The Upright Man (26 page)

He turned at the sound of Henrickson opening the trunk of the car. The man pulled a large rucksack out and looped it over his back in one smooth movement. Then he leaned in again, reaching with both arms. When he straightened once more, Tom gaped at him.

“What the fuck is that?”

It was a stupid question. It was obvious what the man had slipped over his shoulder. It was a rifle. It was also obvious that the shorter, blunter thing he had in his hand was a large-caliber handgun. Neither looked like the sort of thing you saw in hunting stores. They looked like the kind of weapon you saw on the news, with plumes of smoke in the distance behind.

Henrickson closed the trunk. “The forest can be dangerous,” he said.

“It certainly is now,” Tom said. “Jesus. Look, can we leave those things in the car?”

The other man had turned and was walking toward the cabin. Suddenly very unsure about what was happening, Tom hurried after him. By the time he caught up, Henrickson had already rapped on the front door. They waited. Henrickson was just raising his hand again when he stopped, head cocked. Tom hadn’t heard anything.

There was the sound of two bolts being pulled, and then the door opened.

Patrice Anders stood inside. Beyond was a small, cozy room. She looked a little older than Tom remembered, and smaller. But she didn’t look afraid, or even much surprised.

“Good evening, Mr. Kozelek,” she said. “Who’s your friend?”

“You know who I am,” Henrickson said.

“No,” she said, “I don’t. But I know why you’re here.”

“That should make things easy.”

She shrugged. “It does for me. I’m not telling you anything.”

“You will,” Henrickson said. There was something off about his voice. He walked straight past the woman and into the cabin, eyes raking the walls and surfaces. He yanked the phone out of the wall socket. He found the woman’s cell, knocked it to the floor, and stood on it.

“Jim,” Tom said, aghast, “this isn’t the way to go about this.”

“Go about what?” the old woman said. She was trying to seem unperturbed, but her voice was constricted and her face pinched. “What do you think he’s here for?”

“He’s a reporter,” Tom said, stepping inside. “He wants to write a story about what I saw. That’s all.”

Patrice looked at him. “God, you’re dumb,” she said.

“What do you mean?” he snapped. He was tired of feeling that everyone understood things except him.

“He’s not here to write. He’s a hunter. He’s here to kill.”

“Kill what?”

“Bear, I assume. Only thing we’ve got in these woods.”

Tom looked at Henrickson, and had to concede that his friend didn’t look like a reporter anymore. Partly it was the guns, partly the way he was yanking open the cupboards that lined the back wall of the room, rifling through the contents as though the fact that they were someone else’s possessions was of absolutely no moment. “Jim, tell me this isn’t true.”

“Mrs. Anders is dissembling, but otherwise she and I are in total agreement,” Henrickson said, without turning. “On both my intentions and your intelligence. Aha.” He pulled out a thick bundle of rope and threw it to Tom. “Tie her hands behind her back.”

“You’re kidding me,” Tom said. “I’m not doing that.”

The butt of Henrickson’s rifle whipped round in a short, clipped arc that ended with Tom’s face. He didn’t even see it coming.

He crashed backward into a kitchen unit, slipped on the
rug, dropped to the floor. He was dimly aware of Henrickson stepping over him and kicking the front door shut; then of him grabbing the old woman by the hair. He shook his head, to try to clear it. It felt like someone had hammered a screwdriver up each side of his nose.

“You may as well do it now,” he heard the woman saying, through a fog. “Because I’m not going to help you.”

Henrickson’s response was a blow that sent her across the couch. Then he was standing over Tom, holding the rope.

“We’re going to go find this thing,” he told him quietly. “And I am going to do what I came to do.”

Tom stared up at him, feeling blood pouring out of his nose and knowing why Henrickson’s voice sounded different. His accent had gone, the folksy lilt and the backwoods terms. Now he had the voice of a stranger. Tom felt as if he had never been in a room with this man before, and that anyone who had heard this voice would be likely to remember it, and remember it the rest of their life. His voice said that he knew you. That he knew you, and all about you, and all about everybody else too.

“You’re going to help me because otherwise I will make you kill her, and I don’t think you’ll enjoy doing that.”

All Tom could do was shake his head.

“You’ll do it,” Henrickson said. “After all, it won’t be the first time. Different circumstances, I’ll admit.”

