I nodded, and we sat quietly for a while.
'I looked it up,' Nina said, eventually. 'In the last decade there's not been a single murder in this entire county. Not a one. Now two bodies in a week, outside the same small town.'
'They got themselves someone serious.'
'Yep.'
We stayed there, drinking cooling coffee, as the world outside slowly got lighter.
Chapter 11
Meanwhile a man was still out on the road, a man who no longer had any hesitation about going where he was going.
At the end of the previous afternoon Jim Westlake had reached Petersburg, the place specified in the instructions he had been given in Key West. He had parked in the lot of a Publix supermarket on the outskirts. He got out and stretched his legs and waited until five o'clock exactly. Then he pressed and held the 1 button on the phone, which had been programmed to call a number. The identity of the number had been obscured. He supposed that had he been young and technically minded, or if he found and paid someone who was, he might be able to establish what the number was. It was not obvious how this might help, and so he had not bothered.
The phone rang three times and then was picked up.
'It's me,' Jim said. 'I'm here.'
'Good, good,' said a voice. It sounded like the older of the two men from Key West. The Forward-Thinking Boy. Of course. Always him.
'So what now? You going to give me an address?'
'You're going to have to get that for yourself.'
Jim laughed sourly. 'You been to Petersburg? It's not New York but it's no bump in the road. You want this done smartly, you're going to have to do better than that.'
'Well,' said the voice, 'here's where I misled you a little. You've got a little driving to do yet.'
'Where am I supposed to be?'
Without hesitation, the voice on the line mentioned another town. Jim was quiet. Utterly quiet.
'You still there, James?'
'Yes,' Jim said. 'And fuck you.'
'About what I thought you'd say. Which is why you're sitting where you are, rather than where you're supposed to be.'
Jim looked at his left hand, down by his side. It was trembling a little. He clenched it. 'I'm not going there,' he said.
'You are,' said the voice. 'You have to, and not just because I say so. I knew that if I told you this down in your nest in the Keys then you wouldn't do it. That would have been a mistake, because if you don't do this you're screwed. You left a loose end a long time ago. It's just come badly undone. You have to fix it, and while you're there you're going to do work for us too. It's important work and it's personal to me and you're not going to mess it up.'
Jim looked away across the lot. The supermarket flashed in the sunlight. Families went to and fro, pushing baskets empty or full. Bringing food, fetching food. Hunters of the aisles, gatherers of the low carb and shrink-wrapped.
'Okay,' he said. 'Just tell me. The truth this time.'
'Wait where you are,' the voice said. 'Further information will arrive. Then get on it. This matters to me, to us, but it's your life at stake, not mine.'
The line went dead.
Jim stood there by the van for a few minutes, and then the phone made a series of weird noises. After a brief pause it did the same thing again. The screen told him to press a particular button, so he did.
A picture came on the screen. A woman's face. He pressed another button at the prompt, and was shown another tiny photograph, of another woman. Underneath each photograph was a message. It was the same each time.
It just said KILL THEM.
•••
Lost in time. Lost in numbers. Lost in things gone by. Jim was roused again by the sound of bawling. He realized he had been standing leaning against the van for God knows how long. Just standing there, zoned out in the parking lot, staring down at a cellular phone. 'He kicked me. Mommy, he kicked me.' Jim turned his head. Across the way were two young boys, standing at the back of an SUV. The boys were maybe seven years old, and already stocky. The back of the vehicle was open wide like jaws, stuffed full of bags of brightly packaged food-like materials. Enough for a small African country for a month, you'd have thought. The kids had been left there while their mother trekked the basket back to the collection point, about fifty yards away.
Stupid. Really stupid.
The one who'd been kicked was howling and red-faced. The other kid was watching this with a concentrated expression, as if evaluating the experience. You kick, he cries. How interesting.
As he climbed up into the van and started the engine, Jim thought how, to the person overhearing it, the kicking child is nowhere near as annoying as the kicked one, the child who stands bawling, 'He kicked me, he kicked me,' over and over again. Yes of course the child who did the kicking is an asshole, and yes, he started it, and yes kicking is wrong. But it's the whining child you want to go and kick for yourself. You want to punish it for the puling self-righteousness of the wronged, for the attempt to parlay weakness into backdoor power. What the kicked kid wants is for an adult to come along and thump the kicker. He wants to do a violent deed without having done it — to receive advantage without the responsibility of action. This is the kind of kid who will grow up to sue a neighbour's ass off because he tripped on the neighbour's path, after an afternoon spent eating the neighbour's hotdogs and drinking the neighbour's beer.
Jim pulled out of the space and wound down the window. The mother was still forty yards away, on the return journey.
'Hey, kid,' Jim said.
Both children turned to look up at him. Jim spoke to the bawler. 'Either kick him back or shut the fuck up.'
The kid blinked at him, still mechanically sniffling.
'You got it? Stop fucking whining.'
The sniffle stopped dead. The kid nodded, quickly. His face was white.
'Good. Keep it that way. Or I'll come back and get you.'
Jim wound the window back up and headed out of the lot, back out of town, and onto the highway.
