The Whisperers (20 page)

‘You mentioned Bernie’s private papers, Mrs. Fannan. Do you still have them?’

‘Some of them,’ she replied. ‘The rest I burned.’

There was something here. ‘Why did you burn them?’

She had started to cry, and I had trouble understanding some of what she said next. ‘He’d written page after page of just . . . madness, about how he was hearing voices, and seeing things. I thought it was all part of his illness, but it was so disturbing, and so insane. I didn’t want anyone else to read it, because if it got out I thought it would detract from the letter. He was talking about demons, and being haunted. None of it made any sense. None of it.’

I thanked her and let her go. A message had appeared in my mailbox. Ronald Straydeer had come through for me: he’d printed one of the photographs, marked it, then scanned the image again and returned it. There was a short note above it:

Proctor wasn’t in any of the photographs. I knew that there was a system in place whereby veterans of former wars met returning soldiers, but I had no idea how to find out if Proctor had participated, or if he might have been among those who had met Damien Patchett when he got back home. But if Ronald was right in his assessment of Proctor, and I had no reason to doubt him, then the older man seemed an unlikely candidate for a meet-and-greet.

Ronald had given me two more names: Mallak and Bacci. Beside Mallak’s name he’d written: ‘Unionville – but raised in Atlanta.’ He’d also formally identified the black man as Vernon, and a short, bearded man next to him as Pritchard. He’d put an X over the face of a tall man wearing glasses, and had written ‘Harlan deceased’: next to it. Finally, barely visible in the distance to the left of the image, there was a muscular man in a wheelchair: Bobby Jandreau. Kyle Quinn’s words returned to me, spoken as I looked at the photograph of Foster Jandreau in the newspaper.

A bad business
.

I picked up my pen, and formally added Foster Jandreau’s name to the list of the dead.

12

T
obias made the run to Harold Proctor’s motel early the next morning. He supposed that it was fate: he’d been on his way to Proctor’s place when the Mexicans had taken him, so it didn’t exactly throw him to be told to proceed there anyway, even without a cargo to deposit. The reason for the trip was more unexpected, although when he had time to think about it he believed that he had foreseen just such an eventuality.

‘Proctor’s flaking on us,’ said the voice that morning on the other end of the line. ‘He wants out. Take whatever is left there, and pay him off. It’s mostly small stuff that’s left anyway.’

‘You sure he’s not going to talk out of school?’ said Tobias.

‘He knows better than to do that.’

Tobias wasn’t so sure. He planned to have a few words with Proctor when he saw him, just to make certain that he understood where his obligations lay.

His face and hands were hurting. The ibuprofen that he’d taken had dulled the pain somewhat, but not enough to help him sleep properly. Lack of sleep was nothing new to him, though, not lately. In Iraq, he’d slept through mortar fire, he’d been so tired all the time, but ever since he’d returned home he’d been having trouble getting a good night’s rest, and when he did sleep he dreamed. They were bad dreams, and recently they had begun to get worse. He thought that he could even trace the start of his recent problems to one of the runs that he’d made to Proctor’s place a month or so ago. Ever since then, he hadn’t been right.

Tobias wasn’t much for hard liquor, but he could have used a serious drink right about now. Proctor would give him one, if he asked, but Tobias didn’t intend to impose on Proctor’s hospitality for that long. Anyway, the last thing Tobias wanted was to be stopped by the cops with booze on his breath while driving a rig: a rig, what’s more, that would probably contain more potential wealth per square foot than any other that had ever previously been driven through the state.

As if to remind him of the wisdom of his decision to wait until he got back to Portland before slaking his thirst, a border patrol vehicle passed him on the road, heading east. Tobias raised a hand casually in greeting, and the gesture was returned. He watched the border cop in his mirrors until he was gone from sight, then breathed more easily. It would be just his luck to cross the cops after what had happened the night before. Proctor was simply the shitty icing on that particular turd cake.

