The twisted length of A-32 was busy with tourist cars heading into town, but was empty in his direction. Crow’s cell phone began its hysterical chirping, a sound he thought sounded like R2D2 being rogered by Jiminy Cricket. He squirmed around as he tugged it out of his pants pocket and saw that it was just a text message. He punched the buttons to bring up the message, which was just two digits: 69. Crow smiled. One of Val’s saucy little jokes. Perhaps an incentive. He saved the message and stuffed the phone into his shirt pocket. He’d call Val as soon as he finished at the hayride, which was ten minutes from now if Coop was in the office, maybe half an hour if he had to take an ATV into the park to find him. An hour tops with getting the kids out of there and shutting the whole thing down.
He conjured an image of Val in his mind, and for dreamy moments he saw her superimposed over the unwinding road. Her lithe body draped in shadows, glistening with passionate sweat, good muscles rippling under a smooth, tawny hide as she lay back on the blanket in the scarecrow clearing. Crow drummed on the steering wheel as he recalled every delicious inch of her. Maybe she’d want to go for another nice late-night stroll through the cornfields, even though there was no moon and a storm coming.
Smiling and drumming on the steering wheel, Crow barreled down A-32 out of town, soaring up hills and swooping down the other sides, taking the curves and bends sometimes on four wheels, sometimes on two. Missy, for all her bulk, was as agile as a circus acrobat.
In a few miles he’d turn off the extension and head west along Old Mill Road to the hayride, and after that he could backtrack and head over to Val’s. That made him smile. He began singing very loudly with the music, which had cycled onto the Wolf’s jumping version of “I Ain’t Superstitious.” He was yowling out the lyrics in a powerful and rather unpleasant tenor when he nearly ran over the kid on the bicycle.
Even with the rib more or less set and holding in place, Mike’s side still hurt like hell. It wasn’t too bad when the road was flat, but not much of Pine Deep was flat. The long black ribbon of A-32 climbed, dipped, and curved through miles of low hills. Before tonight Mike had always enjoyed the undulating curves of the road, loving the burn in his muscles as he powered up the demanding slopes, but tonight he hated every inch of it. Pedaling in low gear helped a little to ease the pain, but sheer exhaustion was making him pant and panting made his ribs feel as if some little devil were jabbing at him with a red-hot spear. His progress slowed to a crawl. Time had become a paradox: when calculated in terms of how long it would take him to get home at the rate he was going, the night was racing past him; when he tried to climb each new hill every minute was about two weeks long. At his best guess he wouldn’t get home until eleven.
Still, he thought with false cheer, that meant Vic’s beating would be that much delayed. Cold comfort, he mused, knowing that the longer Vic had to wait the angrier he would get. And like the Incredible Hulk, the madder Vic got the harder he hit.
A few cars passed him, and each time he saw the glow of headlights he tensed…but the tow-truck did not return and after a while Mike didn’t even bother to stop when he heard an engine or the whine of tires on the blacktop.
Mike had given up on his futile attempt of not thinking about everything that had happened to him. It was a stupid thought anyway. How can you not think about someone trying to kill you? Or about a deer that had done the things that big white one had done? So, instead of denial he decided to apply logic to the matter. It gave him something to think about other than the pain in his ribs or Vic’s impending fury. Mike was smart, he was very well read for his age, and he knew the rudiments of deduction, and as he labored up another of the long hills he tried to apply what he’d learned from Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, from Spenser and Elvis Cole. He remembered Holmes’s axiom that once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth. The problem was that he had two inexplicable mysteries to unravel, and in neither case could he simply eliminate the impossible. The thing with the big white deer made no sense at all. He twisted that into all sorts of shapes in his mind and it just stayed as weird and impossible as it had been when it happened. A big deer had jumped out of the woods by the site of the car wreck and when Mike had tried to edge past it the deer had simply chased him off. There was no other way to look at that. The deer had frickin’ growled at him. Then it had run him off. Make something of that, Sherlock, he thought. Mike lived in Pine Deep. He’d seen a zillion deer, from little fawns to big bucks, seen them by ones and twos and seen them by the dozen, but never had he seen a pure white one, and never had he heard of one chasing anyone. It was always the other way around. Sure, he’d heard stories of a buck or doe chasing off a dog that was sniffing after a fawn…but this was completely different. This was a buck chasing a person off. From the scene of a car wreck. What the hell did that mean? His inner Sherlock Holmes was at a loss for words.
Then there was the tow-truck. That didn’t seem to make much sense either. After all, the driver of the tow-truck had tried to run him over, had swerved and gone out of his way to do so. Try as he might, Mike just could not see it any other way, but that was ridiculous. Why would someone do that? Not even Vic had ever tried to kill him and Vic really hated him.
Suddenly an icy hand closed around Mike’s heart and he stopped pedaling for a moment. He leaned over onto one foot, motionless by the side of the road, and stared into the darkness as he reviewed what he’d just thought. Vic really hated him. That was true enough. But how much did he hate him? Vic was a mechanic and he worked for Shanahan’s Auto. Shanahan probably owned a tow-truck. Mike swallowed a lump the size of a fist and turned back the way he’d come, looking at the stretch of road until it vanished into shadows behind him.
Had that been Vic in the tow-truck?
The late September wind blew cold across his face, chilling his sweat to ice. Eliminate the impossible and whatever remains must be the truth.
Could that have been Vic?
“Jesus Christ…” he said, and the wind snatched at his words, pulling them from his mouth like an Inquisitor pulling teeth. Terror welled up in him, and he wasn’t sure what scared him more: the thought that Vic might want him dead, or the fact that the concept didn’t really shock him. He turned to face the road ahead. Home lay at the end of that road. Home and a belting. Still, if Vic was the driver of that tow-truck, would that beating turn into something more? His stomach turned to greasy slush.
Mike licked his lips and got back on his bike, started to pedal slowly up the hill. His heart was hammering now and the sweat on his face turned to ice. The bike wobbled as the first wave of the shakes shuddered through him. Around him the comforting darkness — his longtime friend — seemed suddenly full of invisible threat. He looked at the rustling waves of corn that flanked the road for as far as the eye could see and had the sudden and irrational fear that they were watching him. The stalks swayed hypnotically in the breath of the storm, and when the lightning flashed overhead its white fire danced on the razor-edged leaves of each swaying stalk. He was surrounded by an army of shadowy creatures armed with knives and panic welled up in him. His legs pumped faster on the pedals and the War Machine gained speed up the hill.