I got up quietly, moved a little closer.
One shot.
The others would wake up, but I could say he moved.
I knew why Nina had stopped me. I thought she didn't want me to commit murder in cold blood. I thought also that she believed that the relatives of the people we knew the Upright Man had killed — the families of the girls who had disappeared in LA two years before, and any others he might eventually be tied to — had a right to more than hearing some backwoods execution had taken place, out of sight, miles away. I knew that this belief was a big part of what had kept her in her job down the years, kept her trying to put bad people away in face of the evidence that others just popped up to take their place. We had kept The Halls secret, admittedly, but then we'd had no captive in our hands.
In the end, it was neither of those things that made me lower the gun. If I'm honest, I don't know what it was.
I stood up, took off Nina's coat. I laid it over Paul's body, tucked it in around the sides. His face was pure white, lips turning blue.
I found I was crying.
I found myself sitting down close to his head. I found myself pulling it onto my lap, where it would be warmer, and putting my arm around the other side.
I don't know why. I don't understand it. I knew how many people he had killed. I knew he would have killed Nina, and John, and me. But it's what happened.
Connolly woke after a while, but said nothing. I slept then, slumped awkwardly back against the gully wall, a sleep ridged with shivered cramps. I slept until I was woken by a heavy sound above, and a different kind of wind.
I opened my eyes to see Connolly and Phil standing up, supporting each other; white-lit, looking up to heaven as the stretcher was slowly lowered from the helicopter.
I was the last to be winched up, the last to leave that cold place. My head was splitting, and I was so tired I could barely see straight. As I was pulled spiralling up into the noise and wind and billowing snow, it was all I could do to hang on.
I looked down once, ill-advisedly, and for a strange moment, in a sweep of light, I thought I saw a small group of figures down there, in the gully, standing watching me as I was pulled into the sky. I blinked, tried to make out detail, but it was as if it wasn't there to be seen.
Then a swirl of snow blotted the ground out for good, and hands were pulling me into a flying metal machine.
— «» — «» — «»—
Once we hit the ocean we turned right and headed north up the coast road. You're not allowed to own the coast in Oregon, and so it looks wild and old and like a place strange things might happen. Yes, a while back people used to find lumps of beeswax in the sand, and further inland, several tons in total; some looked like they had symbols on them, I gather, and a few could have been ancient Chinese. I knew this much of what Zandt had told me was true, at least, but I didn't believe much of the rest of it. Patterns are just patterns. They don't necessarily describe anything real.
We didn't know where John was now. That night he'd limped back most of the way with Patrice and Nina, not saying anything. I guess he'd been helping them out, watching their backs. A penance. Something. But when they were getting close to civilization, he disappeared. Nina called back into the forest for ten minutes, but he never called back.
That's the thing about that man, as Nina said later: he just will not return your calls.
I didn't tell her what the man with the round glasses had told me about John, and what he had done. He had probably been telling the truth, but I didn't think it changed things a great deal. I also thought it possible that Dravecky might get another visit from him soon. I thought John should never have killed Peter Ferillo. He had crossed a bad river in doing so, and would never come back to our side.
The remaining drive up the coast took about forty minutes. For most of this Nina sat with her feet up on the dash, looking out to sea. Just past Nehalem, her phone rang. She looked at the screen, took the call.
'Doug,' she said, when it was over.
'And?'
'He didn't die.'
'Who?'
'Either of them. The heroic Charles Monroe is progressing in leaps and bounds, by the sound of it. I seriously misjudged that man.'
'No you didn't,' I said. 'He's just not ready for a curtain call.'
It was good news, anyhow. Between Monroe and Doug things could be put back in place. Nina had been foot-stamping pissed to discover Doug had been dealing with John behind her back, but that was nothing in the face of the advantages it had for us. We had already been erased from what happened in the forests north of Sheffer. That was organized with Connolly before anyone else got involved. As far as any law up there was concerned, we blew town right after the doctor had treated my shoulder. Only Connolly and his deputy went into the forest. One of the guys in the chopper was Connolly's nephew, so they'd play ball. Connolly had our guns, to fix ballistics on the dead shooters and Paul. A handgun found in the car the Straw Men's shooters had used would likely tie the glasses-wearing killer to the shooting of Charles Monroe. Patrice Anders would corroborate Connolly's story. She's a tough old bird. I got the sense she and the sheriff had some business in common that wasn't being spoken about, something they took responsibility for. I do also wonder how he knew exactly where to head for in the forest. Whatever. Let people have their secrets, I say.
'Where is Paul?'
'A secure hospital in LA. The physicians there are scratching their heads on how he pulled through.'
'God looks after children, drunks, and the criminally insane.'
Nina smiled. 'I think what's really healing Monroe is knowing he's got the guy he thinks of as the Delivery Boy, broken up to hell and stashed in a hospital with armed guards on all sides. Charles finally gets that case solved, and his problems are going to fade.'
'Which means you're okay, too, right?'
'We'll see.'
Her voice was quiet. I checked the road, then glanced at her. 'What?' I said. 'What's wrong?'
She shook her head. 'Nothing, really. Doug just told me something about a girl called Jean I interviewed last week. Two nights ago she went to a party up at some big house on Mulholland Drive. She's in hospital now with cigarette burns and a broken jaw.'
She stared through the windshield at the road ahead, looking sad and tired. 'Why are we like this?'
I didn't have an answer for her.
— «» — «» — «»—
We got into Cannon Beach just before five. Drove slowly through the town, which isn't much more than a few rows of nice wooden beach houses, a main road with a market and a couple of arty mini-malls. It was dark and still raining and off-season quiet, but at the north end of town we found a place called Dunes that looked okay and was displaying a lit sign saying Vacancy. Judging by the empty lot, we had most of the place to ourselves.
We got a couple of rooms and turned in.
My room was on the third floor. It was big and had a wood fire on one wall. The whole of the far end was glass, pretty much, looking out to sea. I couldn't see anything but darkness, but I sat at the table there anyway, and drank a little beer. On impulse I got out my laptop — Bobby's laptop — and plugged the phone cable in the wall socket. I found myself kicking up a web browser, and typing in an address.
A few seconds later it was on my screen. Jessica's website. It was still there. The web guy evidently hadn't bothered to take the site down yet. Might never bother: a few megs up on a server somewhere, who's going to notice? It would join all the other stuff, the ephemeral memories, the words and pictures on the web. Was it immortality? No. Like the man said: immortality is about not dying. It was something, however, both better and worse than nothing.