“Okay,” Crow said, lowering his hands, “that lets me know you’re not ready for Golden Gloves.” Throwing the punch without power only tugged at his stitches. It didn’t really hurt, and he was glad about that. He’d had a good night’s sleep last night, curled up in Val’s arms, the both of them sleeping long and without dreams. Over breakfast Val had remarked on it.
“I feel almost human today.” Her black hair was glossy and damp from the shower and there was the first trace of a sparkle in her eyes, something he hadn’t seen in days. It had lifted Crow’s heart and made him feel better, too.
Now, scuffling around the backyard with Mike, Crow felt ever closer to his old self—though he still didn’t throw any punches with the arm Ruger had squeezed.
Mike, on the other hand, looked sheepish and ashamed, blossoms of red flaring in his cheeks as he continued to back away from Crow’s approach. Finally, raising his hands palms outward, Crow said, “What was Crow’s Rule Number One?”
The kid shrugged. He was still covered in bruises on every visible inch of his skin. By comparison he made Crow look uninjured and whole.
“Sorry, kid, that was my I-didn’t-hear-shit ear.”
“Never let the assholes win,” Mike snapped irritably.
“Damn right.” They were in the small yard behind Crow’s shop and apartment. The yard was walled in by other stores except in the back and had a fine view of the hills, the distant farms, and the long snaking line of A-32. “Come on now, let’s work on some moves.”
Mike flapped a hand. “It’s just that I hate that I have to learn this stuff.”
“Would you rather just be Vic’s punching bag forever?”
Mike gave him a nasty look. “Just get on with it.”
“Okay, lesson one is going to be about how to evade and parry. The best block is to not be there. You follow me?”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “Yeah, I do.”
(4)
Crow’s phone rang just after they were back in the store and he snatched it off the wall. “Crow’s Nest.”
“Crow? It’s Saul—are you alone?”
“I can talk. Mike’s with a customer. What’s up?”
“Crow, look, I don’t want to sound paranoid, but ever since the other night there have been some pretty strange things happening here in town.”
“You mean besides insane serial killers and body-snatchers?”
“I’m not joking around, Crow. I did the autopsies on—”
The bells above the door jangled and five people came in, laughing and chattering. Tourists. “More customers. Let me take care of them and call you right back.”
“No, look…I’ll talk to you tomorrow at the funeral. This will be better in person.”
“Um, okay. See you then.”
(5)
Clouds had come up suddenly from the southwest and in the course of half an hour the sky went from a hard clear blue to a nearly featureless gray that was beginning to swell to a threatening purple. Val Guthrie was deep in the cornfields on the east side of her property, her father’s big .45 tucked into the waistband of her jeans, snug against the small of her back, hidden by a red-checked thermal jacket. She was walking the fields with Diego, a short, barrel-chested East Texan who had worked for her father for almost twenty years, doing spot tests of the soil pH. It was still a clean 6.54, far above the range of any of the surrounding farms, whereas most of the other farms had shown pH drops well below 5.0 and even lower. Val’s soil remained solidly in the 6.0 to 7.0 range, even in the places where all that separated her fields from her neighbors was a wood-railed fence. Her closest neighbor, Charlie Kendall, had shown her the analysis of his samples and the levels of soil phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium, sulfur, magnesium, and calcium had all dropped, even when a sample was taken five inches from a healthy sample taken along Val’s property line. “I don’t get it,” Val said. “It doesn’t make any kind of sense. It’s too weird to be an accident of nature, and if there is something in our soil that’s making a difference, then it has to be something that was deliberately put here.”
“Like reverse ecoterrorism,” Diego said, trying for a joke.
“If it was something different in our soil it would
“Nope,” Diego agreed. After twenty years he still had that East Texas drawl. “I was talking to Spence the other day,” he said, referring to Todd Spencer, his counterpart on the Kendall farm, “and he was saying that there was not one single stalk that didn’t show signs of root worm. Not one. They’re going to have to burn the whole crop, and this is weird because as you know they’re growing that Mon 863, that insect-resistant corn from Canada. Shouldn’t be even a small percentage of root worm over there.”
“And we have no traces at all of them.” Val shivered in the freshening breeze. “That’s really weird, Dee.”
