At fifty Tow-Truck Eddie had a thirty-two-inch waist and at expansion his chest was sixty-eight inches around. His biceps taped out at twenty-four inches and his wrists at fourteen inches. In his bare feet he stood just over six feet six and on his weakest days he could bench-press 420 pounds in twenty-rep sets. He had always been strong, but never in his life had he been this strong, this blessedly powerful. He jogged upstairs to the second-floor shower and spent a half an hour under the hottest spray he could endure, soaping himself to a high lather, rinsing, soaping, rinsing, until the bathroom was totally fogbound. He toweled himself dry and dressed in clean white underwear, sweat socks, a crisp blue pair of work pants, and a starched work shirt. He pushed a ball cap down over his short blond hair, strapped a Buck folding knife to his belt, tucked a leather slapjack in his back pocket, tucked his feet into work shoes, and then grabbed his keys as he headed for the door.
The wrecker was parked behind his house and it sat there like a sleeping dragon. Eddie unlocked a big corrugated tool chest bolted behind the driver’s seat and removed several flexible magnetic signs that were blank and painted the exact color of the wrecker. Eddie placed the two biggest ones over each of the front doors, obscuring the name Shanahan’s Garage. He took two longer but thinner ones and placed them over the Shanahan clover logo on either side of the tow-truck’s boom. Then he fished in the box and removed a license plate, walked around behind the truck, and pulled off the existing plate, which was held in place by magnets, swapping it for the dummy plate. He knew that he might still be recognized, but with the smoked windows in the cab it wouldn’t be very likely, and if someone did…well, that’s a risk he was willing to take. God would allow him to succeed, or He wouldn’t. Satisfied, he relocked the toolbox and climbed behind the wheel. It was time again to hunt for the Beast.
(2)
Mike Sweeney was crouched behind the hallway railing, listening though the slats as Vic and his mom talked. Vic said that he would be out all day and when his mom asked him where he was going there was a sound that could have been a slap. Mike’s hands closed around the slats and gripped them knuckle-white, but he did not hear his mother crying so it must not have been a hard slap, just one of Vic’s perfunctory shots. Mike listened to his mom apologize for forgetting her place and then prattle on about how she was going to pack him a nice lunch. There was a space of time filled only by distant noises in the kitchen, and then the slam of the door as Vic left. He heard Vic’s car start and drive away. Mike rose from his listening post and went quietly down the stairs, pausing briefly to lean around and peer down the hall. Mom was sitting at the kitchen table pouring gin into her oversized teacup. It was not even noon, but Mike knew she’d be drunk by dinnertime, and passed out by eight.
He moved like a pale ghost down the hall, carefully opened the front door, and slipped out. His bike was around back, beside the garage. Mike had repaired the damage it had sustained when he was nearly run down on the highway. He walked it quickly down the street to the corner before climbing on. The effort of pedaling, even slowly, hurt. His cracked rib were still sore, though he had to admit it did hurt a lot less today than he thought it would, but he had all the bruises that Vic had painted on him with his fists, and every single one of those yelled at him as he started riding the bike up the hill toward the center of town. Except for the big bruise that should have been on his stomach, and wasn’t, but that sliver of awareness was stuck in another part of Mike’s subconscious, hidden away under the label chrysalis.
However, Mike was not thinking about his bruises, but about his new dream—the one with the wrecker. He was smart enough to understand that trauma can gouge a mark in you and leave part of itself there—Mike’s life was all about trauma—yet there was something more to this dream, and as he rode into town he tried to suss out what it was. Possibly it was the newness of the dream that made it so intense, and the fact that it was largely a memory of what had just happened. It could have been that, sure. Or, it could be something else. Mike had no idea what the “something else” might be. He didn’t believe in prophecy any more than he believed in guardian angels or a loving and protective God. So much of his life had argued too eloquently for the opposite of those concepts. Mike had no cosmology, no metaphysics. Yet there was something else.
He biked along the winding side streets toward Corn Hill, flicking his glance carefully down each side street just in case there was a gleaming wrecker waiting there, engine growling quietly.
(3)
Tow-Truck Eddie made the turn from Mariposa Lane onto Corn Hill and began climbing toward the business district. Already the streets were filling with tourists. The crowds were heavier than they had been last weekend, and definitely heavier than they had been this time last year. A good year for the town, except for the blight. Eddie did not consider the blight to be the work of an angry God because he had asked God that question and his Father had told him that the spread of disease and pestilence that was crippling the farms surrounding Pine Deep was the work of the Beast. Eddie could understand that. The Beast was a destroyer and God was a bringer of good things, and those thing included the rain and sun that brought forth the abundance of the harvest. The thought that the Beast had caused such blight in Pine Deep—his town—filled him with a cold rage. It was yet another reason to find the monster and destroy him before all of the farmers Eddie had grown up with were ruined. Destroying the Beast was the same as defending his town, which was the proper work for the Sword of God.
