In an Evil Time

by Bill Pronzini

  Light bloomed behind one of the shaded front windows.

  All right. No point in waiting any longer.

  Get out, walk over there.

  Ring the bell.

  Raise the gun, and when Rakubian opens the door, shoot him. Don’t hesitate, don’t think, just shoot him.

  Rid the world of a monster.

  For Angela. Kenny. Cassie. Eric. Himself.

  He sat there.

  Do it. What’s the matter with you? Do it!

  He sat there. He couldn’t move.

  Could not will himself to move.

  Buck fever, after you already lost your cherry. I’m ashamed of you, boy.

  Now the sweat came. And the shakes, and a shortness of breath, and an awareness that he was dribbling droplets of piss like a scared old man. He cursed himself, bitterly and savagely; and when the reaction ended after a minute, two minutes, it left him feeling weak and ill. He knew he could move then. He might even be able to make it across the street and up to Rakubian’s door. But beyond that … no.

  Couldn’t go through with it after all.

  Not tonight. Not this way.

  But it wasn’t finished; he wasn’t finished. Something had to be done about Rakubian and it was still up to him to do it. All that had changed was the time, the place, perhaps the method. Whatever steps he eventually took to protect his family, they would not be as simple or as cowardly as ringing a doorbell and squeezing a trigger.

  2

  Early Thursday Morning

  AS late as it was when he got back to Los Alegres, most of the lights in the big two-story house were on. The instant he saw that, he knew something was wrong.

  He went tight on the outside, hollow on the inside. He jerked the Lexus into the driveway and left it there instead of putting it away in the garage. The Doberman, Fritz, began barking inside as soon as he ran up the stairs to the front porch. The door opened before he reached it and Cassie stood there. The wrongness was in her face, her eyes, the fact that she was still dressed, her voice when she said, “My God, where have you been? I’ve been frantic. I called your cell phone half a dozen times and kept getting an out-of-service message—”

  He’d turned it off, like a damn fool. “Never mind that now. What happened? Why are all the lights on?”

  “Come inside.”

  “Angela? Kenny?”

  “They’re all right.” She tugged at his arm. “We can’t talk out here.”

  He went past her, into the empty living room. Liquor on her breath, a half-full glass of Irish whiskey on the table beside her chair—she almost never drank anything alcoholic this late. The dog was still making a racket; she must have locked it in the kitchen or on the back porch. He turned to face her again.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “He was here again. Rakubian.”

  “Here? At the house?”

  “No, in town, McLear Park. Angela took Kenny down there before supper for a few minutes. I tried to talk her out of it, but she thought it’d be all right with Fritz along. He showed up there. He must have been lurking somewhere in the neighborhood and seen her leave the house.”

  “Goddamn it! What happened to the neighborhood watch?”

  “I don’t know. People not home yet, not paying attention …”

  “He didn’t try to force them into his car again?”

  “No. Kept his distance because of the dog. She said he was calm this time, didn’t raise his voice.”

  “What’d he say to her?”

  “He came right out with it, Jack. Said he’d kill her if she didn’t go back to him. Her, Kenny, anybody who tried to stop him, and then himself.”

  Hollis ground his teeth, hard enough to bring a flash of pain along his jaw. “You or she call the police?”

  “No. I wanted to—it’s a clear violation of the restraining order, we could’ve had him arrested again. But she said it would only provoke him, make him worse.”

  “She’s probably right.”

  “How could he get any worse?” Cassie said. “He’s totally irrational. He wouldn’t be openly violating the TRO and making outright threats if he wasn’t.”

  “I know that. I know.”

  “God, I feel so helpless.”

  “So do I,” he lied. He crossed to the wet bar, poured a double shot of Bushmills, and drank it in one long swallow. It went down like fire, but it might have been water for all the effect it had on him.

  Cassie came over beside him. “There’s more,” she said. “He followed them back here, parked down the street for almost an hour. Then he drove away and we thought he was gone, but a while later he was back. He drove by the house a few times, parked, left and came back again—twice more.”

