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“Yeah, well, there’s some that think being fourteen is the same as being a kid. Kind of a popular notion, I hear tell. ”
“Yeah, well. What do you think?”
Crow looked at him, looked past the smile at the Mike Sweeney whose father was dead, whose mother was a drunk, and whose stepfather was known to beat him so bad that he missed a dozen days from school a year.
He sighed. “Not everybody grows up at the same speed, I guess. ”
Mike grunted.
“I still don’t want to hear you use bad language regardless. ”
Mike smiled. “Okay, boss. ”
“Okay then. ” They looked at each other and grinned. Crow said, “How’re the ribs?”
“They hurt like a son of a bitch,” Mike said. Crow goggled at him, and then they both burst out laughing. Mike laughed, winced, and
kept on laughing, clapping a hand to his aching side.
“You juvenile delinquent!” Crow gasped.
A half mile later they passed a massive billboard painted with witches and goblins and leering black cats. Written in dripping black and red letters it proclaimed:
PINE DEEP HAUNTED HAYRIDE
Biggest in the East Coast
5 miles
WE’LL SCARE YOU SILLY !
They drove on.
Chapter 11
1
Terry drank the last of the reheated coffee, oblivious of its appalling taste, and set the cup down on Ginny’s desk. The Xanax was kicking in and he felt a little of the tension seep out of his muscles. Ginny quickly picked up the cup, put a pink Post-?It sheet under it as a coaster, and set it down again. The mayor folded his arms, hiked one half of his rump onto the edge of her desk, and looked hard and long at Gus Bernhardt. “So, here we are. ”
“Yeah,” Gus said. “Fine kettle of frigging fish. ”
“Language, language,” Ginny said sotto voce.
“Frigging’s not a curse, you silly bitch,” Gus muttered under his breath as he went back to staring at the huge aerial-?survey map of the town and its close neighbors covering the entire wall above Ginny’s desk.
Across the room Sergeant Ferro and Detective LaMastra were standing, heads together in conversation with officers from the first wave of Philadelphia cops. Every once in a while, LaMastra would look over at Terry and raise his eyebrows by way of sympathetic acknowledgment.
Terry glanced at the clock. It was just past ten, two and a half hours since he’d gotten the call at Crow’s shop. Most of that time had been spent laboriously trying to explain the peculiar geography of Pine Deep to the pinch-?hitting cops. Geographically speaking, Pine Deep was an island, bordered completely by running streams of water: Pine River along the west and its estuary, Black Creek to the south, and then the thin and wandering northern line of the Crescent Canal and the broad Delaware River to the east. Between Black Marsh and the outlying houses of Pine Deep, A-32 rose up into a series of foothills and wannabe-?mountains, taking gymnastic turns around sheer cliffs and doing roller-?coaster rises and dips past the vast Pine Deep State Forest from which the town borrowed its name. The forest surrounded the farmlands and thrust tentative fingers back toward A-32 every few miles so that the long protrusions formed borders between some of the larger farms. The main body of the forest lay solidly westward, and sprawled as far over as Newton’s Reach, a tourist attraction town preserved intact from Colonial times, right down to the working blacksmith’s shop and the tours conducted by high school seniors wearing tricorns and three-?button breeches.
Looking at the map, with the surrounding expanse of greenery from the forestland and the farms, the town of Pine Deep seemed small and remote. Certainly it was no metropolis. The population of the town, counting farmers from the most distant spreads, was just a little under twenty-?five hundred, but considering how much square mileage the town covered, the people were pretty thin on the ground. Most of them lived in the town proper, on a handful of quaint cobble-?stoned streets. Downtown, as it was apocryphally known, was actually situated on a high saddle between two higher peaks, and though the peaks made the town look like it was in a valley, it was nearly a thousand feet higher than some of the farms.
Downtown was where all the “action” was. That was where the tourists flocked in the thousands from the first moderately tolerable day in late March until after the Christmas sales. Antique buyers came from as far west as Ohio and as far north as Boston; rug merchants drove all the way up from Florida to sell truckloads of Seminole quilts, or mock Navajo blankets. Every fifth store sold Pennsylvania Dutch woodcrafts, from plain and sturdy tables to elaborate porch swings with amazingly delicate scrollwork. Amish baked goods from Lancaster scented the air by six o’clock each morning, and in the evening, the breeze blowing past Winifred’s Incense gave the place an aroma of magic. Almost everywhere were the delicate tinkles of wind chimes, the rattle of rain sticks, the clack-?clickety-?clack of hand-?carved weather vanes. Windows were filled with rare books, exotic music from faraway places, crystals for healing, and crystal balls for seeing into any reality of choice, improbable varieties of cheeses, and the largest selection of family chateau wines in the region. One tiny store sold nothing but Pine Deep souvenirs and oddities such as the Fireballs, a kind of bright red pinecone unique to the area; countless books detailing, either in lurid prose or scholarly wordiness, the ghost stories of the region; calendars with twelve months’ worth of magnificent photos bursting with the incredible colors of Pine Deep in autumn, the wild freshness of spring, the deep green of the summer forests, or the stark and ancient beauty of the snow-?swept winters; and the fifty-?odd varieties of locally put-?by jellies, jams, and preserves, including a famous spicy cinnamon-?pumpkin butter that had been touted by the Frugal Gourmet one year and had caused a run on the local supply.
In all that vastness of land, with the millions of tall, full-?leafed plants, the hedgerows and groves of fruit trees, the undeveloped forest land and the fields left fallow, the estates overgrown and gone wild, the cliffs and caves and hollows, there were three men and one car hiding from the eyes of the law.
Terry stared at the map and sighed, rubbing at his eyes and half smiling at the enormity of it all, wishing the three psycho-?bastards had chosen somewhere else to ensconce themselves. He drew in a long breath, held it, and then sighed again. It was going to be a very, very long night.
Terry looked away from the map to see Sergeant Ferro and Detective LaMastra standing at his elbow. “Where do we stand?” Terry asked.
