Blues Highway Blues (A Crossroads Thriller Book 1) Read online

  “Where to?”

  Moog turned and walked to the front door of Connie Erickson’s freshly scrubbed Mediterranean McMansion. “Mr. P. got word Erickson used his credit card at a service station in New Mexico.”

  “New Mexico?”

  “Well, there ain’t much room to run west, is there?”

  Rabidoso followed, struggling with a black plastic bag that was stuffed with soiled rags, used cleanings supplies, and parts of what had once been Randy Baldwick. “When all of this is over, esse, you and me—”

  The big man turned and stopped him there. “If we’re both alive when this wraps up, you can have your shot at the champ. For now, you just concentrate on cleaning up your shit. I ain’t going down ’cause you do a sloppy job. I work clean. I’m a professional. I take pride in my work.”

  Wherever she was, Moog knew his Gramma Mae was looking down on him. And even if she wasn’t proud of what he was doing, he knew she was proud of how he was getting it done.

  The blinding sun that had forced Daniel’s eyes into a pained, Eastwoodesque squint as he drove across the long stretches of Oklahoma prairie had dimmed and all but abandoned him as he rolled into Arkansas. By the time he’d crossed the Mississippi River, the night had grown darker than Delta soil.

  Without a moon above to light the way, he raced over the twisting and turning back roads like a moonshine-running native as the odd barn or boarded-up storefront indicated he was getting closer and closer to what passed for a town. When he hit his first stoplight in Mississippi, he looked over toward the side of the road where a sign illuminated by his high beams proclaimed “The Birthplace of the Blues.” He had arrived.

  Highways 49 and 61 intersect at what passes for the town center of Clarksdale, Mississippi. Without much else going on, Clarksdale has made a nice little cottage industry of its place in blues history with a dozen boutiques and souvenir shops, a classic guitar shop, and even a celebrity restaurant club— (Morgan Freeman’s Ground Zero blues club is just two or three blocks over). And the good folks down at the Chamber of Commerce will tell whoever’s passing through that their town square is the exact spot where a young Robert Johnson traded his mortal soul for immortal guitar prowess. And to lay claim to that legend, the town has erected a twenty-foot signpost that boasts a trio of oversized cutouts of baby blue electric guitars. (It’s an odd tribute to a man who was never known to play anything but a battered Kalamazoo acoustic.)

  Daniel had no desire to stick around until morning just to pick up a Muddy Waters T-shirt or a Little Walter blues harp refrigerator magnet, but still he couldn’t shake the song that kept playing on an endless loop in the back of his head. The lyrics of “Blues Highway Blues,” the mysterious words he’d tried to decipher a thousand times over the course of his pilgrimage, had told him:

  If you wanna earn your soul back, find where your money’s hid

  Better get down to the crossroads like young Robert did

  Daniel had long ago given up on the idea of ever recovering his soul, but he was in desperate need of the cash. So he parked his Kia at those crossroads—in the gravel parking lot that served double duty for Delta Donut and Atlas Bar-B-Q—and waited patiently, too tired to explain to himself just what he was waiting for.

  He focused his frayed attention on the glowing lights of the Kia’s dashboard clock. A minute before midnight. If something was going to happen at these fabled crossroads, the witching hour seemed like the perfect time for it.

  And then, at the exact moment the 11:59 changed to 12:00, at the very stroke of midnight…the witching hour…absolutely nothing happened.

  Outside in the cold distance…a dog barked.

  A truck drove past.

  And then another.

  But nothing extraordinary happened. Not in this world. Not in some underworld of Southern legend and lore. Not in any world, as far as Daniel knew.

  There was nothing extraordinary about it. Not the place. Or time. None of it.

  Daniel wasn’t sure why he felt so disappointed. Had he really expected the song would be anything other than a diversion? Could he have possibly believed there was a hope in hell of getting his money back?

  Of course he could have.

  If he looked back at his life, the entire path was clearly marked with a string of similarly stupid acts and piss-poor personal judgments as trailblazers: Following the thief’s riddles to this godforsaken crossroads. Thinking he could recreate his career with a reality show. Financing the doomed project with a Russian mobster’s money. Self-destructing in the wake of his divorce. Falling for Connie in the first place; believing the lie of her love. Making music his business. Picking up the guitar in the first place.

