The Snatch nd-1

by Bill Pronzini

  There was a street lamp about ten feet in back of my car, and it cast a pool of pale amber light on the dark, silent street. I got inside the car, and Martinetti handed me the case and I put it on the seat beside me.

  He said, “Luck.”

  I tried a little smile, and nodded, and made a sign with my thumb and forefinger. He stepped back and I got the car going.

  When I reached the corner, I looked up at my rear-view mirror. They were all standing there on the edge of the amber pool of light, three black silhouettes against the illumination, watching me. Then I turned the corner and they were gone, and I was alone.

  * * * *

  7

  I drove out of Hillsborough and onto El Camino Real, north. I drove slowly, both hands on the wheel, concentrating on the pavement sweeping by beneath the car’s headlights and letting the rest of my mind lie fallow.

  Traffic was heavy, as it has a tendency to be in the evenings, through Burlingame and Millbrae; when I reached San Bruno, it thinned out considerably and I could make a little better time. At Sneath Lane, I turned left and followed it past the Golden Gate National Cemetery and across Junipero Serra Boulevard, and then across Skyline, and finally into the hills well south of Riverside Park.

  Skyline seemed to be the dividing line between a bright, cold, clear sky and the restless tendrils of blanketing fog that drifted in above Pacifica from the ocean. The fog was thick and wet in the hills, and gave an eerie, disembodied quality to the lights of the Peninsula behind and below me. I put on my windshield wipers after a while and closed the wing window; the wind was sharp and icy up there, and the penetrating dampness of the sea mist had sucked away all the warmth inside the car in a matter of a few seconds. I switched the heater on to the High position. Thick, stale air rushed through the floor and dash vents, but it seemed still to be cold, as if the moistness had somehow gotten permanently into the upholstery and the head-liner.

  I found Old Southbridge Road without difficulty, and the narrow dirt road leading off it. I slowed there, just as I made the turn, and pulled off to the side and stared down as much of the road as I could see in the swirling, enveloping grayness. There were trees scattered on both sides-oak and bay and eucalyptus-and they had a strange, ethereal quality, like nightmarish illustrations in a book by Poe. There were not many homes in this particular area, and consequently, few lights and scarcely any sound at all except for the faint, wet slithering of the fog through the branches of the trees.

  I looked at my watch, and it was ten minutes to ten. Okay. I checked the odometer, and then pulled out onto the road again and drove along exactly one mile. The fog swallowed the road behind me, and seemed to part reluctantly under the probing yellow cones of my headlight beams. The turnaround was there, on my right, a flat space beneath several bunched eucalyptus with their bark peeling off in great gray strips like dead and diseased skin. I stopped the car there and shut off the engine and the headlamps.

  It was heavy dark, and I could just see the outlines of the trees on the opposite side of the road. What night sounds there were seemed muted and directionless, distorted by the thick and enshrouding fog. The luminescent dial of my wristwatch showed that it was now five minutes to ten.

  I lit a cigarette, and in the flare of the match I could see my face reflected back at me in the door window; it looked pinched and apprehensive, a little old, a little tired. I shook out the match and dragged slowly on the cigarette and tried to ignore the viscid coldness which seemed to have settled between my shoulder blades.

  Three minutes to ten.

  I stabbed out the cigarette in the ashtray and caught up the suitcase in my right hand. All right, I thought. Here we go. I stepped out of the car and shut the door without slamming it. Cold tongues of fog licked at my face, wet and feathery, and I shivered involuntarily and hunched my shoulders inside the suit jacket. I wished I had had the sense to bring an overcoat; it was going to take me a long time to get warm again on this night.

  I crossed the wet, dark, empty road and stood on the embankment at the opposite side. I could just make out the slope of the bank dropping away gently between a bay and an oak, the formless and unidentifiable shadows of undergrowth-but that was all. I could not see the road below; the mist was an impenetrable pocket, and as thick and clinging and grayly vibratory as gelatin.

  If he’s down there, I thought, he can’t see me either. But he knows I’m here. He’d have heard the car.

  I took a firmer grip on the suitcase, hefting it in my hand, and started down the embankment. The footing was none too good-the ground had a soft, spongelike consistency, strewn with wet leaves and moss, and I was forced to pick my way a half-step at a time, with my left arm flung out for balance and my right holding the case in close to my body. I had visions of getting lost, of not being able to find that flat sandstone rock, of missing the ten o’clock deadline, so that the kidnapper became frightened by the delay and panicked and ran. But that kind of thoughts were not getting me anything but uptight; I put them out of my mind and kept working my way down the slope.

  Moments passed and it did not seem as if I had gone more than five or six feet, but when I turned to look upward, I could no longer see the top of the embankment. Visibility was maybe two feet in each direction. I took another step forward and down, careful, another, another- and then the rock was there, looming up out of the sodden turf like an oval picnic table, smooth and flat and shiny with mist.

  I let breath out between my teeth in a soft, sibilant sigh and went carefully to the rock and put the suitcase down on top of it. As I straightened up, there was the sound of a twig cracking, a thin report, from somewhere below and to my right. I worked saliva into my mouth and turned and started up the embankment toward the road, leaning forward with my hands low to the ground in case I lost my footing.

