Dead Run

It should have been a simple journey - a drive from Minneapolis to Green Bay, Wisconsin. But a couple of unplanned detours lead Grace MacBride, Annie Belinsky and police Deputy Sharon Mueller deep in the northern woods, far from civilization and a mobile phone signal. Then the car breaks down. The nervous search for a landline and a mechanic leads the women to Four Corners, a sleepy crossroads town. And place they soon wish they'd never stumbled on - because something terrible happened in Four Corners... Filled with the same crackling dialogue, pace and rich vivid characters as Want to Play? and Live Bait, Dead Run firmly establishes PJ Tracy as one of the most exciting thriller writers in the world. Four Corners hadn’t been much of a town since October 17, 1946. That was the day Hazel Krueger's father set the Whitestone Lodge on fire and danced naked through the flames in some sort of sorry recompense for all he'd seen and all he'd done in a place called Normandy. Not that the town had been such a thriving metropolis before that—more like a tiny open spot in Wisconsin's north woods where someone had dropped a lake by mistake—but without the lodge and the trickle of fishermen that made the long drive up from Milwaukee and Madison every summer, the town sort of sat down on itself and started to dry up, corner by corner. By the time Tommy Wittig was born, the lodge road that crossed the county tar had faded back into the forest, and it was only last week that Tommy, approaching his eighth birthday and given to the solitary contemplation of a lonely child, had ever wondered aloud why the town had been named Four Corners when it had only two. Grandpa Dale had told him, while walking him out to Whitestone Lake and showing him the crumbled remains of a brick wall that had once framed the base of the old lodge. ‘You peel your eyes when you walk through these woods,’ he'd said, waving the gnawed end of a briar pipe he hadn't lit in thirty years because he always had his nose stuck inside some engine or other and feared blowing his own head off. ‘You can still mark the hole that fire burned in the forest when it jumped from the lodge to the trees. Probably would have burnt down the whole damn state if it hadn't started to rain.’ Tommy had marveled at that, wondering where he would have been born if Wisconsin had burned right to the ground that day, and if the flag would have looked funny with forty-nine stars on it instead of fifty. ‘Now, if you was a hawk flying overhead, you'd see a fifty-acre circle of second growth, all strangly with those prickery briars that you stuck in your sneaker laces. That was the fire, and I remember it like it was yesterday. Killed this old town, is what it did. Prime white pines was going up like sixty-foot candles on a birthday cake.’ ‘Was he really naked?’ Tommy had asked, focusing on the single part of the story that he found most remarkable. Grandpa Dale had laughed and said that yes, indeed, Mr. Everett Krueger had been naked as the day he was born. ‘Did old Hazel see him?’ Hazel ran the cafe that sat on the corner next to Grandpa Dale's gas station—the only other business left in Four Corners—and she was about a hundred years old, as far as Tommy could tell. That's when Grandpa Dale had squatted down and looked Tommy right in the eye the way he did when something was really serious and he wanted him to pay attention. ‘We don't make no mention of that fire in front of Hazel, you understand, Tommy? She was barely older than you when her daddy up an did this thing, and she was right there, watching, just a little girl peekin' through a porthole into Hell, watching her own daddy sizzle away into a blackened stick. Can you imagine such a thing?’ Tommy had been trying to imagine it for almost a whole week, and still he couldn't put a picture in his mind of Hazel Krueger as a little girl, let alone one touched by tragedy. He was straddling his old bike across the street from the cafe, staring through the plate-glass window, watching Hazel's broad back hunch and move over the grill plate behind the counter. Even through the dust-streaked window, he could see that great pile of too-black hair wobbling on top of her head, and when she turned around to plop a plate down on the counter in front of a customer, he saw the loose skin of remembered chins cascading down over the place where her neck was supposed to be. Tommy squinted until Hazel's bright red lips were a blur and her wrinkles disappeared, and he still couldn't see the little girl under all those years. On the other side of the plate glass, Hazel looked up and caught sight of him and wiggled her fingers, and Tommy waved back, suddenly shy. For all the years of his life, she'd just been old Hazel with the arms so big they could squeeze the squeaks out of you, and the crazy hair, and the free french fries anytime he set foot inside the cafe. But ever since Grandpa Dale had told him the story of how Four Corners became two. Hazel had seemed like a different person—an exotic and interesting stranger who'd watched he own daddy burn to a cinder. He heard the old Ford pickup when it was still a good quarter mile behind him, and he trotted his bike onto the shoulder close to the trees and looked around frantically. ‘C'mon, boy! C'mon, where are you?’ The pup was an early birthday present, little more than a black-and-tan fluffball with too-long ears and too-big feet and a penchant for wandering. The dog had absolutely no sense when it came to cars. ‘Hey, pup!’ Tommy laid down his bike and squatted, peering into the trees that marched nearly up to the tar across the road from the cafe and the gas station. There were ghostly tendrils of morning ground fog still hugging the trunks, and he dearly hoped the pup would come out on his own, because Tommy didn't want to go in there after him. It looked like a scene from one of Saturday night's Creature Features, when mist started floating around crooked graveyard tombstones and you just knew something bad was coming any minute.