The Upright Man

by Michael Marshall

  “Ward, shoot him. Or I will.”

  “John—don’t you do anything.”

  I waited a beat. Then quickly moved to my left. I shouted, “Now!”

  Paul swung around and stepped back to keep Nina between him and me.

  Connelly fired. He picked his shot and planted a single round in the top of Paul’s shoulder, from his vantage slumped up on the other side of the gully.

  Paul swung around, gun out, and for a precious moment it was him I could see, just him, with nothing in the way. I fired three times. Shoulder, arm, leg.

  He turned clumsily, and tried to keep hold of Nina but she shoved out and kicked back at him, managed to wrench herself out of his grasp. Tried to run but only got a few yards before falling.

  By then I was scrambling down the wall. I fired again on the way down, hit main body mass this time and he was thrown back against the wall, gun flying out of his hand.

  I quickly got between him and John. I wasn’t sure that would make a difference. But John didn’t shoot.

  I crossed the river. I walked through the cold, flowing water to the other side. I stopped six feet short.

  Raised my arm. Pointed my gun down at him.

  Paul lay sprawled against the bottom of the wall. He was broken and bleeding heavily. It was hard to believe who he was.

  He looked up at me.

  His face was so like my own.

  CANNON BEACH

  FOUR DAYS LATER WE TOOK A TIP FROM PATRICE. We drove down to Portland and then struck out due west along Route 6. It had rained all the way down through Washington, and it rained as we drove to the coast through the Tillamook State Forest. It’s a fine forest. It has many trees. It didn’t use to. It was logged for many years and then in 1933 a massive fire, the Tillamook Burn, cut a swath right through the middle. By the end of it more than three hundred thousand acres of old-growth timber was gone, and it’s said that hot ashes fell on ships five hundred miles down the coast. But the fire was put out, eventually, and more trees were planted and encouraged to grow. By some strange quirk of fate, the forest burned again in ’39, ’45, and ’51, like a returning six-year curse. So people went out and planted a bunch more seeds: garden clubs, scouts, civic groups all spent their weekends out there doing good. Now it just looks like a regular forest. Unless you knew what had happened to it, you’d think it had always been that way. We’re like that. Sometimes.

  It didn’t really occur to either of us to pull over and take a walk. Wouldn’t have even if it hadn’t been so wet. We had seen enough trees for a while.

  NINA WOULDN’T LET ME SHOOT HIM.

  I was going to. I really was. I didn’t see what else made sense. He was the man who had killed my parents and pulled apart my life. He had killed the daughter of the man who lay on the other side of the gully, his eyes burning holes in my back. He had killed people whose names I would never learn, who might always go unaccounted for. I didn’t know whether John was right to hate me for not shooting him the last time. But I thought he would be right if I didn’t do it now.

  She came up behind me. Didn’t say anything, or try to physically stay my hand. I just felt her standing there, close enough to feel the warmth of her breath on my neck. I watched the man beneath me try to move, hands slipping feebly against the rocks like two small, pale creatures near the end of their lives. I don’t know what it is with the mad, but they’ve certainly got force of will. Maybe it’s not having the checks and balances the rest of us have, or perhaps I’m kidding myself: maybe their minds are simply clearer, unclouded with the anxieties and morality that the rest of us are swaddled with. Perhaps they have the courage to point their magical thinking at the stars. Force of will wasn’t enough for him now, however. He couldn’t move, and he had no gun, and he wasn’t going to be hurting anyone.

  I could still shoot him, I knew. Nobody there would blame me for it. Connelly was watching from the top of the gully. His face looked waxy and I could hear his breathing from where I stood, but the end of his rifle was steady enough. He looked like he might take another shot if I didn’t. I knew what John wanted. I didn’t know Phil’s position at that stage: he seemed a nice guy and not prone to hurt people, but—given that the Upright Man had shot him in the leg and held his head under the water for a spell—I suspect he’d have been with the hawks on this one.

  In the end I let my arm drop.

