Dead Man's Song

First, his mind—still replaying everything that had happened that day—tripped over the buried memory of that bizarre thought he’d felt when he had been on Griswold’s porch, when he had touched the wood with his palm and felt the odd whispering tremble beneath his skin. A voice—maybe it was the voice of Griswold’s ghost, dead these thirty years, or maybe it was the voice of his own fears—hissed at him from the shadows.

She is going to die and there is nothing you can do to save her. Nothing!

Crow jerked upright in his seat and snapped his head around toward Val’s farm. At that moment he heard the gunshots. And the screams.

(5)

Boyd lunged at her and Val fired two more shots, catching him in the upper chest. It didn’t stop him, but the force of the two heavy-caliber bullets turned him while he was in mid-leap, spinning his mass so that he crashed beside her rather than on top of her. He landed with a hiss like a scalded cat and turned toward her, clawing at her with his white fingers, the black nails tearing at her sleeves and chest as she lay on her side, but she brought her feet up and kicked at him while trying to steady the gun with both hands.

“Val!”

Val and Boyd both turned as three men came pelting around the side of the barn. Diego was in the lead, with José Ramos and Tyrone Gibbs close behind. “We heard screams—” Diego was saying and then they took in the tableau. Connie writhing on the ground, her face and throat splashed with blood; Val on the ground with a pistol; and a crazy-looking man grabbing at her. All three men put it together at once—they had all seen the news stories; they’d lived through the aftermath of the murder of their boss and the savage killings of the two cops not eighty yards from where they now stood. They knew who this son of a bitch was, and in the space between one footfall and the next their faces changed from concern to fury.

“Get that son of a bitch!” Diego yelled, and the two younger men—a twenty-year-old heavy equipment mechanic with ropy muscles and a twenty-five-year-old farmhand who once played halfback for the Pinelands Scarecrows—rushed in with hate in their eyes. They were big men who had dealt with their own grief over Henry’s death, and loved Val like a sister, and they wanted a piece of this South Philly wiseguy white trash. Shoulder to shoulder they raced toward Boyd, who had stopped pawing at Val and was rising to meet them; and from ten feet away both younger men threw themselves at him, leaping high and low as if they had practiced the move a thousand times. José slammed his shoulder into Boyd’s thighs and Ty braced his forearms in front of him and took Boyd in the chest, and they crushed him back against the barn wall. Bones snapped, Boyd howled in rage and there was a huge muffled echo from inside the barn.

José clung to Boyd’s legs, trying to pull him down, but Ty landed on his feet with old football reflexes still in his muscles. He pressed Boyd back with one forearm and started hammering him with short overhand rights that pulped what was left of Boyd’s face, splintering his nose, cracking his sinuses, ripping skin along his eyebrows. The sound of his blows was like an ax hitting wet cordwood.

Boyd endured the hits and just shot out one hand to catch Ty’s throat, and with a jerk of his wrist tore the whole front of it away. There was a massive spray of blood that shot like a hose from Ty’s arteries, drenching Boyd, splattering the wall, splashing Val’s face as she struggled to her feet. Ty tottered back, clawing at a gaping red nothing of a throat; his eyes went wide with the impossibility of what was happening, awareness sinking in even as his mind went red and then black. He fell backward, blood geysering up for a second before settling down to a dribble as shock shut down his heart.

“¡Dios mío!” Diego cried, skidding to a stop, his own fist raised for a punch, unable to comprehend what he had just witnessed.

Boyd reached down and grabbed José by the hair and jerked his head up and back, and there was a sound like a rake-handle breaking. The young man flopped to the ground, his chest and shoulders jerking, his feet kicking spasmodically.

Screaming in horror, Val fired two more shots, catching Boyd in the side and staggering him away from where José lay. The young man was staring upward, eyes wide and bright, feeling nothing at all below his neckline but a fiery emptiness as if he had been separated from all of his nerve endings.