Tugging the Bone Man’s hand, Little Scarecrow looked up at him, puzzled and frightened. “I thought you killed the bad man. That’s what Val’s dad said…that you killed the bad man.”
There was a final terrible explosion of thunder and a burst of lightning so bright that it stabbed into Little Scarecrow’s eyes like spikes and he spun away, clamping his hands over his face—
—and woke up with a cry of real pain and genuine terror.
“Griswold!” he screamed as he woke and then there was a big dark shape looming over him and hands on his shoulders. Crow was blind with sleep and morphine and he tried to see, tried to fight, but the hands were too strong.
“Whoa, man,” said the voice of the man standing over him. “You’re gonna pop your stitches you keep that shit up.”
Abruptly Crow stopped fighting, blinking his eyes clear to see the big cop standing there. Broad-shouldered with a shaved head and an easy grin. It took Crow a second to fish his name out of the dark. “Jerry…?”
“Yeah, man, it’s just me.” Head smiled at him, but there was concern in his eyes. “You were having one hell of a nightmare there.”
“Christ,” Crow muttered, “you don’t know the half of it.”
Head helped Crow settle himself and he arranged the sheets and plumped his pillow as tidily as any nurse, gave him a sip of water through a straw, and settled back in his chair, scooping his magazine from off the floor where it had fallen.
Crow rubbed his eyes. “What time is it?”
“Almost six. Sun’ll be up in a bit. You weren’t out more than a few hours, though. You want me to get the nurse to bring you something, help you sleep?”
“God, I don’t think I ever want to go to sleep again.” With the tip of his tongue he probed the stitches inside his mouth, wincing. He sighed and settled back against the pillow but there was no getting comfortable. Everything hurt. Even his hair felt like the ends of brittle pieces of straw stuck into his scalp. “You on shift all night?”
“One of the local blues is supposed to relieve me at six-thirty.” He hesitated. “I can stick around if you want, though—”
Crow waved it off. “Thanks, man, but it’s cool. Tell me, though, did, um, anything else happen last night? I mean, after…”
Last night had been the second chapter in a nightmare that had begun two days before, on September 30. The whole thing had started when a trio of Philadelphia mobsters had forced a drug deal to go sour so they could make off with both the money and the cocaine, and had left behind a warehouse littered with dead men—their own cronies, a posse of Jamaicans, and at least one cop. Karl Ruger led the crew, and if there was ever a sicker, more violent, more vicious son of a bitch on planet Earth, then Crow had never heard of him. Ruger had been the directing force behind the buy, and he had made it go south because he needed enough money to flee the country—not just to elude the police manhunt, but to escape the wrath of Little Nicky Menditto, the crime boss of Ruger’s own outfit. Rumor had it that Menditto had learned that Ruger was the man hunted nationwide as the Cape May Killer—a psychopath who had slaughtered a group of senior citizens at the lighthouse on the Jersey Shore. Little Nicky’s grandparents had been on that tour.
The slaughter had been a bizarre by-product of a mob war in Philly, but Ruger had gone way past his instructions of “doing something to hurt Little Nicky.” Ruger had committed atrocities that were being written about in books and made into movies. Ruger was the kind of real-world killer than made Ted Bundy look like a genial neighbor. His identity had remained hidden for years, but then the whisper stream had started and Ruger knew that he had to run or die. The mob was never known for understanding or forgiveness.
How or why Ruger’s crew had crashed their car was something neither Crow nor the interjurisdictional police task force had been able to determine, and the ensuing manhunt was massive. Unfortunately their car had crashed on a remote edge of the Guthrie family farm. Every time Crow thought about how Ruger invaded the Guthrie house, brutalized the family, and nearly killed Val—his Val!—Crow felt his guts turn to ice.
It burned Crow that he hadn’t been there in time to stop Ruger before he moved like a killer storm through the lives of Val and her family. Crow’s best friend, Terry Wolfe, mayor of Pine Deep and owner of the country’s largest Haunted Hayride, had begged Crow to drive out to the attraction and shut it down, fearing what would happen if Ruger and his men showed up there. Crow had wasted way too much time getting that job done, and not really taking the job all that seriously. Mobsters and police manhunts just didn’t seem real in Pine Deep, and violence on that scale was something safely buried in the town’s past, not its present. Not now.
So, while Crow was tooling around, taking his time, Karl Ruger was beating the hell out of Val, her father Henry, her brother Mark, and Mark’s wife, Connie. Ruger tied everyone up except for Val and Henry and forced them at gunpoint to go out into the fields to help him fetch one of his injured men, Kenneth Boyd. By the time they got back to where Ruger had left Boyd, there was no trace of him, the cash, or the drugs. Boyd had split and taken Ruger’s lifeline with him. Ruger went totally off his rocker at that point, and, as Val later told Crow, Henry had seen just one chance to save his family. He shoved Val away from him, urging her to run while he ran the other way to draw Ruger away from the house. Ruger, snapping out of rage and into cold efficiency, simply shot Henry in the back as he ran and left him to die out in the rainy darkness. It was so callous that Crow felt bile in his throat.
Ruger headed back to the farmhouse, but Val wasn’t there. So he vented his anger on Mark—beating him, knocking his teeth out, totally humiliating him—and then forcing him to lie there on the floor and watch as he set about raping Connie. If Val had been even two minutes later it would have been too late for Connie, but Ruger was just starting to tear at her clothes when Val snuck in and tackled him, then immediately fled, taking a cue from her father’s sacrifice by tricking Ruger into chasing her. She had hoped to outrun him, to lose him in the darkness of her farm and then circle back to the house and get one of her father’s guns, but Ruger was as fast as he was sly and he caught her before she had taken a hundred paces. He was strangling her, trying to crush her throat to satisfy his dark need to hurt, to destroy, when Crow finally arrived. Too late to save Henry, almost too late to save the others.
The only thing that had gone right that night was that Ruger had underestimated Crow. Ruger was a big man, two hundred pounds of sinewy muscle packed onto a wiry six-foot frame. He had incredibly fast hands and he had never lost a fight in his life because there was nothing in his psychological makeup that could accept any reality except one in which he dominated. When Crow stepped out of his car, what Ruger saw was a short, thin man who looked about as threatening as a shopkeeper, which what Crow currently was. What he did not see were the years upon years of jujutsu training; what he did not see were the years on the Pine Deep police force as one its most decorated officers—all of that in the past, but not long past. Ruger made one of the worst mistakes anyone can make in a fight: he underestimated his opponent, and it had cost him.
They fought in the rain and the mud and it was the most vicious fight of Crow’s life. No mercy, no rules, no hesitation. It was eye-gouging and groin-kicking and throat-crushing. It was a life-or-death back-alley brawl between two men who had to win. Quitting or surrender were impossible concepts for both of them because to lose the fight was to lose absolutely everything.