On the other side of the bushes was a clearer area, and then a gully. The gully, he hoped, though it didn’t look at all as he remembered it. He’d only been there in darkness, of course, and had had no time to observe its appearance before finding himself at the bottom. His glimpses with the flashlight had shown it to be fairly wide, however, and about fifteen feet deep at the point where he’d holed up. What was in front of him could only be about twelve feet across, but was a lot deeper. The sides were extremely steep—far too steep and rocky for him to consider climbing down.
He must have overshot his position of the night before.
He glanced right, the direction he’d have to go. Tough-looking trees and bushes grew right up to the side of the drop. He could go back around the long way, but it was a long way. Hence the name. Left looked more clear, but was going in the wrong direction. And it was steep.
Christ, he thought, wearily. His stomach was full of razor blades. His head felt like an avalanche of glass. Did he even need the bag? Maybe it was the smell of alcohol that had attracted the bear. Maybe it was still there, waiting. And drunk. He stood irresolute.
Get the bag, he thought. What else are you going to do?
He trudged up along the edge of the gully. It began to narrow, but not enough that jumping it was a possibility. Twenty years ago maybe he’d have tried to vault ten feet. Actually, no, he wouldn’t—especially when both sides were muddy and rocky and the run up was too short and his ankle was screwed. Either way, it sure as hell wasn’t happening now. He hit a bank of trees and had to dodge left for a little while before skirting back around to the gully.
He stopped. A tree lay across the gap. It had fallen there from the other side, chance bringing it down neatly so there was plenty of trunk on either side of the void it spanned.
Tom limped up to it. The trunk was fairly large, perhaps two feet in diameter. The wood looked to be in good shape. He gave an experimental tug on a branch, and it rebounded crisply back, suggesting the tree hadn’t been down for long. So it wouldn’t be rotten. Maybe. It went from the side where he was to the side where he wanted to be. He could walk nine, ten feet, instead of many hundred.
Right—but nine feet during which there’d be nothing underneath him but empty space, and beneath that, a lot of sharp rocks. Nine feet across a trunk that wasn’t super-wide, might be slippery, and which certainly had snow on it: nine feet which would be hard even if he didn’t have a bad ankle.
Tom’s head swirled for a moment, as if some hidden deposit of alcohol had tardily arrived in his brain. When the world stopped moving, he stepped up to the log and put his good foot on it. The trunk didn’t seem to move. It was big and solid. It would take his weight. His mind was the only thing that would make it harder to cross than a stretch of icy pavement.
He slid his foot a little farther along, accidentally brushing some snow off in the process. Interesting, he thought, immediately seeing the possibilities: don’t walk it—slide it. That way you don’t have to lift your feet (less scary), and clearing the snow will make the next step less slippery too. He poised his weight and lifted the other foot up onto the trunk, so that he was standing sideways on it.
He stood there a moment, testing his balance, looking like the world’s loneliest and coldest surfer.
Then he started out along the trunk. He slid his left foot along a foot, waited until he felt solid, then pulled his right leg along the same amount. He felt secure. Both feet were still above solid ground, granted, but it was a start. He slid the left foot again. Another twelve inches. Then the right. Left foot right on the edge now.
The more steps it takes, the more likely you’ll fall.
Aloud, Tom said, “Who made you the boss of me?” He pushed his left foot out nine inches, pulled the right along to match. He was now officially standing in midair, though a dive would take him back to solid ground. He wasn’t sure where to look. Not down, obviously. Not up. So straight ahead, presumably. Out over the gully. Yi—no, not out there. Shit no.
To the left. To where you’re going.
He turned his head. Good move—the other side really wasn’t that far away. He slid his left foot again. Then his right. Left, then right. He was now nearly in the middle of the trunk.
He slid out again. His foot hit a knot in the trunk, jarring up his leg. He thought he was okay but then realized he wasn’t. His left leg was fine, but the rest of him was suddenly unsure. His torso felt three feet deep and heavily weighted toward the back. He sensed the mass of the planet beneath, willing him to join it.