  Down there in the city waiting for him, and all the while he was up here playing his sick games. I should’ve known this is where he was, should’ve called to find out. Stupid. Stupid!

  “Jack?”

  “… Yes. What else?”

  “He kept calling up,” Cassie said. “Six or seven times. I know we decided not to talk to him anymore after last night, but I was so upset the first time I lost it and picked up and screamed at him. I don’t even remember what I said. He told me to calm down. Can you believe that?”

  “What else did he say?”

  “The same garbage. All the threats thinly veiled again, to me and in the other calls I let go on the machine.”

  “He knows we’re taping his calls. At least he’s still rational enough not to want a record of his death threats.”

  “That’s no consolation.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. Where’s Angela?”

  “She was pretty upset after the park incident. I made her lie down in her room with Kenny. Last time I looked in, they were both asleep.”

  “Good.”

  “She’s not strong enough to stand up to this kind of madness indefinitely. None of us are. What’re we going to do?”

  Round and round, round and round. He shook his head. “I can’t think right now. That dog … quiet him down, will you, before he wakes up half the neighborhood.”

  Cassie nodded and went away. She was much better with the Doberman than he was; Fritz was well trained but trusted her more than anybody else. Her veterinary training. Animals responded to her instinctively. He swung around to pour another drink; felt his stomach quiver and changed his mind. At the back of the house, the barking stopped. Pretty soon Cassie returned.

  Her first words then “Where were you tonight?”

  “A business meeting, I told you that.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “What makes you think I’m lying?”

  “Your cell phone. Why was it switched off?”

  “I didn’t know it was. Must’ve pushed the button by accident.”

  “Dammit,” she said, “you’re up to something.”

  “No.”

  “Something drastic. I can feel it.”

  “No.”

  “You’d better tell me. I have a right to know.”

  “Cass, for God’s sake.”

  “Whatever we do, any of us, it has to be legal. It has to make sense.”

  “Make sense,” he said bitterly. “Get a restraining order, buy a guard dog, take a self-defense class, alert the neighborhood watch, keep a log of drive-bys, save all correspondence, record all phone calls, keep your cell phone handy at all times, join a support group. Has any of that made sense? It hasn’t stopped him and it won’t stop him.”

  “Angela is talking again about going away,” Cassie said. “Changing her name, starting a new life. She’s serious this time.”

  “Does that make sense? He’ll hunt her down wherever she goes if it takes him the rest of his miserable life—”

  “It’s the only choice I have left, Daddy.”

  Angela had come downstairs and into the living room so quietly they hadn’t realized she was there until she spoke. Robe, slippers, her short hair lank and uncombed, her face scrubbed and
colorless. Movements slow, listless. Twenty-five years old, pretty, she’d always been so pretty, the slender, wheat-blond image of Cassie at that age. Now she looked haggard, less youthful than her mother at forty-six—sharper lines around the mouth and eyes, the eyes themselves, once so full of life, faded and glassy from the constant strain. Rakubian’s marks, deeper and more permanent than the cuts and bruises she’d worn like a badge of shame when she first came home.

  Angela. His little girl. The ideal daughter—he’d said that to people while she was growing up, with pride and in all seriousness. Such a happy child, always laughing, full of questions, interested in everything. Never rebellious or troublesome, as Eric had been as a teenager. Never any problems until the summer after her high school graduation, when she’d taken up with Ryan Pierce and lost her head and her virginity and ended up pregnant with Kenny. And even that hadn’t been so bad; the kid had married her voluntarily, and if he’d been too immature to hold down a steady job and care for a family, then been a deadbeat father for more than a year after the divorce, at least he was neither abusive nor crazy. She’d have been all right if she’d gone on to college after the split with Pierce, let Cassie and him raise her son until she got her degree and found a teaching position. But no. Trying so hard to be independent, insisting on paying her own way, working days and going to school nights … that damn secretarial job in San Francisco, Rakubian and his superficial charm and lavish attention, the quick and impulsive rebound marriage. One huge mistake that had put her life, Kenny’s life in jeopardy.…

  “Daddy, don’t look at me that way.”

