The Lonely Dead by Michael Marshall Page B

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.
    He pushed himself forward onto his knees, and 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 carefully lifted the lip of the bag between two fingers, and peered in. Inside he saw 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 half-bottle, 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 smelt food — there wasn't any in the bag, never had been — but the scent of alcohol must have been overpowering. Maybe it knew the odour already, from rootling through bins round the back 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 half-bottle out of the mess, 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 flashlight. Then he saw the footprints in the snow and realized it hadn't been a bear after all.

4
    At just after eight a.m. in North Hollywood, Officer Steve Ryan was sitting in the patrol vehicle waiting for Chris Peterson to come back across the street with coffee. Officer Peterson was taking a while because he'd been 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 —