  Forty-seven years of unbelievable blunders. One leading to the next and then the next, like notes in a song—the worst song ever.

  He hit the steering wheel as hard as he could. “Goddamn it!” There was nothing else he could do, nowhere else to go. No more cards to play. No hope. Nothing.

  He closed his eyes and folded his arms across his chest, not to sleep but just to take a moment to gather up all the disjointed thoughts scattered across the floor of his consciousness like a dropped deck of cards. If there had been a prayer left in his soul, it would have only been the same tired one he’d screamed to the unhearing heavens a thousand times before: “Please, just let it stop. Let everything just fade to black. Forever.”

  Tap. Tap.

  The sound was so faint at first he wasn’t sure it was a sound at all. Tap. Tap.

  Daniel sat up in his seat, looking for the source of the slight sound slowly building in volume and insistence. Tap. Tap. But he couldn’t see a thing. Tap. Tap. The windows had fogged in what seemed like an instant and turned an eerie opaque. Tap. Tap. He couldn’t see a thing out in the night. Including whatever was making the sound. Tap. Tap.

  Daniel rubbed at the glass, trying to wipe away what he assumed was frost, but found the window was dry and clear. Tap, tap, tap. No, whatever was coating the windows had come from the outside. TAP. TAP. TAP.

  The rapping was focused on the driver’s window. Tentatively, Daniel put his palm to the window, like he was reaching out to whatever was now banging at the glass. TAP! TAP! Like he was reaching out to touch what he knew he shouldn’t.

  And then suddenly—silence.

  From out in the darkness, from the other side of the window, another hand appeared against his, pressing its palm against the glass. Daniel pulled his hand back, recoiling in shock. And then he watched in horror as the hand began to wipe away whatever gelatinous film was covering the window.

  At first it had seemed simply opaque, and then as black as the night itself. But as the phantom hand wiped the window clean, Daniel could tell the substance wasn’t black, but red. A dark, dark red. “Oh, Jesus,” he whimpered. The windows were covered in blood. Gallons and gallons of blood. A second hand appeared on the window, trying to assist the other in clearing the blood away.

  And then a face pressed against the glass, twisting and contorting in an effort to get a look into the car’s cabin. A face, but not quite a human face. At least, not human any longer. The nose had been cut off. The ears too. An eye had been removed. And yet the remaining parts were all too familiar. The bloody mess of a face was Randy Baldwick’s.

  Daniel jumped back in his seat as if there were somewhere to escape in the compact’s cramped cabin.

  The face pressed closer to the glass, the remaining eye filled with a hateful fury focused on Daniel. The slashed remnants of a mouth curled in a cruel sneer as it growled hoarsely. “You. Are. A. Dead. Man.”

  Bang. Bang. Bang. “Sir, roll down your window.”

  Daniel sat up in his seat with a start, shielding his eyes from the painfully bright beam of a Clarksdale patrolman’s Maglite. Lingering disorientation left him unsure which was the dream, and Daniel let out a low groan.

  “Sir, roll down your window,” the officer repeated, his free hand resting nervously on the Sig Sauer holstered
at his more-than-ample waist.

  The sight shocked the dream out of Daniel’s foggy head. “That’s what I get for praying,” he moaned to himself as he slowly cranked the window down. “Yes, officer? Is there a problem?”

  “Been drinking tonight?” The accusation slipped from his jowly mouth just as easy as the first piece of sweet potato pie out of the tin.

  “I don’t drink.” It was the truth—for the last eight months or so, anyway. “I’m just tired. I must have dozed off.”

  The officer’s beam started to explore the cabin of the car, seeking to illuminate something he could call probable cause. “Sometimes that can be even worse.”

  “That’s why I pulled over.”

  “Well, this here’s a private parking lot, it ain’t no Motel Six.” The patrolman matter-of-factly requested, “License. Registration. Proof of ’surance.”

  As he reached for the documentation, Daniel began to wonder: Had they traced the stolen Lotus and that whole PCH mess back to him? Had they found what Rabidoso might have left of Randy and figured him for the murder? The night air was cold, but Daniel began to sweat.

