Polk sucked on his cigarette and thought about the money that had bought him that evening’s pleasure. Vic’s money. Polk felt his insides twitch every time he thought about Vic and his money. In the past Polk had done a lot of things for Vic. Things that sometimes weren’t so bad, and sometimes made him sick to his stomach. Only once over those years had Polk ever tried to tell Vic that he wasn’t into it anymore. Only once, and then he had been out of work for four weeks because of the way Vic took the rebuff. Four weeks in which he pissed blood and tried not to breathe too deeply and had to eat only soft foods. He told Gus Bernhardt that he’d taken a bad tumble off his motorbike. No way Polk was ever going to tell Gus, or anyone else, that Vic had stomped him nearly unconscious and then stuffed a handful of dog shit in his mouth and held him at gunpoint until he’d swallowed it.
Lying there in bed, Polk thought back to that day, more than eighteen years ago, and the hand holding the cigarette began to shake.
He took three slow pulls on the cigarette to steady himself, and he blinked repeatedly until the tears of shame dried up. Eighteen years ago and it still felt the same. As Vic had stomped him, he had told Polk over and over again that he was getting off light. Polk believed him with a whole heart. Over the years, the little jobs for Vic had dwindled down to a trickle, just something here and there, usually for small change. But now he had a wad of bills so thick they wouldn’t even fit into his pants pocket.
What the fuck was Vic going to want him to do to earn that kind of scratch?
He had always been afraid that Vic would one day ask him to kill someone, and after that beating, Polk was not so sure that he wouldn’t do it. No devil in hell terrified Polk more than Vic Wingate, and no court or jail came close to intimidating him half as much.
It was a lot of money — a whole lot of money — and Vic always wanted every penny’s worth for his buck.
Please, God, Polk silently prayed. He coughed unexpectedly and sat up, his gut tightening as the spasm shook his whole body. He jammed a fist against his mouth to stifle the sound, and all Donna did was turn over and begin snoring. Polk felt a hot wetness on his hand and when he looked at it, he was confused and scared to see a splatter of dark droplets on his skin. It looked like tar, or like the black goo you find under compost heaps, but it smelled like…
He frowned, feeling sweat burst from his pores.
It smelled like blood.
Polk stared at it, absolutely unsure of what to do, say, or think next. He blinked a few times, and as he did so the light values in the room seemed to change. He angled his hand to let more light fall on the black goo, and suddenly it wasn’t black at all. That must have been the shadows cast by his own face as he bent down over it. No, this was clear, probably just spit, or…
He sniffed it again. A frown touched his mouth. He tasted it with his tongue, and his smile broadened. It wasn’t spit at all. It was brandy. Napoleon brandy. A short laugh bubbled from his throat as he licked up the brandy.
After a moment, Polk slowly lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, a contented smile on his face. When he had coughed, when he had seen the stain on his hand, not as brandy, but as some kind of black goo, the doubts and fears about what Vic was going to ask of him had vanished from his thoughts. Now all he thought about was the last few tasty drags of his cigarette and the sleeping girl next to him who was not going to be getting a full night’s sleep. Not with two hundred dollars to earn.
Iron Mike Sweeney was throwing up. With each spasm of his chest the broken rib exploded with agony, and fresh tears of pain sizzled in his eyes. He knelt by the side of the road, knees on the macadam, hands braced on the curb, head bowed, vomiting pints of a thick, black, viscous liquid into the gutter. It tasted hot and salty, like tears, or blood.
Mike had been halfway home from the hospital after his aborted attempt to visit Crow, and the ensuing lengthy third degree by that shrimpy little reporter, Mr. Newton. He was just crossing Mayfair Street when suddenly his stomach convulsed in such a powerful cramp that his knees had buckled and he’d slumped down over the handlebars of the War Machine and slowed to a stop hard against a curb. He stepped off the bike and let it fall into the street and then sagged against a parking meter, holding it with one hand and pressing his other hand to his stomach. His knees suddenly buckled and he sagged down to the pavement, sitting down onto the curb with a thump. The first spasm faded and for a moment his brain cleared of the greasy mist that had formed as soon as the sick wave of pain had hit, but then a second wave, bigger, darker, far more powerful slammed into him and he fell forward onto hands and knees and vomited into the street over the iron grill of a culvert. It was so sudden, and so unexpected, that it scared him, and when he saw what it was he was throwing up, the fear had blossomed into total terror.
He thought he was hemorrhaging, throwing up blood from some ruptured part of him. The thought that Vic had finally done it, finally beat him so bad that he was dying tumbled through his brain. The vomiting gradually stopped and he coughed and gagged and choked, eyes squeezed shut against the pain that twisted his guts and closed his throat. For almost two minutes he knelt there on the empty street, eyes still pressed shut, waiting for the spasms to start again. Gradually, very gradually, the awful tension in his stomach faded and went away. He could still feel the stricture in his throat and the searing pain of his rib, but his stomach no longer felt like a bubbling cauldron of sewage.
Slowly, afraid to look at the blood he’d puked out, he opened his eyes.
There was nothing in the gutter. Just a drop or two of spit glistening on the bars of the culvert grill. Nothing else.
Mike stared down, trying to understand. He had seen the blood, damn it, black as paint and as searing as raw whiskey. He had felt it as it flooded out of him. It had happened. Except — apparently, it hadn’t happened.
Mike Sweeney stared down at the gutter and felt a powerful wave of terror of some vast and unidentifiable kind sweep over him.
Officer Coralita Toombes and her temporary partner, Dixie MacVey, cruised along the winding stretch of A-32 under a haphazard scattering of stars overhead. The edges of the sky were black as a ring of cloud cover was moving in to cover the region again. The road shook itself out in front of them as they swept southeast toward the Pine Deep — Black Marsh border. By now it was a familiar circuit for Toombes and MacVey, one they’d been covering for nearly seven hours. They had a loop that started at the intersection of A-32 and Old Mill Road, dropped south as directly as the winding A-32 would allow, past the Guthrie farm, then down to the bridge that spanned the Delaware to Black Marsh in New Jersey, and there they would jag west on Peddler’s Trail, which looped past the rusty stretch of Swallow Hill Bridge and turned northeast again until it once more hit the Extension by Old Mill. The whole loop ate up an even thirty miles, though as a crow might fly it the trip could have been done in just over ten, but there wasn’t a straight road to be had anywhere in or around Pine Deep.
Toombes and MacVey drove in silence, partly from tiredness, partly from boredom, and partly because they couldn’t stand each other. From MacVey’s point of view, Toombes was a know-it-all big-city bitch cop who thought that she had seen it all, done it all, and had it all under control. MacVey saw Toombes as one of those cynical and dismissive types who had no time for small-town cops because they weren’t “real cops” and hadn’t tangled with “real criminals” and therefore didn’t rate much, if at all. MacVey was also clearly intimidated by Toombes for these very same reasons.