  I was almost to the roadbed again when I heard the scream.

  It was a man’s voice, and the cry was filled with agony and terror, reverberating hellishly through the churning, hoary fog. I froze there on the slope, chills tumbling along my spine, a sudden vacuum in the pit of my stomach and down low in my groin, and in that moment there was a moaning, a panting, thrashing footfalls in the undergrowth, the sounds of a struggle.

  I thought: Holy Christ! And then I thought: Run, get the hell out of here, you don’t want any part of what’s down there! But then I was straightening up and turning like a damned fool and moving back down the incline, to the sounds, to the flat sandstone rock and the suitcase with three hundred thousand dollars and maybe a boy’s life inside it.

  My feet sluiced out from under me in my haste, and I landed flat on my back and slid a few feet before I could break my momentum and bring myself up again. I staggered upright, but I could not see anything in the wool-like density of the fog, groping my way blind, and there was another scream, same voice, short and sharp and trailing off in a kind of agonized sigh that was unmistakably the ending of a life, and then the sound of something falling heavily across brittle leafage.

  The mist shredded suddenly in front of me and I could see the sandstone rock a couple of feet away on my left, and a black shadow bending over another shadow lying prone near it, and I pulled up short, turning my body toward the shadows and away from the rock, reflex only, not knowing at all what I was going to do, leaving myself unprotected. The bending figure whirled with the tails of a long coat flapping around its knees like folded black wings, and an arm came out and hit me in the stomach, a glancing blow sliding across, but Jesus! he must have had lead in his fist because the pain boils through my belly and I stumble backward and sit down hard and I can see him moving slow-motion away from me, to the rock, hefting the suitcase, moving again, blending with the fog, gone, vanished, and I try to get up but I can’t goddamn it he didn’t hit me that hard!

  I put my hand there as I roll over onto my knees, and I feel wetness and warmth, how can that be, and then

  I take my hand away and hold it up to my eyes and it is dripping, dripping d
ark fluid, and all at once I realize what has happened, I know what it is, he cut me the son of a bitch cut me he cut me with a goddamn knife!

  And now the fire comes, the searing burning fire, and in my mind I see my entrails exposed to the gray-mold fog, I see my belly ripped open and my guts hanging out and the mist touching them like unwashed surgeon’s fingers, I hear a moan low and wailing but it is my voice this time and my guts oh God oh Jesus I’m going to die he cut me and I’m going to die

  get up, get up and run but I can’t yes I can my vision all blurry or is that the fog or is that crying, no a man does not cry but the pain, get up

  on my feet now, I don’t know how, and staggering forward with my hand holding them in and I see the shadow and he is dead with dark fluid leaking out from his belly, a stranger dead with his belly cut open

  and I’m running up the embankment, feet sliding, half crazy with the pain and the fear and the fog so cold so dirty is all around me I’m dying you goddamn lousy world I’m alone and I’m dying for what, oh God what happened

  the road now and the metal hood of my car like ice, clawing the door, falling inside

  oh oh oh the dome light is on and I see the blood the blood oh no please no

  the key find the ignition the gear stick one hand on the wheel and one to hold in my dripping guts

  hurtling through grayness and blackness can’t think can’t see

  sweat in my eyes and the pain you don’t know the pain and the blood I’m so frightened

  light ahead help help but it’s too late I’m dying

  look out look out car veering no control and going off look

  * * * *

  8

  I remembered nothing, and I remembered everything.

  Vividly brief scenes with no continuity, like film edited and spliced together by a madman. All in floating, surrealistic white and gray, except for the brilliant red color of blood. And when the reel of film ended, abruptly — only the richest and deepest of blacknesses.

  I knew the pain.

  Even through the blackness, I knew the pain.

  It raged and seethed inside me, and then, sated on my flesh, it grew still and became little more than dull, half-realized throbbings in my stomach and my head. I lay with it, coming out of the velvet midnight, watching the dawn consume the darkness at the edges, and at first I was calm, waiting.

  But then the film began again, without warning, and half comatose and half rational, I relived it all and saw the blood, and I was terrified. A voice cried out in rising decibels, and it was my voice, and my hands beat at the air with the frantic flutterings of a wounded bird. Fingers soft and gentle took my arms and stilled them and laid me down again, and something cool and moist brushed with careful strokes across my forehead.

  I heard myself whimpering, a child’s whimpering, and somehow I managed to stop that. Then the voice that was not my voice, that was too high-pitched and too filled with terror to have been my voice, began crying, “He stabbed me and took the money, I’m dying oh please you have to call Martinetti, Martinetti has to be told about the money!”

  The cool, moist strokes continued, and it was a woman’s caressing, a woman wearing apple-scented perfume and talking to me in words soft and gentle like her fingers. Some of the panic left me, and I could feel calm returning, and I was aware that I was coming out of it, that I was waking up. I did not want to wake up, because I was afraid of what I would learn, but the panic was no more and with the calm came the need to know. I could not stay under much longer.

