Authors: Jonathan Maberry
All Boyd did was smile as he lunged toward her.
(4)
Crow drove the rutted twists of Dark Hollow road, his mind churning over everything that had happened down in Dark Hollow. The sensations as they had crossed the line, the swamp, the chains with their locks inside the house, the new boards, the roaches. Even for him it was all too weird, too…
real.
Not tainted childhood memories, not alcohol-induced DTs, not the result of repeated head trauma courtesy of Karl Ruger. This had just happened, and unlike when Ruger had said those enigmatic last few words there was a witness this time. He cut a glance at Newton, who had his arms wrapped around himself as if for warmth; the reporter’s head was bowed and he was shaking it slowly from side to side.
Oh boy
, thought Crow,
there’s my credible witness going bye-bye on me.
He braked to a stop where the dirt road emptied out onto A-32, and for a moment he sat there. Turn right and head to town, drop off Newton, then come back here to Val; turn left and go see Val first. He pulled out his cell, got enough bars, and hit speed dial. Val’s phone rang five times and then went to voice mail. He tried her house, same deal.
Then all at once two things happened that changed everything forever.
First, his mind—still replaying everything that had happened that day—tripped over the buried memory of that bizarre thought he’d felt when he had been on Griswold’s porch, when he had touched the wood with his palm and felt the odd whispering tremble beneath his skin. A voice—maybe it was the voice of Griswold’s ghost, dead these thirty years, or maybe it was the voice of his own fears—hissed at him from the shadows.
She is going to die and there is nothing you can do to save her. Nothing!
Crow jerked upright in his seat and snapped his head around toward Val’s farm. At that moment he heard the gunshots. And the screams.
(5)
Boyd lunged at her and Val fired two more shots, catching him in the upper chest. It didn’t stop him, but the force of the two heavy-caliber bullets turned him while he was in mid-leap, spinning his mass so that he crashed beside her rather than on top of her. He landed with a hiss like a scalded cat and turned toward her, clawing at her with his white fingers, the black nails tearing at her sleeves and chest as she lay on her side, but she brought her feet up and kicked at him while trying to steady the gun with both hands.
“Val!”
Val and Boyd both turned as three men came pelting around the side of the barn. Diego was in the lead, with José Ramos and Tyrone Gibbs close behind. “We heard screams—” Diego was saying and then they took in the tableau. Connie writhing on the ground, her face and throat splashed with blood; Val on the ground with a pistol; and a crazy-looking man grabbing at her. All three men put it together at once—they had all seen the news stories; they’d lived through the aftermath of the murder of their boss and the savage killings of the two cops not eighty yards from where they now stood. They
knew
who this son of a bitch was, and in the space between one footfall and the next their faces changed from concern to fury.
“Get that son of a
bitch
!” Diego yelled, and the two younger men—a twenty-year-old heavy equipment mechanic with ropy muscles and a twenty-five-year-old farmhand who once played halfback for the Pinelands Scarecrows—rushed in with hate in their eyes. They were big men who had dealt with their own grief over Henry’s death, and loved Val like a sister, and they wanted a piece of this South Philly wiseguy white trash. Shoulder to shoulder they raced toward Boyd, who had stopped pawing at Val and was rising to meet them; and from ten feet away both younger men threw themselves at him, leaping high and low as if they had practiced the move a thousand times. José slammed his shoulder into Boyd’s thighs and Ty braced his forearms in front of him and took Boyd in the chest, and they crushed him back against the barn wall. Bones snapped, Boyd howled in rage and there was a huge muffled echo from inside the barn.
José clung to Boyd’s legs, trying to pull him down, but Ty landed on his feet with old football reflexes still in his muscles. He pressed Boyd back with one forearm and started hammering him with short overhand rights that pulped what was left of Boyd’s face, splintering his nose, cracking his sinuses, ripping skin along his eyebrows. The sound of his blows was like an ax hitting wet cordwood.
