He sniffed it again. A frown touched his mouth. He tasted it with his tongue, and his smile broadened. It wasn’t spit at all. It was brandy. Napoleon brandy. A short laugh bubbled from his throat as he licked up the brandy.

After a moment, Polk slowly lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, a contented smile on his face. When he had coughed, when he had seen the stain on his hand, not as brandy, but as some kind of black goo, the doubts and fears about what Vic was going to ask of him had vanished from his thoughts. Now all he thought about was the last few tasty drags of his cigarette and the sleeping girl next to him who was not going to be getting a full night’s sleep. Not with two hundred dollars to earn.

4

Iron Mike Sweeney was throwing up. With each spasm of his chest the broken rib exploded with agony, and fresh tears of pain sizzled in his eyes. He knelt by the side of the road, knees on the macadam, hands braced on the curb, head bowed, vomiting pints of a thick, black, viscous liquid into the gutter. It tasted hot and salty, like tears, or blood.

Mike had been halfway home from the hospital after his aborted attempt to visit Crow, and the ensuing lengthy third degree by that shrimpy little reporter, Mr. Newton. He was just crossing Mayfair Street when suddenly his stomach convulsed in such a powerful cramp that his knees had buckled and he’d slumped down over the handlebars of the War Machine and slowed to a stop hard against a curb. He stepped off the bike and let it fall into the street and then sagged against a parking meter, holding it with one hand and pressing his other hand to his stomach. His knees suddenly buckled and he sagged down to the pavement, sitting down onto the curb with a thump. The first spasm faded and for a moment his brain cleared of the greasy mist that had formed as soon as the sick wave of pain had hit, but then a second wave, bigger, darker, far more powerful slammed into him and he fell forward onto hands and knees and vomited into the street over the iron grill of a culvert. It was so sudden, and so unexpected, that it scared him, and when he saw what it was he was throwing up, the fear had blossomed into total terror.

He thought he was hemorrhaging, throwing up blood from some ruptured part of him. The thought that Vic had finally done it, finally beat him so bad that he was dying tumbled through his brain. The vomiting gradually stopped and he coughed and gagged and choked, eyes squeezed shut against the pain that twisted his guts and closed his throat. For almost two minutes he knelt there on the empty street, eyes still pressed shut, waiting for the spasms to start again. Gradually, very gradually, the awful tension in his stomach faded and went away. He could still feel the stricture in his throat and the searing pain of his rib, but his stomach no longer felt like a bubbling cauldron of sewage.

Slowly, afraid to look at the blood he’d puked out, he opened his eyes.

There was nothing in the gutter. Just a drop or two of spit glistening on the bars of the culvert grill. Nothing else.

Mike stared down, trying to understand. He had seen the blood, damn it, black as paint and as searing as raw whiskey. He had felt it as it flooded out of him. It had happened. Except—apparently, it hadn’t happened.

Mike Sweeney stared down at the gutter and felt a powerful wave of terror of some vast and unidentifiable kind sweep over him.

5

Officer Coralita Toombes and her temporary partner, Dixie MacVey, cruised along the winding stretch of A-32 under a haphazard scattering of stars overhead. The edges of the sky were black as a ring of cloud cover was moving in to cover the region again. The road shook itself out in front of them as they swept southeast toward the Pine Deep–Black Marsh border. By now it was a familiar circuit for Toombes and MacVey, one they’d been covering for nearly seven hours. They had a loop that started at the intersection of A-32 and Old Mill Road, dropped south as directly as the winding A-32 would allow, past the Guthrie farm, then down to the bridge that spanned the Delaware to Black Marsh in New Jersey, and there they would jag west on Peddler’s Trail, which looped past the rusty stretch of Swallow Hill Bridge and turned northeast again until it once more hit the Extension by Old Mill. The whole loop ate up an even thirty miles, though as a crow might fly it the trip could have been done in just over ten, but there wasn’t a straight road to be had anywhere in or around Pine Deep.

Toombes and MacVey drove in silence, partly from tiredness, partly from boredom, and partly because they couldn’t stand each other. From MacVey’s point of view, Toombes was a know-​it-​all big-​city bitch cop who thought that she had seen it all, done it all, and had it all under control. MacVey saw Toombes as one of those cynical and dismissive types who had no time for small-​town cops because they weren’t “real cops” and hadn’t tangled with “real criminals” and therefore didn’t rate much, if at all. MacVey was also clearly intimidated by Toombes for these very same reasons.

