Spook

by Bill Pronzini

  Runyon said, “So now you’ve killed three people. Same as Anthony Colton.”

  “So what? You think I’m no better than he was?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Wasn’t justified, what he did. My three are. Three of you will be too. And all the rest after you, three more or thirty more.”

  Get him off that. He was agitated again, increasing tension on the thread. I threw a non sequitur at him: “How’d you find out about Colton?”

  “What?”

  “Colton. Spook. How’d you find out he was alive, living on the streets?”

  “Why do you care how?”

  “I’d like to know myself,” Runyon said. “You bump into him one day, recognize him?”

  “Smart bastards didn’t figure out that part? Not so smart after all.” Valjean’s finger had quit moving, eased off pressure on the machine pistol’s trigger. Thread still holding. “All right, you want to know, I’ll tell you, then you can all die happy. No, I never bumped into him, I thought he was dead a long time ago. It was that blackmailing son of a bitch, he’s the one found out.”

  “Big Dog?”

  “Yeah, Big Dog. Found some crap belonged to Colton, newspaper stories about what he did to Luke and Dot.”

  “Spook’s stash.”

  “Colton talked to them like they were still alive, Big Dog heard the names, same names in the newspaper stories. Even a stupid bastard like him could put two and two together.”

  My desk chair gave a sudden low squeak. Runyon shifting position, lifting his hands to drywash his slick face. It didn’t mean anything to Valjean, but it struck me as an uncharacteristic gesture. I positioned my head so I could look at Valjean and watch Runyon at the same time.

  I said, “How’d he know to contact you?”

  Valjean didn’t seem to hear that. He muttered, “Talked to them, for Christ’s sake. Blew them away that day, walked in there and emptied that Colt into them. My brother... wasn’t anything left of his face, one of the slugs took his head half off. Killed them and got away with it, seventeen years, and he was still talking to them like they were alive!”

  When Runyon lowered his hands again, he let the left one drop to his lap and the right one rest on the edge of Tamara’s desk. The only things within his reach were her computer screen and keyboard, the keyboard on the sliding panel just below desktop level. His gaze slid my way long enough to tell that I was watching, then eased the other way to catch Tamara’s. She was looking, too.

  I repeated my question to Valjean. “How did Big Dog know to contact you? Something else in Spook’s stash?”

  “Not me, smart guy. He didn’t come to me, not the first time.”

  “Robert Lightfoot?”

  “Yeah, Bob. He used to sell cars, had business cards and Colton kept one, who the hell knows why. Big Dog tracked Bob down, said he knew where Colton was, wanted five hundred bucks to say where. Bob called me. We didn’t pay him, not right away. He spilled just enough to Bob, we figured we could find Colton ourselves.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No. We decided it’d be quicker to just pay the five hundred, so I met the bastard and gave him his blood money. Stupid. Should’ve punched his ticket for him then and there.”

  Runyon’s hand was moving on the desktop, so slowly you wouldn’t notice unless you were paying close attention. When it crawled down a few inches onto the sliding panel, I realized what he was after: the mouse attached to the keyboard. His fingers came to rest next to it, near enough for him to lift his index finger and tap it once. He was looking at Tamara as he did it. I thought I saw her give a slight nod in return.

  “You do it alone, shoot Colton?” I said. I moved a cautious half pace to my left as I spoke. Valjean didn’t seem to notice that, either.

  “Yeah, alone. Bob wanted to be there to see it but he couldn’t, he’s in a wheelchair, so I did the job myself. Finally gave Colton what he had coming for what he did to Bob and me, Luke and Dottie and my folks, all of us, finally some justice after seventeen years. Payback, by God, eye for an eye. Colton and Big Dog and Marjorie and you three and anybody else gets in my way.”

  Abruptly he began to pace. Crosswise behind my desk to within a couple of paces of the far side wall, turn, back across to the near side wall, turn. Head tilted sideways, eyes flicking watchfully over the three of us as he moved, his lips forming words that now only he could hear. Working himself up to it, the thread getting closer to the snapping point. I had the clear, chill feeling that when he decided to stop pacing, he would start shooting.

