The slaughter had been a bizarre by-product of a mob war in Philly, but Ruger had gone way past his instructions of “doing something to hurt Little Nicky.” Ruger had committed atrocities that were being written about in books and made into movies. Ruger was the kind of real-world killer than made Ted Bundy look like a genial neighbor. His identity had remained hidden for years, but then the whisper stream had started and Ruger knew that he had to run or die. The mob was never known for understanding or forgiveness.
How or why Ruger’s crew had crashed their car was something neither Crow nor the interjurisdictional police task force had been able to determine, and the ensuing manhunt was massive. Unfortunately their car had crashed on a remote edge of the Guthrie family farm. Every time Crow thought about how Ruger invaded the Guthrie house, brutalized the family, and nearly killed Val—his Val!—Crow felt his guts turn to ice.
It burned Crow that he hadn’t been there in time to stop Ruger before he moved like a killer storm through the lives of Val and her family. Crow’s best friend, Terry Wolfe, mayor of Pine Deep and owner of the country’s largest Haunted Hayride, had begged Crow to drive out to the attraction and shut it down, fearing what would happen if Ruger and his men showed up there. Crow had wasted way too much time getting that job done, and not really taking the job all that seriously. Mobsters and police manhunts just didn’t seem real in Pine Deep, and violence on that scale was something safely buried in the town’s past, not its present. Not now.
So, while Crow was tooling around, taking his time, Karl Ruger was beating the hell out of Val, her father Henry, her brother Mark, and Mark’s wife, Connie. Ruger tied everyone up except for Val and Henry and forced them at gunpoint to go out into the fields to help him fetch one of his injured men, Kenneth Boyd. By the time they got back to where Ruger had left Boyd, there was no trace of him, the cash, or the drugs. Boyd had split and taken Ruger’s lifeline with him. Ruger went totally off his rocker at that point, and, as Val later told Crow, Henry had seen just one chance to save his family. He shoved Val away from him, urging her to run while he ran the other way to draw Ruger away from the house. Ruger, snapping out of rage and into cold efficiency, simply shot Henry in the back as he ran and left him to die out in the rainy darkness. It was so callous that Crow felt bile in his throat.
Ruger headed back to the farmhouse, but Val wasn’t there. So he vented his anger on Mark—beating him, knocking his teeth out, totally humiliating him—and then forcing him to lie there on the floor and watch as he set about raping Connie. If Val had been even two minutes later it would have been too late for Connie, but Ruger was just starting to tear at her clothes when Val snuck in and tackled him, then immediately fled, taking a cue from her father’s sacrifice by tricking Ruger into chasing her. She had hoped to outrun him, to lose him in the darkness of her farm and then circle back to the house and get one of her father’s guns, but Ruger was as fast as he was sly and he caught her before she had taken a hundred paces. He was strangling her, trying to crush her throat to satisfy his dark need to hurt, to destroy, when Crow finally arrived. Too late to save Henry, almost too late to save the others.
The only thing that had gone right that night was that Ruger had underestimated Crow. Ruger was a big man, two hundred pounds of sinewy muscle packed onto a wiry six-foot frame. He had incredibly fast hands and he had never lost a fight in his life because there was nothing in his psychological makeup that could accept any reality except one in which he dominated. When Crow stepped out of his car, what Ruger saw was a short, thin man who looked about as threatening as a shopkeeper, which what Crow currently was. What he did not see were the years upon years of jujutsu training; what he did not see were the years on the Pine Deep police force as one its most decorated officers—all of that in the past, but not long past. Ruger made one of the worst mistakes anyone can make in a fight: he underestimated his opponent, and it had cost him.
They fought in the rain and the mud and it was the most vicious fight of Crow’s life. No mercy, no rules, no hesitation. It was eye-gouging and groin-kicking and throat-crushing. It was a life-or-death back-alley brawl between two men who had to win. Quitting or surrender were impossible concepts for both of them because to lose the fight was to lose absolutely everything.
In the end, Crow had won the fight, though he looked like he’d been trampled by horses. He was bloodied, winded, nearly blind with pain, but he was on his feet and Ruger was down. Which is when Crow had made his mistake, and it was every bit as foolish and dangerous as Ruger’s. Crow had not finished Ruger off. He left him there, down and apparently unconscious, and had run straight to Val to see if she was okay. It was around that time that the first patrol car had arrived, with Jerry Head at the wheel and a young local cop, Rhoda Thomas, riding shotgun. Head had gone into the house to check on Mark and Connie, Rhoda stayed in the yard to help Crow and Val. No one paid enough attention to Ruger. No one saw him struggle to his knees, no one saw him fish in the mud for the gun Crow had dropped at the beginning of the fight, no one saw him wash it clean in the heavy downpour. Only luck, or perhaps a little bone thrown to them by providence, gave Crow just enough warning to react when Ruger opened fire. Rhoda went down with a bullet in her shoulder and Crow was grazed by two bullets, one on each side of his torso, as he scrambled to pull Rhoda’s sidearm. He returned fire and emptied the Glock’s entire magazine into Ruger, watching as the bullets knocked the man into a weird puppet dance. Head appeared on the porch and added his fire and Ruger went down in a storm of bullets.