Suddenly he saw a figure in a hooded sweatshirt pedaling a bicycle not more than half a block away. Heading away from him. Was it the same bicycle? Eddie couldn’t tell, there were people and cars in the way. Tourists were jaywalking, slowing traffic, and Eddie ground his teeth as he saw the figure—was it the Beast?—round a corner and vanish from sight. Growling in fury, Eddie edged his wrecker forward and the sheer reality of its massive size made the tourists hustle out of the way until he finally reached the corner of Trencher Street and he made a hard left out of the flow and bustle.
But the street was empty. Wherever the Beast had gone to, he was nowhere in sight. Eddie cursed and punched the steering wheel with the callused heel of his hand.
Patience, whispered the voice in his mind. His Father’s soothing voice. Patience.
Eddie sat there until cars choked the street behind him and began honking, and when he was calm again, he took his foot off the gas and began rolling down the street, continuing the hunt. Patiently.
(4)
A ragged line of police officers, state troopers, and deputized hunters moved out of the tall corn and passed into the shadows of the great Pinelands State Forest. The trees stood rank after rank, mingling Scotch pine and Norway spruce, pitch pine and Table Mountain pine, and a dozen other varieties, spreading back into the game lands by the tens of thousands, packed so tightly together that men walking nearly shoulder to shoulder were almost constantly separated by the knobby trunks of the trees. The underbrush was heavy, tending toward stunting maple, gnarled scrub pines, and thorny bushes ringed by late-season poison ivy and poison sumac. The ground was uneven and seemed to close like a thousand hungry mouths around the ankles of the searchers. More than one man went down with a twisted ankle and had to limp back to the staging area on Dark Hollow Road. The trees were filled with crows and starlings and other black-eyed night birds who watched with ironic amusement as the men looked for what wasn’t there.
Hours hobbled by like cripples and at times the cool October sun seemed frozen into the hard surface of the sky. At the van of one long arm of the search, Detective Vince LaMastra stalked with hungry eyes, an acid stomach, and a fury that had nowhere to go but inside. He had his big shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm and he wanted to use it on that cop-killing bastard, but by three that afternoon he knew in his heart that the gun wasn’t going to be anything other than dead weight.
His team made it all the way to the Passion Pit, a flat piece of ground at the top of a steep pitch that tumbled down into the shadows of Dark Hollow. It would be time-consuming and dangerous to climb down that hill all the way to the cleft formed by the feet of three mountains, and LaMastra knew he didn’t have enough daylight for that. If Boyd had gone down there, they’d never catch him before sunset, and after dark one man could elude a thousand in that dense warren of twisted gullies, streams, and bogs. If they came back tomorrow to give it a shot they’d need rappelling gear, but by then the trail would be as dead as Jimmy Castle and Nels Cowan.
Standing on the lip of the pitch, LaMastra stared down into the shadows, feeling empty and on edge. He did not notice that all of the trees around him with filled with crows, each of them watching him with bottomless black eyes.
Back at the staging area, Frank Ferro paced slowly back and forth, hands jammed deep into his pockets, shoulders hunched against the deepening cold, thoughts blacker than they had ever been. Ferro knew that he was something of a control freak. Not really a type-A personality, but close enough. He liked answers, he liked patterns, and he liked cases that stayed within the boundaries of police work. Even when he failed to close a case, his world was balanced on the fact that it was all cops and robbers and sometimes the robbers won. This case, though, seemed to be outside of those boundaries. Vince had put his finger on it earlier when he said that the case was getting away from them. Maybe it already was. He didn’t feel that he was in charge of it in any useful way, but he wasn’t blasting himself for it because he truly felt that this case would have gotten away from anyone. It was that kind of case. Outside of all normality, beyond cops and robbers.
He tugged his cell phone out of his pocket and tried for the twentieth time that day to get hold of Mayor Terry Wolfe, but there was still no joy. Annoyed, he jammed the phone back into his pocket as he looked out over the sea of waving corn that was stirred by a piercing breeze out of the north. Night was coming on and Ferro didn’t like the feel of it.
He thought about that feeling, trying to pick it apart. Ferro was never a deeply emotional person, and certainly not one prone to romantic fancies, either in thought or action, so when he realized that he didn’t like the feel of the coming night, he felt a tickle of self-disgust. Or tried to but no amount of personal recrimination would make the feeling go away as he looked out over the corn to the forests beyond. He wanted LaMastra and the others to stop, to turn back, to leave those ugly woods.