“Oh yeah,” D said. “I always wanted to do this. Brace yourselves.”
About five car lengths behind the van, he swung out to the left, ready to slam their left rear with the right nose of the Hummer. Crowe held tight to his seat.
Right about then, their plans took a slightly unexpected turn.
From the corner of his eye, Crowe saw a flash of steel through the trees off to the right, heard the deafening roar of a horn, and an enormous eighteen-wheeler carrying a full rig roared out of a hidden road and crashed full-speed into the side of the transport van.
D slammed on the brakes, slid out of control off the road.
Chester’s head smashed against his window and he dropped behind the seat, out of Crowe’s line of sight.
They were spinning, but Crowe was peripherally aware of the terrible screech of shattered glass and metal and wood as the eighteen-wheeler squashed the transport van against the line of trees like a bug.
And then they were hitting the trees themselves, only feet away. The airbags deployed, burying D and Chester, but the only cushioning for Crowe was the headrest in front of him. His head slammed against it and he dropped his tranq gun and everything went fuzzy and red.
For what seemed like a long time, nothing happened. He could only hear a kind of dim ringing in his ears, and couldn’t get his head around what had just happened. An accident? Where we in an accident? And then, A semi… a fucking semi-truck just came out of nowhere...
Chester was saying, “What the fuck? What the fuck?” over and over again, weakly, but he sounded far away. D-Lux groaned, his huge fingers groping at the air in front of him.
Crowe wiped blood away from his eyes with the back of his hand and pulled himself up from where he’d fallen on the floorboards. “Chester,” he said. “You good?”
“What the fuck?” he answered. He was good.
“D?”
D turned his head to look at him, and his eyes were glazed. Crowe said again, “D? You good, man?”
He nodded, and Crowe became aware then of noise outside the Hummer, voices raised, people yelling, and a flurry of activity.
At the same time he heard the crack of a powerful rifle shot, the front window of their vehicle shattered, and D’s head exploded all over him.
Crowe dropped behind the seat, his hand instinctively going to the .38 in his pocket. Chester screamed something unintelligible and war-like, and before Crowe knew it Chester had bolted out of the Hummer and was firing like mad at someone. Crowe heard a volley of gunfire matching him.
Chester was providing cover. Crowe was sure that wasn’t his intention, but that’s what the jack-ass was doing. Crowe peeked over the headrest.
He counted seven of them.
One, a guy wearing a dirty yellow parka and snow boots, was firing a sawed-off shotgun at Chester, who was busy diving behind the tail end of the semi-truck.
There was a younger man dressed all in black, with a long trench coat and long, unkempt black hair. He too, was shooting at Chester, with a long-barreled revolver.
There was a muscular guy wearing a white tee-shirt and jeans a la James Dean. There was another, older guy with a red cowboy hat propped on his head. Another in a rusty metal mask. And two more in very ugly business suits right out of the mid-70’s.
And Crowe found himself mimicking Chester, at least in his head.
What the fuck?
Five of them had guns, and were firing at Chester. From his angle, Crowe could see him crouched behind the semi, frantically reloading. He looked pretty panicked. Understandably.
The two businessmen didn’t have guns. One had a long wicked-looking knife, and the other a machete that was already stained with blood. They were using them on the Sheriff’s deputies. Three of them were already dead, sprawled out along the side of the road like dolls that had been ripped apart by mad dogs.
Crowe looked just in time to see the rear door of the transport van pop open and the last of the deputies come rushing out, screaming and firing a shotgun. The businessman with the machete was right on top of him. With a face as placid as a spring day, he sliced off half the cop’s hand, and the shotgun went spinning away with most of his fingers. The other businessman—his partner, Crowe assumed—flicked his blade and instantly the lower half of the cop’s face was gone in a wash of blood.
Crowe saw movement inside the transport van. Peter Murke.
Chester had reloaded and was firing around the corner of the semi. “Crowe!” he screamed. “Mother of fuck, Crowe, help me!”
