Dead Man's Song

arms and legs flopped away from the torso, and a head thrown back, mouth wide as if caught in the midst of a great scream, tilting away from the red ruin of a savaged throat.

Connie Guthrie stared past Val, past Boyd, through the open door, and into the wide and sightless eyes of her husband. And screamed.

“MARK!”

That scream—a tearing screech that tore her throat and flecked her lips with her own blood—galvanized both Boyd and Val. With a howl of furious delight he flung himself at Val. The sound of both screams broke her paralysis of shock and she hurled the Maglite at Boyd and threw herself at Connie, knocking her sideways and down so that Boyd’s lunge missed them both. Connie fell hard and Val crashed down onto her and there was a loud snap! as Val’s hip landed on Connie’s ribs. Connie’s scream modulated upward into a shriek of agony; Val rolled off her just as Boyd came scrambling off the ground and she tried to dodge the swing of his open hand, but he clipped her as she moved—not a whole-hand blow, just the flats of his fingers, but it was hard enough to send her reeling against the side of the barn. She struck it with her forehead and the pain stabbed through the healing eye socket where Ruger had similarly struck her. Her right eye went black and the other exploded with white light and the whole barnyard spun around her in a sickening reel. She collapsed into an awkward heap as Connie’s screams continued to rip holes in the night.

Because of the blow to her head everything was suddenly muted, and Connie’s screams seemed to be coming from a hundred miles away. Val tried to crawl toward her, but she couldn’t see. She kept blinking, trying to clear her sight. The right eye stayed black and blind, but there were images now in her left one—fuzzy shapes cavorting in the indirect glare from the fallen flashlight. She saw a hulking shape—Boyd, it had to be Boyd—rising to his feet a half-dozen yards away, and he had something in his hands. Something smaller. Connie! Struggling, still screaming, kicking and flailing. Fighting back. Fighting back against Boyd the way Mark had said she hadn’t done against Ruger.

Mark! Oh God!

Darkness wanted to close around her, to smash her into nothingness, but she fought it with a snarl of heartbroken rage, fought it with hate for what this man had done. Val pulled herself to her hands and knees and supported herself on one palm while she reached behind her back and pulled out her father’s big .45 Colt Commander; she sagged back onto her heels, racking the slide with trembling hands. Her one eye was clearer, but it was like looking through oily glass, and as she raised the gun Boyd lunged his mouth toward Connie’s throat. The sound of his teeth tearing through the softness of her skin was lost in the cannon-loud explosion of the gun. The bullet took Boyd in the hip and the heavy slug’s impact spun Boyd around; he lost his grip on Connie. To Val it seemed like he fell to the ground in exaggerated slowness, trailing a thin arc of blood as he collapsed into the dirt.

“Connie!” Val yelled—or tried to, but her voice was a choked whisper of pain.

Boyd had been knocked off balance, down to one knee, but he turned, whipping his white face toward Val, baring those awful teeth that were smeared now with Connie’s blood as well as Mark’s. Val shot him again as he rose and this time the bullet punched through his stomach and burst out the other side. The impact barely made Boyd pause. He flinched, and that was all; then his snarl became a smile as he rose to his feet.

Val’s mouth formed the word No! as she fired again, taking Boyd in the meat of his thigh and she could see the pant leg puff and blood and bone splatter against the fence post beyond him, but he kept rising, getting to both feet now and starting to move toward her. She fired again, a chest shot that surely punched a hole through his lung.

All Boyd did was smile as he lunged toward her.

(4)

Crow drove the rutted twists of Dark Hollow road, his mind churning over everything that had happened down in Dark Hollow. The sensations as they had crossed the line, the swamp, the chains with their locks inside the house, the new boards, the roaches. Even for him it was all too weird, too…real. Not tainted childhood memories, not alcohol-induced DTs, not the result of repeated head trauma courtesy of Karl Ruger. This had just happened, and unlike when Ruger had said those enigmatic last few words there was a witness this time. He cut a glance at Newton, who had his arms wrapped around himself as if for warmth; the reporter’s head was bowed and he was shaking it slowly from side to side. Oh boy, thought Crow, there’s my credible witness going bye-bye on me.

