Hellbox nd-37

by Bill Pronzini

  He couldn’t figure it out. She wasn’t nothing to him. And she’d tried to put his eyes out with those tacks. Another of his enemies. Got in his way, gave him nothing but trouble, would’ve killed him if she could… an enemy the same as Verriker and the rest. You had every right to take revenge on your enemies, no matter who they were. Sure you did. Soldiers didn’t have no qualms about killing, he didn’t have none, either.

  Then why was he bugged about the woman?

  He put his head out the window, took some deep breaths. Told himself to quit thinking about her, she was dead, it was over and done with. But the smell and the residue wouldn’t let him. His palms still itched, but now it was as much because of her as the thought of killing Verriker.

  He wished he could stop somewhere, wash his hands, change his clothes. But there wasn’t time. Later, after he was done with Verriker and out of the county. He’d have to park at a rest stop or campground somewhere and get a few hours’ sleep-he was already dog-tired from the hours of road time he’d put in today, no way he could make it all the way to Northern Idaho or even out of California without some rest. He’d clean up the camper and himself then. Wash the woman out of his head at the same time.

  The turnoff for the lake was just up ahead. He put on his turn signal even though there were no other cars on the road. Keep playing it safe, obeying the law, no matter where he was. One more survival skill.

  The pickup rattled and bounced through the ruts until he passed the long limestone shelf. Lights on in the Ramsey cabin. Verriker was there and still up, but did he have company again tonight? If the Ramseys were holed up with him, they’d get theirs first thing. But it’d be a whole lot easier if Verriker was alone.

  Balfour passed the place where he’d parked the last time, drove on past the cabin, slow. Grinned, his lips flattening against his teeth, when he saw that the only set of wheels down there was Verriker’s van. All by himself tonight. Perfect. Now he could take his time, make Verriker sweat and beg before he blew him away.

  The road jogged up ahead. On the far side, he found a place to turn around, rolled back past the Ramsey cabin to the hidden parking spot among the trees. He slid the Charter. 38 into his pocket, locked the truck, and made his way along the verge of the empty road. Slower going tonight-he couldn’t see as clear with the clouds keeping the moon covered up. But he could see the cabin lights all right through the trees.

  He went all the way to the driveway this time, down along its edge. No need to go skulking around in the trees tonight. No need to look for an unlocked door or window. Just walk up, walk right inside if the lock was off. And if it wasn’t, knock on the door-Verriker wouldn’t have no reason not to open up for him. Wouldn’t be afraid of him until he was looking down the barrel of the. 38.

  The closer Balfour got to the door, the softer he walked. Excitement made his heart hammer, sharpened his senses-the same as when he had a buck in his sights, ready for the kill. Only better, much better, because shooting a deer wasn’t personal, and this was as personal as it got.

  He had the revolver tight in his hand when he reached the door. He listened, didn’t hear anything inside, reached out real quiet to test the latch. Locked. He let go of it, sucked in a breath, and rapped on the door panel. Not too heavy, not too loud.

  Nothing for several seconds. The. 38 felt big in his hand. Enormous. His palm was itching again, his mouth dry, his thoughts full of blood.

  Come on, Verriker, come on!

  Footsteps then, slow. “Who is it?”

  He almost said, “The mayor.” It was right there on the tip of his tongue. He bit it back, said his name instead.

  “What do you want, Balfour?”

  “I got something to tell you. Real important, Ned. Can I come in?”

  A little more silence. Thinking it over. Open the fucking door!

  Verriker opened it. The bolt lock snapped, light spilled out through a three-inch slit between the door and the jamb. Balfour shoved inward with his free hand, moving forward at the same time, bringing the. 38 up. Saw Verriker backing away fast to one side, snapped at him, “Stay where you are!” as he bulled ahead into the room.

  Movement at the edge of his vision.

  Warning flash… too late.

  Something slammed down on his forearm with enough force to paralyze his fingers, break his grip on the gun.

  From the other side, something hit him across the side of the neck, took his breath away, and dropped him to his knees.

