Twospot

by Bill Pronzini

  The blow and the impact with the floor created a wild roaring in my ears, distorted my vision, but neither stunned me enough to put me out or keep me down. I slid a couple of feet on my back, caught my momentum and scrabbled around on reflex until I was up on one knee, turning back toward the office. I saw the manfigure standing there, two of him, through wavering shadows and a blurred nimbus of light, saw him move and the object he had hit me with leap free of his hand. Reflex made me duck this time, and over the roaring in my head there was the explosive crash of glass shattering on the floor close by. Wetness and glass shards spattered my hands and arms, I could smell the sharp sourness of red wine—the son of a bitch had tried to brain me twice with a goddamn bottle of wine—and I let out a sound that was half grunt and half bellow of rage and pain, and heaved up onto my feet like a wounded bear.

  The man-shape had spun and was running away along the corridor.

  Shaking my head, pawing at my eyes, I staggered after him. Bounced off one of the stone walls before my vision wobbled back into focus and I could see where I was going, where the guy was. Hunched shadow forty yards away, racing past the entrance to the tasting room, heading toward the narrow corridor that led into the area where the aging tanks were. I locked my teeth against the pain in my head, the pain in my wrist, and kept on lumbering in pursuit.

  He was halfway through the forest of redwood vats by the time I cleared the foyer. But then he seemed to slip on something and reeled into one of the tanks, almost fell, got his balance back and threw a look over his shoulder. I was thirty yards behind him then, but I could not see enough of his face in the murky light to get an impression of what he looked like; it was just a dim blur, and he was just a man-shape in dark clothing. I shouted at him, for no rational reason—I was still groggy, still caught up in emotional reaction—but he had already pushed away from the tank and was running again, this time in quick choppy steps like somebody trying to run across ice.

  I saw the reason for that when I came into the vat area: the floor there had been hosed down sometime during the afternoon and the stones were wet and slick and puddled with water. I slowed in time to keep myself from slipping the way he had, adjusted my own strides to match his. The distance between us was still thirty yards.

  There was an archway at the far end of the area, and beyond it, in another room, were the steel vats the wineries use for aging white wines. The floor in there was wet too, but the guy got across it all right and into a third room, this one lined on both sides with horizontally laid oak casks that had been stained a glistening black by millions of gallons of fermenting red wine. A rubber hose was stretched out loosely and carelessly along the stones, and I got my feet tangled in the damned thing and cracked my elbow against the rounded edge of a cask. I finally managed to kick loose just as the guy reached the far end of the room and vanished into a right-angle corridor toward the rear of the cellar.

  The roaring in my ears had diminished and I could hear the hollow drumming echoes of his footfalls and of my own as I ran up there. When I swung around the corner he was just going into a big room with a shadowy maze of overhead refrigeration piping and metal catwalks, and a cluster of stainless steel fermentation tanks. I pounded after him, breathing through my mouth now because the dankness and the overpowering wine smell were beginning to make me nauseous.

  In the room down there the guy broke stride and I saw his head jerk from one side to the other, as if he were looking for a place to hide or some sort of escape route. Then he made a quick glance back toward me again, and must have decided there wasn’t time to do whatever it was before I caught him or got close enough to identify him; he shifted back into a hard run. And when he got to the far end he made another turn, to his right this time and without slowing, into a second north-south corridor.

  What turned out to be down there were areas filled with more oak casks, with smaller aging cooperage stacked in tiers on wooden chocks, with some type of shadow-obscured equipment. He went straight through them all, and I still could not get any closer to him than thirty yards.

  Another archway loomed ahead. A few feet beyond it was a blank stone wall: he had reached the end of the building. But along that end wall was yet another east-west corridor, and the guy veered into it to his right, and two or three seconds later I heard a clattering metallic sound, followed by a sharp creaking—the creaking of hinges. There was a sudden draft of cool fresh air.

  Panting, I stumbled to the archway and lunged through it. A heavy wooden door stood open five yards away; the corridor was empty. I thought something obscene, ran through the door onto the gravel surface of the yard. At first I didn’t see him and I thought he had gotten around to the front or the rear of the cellar; the night seemed dark and still and deserted. Then there was movement off to my right, in the shadow of a black oak growing between the south edge of the yard and a wide, shallow-looking pond. I picked him out then, running toward the pond or toward a dirt-and-gravel road near it that curved up through the open vineyards beyond. He had better than sixty yards on me now.

  I went after him—across the yard, past the oak, over toward the pond. Once he got to the road he ran straight up the center of it, head down and body bent forward, feet kicking up thin puffs of dust. I came onto the gravelly bed and plunged upward in his wake.

  It was rough going. The road climbed steadily up the hillside to a broken line of eucalyptus trees across the crown, and the loose gravel made it difficult to maintain traction. The night air was sweet after the winey dampness of the cellar and it had cleared the last of the grogginess from my mind; but it did not help the throbbing pain where I had been clubbed, or the tightness that was building in my chest from too much exertion. I could feel myself slowing up, starting to stumble like a drunk trying to follow a straight line. But he was slowing up too, I could see that—because he was somewhere around my age or because he was not in the best physical condition. It was all coming down to which one of us gave out first.

