The Upright Man (30 page)

Then he died. There was no signal anyway.

TWO
HUNDRED FEET NEARER HEAVEN
, P
ATRICE
glared dully at the man.

“Did you have to do that?”

“Yes. I don’t expect you to understand.”

“You going to shove me over too?”

“One human is enough. And you’ve got a job to do.”

“This place is all I know and I can’t go any farther. You want a bear, you’re going to have to go find one by yourself.”

The man shook his head. “I don’t believe you. If it comes to it, I’ll make you tell me where they live. But for the time being we’re going back down to the stream, where Tom saw his ‘bear’, and we’re going to sit and wait.”

“You think they’re just going to wander by?”

“No. But they mean a lot to you, which makes me think you might mean something to them. When they know you’re there, they may choose to visit.”

“Like I’m some big mother bear? Right. My own kids haven’t visited in eighteen months.”

“Patrice, you’re beginning to piss me off with this denial.”

“They’ll know I’m not alone.”

“Of course they will. Especially when I start doing things to you. On short acquaintance I already suspect you’ll be good at keeping quiet, but they’ll hear your discomfort in other ways. And they’ll come.”

She looked at the ground, dismayed.

“I thought someone would come,” she said eventually. “But I thought it would just be a hunter. Some asshole who wanted to make his fortune or get on
The Tonight Show.
But you’re not one of those.”

“No,” he said. “I’m not.”

“So what are you?”

“My name is Paul,” he said. “Sometimes I’m called the Upright Man. I’m just doing what needs to be done.”

I
HAD SLEPT FOR A LITTLE WHILE
. I
NCREDIBLE
,
YOU
might think, but just as the guilty will sometimes nod off in a holding cell, the spastic tension of their lives momentarily resolved into an incarceration they can no longer flee, so you’re largely absolved of action when you’re securely tied to a chair.

Once I woke, I couldn’t get back there. It was worse being awake. It left me free to think, and also to attempt to escape. I tried rocking the chair, using my back to pull the legs off the floor. When a rash movement nearly tipped the whole lot straight over forward—gateway to a smashed face and broken neck—I retired from the race. Screw that. I’m not Jackie Chan.

Doing nothing was worst of all, however. I watched the curtain get lighter still, heard the sounds of a world waking up outside: gravel under tires, distant half-second bursts of laughter, clangs and tweets and coughs. I felt a pain in my lower back gradually get more and more acute, and my shoulder begin to glow like fire. I stared at the bedside clock and yearned for each number to increment just by one unit—sometimes I thought it must have broken, so long did it take—but when they did, nothing changed.

It was a long, long wait until 12:51, when Nina finally
kicked the door down, accompanied by two men I’d never seen before.

“HE
SURE AS HELL LOOKED LIKE YOU
,”
THE BIG ONE
admitted. I had been told he was called Sheriff Connelly. The other one was called Phil and he was young and game and sandy-haired. “But I can see you’re not the same.”

“His name is Paul.”

“Mr. Kozelek was overheard calling him Jim.”

“He may be using the name Henrickson.”

Connelly nodded, slowly. “Yes, that would be him.”

Phil’s eyes were like saucers. “He’s a
serial
killer?”

“And then some.”

We were in the police station. We had coffee. My hands were still numb and I had problems holding the cup. Nina wasn’t faring any better. The motel maid had found her tied up, and fetched the police before thinking to untie her. Her face was pale and she looked exhausted and thin. I wanted to find John Zandt and punch his head more than once, and not just for the previous night.

In half an hour we had given the cops a very limited account of what had happened and what we knew. In this version it had been the Upright Man who had tied us up, rather than John. Nina had made it clear she was a federal agent, and managed to dissuade the head cop from calling it in. For now. A lady doctor with a nice smile had looked us over and put a bandage over the open stripe across my shoulder, and then gone away. My eyes felt dry and scratchy and wide, and the light in the room seemed very bright.

Phil shook his head. “Holy crap.”

“So what’s he doing here in Sheffer?” Connelly said. “And where has he gone?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But . . .” I glanced at Nina. “He said some weird things last night. Things about sacrifice. He seems to be on some kind of weird purification thing. He’s already murdered everyone from his past, though, so I can’t think who might be next on the list. Unless it’s something to do with the people who he used to work for.”