He braked to a stop where the dirt road emptied out onto A-32, and for a moment he sat there. Turn right and head to town, drop off Newton, then come back here to Val; turn left and go see Val first. He pulled out his cell, got enough bars, and hit speed dial. Val’s phone rang five times and then went to voice mail. He tried her house, same deal.

Then all at once two things happened that changed everything forever.

First, his mind—still replaying everything that had happened that day—tripped over the buried memory of that bizarre thought he’d felt when he had been on Griswold’s porch, when he had touched the wood with his palm and felt the odd whispering tremble beneath his skin. A voice—maybe it was the voice of Griswold’s ghost, dead these thirty years, or maybe it was the voice of his own fears—hissed at him from the shadows.

She is going to die and there is nothing you can do to save her. Nothing!

Crow jerked upright in his seat and snapped his head around toward Val’s farm. At that moment he heard the gunshots. And the screams.

(5)

Boyd lunged at her and Val fired two more shots, catching him in the upper chest. It didn’t stop him, but the force of the two heavy-caliber bullets turned him while he was in mid-leap, spinning his mass so that he crashed beside her rather than on top of her. He landed with a hiss like a scalded cat and turned toward her, clawing at her with his white fingers, the black nails tearing at her sleeves and chest as she lay on her side, but she brought her feet up and kicked at him while trying to steady the gun with both hands.

“Val!”

Val and Boyd both turned as three men came pelting around the side of the barn. Diego was in the lead, with Jose Ramos and Tyrone Gibbs close behind. “We heard screams—” Diego was saying and then they took in the tableau. Connie writhing on the ground, her face and throat splashed with blood; Val on the ground with a pistol; and a crazy-looking man grabbing at her. All three men put it together at once—they had all seen the news stories; they’d lived through the aftermath of the murder of their boss and the savage killings of the two cops not eighty yards from where they now stood. They knew who this son of a bitch was, and in the space between one footfall and the next their faces changed from concern to fury.

“Get that son of a bitch!” Diego yelled, and the two younger men—a twenty-year- old heavy equipment mechanic with ropy muscles and a twenty-five-year-old farmhand who once played halfback for the Pinelands Scarecrows—rushed in with hate in their eyes. They were big men who had dealt with their own grief over Henry’s death, and loved Val like a sister, and they wanted a piece of this South Philly wiseguy white trash. Shoulder to shoulder they raced toward Boyd, who had stopped pawing at Val and was rising to meet them; and from ten feet away both younger men threw themselves at him, leaping high and low as if they had practiced the move a thousand times. Jose slammed his shoulder into Boyd’s thighs and Ty braced his forearms in front of him and took Boyd in the chest, and they crushed him back against the barn wall. Bones snapped, Boyd howled in rage and there was a huge muffled echo from inside the barn.

Jose clung to Boyd’s legs, trying to pull him down, but Ty landed on his feet with old football reflexes still in his muscles. He pressed Boyd back with one forearm and started hammering him with short overhand rights that pulped what was left of Boyd’s face, splintering his nose, cracking his sinuses, ripping skin along his eyebrows. The sound of his blows was like an ax hitting wet cordwood.

Boyd endured the hits and just shot out one hand to catch Ty’s throat, and with a jerk of his wrist tore the whole front of it away. There was a massive spray of blood that shot like a hose from Ty’s arteries, drenching Boyd, splattering the wall, splashing Val’s face as she struggled to her feet. Ty tottered back, clawing at a gaping red nothing of a throat; his eyes went wide with the impossibility of what was happening, awareness sinking in even as his mind went red and then black. He fell backward, blood geysering up for a second before settling down to a dribble as shock shut down his heart.