  “Useless fucker,” John muttered. Nina walked over to him, dropped to a crouch, and said something quietly in his ear. She kept talking a little while, then took the gun from his hand.

  She came and stood with it trained on the Upright Man while I helped Connelly down the side of the gully. He looked dreadful but no worse than I felt. Any man who could make it alone to the gully from where we’d left him was not going to be giving up the ghost easily.

  He limped down with me to where Nina said Phil was lying. He tried to help, but in the end it was mainly me who half-carried his deputy up to where the others were. There was a lot of noise involved. I propped him up against the far wall, opposite Paul. Connelly sank down to sit next to Phil, his gun firmly trained on Paul.

  I didn’t know what was going to happen next. It was still snowing. It had slackened off a little, but didn’t look like stopping. We were stuck way out in the middle of nowhere. Neither Phil nor Connelly was going to be able to go home under his own steam, and the sheriff’s radio wasn’t getting anything. John looked more fit: judging by his coat, Nina’s shot had not done much more than take a chunk out of his arm. He wouldn’t say anything to me, though. He wouldn’t even look me in the eyes.

  Nina went and fetched the old lady. I hadn’t even realized she was there. She looked about as cold as I can imagine anyone could look without actually being discovered in permafrost astride a woolly mammoth. They talked for a few moments, and then Nina went over to Connelly and asked him for his GPS device.

  “You won’t need that,” the old woman said. “I know the way.”

  Nina put it in her pocket anyway. She came over to me, rubbed my arm for a moment, then took off her coat and gave it to me.

  Then she and the old woman started to walk up the river.

  “I’ll come with you,” John said. He hauled himself up onto his feet.

  “We’re fine, thanks,” Nina said.

  “Maybe. But there are bears around here. I saw one earlier. Saw something, anyway.”

  Nina looked at me. I shrugged. I found myself a big, flat rock a couple of yards away from Paul, and watched them go.

  Two things happened in the night that I didn’t understand.

  The first was minor. I realized Phil and Connelly were talking to each other, voices low, and turned to listen.

  I heard Phil say: “You’ve always known, haven’t you?”

  “I was with your uncle that night,” Connelly said. He looked like he was about to say more, but then glanced my way and saw I was listening.

  He winked at Phil, shook his head. They didn’t talk anymore after that.

  After an hour or so they went to sleep. I didn’t know whether that was a good idea, but they were leaning close together, as warm as they were going to get. I couldn’t keep them both awake through the night. Felt so tired I couldn’t guarantee I could manage it myself. Both were breathing loudly. I’d just have to keep track of that.

  My head felt like a stone balanced on another stone. I felt like I had been running for three months and then reached the end of the track to find there was no tape there, just more of the same. Paul seemed to be unconscious now, but he was shivering hard. It occurred to me that I still had a gun in my hand. It also struck me as unlikely that Nina knew exactly how many holes he had in him. One more would most likely go unnoticed. Maybe the key to finding that finish line lay in my right hand. Perhaps shooting Paul was the only thing that was going to end anything for me.

  I got up quietly, moved a little closer.

  One shot.

  The others would wake up, but I could say he’d mo
ved.

  I knew why Nina had stopped me. I thought she didn’t want me to commit murder in cold blood. I thought also that she believed that the relatives of the people we knew the Upright Man had killed—the families of the girls who had disappeared in L.A. two years before, and any others he might eventually be tied to—had a right to more than hearing some backwoods execution had taken place, out of sight, miles away. I knew that this belief was a big part of what had kept her in her job down the years, kept her trying to put bad people away in face of the evidence and that others just popped up to take their place. We had kept The Halls secret, admittedly, but then we’d had no captive in our hands.

  In the end, it was neither of those things that made me put my gun back in my pocket. If I’m honest, I don’t know what it was.

  I stood up, took off Nina’s coat. I laid it over Paul’s body, tucked it in around the sides. His face was pure white, lips turning blue.

  I found I was crying.

  I found myself sitting down close to his head. I found myself pulling it onto my lap, where it would be warmer, and putting my arm around the other side.