  He realized he’d been staring. He went to her, hugged her, stroked her hair. “Dog wake you, baby?”

  “No. I wasn’t asleep. I heard you drive in.” She stepped out of his embrace, gave him a wan smile. “You look like you’ve had a pretty rough night too.”

  “Never mind about me. Think about yourself.”

  “That’s all I have been thinking about. Kenny and myself. This isn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision. I pretty much made up my mind yesterday. We can’t go on living like this, terrified all the time, never knowing what David will do next. I have to do what’s best for both of us.”

  “Running away isn’t the answer.”

  “It might be. It’s a hope, anyway. If we stay here … David meant what he said tonight. He’ll kill us, and nobody can stop him.”

  I can stop him, Hollis thought. I will stop him.

  Cassie said, “He’ll find you, no matter where you go.”

  “Not with help from NOVA and Stalking Victims Sanctuary. They can arrange a new identity for us, a place to live, and a job for me. He won’t find us. I have to believe that.”

  “But you can’t ever be sure he won’t. You know he’d never give up, and he has plenty of money, resources.…”

  “At least we’ll have a halfway normal life again.”

  “You say that now,” Hollis said, “but it won’t be normal or anything like normal. Looking over your shoulder every time you go out on the street, jumping every time the phone or doorbell rings or you hear a strange noise. You’d never be free of fear.”

  “This kind of fear is worse. I can’t breathe, I feel like I’m suffocating right now.”

  She moved to the couch, slumped down on it with her knees together, her hands palms up in her lap. So young, sitting there like that. And so old. He felt as though he were choking, too. On love and rage as well as anxiety.

  “We’d never see you again,” Cassie said. “Either of you. I couldn’t stand that.”

  “You will see us. We’ll find a way to keep in touch, get together when we’re sure it’s safe.”

  “It’ll never be safe enough. And you wouldn’t dare phone or write—”

  “You’re forgetting e-mail. The support organizations have access to secure sites for message forwarding. Please don’t keep trying to change my mind, it’s only going to make things more difficult for all of us.”

  Cassie glanced at Hollis, then went to sit beside her. “Where would you go? You can’t just pack up your car and start driving without a destination in mind.”

  “I have a destination in mind.”

  “Aunt Celia’s?”

  “Mom, we’ve been over and over that. Aunt Celia and I don’t get along, you know she doesn’t approve of me. I don’t care if she is your sister, she can be a bitch sometimes, and Uncle Frank lets her walk all over him. Besides, David knows about them, knows they live in Cedar Rapids. It’s the first place he’d look.”

  “Just for a few days …”

  “Only as a last resort.”

  “Where, then? What destination?”

  “Well … Boston.”

  “For heaven’s sake, why Boston?”

  Angela hesitated before she said, “It’s about as far from Los Alegres as you can get. And a big city, a place to get lost in until I can make arrangements for someplace even more secure.”

  Hollis said, “You’re hiding something.”

  She started to deny it, hesitated again, and then sighed and said, “It was Eric’s idea.”

  “Eric?”

  “He knows somebody at Cal Poly, another student whose folks have an apartment they don’t use very often near downtown Boston. He’s trying to set it up so Kenny and I can stay there two or three weeks.”

  “I thought we agreed to keep your brother out of this as much as possible.”

  “I couldn’t help it, Daddy. I didn’t go to him. He called yesterday, while I was here alone. I tried to downplay how bad things are, but he kept probing. I couldn’t lie to him even if I wanted to. He knows me too well.”

  “And he offered up this Boston idea.”

  “Yes.”

  “How upset was he?”