Tobias didn’t care much for the older man. Proctor was a lush, and he believed that the fact they had both served in the military meant that they were brothers deep inside, but Tobias didn’t view the world in that way. They hadn’t even served in the same war: their conflicts were separated by more than a decade. He and Proctor were on different paths. Proctor was drinking himself to death, while Tobias was looking forward to making some money and improving his life. He thought that he might ask Karen to marry him, and once they were hitched they’d head south, get away from the damn Maine cold. The summers were better up here, not so humid as Florida or Louisiana, some August days excepted, but they weren’t good enough to make up for the winters, not by a long shot.

He thought again about a drink. He’d settle for a couple of beers when he returned to Portland. He hated himself when he got messy, and hated seeing others get messy too. He flashed to Bobby Jandreau in Sully’s, Bobby shooting his mouth off and attracting attention, even in a place like Sully’s where most people were too busy getting drunk to pay any mind to whatever might be going on around them. He pitied Bobby. Joel wasn’t sure that he could have gone on living if he’d been wounded as badly as Bobby had. His own injuries were enough for him: he limped with every step, and he still experienced phantom pain where the tips of his missing fingers should have been. But Bobby’s injuries didn’t excuse him from getting loud and saying the things that he’d said. They’d promised him a cut, and Joel had been willing to keep to the deal, even after what was said at Sully’s, but now Bobby didn’t want it. He didn’t want anything to do with them, and that worried Joel. It troubled the others too. They’d tried reasoning with Bobby, but it had done no good. Joel figured that his pride had been hurt by what they’d done with him at Sully’s, but they’d had no choice.

Nobody gets hurt: that was the essence of the arrangement that they had. Do no harm. Unfortunately, that wasn’t always possible in the real world, and the principle had been subtly altered to ‘Do no harm to our own.’ The detective, Parker, had asked for what had happened to him, and Foster Jandreau had too. Tobias might not have pulled the trigger on him, but he’d agreed on the necessity of it.

Tobias was already anticipating the sign for Proctor’s Motel, giving him time to prepare for the turn. He was nervous. A rig turning into a disused motel was just the kind of action that attracted attention this close to the border. Tobias preferred those occasions when small items were being moved, and the exchange could be made at a gas station, or a diner. The movement of larger pieces requiring him to come to the motel always made him sweat, but there were only one or two more of those shipments to go, and now he’d find some place near Portland to store them. After Kramer’s death, a decision had been made that most of the larger items weren’t worth the risk, presenting, as they did, all kinds of logistical difficulties. An alternative means of disposing of them would be found, even if it meant a smaller profit. After all, they’d gone to the trouble of transporting them as far as Canada, and damned if they were just going to dump them in a quarry somewhere, or bury them in a hole. Still, buyers had already been found for a number of statues, and it had fallen to Tobias to get them across the border. He’d driven the first shipment, certified as cheap stone garden ornaments for those with more money than taste, straight to a warehouse in Pennsylvania without a hitch. The second shipment had to be stored for a couple of weeks with Proctor, and moving it had taken four men, and five hours. All the time, Tobias had been waiting for the state police, or US Customs, to come blazing in, and he could still recall his sense of relief when the work was completed and he was back on the road, heading for home, and Karen. He just needed to finish with Proctor this last time, then he would be done. If it was true that Proctor wanted out, so much the better. Tobias wouldn’t miss him. He wouldn’t miss him, or the stink of his cabin, or the sight of his lousy motel slowly sinking into the ground.

A man who couldn’t hold his booze wasn’t to be trusted. It was a sign of a deeper weakness. Tobias would bet a dollar to a dime that Proctor had come out of Iraq One a prime candidate for PTSD counseling, or whatever passed for it then. Instead, he’d retreated to a rundown motel at the edge of the woods and tried to fight his demons alone, aided only by the bottle and any food that came wrapped in plastic with a microwave time written on the side.

