Ghost Road Blues
Page 54

The last to be moved was Crow.
His face was crisscrossed with gouges and cuts, dark with bruised flesh and as waxy as a mask. Terry felt tears burning in his eyes as he looked at his friend. He would, he thought, forever relive that dreadful moment when he had searched for the pulse and not found it, and heard Val scream. He wondered if maybe that had pushed her over the edge, and if so, then he was partly responsible for her present situation. How was he to know that he was feeling for the pulse in the wrong place? He was a politician, not a paramedic.
When the real medics had come over and dug their fingers into the carotid arteries and reported that Crow was still alive, Terry felt at once massively relieved and abominably stupid. He had pressed the wrong spot on Crow’s neck and had, of course, felt no pulse. He tried to tell Val, to explain and apologize for his mistake, but she had passed out. In shock, the medics told him. Comatose. Out of it for now, and better for it. Terry wondered if that was true. Knowing that Crow was still alive would probably do her a power of good.
Terry touched Crow’s face, feeling the iciness of the skin, the slickness of sweat.
“Jesus, Crow…” he murmured.
“Bullet graze on the left side,” paramedic had reported after a quick examination. “And another on the right of him. Looks like it glanced off his belt.”
“Is he going to die?” Terry had asked, dreading the sound of his own words.
The paramedic gave a philosophic shrug and said, “Maybe of old age. Two hits and neither of them much of anything. Damn lucky guy. But he has lost some blood and somebody kicked the living piss out of him. Nice gouge on his head, looks like it might have been a pipe or something. Now, sir, if you’ll just step back…”
Terry had let them get to work, and now here Crow was, all trussed up and ready to be carted away to the hospital and the surgeon.
“Okay, Jack, we’re ready for him,” called one of the medics from inside the ambulance. The medic that had first diagnosed Crow as being among the living came over and double-checked the buckles on the straps.
“Okay down here.”
The two medics squatted, grabbed either end of the stretcher, and as one lifted Crow with great care and practiced ease.
“Take good care of him,” Terry said in his mayor’s voice. The medics swapped a quick glance. They heard that sort of thing fifty times a week, as if they would take less care if someone didn’t tell them to do it in an officious voice.
“Ouch!” said someone in a loud, complaining voice.
Terry stared.
Crow opened his eyes, looked around, then closed them and sighed. “Oh, shit,” he said groggily. “Now what?”
Unbelieving, delighted, Terry crowded the stretcher, touching Crow’s arm. “You bloody idiot,” he said.
“I love you, too,” Crow mumbled hoarsely. He blinked a couple of times. “Christ, was I that drunk?”
“No, you numbskull, you were shot.”
Crow’s eyes snapped wide and his face hardened as everything came rushing back. “Val!” He tried to sit up but he hit a brick wall of pain and collapsed back down, aided by the hands of the paramedics.
“Shh, shh, she’s okay,” said Terry. “She’s in the other ambulance. They’re taking good care of her. She’ll be fine.”
Breathing out a heavy sigh, Crow said, “Oh, thank God.” Darkness welled up in Crow’s mind, and he could barely form words. After several false starts, he managed to say, “Terry…did I…do it?”
“Do what? Did you do what?”
“Did I…kill the rotten son of a bitch?”
Terry patted Crow’s arm. “From what one of Sergeant Ferro’s men said, you two were standing there shooting at each other, you fell down, and when the officer joined in and started to shoot, Ruger ran off.”
“Ruger?” Crow’s eyes widened. “That was really…him?”
“Yeah…are you impressed with yourself?”
“Damn, Terry, but he was one tough bastard. Almost…couldn’t take him…”
“You fought him?”
Crow licked his split lips and then quickly—but disjointedly—told Terry everything that had happened. “We beat the living shit out of each other…and then he shot me. Shot that poor girl, too. Rhoda.” He grabbed Terry’s sleeve. “She dead?”
“No, but she’s hurt pretty bad. They took her to the hospital.”
“You sure Val’s okay?”
“She’ll be fine,” Terry said, though he felt that he was lying.
Crow saw dark shapes materialize out of the confusion and there were two men standing there. One tall and black and middle-aged, the other taller, white, and younger. They had the cop look about them.
“Mr. Crow?” the black man said.
“What’s left of him.”
