Michael Marshall - The Straw Men

The lobby was mainly empty, just some couple standing over by the desk. Soft music was playing in the background. Bobby was sitting in state in the middle of a long couch, reading the local paper.

'Yo,' I mumbled, when I was standing in front of him.

He looked up. 'You look like shit, my friend.'

'And you're as annoyingly spruce as ever. What's the deal? You climb into an egg each night and emerge reborn? Or is it an exercise thing? Do tell. I want to be just like you.'

Outside the sky was cloudless and bright, and it was all I could to do to stop myself from yelping. I limped across the parking lot behind Bobby, shielding my eyes.

'Your phone's on? And juiced?'

'Yes,' I said. 'Though frankly I don't see the point. Either Lazy Ed hasn't been home, in which case we're wasting our time heading out there, or he has and doesn't want to talk.'

'You are beink very negative, Vard,' Bobby observed in a Germanic accent. 'Hand me the keys. I'll drive.'

'I feel negative,' I said. 'Good thing I've got a happy android for company. But if you use that voice again I'm going to knife you.' I tossed the keys to him.

'Stop right there.' This was said clearly and firmly, and it wasn't Bobby who was talking. We looked at each other, and then turned.

Four people were standing behind us. Two were uniformed cops, locals: one was in his late fifties and trim and lean, the other about thirty years old and a good forty inches around the gut. Off to one side stood a man in a long coat. Standing nearest to us, about ten feet away, was a slim woman in a neat suit. Of the group, she looked easily the most intimidating.

'Put your hands on the top of the car,' she said.

Bobby smiled ominously, and left his hands exactly where they were. 'This would be a joke of some kind?'

'Hands on the fucking car,' the younger cop said. He moved his hand closer to his holster, clearly

itching to use it. Or at least hold it.

'Which one of you is Ward Hopkins?' the woman asked.

'Both of us,' I said. 'Weird cloning thing.'

The young cop abruptly started walking toward us. I put a hand up at chest height, and he walked straight into it.

'Take it easy,' the woman said.

The deputy didn't say anything, but he stopped coming forward, and just glared at me.

'Okay,' I said, keeping my hand in place but not pushing with it. 'Let's not let this get out of hand. Local PD, I take it?'

'That's correct,' the woman said, flipping identification. 'They are. And I'm a federal agent. So be cool, and let's see some hands being put on that car.'

'I don't think so,' said Bobby, still resolutely underwhelmed. 'Guess what? I'm with the Company.'

The woman blinked. 'You're CIA?' she said.

'That's right, ma'am,' he said, with ironic courtesy and a hick accent. 'All we need is some boys from the navy and we could have us a parade.'

There was an awkward moment. The younger cop turned to his older colleague, who in turn raised an eyebrow at the woman. None of them looked as confident as they had a second before. In the background, the man in the coat shook his head.

I decided to let my arm drop. 'He's CIA. I'm not,' I said, electing, for once, to be helpful. 'Just a member of the general public. Called Ward Hopkins. Why are you looking for me?'

'Wait a minute,' Bobby said. He nodded at the younger cop. 'Let's see you take a few steps back, hotshot.'

'Fuck you,' the cop said, equably.

The woman was still looking at me. 'An Internet search was logged yesterday evening,' she said. 'Somebody looking for 'The Upright Man'. Traced back to your account, and to this hotel. We're looking for someone by that name.'

'Not for me?'

'Until last night I had no idea you even existed.'

'So why are you looking for The Upright Man?'

'None of your business,' the younger cop said. 'Ma'am, are you going to arrest these assholes or not?

I'm really not interested in listening to them otherwise.' 'Have it your own way,' I said. 'You can try to take us in, or you can take a walk. If the former, then,

well, you're welcome to try, but really I can't advise it.'

The older cop smiled. 'Are you threatening us, son?'

'No. I'm too gentle for my own good. But Bobby's badly socialized. There's going to be blood all

over this parking lot and none of it ours.'

Coat man spoke for the first time.

'Great,' he said, wearily. 'Six hundred miles to talk to a pair of shitheads.'

The woman ignored him. 'The Upright Man has killed at least four young women, maybe more than

that. At the moment he has one who may still be alive and we don't have very long to find her.'

Bobby stared at her, his mouth slightly open.

'What?' she said. 'Does this mean something to you?'

'You're about to be scammed, Nina,' coat man said. 'You know what spooks are like.'

Bobby came back to earth enough to close his mouth, but not enough to start a fight. The woman

looked at me.

'Tell me,' she said.

'Okay,' I said, 'It could be we need to talk.'

The older cop cleared his throat. 'Ms Baynam, I'm wondering if you really need me and Clyde any

more?'

We got a table by the window in the hotel's excuse for a coffee lounge. The room was large enough, and new-looking, but had all the atmosphere of an empty cookie jar. Bobby and I sat close to the table, with the woman the other side. The guy in the coat — who'd finally been introduced, though only as being LAPD — sat a little distance away, making it clear that in an ideal world he'd be in another state entirely. The local law had already zipped off in their cruiser to eat pancakes and swap tales of how they would have beaten us up given the chance.

I took Bobby's sheaf of paper and laid it in front of the woman.

'If you want to know why we were searching for The Upright Man,' I said, 'then this is it. Actually we've been looking for something else. But this is what we found.'

She quickly read through the three sheets of paper. When she got to the end she handed the papers

to the other guy.

'So what were you looking for?' she asked.

'A group of people called The Straw Men,' I said. 'Bobby traced a Web site that led to this.

Searching for 'The Upright Man' was the logical next step. That's all we know.'

'This is agency business?'

'No,' I said. 'It's personal.'

'There was a LINKS button at the bottom of the last sheet,' she said. 'What did that lead to?'

'What button?' I said.

'I found it after you crashed out,' Bobby said, looking sheepish. 'Hidden in a chunk of crashed Java

code. Should have spotted it earlier.'

'And where did it go?'

'Serial killers,' he said, and at that the man in the coat looked up. 'Just fan sites. Pages of stuff about

guys who kill, laboriously typed up by dweebs without the ambition to become real dangers to society.'

'Could you show me the first page again?' the woman asked.

He shook his head. 'It's gone. I checked back ' when I was done looking at fuzzy pictures of wackos.

File no longer on the server, presumably moved somewhere else.'

'You didn't bookmark the pages it linked to?'

Bobby shrugged. 'I didn't see any reason to. All I had was guys with paranoid delusions and a

hard-on for serial killers.'

'It's a leak,' the coat guy said, handing the papers back to the woman. 'Fan sites is right. That's all this is. Somehow The Delivery Boy's real name got out, and some psycho wannabe has set this shit up using his name. An interactive experience for people who want to drool over killer stats, complete with spooky moving site address. The net is full of this shit. Cannibal clubs slung up by fucks who can't earn a five-star badge working at McDonald's.'