Bad Things (21 page)

cold. A plastic bag zigzagged suddenly across the parking lot, as if

jerked through the air by an angry hand, momentarily wrapping it-

self around the solitary lamp before being sucked back into the trees.

It felt as if there was no other living human within miles, and I was

alone, just outside a town which was itself a thin veneer upon a sheet

of tilted and jagged rock. There were three other vehicles in the lot,

but I could not feel the presence of any of these people. The middle of

the night makes you feel like you’re peeking backstage even if you’ve

not just been woken by a strange phone call. Everything seemed too

still, the objects of man standing out unnaturally against the sur-

roundings.

Then, on the far side of the road, I thought I saw something

move. A paler patch, just in front of the trees, or a little way inside

them.

I remained absolutely still, staring until my eyes started to spar-

kle, and saw nothing more. Just the plastic bag, perhaps, drifting back

to earth?

I walked slowly across the road, feeling the skin on the back of my

neck tighten. I headed over the mud on the other side, and into the

B A D T H I N G S 141

bushes, feeling cold twigs scrape across my jeans. I trod on something

that cracked, loud in the silence.

When I got into the trees I stopped.

There was a damp, rich odor, like water in which fl owers have

been left too long. Then I saw it.

I don’t know what it was, but
something
moved, back in the trees,

like a shadow.

It wasn’t tall enough to be a man, at least not one standing up-

right. Some part of my brain threw up a fl ag of animal fear, but I don’t

think it was an animal I’d seen, either.

Then I saw it again—it or something else—ten yards to the right.

A paler movement this time, as if moonlight had fallen upon shifting

mist. Maybe that’s all it was.

“Who’s there?”

I hadn’t intended to speak, and my voice didn’t sound great. It

rebounded weakly against tree trunks and silence and fell to the

ground.

A second later I heard a very distant shout, or a cry. It could have

come from behind me, from back in town, but I didn’t think so. It

sounded like it came from deep in the woods.

I stood my ground for another couple of minutes, and saw and

heard nothing more. So I slowly backed away, and out of the trees.

When I got back to the road I saw the plastic bag, lying forty

yards away. It had come back down to earth, after all, but nowhere

near where I’d fi rst thought I’d seen something.

I went back inside my motel room and locked the door and lay

awake on my back for what felt like a long time, tensed against the

phone ringing again. It did not. The only sound was that of the wind

and rain, and of branches once again scratching against the shingles

on the back of my room.

142 Michael Marshall

As I was driving out of the lot early the following morning, my cell

buzzed. When I saw who it was I pulled over and took the call.

“Tell me you’re coming back today,” Becki said, without waiting

for me to speak.

“I don’t think so.”

“John, it would be
real
good if you did.”

“You’re not that busy, surely? And Eduardo or one of the others

can make the pizzas if—”

“The pizzas are not the problem,” she said dismally. “It’s my
fuck-

ing
boyfriend.”

“What’s he done now?”

“Fucked up. Is what he’s done. He’s
fucked up
.”

She sounded close to hysteria, something so hard to imagine in

her that I started listening properly. “I thought it got sorted out.”

“So did I. He just . . . went about it in a really dumb way.”

“Went about what?”

“He subcontracted. Gave some of the stuff to some guys to try to

shift it quicker.”

“Oh, for God’s sake. Did he
tell
you he was going to do this?”

“
Yes
. And I told him it was a dumb idea and he did it anyway. He’s

been . . . he’s been dipping into the product a little too much. He’s re-

ally not thinking straight and he’s getting kind of hard to deal with.”

“And these guys stole it?”

“No. They’re actual friends of ours, not assholes like Rick and

Doug.
But
they tried to sell a couple wraps to the wrong guys outside a gay bar in Portland, who turned out to be fucking Street Crimes

Unit, i.e.,
cops,
and so they got the shit kicked out of them. And lost the drugs.”

“How much?”

“About four thousand worth. And the guys who lent the money

are beginning to get, they’re . . . it’s not good, John. I really wish

you were going to be back today. I’m getting scared. I’d go to Dad

but he’s always had a huge fucking downer on drugs. And on Kyle,

B A D T H I N G S 143

too. There’s a ninety-nine percent chance Dad would just turn him

straight over to the cops.”

“Are the drug guys leaning on Kyle, too?”

“Like, seriously. They called last night and Kyle’s too freaked to

tell them the stuff’s actually
gone,
so instead he says he just needs another couple days to close it out. And now he’s really panicking. He’s

. . . he’s
losing
it, John. At three o’clock this morning I was having to explain to him how he couldn’t go make a complaint against the

Street Crimes Unit, for stealing his drugs. I swear to God.”

I didn’t know what to tell her. It was too late for her to dump

Kyle and walk fast in some other direction. Too late for me to state

the obvious, which was that his suppliers would have a deal with the

Portland police, and Becki and Kyle’s friends got rolled because they

were not part of this arrangement. Too late to explain to Kyle that

his suppliers would have been circling him from day one, biding their

time. You don’t give a pile of drugs to some numb-nut in the hope of

him selling it for you, unless you have a Plan B in place—and a Plan

B that might, in fact, have been Plan A all along.

Then I realized Becki was being ominously silent, and my heart

sank further. “What else?” I said.

“Kyle always told me they didn’t know where we live. But my

neighbor told me she’s seen a couple of black guys watching our place.

Twice. They . . . they so
do
know where we live.”

“You know for sure it was them?”

