“Sure. People using plants to cure illnesses, instead of pharmaceuticals. Like, I don’t know, aromatherapy.”
“No,” Henrickson said, as he stepped over the low fence into the motel parking lot. “Different thing. People have been using plants for a long, long time. Medicine’s nothing more than a specialized form of food, right? In the 1970s they found a Neanderthal burial in northern Iraq. The body had been buried with eight different flowers, almost all of which are still used by herbalists today. The Neanderthals knew about this stuff at least sixty thousand years ago, probably a lot longer. And that’s why they’re in your bag.”
“I don’t get it. Why?”
“Because the creature you saw did come back. He came back and put this stuff where you might find it.”
Tom stopped walking. “A Neanderthal man prescribed me herbs?”
“Got it in one.” Henrickson held his car keys up and pressed a button. The lights of his Lexus flashed. “Hop in.”
“What now?”
“Get in the car, and I’ll tell you.”
Tom climbed into the passenger seat. Henrickson yanked the car around in a tight circle and took it fast onto the main road, passing Frank’s Bar and heading east.
Tom thought, but couldn’t be sure, that he saw Connelly watching them from the windows of the bar.
“Jim, where are we going?”
“To talk to someone,” the man said. “Someone who knows a lot more than they’ve been letting on.”
THE MAN SAID NOTHING ELSE ON THE HALF-HOUR journey. Tom knew where they were going long before the car turned in to the lonely road that led up into the development no one had wanted. Henrickson parked on the windy, empty road, five yards from the gateway to the Anders property. He left the engine running but killed the lights. Darkness fell like a stone.
“Wait here.”
Tom watched as the other man got out of the car and walked up ahead. By the time Henrickson was past the wooden sign it was hard to make him out. Ten minutes later he came back.
“Somebody’s home this time,” he said. His face looked cold and hard and there was wet ice in his hair. “Or isn’t hiding well enough to remember to turn out all the lights.”
He pulled the car forward and through the gate. Drove slowly down the track between the trees.
“You haven’t put your headlights back on.”
“That’s right.”
As they took the penultimate bend the lake became visible, frigid in straggly moonlight. It looked flat and eldritch, proud that nothing had changed for it, ever, that it had always been this way. Then Tom could see the dark shape of the cabin, huddled in the trees, with two small, dim rectangles of yellow light.
Henrickson pulled the car over, turned off the engine. Sat a moment, watching the house.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go. Shut your door quietly.”
“Look, Jim,” Tom said. “We can’t do this now. We should have called ahead. We can’t just turn up. Two guys appearing at her door, it’s going to scare her to death.”
Henrickson turned to him then, and did something with his mouth. It wasn’t a grin. It wasn’t a smile, even. It was similar enough to the things he had been doing with it all along, however, and it made Tom wonder, with a low, quiet dismay, whether any of them had been grins after all.
“Get out,” the man said.
Tom climbed out into the cold, squinting against the sleet. He shut his door silently, looking over at the cabin. If Henrickson was right, this woman had lied to make him look foolish. At least once, maybe twice. Of course Connelly was going to believe her instead of him, especially as he evidently hated the mere idea of Bigfoot. And through her lies, this woman had destroyed his story.
If it took a little surprise in the evening to undo that, maybe it was okay.
He turned at the sound of Henrickson opening the trunk of the car. The man pulled a large rucksack out and looped it over his back in one smooth movement. Then he leaned in again, reaching with both arms. When he straightened once more, Tom gaped at him.
“What the fuck is that?”
It was a stupid question. It was obvious what the man had slipped over his shoulder. It was a rifle. It was also obvious that the shorter, blunter thing he had in his hand was a large-caliber handgun. Neither looked like the sort of thing you saw in hunting stores. They looked like the kind of weapon you saw on the news, with plumes of smoke in the distance behind.
Henrickson closed the trunk. “The forest can be dangerous,” he said.
