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“Very. I could tell you stories—”
“Maybe later,” Ferro interrupted. “What else did he say?”
“Oh, he said that he shot the other man. He was surprised when
I told him that Ruger—or whoever—had run off into the fields. He thinks the guy was hit four or five times. ”
Ferro grunted. “Officer Head also fired at the suspect but isn’t sure if he hit him at all. He said he gave him a cursory look, and it appeared that the suspect fit the description of Karl Ruger. ”
“Nah, had to have been Boyd,” LaMastra repeated, shaking his head.
“Either way,” Ferro said glumly, his face as lugubrious as an undertaker’s, “the man left a lot of wreckage and at the moment we’re no closer to catching him than we were an hour ago. ”
“Mr. Crow must have only thought he’d hit him that many times,” offered LaMastra. “In the dark, in the rain, and having taken some hits himself, Mr. Crow wouldn’t have been able to really tell. And Jerry was firing from the porch…that’s what, seventy, eighty feet?”
“More likely he was wearing body armor of some kind,” Ferro said. “Anyone can get hold of it these days. The shots might had knocked the wind out of him, knocked him down—but he could have gotten up and run off. ”
Reluctantly, Terry had to agree.
The three men looked at each other for a while and then looked away into the moonlit fields.
“That means both Boyd and Ruger are still out there,” Terry said softly. “And so is Henry Guthrie. ”
Ferro sniffed and pointed his chin at the darkened corn. “We’re combing those fields now. If Mr. Guthrie—or anyone else—is out there, we’ll find him. ”
They stood there in silence for a while as the cops and crime scene investigators and paramedics swarmed around them, and neither they nor all of the dozens of cops, techs, or EMTs saw the slim form of a man with pal gray skin, a dark suit, and a blues guitar slung over one shoulder standing by the edge of the cornfield. Every time the lightning flashed, the shadows it cast of the tall corn fell not on him, but through him.
Chapter 19
1
He lay dying in the dark.
The blood wormed its way out of him, soaking through his clothes, seeking the earth below his back, letting the hungry soil feed on him. Overhead the moon looked down at him with typical cold intensity, and stars littered the fringes of the sky. A night bird cawed plaintively somewhere in the corn; other sounds troubled the darkness: sirens, men shouting, car engines roaring as vehicles came and left.
He knew he was still too close to the house, safe only with the cover of darkness and the fact that they didn’t know in which direction he’d gone. He couldn’t linger here. Soon they would be finished with those assholes back at the house. Soon they would be after him with flashlights and maybe even with dogs.
“Fuck!” he growled softly.
He had to get up, he knew that.
But lying there was better for now.
It wasn’t the pain that kept him from rising: Karl Ruger knew everything there was to know about pain, and he’d kicked pain’s sorry ass too many times to sweat that now.
No, it was the hate. Hate had put the steel in his legs that let him stagger away from that mean little bastard he’d gone toe-?to-?toe with, bullet holes and all. Hate had driven him at least this far away from the cops and all the activity. Hate had kept him awake when the damage and the spigot-?flow of blood wanted to lull him down into a drowse that he knew would kill him.
Hate made him patient, too.
The hate wanted him to live, not die. The hate wanted him to find some way of staying awake, staying strong, staying alive long enough to get help, to force help. It was only hate that had given him the patience to stuff his torn shirt into the bullet holes, and kept him from screaming while he did so. That hadn’t stopped the flow of blood, but it had slowed it.
The hate was wise, too. It knew that if he didn’t rest, just for a while, then he would die on his feet and the bastards would win. The bastards would prove that they were stronger than he was. There was no way in hell that Karl Ruger was going to let that happen. His hate was the power that had always kept his black heart beating. It was what kept the vinegar that pumped through his veins cold and fast. It was what made his mouth smile and his tongue water whenever he saw the fear of him that was always there in other people’s eyes. The hate was Ruger’s secret self, defining him, completing him. Now it protected him, teaching him the secret of how to survive this long and nasty bitch of a night.
More than all of this, his hate was his one and only god. A dark god that nightly listened to his blasphemous prayers, offering not absolution, but permission, encouragement, enticement.
Lying there, dying, bleeding, trying to gather together the power to rise once more and move, he prayed in his own way for strength.
He prayed for the strength to live long enough to find that little bastard and kill him. Slowly, painfully. Artfully. He prayed for the strength to find that broken-?nose country bitch and teach her some big-?city manners. His own kind of manners. He prayed for the strength to hurt them all. Hurt them so bad and so deep that even if they did somehow live past his revenge, they would beg for no new tomorrows. He prayed for the strength to find Boyd, and his money, and to make Boyd sorry that his father had ever fucked his mother. To make him sorry that the thought of betraying Karl Ruger had ever wormed its way into his tiny brain. To make Boyd sorry that he hadn’t been simply killed during the drug buy back in Philly.
