5
Took Jack two frustrating hours just to reach Jersey. Midnight had come and gone and Cape May was still better than a hundred miles away. The limit on the Parkway along here was sixty-five. He set the cruise control on seventy and kept his foot off the gas pedal. If he had his way he’d be doing ninety, but that could put a cop on his tail and the last thing he needed was a cop.
His head ached. He’d had the radio on earlier and some station had played “You Keep Me Hanging On.” Now it kept droning through his brain, Diana Ross’s voice like a power saw hitting a nail.
He’d figured a train of freak show trucks and trailers would be next to impossible to miss, but he damn near did. He was a good hundred yards past the New Gretna rest stop when something familiar about the motley assortment of vehicles clustered in the southern end of the parking lot registered in his consciousness.
He slowed, found an OFFICIAL USE ONLY cut-off, and made an illegal U-turn across the median onto the northbound lanes. Half a minute later he pulled into the rest area and found a parking spot near the Burger King / Nathan’s / TCB Y sign where he had a good view of the freak show vehicles.
At this hour on a Wednesday morning in May, the rest area was fairly deserted. Except for a few couples straggling back from Atlantic city, Oz’s folk had the lot pretty much to themselves. But why this rest area of all places? This was the only one Jack knew of that had a State Police barracks for a neighbor.
But he’d come this far...
Jack opened the trunk and stared at the gasoline can. Then he pulled a silenced P98 .22 from where he’d hidden it beneath the spare. Teeny-tiny caliber, but at least it was quiet. He stuck it in the waistband under his warm-up and walked toward the Oddity Emporium vehicles.
Counted two eighteen-wheelers and twenty or so trailers and motor homes of various shapes and sizes and states of repair. As he neared he heard hammering sounds; seemed to come from one of the semi trailers. Two of the dog-faced roustabouts stepped from behind a motor home as Jack reached the perimeter of the cluster. They growled a warning and pointed back toward the food court.
“I want to see Oz.”
More growls and more emphatic pointing.
“Look, he either gets a visit from me or I walk over to the State Police barracks there and have
The roustabouts didn’t seem to feature that idea. Looked at each other, then one hurried away. A moment later he was back. Motioned Jack to follow. Jack lowered the zipper on his warm-up top to give him quicker access to the P-98, then started moving.
One of the roustabouts stayed behind. As Jack followed the other on a winding course through the haphazardly parked vehicles, he saw a crew of workers trying to patch a hole in the flank of one of the semi trailers. He pulled up short when he saw the size of the hole: five or six feet high, a couple of feet wide. The edges of the metal skin were flared outward, as if a giant fist had punched through from within. And Jack was pretty sure that fist had been cobalt blue with yellow eyes.
Shit! He closed his eyes and slammed his fists against his thighs. He wanted to break something. What
The roustabout had stopped ahead and was motioning him to hurry. Jack did just that, and soon came to the trailer he recognized as Oz’s. The man himself was standing before it, watching the repair work on the truck.
“It got loose, didn’t it?” Jack said as he came up beside him.
The taller man rotated the upper half of his body and looked at Jack. His expression was anything but welcoming.
“Oh, it’s you. You do get around.”
“Had to feed it, didn’t you? Had to bring it up to full strength. Damn it, you knew the risk you were taking.”
“It was caged with iron bars. I thought-”
“You thought wrong. I warned you. I’ve seen that thing at full strength. Iron or not, that cage wasn’t going to hold it.”
“I admire your talent for stating the obvious.”
“Where is it?”
For the first time Jack detected a trace of fear in Oz’s eyes. “I don’t know.”
“Swell.” He glanced around. “Where’s that guy Hank?”
“Hank? What could you want with that imbecile?”
“Just wondering if he was bothering it again.”
The boss slammed a bony fist into a palm. “I thought he’d learned his lesson.
Well, he’ll learn it now.” He turned and called into the night. “Everyone-find Hank! Find him and bring him to me at once!”
They waited but no one brought Hank. Hank was nowhere to be found.
“It appears he’s run off,” Prather said.
“Or got carried off.”
“We found no blood near the truck, so perhaps the young idiot is still alive.”
“He is alive,” said a woman’s voice.
Jack turned and recognized the three-eyed fortune teller from the show.
“What do you see, Carmella?” Oz said.
“He is in the woods. He stole one of the guns and he carries a spear. He is full of wine and hate. He is going to kill it.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” Oz said. “Going to get himself killed is more likely.”
Jack understood taking a gun, but not the spear, then he remembered the pointed iron rod Hank and Bondy had used to torture it. Neither would do the job. If Hank ever caught up with the rakosh, he wouldn’t last long.
He stared at the mass of trees rising on the far side of the Parkway. “We’ve got to find it.”
“Yes,” Oz said. “Poor thing, alone out there in a strange environment, disoriented, lost, afraid.”
Jack couldn’t imagine Scar-lip afraid of anything, especially anything it might run across around here.
“Where’d the rakosh break out?”
“About a mile back. Right near mile marker fifty-one-point-three, to be exact. We stopped but could not stay parked on the shoulder-we’d have had the police asking what happened-so we pulled in here.”
“We’ve got to find it.”
“Nothing I’d like better, although I have a feeling you’d prefer to see it dead.”
“Very perceptive.”
“An interesting area here,” Oz said. “Right on the edge of the Pine Barrens.”
Jack cursed under his breath. The Barrens. Shit. How was he going to locate Scar-lip in there-if that was where it was? This whole area was like a time warp. Near the coast you had a nuclear power plant and determinedly quaint but unquestionably twentieth century towns like Smithville and Leeds Point. West of the Parkway was wilderness. The Barrens-a million or so unsettled acres of pine, scrub brush, vanished towns, hills, bogs, creeks, all pretty much unchanged in population and level of civilization from the time the Indians had the Americas to themselves. From the Revolutionary days on, it had served as a haven for people who didn’t want to be found. Hessians, Tories, smugglers, Lenape Indians, heretical Amish, escaped cons-at one time or another, they’d all sought shelter in the Pine Barrens.
And now add a rakosh to its long list of fugitives.
“We’re not too far from Leeds Point, you know,” Prather said, an amused expression flitting across his sallow face. “The birthplace of the Jersey Devil.”
“Save the history lesson for later. Are you sending out a search party?”
“No. No one wants to go, and I can’t say I blame them. But even if some were willing, we’ve got to be set up in Cape May tonight for our show tomorrow.”
“That leaves me.”
If Scar-lip got too much of a head start, he’d never find it...which Jack could live with unless the drive to kill Vicky was still fixed in its dim brain. Seemed unlikely, but Jack couldn’t take the chance.
