Dead Man's Song полностью

However, Mike was not thinking about his bruises, but about his new dream—the one with the wrecker. He was smart enough to understand that trauma can gouge a mark in you and leave part of itself there—Mike’s life was all about trauma—yet there was something more to this dream, and as he rode into town he tried to suss out what it was. Possibly it was the newness of the dream that made it so intense, and the fact that it was largely a memory of what had just happened. It could have been that, sure. Or, it could be something else. Mike had no idea what the “something else” might be. He didn’t believe in prophecy any more than he believed in guardian angels or a loving and protective God. So much of his life had argued too eloquently for the opposite of those concepts. Mike had no cosmology, no metaphysics. Yet there was something else.

He biked along the winding side streets toward Corn Hill, flicking his glance carefully down each side street just in case there was a gleaming wrecker waiting there, engine growling quietly.

(3)

Tow-Truck Eddie made the turn from Mariposa Lane onto Corn Hill and began climbing toward the business district. Already the streets were filling with tourists. The crowds were heavier than they had been last weekend, and definitely heavier than they had been this time last year. A good year for the town, except for the blight. Eddie did not consider the blight to be the work of an angry God because he had asked God that question and his Father had told him that the spread of disease and pestilence that was crippling the farms surrounding Pine Deep was the work of the Beast. Eddie could understand that. The Beast was a destroyer and God was a bringer of good things, and those thing included the rain and sun that brought forth the abundance of the harvest. The thought that the Beast had caused such blight in Pine Deep—his town—filled him with a cold rage. It was yet another reason to find the monster and destroy him before all of the farmers Eddie had grown up with were ruined. Destroying the Beast was the same as defending his town, which was the proper work for the Sword of God.

Suddenly he saw a figure in a hooded sweatshirt pedaling a bicycle not more than half a block away. Heading away from him. Was it the same bicycle? Eddie couldn’t tell, there were people and cars in the way. Tourists were jaywalking, slowing traffic, and Eddie ground his teeth as he saw the figure—was it the Beast?—round a corner and vanish from sight. Growling in fury, Eddie edged his wrecker forward and the sheer reality of its massive size made the tourists hustle out of the way until he finally reached the corner of Trencher Street and he made a hard left out of the flow and bustle.

But the street was empty. Wherever the Beast had gone to, he was nowhere in sight. Eddie cursed and punched the steering wheel with the callused heel of his hand.

Patience, whispered the voice in his mind. His Father’s soothing voice. Patience.

Eddie sat there until cars choked the street behind him and began honking, and when he was calm again, he took his foot off the gas and began rolling down the street, continuing the hunt. Patiently.

(4)

A ragged line of police officers, state troopers, and deputized hunters moved out of the tall corn and passed into the shadows of the great Pinelands State Forest. The trees stood rank after rank, mingling Scotch pine and Norway spruce, pitch pine and Table Mountain pine, and a dozen other varieties, spreading back into the game lands by the tens of thousands, packed so tightly together that men walking nearly shoulder to shoulder were almost constantly separated by the knobby trunks of the trees. The underbrush was heavy, tending toward stunting maple, gnarled scrub pines, and thorny bushes ringed by late-season poison ivy and poison sumac. The ground was uneven and seemed to close like a thousand hungry mouths around the ankles of the searchers. More than one man went down with a twisted ankle and had to limp back to the staging area on Dark Hollow Road. The trees were filled with crows and starlings and other black-eyed night birds who watched with ironic amusement as the men looked for what wasn’t there.

Hours hobbled by like cripples and at times the cool October sun seemed frozen into the hard surface of the sky. At the van of one long arm of the search, Detective Vince LaMastra stalked with hungry eyes, an acid stomach, and a fury that had nowhere to go but inside. He had his big shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm and he wanted to use it on that cop-killing bastard, but by three that afternoon he knew in his heart that the gun wasn’t going to be anything other than dead weight.