Ghost Road Blues

“I’m serious, sir. You managed to save the lives of four people, not to mention yourself, and faced down a man who is widely regarded as extremely dangerous.”



“Oh, come on.”



“No joke, man,” LaMastra agreed, nodding vigorously. “You went up against Karl Ruger and whipped his ass.”



“Truth to tell,” Crow said, rubbing his jaw with a skinned knuckle, “it was kind of a mutual ass-​whipping. And quite frankly—isn’t everyone making a bit too much out of that? Okay, so I won a fight. Considering everything else that’s going on, what’s the big deal?”



“Uh-​huh,” said Ferro quietly. “Mr. Crow—”



“Look, if you would, just call me Crow. My old man was ‘Mr. Crow’ and he was kind of an asshole. I’m just Crow to everyone.”



“Tell me, Crow,” said Ferro, trying it on, “how is it that you are as dirty a fighter as Karl Ruger? You box?”



Crow shook his head. “Martial arts.”



“Karate?”



“Jujitsu.”



LaMastra brightened. “No kidding? I did some judo in college, and I—”



Ferro looked at him until he stopped talking, and then the detective turned back to Crow. “The mayor and quite a number of the town’s officers have been telling us stories of your exploits. Fighting biker gangs, that sort of thing,” Ferro said in a tone that suggested he didn’t believe much of what he’d heard.



Crow didn’t feel like making a case for himself, and besides, half of what the cop had been told probably was a pack of lies. “People love to exaggerate.”



“Frequently,” Ferro said quietly.



Was the cop baiting him? Crow wondered. “Tell you one thing, though, I never fought anyone tougher. Or faster. Son of a bitch was something else. You can’t imagine how cat-​quick this guy is. He’s every bit as dangerous as everyone thinks he is. Maybe more. No remorse, either. He shot Rhoda Thomas and me without any hesitation.”



“He’s killed a lot of people,” LaMastra said. “It’s nothing new to him.”



“It’s nothing to him at all,” Ferro summed up. He tilted his head to one side, appraising Crow. “You know, despite how banged up you are, you’re lucky to be alive and in fairly good working condition.”



“Gosh, I feel like dancing.”



“No, seriously. Ruger has a habit of doing some rather horrible things to the people he doesn’t like.”



“I heard about the whole Cape May thing.”



“Ah. Well, that’s just part of it,” LaMastra said. “He also did a number on one of his buddies. Spoiled him. Tore him to—”



“I think Mr. Crow gets the point.”



“Yeah, Terry Wolfe said something,” Crow agreed. “So, why’d he do it?”



Ferro shrugged. “It’s possible there was a power struggle over who was going to lead the group and Ruger flipped out on his partner.”



“Sounds thin.”



“It is thin, and it’s just a guess. Another guess is that there was some kind of dispute over the money and drugs, which is an idea I can more easily live with. We’re talking about a lot of money, and a very large amount of very expensive cocaine. People have killed each other for just a snort of coke, let alone a fortune in it.”



Crow grunted and shook his head. He felt himself losing interest in the criminal aspect of the case. He believed—knew—that he’d shot Ruger and that the bastard was dead or next to it somewhere in the fields or in the forest just beyond the Guthrie farm. Probably the latter, and in that case his bones would turn to dust before anyone found him. The forest around Dark Hollow was dense, largely impassible, and it seldom gave up its dead. Just to be polite, he said, “So what’s next on the agenda for you guys?”



Ferro waved a hand. “Oh, the investigation is proceeding. We’re pursuing various leads. We have teams out checking all the likely routes of escape….”



“Meaning you have bubkes.”



“Meaning,” Ferro nodded slowly, “that we have bubkes.”



Crow sniffed. “You know you’re never going to find him.”



“Rest assured, sir,” added Ferro, “if Karl Ruger is still in Pine Deep—we will find him.”



Crow open his eyes and studied the cop. “There’s some bad woods out there, Mr. Ferro. You sure about that?”



LaMastra shifted uncomfortably in his seat, coughed, and brushed a fleck of lint from his mud-​spattered cuffs. Ferro smiled thinly at Crow. “I am very damn sure about that, Mr. Crow.”



Crow closed his eyes, settled back against the pillow, looked up into his own interior darkness, and thought: Bullshit. You’re never going to find him.



Chapter 21



1



Dr. Saul Weinstock snapped the cuff of the latex glove against his wrist, adjusted his surgical mask, and strolled into the autopsy suite in the Pinelands Hospital morgue. The CD player was playing John Hammond’s “Wicked Grin,” which Weinstock always considered good cutting music. Also on the changer were two Elvis Costello albums, Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti, and the second greatest hits album by the Eagles. It was going to be a long morning.