Left. Look left. He felt weightless for a moment, but he wasn’t falling. He found himself again, and was still. He stared at the end of the trunk, half-hidden in the white-topped bushes, and made it the center of everything that was flat. He kept going.
Slid and pulled once more. He was over halfway. He slid again, feeling a strange kind of exhilaration. A lot of the time he felt like a character in a video game controlled by someone’s mother, allowed a turn for comedy value on Christmas Day. But just for once . . .
He slid and pulled. He slid and pulled, and he didn’t fall.
He shuffled sideways a final time, and then he was standing on the trunk still, but over land. He paused, suddenly incapable of falling. He looked out over the gully, feeling as if he were hanging in the air, then he stepped off onto the ground.
For a moment the earth too felt insubstantial, as if it could sway and tip and fade. He took another step away from the gully, and it settled. He’d made it.
Looking back and forth along the other side confirmed what he’d suspected: hard going in both directions. Whereas on this side it was going to be a relative stroll.
Nine feet, instead of hundreds.
“Thank you,” he said into the silence.
The voice said nothing. Up above, the sky was turning gray.
HE WALKED FOR TEN MINUTES, STRAYING RECKLESSLY close to the edge. For the moment, in his own small world out here in the trees, things were good. It seemed to be getting colder, unbelievably, but he could take it. He could do stuff, it turned out. He could walk on air. He wasn’t surprised when he spotted his backpack below, even though it was largely covered in snow and would have been easy to miss. His luck had rebooted, that’s all. The world was looking after him, for once. He held on to a small tree, leaned forward, and beamed down at it. It was surrounded by disturbances in the snow, no doubt caused by his feet and hands as he tried to take flight.
But no bear.
He moved on, keeping to the lip of the gully until he came to a place where he could scramble down. He noticed some broken branches and, using his newly acquired bush sense, guessed this was probably where he’d fallen the night before. The second descent went much better, with only a slightly hectic slide at the end. He at least reached the bottom on his feet. Feeling as if he was completing some kind of circle, he limped over to the bag.
It lay open, glass glinting inside. Next to it was a bottle, empty. There were a few scattered packets and a handful of the pills themselves, unnaturally blue. All in a little nest, a clear patch with the wall behind, the stream a way in front, bushes on either side. Tom stared down at it all, feeling like a ghost.
All at once his mouth filled with water, and his stomach lurched.
He took a hurried step backward, not wanting to be too close to the backpack for fear of it pulling him back into the night, and then suddenly he was sitting down, the impact juddering up through his spine, the bushes flickering and wavering in front of his eyes.
After a few minutes’ deep breathing the pain abated a little. Could be hangover. Could be the sight of the pills eliciting a “Don’t do that again” response from the brain in his guts. It could actually just be violent hunger. It was hard to tell. His body had turned into a Tower of Babel. Everything below his throat felt as if it had been replaced by the operational but incompatible gastrointestinal tract of an alien species: it was saying things, and saying them loud, but he didn’t know what
they were.
Oh, he felt bad.
He hunched forward involuntarily. He was shivering now, too. Shivering hard. With a twist of real fear he realized he felt broken, damaged somewhere deep inside the core. He looked up at the sky and saw it was now darker still, a speckled and leaden gray. It looked like it was going to snow again, this time seriously.
What was he going to do?
Even if there were enough pills left, he didn’t believe he’d be able to take them. He didn’t think he’d be able to do anything, ever. There was no way forward. Nothing to do except sit, but how could he sit when he felt this bad? Vodka would at least make his insides feel warm. The prospect was not in the least appealing—in the light of relative sobriety he was prepared to admit that he preferred his vodka with tonic water and a slice of lime, in moderate quantities, and drunk somewhere warm—but it was all he had. Die the man’s way, he’d thought. Or something like that. He couldn’t really remember what he’d been thinking back in Sheffer. It seemed a very long time ago.
