Pine Deep, Pennsylvania, does not seem to be able to get a breather from the ongoing violence that has rocked the town since the end of September. In the latest chapter of this ongoing tragedy the town’s beloved and respected mayor, Terry Wolfe, attempted to take his own life last night by throwing himself out his second-floor window onto concrete flagstones.
Sources say that Wolfe has been under tremendous pressure since the beginning of this season’s crop blight that has brought many of the town’s farms to the brink of financial ruin. “The poor man’s been a wreck,” said Deputy Mayor Harry LeBeau. “First the blight and then the attacks on the Guthries. He’s always been very close with them, ever since he and Val were an item back in school.”
Sarah Wolfe, the wife of the mayor and a career politician herself, made only a brief statement: “Terry has been working night and day to try and save Pine Deep from economic ruin. This town means everything to him and I ask that everyone in town joins me in praying for my husband.”
Sheriff Gus Bernhardt released a brief statement: “Mayor Wolfe is in critical condition and is in surgery at this time. The nature and cause of his injuries are under investigation. It has been a very tragic night for the people of Pine Deep.”
PROLOGUE
Diggin’ in the graveyard—finding all them secrets out I’m digging in the graveyard—I’ll be finding all your secrets out
—Oren Morse, “Midnight Graveyard Blues”
This is a cruel cruel cruel world You have to live in each and every day You can’t hardly trust your next-door neighbor Or they just might steal your life away
—Eddy “The Chief” Clearwater, “Messed Up World”
(1)
The Bone Man was as thin as a whisper; he was a scarecrow from a blighted field. He stood on the edge of the hospital roof, toes jutting out over the gutter, his trousers fluttering against the stick slimness of his legs. His coat flaps snapped vigorously but silently around his emaciated hips. The only sound the wind made as it whipped by him and through him was a faint plaintive whine as it caressed the silvery strings of the guitar slung behind his back.
Far below, the parking lot faded back from the glow of the emergency room doors, spreading out in a big half-circle that had been cut acres-deep into the surrounding sea of pines. Even this late there were dozens of cars down there, dusted with moonlight but asleep. All around the town there was a ring of black clouds that were invisible against the night, but above the Bone Man the stars flickered and glimmered by the thousand.
For three hours he had sat cross-legged on the roof, playing his songs, humming and sometimes singing, coaxing the sad blues out of the ghost of an old guitar that Charley Patton had once used to play “Mississippi Boweavil Blues” at a church picnic in Bentonia, Mississippi. Another time the Bone Man’s father, old Virgil Morse, had used that guitar to play backup on a couple of Sun Records sides by Mose Vinson. The guitar had history. It had life, even though it was no more real than he was. A ghost of a guitar in a dead man’s hands, playing music almost no one could hear.
He’d sat there and played and listened to the whispers and cries and moans from inside the hospital, hearing the beep of the machine that breathed for Connie Guthrie. Hearing the sewing-circle whisper of needles and thread as the doctors stitched Terry Wolfe’s skin, and the faint grinding sound as they set his bones. He heard the whimper of hopelessness from the throat of Jose Ramos as the doctors stood by his bed and explained to his mother that his back was broken, and then the scream as the enormity of that pronouncement drove a knife into his mother’s heart. He heard the dreadful terror as Dr. Saul Weinstock murmured, “Dear God,” over and over again as he knelt alone in the bathroom of his office, hands on either side of the toilet bowl, his face streaked with tears and his lips wet with vomit.
He heard all of these things while he played, and then he heard the hospital slowly fall quiet as drugs or shock or alcohol took each of them into their private pits of darkness. That’s when the Bone Man had stopped playing and rose to stand on the edge of the roof, staring across blacktop and car hoods and trees at the moon.
It was an ugly quarter moon, stained yellow-red like bruised flesh, and its sickle tip seemed to slash at the treetops. The sky above the trees was thick with agitated night birds that flapped and cawed, hectoring him like Romans at the circus.
(2)
“Where are you now?”
Jim Polk cupped his hand around his cell and pitched his voice to a whisper. “At the hospital, like you said. Back loading dock.”
“Anyone see you?”
“Jesus, Vic, you think I’m that stupid?”
Vic Wingate’s voice tightened a notch. “Did anyone
“No, okay? No one saw me.”
“You’re sure?”
Polk almost mouthed off again, but caught himself. A half beat later he said, “I’m sure.”
“Then open the door. We’re here.”
The hallway was still dark and empty. He’d already disabled the alarms and the video cameras, permanently this time per Vic’s instructions. He pocketed his cell and fished for his keys, his fingers shaking badly. His nerves were shot and getting worse every time Vic asked him to do something like this. There was no letup, always some other shit to do, always something that was tightening the noose around his neck. The McDonald’s fish in his