  Tamara had maneuvered her hand and arm onto the keyboard, and her fingers were slowly loosening the mouse cord-connector. Runyon’s gaze met mine again; when Valjean made a turn away from him he nodded once, as imperceptibly as Tamara had, to let me know he was ready.

  I moved another few inches to my left on Valjean’s next turn. For most of his back-and-forth path, my desk was between the two of us; but when he went into his pivot at the near wall, there were a dozen feet of open floor space separating us. A dozen feet... like a hundred yards of no man’s land. I waited until he turned back the other way, looked at Runyon and made a couple of small motions with my head, one at the wall, the other at the floor.

  Tamara had the mouse connector free of its socket.

  Valjean was still pacing, not as rapidly now, no longer muttering to himself.

  Runyon’s fingers closed around the mouse.

  I widened my stance slightly, slid my left foot back a few inches, and held a breath, thinking Here we go.

  Valjean was looking halfway between me and the others, so that he could keep all three of us within the range of his vision. If he saw any of the calculated movements we made, they didn’t register, didn’t put a hitch in his step. Three paces from the near wall, he about-faced again, an almost military heel-and-toe turn.

  And in that second—

  Runyon swept up and threw the mouse sidearm, all in one motion — not at Valjean but past and behind him, its cord flapping and twisting like the tail of a whip.

  Tamara cut loose with a banshee shriek, so loud and shrill it was a pressure in the ear.

  Valjean pulled up short, his stubbled face registering confusion, his attention caught by her and Runyon and the flying mouse — no longer seeing me at all.

  I charged him, head down, body bent as low to the floor as I could get and still make speed.

  He heard me coming halfway, spun in my direction. The machine pistol was a semiautomatic; it chattered two or three times, but confusion and haste and the weight of the thing and the high angle of its muzzle threw all the slugs past me by a couple of feet. Runyon was coming by then; I didn’t see him until he slammed into Valjean, throwing the gunarm up just as the pistol hammered again. I barreled into Valjean from my side, the two of us sandwiching him, and we all went down in a wild tangle of arms and legs and squirming bodies. Behind us something heavy and metallic made a thunderous crashing noise; I could feel the vibration in the floorboards as I clawed a grip on the gun... hot metal, burning my fingers. I yanked it loose of Valjean’s grasp, threw it behind me.

  Runyon had the other arm and the big struggling body pinned. I heaved up and back to get leverage and hit Valjean in the face with as much force as I could muster. It hurt him, brought a grunt of pain and weakened his struggles. I slammed him again, a side-swipe blow to the temple so solid that it popped one of my knuckles — a sharp pain I barely felt. The fight began to go out of him. Runyon’s turn: one, two shots to the face, the second on the point of the jaw. Valjean stiffened for an instant, went limp all at once. Down and out.

  It was over.

  The two of us lay draped over him for a few seconds, sucking wind. Then I lifted up again, onto my knees, and yelled, “Tamara!” Tried to yell it, but it came out in a hoarse croak.

  I saw her before she answered. She must’ve thrown herself down and under her desk after she screamed; now she came crawling out. “Not hurt. You? Jake?�
�

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  There was a pair of handcuffs in the bottom catch-all drawer of my desk. I didn’t have to tell Tamara to get them; she was already crawling that way. Runyon rolled Valjean over, and I yanked his arms behind him and snapped steel around both wrists a few seconds later.

  It took a couple of tries to get up on my feet, a little effort to stay there. I leaned a hand against the desk to steady myself, jerked back because of a flash of pain in my popped knuckle, and switched support to the other hand. Runyon was up, too. Except for a grayish tone to his skin, you couldn’t tell that he’d come within inches of dying. Tamara’s eyes were huge, a lot of white showing, and there was blood on her lower lip that hadn’t been there before — fresh blood where she’d bitten through the skin.

  Runyon said to her, “Good job with that scream. Helped with the distraction.”