He pushed himself forward onto his knees, one arm still wrapped around his stomach, as if that might help. He reached out to the backpack with a hand that was shaking badly. Just the shivers. Just the plain old been-out-all-night shivers. Nothing worse. Please. Not a sign that his whole system was fizzing and sparking like a cut electric cable.
He touched the lip of the bag, and then stopped.
He pulled his hand back. There was something that didn’t look right. Spots of something on the broken glass at the opening to the bag. It had a once-bright but now dull quality that he recognized. There were quite a few instances of it on the back of his hand.
Blood?
He pulled himself closer, wincing. It certainly looked like dried blood. A couple of splashes. He turned his hand palm up: no new cuts. He’d have felt it, even this cold. He was pretty sure he hadn’t done it the night before either. He’d had no need to put his hand near the broken glass.
He picked up the bottom end of the bag and lifted it. A clattering lump of stuff fell out. Broken glass iced together. A whole pack of pills he hadn’t gotten to. Bits of plant, presumably accumulated by the previous day’s stumblings. Aha—a last quart, unbroken.
And a couple more red-brown spots on a piece of glass.
Tom carefully picked up the shard. It was blood, and he was certain it wasn’t his. He’d upended the bag the night before to get what he needed. He hadn’t stuck his hand in there.
But the bear evidently had.
It couldn’t have smelled food—there wasn’t any in the bag, never had been—but the scent of alcohol must have been overpowering. Maybe it knew the odor already, from rooting through bins at the edges of small towns. And that’s why, presumably, it hadn’t chased him. Too busy trying to get a drink.
Tom hurriedly put the piece of glass back down. The reality of what had happened in the night had previously been sealed behind hangover and darkness and a few molten snatches of sleep. This wasn’t. This was right here in front of him.
He’d very, very nearly been attacked by a bear.
Christ.
He levered himself to his feet. This wasn’t a good place to be. He didn’t want to be here when something big got the scent again and decided to come back for a second look. He grabbed the unbroken bottle out of the mess and put it in the backpack. As he prepared to go he noticed something stuck in the bush to his right.
It took a moment for him to work out that it was hair. Quite long hair, dark brown. A few thick strands, caught in the sharp upper twigs of the bush.
He tried to picture a bear. He knew they didn’t have short fur, like a cat or something, a pelt, but these hairs were a good six to nine inches long. Could that be right? Were bears that shaggy?
Tom suddenly had a very strong desire to be somewhere else, regardless of how hard it was getting there. His body would just have to make the best of it.
He limped quickly out of his nest of the night before, and looked around for the torch. Then he saw the footprints in the snow and realized it hadn’t been a bear after all.
CHAPTER FOUR
AT JUST AFTER EIGHT A.M. IN NORTH HOLLYWOOD, Officer Steve Ryan was sitting in a patrol vehicle waiting for Chris Peterson to come back across the street with coffee. Officer Peterson was taking a while because he’d be grabbing a quick bite to eat while he was at the stand, which he thought Ryan didn’t know about but after two years you understood an awful lot about the person you shared a car with. Chris had done this sneak-eat thing pretty much every morning for six weeks because his wife was into some complex health magic, which meant that there had to be effectively no edible food in the house at all. He was being stand-up over it and more or less sticking to it with her—can eat this, can’t eat that, can’t eat much in fact and none of it at the same time—even though being a cop on a diet made you feel like an ass (and was an invitation for other cops to rip the piss out of you, especially the women). So if he was sneaking some jump-start carbs by wolfing a pastry before his shift—and he was, because he always came back looking down the street and wiping sticky fingers on the back of his pants; plus he volunteered to get the coffees every morning now, whereas in the past he had to be kicked out of the car with both feet—then Ryan wasn’t going to make a big deal of it. He knew how it was with wives. As he sat there waiting, eyes squinting against the slanting light coming in through the windshield, he was secretly grateful for an extra five minutes to get his head in gear. He felt tired and his eyes were dry and his shoulders ached. He had been up talking with Monica until three. It had been the usual subject, discussed in the usual way, reaching the usual lack of