The Revenant Road (3 page)

4

An Affair to Dismember

Criswell Nature Preserve,
Northwestern Seattle
. 

At
10:38 PM
, two nights after Jeannie Montgomery was killed, a black Suburban sat parked on the edge of a clearing two miles south of the abandoned guard gates. The park rangers had received a call concerning an injured bear cub that had been sighted on the other side of the park.

Neville Kowalski, the man who made the call about the bear cub, opened the passenger door of the black SUV and stepped out into the clearing. In the circle of illumination thrown by the SUV’s headlights, another man knelt in a patch of red grass.

“That her?” Kowalski said.

His partner didn’t answer.

“Grudge?”

Marcus Grudge stood and nodded, “Some of her.”

As Kowalski ambled toward the clearing he stubbed his toe on a log half-hidden in the soil.

“Son of a...
Fuck
!” Kowalski hissed.

Grudge frowned. “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

Kowalski shrugged. “Every chance I get, brother.”

The two men stared down at the gutted corpse at their feet. Kowalski glanced up at Grudge. The big black man was glaring at the
Montgomery
girl as if he could reanimate her by the force of his will.

“Something’s not right,” he said.

“I know,” Kowalski said. “Two o’ those goddamn
chimichangas
at
Taco Mundo
and I got the worst gas leak since the Exxon Valdez.”

“I’m serious,
Nev
,” Grudge said. “Something’s hinky.”

Kowalski looked around the clearing.

“Whadda ya got?”

Grudge shook his head, “Not sure.”

Kowalski knelt to study Jeannie Montgomery’s remains.

“Nosferatu?” he said.

“No,” Grudge grunted. “Too messy. Whatever ate this poor gal was also a mutilator. ‘Suckers don’t waste blood.”

Kowalski scratched the three-day growth of graying beard stubble that clung to his cheeks. “Wolf?”

“Hasn’t been a skinwalker in the States in five years,” Grudge said. “But this thing, whatever it is… it
feels
a little like a Wolf.”

Grudge shook his head, his brow furled in concentration. “Something
like
it anyway.”

Kowalski belched and stood up. “We’d better get in the wind,” he said. “Park Ranger’ll be making the rounds any minute.”

“Jesus,” Grudge said. “Can’t you feel it?”

Kowalski stopped. After twenty years on the Road with Marcus Grudge he knew when to stop and pay attention.

“What is it?” he said.

Grudge was silent for nearly a minute. But finally, he opened his eyes. “Nothing,” he shrugged.

He dropped a big gnarled hand on Kowalski’s shoulder and offered a faint smile.

“You alright?” Kowalski said.

Grudge shrugged.

“I miss them, Neville,” he said. “I miss my life.”

Grudge rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and sighed deeply. “I’ve been thinking a lot about them lately. Know what I mean?”

Kowalski nodded. “Well, family ain’t everything it’s cracked up to be.”

The night wind kicked up sharply. A cold draft raised the hackles on the back of Kowalski’s neck.

“You think what we do matters?” Grudge said.

Kowalski shrugged.

“Dunno,” he said. “Freezin’ my ass off though.”

Grudge remained silent.

“Say,” Kowalski snapped. “What the Hell crawled up your skink-hole?”

“Choices,” Grudge said. “I’m just not sure they were the right ones.”

Kowalski scowled. “Somethin’ you ain’t tellin’ me?”

Grudge didn’t answer. He stared at the dead girl lying in the grass. Then he swore and punched Kowalski in the shoulder.

“I guess I’m just getting too old for this sh—”

The howl from beyond the treeline cut him off.

“What the hell was that?” Kowalski said.

Grudge pulled a silver-plated H&K .38 automatic. Kowalski’s Sig Sauer appeared in his right fist as if by sleight of hand. The two men stood back-to-back.

The howl repeated, closer this time.

“Christ,” Kowalski snarled. “What
is
that?”

“Goddamit, I don’t know.” 

“Bullshit,” Kowalski said. “You holdin’ silver?”

“It’s not a Wolf,” Grudge hissed. “Look, over there.”

Kowalski looked toward the edge of the clearing.

Something was watching them. A dark shape, partially hidden, high up in the trees. The thing glared at them, a sick amber light flickering in its eyes.  

“Holy Mary Mother of God,” Grudge hissed.

The hunters lifted their guns, too late, as the shadow thing screamed and leapt at them.

It was Marcus Grudge’s sixty-fourth birthday.

May 19
^th
. 

5

Skirmish

Television sucks.

And let’s face it, dear reader, before you get the idea that I’m one of those idiots who try to convince everyone that film is the last, great, modern art form, movies suck too: How many Nicholas Cage pictures can civilization take?

Television and movies, however, are the best things to happen to writers like me since the printing press.

“We’re back in one minute, Connie.”

Two months after the
Montgomery
murders, I was sitting in a television studio with Connie Sawyer, literary critic and host of
The Eighth Hour
, the hottest primetime arts and culture magazine in the public television universe.

The blonde, tall, icily attractive Sawyer ratcheted her black leather chair up just enough to allow her to look down on me. I didn’t mind: The sales from
The River’s Edge
would shore up my ego.

“You’re much better looking than that God-awful photo your publicist sent,” she said. “Too bad you write such crap.”

“You’re not so bad yourself,” I replied. “For a sour old hooker doomed to belittle those more talented than herself.”

