The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels

‘Keep hoping,’ he said, with a sly little smile. ‘So I think, what the hey, maybe I’ll poke around in Ward’s life a little.’

I stared at him, knowing that he was my friend and that this was okay, but still feeling like he’d intruded.

‘I know, I know,’ he said, holding up a placating hand. ‘I was bored, what can I tell you? I’m sorry. So anyway, I get the computers buzzing and hit a few databases. I should say straight away that I didn’t find anything I didn’t know about already. Held for questioning over a few matters over the years, blah, released through lack of evidence. Plus a witness who recanted. And the one who disappeared. The drug-dealing bust in the Big Apple in 1985, quashed when you agreed to inform on a certain student group at Columbia.’

‘They were assholes,’ I said, defensively. ‘Racist assholes. Plus one of them was sleeping with my girlfriend.’

‘Come on, man. You already told me about it and I don’t give a shit either way. You hadn’t done that, you wouldn’t have wound up in the Agency and I wouldn’t know you, which I’d regard as a bad thing. Like I say, either there’s nothing in the files that I don’t already know about, or you’ve got it hidden well. Real well. Kind of like to know which, just as a matter of interest.’

‘Not telling,’ I said. ‘A guy’s got to have some secrets.’

‘Well, Ward, you got them. I’ll give you that much.’

‘Meaning?’

‘After an hour or so I’m kind of annoyed not to have turned anything up, so I come down to checking stuff in Hunter’s Rock – and I said that with an apostrophe. Got the street address of your parents’ house, plus when they moved in and out. They took up residence there on July 9th 1956, which I believe was a Monday. Paid their taxes, did their thing. Your father earned a wage at Golson Realty, mother worked part-time in a store. Little over a decade later you were born there. Right?’

‘Right,’ I said, wondering where this was going. He shook his head.

‘Wrong. The County Hospital in Hunter’s Rock has no record of a Ward Hopkins having been born on that date.’

The world seemed to take a little sidestep. ‘Excuse me?’

‘There is also no such record at the General in Bonville, or at the James B. Nolan, or at any other hospital within a two-hundred-mile radius.’

‘There wouldn’t be. I was born in the County. In Hunter’s.’

He shook his head again, firmly. ‘No, you weren’t.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Not only am I sure, but I checked five years either side, just in case you’d misled people on your age for some reason, like vanity or not being able to count. No Ward Hopkins. No Hopkins under any name. I don’t know where you were born, my friend, but it sure as hell wasn’t Hunter’s Rock or its environs.’

I opened my mouth. Shut it again.

‘Maybe it’s no big deal,’ he said, and then looked at me shrewdly. ‘But has this got any bearing on your digitizing needs?’

‘Play it again,’ he said.

‘I honestly don’t think I can bear to, Bobby.’

He looked up at me. He was sitting in one of the hotel room’s two chairs, hunched over my laptop. I’d just played him the MPEGs, and strongly believed I’d seen them enough times for one day. Perhaps for one lifetime. ‘Trust me. What you see the first time is all there is.’

‘Okay. So play me the audio file.’

I reached across, navigated to the file and doubleclicked it.

He listened to the filtered version a few times, then stopped it himself. He nodded. ‘Sounds like “The Straw Men” all right. And you got no idea what that might mean?’

‘Only in the sense of “surrogate”, which doesn’t seem to go anywhere. You?’

He reached for his glass. We were in possession of a half-bottle of Jack Daniel’s by then. ‘Only other thing I can think of is straw purchases.’

I nodded, thought about it. He was referring to the process by which those who shouldn’t be able to buy guns – either through youth, previous convictions, or lack of a licence – are able to get hold of them. What you do is go in the gun store with a friend who has the requisite qualities. You negotiate with the dealer, find what you want. When the time comes to pay, then your friend – the straw purchaser – is the one who actually hands over the cash, who makes the buy. Of course the dealer isn’t supposed to let this happen, when he knows it’s you who’s going to wind up having the gun, but a lot of them will. A sale is a sale. Once you’re out of his store, what does he care what you’re going to do? As long as you don’t go around and shoot his mother he isn’t likely to give a damn. There are, of course, a great many honest and upstanding people who sell guns. But there are also many who feel in their hearts that every American, every man jack of us and the little ladies, too, should be equipped with a firearm at birth. Who are at ease with the fact that these small, heavy pieces of machinery are a simple means by which to halt someone’s life, who trust that guns are morally uninflected and that it’s only their users who have the power to make them bad. Users with black skins, mainly, or no-good white trash punks on drugs who we don’t serve in this gun store, no way.

‘You think that’s it?’

‘Seems unlikely,’ he admitted. ‘Though there’s been a thing about them in the last couple of years. The Feds and a few cities 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.