“It certainly is now,” Tom said. “Jesus. Look, can we leave those things in the car?”
The other man had turned and was walking toward the cabin. Suddenly very unsure about what was happening, Tom hurried after him. By the time he caught up, Henrickson had already rapped on the front door. They waited. Henrickson was just raising his hand again when he stopped, head cocked. Tom hadn’t heard anything.
There was the sound of two bolts being pulled, and then the door opened.
Patrice Anders stood inside. Beyond was a small, cozy room. She looked a little older than Tom remembered, and smaller. But she didn’t look afraid, or even much surprised.
“Good evening, Mr. Kozelek,” she said. “Who’s your friend?”
“You know who I am,” Henrickson said.
“No,” she said, “I don’t. But I know why you’re here.”
“That should make things easy.”
She shrugged. “It does for me. I’m not telling you anything.”
“You will,” Henrickson said. There was something off about his voice. He walked straight past the woman and into the cabin, eyes raking the walls and surfaces. He yanked the phone out of the wall socket. He found the woman’s cell, knocked it to the floor, and stood on it.
“Jim,” Tom said, aghast, “this isn’t the way to go about this.”
“Go about what?” the old woman said. She was trying to seem unperturbed, but her voice was constricted and her face pinched. “What do you think he’s here for?”
“He’s a reporter,” Tom said, stepping inside. “He wants to write a story about what I saw. That’s all.”
Patrice looked at him. “God, you’re dumb,” she said.
“What do you mean?” he snapped. He was tired of feeling that everyone understood things except him.
“He’s not here to write. He’s a hunter. He’s here to kill.”
“Kill what?”
“Bear, I assume. Only thing we’ve got in these woods.”
Tom looked at Henrickson, and had to concede that his friend didn’t look like a reporter anymore. Partly it was the guns, partly the way he was yanking open the cupboards that lined the back wall of the room, rifling through the contents as though the fact that they were someone else’s possessions was of absolutely no moment. “Jim, tell me this isn’t true.”
“Mrs. Anders is dissembling, but otherwise she and I are in total agreement,” Henrickson said, without turning. “On both my intentions and your intelligence. Aha.” He pulled out a thick bundle of rope and threw it to Tom. “Tie her hands behind her back.”
“You’re kidding me,” Tom said. “I’m not doing that.”
The butt of Henrickson’s rifle whipped round in a short, clipped arc that ended with Tom’s face. He didn’t even see it coming.
He crashed backward into a kitchen unit, slipped on the rug, dropped to the floor. He was dimly aware of Henrickson stepping over him and kicking the front door shut; then of him grabbing the old woman by the hair. He shook his head, to try to clear it. It felt like someone had hammered a screwdriver up each side of his nose.
“You may as well do it now,” he heard the woman saying, through a fog. “Because I’m not going to help you.”
Henrickson’s response was a blow that sent her across the couch. Then he was standing over Tom, holding the rope.
“We’re going to go find this thing,” he told him quietly. “And I am going to do what I came to do.”
Tom stared up at him, feeling blood pouring out of his nose and knowing why Henrickson’s voice sounded different. His accent had gone, the folksy lilt and the backwoods terms. Now he had the voice of a stranger. Tom felt as if he had never been in a room with this man before, and that anyone who had heard this voice would be likely to remember it, and remember it the rest of their life. His voice said that he knew you. That he knew you, and all about you, and all about everybody else too.
“You’re going to help me because otherwise I will make you kill her, and I don’t think you’ll enjoy doing that.”
All Tom could do was shake his head.
“You’ll do it,” Henrickson said. “After all, it won’t be the first time. Different circumstances, I’ll admit.”
“Shut up,” Tom said. The woman was staring at him now.
