night passed.

Four floors below where Crow slept, in the basement morgue of the Pinelands College Teaching Hospital, the body of Karl Ruger lay in a plastic body bag on the stainless steel table in drawer number 14. The remains of Tony Macchio were three drawers to his left. Henry Guthrie was his direct right-hand neighbor. There were more drawers occupied at one time than at any time since a three-car pile up in Crestville the previous April.

The wall clock ticked the seconds slowly as 3:00 a.m. turned to 4:00.

Inside drawer number 14 Ruger’s body was still and cold. There was no blood moving through his veins. His lungs were collapsed, his heart as still and cold as a stone. His muscles, once so strong and deadly, were flaccid, and his brutal hands were limp.

Only his eyes were open. Wide and unblinking, staring up at the utter blackness of the inside of the drawer.

Wait! a voice said in his mind, and Karl Ruger’s dry tongue flicked out over his lips once, twice, then vanished back into his slack mouth. After a while he closed his eyes.

And waited.