AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Next he drove to the Haunted Hayride grounds. It was past two o’clock and everything was shut down, but Crow let himself in and drove to the barn where a dozen ATVs stood in a row. The ones Crow wanted were in the back, three nearly new bright yellow Renegade 800s. Four-wheelers with 800cc, four-stroke v-twins. Less than six hundred pounds each and as tough as Bradley
Fighting Vehicles.
“Sweet. ”
It took him an hour to load three of them onto a flatbed, drive out to the Passion Pit, offload everything, and drive back to get his car. He left a note for Coop, the Hayride’s manager, and then headed up the road to Millie’s Farm Stand. Crow had called before midnight and told Millie that he wanted every drop of garlic oil she had plus six big sacks of garlic bulbs. When she asked why, he told her it was for the Halloween Festival.
Millie was waiting up for him, bleary-eyed but amused. Everything was in boxes and Crow crammed them into his car and tied the sacks of bulbs to his roof.
“For the Festival, you say?” she asked as Crow wrote out a hefty check.
Crow kept his face bland as he tore off the check. “Life’s always a little different in Pine Deep. ”
“Mm-hmm,” Millie agreed, her face equally bland. “Always is. ”
As his car was rolling over the gravel and onto the blacktop, Oscar ambled over and stood by his wife. Unlike Millie, Oscar was not a native of Pine Deep, having been raised on lobster boats off the Maine coast, and despite his forty years in Pennsylvania, he still maintained his laconic New England drawl.
“Was that Crow driving off just now?”
“Mm-hmm,” she said. “He bought ten gallons of extract and three hundred pounds of bulbs. ”
“Ayuh?” he murmured.
“Awful lot of garlic. ”
“Ayuh. ”
“I mean, for someone who owns a craft store. ”
“Ayuh. ”
“And he was here with a policeman last night to buy some, too. I told you about how he was in a terrible hurry. Worked up into such a state. ”
Oscar nodded and wrapped his arm around her shoulder as they watched Crow’s car dwindle to a dot and vanish around a curve.
“Still seems to be in a hurry,” she observed.
“Ayuh. ”
“So, why do you think he needs all that garlic?”
Oscar squinted up into the moonlit sky for a moment and then back at the road. “Probably something to do with the damn vampires, if y’ask me. ”
“You think so?”
“Ayuh. ”
4
Crow got home well before dawn, parked outside of his shop and hurried inside, door key in one hand, pistol in the other. Once inside he locked up again and went straight through the store into his apartment, locking that door behind him, too. His three cats crowded around him, scolding him for being away so long. Their cat box needed changing, their water bowl was dry, and they were hungry.
As he took care of their needs he wondered for the thousandth time where Mike was. “C’mon, kiddo…be okay,” he murmured, but he had nowhere to go with his concerns, and no time to spend on them. He showered—first hot and then very cold—and dressed for a hard day in heavy-duty cargo pants with lots of pockets, North Face hiking shoes, thermal undershirt, his shoulder holster, and a Temple Owls hoody that zippered up the front and was baggy enough to hide his shoulder rig. Appraising himself in the mirror he thought he looked like a street kid getting ready to rob a liquor store.
He stuffed his pockets with a lighter, Swiss Army knife, gum, two PowerBars, a small first-aid kit, and extra magazines for the Beretta, and clipped on a Buck 888 Combat Knife in a black Cordura sheath. It was a real killer, with a 43/4-inch blade, but it weighed only eleven ounces. Crow was as much an artist with a knife as he was with his sword. He took the sword, too, a Paul Chen katana, one of the Orchid series, that had cost well over a thousand dollars and with which Crow had practiced tens of thousands of cuts. He knew that sword better than any other and though he’d never actually fought with it, he believed that with that sword in his hand he could stand up to just about anyone. Or anything. On impulse he packed his two cheaper but still sturdy training swords, putting all of them into an oversized tournament duffel. Then he locked up his shop and went to war.
5
Ferro drove; Vince sat, arms folded, head turned away to look out of the passenger window at the darkness rushing by. He’s been like that most of the way back to Philly, had barely said a word while they were gathering their weapons and equipment—a process that would be creating a lot of questions they would have to answer at some point—and hadn’t said a single word since they’d headed back north.
