“Um…yeah. Sure.”
Crow nodded and threw a light jab with his good arm, aiming four or five inches to the right of the kid’s face and stopping three inches short. Throwing the punch hurt, but Crow kept it off his face. Mike made a clumsy swipe at it that missed and jerked back so fast it looked like somebody had pulled him with a rope. Crow took a shuffle step in and looped a big, wide roundhouse right that had no chance at all of making contact. Mike squeezed his eyes shut and wrapped his arms around his eyes.
“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 show,” she said, shaking her head in frustration, “but it doesn’t.”
“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.”
“No joke,” Diego agreed. There was a rustle behind them and they turned to see the stalks snapping back over the passage of something that moved quickly through the rows. “Deer,” he said, shrugging it away. He went back to collecting soil samples, but Val continued to stare at the spot where they’d heard the rustle, frowning. Then she took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and let it out through he nose as if to cleanse herself of her jumpiness. Her cell phone rang, startling her.
“Hey, baby,” Crow said and the day seemed to brighten for her.
“Hey yourself. I was going to call you soon. I need an insanity break.”
“You mean a sanity—”
“You heard me.”
“Nice to be appreciated for one’s talents. Anyway, honey-chile, I just called to check in. Mike and I finished his first lesson in Kickass 101.”
“How’d he do?”
“Metza-metz. Started off by fighting me tooth and nail about even discussing it, let alone giving it a try, but he came around. Kid is seriously spooked, though. Vic Wingate has really done a number on him.”
“Uh-oh, I’m hearing that Captain Avenger tone in your voice,” she warned.
“Me? I wouldn’t lay a finger on him,” Crow said, then in a stage whisper added, “the slimy shit-eating bastard.”
“Tch-tch,” Val said, but in her heart she agreed with Crow. “Well, maybe one of these days karma will drop a transmission on him at the shop.”
“From your lips to Kali’s ears. On the upside, we did have a good session after he got into gear. Kid has some good reflexes. Really good, actually.”
“Honey…do you think you can teach him enough to do any good?”
Crow made a noncommittal noise. “Time will tell,” he said, and then changed tack. “So, how are you doing?”
“Okay, I guess. I’m out in the fields with Dee. Taking samples and such.” She sighed. “And this afternoon I’ll be setting up for the funeral tomorrow. God, this is so weird. I’m doing ordinary farm stuff one minute and the next I’m planning how to memorialize my dad.”
“I’m meeting that reporter out there at four. You want me to be there earlier?”
“No. I’ve got Diego and the guys.” She told him about the plans, finding a strange sort of calm in the mundane details.
“Well, if you need me there today, sweetie, I’m there. You sound pretty wired.”
“Thanks, but it’s just that I…I keep seeing him everywhere.”
“I understand, baby. Your dad’s spirit is all over that—”
“No,” she interrupted. “Not daddy…I keep seeing him everywhere.”
“Oh,” he said after a moment.
“No matter what I’m doing I always get the feeling he’s right there, watching me from around a corner or peeking through the blinds, or following me through the corn. I can’t seem to shake it. I mean…just now there was a deer walking through the corn and my first thought was him.”
“Val…this is all still pretty raw. It’s just been a week, it’s going to take some time.”
She made an ambiguous noise. Crow said, sounding startled, “Heck with the store. Let me tidy up a few things around here and then I’ll be over. Want me to pick up some Chinese?”
“That sounds good.”
“See you soon, my love.”
“Crow…?”
“Yeah, baby.”
“I really do love you with all my heart.”
“Me too, Val. See you soon.”
She punched the OFF button and snugged the phone back down into her jeans, waved good-bye to Diego, and strolled back toward the house. As if in reflection of her mood, the sky was a weary gray with a sadness of clouds drooping low over the distant trees and a sigh of a cold breeze. A few birds flew overhead but they were hungry and lonely birds, flying fast to find other places where warmth and hope still prospered. Far above the clouds an invisible plane flew from some distant somewhere to another place, whisking by over the grayness of Pine Deep, the intermittent drone of its engine sounding like the moan of some sleeping person dreaming of pain.
As she walked, she came to the spot where her father had died and stopped. There was no sign of it now except for tattered streamers of yellow police tape tied to the fence posts. She climbed onto the fence and sat there in the cold, her short hair snapping in the wind, her dark eyes filling with tears, her mouth tight with cold anger, trying to grasp the impossibility of it all. Her father had died there. Right there, on that tiny stretch of earth that looked no different than any other soil anywhere in the world, and yet it was there, right there, that he had bled to death alone in the rainy darkness on that terrible night last week. The thought that his blood was still trapped within the soil made her feel at once totally repulsed and yet at the same time oddly comforted. It was a stupid thought, she told herself, but somehow she felt as though it meant that something of her father’s spirit remained here, too, as if some trick of geomancy had allowed him to linger. With a certainty as if of ancient ritual Val knew that day after day, probably for the rest of her life, she would come out here and feel for her father’s spirit in the air and in the soil. The thought that such a spirit, such a person who had been filled with so much vitality, so much love and gentle strength could simply end was just too horrible, and it made her feel terribly mortal. If Henry Guthrie could be snuffed out with no more than the flex of a finger on a trigger, then her own life, Crow’s life, and the life of their baby were all equally transient.