Ghost Road Blues

room. “Val?”

Nothing.

Crow hurried over to the open door and peered into the gloom. Val was in bed, the sheets pulled up, turned away. Just a series of lumps in the darkness.

“Baby, you okay?” he asked as he entered the room.

She didn’t stir and he reached over to touch her shoulder and then he froze. Val was lying on her left side, turned away from him toward the window.

Her left side.

The injured side.

With a cry of terror bubbling on his lips he grabbed the sheet and pulled it down.

She turned toward him, her face and body edged with silver from the pale light from outside, and as she turned Crow felt his heart freeze in his chest and his guts turn to icy slush.

It was not Val at all.

The figure in the bed that grinned up at him with a jagged smile of broken teeth was Karl Ruger!

(2)

Detective Sergeant Frank Ferro had just finished brushing his teeth, had changed into pajama bottoms, and was about to sit down on the edge of his hotel bed when his cell phone rang. When you’re a cop, a call at midnight is never going to be good news. He picked his trousers off the bedside chair and pulled the cell from the belt clip.

“Ferro.”

“Frank?” It was his partner, Vince LaMastra, sounding tired but stressed. “Something’s happening at the hospital.”

“What?”

LaMastra told him.

“Shit,” Ferro said. “Lobby. Two minutes.”

He snapped the cover of his cell phone shut and reached for his pants.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

(3)

Crow’s mind was frozen in a black hell of panic. Ruger lay there in Val’s bed — Val was nowhere to be seen — and none of it was possible.

“Surprise, surprise,” Ruger said, and then without a flicker of warning cocked his foot and kicked Crow in the chest with shocking force. Crow flew backward against the wall of the bathroom cubicle, striking the back of his head with a heavy thud. Fireworks exploded everywhere and he felt his knees starting to go.

In a flash Ruger leaped out of the bed and caught him before he could fall, taking two bunched fistfulls of Crow’s robe and hauling him back to his feet. He pulled him close and Crow’s nose was assaulted by the smell of Ruger’s breath — like rot and sewage. It was just the same as it was in the dream he’d had earlier.

“Bet you’re wondering where your little bitch is, aren’t you, boy?” Ruger banged him back against the wall again and again. Crow was more than half dazed and his mind was spinning with a nauseous vertigo.

“Val…” he gasped.

Ruger stopped banging him off the wall long enough to lean close to his ear and whisper, “The bitch is mine, asshole. I’m going to enjoy splitting her right up the middle.” He slammed him back again and held him there. “But you…I just wanted to introduce myself again before I ripped your fucking heart out.” He let go of Crow for a second but before Crow could fall, Ruger closed one hand around his throat and pinned him once again to the bathroom wall. He raised the other hand, holding it flat, and simply slapped Crow across the face.

It was the hardest blow he had ever felt. It was like getting hit by a piece of board or a slab of stone. Ruger’s hands were icy cold and immensely powerful. Crow’s head shot to one side and his face felt mashed. Ruger backhanded him, catching the corner of his mouth this time, and the blow ground lip against tooth so sharply that blood splashed from Crow’s face onto Ruger’s.

Ruger stopped hitting him as he opened his mouth and his tongue — gray and dry — quested out like a hungry worm and found the droplets. He licked each one into his mouth, his eyes fluttering half closed for a moment as he savored the taste.

“Oh my God…” he breathed and he looked like a man in the throes of an orgasm. “Oh my God…”

Crow struggled to make his senses work and he shook his head like a drunkard. Ruger’s eyes snapped open again and the look in them — the appearance of them — nearly stopped Crow’s heart in his chest. Ruger’s eyes had changed. They were no longer a brown so dark that they looked black — now they were as red as the blood he’d just licked off his own lips.

Even with a hand clamped around his throat, Crow screamed.

Ruger’s lips were peeled back like a feral dog’s as he leaned in toward Crow’s throat and they were less than an inch away when Norris Shanks yelled, “What the fuck are you doing?”

Hissing, Ruger turned toward the cop who stood in the doorway. Shanks held his flashlight to one side and was reaching for his handgun when Ruger grabbed Crow with both hands and threw him across the room. Yelling in pain and fear, Crow spun through the air and crashed into Shanks with a teeth-jarring impact that slammed them both against the far wall. Shanks slid to the floor and Crow landed hip-first in the officer’s lap, mashing his testicles and tearing loose all the stitches on both sides of his hips. Shanks shrieked with pain and Ruger took two quick strides toward him and kicked him in the forehead, knocking his head back with a crunch that silenced the scream at once.

Crow rolled off Shanks and spun around on his hands and knees. Despite the searing pain in both hips, with the hand removed from his throat Crow’s oxygen-deprived brain was working better now and adrenaline was starting to pump through his system.

“Cr…Crow…?”

He turned and saw Val’s head and shoulder appear from the far side of the bed, silhouetted against the window. She was alive!

Ruger reached for him but Crow launched himself forward, surprising the killer and driving his right fist into Ruger’s crotch; then as he bent over the pain Crow reached up with both hands, grabbed his hair, and yanked him downward. Ruger hit chest-down on the floor with a crash that sent a shock back up through Crow’s arms. Crow lifted his head and slammed it down again — and again. He could hear bones break.

He lifted a third time and Ruger’s icy hands shot out and caught his wrists like two vises. After those three blows it was an impossible move, something no man, not even Ruger, could have done. But there was no loss of strength in those hands and Ruger held them, pulling Crow’s fists away from his scalp so forcefully that Crow could feel hair and scalp tearing. He still held them as he rose to his feet while keeping Crow in a kneeling position, arms raised as if in surrender.

Crow looked up at Ruger and even in the darkness he could see those fiery red eyes — those impossible eyes — and see the cuts and lacerations on the killer’s face. Even the worst one barely bled a drop.

Crow knelt there, held by overwhelming strength, looking up at Ruger, trying to make sense out of what he was seeing. None of this was possible. Was he still dreaming? Was he lost somewhere in a nightmare? For one wild moment Crow wondered if he had really been shot worse than he thought back there on Val’s farm. Could everything that had happened since then be part of some trauma-induced coma?

Ruger’s fists were tightening and the pressure was making Crow’s arm bones grind together. He had to do something, dream or not, impossible or not.

Using Ruger’s iron grip as a support, Crow picked up both of his legs at once, poised for the split part of a second like a gymnast hanging from the rings, and then pulled his knees up to his chest so his feet could clear the floor as he brought them up and kicked out with every ounce of strength he could manage. He tried to break Ruger’s knees, but the angle was bad and instead his heels struck Ruger in the hard muscle of both thighs.

It was enough. Ruger howled in pain — the first concession to humanity that he had made — and dropped Crow. Ruger staggered back with bad balance and had to grab the footrest of the bed to keep from falling.

Instantly Crow made a dive for Shanks’s pistol and had it out when Ruger lunged at him again, howling with rage. Crow swung the gun up but Ruger swatted it out of his hand and the gun flew across the room where it struck the window, creating a vast spiderweb fracture. Ruger again reached down for Crow but Crow threw himself