We Are Here

by Michael Marshall

  The figure stopped dead and turned.

  It was a woman.

  Slim and tall with thick, dark hair and strong features, eyes the gray end of blue.

  She stared at me like a cornered animal, body tensed for flight. Kristina faltered ten feet away on the other side, seeing the same as me and not knowing what to do.

  Disbarred from throwing myself at the person and tackling her to the ground, I hesitated.

  It was enough. The woman darted away from us and across the street with disconcerting speed.

  I lunged across the street just as the lights went green. Kristina got stuck, so I left her to it and ran. On the other side of the avenue I slipped on the wet curb and went careering across the sidewalk. By the time I got my balance, the woman was half a block down the avenue, headed back the way we’d just come, looking like she was going to take the turn onto 16th street.

  I ran after her. She’d gotten a head start, but I’m pretty fit and was gathering speed fast. I hurtled around the corner and onto 16th, confident that somewhere along its hundred-yard stretch I’d be able to catch her.

  I got twenty yards down the street before realizing I couldn’t see her anymore. I kept moving, looking both ways, at passing doorways, even up at first-floor windows, convinced I was somehow just being dumb.

  By halfway along I knew it wasn’t so. The street was deserted but for a man at the bottom of one of the redbrick staircases I’d noticed a couple of nights before. He was middle-aged and dressed in a brown corduroy suit and watching me with an amused expression.

  When I got closer I realized that he was wearing a priest’s collar. I stopped running.

  “Is everything okay?” His voice was calm and friendly.

  I tried to catch my breath, looking back and forth up the street. “Did you just see somebody?”

  He raised one eyebrow eloquently.

  “A woman,” I said. “Long coat. Must have come past here about a minute before I did.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve just this moment come out. Is something wrong?”

  “No,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

  I saw a winded-looking Kristina turning onto the street, and walked irritably away from the priest.

  Kris was panting. “Any sign?”

  “No,” I said. “She vanished.”

  “But it was a woman, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “That changes things, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So now what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Chapter 14

  When David walked into Kendricks at a quarter of five, he realized how long it had been since he’d gone to a bar outside Rockbridge’s downtown area. Bars downtown make an effort. There are napkins with logos, the staff were perky, and high chairs are available. They downplay the alcohol side of things and pitch themselves as no big deal, a place you can go as part of a perfectly sane existence and enjoy an afternoon from which you will not emerge on all fours or married to someone deplorable.

  Bars outside the city limits are different. Plenty are decent businesses who chose their position on the basis of zoning, convenience to the highway, or any number of reasonable criteria—including the one that says this is where the bar’s always been and who knows why or cares, and look, do you want a beer or not, pal. Their clientele will be more varied, however, and many of these people (and bars) aren’t going to a lot of trouble to hide the bottom line: they’re here because they don’t need to be anyplace else and because liquor is served and they want a big old glass of it, right now, with a peace-and-quiet chaser.

  Situated just outside Rockbridge by Route 74, Kendricks was firmly in the latter camp. It had been in business forty years and had an unusually large metal sign over it that once sported an apostrophe before the “S,” but it blew down long ago and nobody had given enough of a crap to do anything about it, including Ryan Kendrick himself. The rusted punctuation mark was believed to still be around someplace, possibly in the overgrown creek that ran along the back of the parking lot. Once in a while the more intrepid sort of drunkard might amuse himself by having a look for it before lurching home. Kendrick died in 2008, following a short, bare-knuckle fight with lung cancer, and after a couple of years during which the bar seemed to change hands almost nightly, it had found its level once more, settling back into bleary, boozy equilibrium. Battered furniture, a pair of battered pool tables, a battered wooden bar, and some pretty battered regulars—these last in low numbers and staking out the corners with their backs to the door. Music played in the background, not too loud. Some guy earnestly advertised something or other on the TV screen above the bar, pointlessly, the sound off.

  David tried to remember the last time he’d been in the place. It had to be five or six years, soon after he started seeing Dawn. Kendrick himself had still been alive, though a shell of the hulking bad-ass he’d once been. It had been a sketchy bar then. It was a sketchy bar now.

  David got a beer from a barman who looked like he’d just received bad news about his dog. He took it to a table in the darkest corner and sat with his back to the door. It was unlikely he’d see anyone he knew, but the drinking-in-the-afternoon look was one he’d prefer to avoid. He hadn’t wanted alcohol at all, but the barman didn’t look like he’d respond positively to a request for a low-fat latte, extra shot or not.

  David took a cautious sip of the beer and looked at a poster for a long-ago gig on the wall. Why was he even here? After a long night without sleep, he wasn’t sure. However hard he’d tried to work, his mind kept returning to the change left on their top step. For some reason that was working at him even more than the matchbook. It reminded him of something, but he didn’t know what. He kept trying to push it out of his head. It kept coming back. Each time it returned it felt as if someone was gripping his guts a little tighter in their fist.

