Dead Man's Song

“Can I put my order in?” Crow looked up from the Manhattan he was mixing and saw Ferro looking wry and amused, LaMastra flanking him. “You have time for a quick word?” Ferro asked.



“Sure,” Crow said.



Ferro turned to LaMastra, put one hand on his shoulder, and nudged him toward the drinks table. “Presto change-o! You’re now a bartender.” Then to Crow, “Let’s step over out of the line of fire.”



Crow let himself be led far away from the bottles. “Thanks,” he said.



“Hope you don’t think I was overstepping—”



“Hell, no. My AA sponsor would throw a conniption if he heard I was mixing drinks.”



Ferro gave him a dour nod. “I just had a brief chat with your friend, Saul Weinstock. He said that there have been some unusual things happening in town. Would…you know anything about that?”



“This is Pine—” Crow began but Ferro held up a hand to stop him.



“Please, Crow, if I hear that ‘this is Pine Deep, things are always unusual’ line one more time I think I’m going to go a bit postal. I know things are unusual around here. I know this is America’s ‘haunted holidayland,’ yada yada yada. What I’m asking you, given the normal flow of odd happenings in Pine Deep, have you noticed anything outside of what you people here would consider odd.”



“Hmm,” Crow said, “that makes me wonder what Saul told you.”



Ferro’s face had a thoughtful, almost calculating look. “Would you mind just making a comment first?”



Crow shrugged. “Well…I read the papers, I talk to people who come into the store. It’s been a rough season. We had the blight—still have the blight—and that means that there’s a lot of tension and stress. There have been some fights. Probably people blowing off steam. You work your ass off all your life to try and make it work and then a bad season comes along and wipes you out, that’s gonna hurt. People get frightened, they get angry, and they start swinging. Is that what you’re talking about?”



“Anything else unusual?”



Crow thought about it. “Well, we had a pretty bad fire last night. A whole family was killed.”



“What do you think it was?”



“I’m not a cop anymore, Frank, and I’m not a fire inspector.”



“A cop’s always a cop,” Ferro countered.



“Maybe, but I’m also out of the loop. Terry was my conduit into the department, and he’s been wired ever since the Ruger thing.”



Ferro nodded. “What about other things in town? Unexplained deaths, anything like that?”



“Not that I’ve heard of. Saul would be the one to talk to about…” his voice trailed away and he studied Ferro’s eyes. “What exactly did Saul tell you?”



“Hasn’t he spoken to you about his suspicions?”



“What suspicions? What are you talking about?”



Ferro’s eyes were hard for a moment, but then his expression softened and he shook his head. “That’s just it, Crow—I don’t really know what I’m asking. I had a short talk with Saul and all he did was make extremely vague hints and when pressed wouldn’t actually get to any point. If it was anyone else I would have thought he’d been hitting the sauce too hard and was just talking shit, but Saul Weinstock impressed me as one of the more level-headed men in this town, so I’m having a harder time walking away than I otherwise would have.”



“Any idea what he was hinting at?”



“No. You?”



“No. He was pretty vague with me the last couple of times we spoke. Said he wanted to talk to me today, though.”



Ferro grunted. “Interesting.” He took a business card from his inside jacket pocket. “If there’s anything in what he says, would you be willing to give me a call? One cop to an—”



“Dude, if you don’t want me to play the ‘this town is weird’ card then don’t play the ‘brothers behind the badge’ card on me. Saul’s one of my closest friends. If there is something he needs and if that something is best handled by you, or if it involves the Boyd case, then yeah, I’ll give you a call.” With a smile he plucked the card from between Ferro’s fingers and tucked it in his pants pocket. “Speaking of which…what about Boyd? Anything new?”



Ferro shook his head. “No one’s had a whiff of him since he fled this jurisdiction. After the first few sightings in Trenton and Newark he’s dropped off the radar, so the general feeling is that he’s either gone to ground somewhere—a safe house—or he’s out of the country.”



“Gut?”



“I think he’s dead.”



Crow pretended to toast him. “Here’s hoping.”



“Mmm. It’d be nice if this case just quietly wound down and blew away. It’s been a major pain in my ass for too long. Yours, too, I imagine. Speaking of which, how’s your lady?” They lapsed into a more genteel conversation and after a while Ferro shook Crow’s hand and excused himself, and Crow watched as he and the other officers headed out of the house and, Crow thought, out of their lives.



