backward and kicked upward, catching Ruger under the chin. Once more Ruger was staggered backward, but again he somehow managed to shake it off.
“What’s going on?” someone yelled and Crow was vaguely aware of shapes in the doorway — nurses, patients.
“Get the cops!” Crow yelled, but he had no idea if anyone went to get help. Ruger reached over and swung the door shut with such force that Crow could hear cries of surprise and pain as it struck faces and hands.
Then Ruger turned and leered at Crow, showing the uneven row of teeth — the teeth Crow had shattered after they’d fought in the rain — and his grin looked like the mouth of a shark. All of those jagged teeth seemed unnaturally sharp and unnaturally long.
“I’m going to kill you and everything you love,” Ruger hissed. He was not even breathing hard as he closed in again, bone-white fingers reaching to grab.
Crow kicked up again and caught Ruger in the chest, but it was like kicking a tree trunk. It didn’t even slow him down. He tried it again and Ruger caught his ankle and dragged him forward like a fisherman reeling in a marlin. Crow tried every trick he knew to disengage his foot, but all he did was tear the skin on his ankle and twist his knee.
Ruger reached down to grab Crow’s throat again when the loudest sound Crow had ever heard seemed to rip the whole room apart. Ruger was knocked forward and almost fell, but took a broad step to clear Crow and somehow remained on his feet. He turned and Crow looked up and there was Val on her knees, leaning against the far corner of the bed, holding Shanks’s gun out as smoke curled up from the barrel.
With effort Ruger pulled himself erect and faced Val. He hissed at her like a snake and started to reach for her when she shot him again. The bullet caught him in the shoulder and spun him around. Crow covered his head with both arms and ducked out of the way as the bullet punched through Ruger’s upper chest and struck the TV mounted on brackets above the bed. Metal and glass fragments showered down on Ruger, but he did not fall.
“You killed my father!” Val was screaming over and over again. She fired again, catching Ruger on the other shoulder and he did a wild pirouette before careening off the bed.
Crow reached over to Shanks and frantically patted down his legs until he found the backup pistol in a small holster strapped to his ankle. Above him Val fired again and Ruger was slammed back against the wall.
“You fucking bitch!” he screamed, but still he didn’t go down.
Crow tore open the Velcro and clawed the pistol out of the holster. It was a.38 snub-nosed Smith and Wesson, and Crow rolled onto his back and raised the pistol with both hands and just as Val fired a shot into Ruger’s stomach Crow opened fire and hit him again and again and again.
Caught between two fires, Ruger was a puppet dancing in the darkness, being jerked back and forth, either unwilling or unable to fall as Val hit him in the stomach and chest and groin and Crow hit him in the back and kidneys and shoulders.
Crow fired five times and the hammer clicked dry on the sixth chamber, which had been left empty. Val fired twice more and then there was the audible metallic snap of the breech locking open.
Ruger was chest-forward to the wall, and as Crow watched his legs buckled and he slid slowly down to his knees, lingered there for a second, and then toppled over onto his back. Mouth slack, eyes shut, muscles slack.
As Val knelt there her arm sagged to the floor and she dropped the gun. “You killed my father, you son of a bitch.” She looked at Crow with dark and wild eyes and he could see the fresh dark bruise on her face where Ruger must have hit her when he’d slipped into the room during the blackout.
“Val…wait…I have to check.” Holding the gun high, ready to use it as a club, Crow wormed his way over and with his other hand felt for a pulse in Ruger’s throat. Nothing. He tried another spot. Absolutely nothing.
Crow bowed his head.
Karl Ruger was dead.
“Jesus Christ,” Crow said, and then he struggled to his knees and reached across the corner of the bed toward her just as her eyes lost their focus and rolled up in their sockets. With a soft sigh she passed out and sagged down on the bed. Whimpering in fear, Crow crawled over the bed to her and pressed his ear to her chest, not breathing at all until he heard the steady thump-thump-thump of her heart.
“Thank God!” he breathed and kissed her over her heart and then kissed her sweet face. “Thank God….”
Outside, there were yells and an official voice — Frank Ferro, Crow thought — was yelling, “Police! Police! Out of the way!” Footsteps were hurrying, getting louder, coming closer.
A hand clamped around his wrist with implacable force and Crow turned in absolute horror to see Karl Ruger leering up above the footrest, his eyes wide and red and hellish.
With irresistible force he pulled himself up and pulled Crow close and whispered in his graveyard voice, “Ubel Griswold sends his regards.” Then he laughed the coldest laugh Crow had ever heard and the red light went out of his eyes and Karl Ruger sank back to the floor.
Crow was frozen there, his eyes wide and unblinking, his heart beating painfully in his chest, mouth agape as the horror of those five words plunged his entire world into madness.
Epilogue
Midnight came and went in Pine Deep and no one took notice as September died and a cold October was born amid shadows and sirens and flashing lights.
Detective Sergeant Frank Ferro took charge of the investigation and cleanup at Pinelands Hospital and slowly the story unfolded. The hospital lights had been shut off at the source by the simple act of the main breakers being thrown, and the auxiliary generator had been disabled with lines and wires cut. The maintenance supervisor, Carl Wilkerson, was found unconscious in the electrical shed behind the building — alive but badly injured with a cracked skull. The weapon was a pair of bolt cutters; the same cutters had been used to gain entry to the shed and disable the generator. The main breakers were turned back on and by morning the backup had been repaired as well. Wilkerson was admitted to the hospital in guarded condition, though when he regained consciousness two days later he had no memory at all of the event. “Traumatic amnesia,” diagnosed Saul Weinstock.
Weinstock met with Ferro, LaMastra, and Gus in the doctors’ lounge around two in the morning, as things were beginning to settle down. Over cups of coffee — Ferro’s fourteenth of the day — Weinstock gave them a status report.
“Officer Shanks has a hell of a lump on his head and a very sore set of testicles — about which we can all sympathize — but will be fine. We’re keeping him overnight for observation.”
“How’s Ms. Guthrie?” LaMastra asked. “She really came through in there.”
Weinstock grinned. “Yeah, never leave Val out of the equation. She’s known for rising to the occasion. And as far as her injuries go, we put two stitches in her cheek and in the morning we’ll be doing a CT scan of her eye socket. X-rays showed that she has a hairline crack of the right orbit, but we need to rule out trauma to the eye itself.”
“Jeez,” said Gus. “She said all he did was backhand her.”
Ferro shook his head. “And Crow?”
“I had to disappoint him about getting kicked loose tomorrow. He won’t be going anywhere for at least two, three days. Fourteen stitches in his mouth. Both cheeks. Three loose molars. His left wrist has the weirdest compression bruise I’ve ever seen, like it was caught in a vise.”
“He said Ruger just squeezed his wrists.”
Weinstock shook his head. “No. He had to have caught it in a door or something. The human hand can’t generate the kind of PSI needed to do that. But with all the jolts he took I doubt he remembers things clearly.”
“Yeah,” said LaMastra, “he also said Ruger’s eyes turned red for a while.”
“As I said, he’s disoriented.”
Ferro sipped his coffee. It was horrible. Reheated, probably, though that wasn’t why his face was sour. “And
