Ghost Road Blues

That’s when Vic had learned that evil never dies. It waits, it changes, and it always comes back. Unless its force is blocked by prayers and the proper burial rites, it always comes back—and it comes back far stronger, and in the Man’s case, different. Not a werewolf anymore, and certainly nothing human. Now the Man was evolving into something beyond anything the people in this town would understand. Nor was the Man becoming like Boyd or Ruger. Hell, once the Man finished manifesting his new body and rose from his swampy grave, garlic or stakes wouldn’t mean dick to him.



Vic broke off in his reverie and thought about that for a second. Garlic and stakes. He realized that he didn’t actually know if they would stop Boyd and Ruger, either. He’d have to find out. Not just so that he would always have an edge over them, but because he wanted to make sure they wouldn’t be stopped by some asshole who’d just had an Italian dinner and sneezed on them. Stakes he could experiment with to see if the legends held up, but if they did work, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to do much about it. Garlic, on the other hand, could be bought locally from growers, which meant that the supply had to be controlled. He made a mental note to work on that tomorrow.



His cigarette was low and he chain-​lit another, but just as he rolled down the window to toss away the butt he heard the crack of a twig under a foot. Automatically he pulled the old Mauser C-96 Bolo short-​barreled pistol from the shoulder rig he wore. The gun had been made in the 1920s and had belonged to Griswold, which made it sacred to Vic.



He laid the barrel on the frame of the open cab window and waited as someone thrashed his way up the sloop toward the parking area. If it was anyone else than the person the Man had sent him here to meet, he’d blow their head off. The Mauser was unregistered and untraceable. Vic had killed five women with it and three vagrants over the last thirty-​five years, and every one had been a one-​shot kill. You have to love efficiency of that kind.



The bushes at the top of the drop-​off trembled, the dry leaves shivering and flickering with silver moonlight, and then a man stepped up onto the flat ground of the Passion Pit. He was covered with mud and blood and his right leg was twisted askew, though he walked with no flicker of pain on his mushroom-​white face. The man’s eyes were dark, hostile pits and his mouth hung open, revealing teeth that were caked with blood and strings of raw meat. He saw Vic’s truck and snarled, baring those filthy teeth in a mask of pure hatred.



Vic relaxed and clicked the safety back on.



“Over here, asshole,” he said. “Get the fuck in, we’re wasting time.”



The snarl lost some of its venom as the man shambled toward the truck. Vic reached over and jerked the handle, pushing the door open so Kenneth Boyd could climb in.



2



“Jesus!” Terry’s eyes snapped wide as he jerked awake from his doze as if he’d been slapped. The abruptness of waking had thrust him forward and he crouched on the edge of his chair, gripping the armrests with spiked fingers, his big body leaning forward as if to vomit. Thunder boomed in his chest and lightning flashed in his eyes and his pores rained icy sweat. Around him, the doctors’ lounge was quiet, softened with evening shadows, and very still.



Terry looked around, trying to understand what had shocked him awake—but there was nothing. For one horrible moment he feared that his sister’s bloody ghost had returned to torment him with her desperate pleas. No. Nothing.



Nothing, except the vague and fading feeling that something horrible had just happened. A terrible feeling of dread seemed to be clustered around his heart, like moths around a light. The sensation, or awareness, or fading dream—whatever it was—eased gradually. His heart stopped hammering, the rhythm slowing as minutes passed.



He heard heels clicking along the floor outside, coming closer very quickly, and then the door opened. A nurse leaned into the room, her face wearing a quizzical smile.



“Sorry,” she said. “I thought I heard—”



Terry looked at her with his red-​rimmed eyes, a false smile nailed to his rigid lips, his fingers clutching the arms of his chair.



“Is everything okay?” the nurse asked.



“Um…yes. Everything’s fine. I was, um, taking a nap.”



“Sorry to bother you, Mr. Wolfe. It’s just the strangest thing. I thought the TV was on.” She glanced at the dark screen. “Guess I’m hearing things.”



“What do you mean?” he asked.



She laughed self-​consciously. “You’ll think I’m a loony-​tunes, but I thought—just for a moment—that I heard a…well, a roar.”



“A roar?” His voice was tight in his throat.



“Isn’t that silly? I thought I heard a roar. Like a lion, or a bear. Or something.”



“In here?”



“I know, I know…I’m too young for Alzheimer’s!” She laughed. “Sorry to have bothered you.” Her head vanished and she pulled the door shut.



