“I’m the only guy around. All the local blues are busy being actual cops for a change. Terry needed a gofer who didn’t have his head up his ass.”
“Again I ask, why you?”
“Oh, we’re just a laugh riot, aren’t we, Miss Guthrie?”
There was another silence, briefer, less bitter. “Okay, okay,” Val said softly, “but please be careful for a change?”
“Me? Careful? Hey, careful is my middle name.”
“I’m serious, Crow.”
He sobered. “Okay, okay, baby, I promise. No screwing around, and no heroics. And why? ’Cause there won’t be any need for heroics. Just there and back, lickety-split.”
“Good.”
“Okay.”
“Then you’ll come over here?”
“For leftovers?”
“No one has ever called me ‘leftovers,’ pal.”
“I was thinking of my belly, woman.”
“I was thinking of something just south of there.”
“Ah,” he said. “I see. Well then, I guess I had better get my ass in gear. Sooner I get those kids out of there—”
“…The sooner you get to come over here and taste my goodies.”
“Gad, woman, you are in a bold and licentious mood this evening!”
“Call it an incentive program to make sure you get here as safe and as soon as possible.”
“Whoosh. If you count to three and turn around I’ll probably be already there.”
She called him a nitwit and hung up on him. He looked at the phone for a moment, leaned over and lightly banged his head on the wall a couple of times, then slowly set the receiver down.
“Yes, well,” he said aloud as if to counter a return of his desire to stall rather than do what Terry wanted, “let us get a move on, then.”
He went into his bedroom, jerked open the closet door, and fished around on the top shelf until he found a heavy object wrapped in a towel. This he carried over to the bed and carefully unrolled it. Inside the towel was a second cloth smelling faintly of gun oil, and inside this was a Beretta 92F 9mm automatic pistol and several clips. Crow sat down on the side of the bed for a few moments, holding the gun in his right hand, turning it over, weighing it, considering it. He hadn’t worn the gun since he’d quit the department, and even though he’d gotten off the sauce long before he’d turned in his badge, just the sight of the pistol was a link to unhappier times. His drinking had been so bad that Val had broken up with him for two years and wouldn’t start dating him again until after he’d been well into his first year of sobriety. Crow wasn’t one to take a lot of pride in being sober — instead he remembered what it felt like to be a pathetic figure in the eyes of the town, and in Val’s eyes. He never wanted to let her down again, not in any way big or small, no matter how much he really wanted a drink.
Sighing, he hefted the gun and worked the slide, making sure the breech was clear. He located his box of shells in the closet and methodically loaded the clip. He never kept the clips loaded as the constant stress on the clip’s springs could fatigue the metal, and it had been a long time since he’d fired the thing. He slapped the clip into the grip and double-checked to make sure the safety was on.
“Yippee-yi-yo,” he said out loud as he stood and jammed the pistol into his waistband, then danced a little jig as the cold steel burned his skin like a block of ice. “Yikes!”
He pulled off his shirt, put on a T-shirt with an R. Crumb painting of Son House on it and tucked it in, then put the gun back into the waistband of his pants and pulled his flannel shirt over it.
At the door he paused and glanced at the three cats that were now performing their post-dinner ablutions, licking their paws and using them to wash their faces.
“Don’t stay up too late…and no more cable porn.” He wagged a finger.
Pinetop was the only one who looked at him, and his expression was pitying. Crow pulled the door closed and locked it.
Terry hurried up Corn Hill toward the chief’s office, which shared the first floor of the township building with the county court. As he walked briskly through each patch of brightness his shadow seemed to lunge and pounce, springing with lupine speed at his own heels and then vanishing as he moved into a different alignment of light and reflection.
Cars swept up and down the hill, gleaming with polished chrome and tinted glass, complicated antennae sprouting expensively as the cars braked and swept along the immaculate street. Terry glanced at a few of them, once or twice giving the driver a curt wave and nodding to others. He was usually expansive, ready to stop and talk, to shake hands and swap familiar jokes and discuss the day’s business, doing his mayor shtick with élan and a natural affability, but lately his good mood had begun to slip and any trace of good humor seen on his face was put there by effort and held in place by sheer will.
He felt as though the walls of his life were starting to crack and he was terrified of what would pour through once the cracks split wide enough. His depression and stress had begun at the end of summer, when the first traces of the crop blight had turned the summer wheat into rancid weeds that had to be burned. That hadn’t been too bad because wheat was not the town’s staple crop, and for a week or so everyone breathed sighs of relief when the corn crop had looked pretty healthy. Then the blight struck nine corn farms in two days, and since then more than half of the town’s corn crop was infected. The pumpkins were next to go, and they were hit even harder. Cabbages, apples, and berries, too.
That’s about when the dreams started.
Terry had always been prone to nightmares — ever since age ten, when he’d been in a coma for weeks following the death of his sister — but these dreams were new and they were maddeningly persistent. They took two forms, though there was one theme that overlapped them both. In the first set of dreams he was wandering through Pine Deep as it burned — moving past heaps of dead bodies, hearing explosions rip the night apart. Everywhere there was death and pain. Everyone he knew and loved lay strewn about, their throats savaged and bloody, their dead eyes staring accusingly at him, and as he staggered along he would occasionally catch glimpses of his own reflection in cracked store windows. The reflections always showed him not as himself — but as something twisted and bestial. When his dreaming self would try and look closer, as the image became clearer, Terry would come yelping out of the dream, sweating and panting and utterly terrified.
The second type of dream — and by far the most persistent — involved Terry lying in bed next to Sarah and feeling his body begin to change, to reshape, into something horrifying, but horrifying in a way that was not clear to Terry, and no matter how hard he tried he just couldn’t get any sense of what the dreams meant.
Sometimes he had the dreams two or three times a night, and he was feeling the drain on his system. He had told his psychiatrist about them, but the doctor had passed them off as stress-dreams inspired by the local ambience of spookiness and exacerbated by the growing financial troubles of the farmers. The psychiatrist also told Terry that, as mayor, he was taking on too much responsibility for things over which he had no control. Added to it were the constant demands on him by the business owners as the town geared up for its annual Halloween celebration, the biggest event in the year for Pine Deep. Terry was averaging fourteen-hour days at work, and cruising on about four or five good hours of sleep a night. Terry had listened to what the doctor had to say, and all the advice to find some way of calming down — meditation, yoga, anything — nodded his understanding, and then held his hand out for his prescriptions: antipsychotics and antidepressants and antiaxiomatics. The three staples of his current diet.