The Upright Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

and belonging. You only really understand the card’s importance when the machine coughs it back out again and tells you “No,” and that word means not now, not later, not ever; when you are suddenly reminded the card was never some magical gold-producing chalice but just a piece of plastic you didn’t even legally own. I stood in a parking lot in New Jersey turning mine over in my hands until a woman with an SUV and three fat kids told me to get the hell out of the way. She had her own card ready and every confidence it would perform its function. I envied her for that. Though not for her kids, who were ugly as sin.
    I walked back to my car and climbed in. Sat and looked out through the windshield for a while. I had eighteen dollars and change, plus less than half a tank of gas. Nothing else. At all.
    “So, Bobby, what are we going to do now?”
    Bobby didn’t answer, because he was dead. He’d been my best friend, one of the few people whose long-term fate I’d cared about. He’d died up at a place called The Halls, as we tried to catch a psychopath who called himself theUpright Man, and who happened to be my brother. The Halls had been blown to kingdom come, vaporizing Bobby’s body along with them. Bobby had become an unpredictable conversationalist since. Sometimes he said what I needed him to, telling me yes, Ward, maybe this was a good town to stay the night, or yes, I most likely did need another beer—and yes, we’d done our best to find the people who murdered my parents and it would be stupid of me to feel guilty about everything that had gone wrong, up to and including the fact that he was dead.
    Then he’d go silent for a long while. Weeks. I don’t know where he went during these periods, what change took place in my mind that meant I didn’t feel I could hear him. And it was only in my own head that I heard him. I knew that. He wasn’t actually there.
    In the end I drove out of the bank parking lot and found myself a job washing dishes and cutting potatoes three towns away. The Ecuadorean fry cook let me sleep on his floor for two days, after which I had enough cash to get a room of my own provided I didn’t mind sharing it with bugs and dust and noise, and that I didn’t eat. Working in kitchens is good for people in that position, though you become heartily sick of the cheaper food groups. Relations between the Ecuadorean and myself broke down a week later when I tried to get him to share the small coke-dealing business he had going among the other staff and a few young and not-so-young locals who’d turn up round the back some nights. I wound up driving the hell out of town in the small hours, bleeding profusely and feeling like a fool.
    The next morning I was taking a rest outside a Burger King in West Virginia, still bleeding, though less steadily, when a voice finally came into my head and answered a question from nine days before. I cleaned myself up in the BK’s washroom, treated myself to a globalized breakfast of foodlike materials, and drove straight down to Arizona. Once there I located a residence in Flagstaff, which took a while because I’d been there only once before, somewhat drunk, and had since lost the address. I watched the placecarefully for twenty-four hours before getting out my otherwise useless rectangle of plastic, which I used to break in.
    And so for five days I lived in Bobby Nygard’s house.
     
    FIRST THING I DID , ONCE I’ D HAD A GOOD LOOK around and established that if anyone had robbed the place they’d done so very tidily and without being tempted by tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of computer and surveillance equipment, was get online. I hadn’t done this in a while. I was semiconvinced that any attempt to trace personal information would be noticed somewhere and have people coming after me. Among the things Bobby had been expert in was the obfuscation of internet trails. I knew that if I used his home system I’d be safe, at least for a