The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels. Michael Marshall
have been trying to crack down, targeting dealers who are too blatant about letting people get away with it. Huge percentage of inner-city guns get onto the streets that way, via guys who buy in bulk and then sell them to corner boys. Couple of test cases pending, and I think one of them actually went through a year ago. Can’t remember how it played. But either way I don’t get how it relates to your folks.’
‘Nor me,’ I agreed. ‘Far as I know, my father never owned a weapon. I don’t remember him ever coming down hard on the subject either way, but those in favour tend to have a well-stocked gun cabinet. Plus I just don’t see it.’
‘You looked it up?’
‘Looked it up where? The Big Book of Short Sentences?’
He rolled his eyes. ‘On the Net, of course.’
‘Christ, no.’ I like the Internet. Really, I do. Any time I need a piece of crap shareware or I want to find out the weather in Bogota or to look at a picture of a woman and a mule, I’m the first guy to get the modem humming. But as a source of information, it sucks. You got a billion pieces of data, struggling to be heard and seen and downloaded, and anything I want to know seems to get trampled underfoot in the crowd. Somehow, whenever I’m looking for something in particular, I get 404s right across the board.
‘You’re a fucking Luddite, Ward.’ He was already plugging in the phone cable. I left him to get on with it, wishing I hadn’t thrown away the cigarettes earlier in the day.
Five minutes later he shook his head. ‘I get nothing with the major search sites, nothing with the minor ones, nothing with a bunch of specialized Netcrawlers I happen to know about including some you need robust security clearance for.’
‘That’s the Web for you. The deaf and dumb oracle with amnesia.’ I made no effort to sound like I hadn’t told him so.
‘Doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. It just means that if the term does appear on a site, then it’s one that isn’t known to the search engines.’
‘Bobby, there’s no reason to believe anything will be out there. Not every single thing that ever happened is typed up there yet. Plus, it’s just a sentence. Three words. You leave a bunch of monkeys for long enough, one of them will type it a lot sooner than they’ll get around to Macbeth. But it doesn’t mean he’s going to whip up some HTML and sling it on a server with some banner ads and a hit counter – and even if he did, why should it have anything to do with what’s on the tape?’
‘You got anything better to do?’
‘Yes,’ I said, firmly. ‘The bottle’s running low and I’m tired and need a lot more to drink.’
‘We’ll do that after.’
‘After what? You already found out there’s nothing there.’
Bobby rapped his fingernails on the table for a while, squinting at the curtains. I could almost hear his brain humming. I was bored and the whiskey was making my brain feel heavy and cold. Too much new information in the last two days was making me want to forget everything I knew.
‘There must be something else in the house,’ he said eventually. ‘Something you missed.’
‘Only if it was hidden in a fucking lightbulb. I tossed the place. There’s nothing else there.’
‘Everything changes when you know what you’re looking for,’ he said. ‘You thought you were looking for another note. So that’s what you looked for. That’s the grid you had. You only happened to think about video by chance.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I thought about it because the house had been set up that way. I think my father had gone to some trouble to …’
I tailed off. Got up, rummaged in the laptop bag.
‘What?’
‘I backed up his hard disk onto a ffiz! cart. It’s the one thing I haven’t really checked.’
I sat back down in the chair next to Bobby and slotted the tiny cartridge in the machine. Soon as it was mounted I got a Find Slip onscreen and typed in ‘straw men’. Hit return. The machine chirped and whizzed for a while.
NO MATCHING ITEMS FOUND.
I tried it with ‘straw’ only. Same result.
‘Well, that’s that,’ I said. ‘The bar beckons.’ I stood, expecting him to join me. Instead he started doing something with another Find Slip. ‘What are you doing now?’
‘Getting Find to index the contents of all the text files on the disk,’ he said. ‘If this straw thing is some big deal, it would make sense that there’d be no file by that name. You’d want to be less obvious about it. But it might appear inside one of the files.’
It was a reasonable point, so I waited. The ffiz! has a fast access time, and the process only took a couple of minutes.
Then it told us: the text was still nowhere to be found.
Bobby swore. ‘Why the hell didn’t he just leave a letter or something, just telling you whatever the fuck he wanted to say?’
‘I already asked myself that question a billion times and the answer is that I don’t know. Let’s go.’
He still didn’t get up. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I know you’re doing this for me, and I’m grateful. But in the last twenty-four hours I’ve discovered either that my parents were insane and that I once had a twin or they were really insane and pretended I had. I’ve had nothing to eat in days. I stupidly had a cigarette this morning and now I want about a hundred more and it’s taking all my mental energy to resist. I’m done here. I’m going to the bar.’
He turned his head toward me, but his eyes were far away. I’d seen that look in him before. It meant he couldn’t even really hear what I was saying, and wouldn’t until he’d run his course.
‘I’ll see you there,’ I said, and left.
I remember feeling proud of something when I was young – the fact that mosquitoes didn’t bite me. If we went on holiday to the right kind of area, or I went on a school trip at the wrong time of year, I discovered that most people found themselves covered in little red bumps that itched like hell – no matter how much they futzed around with creams and sprays and nets. I didn’t. I’d get maybe one bite, on the ankle. Kind of a strange thing to be proud of, you might think, but you know how it is when you’re young. Once you come to realize that you’re not the centre of all creation, you’re so keen to find some concrete way of differentiating yourself that just about anything will do. I was the boy who didn’t get bitten by insects. Take note, ladies and gentlemen, and have a little respect: there goes No-Bite Boy, the Mosquito-Free Kid. Then, one day when I was in my late twenties, I realized I’d got it wrong. Chances were that I got bitten just as much as everybody else. The only difference was that I didn’t have as strong an allergic reaction, so I didn’t get the bumps. I was still ‘special’ – though by then I was old enough to realize this wasn’t any great distinction to have, and also to be more concerned with hoping that I wasn’t actually so different from other people – but not in the way I’d thought. I got bitten like the rest of you, and No-Bite Boy was vanquished there and then.
As I sat there in the bar and waited for Bobby, this memory was hard to dislodge. My family, my life, was something I suddenly didn’t understand. It was as if I’d noticed that I saw the same buildings in the background of my life, wherever I was, and had finally begun to wonder if it was a film set. As a matter of fact, I did generally see the same buildings. Since the Agency, I had never really gotten a mainstream existence on track, and seeing Bobby had made me realize this far more acutely than ever before. I did a little bit of this, and a little bit of that; some of this had been illegal, and some of that had been violent.