  “Yeah, well, wasn’t all good. I think I peed in my panty hose.”

  “Damn lucky, all of us. If we hadn’t been on the same page...”

  “But we were,” I said.

  There were noises out in the hallway, but nobody tried to come inside. The air was hazy with aftersmoke from the fired rounds and foul with the stink of burnt powder. I saw holes in the plaster next to the door, another in the door itself. Saw something else, then — the source of the booming crash of metal that had shaken the floor. One or more slugs from that last burst had taken down the old, ugly chandelier that had hung between the skylights. It no longer looked like an upside-down grappling hook surrounded by clusters of brass testicles; now it was just a mangled pile of scrap.

  Tamara said, “I always hated that thing.”

  “So did I.”

  “Place’ll never be the same again.”

  “No. No, it won’t.”

  The three of us stood there, looking at each other.

  “Sweet Lord Jesus,” she said.

  Christmas

  Tamara

  She hadn’t been looking forward to Christmas Eve, but it turned out all right. Better than all right. Everybody being nice to her because of what’d happened on Tuesday, tiptoeing around, avoiding the subject. Good thing; wasn’t anything to say that hadn’t already been said ten times. Like Ma going off about criminals and lunatics running loose and how she couldn’t sleep as it was, worrying about Pop all the time; Pop saying okay, if his youngest daughter insisted on doing detective work, then she’d better start keeping a handgun and learning how to use it; Claudia rapping about the evils of guns and urging her to join the gun-control group she and Brian belonged to; Horace trying to talk her into going into another line of work, any kind of computer job where her life wouldn’t be at risk.

  But not tonight. Tonight there was a tree big as ever, all tinseled and strung with lights, and wine, and too much food — ham, roast beef, salads, cookies, pumpkin pie, sweet potato pie — and talk about music, politics, football, all sorts of neutral stuff. Ma was happy because the family was all together and she was doing her homey thing; Pop was happy because Sweetness wasn’t being smartass and disruptive; Horace was happy because of all the food and because his girlfriend wasn’t being smartass and disruptive; Claudia was happy because her little sister wasn’t being smartass and disruptive and because she was with her oreo (no, be fair now, Brian wasn’t so bad once you got him out of a three-piece suit and away from a lawsuit), two of them holding hands and eye-humping each other the whole time. And she was happy because she’d quit letting everything get under her skin, quit fighting herself and the people around her, just started going with the flow.

  Ever since Tuesday, she’d felt like a different person. Scared as hell while it was going down, shaken up for a while afterward, and then cool with it. Somehow easy in her mind. Sort of... what was the boss man’s word? Mellow. Right, sort of mellow. Even if it didn’t last, she liked the feeling. It was like when she was a teenager and she and her girlfriends used to smoke J’s, only this was a legal high, a natural high.

  Dinner, presents, talk, dessert, more talk: the time slid by fast and easy. Seemed they’d just got there and then they were at the door, exchanging hugs and kisses, saying good-bye. She even let Brian kiss her, half on the mouth. Whoo. She must be about half stoned.

  In the car as they started back to the city Horace said, “Really nice this year. Everybody seemed to be having a good time.”

  “Yup.”

  “But you didn’t say much. Sure you’re okay?”

  “Yup.”

  “Well, you seemed... I don’t know, not subdued exactly...”

  “Mellow?”

  “That’s it. Mellow. How much wine did you have?”

  “One glass. How about we put on a CD?”

  “What would you like to hear?”

  “Classical. Yo-Yo Ma.”

  She picked one at random, slid it in. Beethoven, Symphony #5 in C Minor, Opus 67. Recognized it on account of she liked classical music. Didn’t say so to friends, family, wouldn’t even admit it to Horace half the time; wasn’t supposed to be cool to like long-dead white guys’ music, or much of any kind except rap and jazz. So all right, so she wasn’t cool sometimes. Who cared?

