Jeffery Deaver - Bloody River Blues

"I know what you think but it can't hurt. And you've got oil, too."

"Oil."

She stood and took the bag from him. "It's wish oil."

"Wish oil."

"What it is, you pour some in the bathtub-"

"Well, I can't take a bath." He was exasperated. "How can I take a bath?"

She stared at him, tears welling. "I don't think you have to put it in a bath. I mean, if it works in the bath it'd work just as well dabbing it on you, wouldn't it?" She added, "I know it works. You keep wishing that you'll get well. Put the oil on you, then wish and wish and wish. I meditated for an hour and seven minutes last night…"

The Terror hears this and rolls upright. It starts to prowl through Donnie Buffett's guts.

Sweat pops onto his forehead.

Bleeding Christ, is it restless! Dodging around inside him, playing with the pain in his legs, slipping up to his heart, dancing over his crotch. (Can't get south of there, can you, you shit?)

The Terror…

He fights it down. He presses his nails into the palm of his left hand. He concentrates on the pain, willing it to become a wave of agony. This numbs the Terror. Its prowling slows and it grows tired. Buffett begins to calm. Penny does not seem to notice her husband s absence and continues to talk about shopping and her parents and a consciousness-raising group she's been attending.

The Terror finally falls asleep.

Buffett took a deep breath and calmed down, then interrupted her to say, "I'd like you to meet my doctor."

Penny blinked.

Buffett continued, "Dr. Weiser. She's the best in the city."

"You know how I feel about doctors. You need more than-"

"But I do need a doctor, honey," he said. "Come on, please. Just meet her."

"Okay," she said cheerfully, eyes sparkling, "I'd like that. I promise I won't lecture her on…"

What was she going to say? On the right way to practice medicine? Holism? Spiritualism?

Penny did not continue her thought but instead crossed her heart like a coy schoolgirl. "Promise." She nodded broadly, acknowledging, though she probably didn't know it, her excessive sincerity.

There were some moments when Penny appeared completely normal. Her hair would be shiny clean and curled nicely, her face-from the right angle-was soft, her collar turned up, covering the dark bones of her shoulders. Her hands would be folded; the torn cuticles and ragged ripped nails were out of view. A dancing light would be in her eyes-a little mystified, a little shy. It was charming.

At those times, Donnie Buffett remembered the woman he had fallen in love with.

He listened to her tell him about how she and her friends were going to be chanting for him.

"Chanting," Donnie Buffett said, and was suddenly tired. Exhausted. He closed his eyes and suddenly all he wanted was to fall back to sleep. The sleep in which he dreamed of pain flowing through muscles that now felt no pain. Fatigue wrapped around him sensuously and squeezed tight like a college girl making desperate love.

"I'm beat, honey," he muttered, pretending to doze.

"You should sleep," Penny said. She touched his hand.

"Uh-huh." Buffett almost opened his eyes and looked at her. But he chose not to. He felt momentarily guilty about this deception.

I'm a lucky man. Lucky lucky lucky. I didn't get shot in the brain. I didn't get shot in the heart. I didn't get shot in the neck. I can still smell.

And he could hear her voice in a detached little whisper, "You sleep now, honey. I'm going home." He heard paper crinkle. "These are the instructions for the candle."

Donnie Buffett breathed deeply like a man asleep. And in less than a minute this lie became the truth and he was dreaming that he was skiing down a panoramic mountain of huge white cliffs rising into an infinitely blue sky.

Halfway to St. Louis, Stevie saw his chance. He gunned the engine and the car sluggishly responded, movmg ahead of a lumbering truck.

He eased up right behind the Yamaha. A dirt bike, it looked like, with the high fenders that doubled as mudguards and the long shocks that would take the potholes and shitty city streets easily. The rack was cockeyed. Stevie studied the yellow fenders and the silver bars and the red helmet and the leather jacket of the driver and then started looking for an exit ramp.

He saw one a half mile ahead and glanced in the rearview mirror, at what loomed behind him. It was a White semi. Not the trailer, just the tractor, the sort with the ten forward gears and a steering wheel wide as a tire. The truck would have air brakes and little weight, but at sixty it'd skid for a hundred fifty feet.

A quarter mile away.

Stevie Flom started signaling.

He accelerated until he was three feet from the beer man, who was hunched forward, sunlight flaring off his helmet. The truck driver was holding back, seeing Stevie's turn signal but maybe a little confused because the Dodge was not slowing.

A hundred yards.

Stevie eased into the left side of the lane.

The truck driver must have figured the signal was a mistake and had accelerated again, driving up to within two car lengths of Stevie. On the right, the exit ramp blossomed outward.

Stevie floored the pedal and looked to his right, then cut the wheel hard.

His left front bumper goosed the rear wheel of the Yamaha right out from underneath him.

A mad flurry of motion from the bike-a panicked glance over his shoulder as the Yamaha began to lie down. The horn and the gutsy squeal of the trucks brakes filling the air. The man's left boot slamming down onto the highway in an automatic way, hopeless. Reaching up, pitching forward, flying over the twisted handlebars.

Sparks sailing off the gas tank of the cycle. The beer man, his mouth open in a shout that Stevie could not hear, hands outward, began to tumble on the concrete at fifty miles an hour, the fiberglass of the helmet shredding.

Stevie skidded the Dodge into the off ramp, just missing a yellow plastic collision barrel as he braked to twenty-five. He was too busy controlling the skid to see exactly what happened on the expressway. Then he was at the bottom of the ramp. He heard the squealing of tires and horns. Then he caught the end of a yellow light and made a leisurely turn onto a grimy, cobble-stoned street of body shops and empty warehouses and shabby bungalows, not far from the Mississippi River.

The service was in a boxy building in downtown Maddox.

Beth Israel Memorial Chapel.

Pellam hadn't known that Stile was Jewish. They had talked about many things, from women to whiskey to real estate, but religion was in that category of topics where their conversation did not go-for instance, why Stile remained in his profession and never sought to do second-unit directing, as so many stuntmen do. Or why Pellam stopped directing after Tommy Bernstein died.

Pellam had spoken to Stiles cousin in San Diego- his closest living relative-and he had learned that Stile had been raised Reform Jewish. Calls were made, and a service arranged.

The body was en route to southern California and 168 people now stood in a dark building in a shabby part of a dark

Missouri town that had long ago lost whatever allure, or novelty, it might have had for them. From the outfits, this seemed more like a fashion show than a service: No one had brought funeral clothing, of course, but this was a Hollywood crew so there was plenty of black, albeit in the form of minidresses and spandex and baggy suits. Adding to the surrealness were the yarmulkes perching on the men's heads.

The stunt coordinator, Stiles boss, was a tough sixty-five-year-old with blurred tattoos on his forearms, now covered by the sleeves of a wrinkled gray suit. He had fallen off horses at John Ford's direction and crashed through windows at Sam Peckinpahs and he was now crying like an infant. A lot of other people cried too. Nobody had disliked Stile, the man who fell from 130-foot cliffs and who walked through fire.