“Shut up,” Tom said. The woman was staring at him now.

“Tom’s already on the board,” Henrickson told her. “Used to be a partner in a design firm down in L.A. Everything in place—cute car, cute family, regular fuckfest with one of the cute little designer girls driving the big-screen Apple Macs. One night they work late in the office and have a drink on the way home and round the corner from her apartment Tom slides a red light—can’t be
too
late back, not again—and a Porsche smacks into the passenger side. The girl dies looking like modern art. So does the little boy Tom didn’t know she was carrying inside. Tom’s just under the limit, and fortunately the Porsche driver is completely shit-faced. So Tom walks.”

“You think so?” Tom shouted. He pushed himself to his feet. He swiped his sleeve under his nose, viciously, not caring how much it hurt. “You really think I walked from it?”

“You’re alive, they’re dead,” Henrickson said. “You do the math.”

Tom started to move, but the man knew about the thought before he did. A quick movement, and the barrel of his handgun was planted squarely in the middle of Patrice’s forehead.

“I’ll make you kill her and then when we’re done I’ll set you free,” Henrickson said. “You couldn’t kill yourself last time. I doubt you’ll be able to again. I’ll let you flail for a year or two, and then I’ll come find you and put you out of your misery. Maybe. Or we can find this thing and we will photograph it and then it will escape, so far as anyone else knows. Everything will be good. You will attain the distinction and purpose you now know can’t be found in a young woman’s pants. Sarah might even take you back.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Because he’s not human,” the old woman said quietly.

Henrickson laughed shortly. “Tom—are you going to tie her fucking hands, or what?”

Tom looked at Patrice. One side of her face was red, but her eyes were clear and locked on his.

“Don’t,” she said. “Not for me. For them.”

But he looked away, and when the bundle of rope hit his chest this time, he caught it.

“WARD,
BE STILL
,
FOR
G
OD
’
S SAKE
.”

“It hurts.”

“Well, just, be cool.”

“Screw that. Cool is for teenagers. I’m old enough to admit it hurts like a motherfuck.”

I was sitting on the passenger seat with my feet outside. Nina was crouched outside the car dabbing at my shoulder with a cloth soaked in disinfectant. I had no idea where we were except that we were in the parking lot of a gas station just outside a small town whose name we didn’t know.

“It’s clean,” she said. “I think.”

I glanced across at my shoulder and saw a ragged tear across the deltoid muscle. It was bleeding still, but less than it had been for most of the fifty miles from Fresno. It hurt, however, even though I’d eaten a fistful of the strongest pain pills we could find in the market where we’d bought the cloth and disinfectant. It hurt like I was eight years old and a bully was repeatedly smacking a fist into my shoulder, so hard and so fast that the impacts blurred into one long, keening ache.

Nina was looking up at me. She looked young and worried and as if she hoped she had done something well
enough; also as if she hoped I wasn’t going to keep whining for much longer. I realized the dent in my shoulder was nothing compared to the hit she’d taken up at The Halls. I also knew I should just be thankful the bullet hadn’t landed about nine inches to the right, in my back.

“Thank you,” I said. “It does feel better.”

“Liar,” she said. She stood and looked over the roof of the car at the station, where a man with a beard was standing in the window. “We’re being watched.”

“It’s just the till monkey. Wondering if we’re going to buy gas or what. It’s okay. Not everyone is out to get us.”

“Attractive theory,” she said. “You got any proof?”

“Not really.”

“What are we going to do?”

“You’re going to have to call someone,” I said. “Tell them about Monroe.”

“They’ll know already,” she said glumly. “He’ll have had I.D. on him.”

“I don’t mean the fact,” I said. “I mean what happened. And what it means.”

“We don’t know,” she said. “Not for sure.”

“Yeah, we do.”

“I didn’t see the man who came out of the Knights and killed the cop. I’m just going on the witness statements.”

“I know. But he sure sounded a lot like the man who just tried to kill us. Down to the clothes.”

“It’s a very general description. The wage slave in there probably doesn’t look so different.”

“I don’t mean just physically similar. I also mean the kind of man who will walk into a restaurant and keep shooting—in front of witnesses—even when three people are shooting back. Don’t split the atom. I don’t think we need to look for two people here.”

