Shackles

by Bill Pronzini

  Every now and then I would catch myself glancing over at the telephone on the bedside table. The very first thing I’d done when I took this room was to pick up the phone and dial Kerry’s number. And the line had rung and rung and kept right on ringing until I replaced the receiver. I’d tried twice more, once before and once after dinner, and there was no answer those times either.

  It didn’t have to mean anything. She was out somewhere, that was all; she would be home later. Besides, it wasn’t as if I was going to talk to her, tell her I was alive and safe and that pretty soon I would be coming home. I only wanted to hear her voice, to know that she was alive and safe. Then I would hang up.

  It was a selfish thing, to want to relieve my mind and not hers. Nor Eberhardt’s; I had no intention of calling him. How could I talk to either of them, with the hate festering inside me and my life still in a kind of limbo? What could I say to them? Could I confide that I intended to kill the man who had abducted me and made my life a hell for the past three months? Try to explain that I couldn’t rest, couldn’t begin to pick up the pieces of a normal existence, until I had done this thing? No, of course not. They would only try to talk me out of it, and that would do none of us any good. Or instead of telling them the truth, could I just say I was alive and well, I would be home soon, don’t worry, and then hang up? That would make it even harder for them, not having any of the answers; it would open wounds that must be just now starting to heal, and keep them open for days or even weeks until I finally showed up.

  Better this way. Better for all of us if I let them go on knowing nothing for a while longer. Then, when I did get in touch with them, it would be all over and they would never have to know the whole truth. I could bury the final chapter along with the whisperer’s corpse, just as he had planned to do after my death, and nobody would ever have to know the whole truth except me.

  I stared at the TV, listened to the noise … waited. It was warm in the room but I was still cold; I would probably be cold for months to come. After a time I got up and ran a hot bath—I still felt unclean, too—and soaked in it for half an hour. The patches of frostbite on my toes and finger seemed to be shrinking, and I had regained feeling in all three digits. No more danger there. I seemed to be getting over the other physical effects of exposure, too. The weakness was mostly gone from my arms and legs, I was no longer plagued by chills, and the sore throat was gone.

  The noise of the TV had become an irritant, and when I came out of the bathroom I switched it off. The phone beckoned; I went to it and punched out Kerry’s number and let it ring a dozen times. Still no answer.

  Without thinking about it, I dragged out the journal pages and got into bed with them. I told myself that scanning through them, reliving even a few of those agonizing days in the cabin, was a form of masochism and would serve no purpose. But I did it anyway.

  Thirteen days in April, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and seventy-two. Thirteen long, difficult days. But if that’s it—and it must be because I don’t see how it can be anything else—I still don’t know who he is. Or the exact nature of his motive. Or why he would wait all this time, nearly sixteen years to take his revenge.

  He wasn’t someone directly connected with what happened back then; I’d remember him now if he was. And yet I must have met him, we must have had some kind of contact, else why the disguising of his voice, why the ski mask to keep me from seeing his face? A relative or friend of Jackie Timmons, as crazy as that possibility is?

  A relative or friend of the sixteen-year-old boy I killed?

  Jackie Timmons. Car thief, shoplifter, dope runner, burglar—all those things and more at age sixteen. Hay-ward street kid, tough and not very bright; if he’d lived he would surely have ended up in San Quentin after he reached the age of legal majority. But he hadn’t lived, because his path had crossed mine one dark April night, on a rainslick street in Emeryville.

  A man named Sam McNulty had a wholesale jobber’s warehouse there: TVs, stereo equipment, large and small appliances that he supplied to small dealers in the East Bay. It was long gone now—McNulty had died in the mid-seventies and his relatives had mismanaged the operation into bankruptcy—but it had been thriving in April of 1969. And McNulty had been having trouble with thieves. The police couldn’t catch them, even with stepped-up patrols, and the thieves had swiped half a dozen color TVs from under the nose of a sleeping nightwatchman. So McNulty had hired me to see what I could do. I had brought in another private cop, Art Baker, because a job like that is always better worked in pairs, and Art and I staked out the warehouse. The fourth night we were there, Jackie Timmons and two of his pals showed up in a battered Volkswagen van, cut through a chain-link fence just as they had twice before, and then jimmied a warehouse window. Art and I were waiting for them. They ran, and we chased them, and in the confusion Jackie got separated from the other two; they took off in the van, the way punks like that will, and left him to fend for himself. I didn’t know that when I slid in behind the wheel of my car and Art clambered in on the passenger side. And I never saw Jackie come out through the dark hole in the fence, start to run after the van, because I was intent on chasing it myself and getting the license number. One instant there was nobody in front of the car; the next instant he was there, running, and there was nothing I could do, there was no time to swerve or brake. I hit him head-on doing thirty and accelerating.

  The impact threw him thirty feet into a construction company’s dumpster. He was still alive when I got to him; still alive when the emergency ambulance arrived; still alive for the next twelve days. But he had suffered massive brain damage as well as internal injuries and he died on the thirteenth day of his coma, without regaining consciousness.

