The Lonely Dead

MICHAEL MARSHALL THE LONELY DEAD

About the author:

Michael Marshall is a novelist and screenwriter. Before writing the bestselling The Straw Men he had already established a successful writing career under the name Michael Marshall Smith. His groundbreaking first novel, Only Forward, won the Philip K. Dick and August Derleth awards; its critically acclaimed successors, Spares and One of Us, have both been optioned by major Hollywood studios. He lives in North London with his wife.

MICHAEL MARSHALL

THE LONELY DEAD

(The Upright Man)

The second book in the Straw Men series

Version 1.0

British Fantasy Society (nominee)

Copyright © 2004 by Michael Marshall

ISBN 1-84395-665-9

For my father

Yakima

We met in the parking lot of the Yakima mall. Yakima is a small city in central Washington State. It's a city in the sense that it calls itself one; it has a mall in that you can go indoors and shop without views of the outside reminding you where you are. In three hours only two people had entered the mall. Both were teenagers wearing football shirts. Neither looked as if they had the hard cash to turn the place's fortunes around. They came out later, carrying nothing. Huge canvas signs around the third storey advertised retail space at knock-down rates. The big corner spot at street level was vacant, which is never a good sign.

I sat in the car drinking Americanos I fetched from a Seattle's Best across the way. The coffee shop was the only business on the Avenue that appeared to believe in itself: the rest looked like they'd stashed their For Lease sign in a safe place, looking to save a few bucks come the inevitable. I could almost hear the sound of a mayor sitting behind a big shiny desk, drumming his fingers, quietly losing his mind as he felt the town snooze around him. It would survive — even this dead zone needed somewhere to host a Les Schwab and make up the national Burger King quota — but it was unlikely to make anyone rich again. If that was what you had in mind, you'd go up to Seattle, or down to Portland. What you did in Yakima I had no idea.

When John Zandt arrived he was driving a big red GMC, dirty and none too new. The passenger side looked like a bunch of cows had rammed it and nearly won. He pulled around the lot until he was level with my pristine Ford Generic. We wound our windows down. The air was cold.

'Hey, Ward. You ask them for that at the desk?' he said. 'Should've got them to spray 'Not From Around Here' across the hood.'

'You're unbelievably late,' I said. 'So fuck you. My place wasn't running a shit-kicker's special. Evidently you got lucky.'

'Stole it from the airport lot,' he admitted. 'So let's go.'

I got out of my car, leaving the keys in the ignition. I figured Hertz could absorb the loss. They had before. Neither they nor anyone else could trace me from the ID I had used in Spokane. When I climbed in the pickup I saw two handguns lying on the floor. I picked one up, looked it over, put it in a pocket.

'How far is it?'

'About an hour,' Zandt said. 'And then we have to walk.'

He pulled out of the lot and down the Avenue, past the grey new mall which had helped put the curse on the one I'd been watching without looking any too prosperous itself. Took a right to follow 82 down through the sprawl that became Union Gap, then buildings by a road, and then just a road. At Toppenish he took 97's abrupt swerve to the south west. There were no more towns now until an eight-point burg called Goldendale, fifty miles away. Below that, it was another twenty miles to one of the Columbia River's least attractive stretches, upstream of The Dalles dam. I'd spent time with a talkative barman the night before as I sat drinking in Rooney's Lounge, the excuse for a bar offered by Yakima's biggest hotel. I knew we were now in the Yakama Reservation and that there was nothing for eighty miles either side of the truck, the indigenous population having clumped together in a couple of small, battered settlements in the north. I knew that the place called Union Gap had once been called Yakima instead, until the rail company forced the Indians to move their capital a few miles north, reluctance worn down by the offer of free land, bribes dividing the tribe in a way hunger or cold winters never had. I knew also that just upriver from The Dalles was a spot where once had thundered the Celilo Falls, a raging, sacred shelf of water where men had harvested salmon for ten thousand years. It was now silent, buried beneath the bloated waters of the dam. Money had changed hands, some time before, but the Yakama were still waiting for their loss to be recognized in more meaningful ways. It seemed likely they'd be waiting a while longer, possibly until the end of time.

Like most people, I didn't really know what to do with this information. The barman was Native American but had short blond hair spiked like a 1980s pop star, and was wearing quite a lot of make-up. I hadn't known what to make of that either.

Zandt had a map taped to the dashboard. The edges were ragged and there were smears of grease down the front. It looked like it had spent a long time in pockets and grimy hands. A small cross had been marked in the centre of a big empty patch, near a wandering blue line called Dry Creek.

'Where did this come from?'

'A call logged on one of the Rat-On-A-Friend lines. The note was heading straight for the trash — the guy was very drunk and didn't make much sense — but Nina grabbed it out of the slush pile.'

'Why?'

'Because it sounded a long way outside normal and she knows that doesn't mean it's not true.'

'So how'd you find the guy?'

'Those 800 numbers aren't quite as anonymous as the FBI make out. Nina had the call reverse-tracked to a bar in South Dakota. I went there and waited until he showed up again. It was not sudden.'

'And?'

'The informant's name is Joseph. Grew up in Harrah, a bump a few miles west of Yakima. You know this is Reservation land?'

'Too bleak to be anything else. We were so generous to these guys, it's weird they don't love us to bits.'

'This is where they lived. Ward. Not our fault it looks like the moon. Joseph was visiting family and took a walk in the wilds here a week ago. A long walk. He ended up being out a few nights. I should note that his appearance suggests Joseph drinks a great deal on a regular basis. The insides of his arms look bad too. But he was definite about where he'd been.'

'Why didn't he tell the regular law?'

'I don't think he's had a good time with the local police. That's why he was in South Dakota.'

'But he saw your cute new goatee and decided to trust you right there and then?'

Zandt looked away. 'Hoped you hadn't noticed.'

'Man, I noticed. And I haven't even begun ripping the piss out of it.'

'Nina likes it.'

'Probably likes leather purses, too. Doesn't mean you got to wear one on your head. So where is this Joseph guy now?'

'Gone. He has two hundred dollars in his pocket and I don't think he'll be talking to anyone. He was spooked enough already. He thought he'd seen a spirit or something.' Zandt shook his head, as if he found that kind of thing too stupid for words.

I looked away before he could see the expression on my face.

— «» — «» — «»—

Half an hour out of Toppenish we could indeed have been on another planet. Maybe once there had been a reason to come here. There wasn't now. No trees; only sharp hills and shallow canyons and small shrubs and grasses pale amongst the remnants of last week's snow. The rocks were grey and flat brown and looked like an icy watercolour hung in someone else's hallway. The sky had gone a deeper grey and clouds lay on the hills and in valleys like white moss. The only thing that drew the eye was the road.

Zandt kept his eyes on the clock. After another ten miles he started driving more slowly and watching along the side. Eventually he saw what he was looking for and pulled over.