  I don’t know why. I don’t understand it. I knew how many people he had killed. I knew he would have killed Nina, and John, and me. But it’s what happened.

  Connelly woke after a while, but said nothing. I slept then, slumped awkwardly back against the gully wall, a sleep ridged with shivering cramps. I slept until I was woken by a heavy sound above, and a different kind of wind.

  I opened my eyes to see Connelly and Phil standing up, supporting each other; white-lit, looking up to heaven as the stretcher was slowly lowered from the helicopter.

  I was the last to be winched up, the last to leave that cold place. My head was splitting, and I was so tired I could barely see straight. As I was pulled spiralling up into the noise and wind and billowing snow, it was all I could do to hang on.

  I looked down once, ill-advisedly, and for a strange moment, in a sweep of light, I thought I saw a small group of figures down there, in the gully, standing watching me as I was pulled into the sky. I blinked, tried to make out detail, but it was as if it wasn’t there to be seen.

  Then a swirl of snow blotted the ground out for good, and hands were pulling me into a flying metal machine.

  ONCE WE HIT THE OCEAN WE TURNED RIGHT AND headed north up the coast road. You’re not allowed to own the coast in Oregon, and so it looks wild and old and like a place strange things might happen. Yes, a while back people used to find lumps of beeswax in the sand, and farther inland, several tons in total; some did look like they had symbols on them, I gather, and a few could have been ancient Chinese. I knew this much of what Zandt had told me was true, at least, but I didn’t believe much of the rest of it. Patterns are just patterns. They don’t necessarily describe anything real.

  We didn’t know where John was now. That night he’d limped back most of the way with Patrice and Nina, not saying anything. I guess he’d been helping them out, watching their backs. A penance. Something. But when they were getting close to civilization, he disappeared. Nina called back into the forest for ten minutes, but he never called back.

  That’s the thing about that man, as Nina said later: he just will not return your calls.

  I didn’t tell her what the man with the round glasses had told me about John, and what he had done. He had probably been telling the truth, but I didn’t think it changed things a great deal. I also thought it possible that Dravecky might get another visit from him soon. I thought John should never have killed Peter Ferillo. He had crossed a bad river in doing so, and would never come back to our side.

  The remaining drive up the coast took about forty minutes. For most of this Nina sat with her feet up on the dash, looking out to sea. Just past Nehalem, her phone rang. She looked at the screen, took the call.

  “Doug,” she said, when it was over.

  “And?”

  “He didn’t die.”

  “Which?”

  “Either of them. The heroic Charles Monroe is progressing in leaps and bounds, by the sound of it. I seriously misjudged that man.”

  “No, you didn’t,” I said. “He’s just not ready for a curtain call.”

  It was good news, anyhow. Between Monroe and Doug things could be put back in place, more or less. Nina had been foot-stamping pissed to discover Doug had been dealing with John behind her back, but that was nothing in the face of the advantages it had for us. We had already been erased from what had happened in the forests north of Sheffer. That was organized with Connelly before anyone else got involved. As far as any law up there was concerned, we blew town right after the doctor had treated my shoulder. Only Connelly and his deputy went into the forest. One of the guys in the chopper was Connelly’s nephew, so they’d play ball. Connelly had our guns, to fix ballistics on the dead shooters and Paul. A handgun found in the car the Straw Men’s shooters had used would likely tie the glasses-wearing killer to the shooting of Charles Monroe. Patrice Anders would corroborate Connelly’s story. She’s a tough old bird. I got the sense she and the sheriff had some business in common that wasn’t being spoken about, something they took responsibility for. I do also wonder how he knew exactly where to head for in the forest. Whatever. Let people have their secrets, I say.

  “Where is Paul?”

  “A secure hospital in L.A. The physicians there are scratching their heads on how he pulled through.”

  I’d known, somehow, that he was still alive. Maybe he’d survive, maybe not. It was out of my hands, which was the way it should be. “God looks after children, drunks, and the criminally insane.”