He drove straight through the night. Drove due west, staying in Virginia but sticking to minor roads once he was clear of Petersburg. He was on his way. Now he really had no choice.
He was going home.
Part II
The Many
Places have an effect,
for good or bad.
—David M. Smith
The Morality of Place
Chapter 12
Oz Turner took a deep breath and let it slowly out again, lips flapping like a dispirited horse. It was ten forty-five on a Monday morning in September, it was cold, and it was raining. September sucked. Mondays were The Week's Only Just Started And Already Feels Old, and the present hour was a quarter of Are We Having Fun Yet? You factored in the precipitation, which was light but determined, and you truly had a morning to forget.
From his desk against the window he looked down at Lincoln's main street with a jaundiced eye. A couple of locals walked along it, heads bent. They went into Jayne's Stores, and the street was empty again.
Hello boredom, my old friend.
He got up and shambled to the kitchenette, past two empty desks. The paper rarely saw two employees at once; a full house of three would take the outbreak of war, the arrival of space aliens, or the county fair. While Oz waited for the water he heaped four teaspoons of coffee into a cup and added a further three of sugar. His most recently ex-wife had dedicated a deal of time to ragging him over his caffeine consumption, and he still took pleasure in not having to give a crap any more. Pain in the ass that woman could be, really. Fun under the covers, of course, though as she was currently manifesting that with some other guy (and had been for three years, for the first of which she had still been married to Oz), this had turned out to be a mixed blessing. Oz had long ago decided that the world of women could be divided into shy, inhibited ones who stayed faithful and from whom you strayed; and gutsy, come-hither ones who strayed first and strayed fast and far. He'd tried both—mar
ried both, matter of fact—and neither had worked out. He hoped there might be a middle ground someplace, but allowed it might be getting late for him to find out.
He had been staring at his reflection in the kettle for five minutes—at least, he assumed it was him, though hair and beard looked far too uniformly grey, and excessively bushy for general tastes—before he realized it had boiled. Back at his desk he stared disappointedly at the screen for a while, cradling his coffee on his gut. The morning had added five hundred words to his current article, but they were no good. So the Newport Tower down on Rhode Island looked surprisingly Norse in construction. What of it? The subject was old ground. Oz's angle was The Pig-headed Blinkeredness Of The Establishment, Not To Mention The Powers That Be. It was his whole approach to life. But he was a professional, too. You can't just say the thing time and again. Even if no one ever read his section (which seemed all too possible), or skimmed it and thought it was a joke (and he knew for sure that some did), you had to do it right.
Otherwise—what was there?
He selected, erased. Started again. The next half-hour of the morning passed without too much of a fight.
•••
When he heard a thunk from outside he looked up.
A car had appeared in the street outside Jayne's. It was noticeable because it was parked nose out, a feat of bravura which would have taxed most locals well beyond their limits: also because it was a rental, big and black, with Colorado plates. Someone was standing at the front. Above average height, broad shoulders, dark hair cut very short. His face was lightly stubbled and kind of gaunt. He was looking right up at the windows of the Lincoln Ledger.
He glanced away, up the street, then down. The action had a professional look about it.
Oz leaned forward and watched, intrigued by a fanciful notion. The guy reminded him of the Terminator. Not that he was anywhere near as wide or pumped as Arnie had been in those days, nor was he dressed head to toe in black leather. Anyone like that rode into Webster County, Massachusetts, it would have been on the news by now. News that was broadcast out of a small studio a couple towns away, from a chair that Oz himself occupied for an hour a week in the dead zone from midnight until one. 'The Oz-Man's O-zone', its audience a handful of bilious insomniacs, syndication rights still very much available.
No, actually the guy was lean and compact and the resemblance came only from the way he stood; from an apparent indifference to the rain, a sense that it, and probably many other things, didn't matter to him at all.
Call me Woodward, Oz thought, or colour me Bernstein if you will: but that guy hasn't stopped for a comfort break.
He turned to grab his digital camera. It took him thirty seconds to locate the device under piles of reference material, and when he turned back, there was no one standing in the street any more.
'Oh, crap,' he muttered, peering quickly left and right up the street. Must've gone into the market after all, some passer-by needing cigarettes or a soda. Lincoln could rest easy. Any potential excitement had been averted.
Then somebody knocked on the door.
Knocked hard.
Oz turned in his chair, neck tingling. That couldn't be so. Shouldn't be, anyhow.
It happened again. Three heavy raps.
Oz stood slowly. Took a couple of steps back, to where he had a clear view of the Ledger's door. Top half was frosted glass.
A blurred shape was visible through it.
Oz waited to see if the person would knock again. Then he realized it was brighter in the office than the stairwell, and if Oz could see whoever was out there, they could sure as hell see him. No point knocking again if you know someone's already heard.
Oz squared his shoulders—which had minimal effect, but made him feel a little more bullish—and went to open the door.
The man from the street was standing on the other side.
There were beads of moisture on his long coat. He stood with his feet a little apart; solidly planted, very still, yet giving the impression of someone ready to move quickly in any direction he chose. He looked at Oz. His eyes were green and sharp.
'Are you Oswald K. Turner?'
'How did you get up here?'