“Tom’s already on the board,” Henrickson told her. “Used to be a partner in a design firm down in L.A. Everything in place—cute car, cute family, regular fuckfest with one of the cute little designer girls driving the big-screen Apple Macs. One night they work late in the office and have a drink on the way home and round the corner from her apartment Tom slides a red light—can’t be too late back, not again—and a Porsche smacks into the passenger side. The girl dies looking like modern art. So does the little boy Tom didn’t know she was carrying inside. Tom’s just under the limit, and fortunately the Porsche driver is completely shit-faced. So Tom walks.”
“You think so?” Tom shouted. He pushed himself to his feet. He swiped his sleeve under his nose, viciously, not caring how much it hurt. “You really think I walked from it?”
“You’re alive, they’re dead,” Henrickson said. “You do the math.”
Tom started to move, but the man knew about the thought before he did. A quick movement, and the barrel of his handgun was planted squarely in the middle of Patrice’s forehead.
“I’ll make you kill her and then when we’re done I’ll set you free,” Henrickson said. “You couldn’t kill yourself last time. I doubt you’ll be able to again. I’ll let you flail for a year or two, and then I’ll come find you and put you out of your misery. Maybe. Or we can find this thing and we will photograph it and then it will escape, so far as anyone else knows. Everything will be good. You will attain the distinction and purpose you now know can’t be found in a young woman’s pants. Sarah might even take you back.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Because he’s not human,” the old woman said quietly.
Henrickson laughed shortly. “Tom—are you going to tie her fucking hands, or what?”
Tom looked at Patrice. One side of her face was red, but her eyes were clear and locked on his.
“Don’t,” she said. “Not for me. For them.”
But he looked away, and when the bundle of rope hit his chest this time, he caught it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“WARD, BE STILL, FOR GOD’S SAKE.”
“It hurts.”
“Well, just, be cool.”
“Screw that. Cool is for teenagers. I’m old enough to admit it hurts like a motherfuck.”
I was sitting on the passenger seat with my feet outside. Nina was crouched outside the car dabbing at my shoulder with a cloth soaked in disinfectant. I had no idea where we were except that we were in the parking lot of a gas station just outside a small town whose name we didn’t know.
“It’s clean,” she said. “I think.”
I glanced across at my shoulder and saw a ragged tear across the deltoid muscle. It was bleeding still, but less than it had been for most of the fifty miles from Fresno. It hurt, however, even though I’d eaten a fistful of the strongest pain pills we could find in the market where we’d bought the cloth and disinfectant. It hurt like I was eight years old and a bully was repeatedly smacking a fist into my shoulder, so hard and so fast that the impacts blurred into one long, keening ache.
Nina was looking up at me. She looked young and worried and as if she hoped she had done something well enough; also as if she hoped I wasn’t going to keep whining for much longer. I realized the dent in my shoulder was nothing compared to the hit she’d taken up at The Halls. I also knew I should just be thankful the bullet hadn’t landed about nine inches to the right, in my back.
“Thank you,” I said. “It does feel better.”
“Liar,” she said. She stood and looked over the roof of the car at the station, where a man with a beard was standing in the window. “We’re being watched.”
“It’s just the till monkey. Wondering if we’re going to buy gas or what. It’s okay. Not everyone is out to get us.”
“Attractive theory,” she said. “You got any proof?”
“Not really.”
“What are we going to do?”
“You’re going to have to call someone,” I said. “Tell them about Monroe.”
“They’ll know already,” she said glumly. “He’ll have had I.D. on him.”
“I don’t mean the fact,” I said. “I mean what happened. And what it means.”
“We don’t know,” she said. “Not for sure.”
“Yeah, we do.”
“I didn’t see the man who came out of the Knights and killed the cop. I’m just going on the witness statements.”
“I know. But he sure sounded a lot like the man who just tried to kill us. Down to the clothes.”
“It’s a very general description. The wage slave in there probably doesn’t look so different.”
“I don’t mean just physically similar. I also mean the kind of man who will walk into a restaurant and keep shooting—in front of witnesses—even when three people are shooting back. Don’t split the atom. I don’t think we need to look for two people here.”