“Do you know what happened here tonight? We can’t seem to get a clear picture of the events of—”
“I just got here a few minutes ago, man. Drove up, saw some asshole attacking my girlfriend, and jumped right in. I…don’t know much of what else happened.”
“You didn’t go into the house?”
“No,” Crow said and then felt a hand clamp around his heart. “Val’s family—”
“Her brother and sister-in-law are on their way to the hospital. Nothing serious.”
Crow was relieved for a second, and then realized that the cop hadn’t said anything about Val’s father.
“What about Henry—Val’s dad?” His head was pounding as he tried to remember something Val had tried to tell him. “Jesus Christ! I think he’s out in the cornfield. I think he’s hurt!”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes! No…oh, Christ, I don’t know…send some fucking guys out there!”
The cops looked at him for a moment and then melted away. He heard them shouting orders.
Crow’s body felt like a single huge bruise and his head was swimming. As much as he was trying to keep it together he felt himself fading fast.
He still had Terry’s sleeve caught in his fist, and he gave it a shake. “Terry—”
Bending close, Terry said, “Yeah…?”
“Find…Henry!” And then the darkness wrapped itself completely around him and he passed out.
Terry leaned back and sighed in frustration and disgust. “Okay, fellas, take him away. When you get to the hospital, tell them that the township is picking up the tab for all this. Oh, and tell Dr. Weinstock that I want him to call me the moment—and I do mean the very moment—that Mr. Crow comes out of surgery.” He glared at the ambulance driver, looking every inch of his muscular six-four. “You boys got that?”
They nodded curtly.
“Good, now get a move on.”
The ambulance left in as much of a hurry as safety would allow, and Terry watched them go. Then he spun on his heel and called for Detective Sergeant Ferro. The detective was speaking in low, fast tones with LaMastra and looked up as Terry hurried over.
“How’s your friend?” Ferro asked.
“He passed out and they’re taking him in,” Terry said.
“He say anything more about what happened?”
“More or less. He and one of your bad guys went toe-to-toe. Crow says he beat the man in a fight, though from what he said and the way he looks, it was a close call.”
“Then it must have been Boyd who Jerry Head saw run off into the corn,” LaMastra said. “If your buddy had gone up against Ruger we’d be scraping him up with a spatula.”
Terry half smiled. “Maybe, and maybe not. Don’t underestimate Crow. He may be a little guy, but he’s just about as tough as they come.”
“Good fighter, is he?” asked LaMastra.
“Very. I could tell you stories—”
“Maybe later,” Ferro interrupted. “What else did he say?”
“Oh, he said that he shot the other man. He was surprised when I told him that Ruger—or whoever—had run off into the fields. He thinks the guy was hit four or five times.”
Ferro grunted. “Officer Head also fired at the suspect but isn’t sure if he hit him at all. He said he gave him a cursory look, and it appeared that the suspect fit the description of Karl Ruger.”
“Nah, had to have been Boyd,” LaMastra repeated, shaking his head.
“Either way,” Ferro said glumly, his face as lugubrious as an undertaker’s, “the man left a lot of wreckage and at the moment we’re no closer to catching him than we were an hour ago.”
“Mr. Crow must have only thought he’d hit him that many times,” offered LaMastra. “In the dark, in the rain, and having taken some hits himself, Mr. Crow wouldn’t have been able to really tell. And Jerry was firing from the porch…that’s what, seventy, eighty feet?”
“More likely he was wearing body armor of some kind,” Ferro said. “Anyone can get hold of it these days. The shots might had knocked the wind out of him, knocked him down—but he could have gotten up and run off.”
Reluctantly, Terry had to agree.
The three men looked at each other for a while and then looked away into the moonlit fields.
“That means both Boyd and Ruger are still out there,” Terry said softly. “And so is Henry Guthrie.”
Ferro sniffed and pointed his chin at the darkened corn. “We’re combing those fields now. If Mr. Guthrie—or anyone else—is out there, we’ll find him.”
They stood there in silence for a while as the cops and crime scene investigators and paramedics swarmed around them, and neither they nor all of the dozens of cops, techs, or EMTs saw the slim form of a man with pal gray skin, a dark suit, and a blues guitar slung over one shoulder standing by the edge of the cornfield. Every time the lightning flashed, the shadows it cast of the tall corn fell not on him, but through him.