  Nina smiled. “I think what’s really healing Monroe is knowing he’s got the guy he thinks of as the Delivery Boy, broken up to hell and stashed in a hospital with armed guards on all sides. Charles finally gets that case solved, and his problems are going to fade.”

  “Which means you’re okay, too, right?”

  “We’ll see.”

  Her voice was quiet. I checked the road, then glanced at her. “What?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing, really. Doug just told me something about a girl called Jean I interviewed last week. Two nights ago she went to a party up at some big house on Mulholland Drive. She’s in the hospital now with cigarette burns and a broken jaw.”

  She stared through the windshield at the road ahead, looking sad and tired. “Why are we like this?”

  I didn’t have an answer for her.

  WE GOT INTO CANNON BEACH JUST BEFORE FIVE. Drove slowly through the town, which isn’t much more than a few rows of nice wooden beach houses; a main road with a market and a couple of arty minimalls; and another street or so to the east. It was dark and still raining and off-season quiet, but at the north end of town we found a place called Dunes that looked okay. There was a lit sign saying Vacancy, which was the main thing. Judging by the empty lot, we had most of the place to ourselves.

  We got a couple of rooms and turned in.

  My room was on the third floor. It was big and had a wood fire on one wall. The whole of the far end was glass, pretty much, looking out to sea. I couldn’t see anything but darkness, but I sat at the table there anyway, and drank a little beer. On impulse I got out my laptop—Bobby’s laptop—and plugged the phone cable into the wall socket. I found myself kicking up a web browser, and typing in an address.

  A few seconds later it was on my screen. Jessica’s website. It was still there. The web guy evidently hadn’t bothered to take the site down yet. Might never bother: a few megs up on a server somewhere, who’s going to notice? It would join all the other stuff, the ephemeral memories, the words and pictures on the web. Was it immortality? No. Like the man said: immortality is about not dying. It was something, however, both better and worse than nothing.

  There was a welcome page with Jessica’s bright, smiling face. A link to the webcam page itself, which was dead. Another page where she had written about her hobbies—songwriting,
which I guess made sense of the guitar—and a few pages of specimen stills. Only one of these was seminude, and I flicked past it. It was the others that spoke. Pictures of a young woman, going about her life, watching her television and reading her magazines. The way she really had been, still there: something more than the cold body in the tray of a cabinet in an L.A. morgue. I still found it hard to rid my head of the idea that I’d seen her in the forest, but I knew it was just a trick of the mind.

  I did a little hacking and got past the browser, into the folder on the server itself. Copied the contents down onto my own computer. To keep them safe, I guess, in case the guy did ever get around to cleaning out. When I’d finished I noticed there was a text file among them. I opened it up. It was short, a few brief diary entries she’d evidently decided not to link to from the site. The feds would have had it all along, and there was certainly nothing there that would have helped. The last entry was dated three days before she died. It was about some guy called Don, who she thought maybe liked her a little, wondering whether she should call him sometime.

  I closed Bobby’s laptop and thought of him for a while, in his silent place deep in my head. It’s where they all go to: the cemeteries in our heads. Back there, behind your eyes, where you can’t see them whichever way you turn. But the things they did, the people they were, it’s all still true. It doesn’t have to be lonely in there. You can visit, from time to time.

  THE NEXT MORNING I GOT UP LATE. IT HAD stopped raining but the wind was back in force. Out of my window I could now see a long stretch of beach—gray sand, gray water, gray sky—between craggy cliffs.

  A while later Nina knocked on my door. “You up for a walk?”

  “What—because it’s such a lovely day?”

  We wandered the empty streets, grabbed a coffee or two, sniggered at bad art. Spent a few hours down on the sands, alone in all the world, sometimes together, sometimes apart. We watched big rough waves crash down and around the rocks, cheered brave birds as they wheeled hectically in the stormy chaos above. In the midafternoon the wind got so fierce and strong that you could stand with your arms outstretched and lean into it, trusting it to hold you up. So we did, as sand whirled around us and the world spun.