Connelly was looking right over my shoulder, a strange look on his face.

“Mr. Kozelek spent some time in the woods,” he said. “He came back somewhat disheveled, and claiming he’d seen some things.”

“What kind of thing?” Nina asked.

“Said he’d seen a Bigfoot.”

I was surprised into a laugh. “Right.”

Connelly smiled tightly. “Exactly. It was a bear, of course. But this brother of yours spent a lot of time with Mr. Kozelek, and I can’t see why he’d do that unless Kozelek’s claim was of interest to him. Can you think of any reason why that might be?”

I couldn’t. I shook my head.

Connelly looked away, bit his lip. “Phil. Give Mrs. Anders a call for me, would you?”

“Why . . .”

“Just do it. Number’s 4931.”

The younger policeman grabbed a phone and punched in the number. Let it ring for a while, and shook his head. “No answer.”

“Try her cell.” He reeled off that number too. The deputy tried it, waited, and again shook his head. The sheriff bit his lip thoughtfully. “You seen her around town this morning?”

“No.”

“Me neither.” Connelly stood up. “And I mentioned her name last night. I think we’d better go take a look-see. Phil—get some coats and gloves for these people. See if we got any boots in the right size too.”

“Sure.”

“Also go to the cabinet and get us some guns.”

“Which ones?”

Connelly looked at me, and I nodded.

“The big ones.”

We walked quickly out to the lot behind the station to find it had started to rain. Neither policeman seemed to notice. If you live in the Northwest, rain is evidently business as usual. Connelly pointed us to one vehicle, and his deputy to another.

“Don’t be trying to get there ahead of me,” he told him. “Just stick behind me and follow, you hear?”

Nina and I climbed into the backseats. Connelly got in the front and closed the door. He started the engine, then turned in his seat to look back at us.

“Funny thing,” he said. “I saw Henrickson and Kozelek leave town around eight-thirty last night, which is when I ran his registration. Checked in the motel lot later. No sign of the car. But then you get here in the small hours, and he’s around to tie you people up.”

We didn’t say anything.

Connelly sighed. “That’s what I thought. This other guy—he going to be a problem to us?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“He with you or with them?”

“He’s with nobody.”

“Everything else you told me was true?”

Nina replied. “Mostly.”

Connelly faced front and put the car in gear. “Great. I am so glad you people came to town.”

He pulled quickly around the lot and onto the wet blacktop of the main road, waited for his deputy to catch up, and then sped off up the road. Later I heard that two minutes after the patrol cars set off, a woman in Izzy’s coffee shop saw a car come around from the back of a bar called Big Frank’s, and follow us out of town.

I
SPENT THE NEXT FIFTEEN MINUTES TRYING TO RUB
feeling back into my hands. Nina did the same. I wanted to tell her more of what John had said, but it didn’t seem the right time. Connelly took us fast along a road that had very few other cars on it. Though it was only a little after two, the sky was trying hard to make it look later. The rain stopped, but not in a good way. It was getting colder.

We took a turnoff just past a coffee hut, onto a narrow road that didn’t seem to have a name. We’d only been on it thirty seconds when the deputy’s voice came crackling over the radio.

“Chief,” he said, “you missed the turn. Cascade Falls is back up—”

“Just keep your eyes on the road and follow me,” Connelly said. “We’re going a different way.”

He kept driving for a lot longer than I expected. From what I had gathered, the woman we were going to visit lived in a development not too far off the main road. This road didn’t look like it was going anywhere. After twenty minutes it narrowed to a single lane and he dropped speed because of the snow still on it. Tall trees grew right up to the sides, and there were no little signs saying the local Kiwanis were proudly sponsoring the road’s upkeep. Still he kept driving. I glanced through the rear windshield once in a while and saw Connelly’s deputy doggedly hanging on our tail. He kept a decent stopping distance but was still close enough for me to make out the puzzlement in his face.

Then Connelly slowed, for no reason I could see. He was peering out the right-hand side of the car. I glanced at Nina.

“Sheriff—are you sure you know where you’re going?”

“I am,” he said. “Matter of fact, we’re here.”

He killed the engine and climbed out. When Nina and I were standing by the side of the road, the place we were in seemed even more remote. Bushes and trees stopped you from being able to see very far on either side, and the ground was carpeted with unbroken snow. The road petered out completely about fifty yards ahead.

