Bad Moon Rising. Джонатан Мэйберри

from a blue-collar hick town into an upscale arts community. The Bone Man became an urban legend, the local bogeyman who was blamed for all of the killings of that Dark Harvest Autumn of 1976. The name of Ubel Griswold was forgotten.

      Just yesterday, while death was stalking Val and her family, Crow had gone down into Dark Hollow, the remotest spot in the whole borough, dragging Newton along with him—the two of them on a stupid quest to somehow try and prove Crow’s tale of thirty years ago. Down in the Hollow they’d found Griswold’s house, but they hadn’t found a werewolf or even a man. Maybe they’d found a ghost, even Crow wasn’t sure, but when they tried to enter the house they were driven back. First by the porch roof that collapsed and nearly crushed them—strange timing for a roof that had been sagging for three decades—and then from the rubble a swarm of bristling black roaches attacked them. Hundreds of thousands of them. Crow and the reporter had dropped everything and run. Heroics be damned. It was only the presence of patchy sunlight that had given them a chance to escape. The insects would not cross from shadow into light, and so Crow and Newton ran back through the woods and climbed the hill.

      Now, looking back on it with vision filtered through his rage, Crow realized that everything that had happened down in the Hollow must have been some kind of delaying tactic, keeping Crow out of play so that Val and her family would be vulnerable. It had worked, too. Crow got there way too late.

      So, it galled Crow that Val had been forced to do it alone, just as it galled him that he wasn’t the one to swoop down like Captain Avenger and save the day. Val had done that. Pregnant, injured, grief-torn Val. Not him, not Crow. Her.

      “You are a stupid day-late and a dollar-short chauvinist jackass,” he told himself. He burned to be able to step back one day and change this. Save Mark and Connie and the others if he could; but as guilty as it made him feel, those concerns were secondary to wanting to take that experience away from Val. It was beside the point, there were no villains left to kill. All the bad guys were dead. The show was over. All that was left for him to do was wait while the doctors and nurses did what they did; wait until Val was brought up here to her room…and even then it wouldn’t be Captain Avenger she’d need. Val would be grieving, and he would need to be her rock.

      Behind him, Newton, the dumpy little reporter, stirred in his sleep and shifted to a less uncomfortable position in the comfortless guest chair of what would be Val’s room when they finally brought her up from the ER.

      Crow looked at the clock. Three-thirty in the morning. What was taking the doctors so long? Was it a “no news is good news” deal? From his own memories of hospitals he didn’t think so. Val had been hit in the head by Ruger—first a pistol-whipping, then a punch that cracked her eye socket; then Boyd had hit her even harder. There was a danger, Crow knew, of her losing the sight in that eye.

      Would she lose the baby, too? The thought sent buckets of ice water sloshing down through Crow’s bowels.

      There was a discreet tap on the door and Crow leapt up, hope flaring in his chest that it was Val being brought in, but as soon as he saw the look on the face of the young doctor in the hall his heart crashed.

      “Mr. Crow…?”

      “What’s wrong? Is it Val? How is she, is something wrong?” He took a fistful of the doctor’s scrub shirt.

      “Mr. Crow, please,” the doctor said, lightly touching his wrist. “This isn’t about Ms. Guthrie. She’s still in the ER, and the last I heard is that her condition is listed as stable.”

      “Thank God—”

      “Dr. Weinstock told me to tell you about the other Ms. Guthrie…Mrs. Connie Guthrie. He said you’re more or less family? Next of kin?”

      “Close enough. I’m engaged to Val. Connie’s her sister-in-law.”

      The doctor looked sad. “Mr. Crow…I’m sorry to tell you this, but Mrs. Guthrie passed away.”

      “What?” He couldn’t process what the doctor just told him.

      “Her wounds were too severe, there was extensive damage to her airway and…” He faltered and shook his head. “We did everything we could. I’m so sorry.” He left very quietly.

      Crow had no memory of walking into the bathroom, but he suddenly found himself sitting on the floor between the toilet and the sink, dizzy and sick. He clamped his hands together, laced his fingers tightly over his knuckles, and bent his head, mumbling prayers to a God he’d long since come to doubt, or at best mistrust. He wanted to pray, tried to put it in words, but there had been too many bad nights and too many broken years since he last believed, and he found that he’d lost the knack of it. So all he did was squeeze his eyes shut and say the only words that he could muster, making the only argument that made any sense to him.

      “Take me if you want,” he pleaded, “but not Val. Not her, too. Not our baby. Do whatever you want to me, but save my family.” When he added, “Please!” it sounded like the word had been pulled out of his mouth with pliers.

      (2)

      Jim Polk was in charge of the police detail at the hospital. He was Sheriff Gus Bernhardt’s right-hand man, the department’s only sergeant, and getting what he wanted was easy. Gus was an idiot and even Gus knew it, just as Gus knew that if it wasn’t for Polk’s efficiency, energy, and attention to detail the whole department would be a total wreck. So, what Polk wanted, Polk got.

      Even Brad Maynard, head of hospital security, deferred to Polk, especially in light of the hospital’s appalling track record lately. First Ruger had broken into the hospital and disabled both main and backup generators so he could try and kill Crow and Val; then the very next day Boyd broke in and stole Ruger’s body from the morgue. It was an open secret that Maynard was going to have to face the hospital’s board and no one was putting hot money on his chances for keeping his job.

      All of this was Polk’s doing. Ordered by Vic, of course, but planned and executed by Polk. I should just request a revolving door for the morgue, he thought as he poured ten sugar packets into the cup of cafeteria coffee he’d sent one of the hospital guards to fetch for him.

      It was coming on 4:00 A.M. when his cell phone vibrated in his pocket. Polk didn’t even have to look at it to know who it was. He jerked his chin for the hospital guard to come over. “Duke, I’m gonna go catch a smoke. You stay here. Remember—no one talks to Val Guthrie unless I personally say it’s okay. No exceptions.”

      “What about Crow?”

      Polk gave him a Clint Eastwood squint. The one Clint uses when he’s trying to figure out how to explain to some total idiot the difference between shit and Shinola. Vic had given him that same look too damn many times. “Just do what you’re told, okay?”

      Polk turned on his heel the way he’d seen Clint, and Vic, do and strolled out of the ER and into the fire tower. He jogged up a flight and then down a flight to make sure no one else was around and then pulled out his cell and hit speed-dial. Vic answered on the first ring. “What the hell took you so long?”

      “I was with people.”

      “Gimme a status report on Mayor Wolfe. He going to make it?”

      The town’s mayor, Terry Wolfe, had attempted suicide by hurling himself out of his second-floor window. The drop was not far enough to kill him, but almost.

      “He’s a mess. Forty broken bones, couple of ’em compound. Shattered skull. Brain’s probably chopped liver. He’s in a coma right now. Guess we’re going to need a new mayor.”

      “So he’s definitely out of the picture for the moment.”

      “What about Val Guthrie? What shape did Boyd leave her in?”

      “Might go blind in one eye. They just ran a bunch of tests, but right now they got an OB-GYN in with her. Turns out she’s pregnant and they’re checking to see if she’s going to lose the baby.”

      Vic grunted. “Bun in the oven, huh? Let me think on that some, maybe it’s something