There were three autopsies stacked. One was a little girl from Crestville, almost certainly a SIDS case, and the other two were tied into what was going on in town. Poor Henry Guthrie, whom Weinstock was going to leave for a colleague to do. His family had been friends with the Guthries since his grandfather’s time, and Weinstock didn’t very much relish imposing the necessary indignities of an autopsy on a man he greatly admired. It felt ghoulish and rather rude.



The third case was before him on a stainless steel table, still in the dark gray zippered body bag, fresh from the crime scene on A-32.



Weinstock took the clipboard off the hook on the side of the table, switched on the tape recorder by stepping on the treadle positioned under one corner of the table.



“This examination is dated September thirtieth, beginning at 1035 hours. This autopsy is carried out by Saul Weinstock, M.D., deputy chief coroner for Bucks County and senior staff physician for Pinelands College Teaching Hospital, and performed under the authority of Judge Evan Doyle, justice of the peace for the Township of Pine Deep. The name of the decedent is believed to be…” He consulted the clipboard, “…one Anthony Michael Macchio, age thirty-​seven, a resident of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.”



That said, he pulled down the zipper and parted the plastic folds.



Saul Weinstock stood there and stared as the tape rolled on, beholding the handiwork of Tow-​Truck Eddie, the Sword of God.



“Holy shit!” he said, and it forever became part of the permanent record of the case.



2



When Vic got back to Shanahan’s the place was deserted. There should have been five mechanics on shift, including himself. One was down with a cold, one had just not shown up that day, one, Sammy, was out road-​testing a car and probably parked somewhere with a sandwich and a cold beer, and the other guy had been called in to the chief’s department for some kind of reinstatement bullshit. It pissed Wingate off, because there were four jobs that absolutely had to be done that day, and one was a valve job that was a real prick. Sammy should have been there working on it, not tooling around in Dr. Crenshaw’s BMW. Road test, my ass, thought Vic. He glanced at the wall clock. Half past two. Shit! There was no way that he was going to get out of there any earlier than six, and maybe not that early.



With the backpacks full of bloodstained cash still locked in his truck, he was uneasy. He wanted to get it home, clean it up, count it, and then start spreading it around where it would do the Man—and himself—the most good, but he couldn’t blow off his job because he absolutely did not want to do anything that would give him a high profile. His name had already been on the lips of the mayor and that jerk, Crow—all because of Mike—and he wanted to drop completely off the radar.



Grumbling, he snatched up the worksheet on the pissant little Saturn in bay two and glowered at it. Brake job. Well, that wasn’t too bad, time-​consuming but easy. He found the keys in the office and moved the car onto the ramps of the lift, put on the emergency brake, and hopped out. The old hydraulics wheezed as they lifted the bright red car six and a half feet off the grease-​spattered floor. Vic hooked a droplight on the chassis and set to work with an impact wrench. As he worked, he thought about the kid. Fucking kid. Fucking four-​eyed little sissy piece of shit. Vic hated Mike, had hated him ever since he’d first seen him sucking on Lois’s tit. Scrawny little shit-​heels. Vic found it nearly impossible to believe that Mike was actually the son of…well, the offspring of someone so powerful.



He wondered if the kid would have grown up different if he’d known who his dad really was, instead of growing up thinking he was the son of that jackass John Sweeney, the fucking loser Lois had married before. Maybe if the kid had known who his real father was he’d have grown up with some brick in his dick. But no…the Man didn’t want the kid to know. He wanted things kept quiet for reasons Vic could certainly understand, but it still rankled him. A kid should be brought up to respect the father. Honor the father. Someone like the Man deserved to be honored, especially by his own son. But no, the Man just wanted the kid raised and protected—at all costs protected. At least, Vic thought with grudging approval, the Man did not require a hands-​off policy for the little shit. The Man couldn’t care less if Vic pounded the piss out of Mike morning, noon, and night as long as no life-​threatening harm ever came to him. Personally Vic thought the Man worried too much about the kid. The no-​balls little punk could never be a threat to the Plan. Never. Vic firmly believed that, no matter what the legends said. Kid was only a useless piece of meat. But…



He sighed, thinking about it, about the Man, about the Return, about the kid. It really torqued his ass that the kid always had his nose in a goddamn book. Thought he was so smart—but he didn’t know squat. Couldn’t even hold a football let alone throw one. Had posters of superheroes up all over his room. Vic shook his head. When he’d been fourteen, Vic had had posters of Farrah Fawcett and Barbara Carrera all over his room, not Green-​fucking-​Lantern and that faggy-​looking Cyclops. Real women from the real world, not some dorky superjocks. When he’d been fourteen, he’d had a stack of Penthouse magazines a yard high in his closet. When he’d been fourteen he was buying a pack of Trojans every week or so. He doubted if that puke kid even knew how to put one on, let alone what to do with it afterward.