Breakdown nd-18

by Bill Pronzini

  “I told him drive us by my house,” Pendarves said. “Cops all over the place … Christ! Right there in my garage they killed him. Knew I couldn’t go to the cops. My word against Coleman’s, they’d never believe me. Nothing I could do but hide out at Doug’s. Wait until they quit looking for me and then take off, get out of the state. Doug scraped some cash together for me, didn’t you, chubby? Good old Doug. Good old Doug and his lousy goddamn postcards.”

  “But then you got to thinking,” I said. “Why let Coleman and Vega get away with what they’d done to you. Why not fix them like they tried to fix you.”

  “Yeah. Fix ‘em good.”

  “Doug buy the gun for you?”

  “This baby? Had it since I was in Korea, locked up in a box in my basement. Sent fatso over to see if the cops found it but they didn’t. He didn’t want to bring it, did you, Doug? But I convinced him. He does what I tell him. Fetch, Doug, and he fetches like a fat old dog.”

  “You fixed Coleman, Nick,” I said. “And the cops have Vega so he’s fixed too. It’s finished now. Why come in here with that gun, why hurt your friends?”

  “Friends? Like you, huh?”

  “Not me. All these other people-”

  “I got no friends, I don’t need no friends.”

  “What about Doug? You needed him, didn’t you?”

  “Not no more. Look at him. He’s just a fat old dog. They’re all old dogs, no good to nobody. Best thing with mangy old dogs is put ‘em out of their misery.” Bitter anger thickened his voice again. He shifted his gaze to the far wall. “How about it, huh? Put you old dogs out of your misery.”

  Lyda Isherwood made a thin keening noise. A look of desperation crossed Ed McBee’s seamed face; he put both hands on the table in front of him, getting ready to rise. Pendarves swung the automatic his way, his finger pad just starting to flatten on the trigger. I lifted my heels off the floor, tensing.

  And the front door opened and Kate and Bob Johnson walked in.

  They came in jauntily, loud as always, laughing about something. Pendarves rotated his hips on the bar top, brought the gun arcing back past me to them. Kate Johnson saw it first and her laughter broke into an astonished gurgling cry. Her husband yelled, “Hey!” and Douglas shrieked, “No, Nick, no!” I came up out of the chair, fast and low-a couple of seconds too late.

  Pendarves fired twice at the Johnsons.

  Panic, chaos: screams, shouts overriding the echoes of the shots; people tumbling out of chairs and off the wall bench, scrambling for cover. Pendarves saw me coming, swung the automatic again, fired wildly … and I was on him, left hand coming up under the gun, driving it ceilingward as he squeezed off a fourth shot, right hand clawing a hold on his shirtfront and dragging him forward, down off the bar. He slammed into one of the stools; it collapsed under him and we both went to the floor.

  I let go of his shirt, used both hands to go after the gun. I couldn’t get hold of it at first because his arm was pinned under him and he kept squirming and kicking to free it, hurling words and spittle into my face. Finally I managed to close my left hand around the barrel and trigger guard, twisted it against his hip so he wouldn’t squeeze off again. With my other hand I found a grip on his wrist, bent and wrung it hard enough to crack the bone. He yelled, his fingers relaxed, and I had the piece.

  I slammed the butt of it against his jaw. That made him quit squirming. I hit him twice more in the face, both times with my right fist. Caught a handful of his hair and slammed his head against the floor once, twice, three times, hard enough to crack the bastard’s skull-

  No! That’s enough, he’s out, he’s out!

  — and let go of him abruptly and shoved back off his body and knelt there panting, clutching the automatic against my chest.

  My mind cleared, like a dark haze lifting, and I was aware again of what was going on around me. No more screams but voices babbling, weeping, moaning; shifting movement, people milling about; somebody leaning over me, then backing off quickly when I tilted my head to look up that way. Sweat stung my eyes. The stink of burned gunpowder fouled the air, led me to breathe through my mouth.

  Over by the door Bob Johnson’s voice rose shrill and frightened, saying, “Kate, oh God, Kate!” as I got unsteadily to my feet. Most of the others were over there, too, or moving that way, and when I joined them I saw Kate Johnson down on the floor, blood staining her coat and dress. One of the bullets had struck her high on the chest, under the collarbone — too high to be fatal, I thought. She was conscious and in shock, making liquid sounds that had no meaning.

  “Somebody call an ambulance!” her husband pleaded. He was on his knees beside her; he hadn’t been hurt. “Hurry, please, somebody get help!”

  I turned back to the bar, but Sam Cotter was already behind it with the telephone receiver in his hand.

  Pendarves lay where I’d left him, crumpled, unmoving. Alongside him on the floor, Douglas Mikan sat crying into his hands. I looked around to be sure nobody else had been hurt; then I made certain Pendarves was going to be out for a while; and then I pushed my way through the crowd near the door. All of the regulars shied away from me, and I realized I still held the automatic in my hand. But that wasn’t the only reason.

  I put the gun into my coat pocket, went outside and opened the trunk of my car and got the set of handcuffs. Back inside, I shackled Pendarves’s wrists behind his back. Some of the regulars watched me do that, but when I was done they turned away. None of them said anything to me-not a word.

  Reaction was setting in: shaking, sweating, shortness of breath, faint nausea. I made my way to one of the back-wall booths, sank down there to wait alone.