  My brain began to clear, and it was full dawn soon and the blackness was gone. I lay there, awake now, with only a fuzziness disturbing the clarity of my thoughts, my eyes squeezed tightly shut and my hands pulled into fists at my sides. I knew I was in bed, in a hospital; there were the faint odors of ether and disinfectant and floor wax-institutional smells-pushing away the quiet apple scent of the woman, and knowing this, my body took on a stiffness, a rigidity, and images tried to push their way into my mind. I fought them, I fought them desperately, because they were carefully buried images of things I had seen in field hospitals in the South Pacific, and I knew that if I allowed them to return they would bring the panic and the terrible fear with them. I fought them, and I won, and they retreated. The confrontation left me gasping for breath. I closed my mouth and willed normalcy to my lungs.

  I listened. There was a faint, faraway ticking that would be a wall clock, perhaps, and the sounds of hospital activity muted by thick walls, and now the scraping of a chair, and now a muffled cough, and now nothing.

  I opened my eyes.

  My vision was clear, except for lingering, shimmering pulses of light at the periphery of it. I was looking at a big man in a white hospital smock, with big capable hands and gold-rimmed spectacles and a neat salt-and-pepper mustache. He was smiling, a tired and wan smile, standing just beyond the tubular gray rail at the foot of the bed on which I lay. The walls of the room behind him were a pale green, with an off-white ceiling, and there was a white table with a stainless-steel water carafe and some plastic cups on it.

  I looked at the doctor, blinking a little. I said in a calm, clear voice-my voice, “Am I dying?”

  “No,” he answered gravely, “you’re not dying.”

  I grasped that with my mind, and clung to it, and I saw in his eyes that it was the truth. The quiescence, so tenuous before, now became firm and complete; there would be no more panic. I said, “My belly …”

  “A nasty cut, but not deep enough to have done much damage. You lost a lot of blood, and it took twenty-seven stitches to close you up, but you’ll be all right.”

  “I thought … I thought my entrails were …”

  “Shock,” the doctor said, with a small, understanding nod. “It magnifies things out of proportion. You’re not badly hurt, you can believe that.”

  I let my mind focus on the pain in my stomach now, and it was still dull and vaguely pulsing. They would have used Novocaine as a local anaesthetic, and given me some kind of pain-killer, too, which would account for the fuzziness at the fringes of my thinking; the pain perhaps would be stronger later, but I would be able to tolerate it, knowing that I was not dying.

  I swallowed into a parched throat, and raised one of my hands off the bedclothes to touch my forehead just over my right eye, where the pain in my head seemed to be centered. I encountered a bandage, with a sensitive lump beneath it. I said, “How did I get this?”

  The doctor moistened his lips, and his eyes shifted to my right. For the first time since I had come completely awake, I realized that there were other people in the room. I turned my head on the pillow.

  A slender, doe-eyed young nurse stood near the window, auburn hair tucked under one of those little newspaper-sailboat white hats. Her face was solemn and very dedicated, and she would have soft hands and an apple scent about her. In a hard metal chair pulled back from the bed, a very fat man in a dark brown worsted suit sat with his hands flat on his knees. He had shiny black eyes, like smooth Greek olives, and they were watching me with no expression other than a kind of resigned weariness. His mouth was thick and sleepy-looking, and there was a ponderousness to the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head; but I had worked with cops of one kind and another for a long time, and I knew that that was what he was, and I knew as well that he was not half as soft and sleepy as he appeared or pretended to be.

  He shifted a little on his chair and looked at the doctor and the nurse. They left the room immediately, wordlessly. The fat man said to me, “You got the lump when your car went off the road. Steering wheel or windshield. It could have been worse, but you only sideswiped a couple of eucalyptus and nosed into a ditch.” He spoke softly and carefully, as if weighing each sentence before putting voice to it.

  I said, “Who are you?”

  “My name is Donleavy. I’m with the District Attorney’s Office of San Mateo County.”

  I looked at the identification he produced, and moved my head on the pillow
in careful acknowledgment. Special investigator. Well, he wouldn’t be here if it was just the knife wound in my stomach, I thought-or even if they had only found the dead man by the sandstone rock. But he would have come out, all right, if the authorities had wind of the kidnapping.

  Donleavy was watching me think. After a time he said, “Mr. Martinetti is waiting at his home just now, with my partner. If you were wondering whether you should say anything.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “You told us,” Donleavy said. “Indirectly.”

  I just looked at him.

  “Man who lives in the house near where you went off the road heard the crash and went out to investigate. He called the hospital here-Peninsula Emergency, if you’re interested-and they sent an ambulance. You were delirious when it arrived, kept repeating the name Martinetti and something about a kidnapping and murder and the money being gone. The attendants passed it on to the staff here when they brought you in, and they relayed it to us.

  I took a long, slow breath, remembering the shouting I had done in the half-world of returning consciousness. “What time is it now?” I asked Donleavy.

  “Just past five A.M.”

  “Has the boy been released yet?”

  “No.”

  “Any word?”