Ghost Road Blues (Pine Deep #1)

“Wh…what?”

Lightning flashed overhead, and Val had the briefest glimpse of a tall man, gaunt and sad, stooped beneath some terrible weight, dressed in dirty black clothes, gray face streaked with mud. A guitar was slung down his back, the strap crossing his chest.

“Go back,” he whispered.

She knew this man…but she couldn’t place where from.

The lightning flashed again and for just a second the small silver cross that she wore around her neck burned as if it somehow had suddenly flared with inner heat. Then as quickly as the sensation had come, it was gone.

Val was alone.

She stood there, head swimming with pain and shock and terror, her fingers touching the cross, the skin over her heart still tingling from the burn.

“Go back…” she murmured to herself.

Then she turned. Limping, her damaged arm swinging painfully, tears streaking her face, she started back toward the house.

4

At that same moment, eight miles away, Crow was tooling along the upper reaches of A-32. Jed Davenport was singing “Mr. Devil Blues” from a mix CD, and Crow was singing along, his voice leaping at the note but never quite grabbing it.

A state police car came rocketing up behind, lights flashing, siren tearing holes in the night. Crow sighed and slowed down to something near the speed limit as the unit changed lanes and pulled abreast. The officer riding shotgun dazzled him with a flashlight for a moment, then clicked it off. The patrol car accelerated and passed, taking charge of the lane and barreling way ahead.

Crow was impressed with the speed of the unit. He felt he could top it with Missy, but getting into a pissing match with the state police held little attraction for him. He let them zoom out of sight before he let the speedometer climb back up into the low eighties.

Muddy Waters was now “Screaming and Crying,” and Crow sang along.

He only slowed long enough to turn onto Johnson Wells Road, the old farm track that led around the huge cornfields and would take him right to Val’s back door. The road was badly rutted and bumpy and not even Missy could safely take it at anything like her best speed. Crow slowed to fifty and grimaced with the teeth-​rattling jolts.

The racing cop car stayed in Crow’s mind. Where was it going? What the hell else was out here this far down on A-32?

If a thousand volts of electricity had shot up through the seat into his spine he could not have more instantly snapped to a straighter position.

There was only one thing this far down on A-32.

“Val!” He shouted her name and kicked down on the gas. Bumps and ruts be damned. Missy hurtled forward. No answer to any of his calls. What a fucking fool! he thought.

The car shot along the old farm road, high beams plowing a path before him. Thunder rumbled again, way over beyond the Guthrie farm.

In the back of his mind he kept hearing one word over and over again: Hurry!

“Oh my God!” he said out loud. “Val…”

Chapter 16

1

Ferro carefully unwrapped a stick of Beechnut and laid it on his tongue until the surface sugar melted, then chewed it very slowly. He folded the wrapper neatly and stuffed it in his shirt pocket. For long minutes he had just stood there staring at the devastation, letting the horror burn into him and then burn out, letting the fires burn away all of the sensationalism and emotion until all that was left was a crime scene. Facts, data, evidence, and leads: nothing more.

Ferro looked up, not surprised to see that the moon had vanished behind featureless black storm clouds. “Yeah, Vince, we’re going to lose the scene before the lab crew can get here from Philly. I’m going to run through the preliminaries. You up to helping?”

LaMastra hoisted himself up off the ground, slapped dirt and crushed corn from the seat of his pants, and gave Ferro a vague nod.

“Good,” said Ferro. “Chief?” Bernhardt, who by now was standing on the far side of the car, well out of sight of the body, looked up. “Chief, can you arrange to get some kind of tarp? We need to protect the site as much as possible.”

Bernhardt made an inarticulate sound that Ferro took as an assent and set off back to the road in a wobbling Clydesdale canter.

Ferro knelt down by the opened briefcase and set to work. First he removed a folded sheet of white plastic, opened and spread it out to form a kind of pristine picnic blanket, weighing it down with ears of corn. On top of this he quickly and deftly lined up several items from the case: a small stack of clear plastic bags of various size, from those only large enough to hold a few pennies to some as large as lunch bags; clear glass vials and disposable eyedroppers in sterile plastic sleeves; paper bags; a gunpowder trace kit; tweezers; scissors; evidence tags; and a small battery-​powered tape recorder with a voice-​activated microphone.

