The Revenant Road Read Free Page A

smile. They were rare and I wanted to make this one last.
    May 19th , O-dog, Doctor Necropolis whispered. Wanna know what year?
    Shut up, you bastard, I thought.
    Part of me hoped that I was crazy; that a twelve-dollar bundle of balsa wood and string couldn’t really predict when a man would die.
    The problem was that four months earlier, Necropolis had predicted the death of Tubby the Wonder Cat, my Aunt Selena’s Siamese surrogate child. He’d correctly forecast the fatal heart attack of our next-door neighbor, Mr. Grant, as well as the abduction and murder of my kindergarten-teacher Mrs. Reagan.
    The problem was that Doctor Necropolis was never wrong.
    Marcus and Lenore loved each other, for the most part, but some unuttered resentment clouded the air between them. For my whole life we’d lived under that cloud the way prairie dogs live beneath the shadow of a circling hawk. We completed the drive back to New York shrouded in the kind of silence you find at the better funerals.
    Marcus moved out the next day.

     

 
     
     
    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