The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels. Michael Marshall
a big fuss about animal rights the whole time but had the finest collection of shoes in the whole school, the vast majority of them made out of things that had once been able to move about under their own steam and not just because they were strapped around her pretty little feet.
After he’d let her drink this time, he replaced the cover again and went away. During the following two hours Sarah had been completely lucid, which was one of the things that worried her about what had happened next. She knew she had been lucid because she had been thinking about escaping. Not thinking about actually doing it. She seldom imagined that any more, although for a while it had occupied most of her waking thoughts. At first she had pictured suddenly finding the strength to burst up from beneath the floor, like some person who’d been buried too soon and was real pissed at everyone. Then it had been the idea of talking to the man, charming him – she was charming, she knew that; there were boys at school, had been boys, who hung on her every word, not to mention the waiter in the Broadway Deli they’d had one time who came back to the table to check on them, like, far more often than had been strictly necessary, and on this occasion, for once, it hadn’t been Sian Williams’s attention that one of the penis people was trying to catch – or discussing it rationally with him, or finally even just ordering him to let her out. Each of these had been tried and proved laughably ineffective. In the end it had been fantasies of her father just coming and finding her. She still thought about this sometimes, but not as often as she once had.
Anyway, then she had heard something coming into the room above her. At first she thought it was the man, but then she realized it could not be. It had far too many feet. These feet had walked round and round the room and crisscrossed back and forth directly over her head. Then they had stopped directly above her. There had been sounds like laughter, high-pitched sometimes, but also deep and ragged. It moved back and forth for a while, making unpleasant noises, like grunting and a strange bark, and bits of its body had thudded and other parts had slid with a kind of heavy rasp. Finally a moan, but it didn’t sound like it was coming from just one throat, but from several at once, as if the creature had more than one mouth.
It had been still for a while after that, and then it had gone.
Sarah lay with her eyes wide open. This, she knew, was a bad development. Very bad. That had not been the man, or if it had, then he had changed into something. The thing she had heard was what she had most feared, and now it had come in daylight and was no longer biding its time. There could be no doubt.
It had to have been Nokkon Wud himself.
Nina left the house early, leaving a note saying she’d call. Zandt spent the morning pacing around the patio. Each morning he woke it was less likely that Sarah Becker was still alive. Knowing this did not open any doors.
He went over the theory he’d presented to Nina, and was unable to find fault with it. He knew it was largely speculation, and understood that he had his own reasons for clinging to the idea. If the man he had killed had been responsible for the abduction of the girls, had snatched them to hand them on to someone he knew would kill them, Zandt believed he would find a way of coming to terms with having killed him. The last two years of solitude had taught Zandt one thing, and taught it well: If you can live with yourself, the opinions of others can be withstood. He was aware that The Upright Man probably thought the same, but that didn’t change the fact.
Heavy coffee intake and the view gradually turned his hangover into a generic malaise that he could ignore. The kinks in his neck and back from a night on the couch had gone. The sea could do that for you, even at this distance.
At midday he had spiralled indoors in search of food. Nothing in the fridge. Nothing in the cupboards or the freezer. Zandt didn’t think he’d met a woman who didn’t even have a small pack of cookies in the house, or some bread in the freezer, ready for toasting. It seemed most women would live on toast, if they had the chance. At a loss, he found himself wandering around the living room, looking at the materials on the bookshelves. There were books on serial crimes, both popular and academic; collections of papers on forensic psychology; reams of photocopied case notes, all in folders, organized by state – an outright illegality. A few novels, none of them recent, and most written by people called Harris and Thompson and Connelly and King. Very little that wasn’t concerned with the dark side of human behaviour. It looked familiar, from the afternoons he had spent in the house in 1999, hours during which criminology had been the last thing on his mind. He had made his peace with this a long time ago. Jennifer had never found out, and the affair had affected neither what he felt for her nor the outcome of their marriage.
He took down one of the folders of case notes and absently flicked though it. The first section detailed the activities of a man called Gary Johnson, who had raped and murdered six elderly women in Louisiana in the mid-nineties. A note clipped to the front page recorded that Johnson was currently serving six life sentences in a prison Zandt knew would be a hell on earth: a dungeon full of dangerous men whose small seams of affection were usually reserved for their elderly mothers. It would be a miracle, in fact, if Johnson was still alive. One for the good guys. The next section held information about a case in Florida that, at the time of the most recent entries, had been ongoing. Seven young men missing.
One for the killers. One of many.
He took down another folder.
Two hours later he was sitting in the middle of the floor, surrounded by paper, when there was a knock at the door. He lifted his head, confused. It took another few raps before he realized what the sound was.
He opened the door to find a short man with bad hair standing outside. Behind him was a car that had once been gracious.
‘Cab,’ the man said.
‘I didn’t order a cab.’
‘I know you didn’t. The lady ordered it. She said for me to come here, pick you up. Take you. Everything very fast. At all times.’
‘What lady?’ He felt fuzzy, head full of what he’d been reading. Something within it was pulling at him.
The man grunted impatiently and rooted in his pocket. He pulled out a mangled piece of paper and angled it towards Zandt as he read it. ‘Nina is the lady. She say to tell you to hurry. You maybe found something, or she found something, a righteous man – I don’t understand that part. But we go now.’
‘Where?’
‘The airport, man. She said I do this very fast and she give me triple fare, and I need this money so can we leave now, for please?’
‘Wait here,’ Zandt said. He turned and went back inside. He picked up the phone and dialled Nina’s cell phone.
After two rings she answered. There was a lot of background noise, the hectoring, muffled sound of a voice on a public address system.
‘What’s going on?’ he said.
‘Are you in the cab?’
Her voice was excited, and for some reason he found this irritating. ‘No. What are you doing at LAX?’
‘I got a call from the guy I had monitoring the Web. We got a hit on “The Upright Man”.’
‘It’s three words, Nina. It could be an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs. And presumably the Feds are already on the case.’
‘It wasn’t a Fed trace,’ she admitted, annoyed. ‘I did it independently.’
‘Right,’ Zandt said. ‘Figures.’
‘He logged the IP address of the computer that made the search, and hacked out the access line of the call. Come on, John. It’s the first time this has come up in two years. I never handed in the note you got. As far as the world at large is concerned, he’s still called The Delivery Boy.’
There was an explosion of noise from the handset, as someone bellowed another announcement at the other end.