reached out a hand and just glided his fingers along the surface debris. “The world’s changed a lot,” he said. “There’s stuff I had to do that we hadn’t thought of before.”
The bird rustled its feathers and he looked hard at it, squinting in the gloom.
“A lot of things have changed.”
The bird stared back.
Vic looked back down at the mud. “I’ve taken care of everything.” He paused and a slow, cold smile wriggled onto his thin lips. “Everything.”
In his sleep, Vic shifted, a faint smile on his mouth. Beneath his hand he grew hard.
Ruger saw it happen just in time to save his own life. That he saved the others, too, was inconsequential to him. He saw it because he was waiting for it, because he wanted it to happen. He needed it to happen, knew it
For weeks now he had felt that Death was dogging his heels and that sooner or later it was going to jump him. That, or maybe he’d find some way to turn it around and spit in Death’s eye. He found himself taking outrageous risks lately, risks like letting a dying man drive his getaway car. Instead of dreading the nearness of death, Ruger had started to groove on it, getting an almost erotic high from the nearness to total blackness. It jazzed him higher than a spike in the vein, and he’d been running on that high for days now, first planning the drug scam with the Jamaican posse, then forcing the deal to go sour by mouthing off to the chief of the Jamaican crew, then the shoot-out at the warehouse, and now this doomed flight.
It had all been good, all been a wild high. He knew that it would somehow end in a fireball of some kind, and he was perched on the edge of his perception, waiting to take control of it, to force the events to bend to his will, as so many other events in his life had been twisted to his will. There was no rush like it. When Tony lost it, it would be up to Ruger to take Lady Death by the tits and give her a tweak. That’s how he saw it. Give Lady Death’s tits a good tweak.
If he lived through the wreck, it was because his will was strong enough, and that, he knew, would mean that he’d been right all along about something a Gypsy lady had told him: that he was “special,” that he was protected from ordinary death. Maybe even immortal, a concept he did not consider either outlandish or absurd. If he died…well then, he’d just go rushing into that great big blackness with a hard-on and a curse on his laughing lips and see if the darkness could hold him.
This is how the wreck happened. The black car rounded a bend in the road, leaving the canal behind, and zoomed onto a long stretch of straight highway that clove through seemingly endless cornfields. The ranks of dry corn stood at attention on either side of the car as it whisked along the blacktop, and the car’s slipstream made them sway and whisper. Tony’s hands gripped the wheel so tightly that his knuckles were bone white in the places where they weren’t stained with blood. He kept trying to grip harder just to be able to feel something, but the hands at the ends of his wrists were merely dead lumps abruptly ending in coldness. He could not feel any of his fingers or even his palms. He kept looking at the wheel just to make sure he was actually holding it.
They approached a crossroads where a farm road cut the highway and Tony was looking at his hands when the man walked out of the right-hand cornfield and stopped in the middle of the road. Tony looked up just in time to see the man stop dead in the spray of the headlights. Maybe it was a trick of the light, or maybe it was his own failing vision, but Tony thought the man — a tall, pale man with blond hair and heavy features — seemed only as substantial as mist, that the burning light of the headlights cut right through him and that he cast no shadow on the ground.
The man grinned nastily at the onrushing car. His skin was white as snow. Not merely pale, not even the white pink of an albino, but as white as the cocaine in the trunk, as white as Tony’s knuckles, as white as Ruger’s teeth when he smiled. The white man stood there, his blond hair fluttering in the storm breeze, his lips curled into a grin as evil and hungry as Ruger’s own.
Tony screamed, and then Ruger swiveled around from looking at the driver and saw the man loom in the headlights and just for a moment he felt a flash of recognition punch through his brain like a bullet.
“Ruger,” he thought he heard the man say in a heavily accented voice, but it was impossible at that distance and at that speed to have heard anything. “Ruger, you are my left hand.”
Time instantly
The car seemed to almost freeze around him and Tony and Boyd were like mannequins, their mouths opened in comical parodies of screams. Only the man in the road seemed to exist in real time. He raised a hand and beckoned to Ruger.
Ruger’s mouth moved to form the name “Griswold” and the shape of it felt familiar on his lips and tongue.
The ghostly figure spoke. “Vic Wingate has been my John the Baptist…he has paved the way. But you, Karl…you will be my Peter, my rock, and on this rock I will build my church.” The voice echoing in Ruger’s head was heavy with mockery, but he liked the sound of it.
All at once time caught up to Ruger and the car hurtled at the man too fast to stop or even veer. Tony screamed again and the instant of contact (or had it been a hallucination brought on by stress?) was gone. Tony’s hands were moving all over the wheel and instantly Ruger knew what was about to happen. Tony swung the wheel to the right, trying to swerve around the apparition, but he was ham-fisted with blood loss and overdid the turn. The car lurched away from the man, missing him by less than a foot, and rocketed off the road out of all control. Ruger grabbed the wheel with both hands, shoving Tony against the door. He fought the wild turn, swerving into it with a gentle angularity, preventing it from becoming a tumble. The car jolted as the front wheels hit the edge of the drainage ditch forming a border between road and field. The car almost nose-dived into the ditch, but Ruger jerked hard on the wheel to correct the angle, and a microsecond later the back wheels slammed into the edge of the ditch. The impact slackened some of the car’s momentum, but Tony’s foot was still on the accelerator and the sedan plowed into the cornfield like a runaway train. Cornstalks whipped at the windows and died beneath the wheels in sharp crunches of agony.
“Get your fucking foot off the pedal!” Ruger hissed. When Tony didn’t, or couldn’t, Ruger cocked his arm and drove his elbow into Tony’s nose once, twice. The brittle cartilage in Tony’s nose crunched and blood exploded from his lacerated skin, pouring down over his mouth. Tony sagged against the door and his foot slid from the pedal. Thoroughly enjoying himself, Ruger grinned, shifted his hips, then reached over with his own left foot and stamped on the brakes. The car jerked and jolted, throwing Ruger against the dashboard and Boyd against the back of Tony’s seat. Tony’s seat buckled forward, and Tony’s right temple struck the steering wheel with a sharp crack.
A moment later there was a much louder
The engine growled in confusion as it wound itself down.
Pushing himself away from the dashboard, Ruger reached over and shoved the automatic transmission into park, then switched off the engine. A tarpaulin of silence dropped over the car, broken only by small tinkling sounds from the now still engine and the far-off rumble of thunder.
Chapter 4
Long black lines of burned rubber marked where the car had gone off the road into the corn. The tall man with the blond hair stood at the outer curve of the skid mark and stared into the field for a long time, his mouth cut into a cruel smile of triumph. Despite the total cloud cover his skin and blond hair seemed to glimmer with a luminescence like cold moonlight.
He reached out his left hand, fingers splayed so that from his perspective his hand encompassed the whole