Crowe kicked open the door facing away from the road and tumbled out of the Hummer. Instantly, some of the shooting focused on him. Bullets pounded into the vehicle and the trees above his head, showering him with wood chips. He fired blind over the hood of the Hummer, hoping to get lucky. No one screamed out any death throes.
The rear of the transport vehicle was visible from where he crouched. The downside: they could see him as well as he could see them. The two businessmen were looking at him curiously, and between them the rough-looking fish-faced Murke was stepping down out of the van.
Crowe raised his gun and fired three times before he had a good bead and his closest shot ricocheted off the bumper of the van. Murke and the machete businessman flinched, but the one with the long knife only smiled and very casually flipped his blade at him.
It thunked into a tree, less than two inches from Crowe’s head.
“Fuck!” Crowe scrambled out of the guy’s line of sight, fumbling in his pocket for one of the speed re-loaders.
From the other side of the Hummer, bullets pounded into metal, and Chester was still screaming for help. Crowe reloaded his revolver as quickly as he could, but he knew he’d never be able to do it before the freaks had moved in on him.
A sudden intense pain in his left shoulder made him nearly drop the gun, and he looked to see a throwing knife sticking out of him. He gazed up in mild shock at the businessman. He’d crept up while Crowe was preoccupied, and was now smiling down at him from less than six feet away. Already, he had another knife in his hand and was getting ready to throw it.
Crowe lurched to his feet and bullets whined around him. The knife-wielding businessman threw his blade, and it caught Crowe in the right shoulder blade as he was turning to get away.
He stumbled forward, right into the other businessman, the one with the machete.
He pushed Crowe back with one hand, swung his machete at him with the other. Crowe felt the blade slice across his face and everything went like a kaleidoscope, different colors, spinning crazily.
Crowe was in the middle of the road, about to fall, firing at something he couldn’t see. He could hear bullets pounding the blacktop, and then he could hear his own revolver clicking empty. In his peripheral vision, he saw Chester, laying face-up but not moving.
A bullet in Crowe’s right arm then, like a hot lance, and he fell, fell far, far down, to the icy blacktop.
And there had been no time, no time at all, to even wonder, except in the vaguest way, who these people were or what the hell was going on. It all happened too fast. Seven killers, a semi-truck, four dead Sheriff’s Deputies.
And three hapless crooks, down before they knew what hit them.
After that, the sound of another car arriving, and of Murke and the freaks escaping.
His new overcoat wasn’t doing such a good job keeping out the chill from the blacktop. He sprawled face-down, tasting the copper tang of blood, but didn’t feel much pain because the cold was seeping into his bones and everything was numb. Particularly, he couldn’t feel his right arm. He didn’t want to turn his head and look. What if the damn arm was gone completely? That would’ve been too goddamn depressing to even think about.
He gave his best effort toward lifting his head, but didn’t have any luck. The road scraped his jaw and fresh warmth trickled down his temple. But by casting his eyes up as far as they would go, he could see the tail end of the Sheriff’s Department transport van. The rear doors
were thrown open, and one of the cops half-hung out of it. His hand dangled over the road. Three of his fingers were gone, from when he’d raised his hand to ward off the machete blow.
Crowe couldn’t hear anything except his own heart pounding against the blacktop.
That was when the Ghost Cat came out of nowhere. It materialized before him, flickering like an ancient piece of film, black and white and ravaged by time.
Black and sleek, with the white cross on its forehead, like a Pentecostal. It meowed, but the sound of it seemed far away. It wandered around amidst the spent bullet casings and blood, sniffing, searching.
“Cat,” Crowe said, for no good reason.
It looked at him with curious gray eyes, meowed again. He couldn’t hear it now. It sat on the cold road, licked irritably at its hind-quarters, and looked at him one more time.
Then it disappeared. It just evaporated, like steam off the blacktop.
“No,” Crowe said. “Come back.”
He rolled his eyes back to a more comfortable position and saw Chester, about six or seven feet away. He was on his back, near the side of the road. He didn’t look so good, but as Crowe watched him he saw his chest moving up and down—very slowly, almost imperceptibly, but moving.
