Michael Marshall - The Straw Men

'So now what do we do?'

'I don't know.'

Bobby stood. 'I'm going to see if I can scare up some coffee. This arm is starting to hurt like a motherfucker.'

I listened to the sound of his feet disappearing down the corridor. Some part of me, unbidden and against all the evidence, had apparently been holding out hope that all of this, everything since the phone call from Mary when I was sitting on a porch in Santa Barbara, had been a mistake. Had been wrong. This part had created the dream by the swimming pool, tried to convince me that there was something worth hurrying for, that there might still be people to be saved. Now I knew that wasn't true, that there was room for no final effort. My father had a plan, of course. He always did. But the note I'd found was all that had been left of it.

My phone rang, scaring the hell out of me. The number on the screen wasn't familiar.

'Who's this?'

'Nina Baynam. Are you okay? You sound weird.'

'Kind of. What do you want?' I felt numb, and not in a mood to talk about serial killers or anything

else.

'We're in Dyersburg. Where are you?'

'34 North Batten Drive,' I said.

There was a beat before she replied. 'Could you repeat that?' Her voice now sounded odd. 'It

sounded like you said 34 North Batten Drive.'

'I did.'

'That's the address of a man called Harold Davids,' she said.

My heart did a hard double-thump. 'How the hell do you know that?'

'Just stay there,' she said. 'Be careful. We're on our way.'

The connection went dead. I turned to the door as I heard Bobby approach, but his face knocked

any words out of my mouth.

'Davids isn't here,' he said. 'He's gone.'

'Gone where?'

'Just gone. There's a door out the back.'

I ran to the front window, pulled the curtain aside. Where the big black car had been earlier, there

was now a space.

We turned Harold's house upside down. There was nothing to find — nothing that meant anything to us. Just a tidy old house full of tidy old things.

After ten minutes there was a hammering on the door downstairs.

33

Nina was still banging the door as I yanked it open. Zandt pushed straight past me and into the house, striding into the ground-floor rooms one after another. I turned to watch him go, my movements slow and vague. I felt like I was asleep, as if one dream had butt-joined into another.

'What's he doing?'

She ignored me. 'Where's Davids?'

'Gone,' I said. Her eyes were wide, with dark circles underneath. She didn't look like she'd slept in

days.

'Gone?' she shouted. 'Why on earth did you let him go?' She all but stamped her foot. Bobby emerged from the kitchen.

'We didn't,' he said. 'He just disappeared. What's it to you, anyway? How do you even know he

exists?'

She pulled a small pad out of her handbag and opened it, held it up to his face.

'The developers of The Halls are hidden behind about a million dummy corporations,' she said. 'But on the plane I tracked them, and we got close enough. What looks like the trustee company is Antiviral Global Inc., registered in the Cayman Islands. Mr Harold Davids of this address is their designated legal representative in Montana.'

'Fuck,' Bobby said, his face pale. He turned and stalked furiously back into the kitchen.

I stared at Nina. 'You've got it wrong. I've just been talking to him. To Davids. He told me … well, he told me a bunch of stuff. He knows about The Halls, yes. Certainly. But from the outside. He's not with them. He's tried to help my parents get away from these people.'

'I don't know what he told you,' Nina said. She looked up at the sound of Zandt coming out of the back room. He shook his head at her and hurried up the stairs. 'But I don't think Mr Davids is what he

seems.'

'What's Zandt looking for?'

'A body,' she said, simply. 'Hopefully not a dead one.' Her voice was slightly too flat, and I realized that beneath a hard-fought exterior, she was nearly vibrating with tension. The attempted throwaway was not convincing in the least. 'She's not going to be here. Harold is not your killer,' I said. 'He's an old man. He's…'

'Nina — you got a number for The Halls?' Bobby was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, holding the house phone.

She glanced into her notebook, flipped a page. 'We have 406-555-1689. But all you get is a recorded message and an interminable menu system. Why?'

Bobby smiled, sort of. He made a facial expression, anyway. 'Harold called that number. It's in his redial list, from twenty minutes ago. While we were in the house.'

'But…' I said. For a moment my mouth did nothing but move, without sound, as I tried to frame my objections. 'He looked freaked. You saw him. He was sitting here waiting, knowing they were going to come for him. Like they came for Mary and Ed. You saw him, for Christ's sake. You know how he looked.'

'Sure he looked frightened, Ward. But of us. Of us. He thought we knew about him. He thought we were going to whack him.'

Zandt came back down into the hallway. 'She's not here.'

Davids had seen me with a knife. He knew we had guns. But I was still at a loss. 'Why would he tell me anything, if he's with them?'

'You'd found out he was part of the Hunter's Rock group. You mentioned a video, a note. You recognized him. He didn't know how much else you knew. You could have been bluffing him. Simplest thing is to tell you the truth most of the way, and then switch it at the end.' He swore briefly but viciously, seeming to take the deception very personally.

Nina's face was a row of question marks. 'Who are the Hunter's Rock group?'

'Later,' I said. 'We've got to find Davids first.'

A cell phone rang. We all reached at once, like strung-out-six-shooters. But the call was for Zandt.

'Yeah?' he said.

'Hello, Officer,' said a voice. It was loud enough for us all to hear.

Zandt looked at Nina, talked into the phone. 'Who's that?'

'A friend,' the voice said. 'Though I admit we haven't met yet. Not my fault. You weren't good enough

to bring us together.'

Zandt was very, very still. 'Who is this?'

There was a chuckle down the line. 'I thought you'd guess. I'm The Upright Man, John.'

Nina's mouth dropped open.

'Bullshit.'

'Not bullshit. Well done on finding Wang. And for encouraging him to do the right thing. We owe you

one. He could have been an embarrassment.' Zandt's mouth was dry, and clicked when he spoke. 'If you're The Upright Man, prove it.'

Bobby and I stared at him.

'I don't have to prove anything,' the voice said. 'But I'll tell you something to your advantage. If you're

not out of that house in about two minutes, you'll be dead. All of you.'

The connection was cut.

'Out of the house,' Zandt said. 'Now.'

By the time we'd reached the street we could hear sirens approaching. A lot of sirens. I unlocked the

car and jumped into the driver's seat.

Nina stood her ground. 'I'm an FBI agent. We don't have to go anywhere.'

'Yeah, right,' Bobby said. 'We shot a couple of cops earlier. They're not dead, but we still shot them.

You want to stand in the middle of the road with your badge out, be my guest. This isn't HBO, princess. They're going to blow your fucking head off.'

The police had failed to double-up their approach, and we made it to the main drag without incident. I hung a right and put my foot down hard.

Within twenty minutes we were out of town and following the road as it slowly wound upward through the foothills. Nobody asked where I was going. Everyone knew.

Nina explained what had happened back in LA. I told them what Davids had told us. Zandt revealed, not in detail but sufficiently, his background with The Upright Man.