Blood Of Angels (35 page)

Most men will find ways of engaging on this quest which they can share, and their lives will follow their timeless course, still and forever in the wake of the Forward-Thinking Boy. For he will be the first to tick the penultimate box, too, that of getting a girl pregnant — thereafter putting aside forward-thinking things in return for the adult glees of earning a wage and putting up shelving and sitting alone on the back porch some evenings and drinking beer that now tastes much like water, as he stares out into the yard as if wondering what on earth the next day could be
for.

He'll often be first to return to the home plate, too, to leap over that final horizon unto death, but they never tell you that at school. Back then, first was always better: it's only later in life you realize the value of idling further down the pack. And in some senses that boy never dies, even when he winds up drunk-tangled in the metal of his car down some country lane. He is immortal, the dark seed embedded deep inside: your endless opinion of yourself. He was the person who made you understand you were not exceptional and that you would never be first in any race that other people could know about. He is gone, but you will meet him again. He will be older then, and gaunt, but some day you will realize that many of the actions you believed had been yours had actually been his. He will always be that one step ahead, knowing you better than you know yourself. Pulling strings, guiding you down dark alleys, his hand drawing new and strange and awful boxes for you to tick.

And when you have done his work and stand panting in the night, staring in a mirror that reflects a world from which you can never now escape, it will be his face you see looking back.

===OO=OOO=OO===

His phone rang suddenly, stopping him in mid-sentence.

He let it ring. He had done this once before, earlier in the day, or perhaps it had been the night — Nina hadn't been able to tell the difference between the two. Both were murky. The ringing had reminded her that her own phone might be somewhere in the van. Also that it was turned off, and she was tied up. Her phone was a dead end, but she had not forgotten about it.

There was quiet for a few minutes.

Then the phone rang again, and this time he answered. He listened for some time, and in the end said only 'Okay.'

That was the end of the conversation.

He lit another cigarette. Nina could tell immediately that there was a marked change in the ether.

'Well, he's coming,' he said. He sounded different, hard once again. 'Talk of the devil. Forward-Thinking Boy himself is on his way. And so… I'm going to do this after all.'

Nina tried to say something. Anything. Only gurgles made it past the gag. He quickly tied the blindfold back around her eyes, and everything was inky charcoal again.

The van swayed as he got up and moved past her. She heard what sounded like a drawer being opened above her head. Other, quiet noises for a while, and then he moved back in front of her. There was a dry, rasping sound.

It sounded like a Polaroid photo being taken.

A clunk as something was put down. Then he was very close to her. He took her right arm in his hands and she could hear that he was breathing quickly and this did not make her feel very safe.

Something was tied around her upper arm, tightly. She tried to kick, to jerk her body away. Then something shockingly sharp slid into the inside of her elbow. She went rigid, terrified.

Still his breathing, shallow and fast.

The sharp thing stayed in her for some time, several minutes, five, perhaps ten. Then it was pulled out again.

He stayed motionless for a few moments, standing over her, as if this was his last chance to not do something. Then he moved away.

Now what? What was he going to do now?

She heard the sound of some pieces of equipment being taken from a cupboard. She could not tell if they were knives. A clank, a screwing sound, a brief wisp of something that smelled like gas. Then the sound of a match being struck, though this time it was not followed by the smell of a cigarette.

She tried very hard to make her mind go away someplace else. To go back to the lake. To see its shiny black surface under a cloudy sky, to believe that if she could just wake up and turn her head, she would see Ward sitting next to her, a half-smile on his face, amused at the way she had cried out while she was dreaming.

She couldn't get there. It was too far away.

She had to remain here, to stay in the van with this man. She could not fail to understand what he was doing. She didn't even particularly mind the sound of her blood draining into a metallic-sounding receptacle, though the realization of how much he'd taken made her stomach turn. That was bearable.

Far worse was the smell as it cooked.