Ferro took one of the eyedroppers and one of the vials and walked toward one of the pools of blood. Over his shoulder, he said to LaMastra, “I’ll collect, you catalog and tag.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Terry left them to it. He walked away from the scene and climbed back up to the road. Chief Bernhardt was chain-​smoking Camels as he talked into the handset of Rhoda’s unit; he looked like he was a short step away from a stroke. His bald head was bright red and beaded with sweat and he kept mopping it out of his eyes with the back of his chubby paw. The effect made it look as if he were a sniffling kid wiping tears from his eyes.

Gus finished with the radio and came over to stand with Terry. “This is some shit, huh?”

Terry nodded mutely.

“What I don’t get is why on earth this Ruger guy would do that to one of his buddies.”

“A difference of opinion over the division of spoils perhaps? Who knows? Ruger is supposed to be a super-​freakazoid, as Crow would say. Me, I’m amazed at the guy’s chutzpah. He has every cop on the East Coast after him, and he stops and takes the time to do something like this. He must be totally whacked out.”

“Jesus.” Gus finished his cigarette and crushed it out under his toe.

“You think they’re still around here, Gus?”

“Christ, I hope not.”

“They can’t have gone far without the car, and they can’t have been gone long if Ruger stopped to do all that. Two men on foot, hauling all the drugs and money Ferro was talking about—they have to still be somewhere close. We have some serious hills around here, not to mention some very thick fields that aren’t easy to wade through. I can’t see how they could have gotten more than a few miles away.”

“Ain’t much around here,” Gus said thoughtfully. “The road to Dark Hollow’s not far, but there’s nothing back there. And what else? A couple of back roads. Farm roads.”

“Whose farm is this?”

Gus frowned and peered up and down the road, assessing. “You know, I can’t quite tell if this is the north end of Henry Guthrie’s place, or the south end of Hobie Devlin’s.” He cupped a hand around his mouth. “Rhoda! Whose farm is this?”

“I think it belongs to Mr. Guthrie.”

“Yeah, I thought so.”

Terry tensed. “Guthrie…You’re right. This must be their big field, the one Henry calls the far field, ’cause it’s furthest from the house.” His eyes snapped wide. “Gus…can you get a unit out to Henry’s house? I mean right now!”

Gus blinked in surprise for a second; then he got it. “Oh, Jesus, you’re right! It’s the only place they could have gone.” Gus spun around and waddled quickly over to Rhoda and the other officers.

Watching him, Terry felt icy fingers close around his heart. Guthrie’s farm. Val Guthrie was Crow’s ladylove. And Crow was supposed to be going over there after his job at the hayride.

“Dear Jesus…” he breathed.

2

The thunder growled loud enough to wake the storm. Lightning flashed along its belly, burning the sky, burning the lands below, bursting trees and searing lines into the firmament. The rains came weeping in, angry tears spilled by troubled clouds.

Val Guthrie staggered out of the cornfield amid a crash of thunder that actually shook the dirt beneath her feet. Lightning danced and spun in the air above her, an almost continuous curtain of bright blue white.

She clutched her sprained arm to her body with all her strength, trying to keep it from swinging, but with each step the injured muscles and tendons twitched and spasmed, sending new and sharper spikes of pain. She didn’t know how much more of it she could bear. Nausea washed over her in waves, bubbling up in the back of her throat, dimming her tear-​streaked eyes, stoking the shock-​induced fever burning in her veins.

“Dad!” she cried as she stumbled through a curtain of rain and into the clearing.

The kitchen door lay where she’d dropped it, and the wheelbarrow stood empty, the red paint washed to brightness by the rain.

The madman with the gun was nowhere to be seen.

Val stood there, swaying, uncertain, not even remotely sure of what to do next.

Thunder broke above her so loudly she screamed, thinking the man had crept up behind her and shot her. She spun—but there was no one there.

Then in the flash of lightning, she saw the ragged form that lay crumpled in the lane only a few dozen yards away. The wind fluttered the sodden work clothes as it blew over outstretched legs and arms.

“Dad!”

She ran, shoving the pain down inside her mind, seeing nothing but the battered figure. Skidding, slipping in the mud, she tripped and landed on her knees in the mud and with her one good hand, she reached for her father’s shoulder. He lay on his stomach, his face pressed into the muck. One hand lay stretched out in front of him. In the brightness of the lightning, Val could see the neat round hole burned high in his back, nearly between the shoulder blades, the cloth washed clean of blood by the downpour.

“No!” she screamed and pulled at him.

His big old body resisted her, fighting her with limpness and weight and sopping clothes, but eventually Val found the strength to turn him onto his back. She wasn’t even sure if it was the right thing to do, or the wrong thing, or if she should do anything at all. She was beyond ordinary thinking.