Michael Marshall - The Straw Men

And then her throat clicked, and a full bladder voided, the smell warm and acrid. Her eyes seemed to go from moist to dry in an instant, as if fast-forwarded. Perhaps it was the coldness of the air, but it looked as if she'd been pulled away in front of our eyes, and pulled away fast.

Bobby looked slowly up at me. I stared back. I didn't have anything to say.

'What happened?' I asked. It was the first thing I had been able to say in ten minutes. 'What the hell happened back there?'

Bobby was peering hard through the windshield, whipping his head back and forth to look up side roads as we sped past them. All were early-evening quiet. Mary's body was two miles behind us now, still lying on her porch. It would receive medical attention there faster than we could have got it to a hospital, and anyway it was dead without hope of reprieve. Both Bobby and I knew that.

He shrugged. 'She got in the way. Like I said,

someone came in over the yards. She heard something, came out. So they emptied half a gun into her. I'm sorry, man.'

'Someone comes down here to blow me up, bringing a gun with a silencer just in case. A harmless old

lady gets in the way and they whack her. Just like that.'

'These people are serious, Ward, and they really don't like you at all.'

He yanked the car round a sharp left and then we were back down in the main part of town. A fire

truck flashed past us along the main drag, heading in very much the wrong direction to get to the house.

'Where the fuck is he going?'

A car behind us honked. Bobby and I turned as one and a guy in a pickup indicated that the lights

had changed and maybe we'd like to move. Bobby pulled out, and headed down the road after the fire truck.

'The truck's going the wrong way, Bobby.'

'I told them the address just as you told me. It was good enough to get me there.'

'But why the…' I stopped. We could both now see the orange light up ahead.

Bobby abruptly pulled over, without signalling. We got another stern honk from the oldster in the pickup, who turned to stare heavily at us as he passed. Neither of us really paid him much mind. We could see now that the Best Western, or at least a small part of it, was on fire. I stared at it in frank disbelief, wondering how Dyersburg had suddenly come to reside within one of the circles of Hell.

'Get closer,' I said, faintly.

He drove slowly, and after a block left the main drag to come around at the hotel along a side street. We stopped at the top, putting us about a hundred yards from the hotel. From here we could see that the fire was relatively small, only affecting a forty-yard stretch of one wing. The hotel would survive to host another convention. Four fire trucks were already in attendance, and a fifth joined them as we watched.

The other end of the street was already thronged with people, and more were walking quickly past the car, hurrying to get a better view of the excitement. Half of the town's police force appeared to be in attendance.

'That start round about where your room was?'

I didn't even answer. I felt sick. For some reason attacking the hotel felt like more of a personal wound than the house had done. I wondered if my neighbours had been in, the people in the rooms

around me.

'Ward, this message you sent them,' Bobby said, 'what exactly did you say?'

'This is ridiculous,' I said. 'This is completely out of hand.' Then: 'What about the house? What are

they…' 'They've probably got someone up there already. Other neighbours will have called it in. And before

you even get around to wondering, your stuff is safe.'

'What stuff?'

'Well, not your clothes. Look in the back.' I turned and saw my laptop bag in the backseat of the car.

'Never assume you've got refuge,' he said, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, and watching the fire. 'I'm a prospect man myself. Keep what you need within reach. I think now would be a good time to blow Dodge.'

I wanted to go up into the hills and kill someone. Bobby read my mind, and shook his head firmly. 'Once this fire is under control they're going to find which room went up first. Chances are they'll have taken more time and made it look halfway credible. But add it to the house and you're going to leap straight to Dyersburg's Most Wanted.'

'In what fucking sense? I didn't do anything.'

'There an insurance policy on your folks' house?'

'Yes.'

'Big one?'

I sighed. 'Probably. I didn't listen. And then they'll find Mary and some bright cop will decide to dust

her down just in case. That much blood, they may get some latents. Your prints on file, Bobby?'

'You know they are.'

'Mine, too. You're right. It's time to leave.'

Twenty minutes later we were at Dyersburg airport.

16

Zandt reached Beverly Boulevard at nine in the evening. He was exhausted, and his feet hurt a good deal. He was also drunk.

At 3.00 a.m. he'd stood outside the cinema where Elyse LeBlanc had last been seen. Cinemas look strange at that time, as do stores and restaurants. In the small hours they seem odd and arbitrary and edificial — as if we are explorers who have missed, by a bare decade or two, whatever civilization brought them into being. A few hours later he watched the house where Annette Mattison spent her last evening with a friend. He recognized the woman who came out at seven o'clock, dressed in a business suit, on her way to the television mines. Zandt had interviewed Gloria Neiden on more than one occasion. She had aged a great deal in the past two years. He wondered if she was still in touch with Frances Mattison. Their daughters had visited with each other many times, and always walked the three short blocks home. It was the usual arrangement. They lived, after all, in a very nice neighbourhood, up in Dale Lawns, 90210 — and surely one of the reasons why you paid seven figures for a house was so that you could walk under the stars after dark. Zandt suspected that the relationship between the two mothers would have become strained, if not altogether dead. When Zoë Becker had mentioned Monica Williams, her voice acquired a colourless tone — though the latter could hardly be held responsible for Sarah's electing to wait out the time until her father came to pick her up. Their small community had failed. When this happens, you ask what it's for, and look for someone to blame. The people within the walls are closest.

Zandt turned away as Mrs Neiden's car swished past. It was possible she would recognize him, and to have watched for longer would have made him feel unwelcomely like another man, the one who had stood outside her house, perhaps in the same spot, two years before.

He walked on. By late morning he had been in Griffith Park, at the place where Elyse's body had been found. There was nothing to mark the space, though for a while there had been flowers and he found the remains of a broken glass jar. He stood there for a long time, looking out over the hazy city, at the places where a million people worked and slept and lied, turning rank in the urban field.

It was soon after this that he first went into a bar. And, a little later, into another. He kept walking in between and afterward, but more slowly, feeling his sense of purpose bag around the seams. He had walked these routes many times. All they had brought him was blood and breakage. He could still hear the voices that had propelled him to his feet when Nina left, the cries of the missing — but obscured by daylight and rationality they were too faint to lead him anywhere. His shirt became untucked, and when he passed other pedestrians he was aware of their scrutiny. It's claimed that you can tell the police, especially a policeman, by his eyes, a gaze that measures and assays, that judges from a position of suspicion and strength. Zandt wondered if you could also tell someone who was not a cop any more, by the look of emasculation, of having turned away. He had known this city once, known it from inside. He had walked the streets as one to whom the residents turned in times of chaos. A part of the immune system. Now he lived without this sanction. He was no longer identified, was without fame or its equivalent in function. He was just a man on the street in a city where very few people walk — and where those who did regarded him with caution. It was a habitat as real as any steppe or shaded valley, no more different to the countryside than Death Valley was to Vermont, or Kansas to the bottom of the sea. The only distinction was in the people, the smog-stained and battle-weary. All the people.