I had slept very badly. I tried hard to get some rest, because I didn't know any faster way of making it day again. Getting a room in the Holiday Inn was not difficult and I lay on a wide, flat bed and stared at the ceiling and willed it to shade away and let me float up into some place where my head did not ache with absence. It did not want to do so, and perhaps I didn't really want it to either. A period of unconsciousness could only make Nina seem further from me, time fading reality's colours like a wind blowing autumn leaves away. Some time after 2 a.m. I got up, took my phone out of my jacket, and tried her number again. There was still no answer, just the redirect to voicemail.

In the small hours I must have stumbled into something close to sleep, because I spent time in places that were not Thornton. I stood for a while on the precarious balcony of Nina's house in Malibu, waiting for her to join me. She did not, and when I went inside I discovered the outside was connected instead to the interior of the house I grew up in as a child, hundreds of miles north of Los Angeles in Hunter's Rock. The house was cold and empty and damp patches of neglect had settled into the corners of the ceilings and some of the walls. One room had a bed in it, and a telephone on the bedside table, but the phone steadfastly remained silent. I waited there for a while, thinking that if nothing else my mother might call. Then for a time I walked through trees, not like the scrubby local woods but the deep endlessness of the forests around Sheffer. It had snowed recently and there were fleet shadows behind some of the tall and silent trunks, and these shadows had minds and knew my name: but it appeared none wanted to talk. They just watched, not unkindly, as I struggled deeper and deeper.

Finally I was on the couch of an apartment I had lived in for a while in Seattle ten years before. Five storeys up, with a view over Elliot Bay, it was one of the most pleasant places I have lived. I spent my time there with a woman, the longest relationship I have ever managed. Most of the time this woman was businesslike, can-do, a scourge to the indolent and pessimistic. I had a nickname for her: Hope. Partly because she looked like the actress who played a character of that name in
thirty something,
but also because that's what she had. A hope, or confidence, that the world was a good and sensible place: that it was organized for the benefit of the right-minded and fair, and would always see them okay in the end.

But every now and then something would crash a little inside. I would see her staring into space in a bar, or down at her hands, or not looking properly at the television. Her movements would become tighter and defensive, her eyes wide. I would ask her, when I noticed, if something was on her mind. She'd say there wasn't, and I'd go back to drinking beer or chuckling at Chandler or eating potato chips — the important stuff.

But then a little later and apropos of nothing, she would ask: 'Will it be okay?'

'Will what be okay?'

'Everything,' she'd say, quietly, and I'm sure each time she was unaware we'd had this exchange before. 'Will everything be okay?'

And I'd say that it would be, and hold her a while, and steer us back to the mundane — and usually in the morning I'd wake to hear her singing in the shower. She sang like a frog, but I was glad to hear it.

We made it to ten months, then slowly spiralled apart. In the end things were not okay. Not for us, not in general.

In this world, everything is never okay. But I'm glad I didn't know that then, and I'm glad I never told her.

I woke at five thinking I heard someone in the bathroom of the suite. I half-fell off the bed, dragging myself towards the sound. But there was no one in there. Any singing I thought I'd heard must have come from some other room, or another time. I knew there was no point going back to bed so I stood under the shower for a while. The exchange of information in hotels is very efficient, and when I turned up at the hotel cafe well before opening time the people setting up there rapidly provided me with coffee. I probably did not thank them well enough. I was not yet ready to accept the solicitousness offered to the bereaved, and became monosyllabic in the face of kindness. I took my cup of coffee through the lobby doors and stood outside.

The parking lot was largely empty and looked like a winter sea, cold and grey and flat. As I stared across it, willing Nina to somehow appear, I knew that if I didn't find her then nothing would ever be okay again.

And I knew also that time was running out.

===OO=OOO=OO===

'You got her to talk once,' I said. 'Maybe you can do it again.'

John shook his head. 'I don't think so.'

