But Terry had clamped a hand to his mouth and staggered away to fall to hands and knees beside Bernhardt. They took turns retching and coughing. Ferro tried on an amused and superior smile, but it tasted wrong, so he spat it out.
Terry shambled back, wiping his mouth and looking even paler, if that was possible.
Ferro looked at him. “Are you okay, sir?”
“What do you think!” Terry gulped some air. “You figure that this Karl Ruger did this?”
“Well, I sure as hell hope so.”
Terry gave him a quizzical look. “You ‘hope so’?”
Nodding, Ferro said, “You should hope so, too, Mr. Mayor. That, or you’ve got two incredibly dangerous homicidal maniacs running around in your quiet little town.”
“Oh no…” Terry breathed.
“Relax,” said Ferro, “what are the odds of that?”
Crow closed his cell phone and slid it back into his pocket. He was beginning to get the first tingling of unease. He’d called Val’s cell twice and got no answer, and had called the house and gotten nothing. He wanted to get this job done and get over there.
The ATV was a chunky little three-wheeled Kawasaki with puffy low-pressure tires and motorcycle handlebars. Every time Crow used one, he felt as if he were in the jet-speeder chase in Return of the Jedi. The ATV growled to life, hinting at more muscle in its belly than one might guess, and as Crow gave her some gas, it kicked out a cloud of dust and leaped forward.
“Hi-yo, Silver,” Crow yelled, “away!”
Barney and Mike watched him go, standing side by side: the eighteen-year-old with the fake knife in his chest, and the fourteen-year-old with the broken rib and the marks of a near-fatal encounter with madness flickering in his eyes. They watched until Crow’s taillights vanished around a bend in the road.
“Crow’s a friggin’ goof,” Barney said, scratching at the adhesive bandage that held the knife.
Iron Mike considered for a moment. “Yeah, he’s just about weird enough.”
Just a minute or two after Crow vanished into the night, a pair of headlights cast the parking lot in whiteness. Barney and Mike turned to see a station wagon pull into the lot and crunch across the gravel toward them. Mike hesitated for a moment, then smiled and waved.
The station wagon rolled to a stop and the driver’s door opened. Vic Wingate unfolded himself from behind the wheel. He was a big man, just over six feet tall and very muscular, with a military-style blond crew cut and a Marine Corps jawline. That jaw was set as he walked over to meet Mike.
“Hi, Vic!” Mike said, forcing his voice to sound pleased to see the man. “I guess they told you what happened. My bike’s in the—”
Vic hit him.
It was a savagely fast, stunningly hard blow. Not a slap, but the full rock-hardness of Vic’s fist. It caught Mike in the stomach and seemed to smash back every bit of flesh between shirtfront and backbone. All of the air whooshed out of Mike’s mouth along with a strangled cry of surprise; after that Mike had no breath even to scream. The pain was worse than anything he had ever felt. Worse than the broken rib, worse than all the bruises from when he’d gone off the road. Worse than any pain from any punishment Vic had ever given him. It was the first time in his life Mike had ever been punched by an adult. Before that it had been slaps, hard slaps with Vic’s hard hands, but just slaps. The punch was so crushingly hard, and so unexpected, that Mike felt as if his entire body had shrunk down into a single twisted knot of white-hot pain. He lay on the gravel in a fetal position and tried to breathe.
“Yo! mister!” Barney called in alarm, stepping forward. Vic wheeled toward him and pointed a finger at the kid’s nose. The finger was like a steel dagger and it stopped Barney in his tracks.
“You got something to say, shit bag?”
Barney’s stood there, speechless, powerless, shocked, and scared beyond action. He watched in horror as Vic jerked open the rear passenger door, then bent and caught Mike by the belt and the hair, hoisted him off the ground, and literally threw him into the backseat. Mike slid across the seat and thumped against the opposite door.
All the time Mike’s mom just sat in the front passenger seat and looked down at the floor. Barney tried to catch her eye, to make some kind of appeal, but she wouldn’t look at him. Barney wished Crow was still there, though what Crow could do against a guy like Wingate he didn’t know.
“Where’s his fucking bike?” Vic demanded, closing on Barney.
All Barney could do was point. Vic stalked over and yanked it out of the back of Crow’s trunk. He didn’t bother to close the hood. He crammed the bike roughly into the bed of the station wagon, slammed the rear door, and then stalked around to the driver’s side. Over the top of the car he again leveled a finger at Barney. “This is a family matter, do you understand me?”
Barney nodded.
“Good, then keep your mouth shut or it won’t be a plastic knife you’re gonna find sticking out of your chest. Now get the fuck out of the road.”
Barney retreated and watched in mute horror as Vic made a screeching turn and left the lot in a spray of kicked-back gravel.
Crow bounced along the road, following the path he knew so well. The Haunted Hayride covered a huge area, spread out over parts of three different farms, two of which were now owned by Terry Wolfe, one of which leased acreage to the mayor for his attraction. It was wrapped like a horseshoe around the north end of the Pinelands College campus and was itself wrapped in the arms of the vast Pine Deep State Forest. Most of the land was given over to pumpkin patches, cornfields, and wheat fields, but since the harvest had begun in earnest for most of the town, much of the crop had already been cleared. Some of the corn stood unpicked, it having been planted later for a late fall harvest. A lot of the local farmers staggered their harvests so they could keep sending fresh produce to the markets up until the very edge of winter.
Crow loved the place. Even though he had designed every part of it, and knew all of its theatrical ins and outs, he loved the feeling of supernatural dread that he always sensed when he was covering these dark lanes. For a lark, he’d even spent a couple of nights as one of the monsters, scaring the bejesus out of the ten-dollar-a-head tourists.
The hayride was set up so that one main path led through all of the traps. The traps were the spots where costumed staffers waited to leap out and, in their own scripted or improvisational way, go “Boo!” Some of the traps were set scenes, such as a witch trial that showed a poor wretch being crushed beneath planks weighted with rocks, or tied to a chair and dunked into the creek; or where a line of victims were led up to a chopping block where a burly headsman (the defensive lineman for the Pine Deep Scarecrows) waited to shorten them by a head. Some of the traps were shockers, which had either mechanical or human monsters leaping unexpectedly out at the customers during lulls in the ride. There were a few interactive traps as well, such as Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre rushing at the flatbed with his chainsaw buzzing. The chain on the saw was totally blunt, so when he tried to cut through the planks on the side of the flatbed, he really got nowhere, but Crow had added plastic bags of sawdust taped to the outside of the planks that would burst as soon as the chainsaw was pressed against them. The swirling sawdust and the buzz of the saw made it really appear as if Leatherface was really cutting his way through the wood and was actually going to dismember the paying customers.