  I was exonerated of any blame, of course—any legal blame. But Jackie Timmons had a mother and she didn’t exonerate me. He had a twenty-two-year-old pregnant sister and she didn’t exonerate me. He had street friends, neighbors, and they didn’t exonerate me. And I didn’t exonerate myself, not at first, because no matter what Jackie Timmons was and might have become, he had been sixteen years old and he was dead and his death was on my conscience. It was a long time before I could sleep at night without seeing him lying broken and bloody next to the dumpster on that rain-slick Emeryville street.

  His mother screamed at me in the hospital when I went there to check on him a couple of days after it happened; she called me a damn murdering pig and worse. His sister spat in my face. But that had been the end of it. I did not see either of them again; I didn’t see any of his friends, either, including the two who had been with him that night, because the van turned out to be stolen and they were never identified, never made to answer for those particular crimes. There were no threats on my life, no attempts at reprisal—no repercussions of any kind. It was just a tragic incident in a profession filled with tragic incidents, buried under layers of scar tissue. You have to forget; you can’t go on doing my kind of work unless you learn how to forget.

  Only now it looked as though somebody hadn’t forgotten. After sixteen years, somebody connected with Jackie Timmons not only still hated me enough to want me dead but to put me through the worst kind of torment before I died. It didn’t seem possible, this long after the fact—and yet nothing else made sense either. Thirteen days for Jackie to die … thirteen weeks for me to die. And for some reason, a span of sixteen between the two thirteens.

  Sixteen. Jackie had been that many years old when he died; was there some kind of correlation between the two? Possibly. But what kind of madman waits sixteen years to avenge the death of a sixteen-year-old kid?

  Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I start to find out.

  * * *

  Part Three

  Hunt

  * * *

  * * *

  The First Day

  * * *

  MORNING

  Sluicebox Lane turned out to be a short, carelessly paved street a third of a mile from the Pine Rest Motel. Rite-Way Plumbing and He
ating took up most of the second block on the north side—a good-sized combination of pipe yard, warehouse, showroom, and business office. It was twenty of nine when I walked into the office and showroom at the front.

  Water heaters, sinks, and small color-coordinated mock-ups of a bathroom and a kitchen took up two-thirds of the interior; the other third was the office, with a couple of desks arranged behind a low counter. Only one of the desks was occupied, by a plump middle-aged woman with streaky, dyed blond hair and a demeanor that just missed being bovine. She stood when I approached the counter, smoothed out the tweed skirt she was wearing, and showed me teeth any dentist would have been proud of, real or not. “May I help you?”

  “I hope so. I need some information?”

  “Yes?”

  “About a customer of yours six to eight years ago. The owner of a cabin up near Deer Run.”

  Wrinkles appeared in her forehead, creating a V that pointed down the length of her nose. “I don’t understand …”

  “I’d like the person’s name.”

  “You don’t know his name?”

  “No, Ma’am. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Why do you want to know his name?”

  The impatience came crawling back; I could feel the muscles in my stomach draw tight. All right, then, I thought. Tell her who you are, show her the license. If she read or heard about the disappearance and makes the right connection, bluff it through.

  I said, “I’m a private detective. Working on an investigation.” I got my wallet out and flipped it open to the photostat of my California PI license.

  She said, “Oh,” with a small amount of surprise and nothing else in her voice, and looked at the license just about long enough to identify the state seal And if she noticed that I was clean-shaven in the photograph she didn’t comment on it. One of these placid types, born without much imagination or curiosity. “Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t give out information about our customers.”

  “It’s very important—”

  “Besides,” she said, “all our work orders and invoices are filed alphabetically. Without the customer’s name, I couldn’t very well … oh, Mr. Hennessey. Could you come over here a second?”

  There was a door to the warehouse back beyond her desk and a silver-haired guy in his fifties, wearing a pair of overalls and duck-billed cap, had come through it. He angled over to the counter, smiled and nodded at me—I smiled and nodded back at him—and said to the woman, “What’s up, Wilma?”

  “This man wants to know the name of one of our customers. He’s a private detective.”

  The guy’s craggy face lit up at that, as if she’d told him I was somebody important or famous. He gave me a closer, appraising look and an even broader smile. “No kidding?” he said. “A private eye?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Like Magnum, huh? Mike Hammer, Spenser?”

  “No,” I said, “not like them.”

  “What, no fast cars and hot broads?”

  “No.”

  “Mean to tell me real private eyes aren’t like what you see on TV?”

  “Not hardly. I’m just doing a job, the same as you.”

  It was the truth and he liked it; it put him on my side. “Yeah, that’s what I figured. All that bang-bang, sexy stuff is so much crap, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Sure. It’s like I told my wife: Private eyes don’t get seduced any more than plumbers. I been in this business thirty years and I never had a customer try to get in my pants. Man or woman.” He laughed as though he’d made a joke, and winked at Wilma. She smiled dutifully, but without either humor or appreciation; the expression in her eyes said that as far as she was concerned, all men were little boys and sometimes it was a chore putting up with them.