Boyd endured the hits and just shot out one hand to catch Ty’s throat, and with a jerk of his wrist tore the whole front of it away. There was a massive spray of blood that shot like a hose from Ty’s arteries, drenching Boyd, splattering the wall, splashing Val’s face as she struggled to her feet. Ty tottered back, clawing at a gaping red nothing of a throat; his eyes went wide with the impossibility of what was happening, awareness sinking in even as his mind went red and then black. He fell backward, blood geysering up for a second before settling down to a dribble as shock shut down his heart.
“¡Dios mío!”
Diego cried, skidding to a stop, his own fist raised for a punch, unable to comprehend what he had just witnessed.
Boyd reached down and grabbed José by the hair and jerked his head up and back, and there was a sound like a rake-handle breaking. The young man flopped to the ground, his chest and shoulders jerking, his feet kicking spasmodically.
Screaming in horror, Val fired two more shots, catching Boyd in the side and staggering him away from where José lay. The young man was staring upward, eyes wide and bright, feeling nothing at all below his neckline but a fiery emptiness as if he had been separated from all of his nerve endings.
Boyd crouched and spun, hissing as he began to advance toward Val once more, but Diego snapped out of his shock and waded in to land a single wide haymaker on the side of Boyd’s jaw. It was a powerful punch, backed by all of the sturdy foreman’s mass and turn, and Boyd’s head snapped so far around that there was an audible snap somewhere in his neck, but he just twitched his shoulders and turned his head back toward Val, lashing out with one hand almost as an afterthought and catching Diego on the cheekbone. This was a far more powerful blow and the foreman spun like a dancer on the ball of one foot and landed facedown, his eyes rolling high and white.
Grinning with his bloody mouth, baring his jagged rows of teeth, Boyd lunged once more at Val and she fired again, standing in a shooter’s crouch now, the gun held in one hand, the other one clamped around her wrist to support its weight, one eye seeing nothing but black and the other staring right into Boyd’s hideous face. Her first bullet punched through his mouth, clipping the tips off several teeth, like a missile flying through a cave and snapping off stalactites and stalagmites. That slowed Boyd by no more than a half-step.
She put the next round through his right eye and the next through his forehead.
The force slammed him back against the barn, but this time he seemed to freeze in place. His one remaining red-within-black eye stared at her with such profound shock that Val didn’t pull the trigger again. Instead she watched as that dark eye lost its clarity and slowly rolled upward as Boyd slid down into the wall, toppled over into the bloody dirt, and lay still.
Val stood there, her muscles locked and trembling, pain continuing to detonate in her skull and in her bad shoulder, but she still held the gun tightly in both hands. She took a single step forward, barrel aimed at the killer’s head, but there was no movement. Another step, remembering how Ruger had fooled Crow that terrible night. She wouldn’t make the same mistake. She took another step, and risked a glance around her. Ty was definitely dead. José—she thought his neck must be broken, but she could hear him breathing…and crying. Diego was out, but didn’t look that bad. And Connie. Dear God…Connie was alive, her hands clamped around her throat, her eyes open and glassy with shock. Inside the barn, Mark lay silent amid the shadows. She looked back at Boyd and took a final step until she was standing over him, the gun barrel pointing down. He had two black holes in his face. One where his right eye should be—which was now a dark mass of jelly—and another in the center of his forehead. He was definitely dead.
But she emptied the rest of the magazine into him anyway, each shot punching through his skull and into his brain.
The slide locked open, the magazine empty.
Val staggered back, lost her balance, and fell just as the first sob broke from her chest, and abruptly the whole yard—the house, the path, the barn, and all the bodies—were washed into a cartoon of harsh blacks and whites by headlights as Crow came tearing up the road toward her.
(1)
Crow sat with Val, both of them wrapped in the blanket the paramedics had draped around her shoulders. The cartoon black and white of the scene had been repainted with the red and blue of police lights, and ambulance sirens were a constant wail. Diego, Connie, and José had all been taken away. Ty Gibbs still lay where he had fallen, his dead face still registering amazement; inside the barn, Mark was being photographed. Crow could see the white flashes of the camera as they documented the scene. Crow had done it himself once upon a time; he knew the drill. He looked up and saw Newton standing nearby talking into his cell phone, calling in the story, scooping everyone else. Crow almost hated him for it, but just couldn’t spare the energy.