  He’d decided that he would come here and sit for half an hour. Dawn had a staff meeting and wouldn’t be back until nine, so that was covered. He had the matchbook in his pocket and intended to leave it on the table when he went, along with any notion that there was something he was failing to remember.

  If you spend your life trying to make things mean something, it can be hard to stop when you get up from your desk at the end of the workday. That was all this was. Some unexplained change. A few scratch marks. Big deal.

  In twenty-five minutes he was walking away.

  “Hello, David.”

  David looked up, heart thumping. A man was standing over the table. He was lean and wearing jeans and a white shirt under a dark coat. His skin was tan, chin stubbled, and he had sharp blue eyes.

  It was the man David had seen in Penn Station. The man who’d followed him. Seeing him again was like hearing a phone ring in the dead of night.

  “Who …”

  “Is this chair free?”

  David stared dumbly up at him. The man grinned back, a little too wide. “But then—are any of us truly free?”

  “What?”

  “You used to say that. It was funny.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  The man sat in the chair opposite. “It’ll come.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to see you, of course.”

  David put the matchbook on the table. “I bumped into you in New York. It was an accident. I saw you again at the train station. That’s all I know.”

  “No. That’s all you remember.”

  “Look, is this some kind of scam? Because—”

  The man held a finger up to his lips. “Don’t talk so much. You’ll learn more that way. And it’ll look less weird while you remember how things are done.”

  Despite himself, David lowered his voice. “What are you talking about? What things?”

  The man picked up David’s beer and took an unhurried sip, before placing the glass back exactly where it had been on the table.

  David star
ed at him. “Are you kidding me?”

  The man settled back and folded his hands behind his head. “Look around, friend.”

  David did so. The barman was watching an advert for a barbecue set. The other drinkers were staring into their glasses or space or, in the case of one throwback, reading a paperback novel.

  “I didn’t choose five o’clock by accident,” the man said. “Afternoon shift’s wandered home or too drunk to care. The evening crowd isn’t here yet. In the meantime, everyone’s giving each other plenty of space.”

  “So?”

  “Nobody saw what I did. So it didn’t happen. Nobody sees, nobody knows, right? Does that ring a bell?”

  David swallowed. It did, though he didn’t know why. “How did you find out where I live?”

  “I saw the train you left the city on. ’Course that wouldn’t have led me to this bump in the road, except I also overheard your wife mention somewhere called Rockbridge. It wasn’t hard and I’m not dumb. I usually get what I want. You should remember that.”

  David felt the hand tighten around his guts—this time far worse than before, as if long fingernails were digging in. “I’m going to leave now.”

  “Don’t. We’ve got a chance here, David. We can be friends again. That almost never happens.”

  David tried to sound calm and firm. “Look, I don’t have much money. I don’t have anything you might want.”

  “You’re so wrong,” the man said, leaning forward earnestly. “Just being here like this, seeing Dawn … you have no idea of how much that means. And she’s wonderful. You did well, my friend. Congratulations.”

  David stared, chilled by the way the man had casually dropped his wife’s name. “This is going to stop,” he said. “Now. Or I’m walking out of here and going straight to the—”

  There was a rasping noise.

  The man swore and pulled a cheap cell phone out of his jacket, the disposable type that comes with prepaid credit and no contract. The kind, David gathered from watching cop shows, that are called “burners” and are favored by the criminal fraternity because they’re easy to come by and dispose of. Was that what this guy was? Part of a group who’d singled him out for a complex shakedown—some real-world version of an e-mail phishing scam?

  “I have to take this,” the man said. He looked torn. The phone vibrated again. “You’ll stay?”

  His tone made David realize this encounter was more inexplicable than he’d realized. There was no threat in it, rather a kind of entreaty.

  The phone rasped once more and the man got up and walked away, gesturing for David to stay where he was.

  When he heard the door to the bar open and shut, David let out a shuddering breath. His hands were shaking. What should he do? There was only one way out of the place and if the guy was in the lot he’d be bound to see him. If David walked, would he follow? If so, what then? The man hadn’t done anything overtly threatening. If anything, his mood had been one of off-kilter good cheer—albeit the kind of dark cheer that sometimes escalates into pulling out a concealed weapon.

  David wanted to put distance between them. Leaving the bar was the only way. Walking out—and then talking to the cops. He’d seen too many movies where the hero kept quiet about some whacked-out situation for too long. He wasn’t going to be that guy—especially now that he remembered Dawn saying Angela had thought she’d seen David outside the school gates.

  She hadn’t seen David, but perhaps she had seen someone. A man who’d just dropped Dawn’s name into the conversation as if he knew her.

  Or as if he had been watching her.

  There was a coughing sound. David quickly turned, convinced the man had somehow slipped back in without him hearing. It was a man in his midfifties, however, heavy in the gut, with a broad, fleshy face. He stood a few yards behind David’s chair, beer in hand.

  David realized it was George, the guy who worked at Bedloe’s

  Insurance up the street from his old office at It’s Media.

  “Hey,” the man said.

  David nodded cautiously. “George, right?”

  “You’re the writer guy. Friend of Talia’s.”