  In the flicker and shine of passing headlights she watched Horace listening to the cello passages, his ugly face almost handsome. A tenderness came into her. She loved him, no question about that. He was her man. Always would be, one way or another. But the thing was, the relationship she had with her job and with Bill was another kind of love, almost as deep in its own way. Tuesday afternoon, what they’d shared... you couldn’t get much closer, more intimate. Jake Runyon had been part of it, too. Three of them working together, a unit, a team... kind of a professional ménage à trois. That was the only reason they were all alive right now.

  So she was staying home, just as she’d pretty much known all along she would. The Bay Area was her center, the place she belonged. But that didn’t mean she was giving up on Horace. After he left for Philly, well, maybe they could keep up a long-distance relationship, for a while anyway. Wouldn’t be easy, but love was never easy. She’d always hated that Bobby McFerrin song, but hey, could be the message had some truth after all. Don’t worry, be happy.

  She put her head back, closed her eyes, let the soothing sounds of Beethoven and Yo-Yo Ma wash over her. Alive and well, young, part of a team, plenty of future prospects; coming from her family, going home with her man. Wasn’t much more you could ask for on Christmas, was there?

  Jake Runyon

  Most of the day before Christmas he spent driving around the city, and Oakland and Berkeley and the other East Bay cities, familiarizing himself with streets and neighborhoods. Early dinner in a Chinese restaurant on Taraval: egg rolls and mooshu pork. Back to his apartment building before seven.

  A family party was going on in one of the other units — Yuletide music, laughter, kids’ happy squealing voices. The sounds followed him upstairs, penetrated the walls faintly once he was inside.

  He checked his answering machine. No messages. There hadn’t been any messages since before last Saturday. He stood for a time looking down at the phone, listening to the distant pulse of music and laughter from below. Then he caught up the receiver, tapped out Joshua’s number.

  Recorded voice. But a different one this time, computer-generated, telling him that the number he had called was no longer in service.

  Had his number changed. And the new one would be unlisted.

  Runyon went into the bedroom. The silver-framed photo of Colleen, the best of the batch taken by a commercial photographer a few years ago, was on the night-stand. He brought it out to the living room, put it on the table next to the couch. Then he flipped on the TV, did some channel surfing until he found an old movie — always old movies on cable-system TV, even on Christmas Eve. This one was Christmas in Connecticut, with Barbara Stanwyck and Sydney Greenstreet, just starting. He watched it all the way through, not even bothering to mute the commercials. The party
below was over by then; even the rain had stopped and the wind was quiet outside. Silent night.

  He watched another film, something from the thirties with Bette Davis. When that was over he darkened the set. In the kitchen he took down the bottle of Wild Turkey, poured a thimbleful, carried the glass back to the couch. The table lamp illuminated Colleen’s smiling image, oddly as if the glow were coming from within. He looked at it for a long time, holding the glass of whiskey, remembering Christmases with her in their Seattle home, one up in Calgary, another at a ski lodge. Presents they’d given each other, trees they’d trimmed, food and drink and special moments they’d shared.

  He raised the glass. Aloud he said, “Always,” and drank.

  In the silence he sat there looking through more good memories, as if he were turning the pages of an album. Dwelling in the past so he wouldn’t have to think of tomorrow.

  Bill

  The best thing about Christmas morning was the look on Emily’s face.

  She’d been happy the night before, all smiles after she finished reprising the three pageant carols in her sweet voice and Kerry and I gave her a literal standing ovation. But today, standing in front of the lighted tree in her robe and slippers with Shameless cradled in her arms, peering down at the array of presents we’d set out while she was asleep, she seemed radiant. Almost angelic in the shaft of pale sunlight, the first sunlight we’d seen in ten days, that slanted in through a part in the drapes.

  “Some pile of loot, huh?” I said.

  “Wow. Santa was good to us this year.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in Santa.”

  “I do now,” she said.

  I was basking in her glow when the cat did his perverse feline thing, jumping out of her arms and launching himself onto my lap from ten feet away. I wasn’t ready for it and didn’t get my hand out of the way in time; one paw smacked into my bandaged finger and sent shooting pains up my arm.