“So who is he? You’ve got something on your mind again and I really wish you’d just tell me what it is.”

“We need to keep driving,” I said. “Not just because we need to get ourselves as far from that disaster as possible. Also because there’s a woman we have to see tonight and it’s a long way.”

“Where?”

“North. Get my bag for me. I’ve got the address.”

MRS. C
AMPBELL WASN
’
T HOME
.

This time I called ahead long before we reached San Francisco. There was no answer, and no machine. It’s funny how quickly you get used to the idea that houses have a memory, and liaise with strangers, and will pass on a message for you. This house wasn’t there to help. So we just drove up there instead. Nina meanwhile continued to refuse to call the FBI in L.A. They would either know about Monroe, or learn soon. She didn’t feel inclined to trust them either way. I thought this was wrong, that declaring our position and innocence as early as possible made sense. There might be one strange person wandering the halls of justice: it didn’t mean the whole organization was riddled. I couldn’t convince her. In the end we stopped discussing it. The more time I spent with Nina, the more I got the sense that there were inner defenses—a whole castle, with a moat and a keep and probably boiling oil in reserve too—that it would be hard or impossible to bust through.

The ache in my shoulder was manageable so long as I kept gobbling painkillers. More of a problem was that it started to tighten up. By the time we reached San Francisco it felt like it had been sewn on by someone who hadn’t bothered learning how it was supposed to work inside the cloth. This kept me on map-reading duty, which was probably a good division of labor. Nina drove well. Her sense of direction wasn’t so hot; the inconveniences of three-dimensional space seemed to irritate her. I wouldn’t want to see her in a Humvee. I suspect she’d just drive straight through anything in the way.

“Why now?” she said eventually. “Why wait three months before pouring it on? Okay, you were AWOL and hard to find. But they could have clipped me and John right away.”

“Assume regrouping time, I guess, after The Halls got blown up.”

“But that can’t have been all of them up there. If they’re as powerful as we think, there must be more. Do we really think the guy I saw with Monroe was one of them?”

“I do,” I said. “And that scares me.”

“Me too. But it makes it even harder to believe that they couldn’t have had us killed.”

“They sure as hell tried tonight.”

“Yes. But why not sooner?”

“You work for the FBI. If you turn up in a Dumpster, questions are going to be asked. Questions that wouldn’t go away. I could see Monroe turning it into a crusade.”

“For the good of the department, of course. But I’m still dead.”

“These people take a long view. The cabin we found near Yakima says they’ve been at this kind of thing a long time. They were going to let us sweat, on the grounds we were no real danger, and clear us up when the opportunity arose. Then everything went wide immediately after John capped this Ferillo person. He must have got hold of some huge great stick and pushed it right into their nest. They obviously had someone surveilling him after his daughter disappeared, taped him coming out of DeLong’s house. Evidently they decided to let it go, maybe DeLong was overdue for retirement anyhow, but now John’s done something big enough for them to dust it off. John’s the key to this.”

“If he doesn’t call soon I’m going to kill him myself.”

“Cool,” I said. “I’ll help.”

It was shortly after nine o’clock by the time we were getting close. I called again. Still no response. Either she wasn’t answering the phone for reasons of her own, or she wasn’t home. First didn’t make much sense. Second worried me.

Nina parked right outside a house that showed a single light, over the door. We got out and looked at the house.

“Nobody home, Ward.”

“Maybe.”

I walked up the steps and rang on the bell. It jangled inside. No lights came on. Nobody came to the door.

“I don’t like this,” I said. “Old people don’t get out much. They’re always home.”

“Maybe we should talk to the neighbors.”

I looked down at myself, then at her. Her blouse had a decent-sized splash of blood on it. The arm of my jacket was hanging on by a string and looked dark and blotched under the streetlight. “Yeah, right.”

“I see your point,” she said. “So what do we do now?”

I got out an ATM card, which still didn’t work, but which I’d never had the heart to throw away.

“Oh, great,” she said.

She turned and watched the nearby windows while I worked the card into the frame of Mrs. Campbell’s door.

Five minutes later we’d confirmed she wasn’t home. I had been half-convinced we’d find her with an ax in her head. All the rooms were empty, however, and tidy.

“So she’s out,” Nina said. “Maybe she’s just got more of a social life than you.”