“Who the fuck else? What am I going to
do,
John?”

“Text me your bank account details.”

“What?”

“Do it now. I’ll talk to you later.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Just do it, Becki.”

I closed the phone and drove out onto the road.

Probably I could have gotten rid of her more gracefully, but I

wanted to see whether I had got something right.

144 Michael Marshall

There was only one person in whose problems I could be said

to be getting involved (bar Becki’s, of course), and that was Ellen.

Yesterday I’d met with her and we’d spoken for nearly an hour. If

someone actually was spying on her in the way she claimed, that

meeting could have provided enough provocation for the Robertson

dynasty to get involved. It would not have been hard for that person

to follow me to where I was staying, or to determine the direct line

of my room.

Cory had a sister.

I thought it was probably Brooke Robertson who had left the

original message on my cell phone, and then called the motel room

in the middle of the night.

I was going to go fi nd if this was true, and explain to her—and

anyone else who needed to hear it—that threatening me was not a

good idea.

On a section of road three miles short of the turn, I ran into traffic.

At fi rst it was light but after half a mile it slowed to a crawl, and then

a standstill for ten minutes.

I used the time to make a phone call but after that quickly started

to get frustrated, and was considering trying to U-turn and fi nd some

other way around when the traffi c started to move again for no ap-

parent reason. I didn’t notice a fl ashing light behind me until the ap-

proaching police motorcycle banged his horn at me to get out of the

way. I pulled as far to the right as I could to let him pass—hampered

by the wall of rock only a couple of feet away—and suddenly realized

why the cop was trying to get by. Moments later I passed the cause of

the snarl-up, and I nearly rammed into the car in front of me.

I saw a sports car twisted against the side of the road, and the

body of Ellen Robertson being cut from it.

C H A P T E R 2 0

They took her to the county hospital, Hope Memorial. I knew it well,

having once fretted in a room there while Scott had stitches put

in a cut just below his knee, courtesy of a rogue nail sticking up

out of the jetty over the lake—an event which had found me that

evening crawling the entire length of said jetty on my own hands

and knees, with a hammer, making damned sure it wasn’t going

to happen again. I remembered sitting in the waiting room with

a folded cloth held tightly against Scott’s leg, listening to my pale

son describing how he’d stared down into the cut immediately after

feeling the sensation of nail carving through fl esh, seen it “empty,”

and then watched as blood fl ooded in from the surrounding tissue

to fi ll the gash until it dripped out onto the jetty. I remember smil-

ing and nodding reassuringly while feeling absolutely certain I was

going to throw up—in a way I never had when confronted with far,

far worse things while in uniform.

I established that’s where Ellen was headed by shouting the

question out the car window to the paramedics, and hoped it was

a sign that—despite the blood that had covered most of her face

and sweater—she hadn’t cracked her head or spine or too obviously

mashed up her insides.

146 Michael Marshall

The traffi c was messed up again on the other side of the accident,

and it took me a while to fi nd a way of cutting back around the far

side of Cle Elum and then taking the back route past the top end of

Black Ridge—passing not far from Bill Raines’s house, which made

me feel guilty. I checked at the desk in the hospital when I eventually

got there, describing myself as a friend, and learned she was being

patched up. That was the term used, which reassured me.

I retreated to the parking lot to wait, and was leaning against the

hood of my rental when I saw a large car come in from the other end.

It parked on the right and both doors opened at once.

Cory Robertson got out of the passenger side. A woman of about his

height and not dissimilar age, wearing a smart black pantsuit, got out of

the other. They walked off toward the main doors virtually in step.

I decided I’d go check on Ellen’s progress again.

When I came out of the elevator on the second floor I saw Cory in

imperious discussion with the nurse, presumably having been told the

same as me, which was that visitors were not welcome, and unlikely to

be for an hour or more.

I hung back to watch, admiring the steely implacability of the

woman behind the desk. If our country is ever in danger of invasion

all we need do is man our coastline with medical receptionists, and

no one could ever pass. When Cory fi nally turned and walked away,

exasperated, I decided I might as well kill two birds with one stone.

I stepped out of the corridor, giving them plenty of time to see

my approach. The woman paid no attention. Cory Robertson glanced

away, then quickly back again.

“What are
you
doing here?”

“Visiting a friend,” I said. “How about you?”

“I thought . . . you were just passing through.”

“Circumstances change.”

I turned to the woman. Though I’d never seen her before their

B A D T H I N G S 147

car pulled into the lot outside, the family resemblance was marked.

While Cory’s face had already started to sag, however, this woman’s

remained sharp, her body lean with the form that comes from spend-

ing a good deal of time on the tennis court you own and swimming

in your own pool. There was a tiny key on a thin gold chain around

her neck.

“Hi,” I said, holding out my hand. “I’m John Henderson. But you

know that, of course.”

She didn’t shake, or make the slightest movement toward doing

so. She merely looked at me with what appeared to be mild amuse-

ment.

Cory looked confused. “You said your name was Ted some-

thing.”

“I lied.”

“So who the hell
are
you?”

“Aren’t you two comparing notes? Your sister seemed to know

exactly who I was when she called my motel room in the middle of

the night.”

I saw the penny drop.

“You entered our house under false pretenses, sir,” Cory said,

sounding about three times his age.

“Guilty. And you said the other house on your property was

empty, whereas the ‘tenant’ was there all the time.”

“And why would you care?”

A husky voice said: “Because he’s screwing her, of course.”

I stared at Brooke. “Excuse me?”