  I managed a small chuckle for his benefit. He liked that too. He said, “I’m Bert Hennessey, I own the place,” and poked a callused hand across the counter at me. I took it, gave him my right name—just the last one, in case he wanted to look at my license. But he didn’t. And the name didn’t seem to mean anything to him, any more than it had to Wilma. “So why do you want the name of one of my customers?”

  “A case I’m working on.”

  “What kind of case?”

  “A confidential one.”

  “Oh, sure. He live here in Sonora?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is that he owns a mountain cabin up near Deer Run, on Indian Hill Road—or he did six to eight years ago. You installed a water heater for him, maybe ran some copper piping and did some other work on the place.”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  “The water heater’s got your tag on it.”

  “Ah. Deer Run, you say?”

  “On Indian Hill Road. Six to eight years ago.”

  “Deer Run, Deer Run … oh, yeah, I remember. I don’t get many jobs up that way. Only reason I got the one you mean, the customer called three or four shops for estimates and I gave him a low one, even with all the travel time, on account of it was a slow spring and I needed the work.”

  “Do you recall his name?”

  “Well, I’m not sure.” He frowned, thinking about it. “Seems to me it was a sports name.”

  “The same as an athlete’s, you mean?”

  “Yeah. Baseball or basketball player … no, both. White guy used to play for the Giants. And a black guy played in the NBA, does those Lite Beer commercials you see on TV. The guy with the big feet; you know, they keep making jokes about his big feet.”

  Talk, talk, talk. The impatience had built a jangling inside me; I clenched my hands tight to keep them still. Hennessey was enjoying himself, playing a little riddle game with me, and the only thing to do was to play along with him. If I pushed him he might decide I wasn’t such an interesting specimen after all and close up on me. You either encourage people like him or you leave them be and let them get it out in their own sweet time.

  I shook my head and shrugged and smiled and said, “Guess I don’t watch enough sports on TV.”

  “My wife says I watch too much,” Hennessey said. “She says sports on TV breaks up more marriages than nookie. Not that she knows much about nookie,” and he winked at Wilma again.

  She smiled her dutiful smile. I waited.

  “Lanier,” he said finally, as if he were answering a big-prize question on a TV game show. Proud of himself, because he knew something a private eye didn’t. “Hal Lanier, pretty good infielder with the Giants once, manages the Astros now. Bob Lanier, the black basketball player with the big feet.”

  “Lanier,” I said. It was a letdown because the name meant nothing to me. “You’re sure that was his name?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “What was his first name?”

  “That I don’t remember.”

  “Did he live in the cabin year-round? Or did he give you another address?”

  “Don’t remember that either,” Hennessey said. He glanced at the woman. “Look it up, Wilma, will you? Lanier. Must have been ’eighty-one. That was the year we had the slow spring.”

  “Those files are in the storeroom,” she said. There was mild disapproval in her voice. But she was too placid to argue; and when he said, “Won’t take a minute, you know where they are,” she released a small sighing breath and went through the door into the warehouse.

  I asked, “What did this Lanier look like?”

  “Look like? Well, I don’t have much of a memory for faces …”

  “It’s important, Mr. Hennessey.”

  “Important case, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “He do something crooked, this Lanier?”

  “He might have.”

  “Up at the cabin in Deer Run? Some kind of crime happen up there?”

  “Yes,” I said, “some kind of crime.”

  “Can’t say what it is, huh?”

  “I’d rather not.”

 
“Sure, I understand. Well, let’s see. I think he was bald … yeah, that’s right, bald as an egg.”

  “Big man? Medium? Small?”

  “Kind of medium, I guess.”

  “Was there anything unusual about him? Scars, moles, mannerisms, the way he talked?”

  “Not that I can remember.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Oh … around our age.”

  “You’re sure? In his fifties?”

  “He was no spring chicken, that’s for sure.”

  Not my man, then. If this Lanier had been in his fifties seven years ago, he would be close to or some past sixty now. The whisperer hadn’t been anywhere near that old; there had been a quality of relative youth about him, of that I was certain.

  “What else can you tell me about Lanier?”

  “That’s about all. Hell, it’s been so long …”

  Wilma came back in from the warehouse, carrying a slender file folder in one hand. “Here it is,” she said in her placidly disapproving way. “James Lanier.”

  “James, that’s right,” Hennessey said. “James Lanier.”

  I asked Wilma, “What address did he give?”

  She consulted the file. “Spruce Cabin, Indian Hill Road, Deer Run.”

  “Is that the only one?”

  “No. There’s another here. But it’s not local.”

  Jesus, these people! “What is it, please?”

  “It’s in Carmichael,” she said. “Two-one-nine-six-three Roseville Avenue, Carmichael.”