I was still in the parking lot, where John had found me ten minutes before. I had drunk a good deal of coffee and smoked some cigarettes and felt a little more alive, though not necessarily in a good way. The morning was very crisp and cold and the temperature had fallen ten degrees overnight. If we'd chosen today to go digging in the woods we'd have needed pickaxes to break ground.

'I don't see how it would help us,' he added. 'That woman didn't abduct Nina.'

'Some guy told me once that investigations proceed by pushing in any direction you can, in the hope it will take you where you need to go. Oh, wait — that was
you,
right? Yesterday?'

'Do you have any idea how annoying you are?'

'People regularly try to kill me, so I guess that's a clue. John…'

'Monroe's not going to let me interview her again.'

'Why not? You got a confession out of her. Which is more than he or Reidel ever did. Or Nina, come to that.'

'I didn't get anything out of her. She elected to tell me what may or may not be the truth, for bizarre reasons of her own. And then she stopped talking. You saw what happened next. I could spend another week with her and get nothing.'

I turned away, frustrated. 'But what else do we do?'

'Nina's probably not even in Thornton any more. Why would an abductor keep her in town?'

'Because this is where he lives.'

'Assuming it's a local crazy person, yes — but there's already someone in custody who's confessed to those killings, Ward. If this is related to the Straw Men instead then Nina's most likely miles away by now. You understand that, don't you?' He looked at me seriously, and visibly made the decision to broach a subject. 'You also need to prepare yourself for the idea that she could be…'

'Don't you
fucking
say it.' Suddenly I couldn't hold anger back. 'I know damn well what she could be. Every time I shut my eyes I believe she's dead. But until I feel it and know it, she isn't.'

'Ward, I'm just trying to…'

'You're not the only guy who's lost people, you know. Come down off the fucking mountain.'

'What do you mean by that?'

'The way you look down on me and the rest of the world from the moral high ground of having lost your daughter. I get that's a bad thing, John, I really do, and I'm sorry my brother did it. But the Straw Men killed my parents, too, remember? They cut my life off at the knees and I'm not letting anyone else go. Nina is alive until I have no choice but to accept otherwise. You can gently kill her off in
your
head if that suits you, but it's not fucking happening in mine.'

John pursed his lips and looked away. Then he walked quickly back into the hotel. I'd just had time to smoke another cigarette, and calm down, when he reappeared.

'It's confused in there,' he said. He was holding a slip of paper. 'They're split three ways on a serial killer, a cop-killing and an abduction, and have no clue about any of them. Plus someone left a kiddie bomb in a mall in LA yesterday so they're twittering all over that.'

'A bomb?'

'Nothing serious, apparently, just some random kid playing with a pipe bomb instead of a gun. Anyway. Charles Monroe left the hotel very early this morning, it turns out. They wouldn't tell me where he went.'

'So I'll call his cell phone,' I said. 'I could have done that without you bothering the Feds.'

'Didn't go in there for him. I've got another idea.'

'Yeah?' I said, dubiously. 'And what's that?'

===OO=OOO=OO===

The building was a few blocks the other side of the historic district, an easy walk from the Starbucks and yet just a little down at heel. Whatever regeneration programme had converted it out of old business premises had not outlasted the early nineties. We got there just after eight and waited for ten minutes. Didn't see any cops around.

'Shouldn't they have someone posted outside?'

'I guess they're busy,' he said.

As we got out of the car John's phone rang. He answered it and listened for a while.

'No,' he said, quietly. 'It wasn't me.' He listened some more. 'The further the better. Don't tell the local cops anything. Don't even call them. And don't go home or to the office without checking with me first.'

He ended the call and stared out of the window a moment, biting his lip.

'Who was that?'

'That site with the missing pictures? Oz Turner runs it. The pictures aren't there because his server has been wiped. Yesterday some suspicious-looking Hispanic guy turned up at his office looking for him. Luckily Oz was feeling paranoid and hadn't gone to work. Last night he stayed with a friend. This morning he goes back home and finds his back door is missing, along with all of his files and his computer.'