“So who is he? You’ve got something on your mind again and I really wish you’d just tell me what it is.”
“We need to keep driving,” I said. “Not just because we need to get ourselves as far from that disaster as possible. Also because there’s a woman we have to see tonight and it’s a long way.”
“Where?”
“North. Get my bag for me. I’ve got the address.”
MRS. CAMPBELL WASN’T HOME.
This time I called ahead long before we reached San Francisco. There was no answer, and no machine. It’s funny how quickly you get used to the idea that houses have a memory, and liaise with strangers, and will pass on a message for you. This house wasn’t there to help. So we just drove up there instead. Nina meanwhile continued to refuse to call the FBI in L.A. They would either know about Monroe, or learn soon. She didn’t feel inclined to trust them either way. I thought this was wrong, that declaring our position and innocence as early as possible made sense. There might be one strange person wandering the halls of justice: it didn’t mean the whole organization was riddled. I couldn’t convince her. In the end we stopped discussing it. The more time I spent with Nina, the more I got the sense that there were inner defenses—a whole castle, with a moat and a keep and probably boiling oil in reserve too—that it would be hard or impossible to bust through.
The ache in my shoulder was manageable so long as I kept gobbling painkillers. More of a problem was that it started to tighten up. By the time we reached San Francisco it felt like it had been sewn on by someone who hadn’t bothered learning how it was supposed to work inside the cloth. This kept me on map-reading duty, which was probably a good division of labor. Nina drove well. Her sense of direction wasn’t so hot; the inconveniences of three-dimensional space seemed to irritate her. I wouldn’t want to see her in a Humvee. I suspect she’d just drive straight through anything in the way.
“Why now?” she said eventually. “Why wait three months before pouring it on? Okay, you were AWOL and hard to find. But they could have clipped me and John right away.”
“Assume regrouping time, I guess, after The Halls got blown up.”
“But that can’t have been all of them up there. If they’re as powerful as we think,
there must be more. Do we really think the guy I saw with Monroe was one of them?”
“I do,” I said. “And that scares me.”
“Me too. But it makes it even harder to believe that they couldn’t have had us killed.”
“They sure as hell tried tonight.”
“Yes. But why not sooner?”
“You work for the FBI. If you turn up in a Dumpster, questions are going to be asked. Questions that wouldn’t go away. I could see Monroe turning it into a crusade.”
“For the good of the department, of course. But I’m still dead.”
“These people take a long view. The cabin we found near Yakima says they’ve been at this kind of thing a long time. They were going to let us sweat, on the grounds we were no real danger, and clear us up when the opportunity arose. Then everything went wide immediately after John capped this Ferillo person. He must have got hold of some huge great stick and pushed it right into their nest. They obviously had someone surveilling him after his daughter disappeared, taped him coming out of DeLong’s house. Evidently they decided to let it go, maybe DeLong was overdue for retirement anyhow, but now John’s done something big enough for them to dust it off. John’s the key to this.”
“If he doesn’t call soon I’m going to kill him myself.”
“Cool,” I said. “I’ll help.”
It was shortly after nine o’clock by the time we were getting close. I called again. Still no response. Either she wasn’t answering the phone for reasons of her own, or she wasn’t home. First didn’t make much sense. Second worried me.
Nina parked right outside a house that showed a single light, over the door. We got out and looked at the house.
“Nobody home, Ward.”
“Maybe.”
I walked up the steps and rang on the bell. It jangled inside. No lights came on. Nobody came to the door.
“I don’t like this,” I said. “Old people don’t get out much. They’re always home.”
“Maybe we should talk to the neighbors.”
I looked down at myself, then at her. Her blouse had a decent-sized splash of blood on it. The arm of my jacket was hanging on by a string and looked dark and blotched under the streetlight. “Yeah, right.”
The Upright Man Page 27