The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels. Michael Marshall
end of the afternoon Bobby and I still constituted about a third of the clientele. I’d lightly quizzed Ed on what time Lazy usually came by, but apparently it was completely unpredictable. I thought about asking for his address, but something told me the guy wouldn’t give it up and that the question would make him suspicious. Early evening there was a rush. A whole four people came in at once. None of them was Ed.
Then at seven, something happened.
Bobby and I were playing pool again by then. He wasn’t beating me so easily by this point. Somebody had put classic Springsteen on the jukebox and it felt weirdly as if I could have been playing twenty years ago, in the days of hair gel and pushed-up sleeves. I was getting drunk enough to be verging on nostalgic for the 1980s, which is never a good sign.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the door to the bar open. Still leaning over the table, I watched to see who’d come in. I got just a glimpse. A face, pretty old. Looking right at me. And then whoever it was turned tail and went.
I shouted to Bobby, but he’d already seen. He ran straight across the floor and had crashed out the door before I’d even dropped my cue.
Outside it was dark and a car was on the move and fast. A battered old Ford, spraying gravel as it fishtailed out of the lot. Bobby was swearing fit for competition standard and I quickly saw why: some asshole had blocked us in with a big red truck. He turned, saw me. ‘Why’d he run?’
‘No idea. You see which way he went?’
‘No.’ He turned and kicked the nearest truck.
‘Get the car started.’
I ran back inside and straight up to the bar. ‘Whose is the truck?’
A guy dressed in denim raised his hand.
‘Get it the fuck out of the way or we’re going to shove it clean off the lot.’
He stared at me a moment, and then got up and went outside.
I turned to Ed. ‘That was him, right? Guy who ran?’
‘Guess he didn’t want to talk to you after all.’
‘Well that’s a shame,’ I said. ‘Because it’s going to happen regardless. I need to talk with him about old times. I’m feeling so nostalgic I could just shit. So where does he live?’
‘I ain’t telling you that.’
‘Don’t fuck with me, Ed.’
The man started to reach under the counter. I pulled my gun out and pointed it at him. ‘Don’t do that either. It isn’t worth it.’
Young Ed put his hands back in view. I was aware of the bar’s other patrons watching, and hoped none of them was in the mood for trouble. Folks can get very protective of the people who serve their beer. It’s an important bond.
‘You the kind of guy who can shoot people?’
I looked at him. ‘What do you think?’
There was a long beat, and then Ed sighed. ‘Should have known you were trouble.’
‘I’m not. I just want to talk.’
‘Out on Long Acre,’ he said. ‘Old trailer by the creek on the other side of the little woods.’
I threw down money for the beers and ran out, nearly knocking down the guy coming back from moving his truck.
Bobby had the car pointed and ready to go. Now that I knew where we were going, it sounded kind of familiar. Long Acre is a seemingly endless road that arcs out from the back of town into the hills. There aren’t many houses out that way, and the creek the man had referred to was well out beyond them, the other side of a thick stand of trees.
It took us about ten minutes. It was very dark, and Bobby was driving very fast. I couldn’t see any sign of taillights up ahead.
‘Maybe he wasn’t heading home,’ Bobby said.
‘He will sooner or later. Slow down. It’s not that far now. Plus you’re scaring me.’
Soon after that we saw the mirror surface of the creek, silver under the blue-black sky. Bobby braked like somebody hitting a wall and turned off down a barely marked track. At the end you could see the shape of an old trailer sitting in splendid isolation. There was no sign of a car.
‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Okay. Pull around where we can’t be seen from the road.’
After about half an hour I started to lose patience. If Lazy had gone some other way to make sure he wasn’t being followed, then he still would have been home by now. Bobby agreed, but put a different interpretation on what I’d said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I knew this guy a long time ago. I’m not rooting through his home.’
‘Wasn’t suggesting you did it. Come on, Ward. Minute this guy sees you, he takes to his heels. You called right. The bar in the video was to remind you of someone, and this old guy knows something.’
‘He could have mistaken me for somebody else.’
‘You’re probably a little thicker than you were back then, but it’s not like you put on a hundred pounds or changed race. He knew it was you. And for someone who’s supposed to be old, he put some distance between you pretty fast.’
I hesitated, but not for long. I’d spent a lot of time with Lazy Ed. I’d only been one of many, for sure, and doubtless there had been several generations of underage drinkers since. But I’d been hoping for a more friendly reception.
We got out of the car together and I walked with him to the door of the trailer. Bobby tricked the lock and slipped inside, and a moment later a dim light seeped out through the windows.
I sat on the step and kept watch, wondering if my parents had suspected that one day it would come to something like this. Their son, half-drunk and breaking into the trailer of an old man. I don’t like the man I have become, but then I didn’t much care for the guy I was before. I wasn’t entirely out of line, and it made sense, of a kind: the memory of playing pool with my father long ago, the way Ed had reacted on seeing him back then, was what had made me go to the bar. But it seemed to me, as I watched down the track and listened to Bobby moving about inside, that I heard my father’s voice again.
‘I wonder what you’ve become.’
Ten minutes later Bobby came back out, holding something.
‘What’s that?’ I stood up, feeling my legs ache.
‘Show you inside. You must be cold as fuck.’
Back in the car I flicked on the interior light.
‘Well,’ Bobby said. ‘Lazy Ed is getting through his twilight years with the aid of alcoholic beverages, and has gotten to the stage where he’s hiding the empties even from himself. Either that or he’s aptly nicknamed, and just can’t be fucked to take them outside. It’s a zoo in there. I couldn’t look through everything. I did, however, come upon this.’
He held out a photograph. I took it and angled it so the light fell on it. ‘Found it in a box stowed beside what I assumed must be his bed. The rest was random junk, but this caught my eye.’
The picture showed a group of five teenagers, four boys and a girl, and had been taken in poor light by someone who’d forgotten to say ‘cheese’. Only one guy, standing right in the centre, seemed to be aware that he was being immortalized. The others were glimpsed in half-profile, faces mainly in shadow. You couldn’t tell where it had been taken, but the clothes and the standard of the print said late 1950s, early 1960s.
‘That’s him,’ I said. ‘The guy in the middle.’ I felt uncomfortable holding something that was so much of someone else’s past and nothing to do with me.
‘By “him”, you mean this guy Lazy Ed.’
‘Yes. But this was taken fifty years