As Toombes saw it, MacVey was just another one of those NRA types who collected big guns because they were disappointed by the size of their own dicks, and had wet dreams about real honest-​to-​gosh shoot-​outs with real honest-​to-​gosh criminals. The kind of small-​town rube (though Toombes had to admit that there were plenty of them in the city, too) that had a yard-​high stack of Soldier of Fortune and American Handgunner magazines next to his bed, watched every episode of COPS, and could recite the specs and stats of every high-​caliber gun made since 1950. Toombes, in short, thought MacVey was an adolescent ass wearing a cop’s disguise, and having him as a partner made her miss Jerry Head, her own partner from back in the city, and it also made her uneasy, because one thing a cop needs for peace of mind is the knowledge that her backup is a professional and not likely to shoot her instead of the bad guy. Toombes figured that if push ever really came to shove, MacVey would probably shoot his own balls off while trying to remember how to get that monster Blackhawk .44 out its fancy breakaway holster.

As partnerships went, it was something less than a roaring success.

There is an old cop belief that under the right circumstances, given the proper negative stimulus, even the best law enforcement officer will sink to the level of an incompetent partner. Stupidity, as the saying goes, is catching. So is clumsiness. As they cruised along the road, they were both so caught up in mentally psychoanalyzing each other that they forgot to pay attention to what they were about. They forgot to look for Kenneth Boyd, who was walking alongside the road, knee deep in withered onion grass, heading in a straight line toward the Black Marsh Bridge.

If the officers had been driving more slowly, if they had been shining their spotlights along the side of the road, if they had not been fuming about being partnered with each other, then they would very probably have seen him, but they didn’t. Instead, they sped right past him, made the left that put them on Peddler’s Trail, and headed east. In minutes the unit was nearly lost in dust and distance, and then swallowed whole as they dropped over a hillock.

From his vantage point twenty yards up a darkened side road, Vic Wingate stared as the cruiser passed Boyd.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” he growled. “How thick can you get?” He fired up the truck and pulled out onto the road until he was just ahead of Boyd and then pulled to a stop in front of him.

“Get the fuck in!”

Boyd stopped and stared at him with intense hatred and naked hunger.

“I said get in! C’mon, we don’t have time to waste. And don’t get any maggots on the seat this time.”

The creature climbed in beside Vic and pulled the door shut.

“So much for getting a couple of trained observers to spot you leaving town. I mean, Jesus, how far up your own ass do you have to be not to spot an ugly fucked-​up piece of shit like you right there by the side of the road? Maybe I should have put some neon friggin’ lights on you.”

Boyd just glared at him.

“Okay, new plan,” Vic said, putting the truck in gear. “I’m going to drive you over to Black Marsh and drop you off somewhere. Make sure you’re seen by at least two or three people. Make a scene…break a window or something—but don’t fucking bite anyone and don’t get fucking caught! You hear me? You have to be seen—clearly seen—but you have to get away. Do whatever you got to do to make it back across the river. Hide in the fields until you hear from me or the Man.” He reached over and smacked Boyd on the forehead. “Hey! You listening to me?”

Boyd’s eyes were red torches in the dark pits of his eye sockets. He opened his mouth, his gray tongue flicking over his lips. The hands in his lap twitched and spasmed, wanting to grab, to rend.

Vic pulled onto the bridge and the wooden beams rumbled beneath the wheels. Watching Boyd out of the corner of his eye, Vic said, “You’d just love to rip my throat out, wouldn’t you?” He laughed. “Go ahead and try it…and see what the Man will do to you. That’s providing I don’t kick your sorry dead ass first.”

The creature’s torn and bloodless lips formed a single word, Griswold, but there was no sound.

“That’s right—Griswold. You know you don’t want to fuck with the Man. Don’t think being dead would save you if you fucked with him. The Man would eat your soul!” Vic’s voice was thick and heavy and he leaned into the words, his smile gone now. Boyd’s hands gradually stopped their twitching. “Yeah, there are worse things than death, Boyd, and trust me when I say you don’t want to find out what they are.” There were fires in Vic’s eyes now, and Boyd slowly recoiled from them. “You don’t want to find out what they are,” he repeated softly as the truck rolled off the bridge and he headed southeast to Black Marsh.

6

Tow-​Truck Eddie sat behind the wheel of his wrecker and felt something in his mouth. Frowning, he raised a huge hand to his lips and then looked at his fingers, surprised to see them glistening wetly, darkly. His frown deepened as he bent to sniff at the wetness. It had the sheared-​copper smell of fresh blood. Tow-​Truck Eddie touched his tongue-​tip carefully to the viscous smear. It didn’t taste at all like blood. It tasted like tears. Nodding to himself in sudden understanding, Tow-​Truck Eddie licked the black blood from his fingers and savored the taste.