The sonofabitch was alive.
Not far from his head, metal glinted. Crowe focused on it. It was a gun, a revolver. Not his, he had no idea where his was, and not Chester’s or D-Lux’s. One of the cops, maybe. He grasped at it with his left hand. His fingers barely reached the barrel, but he managed to snag it and painstakingly drag it toward him.
When it was close enough, he grabbed the grip. It was cold in his palm.
“Hah,” he said to himself.
He extended his arm in Chester’s direction, aimed the gun at the back of Chester’s head, pulled the trigger.
The hammer slammed on an empty chamber.
“Sonofabitch…” he said. “Sonofabitch gun…”
He tried two or three more times, just for the hell of it, but no-go. He put the goddamn useless gun down next and closed his eyes. Death. Ghost Cat means death. I dreamed about it. I dreamed about the Ghost Cat.
That’s when the ice started coming down.
He heard tires squealing as their back-up arrived, someone saying, “Jesus Christ, what the fuck!” and he thought about the lesson he should’ve known by now, the adage he’d had to learn the hard way, seven years ago: That’s what you get, fella, for going into something not knowing.
That was all.
Our defining tragedy, Crowe once heard a melodramatic news anchor call it, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. What the assassination of JFK was to a previous generation, or the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or any number of horrible things you can think of. Crowe remembered it very well, because at the time he was beating a man to death in a seedy hotel room off Elvis Presley Boulevard, in Whitehaven.
The little 13-inch TV was on the whole time, but he didn’t notice it because he was preoccupied. He was pulling Leon Berry up off the floor for the third time, getting annoyed because Leon kept laughing, even with a mouth full of broken teeth. “Not the time for chuckles,” Crowe said, and slapped him backhand across his jaw.
Leon grunted, blood spilling down his chin onto his bare chest, and laughed again and mumbled, “You gotta… you gotta do better than that…”
It took a great deal to get Crowe truly angry, but little Leon Berry was pulling it off. Crowe had come there to beat a little sense into him. He was into the Old Man for almost five grand, betting more than he could afford on a series of bare knuckle brawls over the summer, down near the state line. He’d ignored the Old Man’s calls, and eventually dropped out of sight, and Crowe had been the one tagged to track him down and make him see the error of his ways.
Finding him had been easy. Crowe knocked on his hotel room door, heard him fumbling around in there in sudden panic, and Crowe kicked open the flimsy lock with the heel of his shoe. Leon had been standing by the bathroom door, reaching with one long-fingered hand for a razor blade on the sink. When he saw Crowe, he went still.
Crowe grinned. “Leon. You don’t call. You don’t write. We worry.”
Leon said, “There ain’t nothing you can do to me.”
“Well,” Crowe said, closing the door behind him. “Why don’t we just put that theory to the test.”
Leon was wrong. Crowe did plenty to him. Only it didn’t do any good.
This was the sort of thing that should’ve been par for the course. Just another day in the life. But instead, it turned out to be the day that changed everything. Leon Berry was no ordinary squelcher. And this was no ordinary morning.
The TV was on, and from the corner of his eye, Crowe saw a shot of the Twin Towers in New York, saw a newscaster looking grim, his mouth moving. Leon had turned the volume down.
Crowe didn’t think anything about it. He had work to do.
He didn’t know that Leon was one of those rare fellas who are practically impervious to pain. He didn’t know the cops wanted Leon on a felony charge. He didn’t know they were staking him out, in the very next room. He didn’t know terrorists were throwing airplanes at the World Trade Center.
Didn’t know, didn’t know, didn’t know. That’s what you get for going into something not knowing.
He wound up doing a lot more damage to Leon than he’d intended, because Leon wouldn’t stop laughing and carrying on. Holding him up by the collar of his dirty tee-shirt, Crowe smashed his fist into his nose, and Leon only grunted and kept laughing. Crowe said, “Leon. I’m getting bored with this. I don’t wanna keep hitting you. Do us both a favor, and stop laughing.”