We sat and waited until half past nine. Then Nina sat some more, while I paced around. Finally this took me out into the hallway, where I saw something I hadn’t seen in a while. A telephone table. One of those pieces of furniture designed to hold a phone, back in the days when being able to speak to people from afar was still something of a big deal. Next to the phone itself was a small notebook covered in a floral fabric.

A personal telephone book.

I picked it up and rifled through to the letter
D
. No names I recognized. Then, realizing I would probably have done the same, I looked under the letter
M
instead.

There it was.

I picked up the phone and dialed. It was late. Mrs. Campbell had told me Muriel had kids, but I hadn’t gathered what age. Probably I was going to get an earful even assuming she answered the phone.

“Dupree household.”

“Is that Muriel?”

“Who is this?”

“My name’s Ward Hopkins. We met a few—”

“I remember who you are. How did you get my number?”

“I’m in Mrs. Campbell’s house. It’s in her book.”

“What the hell are you doing there?”

“I need to speak to her urgently. I came to see her. She wasn’t home. I got worried and thought I should check inside.”

“Why would you be worried? Do you know something I don’t?”

“Muriel, could you just tell me: do you know where she is?”

There was a pause, and then she said, “Wait there.”

The sound of the phone became muffled. I heard her voice talking, but couldn’t make out any of the words. Then it became clear again. “She says she’ll talk to you,” Muriel said, making it clear she thought this was a mistake. “You’d better come over.”

IT
WAS A TWENTY
-
MINUTE DRIVE ACROSS TOWN
. Muriel Dupree didn’t look at all welcoming when she opened her door, but she did eventually step aside. She looked at Nina suspiciously.

“Who’s she?”

“A friend,” I said.

“She know she’s got blood on her shirt?”

“Yes,” Nina said. “It’s been a long day. Ward has it on him too.”

“He’s a man. What do you expect?”

Mrs. Dupree’s house was tidy and airy and one of the nicest decorated I’d seen in a while. Plain and simple, the house of someone who both lived and valued an orderly life. She led us down a hallway into the back, where a wide kitchen gave onto a sitting area. Mrs. Campbell was in a chair right next to the electric fire. She looked more frail than I remembered.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“Any reason she shouldn’t be?”

I glanced at Muriel and realized Mrs. Campbell meant a great deal to her. Also that, beneath the “Screw you” exterior, there was something else. Concern, certainly. Fear, perhaps.

I sat on the end of the couch. “Mrs. Campbell,” I said, “there’s something I have to ask you . . .”

“I know,” she said. “So why don’t you go ahead.”

“ . . . but why are you here?”

“Funny things been happening,” Muriel said. “Joan has been hearing strange sounds outside her house in the night. Where she lives, that’s not unknown. But then some man came to the door and was asking her a lot of questions.”

“When was this?”

“The day after you came,” Mrs. Campbell said. “It’s okay, Muriel. I’ll talk to him.”

“What did this man look like?”

“Your height. A little broader across the shoulders.”

I looked at Nina. “John. I hope so, at least. He’s a detective. He’d have been able to find out an old employee list.”

“He knew I’d worked there, that’s for sure. I didn’t know the answers to his questions, though. He went away. He was polite. But he didn’t seem like a man who would treat everyone that way.”

“What did he ask you about?”

“Same thing you’re about to. But I know the answers now.”

“When we spoke before, you told me about a family who had taken Paul in. The one where the woman had a dog that died in strange circumstances.”

“I remember.”

“Was their name Jones?”

Nina’s head jerked around to stare at me.

“No,” Mrs. Campbell said. “It was Wallace. Jones was the other family. The one who let him go when they had a baby girl.”

I felt dizzy. “How come you remember this now?”

“She had me find out,” Muriel said quietly. “After you’d gone, she called me up. First I thought she was going to be angry for me putting you in touch with her. But she wasn’t.”

“I asked Muriel to do a little detective work on my behalf,” the old woman said. “Track down a couple of my old colleagues, people who had been there back then. Found one in Florida, of course, baking herself to alligator hide. Other one in Maine. Moved back to be close to family, then the kids died ahead of her. That’s life, I guess. With three sets of memories, we could put it together.” She bit her lip. “So tell me. What has happened?”