Douglas Preston - Still Life With Crows

And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents,

Where Cressid lay.”

Corrie looked at the man reclining in the seat beside her, his eyes still half closed. He was seriously weird.

“Now, may we continue with the tour?”

Corrie glanced around. The cornfields were reappearing on both sides of the road. “Tour’s over. We’ve already passed through town.”

There was no immediate response from Pendergast, and for a moment Corrie worried that his offer would be rescinded and all that money in the glove compartment would vanish back into the black suit. “I could always show you the Mounds,” she added.

“The Mounds?”

“The Indian Mounds down by the creek. They’re the only thing of interest in the whole county. Somebody must’ve told you about them, the ‘curse of the Forty-Fives’ and all that bullshit.”

Pendergast seemed to think about this for a moment. “Perhaps later we will see the Mounds. For the present, please turn around and pass through town once again, as slowly as possible. I wouldn’t want to miss a thing.”

“I don’t think I’d better do that.”

“Why not?”

“The sheriff won’t like it. He doesn’t like cruising.”

Pendergast closed his eyes completely. “Didn’t I say I would concern myself with the sheriff?”

“Okay, you’re the boss.”

She pulled to the side of the road, made a nice three-point turn, and headed back through town at a crawl. “On your left,” she said, “is the Wagon Wheel Tavern, run by Swede Cahill. He’s a decent guy, not too smart. His daughter is in my class, a real Barbie. It’s mostly a drinking establishment, not much food to speak of except Slim Jims, peanuts, the Giant Pickle Barrel—and, oh, yeah, chocolate eclairs. Believe it or not, they’re famous for their chocolate eclairs.”

Pendergast lay motionless.

“See that lady, walking down the sidewalk with the Bride of Frankenstein hairdo? That’s Klick Rasmussen, wife of Melton Rasmussen, who owns our local dry goods store. She’s coming back from lunch at the Castle Club, and in that bag are the remains of a roast beef sandwich for her dog, Peach. She won’t eat at Maisie’s on account of Maisie being her husband’s girlfriend before they got married about three hundred years ago. If only she knew what Melton gets up to with the gym teacher’s wife.”

Pendergast said nothing.

“And that dried-up old bag coming out of the Coast to Coast with a rolling pin is Mrs. Bender Lang, whose father died when their house was burned down by an arsonist thirty years ago. They never found out who did it, or why.” Corrie shook her head. “Some think old Gregory Flatt did it. He was the town drunk and kind of nuts, and one day he just sort of wandered off into the corn and disappeared. Never found his body. He used to talk about UFOs all the time. Personally, I think he finally got his wish and was abducted. The night he disappeared there were some strange lights in the north.” She laughed derisively. “Medicine Creek is an all-American town, and everybody’s got a skeleton in his closet. Or her closet.”

This, at least, roused Pendergast, who half opened his eyes to look at her.

“Oh, yes. Even that dippy old lady whose house you’re staying in, Winifred Kraus. She may act pious, but it’s all a crock. Her father was a rum-runner and moonshiner. Bible-thumper, too, on top of that. But that isn’t all. I heard that when old Winifred was a teenager, she was known as the town vamp.”

Pendergast blinked.

Corrie snickered, rolled her eyes. “Yeah, there’s a lot of that going on in Medicine Creek. Like Vera Estrem, who’s doing the wild thing with the Deeper butcher. If her husband ever finds out, there’s going to be blood. Dale Estrem’s the head of the Farmer’s Co-op and he’s the meanest man in Medicine Creek. His grandfather was a German immigrant and during World War II he went back to fight for the Nazis. You can imagine what the town thought of that. The grandfather never returned. Screwed the whole family, basically.”

“Indeed.”

“We’ve got our share of nutcases, too. Like that tinker who comes through here once a year and camps out in the corn somewhere. Or Brushy Jim, who did one tour too many in Vietnam. They say he fragged his lieutenant. Everybody’s just waiting for him to ‘go postal’ one of these days.”

Pendergast had lain back in the seat again. He looked asleep.

“Anyway. There’s the Rexall Drug. That empty building is where the Music Shop used to be. There’s Calvary Lutheran Church. It’s Missouri Synod. The pastor is John Wilbur. A fossilized specimen if ever there was one.”

There was no response from Pendergast.

“We are now passing Ernie’s Exxon. Don’t get your car fixed there. That’s Ernie himself at the pump. His son’s the biggest pothead in Cry County and old Ernie doesn’t have a clue. And that old wooden building is Rasmussen’s, the dry goods store I told you about. Their motto is, ‘If you can’t find it here, you don’t need it there.’ I’ve always wondered where ‘there’ was. There’s the sheriff’s office on the left, but I hardly need to point that place out. And there’s Maisie’s on the right. Her meatloaf is just edible. Her desserts would give a hyena the runs. Uh-oh, I knew it. Here he comes.”

Corrie watched in the rearview mirror as the sheriff’s cruiser pulled out of the alleyway, lights flashing.

“Hey,” she said to the motionless Pendergast. “Wake up. I’m getting pulled over.”

But Pendergast seemed sound asleep.

The sheriff came right up behind her and gave his siren a crank. “Please pull off to the side of the road,” his voice rasped through the loudspeaker atop the car. “Remain inside your vehicle.”

It was the same thing that had happened to her at least ten times before, only this time Corrie had Pendergast in the car. She realized the sheriff probably hadn’t seen him, he was sunk so low in the seat. His eyes remained closed even through the siren and the noise. Maybe, she thought, he was dead. He certainly looked dead.

The door of the cruiser flung open and the sheriff came sauntering up, billy club flapping at his side. He placed his meaty palms on the open passenger window and leaned in. When he saw Pendergast, he jerked back abruptly. “Jesus!” he said.

Pendergast opened one eye. “Problem, Sheriff?”

Corrie enjoyed the look that came over the sheriff’s face. His entire face flamed red, from the fuzz-covered folds of skin piled up against his collar to the tops of his hair-clogged ears. She hoped Brad would age just like his father.

“Well, Agent Pendergast,” Hazen said, “it’s just that we don’t allow cruising back and forth through town. This is the third time she’s been through.”

The sheriff paused, obviously awaiting some kind of explanation, but after a long silence it became clear he wasn’t going to get any.

At length, Hazen pushed himself away from the car. “You may go on your way,” he said.

“Since you’ve taken an interest in our movements,” said Pendergast in his lazy drawl, “I should inform you that we’ll be driving through town again, and perhaps even a fifth time, while Miss Swanson shows me the sights. After all, I am on vacation.”

As Corrie looked at the darkening expression on Sheriff Hazen’s face, she wondered if this so-called Special Agent Pendergast really knew what he was doing. It was no joke making an enemy like Hazen in a town like Medicine Creek. She’d been stupid enough to do it herself.

“Thank you for your concern, Sheriff.” Pendergast turned to her. “Shall we go, Miss Swanson?”

She hesitated a moment, looking at Sheriff Hazen. Then she shrugged. What the hell, she thought, as she accelerated from the curb with a little screech and a fresh cloud of black smoke.