  He tried to get up, but his legs and arms wouldn’t work. Another blow sent him sprawling onto his back. He lay there dazed, staring up through a haze of pain. Two faces swam into focus above him, faces he recognized No!

  Panicked disbelief surged through him. He tried to scuttle backward away from the hands that reached down for him, but all he could do was flop and jerk like a deer with a busted spine.

  Verriker dead, Idaho… never happen now. Screwed again. Why couldn’t nothing ever turn out the way he planned it, why did the shit always have to happen to him?

  27

  Runyon scooped up Balfour’s snub-nosed revolver and shoved it into his pocket, then helped me haul him up off the floor. We dragged him to the couch and threw him down on it and slap-frisked him to find out if he had another weapon. He didn’t. Runyon had brought in the set of handcuffs he keeps in his car; he snapped one circlet around Balfour’s wrist, the other around the shaft of an old, heavy pole lamp.

  While he was doing that, I got up beside Balfour on my knees, bunched my fingers in the neck of his shirt, and put my face close to his. He wouldn’t look at me, kept jerking his head from side to side. I shook him, hard.

  “Where’s my wife, you son of a bitch?”

  He made gurgling sounds, mouth twitching and spraying spittle, his little black rodent’s eyes bright with fear and confusion. Kept up that rolling motion with his head to avoid eye contact.

  “What did you do with her? Where is she?”

  “Uh… uh…”

  I cuffed him with the back of one hand. Shook him again with the other, hard enough to snap his head forward this time. “Where is she?”

  “Bill!” Runyon’s voice sharp behind me. His hands on me then, wrestling me backward. The cloth of Balfour’s shirt ripped before my fingers came loose; he bounced back against the cushion. “He can’t talk if you break his neck.”

  I struggled a little, not much. Jake held onto me until I quit, but when he let go, his body was still blocking me from Balfour. The initial burst of rage had banked some; I leaned against the couch arm, trying to get my breathing under control. Balfour was still twitching, but only the right side of his body moved; his left arm hung limp across his lap. The gurgles had become grunts, and one of the grunts shaped out into a pair of words.

  “Crippled me…”

  Temporarily, that was all. Runyon had learned judo when he was on the Seattle PD; the nerve paralysis from his chop across Balfour’s neck would fade pretty soon, but we weren’t about to tell him that.

  Verriker had crossed to stand alongside the pole lamp, his heavy face mottled with a fury that matched mine. I watched him lean down and spit in Balfour’s face. “You miserable sack of shit, you blew up my house, you killed Alice.”

  “No, I never-”

  “Yeah, but it was me you were after. Why? I never done anything to you.”

  “Hell you didn’t. You and your mayor crap.”

  “Crazy, you’re crazy as hell!” Verriker hit him hard on the side of the head, half punch, half slap. “I ought to-”

  Runyon said, “You won’t do anything,” and shouldered him aside. “Stand over there by the fireplace, stay out of it.”

  Verriker glared, muttered something under his breath, but the look on Runyon’s face pulled his gaze down. He went without argument.

  I was all right now, in control again. I nodded to Runyon to let him know it, tried to push in next to him so that both of us would be looming over Balfour. It was like trying to push a hun
k of cement.

  “Let me handle this, Bill.”

  Taking charge. Okay with me. My thinking had straightened out enough to understand that he was the only one of the three of us who had his emotions in check. So I didn’t put up an argument, just nodded again and backed off. He’d been a rock through all of this. If it hadn’t been for him and his long shot idea, we wouldn’t have been lucky enough to catch Balfour. Jake’s reasoning had been that Balfour could have found out where Verriker was staying, hadn’t been able to get at him last night because Verriker told us the cabin’s owners had stayed over, and might risk delaying escape to come gunning for him tonight. So we’d staked out here before dark and waited, waited, waited. My screaming nerves wouldn’t have stood much more of it.