Val went down a moment later, the damage to her throat blending with shock and dragging her down into darkness. Crow tried to stay conscious, but after the beating he had taken, and the two bullet wounds, he had nothing left. He dropped.
His next memory was of waking up in the hospital, with Terry Wolfe telling him that Henry was dead but Val was alive. Mark and Connie were deeply hurt, both physically and psychologically, by Ruger’s sick games. Rhoda was in surgery, but was expected to make it. And Karl Ruger…well, somehow, with all the commotion as cops and paramedics flooded the place, he crawled off and vanished. A dozen bullets in him, Crow was sure of that, and yet he crawled away and simply dropped off the face of the world.
That should have been it. Crow assumed that it was it, that Ruger’s bones would one day be found out there in the woods beyond the Guthrie farm. Yeah, we all know about assumptions. Ruger was far from dead. Last night—could it be just a few hours ago?—just shy of midnight, Karl Ruger broke into the hospital. He attacked and nearly killed the facilities engineer, shut down the main and backup generators—plunging the hospital into total darkness—and while everyone was screaming and staggering in blind panic, the killer made his way to Crow’s room, beat the shit out of Crow’s police guard, and attacked Crow again, looking for serious payback. Val had been with Crow in the room, and Ruger struck her a terrible blow to the head, fracturing the bone above her eye socket.
Crow was sewn together with stitches and badly bruised from their last fight, but even with all that he should have been able to defeat Ruger a second time because Ruger should have been a short step away from dead, but Ruger was not a shambling hulk, he was not dying on his feet. Instead he faster than before, and far stronger. Unnaturally strong, like nothing Crow had ever seen. He threw Crow from one end of the room to the other and was a heartbeat away from crushing his throat when Val—dazed and bleeding—crawled over and got the pistol from the fallen officer’s duty belt. She opened fire, and that gave Crow a tiny window of opportunity to scuttle over and grab the small throwdown strapped to the cop’s ankle holster. From point-blank range they emptied both guns into Ruger, and this time there was no doubt—every shot went home.
In a bizarre encore of the night before Ruger went down, almost immediately followed by Val.
And still it wasn’t over. In the brief period between Val’s collapse and the arrival of doctors, nurses, and a lot of cops, there had been a moment of complete insanity when something impossible happened, and no one but Crow had witnessed it. He had bent to reach across Ruger’s dead body toward Val when Ruger opened his eyes and grabbed Crow’s wrist with unbelievable force, pulling him close long enough to whisper five words. Just five, but they had punched holes in Crow’s mind.
“Ubel Griswold sends his regards.”
Then Ruger had laughed the coldest laugh Crow had ever heard, the light went out of his eyes, and he sank back to the floor. Dead for sure this time.
From that moment to this those words kept echoing through his mind. All through the process of being stitched, bandaged, moved to another room, Crow kept hearing that icy voice.
There was no way Karl Ruger could have known that name, Crow was sure of that. Griswold was thirty years dead, killed by the Bone Man and left to rot down in the wormy swamps of Dark Hollow. No one in Pine Deep even mentioned his name anymore, and yet Karl Ruger had used his dying breath to speak the name of the only person to have shed more blood, done more harm, destroyed more lives, than Ruger himself had.
Ubel Griswold sends his regards.
Jerry Head said, “No, after all that shit, what else could happen?” He laid his magazine on his thighs. On the cover Eva Longoria was wearing next to nothing and looking happy about it. Crow nodded and they both sat there for a moment watching the second hand on the wall clock tick its way around from 5:54 to 5:55.
“Jerry? Are they sure Ruger’s dead?”
“You kidding me?” Head asked, grinning; then he saw that Crow wasn’t kidding. “Yeah, that evil son of a bitch is dead for sure. You and your lady popped enough caps in him to kill him five times over.”
“You’re sure? I mean really sure?”
“Man, if he ain’t then I’m going to get myself a hammer and pound a stake through his heart.” There must have seen something in Crow’s face—in his lack of a responding smile—because he spread his hands and said, “Just kidding, man. You want me to go ask a doctor to double-check on Ruger, be more than happy.”