Sawyer’s smile vanished. She’d likened my first book to “…a vile descent into a world too banal to be horrified by its own senseless violence,” and “…a relentless dry hump.” It was a testament to the persuasive powers of my publicist that I had agreed to appear on Sawyer’s show. The last thing I wanted to do was help her: I wanted to drop kick her down an abandoned well.

The assistant director stepped in and waved his fingers in my direction. “Five seconds,” he said. Sawyer glared at me, her perfect teeth clenched.

“Smile, asshole,” she snarled. “This sour old hooker’s about to make you a lot of money.”

“Four. Three. Two. One...”

Red lights ignited and Sawyer smiled for the cameras.

“We’re back with author Obadiah Grudge, whose new book,
The River’s Edge,
has graced the New York Times Best-Seller list for four weeks in a row.”

“Five, Connie,” I injected.

Sawyer’s smile cracked. Not a mortal rupture (She was far too frigid for that), merely a minor stress fracture, but it made my night.

“Obadiah, your books have been called “dark,” “menacing” and “ominous,” she continued smoothly. “What is it about the shadowy element of society that attracts your focus as an
aspiring
writer?”

Bitch

“I don’t think of my characters as menacing, Connie,” I said. “Some of them are as familiar to me as members of my own family.”

Sawyer laughed.

“Scary family,” she said.

I smiled and counted royalty checks in my head.

“Let’s talk about
The River’s Edge,
the story of a little girl who is abducted by her father and taken on a gruesome cross-country odyssey. Were you inspired by real events?”

“Connie, I think all ideas spring from experience. Stories are like doorways into the human psyche. Sometimes they lead to something productive and entertaining, like
The River’s Edge,
sometimes they lead to the
unknown;
unexplored rooms in the mansions of the mind.”

Sawyer smirked.

“You must spend a lot of time in dark rooms.”   

“I’d like to drag
you
into one sometime, Connie.”

We chuckled invisible daggers at each other. Off camera, the assistant-director cleared his throat.

“The best thing about those doors, Connie, seriously, is that you never know where they’ll take you. Some people find that scary. I take comfort in it.”

“Some might call that that cold comfort,” Sawyer said.

I made a mental note to call her for a date.

“Sometimes that’s the only comfort we get, Connie.”

* * * *

My assistant, Carla, was waiting in the limo.

“Yo, your publicist booked you on
JUNO
for next week,” Carla droned. “Oh, and your mother called. She said it was like, very important.”

Carla Quintana might have been the cloned lesbian love-child of Jennifer Lopez and Fran Drescher. A proud “New Yorican,” Carla was sexy in the way that all girls from the
Bronx
are sexy. She was compact, with the body of a hip-hop video dancer and the mouth of a Mexican longshoreman.  

“Call my mother,” I said. “Tell her I’m in the hospital: Minor stroke, some edema. Nothing serious, but no visitors.”

Carla wearily punched in the number.

“You are going straight to Hell,” she said.

The limo driver chose that moment to speak.

“Mr. Grudge, I just want to tell you that I loved
Death and the Sorcerer.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“It’s my favorite book.”

“Thank you so much.”

The driver brightened, encouraged. His attention shifted from the road to the rear view mirror, seeking mine, searching for the
click
. I reached into the mini-bar and grabbed a tiny bottle of Jack Daniels while he rattled on.

“I love the hardboiled private-eye stuff,” he said. “You do it better than a lot of these guys.”

“Cheers,” I said, lifting the bottle, steeling myself.

“You know, I write a little,” the driver said. “Mostly...”

“Mostly Fantasy stuff,” I cut in. “Maybe a little Horror thrown in for good measure, right?”

“That’s amazing,” the driver said. “See? I
knew
you and me was from the same tribe. How’d you know?”

I shrugged and drained the too-small bottle in one gulp. It was an ordeal I’d endured at least twice daily since the publication of my first novel,
Death and the Sorceror:
fervent slobberings from semi-sentient tassels of the literary lunatic fringe that is Horror/Fantasy fiction today, a fringe that I despised.

Let me explain: I hate Horror.

Any form of “literature” that smacks of the supernatural makes my ass bone throb with disgust. I write mysteries, “Hardboiled” suspense stories. Violent? Yes. Dark?
Certainly
, but my novels are grounded in real-world horrors: serial killers, mad gunmen, and drunken detectives at the end of the line.

But for reasons unfathomed by me at that time, my work had always appealed to the Horror geeks. This had proven to be a distinct handicap in an industry that sells thousands of Horror titles each year while ghettoizing even its most successful adherents, saddling them with the literary equivalent of a scarlet letter: the title of
Horror Writer
.

No horror writer whose name doesn’t begin and end with ‘Stephen King’ is ever considered a
real
writer. They are laughed at, ridiculed and discounted by the publishing industry, the literary establishment and the public.

“Call me a snob,” I said to the hopeful driver. “But I’d rather let a one-eyed baboon shave my balls with a rusty hacksaw than waste my time writing such inane bullshit.”

To my savage satisfaction, the driver’s hopeful expression died. He pushed a button on the steering wheel and raised the privacy screen between us without another word.

“It’s your mother,” Carla said. 

I shot her a look full of the promise of murder.

She handed me the phone and looked out the window.

“Yeah, mother. What’s up?”

Three minutes later, we were heading for my mother’s house in Bronxville.

My hands were shaking. As the car turned around and headed North, toward the suburbs of
Westchester
County
, I willed them to be still. When I looked at my watch the trembling returned, worse than before: Death had come to call on an old family acquaintance.

She was right on schedule.