  The ugly little bastard was still twitching, sweat leaking out of him in oily pustules. But his shock and pain had diminished; his face was set tight again with some of the same belligerence he’d shown at the fairgrounds this morning. Only, it didn’t run deep, and I could see behind it. Coward, all right. When push came to shove, the yellow would show through like jaundice, and he’d crack wide open.

  Runyon leaned down close. “Where is she, Balfour?”

  “Who? I dunno what you’re talkin’ about.”

  “The woman you kidnapped. Kerry Wade.”

  “I never kidnapped nobody.”

  “Monday afternoon, on that logging road. After you boobytrapped the Verriker house.”

  “Never done that, neither. You can’t pin that on me.”

  Verriker said, “Lying bastard!”

  Runyon waved him to silence without looking at him. He said to Balfour, “That’s why you took her, we know that. We also know you had her locked up in a shed with the pit bull on guard.”

  Balfour hadn’t expected that. Flesh rippled on his cheek, became a tick that fluttered one eye into a series of uncontrollable tics.

  “There’ll be DNA evidence in the shed to prove it,” Runyon said. “You’re going down for kidnapping and attempted murder, that much for sure. Maybe the law can prove you rigged the explosion that killed Mrs. Verriker, maybe they can’t. If they can’t, all you’re facing is some jail time. But if we don’t find Mrs. Wade alive, then it’s kidnapping and murder with special circumstances-a capital offense. The death penalty for sure, Balfour.”

  Spitting mouth, but nothing came out of it.

  “She’s no good to you now, you can’t use her as a hostage. Tell us where she is before it’s too late.”

  Silence.

  I looked away. If I hadn’t, I’d’ve gone after him again. My mind crawled with vague images of dark, empty woods, Kerry all alone, sick, hurt, eyes shining in the blackness around her… animals, bears, other prowling flesh-eaters…

  “One way or another, she’ll be found,” Runyon was saying. “Alive, and you stay alive. Dead, and you’re dead.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Maybe you think you’ve got her hidden some place where she’ll never be found. Doesn’t matter. There’ll be enough evidence against you for a no-body murder conviction. You’ll still end up on death row.”

  “Bullshit,” Balfour said again. He was looking down at his left arm, watching it jerk and flex as feeling came back. He rubbed it with his shackled right hand. There were flecks of something dark gray on his fingers, I saw then, dried mud or clay. “Go ahead, call the cops. I got nothing more to say to you.”

  His cowardice should’ve started fissures showing by now, and it hadn’t. You could see the fear in his eyes, in the oozing sweat on his face, but still he kept holding out, blustering. Why? Stupidity? Psychosis? Something else going on inside his head that was stronger than the fear, some kind of dirty little secret?

  I said, “This isn’t getting us anywhere, Jake. We’ll have to beat it out of him.”

  The words were intended to push Balfour’s buttons, but I meant them just the same. The violence in me was hot and toxic, bubbling close to the surface with an intensity that scared me a little. I could pound this inhuman piece of waste to a bloody pulp and not turn a hair while I was doing it-an act of savagery I wouldn’t have believed I was capable of until these past few days.

  His buttons didn’t push. “Go ahead,” he said. “Beat on me all you want. Won’t do you no good.”

  Verriker said, “Why don’t we find out?” and started across the room.

  Runyon said, “Stay put,” and then reached down and began digging through Balfour’s pockets, shoving him roughly to one side and then the other to get at the back ones. There was no resistance. Balfour sat there with that same expression on his ugly face, part fear, part defiance, part something else that I couldn’t read.

  Keys on a grubby chain jangled as Runyon yanked them free. The only other item that came out of the search was a thin leather wallet. Runyon opened the wallet, fanned through it; glanced at me when he was done, and shook his head. He threw the wallet in Balfour’s lap. The keys went into his pocket before he straightened up.

  “She wouldn’t be in that pickup of yours, would she, Balfour?”

  The facial tic that jumped again said she might be; his sneer said she wasn’t. “Won’t find it in the dark.”