  The cop noticed the beads forming on Daniel’s forehead. “Is there a problem there, mister?” he asked suspiciously.

  There were lots of them, but none that Daniel wanted to explain to a Mississippi cop. “No problem.” He fished his license out of his wallet, opened the glove box and pulled out the car’s paperwork, then handed it all over.

  “Wait here and don’t start your ve-hic-le.” Without another word, the chubby cop returned to his patrol car.

  As unpredictable as his life had been, Daniel had never—not even once—foreseen a scenario in which he was taken into custody by a night-shift patrolman in Clarksdale, Mississippi. If he wasn’t struggling to contain a fear-induced impulse to vomit, he might have laughed out loud.

  After what seemed like a long while, the cop returned, his slightly crossed eyes squinty with grim suspicion. “Sir, can you explain why the address on your license don’t match the registration of the ve-hic-le?”

  That was an easy one. “Connie.”

  “’Scuse me?”

  It was karmically perfect that she’d ultimately be responsible for his tragic end, sending him off to a life in the Mississippi State penal system. “My ex-wife. She’s got the Jaguar and the Escalade and I had to come begging to use the goddamn Kia.”

  The cop’s jaw clenched as a jolt of anger sparked in his offset eyes. For a second Daniel was convinced he was completely fucked. And then, an instant later, the policeman’s countenance softened. “Goddamn, don’t I know that one.” His jowls wagged as he nodded his understanding. “Had me a 2010 Superduty F-250 King Ranch. Beaut-i-ful. V-8 Turbo Diesel. Eight-foot box. Had her jacked up on a Skyjacker lift kit.”

  Daniel had no idea what the patrolman was talking about, but he was grateful for a diversion from his situation and faked an enthusiastic “Wow!”

  “Yeah, ‘Wow!’” The portly cop stopped to take a deep, cleansing breath, a process Daniel thought the guy must have learned in some court-ordered anger management class. “Turned out my bitch of an ex-wife was fuckin’ my best friend.” Another deep breath, although this time it was more of a snort. “She ended up takin’ damn near everything I had. Now I’ll be damned if that sonofabitch ain’t drivin’ my truck!” It was clear the cuckolding hadn’t been the worst of it as he shook his head sadly over the loss of his truck. “If I hadn’t sworn an oath under God as a law officer—” He didn’t finish his declaration, but Daniel guessed the unspoken threat was where the court-ordered anger management had come into play.

  Daniel felt sorry for the guy, even if he was about to slap the iron bracelets on him. “It’s not right.”

  “No. It ain’t.” There was a moment when the patrolman seemed like he might say something else, but instead he drifted off into his own dark thoughts. (It must have been a hell of a truck.)

  When he finally surfaced again, the cop simply handed Daniel his license and paperwork. “Sorry ’bout this, but we keep a sharp watch on this corner. Get all sort of freaks come down here.” He snorted contemptuously. “Think they’re gonna see some goddamn ghost story or somethin’. ”

  “Really?” Daniel did his best to sound surprised.

  “On account o’ all that crossroads bullshit,” the officer explained halfheartedly as he pointed up at the guitars overhead. “Dumb shitheads,” he laughed to himself. “It ain’t even the right crossroads.”

  “It isn’t the right what?” Daniel tried to contain his surprise—and interest.

  “Shit, no.” The cop laughed a little, amused by all those misguided musical pilgrims. “I don’t listen to that kinda music, mind ya.”

  “No. Me neither,” Daniel lied, trying to build some common ground with his new redneck friend—besides the cuckoldings and financially disastrous divorces.

  “Give me Skynyrd any damn day.”

  Daniel weakly tried a few bars of “Freebird.”

  The patrolman grinned a good ol’ grin. “Or Stevie Ray.”

  Daniel obliged with the chorus of “Pride and Joy,” croaking it like an out-of-tune human jukebox.

  “That’s why I won’t ever get on no air-o-plane,” the officer observed solemnly.

  Daniel nodded as if his precaution made perfect sense, and then quickly redirected the conversation. “But this isn’t the crossroads?”