  “He wasn’t, not the way you mean. He really isn’t as hot-headed as he was before he went away to college.”

  Hollis wished he could be certain of that. Eric had inherited his grandfather’s brooding temper, and he had a penchant for using poor judgment. Bright kid, IQ higher than anyone in the family, plenty of good qualities, but difficult to understand sometimes. They’d never been as close as Hollis wanted them to be, no matter how hard he tried to establish a tighter bond. That rebellious streak had gotten Eric in trouble a few times—suspended from high school twice for fighting, busted for smoking marijuana in a public place. And he’d disregarded family rules too many times to count. Yet he’d managed to keep up his grades, maintained a high enough GPA and scored well enough on his SAT to get into Cal Poly, Hollis’s alma mater; and now in his junior year, majoring in engineering, he was in the top 10 percent of his class. Good kid at heart, who would someday be a good man—Hollis was sure of that. But that dark streak still worried him.

  “When is he supposed to let you know about this apartment?”

  “He thought he’d know today, but I haven’t heard from him. If he doesn’t call by noon tomorrow, I’ll get in touch with him—”

  “No, let me do it. I want to talk to him.”

  “Dad, you won’t try to—”

  “No, don’t worry.” His facial muscles felt bunched and tight. A tic seemed to want to start under his right eye; he made an effort to keep it still, his expression neutral. “I won’t argue with him or lecture him.”

  “Please don’t.”

  Cassie asked, “If it works out, this Boston apartment … when will you go?”

  “As soon as possible. This weekend.”

  “That soon? All right, don’t say anything, I’m not going to try to talk you out of it. But suppose the apartment doesn’t work out?”

  “I don’t know yet. There’s one other possible arrangement I can make. No matter what, though, we’re leaving by the first of next week, before it’s too late.”

  There were more words between the two, but Hollis was no longer listening. He moved to the couch, bent to kiss the top of his daughter’s head. “I’m going up to check on Kenny,” he said.

  Much of Angela
’s old room had been preserved as it was when she was growing up—the stuffed animals on their shelves, the movie- and rock-star posters decorating the walls, her collection of Nancy Drew and Judy Bolton books neatly displayed. Sentiment on Cassie’s part as well as on Angela’s. Kenny was asleep in the daybed next to her old twin, sprawled on his back, one hand fisted against his cheek, the other arm outflung, most of the bedclothes kicked off as usual. The night-light and the pale glow from the hall made his small face seem radiant. Sweet face, like his mother’s. He resembled Angela, though he’d inherited Pierce’s dark hair and complexion.

  Hollis tiptoed in, lifted part of the tangled sheet, and covered the boy to his waist. He touched his lips gently to the smooth forehead, straightened, and stood looking down at his grandson in the shadow-edged light.

  Nothing is going to happen to you or your mom, he promised silently. I swear it. I swear it on my own life.

  In the darkness of their bedroom, no sleep again for either of them, they lay side by side without touching. Cassie had asked him to hold her, and for a time he had, but he was afraid she’d try to stir up more in the way of comfort; he knew he couldn’t oblige. Sexual dysfunction, the inability to sustain an erection—that was another symptom of escalating prostate cancer. He’d pretended his recent impotence was stress-related because he did not want her to know the truth yet. The early diagnosis, the hope that the cancer was slow-growing enough to maintain a lengthy wait-and-see monitoring … meaningless now. It was escalating, all right. The symptoms and the last battery of tests made that plain enough. Stan Otaki was going to insist, the next time he saw him, that they begin aggressive treatment—surgery, radiation therapy. Which was why he’d canceled two appointments in a row. The way things were now with Angela and Rakubian, he could not put up with strength-sapping doses of radiation, or pressure from Cassie to allow himself to be cut open. When Rakubian was no longer a threat, then he’d see the doctor, then he’d tell her, then he’d give his full attention to fighting the cancer.

  “… you were tonight.”

  “What?”

  “I said, you still haven’t told me where you were tonight.”