Phil had parked right behind us. “Chief, where are we?”

“End of the old service road,” he said. He pointed into the trees over my shoulder. “You see?”

If you looked hard, you could just make out the shape of a ruined building, hidden among trees about ten yards away.

“Okay,” I said. “Why?”

Connelly slung his gun over his back and started walking.

“I talked to Mrs. Anders couple nights ago,” he said. “And she told me she’d not been truthful when she said where she’d found Mr. Kozelek’s stuff. She thought he didn’t seem like a man quite in his right mind, and didn’t want him going back out there again. She gave me an
indication of where it was. If Henrickson’s got her, which I guess he has, then he’ll make her take him there.”

“Is it close?”

“No,” he said, turning off the road and heading into the forest. I saw there was an area ahead where the trees were thinner on the ground, and looked a little younger. An old logging road, I guessed, now overgrown. “Not as such. This will get us some of the way. Then it’s a hard walk.”

SO
FAR AS
N
INA AND
I
WERE CONCERNED THE
walking got hard pretty much immediately. We just seemed to go up and up. After an hour there was no longer any sign we were on a track. I didn’t really notice it go. The trees around us were huge and thick now, and the way was steep. I’m no kind of hiker, as I’d told Zandt, and was finding it tough. With the snow on the ground it was difficult to tell what was underneath. Sometimes it was rocks, sometimes you’d step somewhere that looked dependable and without warning find yourself up to your knees. It started getting darker, partly because of the wall-to-wall cloud. It still wasn’t raining. It had been cold when we started out, but I soon began to look back on that as a halcyon period of balmy comfort. If Kozelek had spent two days out in this, I was amazed he’d come back alive. I was also amazed at the dedication of the pioneers who’d forged roads across this landscape. The thing about us is we always want to be on the other side. We bring our saws and trucks and sweat and make it so. Turn your back, though, and it comes creeping home again, and it creeps fast.

“You okay?”

“More or less,” I said. Nina and I were walking together, a couple yards back from the two cops. “You?”

“I guess. Unbelievably cold.”

And tired, and hungry. I called out to the sheriff. “Are we nearly there yet?”

“No,” he said, without turning. “About halfway.”

“Christ,” Nina said quietly. “I hate the outdoors. It sucks.”

We kept on walking. I quietly told Nina more of what
John had said the night before. She concurred that it sounded as though he’d lost his mind. It’s funny, though. First time you hear something, it sounds outlandish and broken and like it doesn’t make sense. But once it’s been in your head awhile it’s as if the other thoughts in there wriggle out of the way to give it some room. The stuff about serial murder and a curdled sacrificial instinct was easiest to accommodate. As a theory it made as much sense as any. I found it harder to believe that any anomalous rumor about my country could be laid at the Straw Men’s feet. There were lots of things about them that took them outside normal human sense, however. So who knew?

After a while we stopped talking, mainly because we ran out of breath. Phil looked to be struggling too, but Connelly kept up an even pace. It was loud, the sound of four pairs of boots in the snow, four rhythms of panting breath. The combination of tiredness, sleeplessness, and the semi-constant white in front of my eyes began to have a hypnotic effect. I stopped thinking, seeing only the next step, which rock to head for; feeling the rises and dips and smelling pine needles and bark in the shockingly clean air. My face began to lose elasticity, feeling numb when I rubbed it, and when I blinked there was a flash in front of my eyes. I stumbled every once in a while, and Nina did too.

“Stop.”

When Connelly spoke it was low and quiet and intent.

I was pulled out of a reverie; jerked my head up and stopped dead. “What? Are we there?”

He turned around to face us, but didn’t reply. Just squinted into the forest back the way we’d come, over to our left. After the walking, the silence was very loud, and my ears sang.

“What did you hear?” Nina asked.

Connelly was silent for another twenty seconds. “Nothing,” he said eventually. “Thought I saw something. Looked back to see if you two were bearing up and I thought I saw a shadow back there, about forty yards over to the side.”

“Lot of shadows,” I said. “It’s getting dark.”

“Maybe,” he said. He looked at his deputy. “Our friends
here know another party who might be interested in Henrickson. Seems possible he might be in these parts too.”