  “We’ll find it.” Runyon turned to Verriker. “You stay here and keep an eye on Balfour. But don’t go near him.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  One other thing Runyon had brought in from his car was a flashlight; he went for it, and I hunted up another one Verriker said was in the kitchen. We hurried outside. The night had turned chilly, a sharp wind blowing down from the Sierras’ higher elevations. It dried the sweat on me, turned it cold and gummy.

  “Jake. What happened in there-”

  “Nothing happened in there. Except that Balfour wouldn’t talk.”

  “All right. But we can make him talk.”

  “I don’t think so. He’s scared, he’s a coward, he knows he’s finished-pressuring him should’ve been enough to break him. But he’s hiding something that’s holding him together.”

  “It’s not that Kerry’s already dead. I won’t believe that.”

  “No. Whatever it is, hurting him won’t make him give it up.”

  Maybe not. But if we didn’t find anything out here, I’d work him over anyway. And this time, I wouldn’t let Runyon stop me.

  We were at the road now. I said, “Vehicle that went by a few minutes before Balfour showed up must’ve been his pickup. Heading south first, then back to the north.”

  “Right. Figures to be hidden off the road in that direction, and not too far away.”

  It took us twenty minutes to find it, each of us working a side of the deserted road, and when we first uncovered it, it didn’t look like the right vehicle. Dirty white Dodge pickup, but with a bulky camper shell on it and different license plates. But it was Balfour’s, all right. He must’ve put the camper and the new plates on this morning-the reason for the open workshop on his property.

  The driver’s door was locked. I held my light up against the window long enough to be sure that the cab was empty. We went around to the back. The second key Runyon tried unlocked the camper door. I dragged in a breath as he pulled it open and shined his flash beam inside. Nothing to see except jammed-in goods and weapons, and a narrow open space on the floor in the middle, but the human body odor that came rolling out had the force of a blow to the face.

  My empty stomach convulsed; I spun away, gagging. It took a few seconds for the sickness to pass. I sucked in more of the cold night air, leaned a hand against the side of the pickup away from the open camper door.

  Runyon was still working the camper’s interior with his light. He said in heavy tones, “Empty.”

  “She was in there. Today, tonight.”

  “Yeah. Unloaded her somewhere before he came here. He wouldn’t waste time doing it before he went after Verriker.”

  “Take a quick look around anyway.”

  We looked. All around the pickup, up and down along the road, over on the other
side. The trees and ground vegetation grew thickly in the area; Balfour couldn’t have gone far carrying a heavy weight, and our lights would’ve picked up signs and there weren’t any.

  Back at the truck, I said, “I’ll check the cab, you look in the camper. I can’t go in there, Jake.”

  “I know. I’m on it.”

  I got the driver’s door unlocked. Some of the body smell was in the cab, too; I locked my sinuses against it, breathed through my mouth. There was nothing on the seat except a light denim jacket, nothing on the floorboards. Usual papers and crap in the glove box, none of it that told me anything. I felt around under the seats, found a small box on the passenger side, and hauled it out. Cigar box with a rubber band looped around it. Inside was a lot of cash in small bills-Balfour’s run-out money. I closed it up again, stuffed it back under the seat.

  When I laid my free hand on the steering wheel to push myself back out, the rubber felt sticky, grainy. I put the flash beam on the wheel. Gray flecks adhered to it, the same kind I’d noticed on Balfour’s hand. I picked off one of them, rolled it between my thumb and forefinger. It wasn’t mud. Felt faintly moist, like clay or putty, but it didn’t look like either one.

  Runyon’s light came bobbing around to where I was. “Nothing back there,” he said, “except a one-man arsenal.”

  I showed him the flecks on the steering wheel, watched him rub one the way I had. “What do you make of it?”

  “Not sure. Seems fresh.”

  “Balfour has the same stuff on his fingers.”

  “And under his fingernails. Something else I noticed, too, on one knee of his pants. Sawdust.”

  “Where the hell could he have been to get clay or whatever this is and sawdust on himself?”

  “Wherever he left Kerry, maybe.”