  We were well up into the vineyards now—rows of old gnarled leafy vines curved out on both sides—and the guy was coming in on the line of eucalyptus at the brow of the hill. The road hooked near there, through the trees; I cold not see from where I was the point at which it came out of them and went down the far slope. Which meant I was going to lose sight of him pretty soon, if only briefly.

  And that was what happened: one second he was there, running through the curve, and the next he was gone into the deep shadows cast by the eucalyptus.

  A bird screeched in a startled way up there, as if it had been disturbed from its sleep; the only other sounds were the scrape of my shoes on gravel and the wheezing rasp of my breath. I staggered finally through the hook in the road, to where it leveled off at the crest and the trees began. Then I could see the direction it took, and beyond the eucalyptus, in another hollow, I had an impression of lights glowing against the sky; but I still could not see the guy.

  I started into the trees—and off to my left there was the faint rustling of leaves, the sound of a snapping twig.

  I pulled up sharply, turning in that direction, sleeving sweat from my face and eyes. Blackness, crouching shadows. But then I heard the rustling again, and it was no more than fifteen yards away, back toward the slope I had just come up; he must have gone in there to hide and been too exhausted or too panicked to bring it off. A second later there was movement that I could perceive even in the darkness, the crunch and slide of retreating steps. He knew I had heard him and he was making a run for it again.

  All right, you bastard, I thought. I veered off the road and cut into the trees, and I had glimpses of him dodging and weaving with more agility than he had shown before. Maybe he had gotten a second wind—but there was a smoke-and-fire pain in my lungs and my chest felt as though it were being squeezed in a vise. I would not be able to keep on like this much longer. If I was going to get him at all, it would have to be now, right now.

  The eucalyptus were beginning to thin out and between th
eir trunks the black rows of grape vines were visible ahead. He saw that too, cut sharply to his left and came out into the open, down onto the clotted black earth between two rows of vines. Running downslope on that surface was even harder than running up the gravel road; he stumbled, lurched sideways, and fell jarringly to his hands and knees. He struggled up immediately—but the fall had cost him the last of his advantage.

  I had him then. I had him good.

  I threw myself forward with my arms outstretched and hit him in the small of the back with the fleshy joining of my upper chest and upper right arm. The air went out of him explosively, like a balloon bursting, and my momentum knocked him sprawling into one of the vines and carried me down on top of him. A vine branch splintered and caught me a scraping blow across the temple, showered me with juice from a burst cluster of grapes. None of that did any damage but it made me lose the grip I had on the guy’s clothing. He kicked out from under me and tried to pull away, making little mewling gasps the way somebody does when he’s had the wind knocked out of him.

  I twisted around and got another grip on his jacket. He lashed out in a frenzy, all arms and legs and hard edges of bone; I had to keep my head tucked in against my chest to protect it from the blows. But I seemed to have more weight and more strength and I managed to pull myself over him again, smothering his movements, and then cuffed him a couples of times awkwardly with my free hand.

  Only then I became aware of his body beneath mine on the loose earth, squirming, and there was something about the touch of him that was not quite what it ought to be. I reared back, straddling him now, holding him down with the one hand while the other one cocked back on reflex. And got a look at the white face and a pair of wild glaring eyes. And realized with astonishment and another sudden rush of confusion just what it was that was wrong.

  It was not a man I had under me, it was an outraged woman.

  I stared down at her, shock-frozen, and she used that moment to lunge upward with her head and shoulders and sink her teeth into the flesh below my collarbone. I let out a yell, pushed at her head and wrenched it aside; skin came tearing loose with her teeth, there was more stinging pain and the wetness of blood. She kept on struggling frantically, dangerously, and I had no choice except to force her back down again and hold her pinned until I could get my breathing and my thoughts under control.

  “You son of a bitch,” she said. It came out in thick stuttering pants. “If you try to rape me I’ll be the last woman you ever do it to.”

  I said, “Jesus Christ ”

  She was not the one who had clubbed me back in the cellar, not the one I had been chasing; he had been a man, all right, I was sure of that. He must have stayed on the road, gone down into the hollow on the other side of the hill. Long vanished by now. The woman was somewhere under forty, slender and muscular and small-breasted, and her hair was cut very close to her head in one of those mannish styles; she was also wearing a dark shirt and jacket, dark trousers. All of which, along with the black night, explained why I had mistaken her for the guy.

  But what the hell had she been doing up in those trees?

  She was still struggling, still glaring up at me. There did not seem to be much fear in her; just fury and determination. She called me a couple of things, still fighting for breath, and told me what she would do to me if I tried to rape her. Hardboiled language, and all of it razor-edged.

  “Listen,” I said, “listen, I’m not trying to rape you.”

  Her mouth worked and she let go with a blob of spit that splattered across my cheek.

  “Goddamn it, I tell you I’m not trying to rape you.” I was having trouble drawing enough air, just as she was; my lungs burned malignantly. “I was chasing somebody else, a man, I thought you were him in the dark.”