  “Hell, no. You ask any of the old-timers ’round here. More than a few of ’em knew that ol’ boy, most all of ’em knew someone who did. They’ll all tell you Robert Johnson played ’round here but never lived here. So if’in he went to some damn crossroads or whatnot, he’d done it down there on Dockery Plantation.”

  If the night hadn’t already put a chill into Daniel, hearing the name of the band that had recorded the mystery song would have done the job. “Dockery Plantation, huh?”

  “Yeah. Down ’tween Ruleville and Cleveland. Bunch a’ them blues guys came outta there. But you ask anyone and they’ll tell you the real crossroad’s down there. Corner of Dockery Road and Highway Eight.”

  “Dockery Road and Highway Eight,” Daniel repeated, trying hard not to sound like his very life depended on it.

  “Now, you best get yourself off the road as tired as you are.” There was more than a little paternal tone to his voice. “I don’t wanna come haveta’ pull you outta some ditch in an hour or two.”

  “No. You wouldn’t—”

  “Too much damn paperwork,” the cop laughed a little more. “Seriously, you get yourself just down the road there and check into the Sleepin’ Inn. You tell ’em ol’ Ronnie Granger sent ya and they’ll treat ya right.”

  “I’ll do that,” Daniel lied again.

  “The hell you will,” the cop said with a knowing chuckle, his voice suddenly alarmingly deep and raspy. “You a goddamn liar.” It was the same voice he’d heard escaping from the convenience store clerk back in New Mexico. “You got miles to go and you better get going, mi key.”

  The sound of it was no less horrifying than the apparition at his window. “Excuse me?”

  “I said, ‘Have a good night now,’” the policeman clarified in his thick, gentle Southern drawl. He cocked his head, clearly wondering whether he’d made a mistake in not having written a ticket.

  Unnerved, Daniel forced himself to say, “I’ll try.”

  The patrol car pulled past him and headed on down the highway, but Daniel couldn’t shake the feeling he was still being watched. Carefully, he turned the Kia around and headed south down 61. When the lights of the northbound patrol car finally faded into the black, Daniel picked up speed. He saw the Sleepin’ Inn off to the right…and drove right on past it.

  He was headed south, down to the Dockery Plantation.

  For all the dark legend it holds, there is nothing to distinguish the intersection of Mississippi Route 8 and the old Dockery Road from any of the other countless dirt paths that cut away from the macadam highway and sna
ke off through the tall grasses only to disappear beyond some creek bed or on the far end of a stand of cypress. There’s not a plaque or historical marker for Robert Johnson. No monument to the man who reinvented the blues (and everything else that sprang forth from those magical musical seeds). There’s not so much as a handmade cross to mark the spot where he supposedly struck his sinister deal for the powers to do it.

  The only notice to alert a traveler (or pilgrim) of that particular crossroad is a green road sign reading Dockery Road, so small that it’s easy to drive right by without noticing. Daniel was almost a quarter mile down the road before his road-weary brain realized what he’d just glimpsed in his peripheral vision.

  It was another eighth of a mile before he could find a spot to turn around. Off to the left was a small service station with a two-pump island out front. Its windows were darkened, making it impossible to tell whether it was simply closed for the late hour or had been abandoned altogether.

  Daniel pulled into the station’s gravel-covered lot and palmed the steering wheel hard to the right. As the Kia came round its turn, its headlights lit up an old barn a hundred yards beyond the gas station. Its roof was faded from a hundred summers and its side planks were weathered gray. Across those ancient timbers, someone had painted in whitewash letters three feet high: DOCKERY FARMS.

  Daniel stopped the car and sat for a minute, staring at the words. Although they’d clearly been painted decades ago as part of a historical preservation effort, they seemed to him to be a mean-spirited personal taunt. Maybe his senses had been compromised by fatigue or stress or shock; but it seemed like someone had put them there all those years ago, knowing even then on some dark night in the future he’d stand before them and see them there. It was as if whatever force was responsible for dragging him out to such a desolate spot was bragging about its omniscience, its total control of time and circumstances—warning him, perhaps, that he’d come too far to ever turn back.