“I can’t… I can’t help it,” he choked. “It’s not… it’s not my fault…”
And went into another bout of hysterical cackling.
Later, he would read about people like Leon, people who have some faulty wiring upstairs, messing with their pain receptors. It wasn’t a mental illness. It was a neurological thing.
Crowe found it amazingly frustrating.
So he kept pounding Leon and Leon kept laughing and Crowe kept getting more and more angry. His knuckles were raw by then, Leon was missing several teeth, and his eyes shined out of the blood-red mask his face had become. Finally, Crowe saw his eyes shift over to the TV, and something like horror finally came into them.
That tore it. Crowe couldn’t get the reaction he needed, but something on the goddamn television had affected him. Furious, Crowe hit him one last time, square in the left temple, and Leon went limp, like a hippie being arrested at a protest. Crowe let him drop, and he slumped lifeless to the floor.
He’d killed him. HE could tell that much without checking his pulse. You do this sort of work as long as he had, you just know.
“Sonofabitch,” he said. “Leon, you stupid little bastard.”
He glanced at the TV to see what exactly had inspired the dread he’d failed to create, just in time to see what must have been the fourth or fifth replay of the footage they would wind up playing all week. The World Trade Center was smoking, and the second airliner was just crashing into one of the towers. And the whole goddamn thing collapsed.
“Sonofabitch,” Crowe said again.
The cops burst through the door then, guns waving, screaming, “On the floor, now! Get the fuck down on the goddamn floor!” and they were all over him, throwing him to the dirty carpet, yanking his arms behind his back, cuffing him. They didn’t pass up the opportunity to kick him in the head a couple of times, being the pragmatic fellas they were.
“Sonofabitch,” Crowe said again, craning his neck to see the television. “Are you boys seeing this?”
“Shut up!” one of them said, and punctuated the sentiment with another kick to his skull.
They’d heard the whole thing between him and Leon, listening from the next room with the device they’d planted under Leon’s bed. How long they must have agonized, surprised by the unexpected arrival of one of the Old Man’s
strong-arms, trying to decide if they should risk their operation by busting in and saving the day. By the time they finally decided, it was too late to save their suspect. Crowe’s only consolation was they didn’t know any more about the World Trade Center than he did.
He was charged with second-degree murder, given a ten-year sentence, and was in the State Penitentiary by late December.
The Old Man didn’t do a goddamn thing.
Crowe tried to reach him, naturally. His obligatory phone call was directly to his office. The Old Man didn’t take the call. He didn’t send a lawyer. The bastard had washed his hands of Crowe completely. And later on, of course, he’d die of heart failure and Vitower would take over and send the stupid punk to try to kill him.
They gave him a state-appointed attorney who went through the motions and shrugged philosophically when they sentenced him. “Good luck,” he said when they escorted Crowe in cuffs out of the courtroom. “Be good. You’ll never do the whole ten, so don’t worry.”
He was right, Crowe didn’t do the whole ten. He would’ve done five, except for the killing in prison, which got him an extra two, and he was out after seven years without even a parole hearing.
Seven years, ten years, a hundred years. It didn’t matter. It didn’t take near that long for him to know what he would do when he got out.
Dr. Maggie lost her medical license fifteen years earlier for selling prescriptions to junkies. So Crowe had to laugh when she said, “In my professional opinion, Crowe, you should stay in bed for at least another three days.”
His laugh didn’t endear him to her. She glared from behind her John Lennon frames and tapped a pen against her large but firm thigh.
“Three days,” he said. “Right. Doctor’s orders.”
“It’s not as if you have anywhere to be, is it?”
Now she was just getting nasty. He grinned and let her push him back down against the pillows.
From what everyone had been telling him, they were in a large, frame farmhouse north of Memphis. He didn’t really know, as he hadn’t been out of bed in two days. He had a window he could peer out if he sat up, but the view was limited; the branches of a heavy magnolia tree, glimpses of gray sky beyond it. They could have been anywhere, so he had to take their word for it.
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