'Came in the door, walked up the stairs.'
'Just opened the street door, right?'
'That's correct.'
'No. It was locked, dude.'
'I didn't notice.'
'Didn't…right. Whatever you say.' This wasn't something Oz was prepared to make an issue of. The longer he stood with this guy, the more he wondered if he was a cop. Or a soldier. Or a full-on Man in Black. Something heavy, that's for damned sure.
'Can I come in?'
Oz thought that was curiously polite of him, given he looked like a guy who was used to going pretty much where he wanted.
'Depends,' he said, warily. 'What do you actually want?'
The man reached into his jacket and pulled out a piece of paper. Held it up so Oz could see. It was an interior page from the Ledger, printed three weeks before. The article carried the Oswald K. Turner byline and was entitled 'WHEN WILL THEY TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY?'
'I want to talk about this,' the man said. 'I want you to show it to me.'
'Go out there? It's raining.'
'I'm aware of that.'
'My car's in the shop,' Oz said.
'Mine isn't.'
'There's a serious walk even when you get there. Uphill. And it's on private land. And the owner doesn't like me much.'
The man didn't say anything, merely inclined his head about five degrees and kept looking at him. Oz got the picture. They were going to go see this thing, they were going now, and they were going if it started hailing, or snowing, or raining cows.
'Are you with…somebody, or what?'
'Me?' the man smiled, kind of. He looked out of practice. 'No. I'm just an avid reader.'
'And do you have a name?'
The man looked at him coolly for a moment, as if making a judgement.
'My name is John Zandt.'
•••
The man drove in silence, speaking only to get directions. Oz kept quiet too, exercising his observation skills. Maps and books were spread across the back seat. The car had six and a half thousand miles on the clock, the journey indicator said six thousand two hundred. It was possible the hire place hadn't remembered to reset it before giving the car to this guy or some previous fellow, but Oz didn't think so. The car smelt a little of cigarette smoke, but otherwise was factory fresh. Oz thought Mr Zandt had been on the road for a while, or drove fast, and possibly both.
Oz took him up 112 and then a right onto 51C—or Old Pond Lane, as it was called. It wasn't obvious why: the road did pass a pond on the left side, but the area was full of water features and there was nothing to suggest why this one was considered worth mentioning. Oz saw the guy glance at it as they passed, and guessed he was wondering the same thing. He had no way of knowing that the man was observing a resemblance between the small lake and one in Vermont he had stood by, a little over a year before; that he was trying to remember what his life had been like then, and could not recall.
Fifteen miles up the way Oz pointed to the right again, and they started up the rough one-lane road that skirted the edge of the Robertson state forest, a near-thousand acres of trees and foothills that people went hiking in once in a while.
At the end of it was a gate. 'Going to have to park here,' Oz said. 'Do the rest on foot, like I said. It's a couple miles.'
The man nodded, killed the engine. Got out. Waited for Oz to do the same. Then locked up. Waited for Oz to lead the way.
The first few hundred yards made Oz nervous, because it involved going up what was effectively Frank Pritchard's driveway. The Pritchard farm backed into the park and was surrounded by it on three sides. Getting where they were going was a lot easier if you took this short-cut through Frank's property, ducked back onto national land, and then came back onto private property at the end. Problem was Frank, w
ho was not big on local heritage. Last time he'd seen Oz slinking around he had threatened to destroy the damned thing, with conviction, and while waving a shotgun.
They left the road without incident and dipped into the forest, where Oz soon stopped feeling he was leading the way. He had to point out the direction every now and then, but the other guy walked fifty per cent faster than Oz's usual pace, taking rises and stream beds as if it was all level ground, and before long Oz was red-faced and hot.
'Been here a while,' he panted, at the other guy's back. 'Another twenty minutes aren't going to make much difference.'
The man stopped, turned to look at him. But he did seem to walk a little more slowly after that.
Oz kept them on a rough north-east bearing up into the hills. 'Aw, crap,' he said, a little later. He stopped walking, and pointed. 'Bastard's repaired the fence.'
He rested a moment, hands on his knees. Part of him felt relieved. Where they were headed was now the other side of a new eight-foot wire fence. This meant they couldn't go on. Game over, weird guy. Been nice not knowing you.
The man walked up to the barrier, looked at it. Reached into his coat, and pulled out a small tool. In about forty-five seconds he had clipped a five-foot vertical slash in the wire.
'Oh, great,' Oz said, but the man was already climbing through.
Oz followed. What else was he going to do?
Once they were back on Pritchard's land, it wasn't far. About three hundred yards in the lee of a ridge, then a sharp left and over a small hill. The other side was a little steep, and they came down carefully. When they reached flat ground again they were faced with another very similar hillock, about six yards in front. Trees grew all around, and the undergrowth was tangled. Oz led the guy around to the right, then stopped.
'So there you are,' he said, with a touch of pride. 'There's your root cellar.'
He was about to say more, go into his spiel, but the guy held up his hand and so Oz shut up instead. The man walked closer to what they'd come to see. It wasn't anything outstanding to the naked eye, and in fact would have been easy to walk past without noticing, as people had for many, many years.
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