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

He looked around, checking out the terrain. ‘If I was going to put up a shelter, I’d do it over there.’ He pointed at an area of trees and thick brush that extended over the slope on the west side of the pond. ‘Prospect- and refuge-wise.’

I led the way round the pond, peering ahead to where Bobby had indicated. Could have been my imagination, but it did look as if an area in the middle was thicker than the rest, as if materials had been gathered and heaped up.

It was then that the first shot rang out. A sharp crack, following a whiz and then a whine.

Bobby yanked me back from the edge of the pond and started running. Another shot swished through the leaves a couple of feet above us. When we were behind the trunks I twisted my head round, trying to see where the shots were coming from.

‘What is with this guy?’

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Look over there.’

I pointed at the thicker area of undergrowth. A head was now poking out of the brush – the head of an old man, one who was nowhere near the place the shots were coming from.

‘Shit,’ Bobby said, a gun now in his hand. Two men in fatigues were running down the side toward the pond. Another man in denim was approaching from the other side.

‘That’s the guy from the bar last night,’ I said. ‘The one who boxed us in.’

The men in khaki had reached the opposite side of the pond. The larger of the two dropped to a kneeling position, and fired directly at the stand of trees: measured, unhurried shots. The other was heading fast round the other side of the pond, banking it high to get round the top. Denim man was also shooting.

‘Who the fuck are these guys?’

‘Bobby – one’s heading around toward Ed.’

‘I’m on it,’ he said. ‘Let’s have some cover.’ He sprinted off. I pulled my gun, stepped out from the side of the tree, and started firing.

The kneeling man executed a neat roll to the side and slipped behind the remains of a large fallen tree. I cut sideways through the trees. I was shooting into cold and slanting light, flickered across my face by the uprights of twisted trees, half my mind on avoiding roots so I didn’t go flying. Within ten seconds there was a cry, and the denim man spun around and fell onto his back.

Bobby was ploughing into the undergrowth ahead, firing at the guy coming down the rise, having cut up around in the high ground. The man was ignoring Bobby and me altogether, despite the fact that Bobby was firing at him; he was concentrating on shooting at Lazy Ed’s shelter.

I stopped, steadied, and fired.

The first bullet hit him in the shoulder. One from Bobby followed half a second later, and the man was punched backward against a tree. But he kept shooting, and still not at us.

I fired again, twice, getting him plumb in the chest. Bobby had stopped running too now, and three shots of his followed. The man disappeared from sight.

I took a step forward but Bobby flapped a hand back at me, indicating that I should stay where I was. He moved ahead cautiously.

‘Ed?’ I called. ‘Are you okay?’

Suddenly the man in khaki came into view again. He’d slid a little way down the hill, under cover of the undergrowth. As Bobby and I watched, astounded, he pushed himself to his knees, still holding what I now saw was a machine pistol.

Before I could think of moving, the man started firing again. He was dying in front of our eyes, but he had time to put maybe another fifteen shells into the undergrowth. He didn’t consider taking us down. It was like we weren’t even there.

Then he slumped forward onto his face and was quiet for ever.

Bobby turned on his heel and doubled back, reloading. I ran forward, kicked the dead guy over to check, and shoved my way into the undergrowth.

Right in the middle were the remains of a hide. A loose collection of weathered wood, dry brush, twisted old branches. Unless you were looking for it, you’d probably think it was natural, at most the remains of something from long ago, rather than something a man had put together for shelter because he just liked sitting out in the woods and looking down at a pond. Lying in the middle of it was Lazy Ed.

I knelt beside him and knew that he wouldn’t be leaving the forest. You couldn’t count the holes. His face was least affected, though one ear was gone and you could see the bone.

‘What’s going on, Ed?’ I said. ‘What the fuck is happening? Why is someone killing all of you?’

Ed swivelled his head an inch or so, looked up at me. It was hard to see the man I’d once slightly known, among the wrinkles and burst blood vessels.

‘Fuck you,’ he rasped, quite clearly. ‘You and your fucking family.’

‘My family is dead.’

‘Good,’ he said, and died.

There was nothing to find in the shelter. A few empty cans, a stash of tobacco, a half-full bottle of very cheap tequila. I thought about closing Ed’s eyes and then didn’t. Instead I turned round and walked back out of the bush.

By the time I reached the pond, and the body of the man in denim, Bobby was heading back down a hillock toward me.

‘Got away,’ he muttered.

‘He looked like he knew what he was doing. You okay?’

‘Yeah, except I nearly got lost on the way back.’

‘It’s a lost pond,’ I said. My hands were shaking. ‘Jesus.’

‘They dealt the play,’ he said. ‘We weren’t looking for this.’

‘I know,’ I said, overcome with the bizarreness of being back in a childhood environment, this time with a gun. ‘But what difference does that make? Someone will always be shooting somebody.’

Bobby squatted down next to the denim man’s body and felt through his pockets until he found a wallet. He flipped through it in front of me. There was no driver’s licence, no stamps, no receipts, no photos – none of the standard wallet detritus. Nothing except for about forty dollars.

‘Did you look at the other dead guy?’

‘Only for long enough to make sure he wasn’t going to start shooting again,’ I said. ‘He was wearing a vest, but I’m still impressed at how long he kept going. That guy showed real dedication to his task. Which was nothing to do with us. They could have taken us out easily. They were after Lazy Ed. We were just in the way.’

Bobby nodded. ‘There was no identification on him either,’ I said. ‘At all. I turned back the collar of his sweater, and looked in the back of his pants. No labels. They’d been cut out.’

‘It’s The Straw Men,’ he said. ‘They’re taking them out one by one.’

‘But why? And how did they find us?’

He shrugged. ‘The Fed chick did. Maybe they did it the same way. It’s their Web page: they’d have immediate notification of any access, without waiting for some hacker to intercept it. Or they could have been on the case before we were, Ward. There’s evidence that some sort of cleanup is in operation.’

He looked up at me, looking tired and pissed off with our failure. ‘Either way they got the job done. There’s nothing left for us here except trouble, and we already got enough of that.’

Without another word we started walking.

Chapter 26 (#ulink_d391f75c-cfc6-509c-8a6f-ac963104237a)

Nina had assumed Zandt would explain to her what was on his mind, but from the moment the other two guys had left, he’d clammed up. When he’d turned up at LAX in the cab, though he hadn’t been particularly friendly, he had at least seemed to be present. As soon as they’d established that the men at the Holiday Inn in Hunter’s Rock – whatever they might have been up to, and she still had questions about that – were nothing to do with The Upright Man, it was like he’d retreated again. She felt stupid about hauling them upstate, but making a mistake was better than doing nothing. She was very aware of the passage of time, aware of it as acutely as if someone was pulling her skin off her face. In her it bred a desire to talk, to try to do or say something, anything, almost as if they could vocalize a solution into existence. In Zandt it seemed to have the opposite effect. It would not be long, she believed, before he became utterly mute.