  I had to say it again before she finally stopped thrashing around. She lay there tensed and wary, breasts heaving, hating me with her eyes. “Why were you chasing somebody out here? Who the hell are you?”

  “A friend of Alex Cappellani’s,” I said. “I drove out to the winery to see him and this guy came out of the cellar office and tried to brain me with a wine bottle. So I went after him.”

  “What guy?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t get a look at him. He shut off the light in the office when he heard me coming.”

  “None of that makes any sense.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Look, I’ll let go of you, let you up, if you don’t try to mix it up anymore.”

  “That depends on what you try.”

  “A little more conversation, that’s all.”

  “Then let me up.”

  I released one of her arms and she did not move. So I let go of the other one and slid back off her and made it up painfully onto my feet. My legs felt weak now, and I seemed to have half a dozen pulsing aches all over my body; the place where she had bit me stung like fury. I wiped her spittle off my cheek, stepped back and over to one of the vines and rested my weight on a grape stake there.

  The woman got up slowly, not taking her eyes off me. She brushed the dirt off her clothing in an angry way, put a hand up and ran fingertips across her jaw where I cuffed her. “You play pretty damned rough, don’t you,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. Are you all right?”

  “I’ve been treated worse.” She slapped again at the front of her jacket and the blue jeans she was wearing. “You said you were a friend of Alex’s. What’s your name?”

  I told her.

  “I never heard that name before.”

  “I only met Alex a few days ago.” My respiration was just about back to normal, but the constriction in my chest had not lessened any yet. The damned cough started up again, thin and dry.

  She stood there watching me, speculatively now, not saying anything.

  When the coughing quit I said, “What about you? Do you live here?”

  “No, I don’t live here.” She hesitated then, but only for a moment ; most of the anger seemed to have gone out of her. “I work for the Cappellanis, in their San Francisco office. I’ve been staying up here as their guest since last night.”

  “Why were you in those trees?”

  “Because the guest quarters are over on the other side of the hill and I was walking over to the main house. On the road. Somebody came running up from the other side, and as soon as he saw me he veered off into the trees. I thought that was pretty odd so I went in there a little ways to try to see who it was. Then I heard you, and you heard me and came after me, and I reacted stupidly and ran. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.”

  “You didn’t get a look at the guy?”

  “It was too dark. Look, you said he: shut off the light in the cellar office and then came out and hit you with a wine bottle. Why would anybody do a crazy thing like that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Unless he’s a thief and he panicked. Or—”

  I stopped abruptly, because for the: first time since I had been attacked I was beginning to think logically instead of emotionally —and I was remembering all at once that scraping sound I had heard, the sound of something heavy being dragged across the stone floor.

  The woman said, “What’s the matter?”

  “Alex Cappellani,” I said. “He asked me to come out to see him tonight. He was supposed to be in that office when I got here, waiting for me.”

  She understood right away what I meant. “My God,” she said, “you don’t think that man might have done something to Alex?”

  I did not answer her; there was nothing to say. I just turned and started back toward the dirt-and-gravel road, not running because of my lungs but moving pretty fast just the same. After the first few steps the woman was right beside me.

  3

  When we got down to where I could see the yard in front of the cellar, the figure of a man appeared there, walking toward the entrance doors from the direction of the Cappellani house. I tensed a little—but there was nothing furtive about his movements. He noticed us at ab
out the same time, slowed and then stopped in the light from one of the night globes burning above the archway.

  The woman and I left the road and hurried across the yard. The man stood with his arms at his sides, watching us approach. He appeared to be in his forties, wiry and pinch-faced, and he was wearing a sports jacket and an open-necked shirt and slacks, all of them dark-colored. His expression was one of curiosity at first, but as we came up and he got a good look at what was in our faces, at the condition of my clothes, it changed into an anxious frown.

  He blinked at me and said to the woman, “Shelly? Is something wrong—?”

  I went right by him, and she did the same thing without offering a response. The dark winey coldness enveloped me again as I stepped inside; I had to breathe through my mouth to keep from gagging. I went at an angle across the foyer, into the corridor to the north and along it to where the office was. Echoes from my footfalls and the woman’s bounced hollowly off the stone walls. On the floor up there the spilled wine gleamed blackly, like blood, amid the shards from the broken bottle.

  When I got to the open office door, the woman—Shelly—said, “There’s a light switch on the wall inside, to your right.”

  I reached in there, fumbled around and located the switch and flipped it. Bright fluorescent light from a pair of overhead tubes consumed the blackness; the sudder. glare made me squint. Behind me I hear the sharp intake of Shelly’s breath.

  Alex Cappellani was lying face down in the middle of the floor, and there were streaks of crimson matting the curly hair on the back of his skull.

  I moved to him and went down on one knee, pressed fingertips against the artery in his neck. There was a pulse, irregular but strong enough. I let out the breath I had been holding, started to shrug out of my jacket.

  Shelly leaned down next to me. “Is he—alive?”

  “Yeah. But he needs a doctor, fast. That head wound—”

  “Good God!” a man’s voice said. It was the pinch-faced guy; he had followed us inside, and he was standing now in the doorway with his eyes wide and shocked. “Alex! What’s happened to him?”