He was looking around for Val when he felt a hand close around his elbow and turned to see Saul Weinstock standing at his side. “Word with you, Crow?” Weinstock’s face had looked pinched earlier, and up close it showed even more signs of stress. “Listen…have you noticed anything, um, ‘funny’ going on around town lately?”



Crow suppressed a smile. “Everyone’s asking me that.”



“I know, I saw you talking to Frank. What did he say? He tell you what we were talking about?” Weinstock’s questions came out so fast it was like they were wired together.



“He said you were bugged about something. What’s up?”



“I told him that there have been some bad things happening around here.”



“You said as much on the phone yesterday?”



“Yeah, yeah,” he mumbled while fishing a tin of Altoids out of his pocket; he opened it, looked inside, closed the tin, and put it back without having taken one. Crow had the impression that Weinstock had not even registered doing any of that.



“You need to lay off the microbrews, kemosabe,” he said.



Weinstock frowned. “Haven’t had a drink yet today,” he said, “but it’s a good idea.”



He started to move away but Crow caught his arm. “Dude…what the hell’s with you? You’re acting fruitier than a nutcake.”



Weinstock smiled faintly. “It’s…nothing. I’m just being paranoid.”



“Saul,” Crow moved closer, “don’t give me that bullshit. Something’s frying your grits and it’s not the corn blight.”



“I’m not sure I want to go into it right now,” he said, and then seemed to remember that it was he who had brought it up. He took a breath, blinked a few moments, and then met Crow’s gaze. “Look, some funky stuff has been happening at the hospital. I shouldn’t go into it right now. Hell, I shouldn’t even be talking to you about this.”



“Too late.”



“Crow…this is going to sound really crazy, but I want a straight answer.”



“Ooo-kay.”



“Do you believe in ghosts?”



Crow smiled. “Are you freakin’ kidding me here? You’re asking the biggest horror geek in Bucks County if he believes in ghosts?”



Weinstock touched Crow’s arm. “I’m being serious here. Not Halloween stuff, either. Just answer me straight. Do you believe in ghosts?”



“Sure I do, Saul, but you don’t, so why are you asking me?”



The doctor looked around at the other people milling in the kitchen, some of them smiling as they chatted and ate and drank. He licked his lips and then looked back at Crow.



“You’re right. Forget I said anything.” He went to move away.



“Whoa! Slow down, Saul…I didn’t mean to insult you here…”



“You didn’t. Forget I said anything.” He clapped Crow on the shoulder, gave him an enigmatic smile, and then melted into the crowd, leaving Crow feeling completely at sea.



“What was that all about?” The voice came from behind him and Crow jumped a foot. He spun around and Val was standing there holding a paper plate piled high with salad. “What are you so jumpy about?”



“I just had the weirdest conversation with Saul,” he said, and told her about it.



Val nodded. “I saw that he was looking stressed and asked Rachel about it, but she said that Saul’s been overworked lately. He’s been pulling a lot of long days at the hospital and is always exhausted, and yet she said—tired as he is—he can’t sleep at nights. He usually sits up on the Internet or locked in his office at home and then falls asleep around dawn.”



“Maybe whatever’s eating Terry is catching,” Crow said.



“I don’t think so,” Val said, and ate a forkful of spinach. “Terry’s been coming apart at the seams for weeks now. No, whatever’s going on with Saul is something new. It’s just been the last couple of days, Rachel said. Since those police officers were killed.”



“That can’t be it. Saul wasn’t close with either of them.”



“Then what’s your suggestion?”



“I don’t know. I’ll call him tomorrow. Maybe take him out to lunch, see what’s up.” At that point Val’s cousin Andrea and her fiancé came over to give her hugs and kisses and the tide of conversation turned back to the immediate. By the time the long day ended and Rachel and Sarah had helped Val and Crow clean up, Crow had completely forgotten about his conversation with Weinstock.



(3)



Mike cycled back toward town, climbing the long hills, gliding down the other side, eyes always flicking left and right down side roads, expecting to see the grille of the big wrecker. Nothing. As the days passed he was becoming more and more convinced that the incident on the road had been different than he remembered it. Sure it was a near thing, and sure it was scary as hell, and sure it hurt a lot—but whether it was intentional or not was something he was less sure about. He was also certain that if it had been Vic driving the wrecker then that prick would have found some way to taunt him with the information. Vic would have used the threat of it to hurt him.