Haunted Hayride, and the manager there called me and asked if I would notify you.”
“The hayride? That’s all the way the hell out—”
The mayor’s voice cut him off smoothly. “I know it’s a bit of a haul, Mr. Wingate, but as the boy’s health and welfare are involved, I’m sure you would want to go pick him up.”
Vic’s eyes were narrowed. The phone call had a weird, fishy smell to it, but there was nowhere to go with it except to agree. “Yeah. Sure. Whatever. I’ll go fetch him.”
“Thank you, Mr. Win—”
Vic hung up on him and stood for a moment, arms folded, lips pursed, staring at the phone.
He smiled slowly, believing his guess to be right. If the little punk had been run down by a tow-truck, then that would be perfect. That was what the Man had been trying to orchestrate for a while now, but Vic hadn’t known the plan was in full swing already.
He nodded and chuckled. “That’s cool.”
Then he remembered Lois waiting for him in the living room.
“Does the mayor want you to arrest him?” Mike asked as Missy took curve after curve.
“Who — our guest psycho? Two words best express it. Hell no!” Crow shook his head. “I’m just an errand boy, and that’s all. I’m gonna go out, close down the hayride, wait for your folks to pick you up, and then I’m done with it.”
“But you’re a cop, aren’t you?”
“Kind of…well, not really. I’ve been reinstated just for tonight. Can’t have civilians doing official work.”
“You used to be one, though?”
Crow said nothing, his eyes watching the road.
“Crow? Didn’t you used to be a cop?”
“Once upon a time, young Jedi.”
“Why’d you quit?”
They drove on for almost half a mile before Crow answered that. He gave Mike a brief, searching look and then refocused on the road.
“Sometimes things don’t work out,” he said simply, then smiled. “Besides, if I was a cop, whom would you buy your comics from?”
“Probably Nick’s Comic Cave in Crestville. Or maybe at Waldenbooks in—”
“Mike…?”
“Yeah?”
“Shut up when grown folks are talking.”
Mike grinned. Outside the windows the black fields whipped by, beards of corn glowing with the cold moonlight. “Do you think the chief will catch him?”
Crow was about to suggest that Gus Bernhardt couldn’t catch the clap in a whorehouse, but thought better of it. He said, “I guess he might. He has a lot of help from Philly cops. By morning there’ll be more cops in town than tourists.”
“Won’t the tourists be scared off anyway ’cause of what’s happening?”
Crow snorted. “Hardly. We’ll probably have a banner day, once this gets out. People love blood and guts as much as they do a good five-alarm fire. Draws ’em like flies to sh…uh, garbage.”
“You were going to say ‘like flies to shit.’”
“Yes, but I didn’t, and you shouldn’t either.”
“Jeez, Crow, I’m fourteen!”
“Yeah, well, there’s some that think being fourteen is the same as being a kid. Kind of a popular notion, I hear tell.”
“Yeah, well. What do you think?”
Crow looked at him, looked past the smile at the Mike Sweeney whose father was dead, whose mother was a drunk, and whose stepfather was known to beat him so bad that he missed a dozen days from school a year.
He sighed. “Not everybody grows up at the same speed, I guess.”
Mike grunted.
“I still don’t want to hear you use bad language regardless.”
Mike smiled. “Okay, boss.”
“Okay then.” They looked at each other and grinned. Crow said, “How’re the ribs?”
“They hurt like a son of a bitch,” Mike said. Crow goggled at him, and then they both burst out laughing. Mike laughed, winced, and kept on laughing, clapping a hand to his aching side.
“You juvenile delinquent!” Crow gasped.
A half mile later they passed a massive billboard painted with witches and goblins and leering black cats. Written in dripping black and red letters it proclaimed:
PINE DEEP HAUNTED HAYRIDE
Biggest in the East Coast
5 miles
WE’LL SCARE YOU SILLY!
They drove on.
Chapter 11
Terry drank the last of the reheated coffee, oblivious of its appalling taste, and set the cup down on Ginny’s desk. The Xanax was kicking in and he felt a little of the tension seep out of his muscles. Ginny quickly picked up the cup, put a pink Post-It sheet under it as a coaster, and set it down again. The mayor folded his arms, hiked one half of his rump onto the edge of her desk, and looked hard and long at Gus Bernhardt. “So, here we are.”
“Yeah,” Gus said. “Fine kettle of frigging fish.”
“Language, language,” Ginny said sotto voce.
“Frigging’s not a curse, you silly bitch,” Gus muttered under his breath as he went back to staring at the huge aerial-survey map of the town and its close neighbors covering the entire wall above Ginny’s desk.
Across the room Sergeant Ferro and Detective LaMastra were standing, heads together in conversation with officers from the first wave of Philadelphia cops. Every once in a while, LaMastra would look over at Terry and raise his eyebrows by way of sympathetic acknowledgment.
Terry glanced at the clock. It was just past ten, two and a half hours since he’d gotten the call at Crow’s shop. Most of that time had been spent laboriously trying to explain the peculiar geography of Pine Deep to the pinch-hitting cops. Geographically speaking, Pine Deep was an island, bordered completely by running streams of water: Pine River along the west and its estuary, Black Creek to the south, and then the thin and wandering northern line of the Crescent Canal and the broad Delaware River to the east. Between Black Marsh and the outlying houses of Pine Deep, A-32 rose up into a series of foothills and wannabe-mountains, taking gymnastic turns around sheer cliffs and doing roller-coaster rises and dips past the vast Pine Deep State Forest from which the town borrowed its name. The forest surrounded the farmlands and thrust tentative fingers back toward A-32 every few miles so that the long protrusions formed borders between some of the larger farms. The main body of the forest lay solidly westward, and sprawled as far over as Newton’s Reach, a tourist attraction town preserved intact from Colonial times, right down to the working blacksmith’s shop and the tours conducted by high school seniors wearing tricorns and three-button breeches.