Crow kissed Val’s face, her hair. “It’s over,” he murmured.
“He was dead,” she whispered.
“He’s dead, baby, it’s okay. You killed the bastard—”
“No!” she had snapped, pounding on his chest with her fist. “He was dead. I shot him over and over again. I didn’t miss once. Not once. He was dead.”
Crow looked at her and saw the truth of it in her eyes. Not shock, not delusion. He stood up and walked over to where Boyd lay, ignoring Dixie McVey, who was writing in his notebook. Crow squatted down and counted the bullet holes. Fifteen of them from Henry’s old .45. But it was worse than that, worse than even Val knew, and sometime soon he’d have to tell her. As Crow knelt there, using a Bic pen to lift the folds of Boyd’s clothing, he saw other bullet holes. Old ones. Nine of them. In belly and groin and chest. Nearly healed over. Nine shots. The number of bullets that had been fired from Jimmy Castle’s pistol. Nine. Nine and then Val’s fifteen, the last of which had been head shots. Twenty-four shots all told. It was, of course, impossible.
He looked at Boyd’s mouth, the jaw hung loose, twisted askew, the lips slack over the teeth. With hands that were starting to shake with a palsy of rising terror, Crow reached out and pushed back Boyd’s upper lip, looking at evidence of what he did not want to find; but the bullet had done too much damage and what was left of the teeth revealed no dark secrets. Crow got to his feet feeling no relief.
He turned and walked slowly back to Val and waved away the paramedic who was trying to usher her into the back of an ambulance. The paramedic must have seen something in his face; he held up his hands, palms out, and retreated to his vehicle.
Crow took Val in his arms, careful with her.
She leaned into him. “He was dead,” she said again.
He nodded. “I know.”
(2)
When they heard the shooting and saw Crow’s car pull into the driveway, Vic started his truck and he and Ruger drove without headlights down the farm access road all the way to the river, then Vic turned his lights on and headed first north then west until they had circled above the town proper. Most of the way they didn’t say anything.
Vic’s cell phone rang when they were just north of town. It was Jim Polk. Vic put it on speakerphone. “All hell’s breaking loose at the Guthrie place. Is that your stuff?” he asked.
Vic had to take a breath before he answered. All he said was, “Boyd.”
“Yeah, well that reporter from Black Marsh called in that Boyd was dead.”
Vic and Ruger exchanged a look. “What do you mean ‘dead’?” Vic said.
“I mean dead, what do you think I mean? I was the one that took the call,” said Polk. “Mark Guthrie’s dead, too, and someone else, some guy works at the farm.”
“What about Val Guthrie?” Vic asked hopefully. “She dead, too?”
“Not as far as I know.” He told Vic everything Newton had said. “What the hell happened out there?”
“None of your business.”
“There’s one more thing, Vic. We got a report that Terry Wolfe tried to kill himself.”
“What?” Vic yelled.
“Yeah. Threw himself out of a window…he’s in critical condition. They’re not sure if he’ll make it. Vic…what the hell’s happening?”
“I’ll get back to you. Keep me posted.” He hung up, slammed the cell phone down hard on the seat, and then punched the dashboard. “Shit!”
“Let me get this straight,” Ruger said in his whispery voice, “that bitch killed Boyd? How the hell did she manage that? I thought you said no one would know how to kill us. I mean…it’s not like that stake-through-the-heart shit actually works. So what happened?”
They stopped at a light and Vic pushed in the dashboard lighter and fished in his pocket for a cigarette. “I don’t know!”
“Oh, that’s just peachy. You got this great big master plan, you got wheels spinning within wheels, you own dozens of key people, and you can’t kill one woman?”
Vic stabbed the air in front of Ruger’s nose with his forefinger. “You can shove that up your ass, sport, because this was your plan, not mine. I should have just dragged her ass down to the swamp and fed her to the Man. But no, you gotta be some criminal mastermind and screw with their heads. This is your fault.”