  “Yes.” One out of two, at least. It was the first time someone had referred to him as “the” or even “a” writer. It didn’t feel a close fit. Meanwhile, the other man kept looking oddly at him.

  “You okay, George?”

  “It’s been a strange week,” the man muttered.

  David got the sense that George was a couple beers down already. Also that what he probably meant was the story he’d told Talia, about the hitchhiker who disappeared. David didn’t know whether he was supposed to know about that. He was only a friend of a friend, after all.

  “Huh,” he said, in the hope this would cover it.

  “You here alone?”

  “Yes,” David said, fighting the impulse to glance toward the door. Right now that was the truth. It occurred to him this might even be some kind of come-on, but if so he had no idea of how to respond.

  “Really?”

  “You see anyone?”

  “No. Thought I did, though. Couple minutes ago. Sitting opposite you.”

  The back of David’s neck twitched.

  “Didn’t see him leave,” George went on thoughtfully, as if to himself. “Did you?”

  “I’m not here with anyone,” David repeated.

  George looked at the chair opposite a moment longer. “Yeah, well, okay. Sorry to have bothered you.”

  He wandered back toward the far corner. David waited until George settled at a table there, and then he got up and left the bar, taking care not to catch anyone’s eye.

  Outside it was dark with storm clouds and the wind was picking up. Cars and trucks stood at discreet distances from one another, like people awaiting the results of blood tests that would not reflect well on their lifestyles.

  Down at the far end of the building David saw a shadow beneath the dim corner light. After a moment he heard a voice, too. It sounded like someone on the phone.

  He marched toward it. The man must have heard him approaching, because he slipped around the corner into deeper shadow, presumably to protect his privacy. This was the final straw for David, who felt that his privacy had been plenty invaded.

  “I don’t know what you want,” he said loudly as he rounded the corner to confront the man. “But if I see you again, I’m going straight to the—”

  There was nobody there. The side of the bar was a graveyard for broken wooden crates. There were a few battered and rusting gas canisters and some old sacking too, tangled in the long grass like brown ghosts.

  Nothing—and nobody—else.

  The man must have slipped along the side.

  David picked his way through the debris and grass toward the back, where the lot shaded into the edges of the creek that ran past the rear wall of the bar. Holding on to the wall to stop himself from sliding into muddy water, he looked along it.

  No one there. David stared at absence, his guts now screwed so tight that it felt like he was going to vomit, then made his way back to the parking lot.

  He noticed a shape drawn in the dusty gravel, a rectangle that tapered toward the bottom. It didn’t mean anything to him.

  He dragged his feet through it nonetheless, until the shape was completely gone.

  Chapter 15

  “Because I’m an idiot,” David said.

  “Roger that, but you’re always an idiot. This doesn’t explain the specific omission today.”

  They were in the kitchen and the discussion concerned supper. He always looked after what they ate. It was his job. Hunter-gather words, and also food. Today he’d forgotten. That was because of going to Kendricks, of course, which wasn’t something he wanted to discuss. When he got back, he’d gone to his study to work but wound up reading more of Talia’s book instead. It was easier than working on his own. Easier than thinking, too, and easier and better than trying to work out whether to go to the cops. Doing thi
s had been Plan A for the entire walk home, but it ran out of steam when he got indoors. What could he tell them? That a stranger was bugging him in a way that seemed too genial and unobtrusive to count as stalking? That there was an excessive familiarity in his manner that made David feel not attacked but guilty, as if the situation was his responsibility? That David believed this stranger had subsequently vanished out of a parking lot (yes, Officer, I had been drinking, just a little bit)?

  No. Talking to the cops wasn’t going to work, at least not yet, and the real reason was that David couldn’t seem to think clearly about what had happened. The encounter felt intangible. Or like a day-dream. Something he’d made up. Nothing real.

  But not unreal, either.

  Eventually lack of sleep and an unaccustomed afternoon beer caught up with him, and he’d nodded off at his desk, waking at the sound of Dawn getting back to the house after her meeting. He felt bleary and caught out even though she wasn’t giving him a hard time.

  She laughed at the look on his face. “No biggie, little boy lost. We can rustle up something from the cupboards, I’m sure. How did the day go otherwise?”

  He was momentarily wary. “In what way?”

  “The writing, darling. Remember that?”

  “I’m not a writer, babe. I just sit up there to keep the computer company.”

  She smiled, but it looked a little forced. “Actually it’s going a lot better,” he said. Apart from that afternoon, this was broadly true. Although he hadn’t written many actual words, the phantom hitchhiker thing still felt like it might pay off. “Got a new idea.”

  “That’s great,” she said, much more warmly. “Don’t suppose you’ll tell me what it is?”

  He shook his head, as she’d known he would.

  “I’m very proud of you, you know,” she said.

  Taken aback by her seriousness, he struggled for a response. “Well, let’s see how the first one—”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not going to wait and see how it sells. You wrote it, and it’s great, and it’s going to be published. Everything else is out of your hands. I’m proud of what you do, not for what fate throws your way.”