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“Mark Guthrie’s in there. ” Ruger’s tongue flicked out and lapped spit off his lips. “I want to pay my respects. ”
With a dry little laugh Ruger turned and went into the morgue.
Polk looked at Vic, who took a cigarette from his shirt pocket and slowly screwed it into his mouth, his eyes narrowed and thoughtful. Absently Vic began patting his pockets for a match and Polk pulled his own lighter and clicked it. Vic cut him a quick look, then gave a short nod and bent to the light, dragging in a deep chestful of smoke.
“Vic…?”
Vic said nothing. Polk licked his lips. “Vic…is this all going to work out? I mean…is this all going to be okay for us?”
Vic Wingate exhaled as he turned to Polk, and in the darkness of the hallway his eyes were just as black and bottomless as Ruger’s. “Couple hours ago I’d have told you we were screwed. Royally screwed. ” He plucked a fleck of tobacco from his tongue-tip and flicked it away. “But a lot’s happened since then. ” He took another drag.
“Does that mean we’re okay now? Does that mean we’re safe?”
A lot of thoughts seemed to flit back and forth behind the black glass of Vic’s eyes. “Depends on what you mean,” he said with a smile, and then he headed down the hallway toward the morgue.
PART ONE
AMERICA’S HAUNTED HOLIDAYLAND
October 14 to October 16
Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Walking that Ghost Road is like walkin’ down to Hell Walking the Ghost Road—it’s taking me down to Hell. I’m walking it once, won’t walk it no more Tonight I’m walking down to Hell…
—Oren Morse, “Ghost Road to Hell”
Chapter 1
1
Malcolm Crow wanted to kill someone. He wanted to take a gun, a knife, his hands…and mur
der someone. He wanted it to hurt, and he wanted it to last. He wanted to run up and down the hospital hallways and find someone who needed killing, some black-hearted bastard whose death would mark the line between the way things were and the way they used to be. Or should be.
Waiting was excruciating. It had been hours since he’d ridden with his fiancée Val in the ambulance to Pinelands Hospital and then watched the ER team take her away. He’d tried to bully his way in so that he could be with her while they checked to see how badly she’d been hurt—Val and the tiny baby just starting to grow inside of her. Their baby. Crow had tried to stay by her side, but the doctors had been insistent, telling him that he needed to leave, needed to let them work. Yeah, well…what he really wanted was a villain he could find and hurt. He needed to have a big summer blockbuster ending to this madness, with explosions, CGI effects, a big body count, and the sun shining on the good guys as the bad guys lay scattered around them. Defeated, once and for all. That’s what he needed, and he needed it bad.
A snowball had a better chance of making it through August in Hell.
The voice in his head was giving him a badass sneer and telling him he’d come too late to this dogfight. It was all over and if the good guys won, it had nothing to do with him. Not in this latest round. He stood looking at his reflection in the darkened window, seeing a small man, barely five-seven, slim, with a scuffle of black hair. He knew he was tougher than he looked, but toughness hadn’t been enough to get him to Val’s side in time to help her. To his eyes he just looked as weak as he felt.
Karl Ruger was already dead—okay, to be fair Crow had killed him two weeks ago, right in this very hospital, but that was yesterday’s news. Kenneth Boyd was dead, too, but Crow had no hand in that, though he wished he could fly counterclockwise around the world like Superman and roll time back to last night so he could change the way things happened. It would have been so much better if he had been the one to face Boyd down there at the Guthrie farm. Him…rather than Val.
It was crazy. Ruger was supposed to be the stone killer, not Boyd—his crooked but relatively harmless chum. But after Ruger died Boyd suddenly steps up and takes a shot at being Sick Psycho of the Year by killing two local cops at Val’s farm, breaking into the hospital to steal Ruger’s corpse from the morgue—and Crow didn’t even want to think about what that was all about—and then, to really seal the deal, the rat-bastard tried to kill everyone at Val’s farm. It had been a true bloodbath.
Val’s brother, Mark, was the first victim. He’d stormed off after a spat with his wife, Connie, and had apparently been sulking in the barn where he’d run into Boyd. For no sane reason that Crow could imagine, Boyd murdered him. Tore his throat out with his teeth. Drank his blood. Actually drank his blood. Every time Crow thought about that a sick shiver rippled through him and gooseflesh pebbled every inch of his skin. He got up from his chair and stared out the window at the featureless black of the middle of the night.
Val was taking Connie out for a cool-down stroll when Boyd attacked them. Connie—poor Connie, who was never much cut out for the real world and had very nearly been raped by Ruger—was overwhelmed by Boyd. He bit her, too. Not immediately fatal, but bad enough. From what little Crow had been able to find out from harassed nurses, Connie’s throat was a ruin and she was fighting for every breath, every heartbeat. No one seemed hopeful about her chances.
Three of Val’s farm hands—big, tough sons of bitches—had come pelting up and tackled Boyd. They should have been able to stomp the living shit out of him, and that should have been the end of it; but two seconds later Tyrone Gibbs was dead, José was down with a broken neck—alive but paralyzed for life—and the foreman, Diego, was knocked senseless.
That left only Val.
Crow closed his eyes hard, trying to squeeze the image out of his head, but it worked on his mind like rat’s teeth. Boyd tried to kill her, and the thought of her facing down the murdering monster was too much to bear. Rage kept spiking up and Crow was sure his blood pressure could blow half-inch bolts out of plate steel. Thank God Val had been carrying her father’s old . 45 Colt Commander ever since Ruger invaded the farm at the end of September. It was too heavy a gun for a woman, even a tall, strong farm woman like Val, but heavy or not she must have been pumping adrenaline by the quart. She held her ground and used that heavy pistol to blow the living hell out of Boyd.
The thing was—more gooseflesh rippled along Crow’s arms—Boyd didn’t go down like he should have. That . 45 should have punched him down and dead on the first shot. Maybe the second, if Boyd was totally whacked out…but Val shot him over and over again until finally a shot to the head snapped off his switch.