Ruger turned away and looked out at the darkness. “This should have worked. With anyone else…it
would
have worked.” He turned back to Vic. “There’s something else going on here.”
The lighter popped and Vic pulled it, held it to his cigarette and the glow of it painted his face a hellish red. “Listen to me, sport,” he said. “These two are standing in the way of the Red Wave, and now they know that something hinky is going on around here.” He leaned close. “We can’t have that.”
“No, we can’t.”
“If Boyd’s really dead, then we have to get his body before they can do an autopsy. Let’s call that Priority One. I mean, if we have to burn down the shitting hospital, then that’s what we do. Accidents happen.”
“We can work something out,” Ruger said. “There are a lot of us now.”
“The thing is…Crow and that reporter were at the house. They were in the Hollow. How or why the Man couldn’t stop them I don’t know, but they were there, they got away, and they have a story to tell. Plus, that Guthrie bitch saw Boyd—she had to see what he was. All of them now know more than they should. Shutting them up or shutting them down is Priority Two. Problem is…with Wolfe out of action we can’t actually kill the son of a bitch anymore. Damn it.”
“Then we’re screwed.”
Vic sat in silence while the light turned yellow and then red again. A smile grew on Vic’s face like the slow spread of a disease. “Maybe not,” he said softly.
The light turned green again and Vic drove them both back home.
(3)
Crow’s cell rang while the paramedics were examining Val. He saw that it was Saul Weinstock and flipped it open. “Saul—thank God it’s you. I guess you heard…”
“I know, it’s horrible,” Weinstock said, sounding ragged. “I just can’t believe I didn’t see this coming.”
Crow hesitated. “What do you mean? How could you have foreseen something like this?”
“Well, come on, Crow,” Weinstock said, “we’ve all been watching him come apart for weeks now and—”
“Saul—what the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Terry. What are
you
talking about?”
Crow told him.
“Holy shit!” Weinstock yelled. “My God. I didn’t know—I’ve been in the ER for the last hour working on Terry.”
“Terry? What the hell happened to him?”
“Crow…about ninety minutes ago Terry Wolfe threw himself out of his bedroom window. I’ve got a team of residents picking glass out of him, and he has forty broken bones, including a skull fracture.”
Crow took a wandering sideways step and sat down hard on the fender of his car. He looked wildly across the driveway to where Val was being tended to, and over at the bodies that crime scene investigators were examining. And at the
thing
that Val had shot fifteen times. Then he looked up at Newton, and all of that hit him, too.
“Crow? Crow—are you there?”
“Y-yeah, Saul…it’s just all…it’s too much.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“Believe me—I think I do.”
“Believe
me
,” Weinstock insisted, “I think you don’t. We have to talk.”
“Not now, Saul…Val…I—”
“No, not now—but soon, Crow, as soon as we can. I need to talk to someone about what’s happening around here. I was going to tell you tomorrow morning. Crow, I’ve never been this scared before in my life!”
“I have,” Crow said hoarsely. “But not recently.”
“Crow—Pine Deep’s in real trouble,” Weinstock said softly.
“Yeah,” Crow agreed. “I think so, too.” Crow cleared his throat. “Look, they’re getting ready to bring Val in. I’m going with her. I’ll…see you at the ER.”
“Okay,” Weinstock said, and hung up.
Crow tried to walk calmly, normally, over to Val, but every third or fourth step he staggered, just a little. The paramedic was reaching down to help her up, but Crow gently pushed him to one side. “I got it,” he said and drew Val to her feet and then pulled her close, wrapping his arms around her. “Let’s go.”
There was a look of hurt and panic in her eyes. “Mark—”
But Crow shook his head. “Sweetie, they’ll take care of him. We can’t do anything here, and Connie’s going to need us at the hospital when she wakes up.”
She searched his face with her one good eye; the other was once again wrapped in gauze. “What’s happening, Crow? Everything’s gone crazy.” Tears ran down her face and he bent and kissed her forehead, her cheek, and then her mouth, and as he did so a sob broke in his chest. They clung together, both of them crying as the paramedic fidgeted nearby looking greatly embarrassed.