conclusion. It wasn’t that he didn’t want kids: he absolutely did. It was just that they had been trying for more than two years (month in, month out, in, out, no pun intended) and the process was beginning to lose its sparkle. Doesn’t matter how much you love your wife, or how attractive you found her still, being required to perform at very specific times—then and only then, the urgency of the need retreating to about nil for the rest of the month—it soon stopped it from being something you thought of as recreation. It became a job, and he already had one of those. True, hadn’t been much upward progression there either, but at least he had hopes, wasn’t debarred from progress by brute biology. He was getting friendly with some of the detectives. Not being pushy. Just listening, trying to understand what they did, how they thought. Just because it never worked out for his old man didn’t mean it was going to be the same for him. It could happen that way too. He’d seen it. Right place at the right time, a pair of hands in a trophy arrest, could be you’re seconded onto a team. Suddenly you’re not just a stiff in a car out checking windows and breaking up domestic disputes (Ryan knew about wives, of all kinds, and he’d learned a great deal about husbands too) and chasing crackheads down alleys while their friends hooted and jeered and threw bottles at you. Suddenly you’re part of a unit and from there to getting out of uniform didn’t have to be too far at all. It was all a matter of hard work and luck, and Ryan didn’t mind either of those. No, the stuff that wore you down was the parts where no amount of work seemed to make a difference, where the luck simply wasn’t there and wasn’t coming and you couldn’t seem to explain that to someone who had their heart set on the world being the way it was supposed to be, instead of the way it was. Monica got very upset when they talked about it and he didn’t blame her. It made him sad too, sad and tired and depressed. He wanted to be a father. Always had. Man, he’d even consider that shit with the test tubes, assuming they could afford it. He’d said so last night, that they should look into it, and that helped a little though then they went into a discussion of how they couldn’t possibly afford it and so the whole thing was still a swirling vortex of despair. He said maybe they could afford it, if they saved, didn’t take a vacation for a couple years, if he made the squad. She said no, they couldn’t. He said yes, maybe. She said no, and started crying . . . and so it went, until he didn’t know what was left for
him to say and it was three A.M. and nobody had been made any happier and he really had to go to bed. She’d been a little quiet when he’d left that morning. Probably just wiped out. He’d give her a call in a little while, check that she was okay. Assuming he ever moved from this spot: what the fuck was taking Chris so long? In the time he’d been gone, he could have gone to a Denny’s and sneaked a whole breakfast complete with home fries and French toast. Ryan leaned across the passenger seat, caught a glimpse of his partner up at the counter, shoving something in his mouth. He smiled, sat back. Whatever. Let the man eat. The radio was quiet, for the moment. It wasn’t like the city would run out of crime and they’d be sent home without pay. That didn’t seem likely at all.
“Good morning,” said a voice.
Ryan turned to see a guy standing on the pavement by the car. He was wearing worn green combat pants and a dusty gray vest. The sun was behind his head. He was tan and his hair was cropped short and he wore small round glasses. He looked like the kind of guy you might see busking on a street corner, or running a Pilates course down on Venice Beach. He didn’t look like the kind of guy to do what he did next, which was pull out a big handgun from behind his back and shoot Steve Ryan twice in the head.
BY THE TIME NINA GOT THERE THE ROAD WAS CORDONED off and a decent crowd had already gathered. A lot of civilians but a lot of cops too. They were standing in clumps, looking angry and impotent, largely staying away from the bench where a tall redheaded cop was sitting staring down at the pavement. Other officers, one male, one female, stood on either side of this man. The woman had a hand on his shoulder. The male was saying something. It seemed unlikely that either of these well-meant gestures would be making Patrolman Peterson feel any better about the fact that his partner had been shot dead while he was across the street feeding his face.
She parked and walked quickly across the road, seeing Monroe was already present and being harangued. A couple of cops put their hands up as she approached, but she had her card ready.
The Upright Man Page 5