Terry sat stock-​still, staring at the door, feeling under his fingers the jagged tears in the leather upholstery. Stiffly, he bent forward and looked down, first at one arm of the chair and then the other. The tough leather was slashed in long lines, as if dull knives had been viciously racked across them. Several sets of tears, four lines to a set.



“God save me!” he whispered, and in the back of his mind he could hear Mandy’s voice whisper to him.



God didn’t save me, Terry.



“No!”



God didn’t save you, either. God won’t save this town, Terry.



“Get out of my head!” he cried, beating at his skull with both fists.



And you know what he wants from you. You see that, too. You see that every time you look in the mirror.



He bent forward and put his face in his hands and wept for his sanity, and his soul.



3



Officer Jim Polk lay on his back and blew cigarette smoke up at the ceiling. On the radio, Jerry Garcia was insisting that any friend of the devil was a friend of his. Beside him, Donna Karpinsky moaned softly in her sleep and turned away. Polk turned and looked at her back. She was a pretty girl, half his age, with lots of black hair, almost no ass, and eyes that were often pretty but could turn as hard as fists when she was in one of those moods. Polk understood the look. It was the whore look, old as time and as uncompromising as a hammer. She had given him that look when he had flagged her down two hours ago, thinking that he was rousting her or looking for a freebie, but the look had dissolved when he had waved a fistful of long green at her, and after that she got all dewy-​eyed and as willing to please as a twice-​kicked dog. Polk knew he could have gotten her to do him for free, just by flashing his badge, but it felt good to have her full and unreserved attention, with no resentment to spoil the mood.



He had given her two hundred bucks, which was four times the rate for a half-​and-​half, and he’d paid for the motel room and the bottle of Napoleon brandy that stood half-​empty on the bedside table. Polk would have been happy just to have her be nice to him while they did it, but she must have been really psyched by the extra cash, and for over an hour they had made out like high school kids, kissing and touching and making it feel like something tender for a change. Then it had gotten down to business and she had properly hauled his ashes for him. Even so, he thought, she had been nice about that, too. She had made it seem like two people doing it, not just a half-​drunk cop and a motel hooker.



Polk sucked on his cigarette and thought about the money that had bought him that evening’s pleasure. Vic’s money. Polk felt his insides twitch every time he thought about Vic and his money. In the past Polk had done a lot of things for Vic. Things that sometimes weren’t so bad, and sometimes made him sick to his stomach. Only once over those years had Polk ever tried to tell Vic that he wasn’t into it anymore. Only once, and then he had been out of work for four weeks because of the way Vic took the rebuff. Four weeks in which he pissed blood and tried not to breathe too deeply and had to eat only soft foods. He told Gus Bernhardt that he’d taken a bad tumble off his motorbike. No way Polk was ever going to tell Gus, or anyone else, that Vic had stomped him nearly unconscious and then stuffed a handful of dog shit in his mouth and held him at gunpoint until he’d swallowed it.



Lying there in bed, Polk thought back to that day, more than eighteen years ago, and the hand holding the cigarette began to shake.



He took three slow pulls on the cigarette to steady himself, and he blinked repeatedly until the tears of shame dried up. Eighteen years ago and it still felt the same. As Vic had stomped him, he had told Polk over and over again that he was getting off light. Polk believed him with a whole heart. Over the years, the little jobs for Vic had dwindled down to a trickle, just something here and there, usually for small change. But now he had a wad of bills so thick they wouldn’t even fit into his pants pocket.



What the fuck was Vic going to want him to do to earn that kind of scratch?



He had always been afraid that Vic would one day ask him to kill someone, and after that beating, Polk was not so sure that he wouldn’t do it. No devil in hell terrified Polk more than Vic Wingate, and no court or jail came close to intimidating him half as much.



It was a lot of money—a whole lot of money—and Vic always wanted every penny’s worth for his buck.



Please, God , Polk silently prayed. He coughed unexpectedly and sat up, his gut tightening as the spasm shook his whole body. He jammed a fist against his mouth to stifle the sound, and all Donna did was turn over and begin snoring. Polk felt a hot wetness on his hand and when he looked at it, he was confused and scared to see a splatter of dark droplets on his skin. It looked like tar, or like the black goo you find under compost heaps, but it smelled like…



He frowned, feeling sweat burst from his pores.



It smelled like blood.



Polk stared at it, absolutely unsure of what to do, say, or think next. He blinked a few times, and as he did so the light values in the room seemed to change. He angled his hand to let more light fall on the black goo, and suddenly it wasn’t black at all. That must have been the shadows cast by his own face as he bent down over it. No, this was clear, probably just spit, or…