Tobias had never believed that he himself suffered from post-traumatic stress. Oh sure, he had trouble relaxing, and he still had to fight the urge to flinch at the sound of fireworks launching or a car backfiring. There were days when he didn’t want to get out of bed, and nights when he didn’t want to get into bed, didn’t want to close his eyes for fear of what might come, and that was even before the new nightmares. But post-traumatic stress? No, not him. Well, not the severe kind, not the kind where, just to get through the day, you had to be so doped up that it popped out of your pores like discolored sweat, not the kind where you wept for no reason, or you lashed out at your woman because she burned the bacon or spilled your beer.

No, not that kind.

He looked around the cab, certain that someone had spoken, the voice strangely familiar. The wheel twisted slightly so that he felt his heart skip a beat before he readjusted, fearful of sending the rig off the road and onto the slope, fearful of tumbling, of ending up trapped in his cab, trapped almost within sight of the old motel.

Not yet
.

Where had that voice come from? And then he remembered: a warehouse, its walls cracked, its roof leaking, a consequence of the earlier bombing and the poor workmanship that had gone into its construction; a man, little more than a pile of bloodied cloth now, the life already leaving his eyes. Tobias was standing over him, the muzzle of his M4 carbine, the gun that had torn the man apart, pointing unwaveringly at the fighter’s head, as though this bloodied rag doll could pose any threat to him now.

‘Take it, take it all. It’s yours.’ The fingers, stained red, indicated the crates and boxes, the shrouded statues, that filled the warehouse. Tobias was amazed that he could even speak. He must have taken four, five shots to the body. Now there he was, waving a hand in the flashlight’s beam, as though any of this was his to give or to retain.

‘Thanks,’ said Tobias, and he felt himself sneer as he spoke the word, and heard the sarcasm in his voice, and he was ashamed. He had belittled himself in front of the dying man. Tobias hated him, hated him as he hated all of his kind. They were terrorists, haji: Sunni or Shia, foreign or Iraqi, they were all the same in the end. It didn’t matter what they called themselves: al-Qaeda, or one of the bullshit names of convenience that they made up from their stock jumble of phrases, like those collections of magnetic words that you stuck to your fridge and used to create bad poetry: Victorious Martyrs of the Brigade of Jihad, Assassination Front of the Imam Resistance, all interchangeable, all alike. Haji. Terrorist.

Yet there was an intimacy to death in moments like this, in giving it and in receiving it, and he had just breached the protocol, answering like a surly teenager, not a man.

The haji smiled, and some white was still visible through the blood that had filled his mouth and stained his teeth.

‘Don’t thank me,’ he said. ‘Not yet . . .’

Not yet
. That was the voice he heard, the voice of a man with the promised virgins waiting for him in the next world, the voice of a man who had fought to protect what was in that warehouse.

Fought, but not hard enough. That was what Damien had said to him: they fought, but not as hard as they should have.

Why?

The motel came into view. To his left, he saw the line of boarded-up rooms and shivered. The place always gave him the creeps. No wonder Proctor had become what he was, holed up here with only the trunks of trees behind him and his bequest, this dump, before him. It was hard to look at those rooms and not imagine unseen guests, unwanted guests, moving behind the walls: guests who liked damp, and mold, and ivy curling around their beds; guests who were themselves in the process of decaying, malevolent shadows entwined on leaf-strewn beds, old ruined bodies moving rhythmically, dryly, passionlessly, the horns on their heads—

Tobias blinked hard. The images had been so vivid, so strong. They reminded him of some of the dreams he’d been having, except in those there had only been shadows moving, hidden things. Now they had shape, form.

Jesus, they had
horns
.

It was the shock, he decided, a delayed reaction to all that he had endured the evening before. He pulled up within sight of Proctor’s cabin and waited for him to emerge, but there was no sign. Proctor’s truck was parked over to the right. Under ordinary circumstances, Tobias would have hit the horn and rousted the old bastard, but it wouldn’t have done to blast the woods, particularly not since Proctor had a neighbor who might be tempted to come and take a look at what all the noise was about.