  Now it’s over, I thought. Now the circle’s closed.

  They were the last thoughts I permitted myself until the police and the ambulance arrived.

  * * * *

  Chapter 24

  The older I get, the more it seems I’ve lived my life not in a linear fashion-day to day, year to year-but in blocks and scraps of time. These exist in my memory like an archipelago, some large islands, some small, each made up of a momentous event, a deep impression, a profound insight, a living nightmare. With each passing year, a few of the tinier islands sink and never resurface, and a few others become distorted as if by mist. The larger ones will be there to the end, waiting for me to inhabit them again, even if I never do.

  The aftermath of the Lujack case was a series of little reefs and atolls, adjuncts to the one big island. All of them, unlike the island itself, would eventually sink or be shrouded in obscurity. But not for a while. Not for a long while, some of them.

  * * * *

  Douglas Mikan was arrested along with Pendarves and charged with harboring a fugitive and being an accessory in the slaying of Coleman Lujack. He collapsed while in custody and had to be hospitalized. Acute neurasthenia, the doctors said, compounded by fear-psychosis and guilt. Add another breakdown to the list.

  I spoke to Paul Glickman about the charges against Douglas. Glickman said that given the extenuating circumstances, and the fragile state of Mikan’s mental health, it was doubtful that the DA’s office would move to bring him to trial. And even if they did prosecute, no jury would convict. Douglas Mikan, he said, would never see the inside of a prison.

  But he was wrong. Douglas Mikan was already in prison, and he would stay there for the rest of his natural life. Solitary confinement, with no possibility of parole.

  * * * *

  Pendarves and Rafael Vega, fittingly enough, were held under guard in adjoining rooms in the prison wing at S.F. General. Made calm and rational by an antipsychotic drug, Pendarves signed a full confession. So did Vega, on the advice of his public defender, so he could cop to a second-degree murder charge.

  I was privy to both confessions, thanks to Eberhardt’s influence at the Hall of Justice. It had all gone down pretty much as I’d surmised and as Pendarves had indicated at the Hideaway. Vega confirmed that part of Coleman Lujack’s plan had been to murde
r Pendarves that night at Stow Lake and then dispose of his body. Pendarves’s escape had prodded them into hurrying up their run-out preparations, with Coleman’s final destination being South America. They were afraid that if Pendarves were caught, and he spilled what he knew about the coyote connection, they would be detained pending a full investigation.

  They had argued long and hard, Vega said, over the necessity of killing both Thomas and Pendarves; Vega hadn’t wanted any part of it at first. But the decision to kill me had evidently been made with little or no argument. One more murder didn’t matter much to either of them by then.

  There are all kinds of crazies with guns.

  * * * *

  Thoughts while lying in bed waiting for sleep: Was I a potential crazy with a gun? Something of a loner, tendency to brood, given now to sudden black rages and monomaniacal pursuits and the breaking of laws I had once obeyed to the letter … I wasn’t all that different from Nick Pendarves and others like him. Did I have the capacity for the same terrible type of breakdown, like a poisonous seed growing in the new, dark side of me?

  No. No. There is a line between change and collapse, self-awareness and self-delusion, monomania and psychosis, and it’s not such a fine or easy one to cross. Not for a man like me. I would never willfully harm an innocent person, under any circumstances. I have too much respect for life, too much empathy for the victims of wanton violence, too much love of justice and order. These are the things that make me who and what I am; they are too deeply rooted to ever be blighted, to ever allow the nurturing of an evil seed.

  I had changed, no question of that. But no matter how profound the changes were, I would never break down.

  * * * *

  Kate Johnson survived her gunshot wound. I couldn’t bring myself to visit her in the hospital, but I did send flowers. They were not acknowledged.

  * * * *

  Ten days after Vega’s confession, INS field agents and members of the Border Patrol’s elite antismuggling unit, working in cooperation with the Mexican government, made a sweeping series of arrests that broke the back of the coyote operation financed by the Lujacks. Fifty-seven people on both sides of the border were taken into custody.

  The ironic thing was, the INS had had only sketchy information on the ring until I came along and until Vega supplied the details. Their investigation, which had only just begun, would have taken months; and even then they might not have come up with enough hard evidence to convict the Lujacks. Coleman and Thomas had panicked prematurely. Done all that they’d done without any real justification.

  The INS hadn’t broken them down, nor had anybody else including me. They had simply self-destructed.

  * * * *

  I did not go back to the Hideaway. I would no longer have been welcome. In my own way I had betrayed and deceived the regulars too, and such sins could never be forgiven. But the main reason was that I didn’t want to see it or its denizens again-the same reason a man might not want to walk through the rubble of a quake-collapsed building he had once frequented. Some places, some states of mind, can’t be reconstructed once they’ve been battered down. The Hideaway would never be the same for the regulars, so how could it be anything at all for me?

  But I kept thinking about the ones who had been there that Sunday evening, Kate and Bob Johnson and Douglas Mikan in particular. I kept wondering if they would ever feel safe again.

  * * * *

  The night before Kerry’s birthday in early February, she and I had dinner together at my flat-our own private celebration. Her birthday, like Christmas, would be spent with her mother.

  While we were eating Kerry said, “Cybil finally read the literature from Children of Grieving Parents. I talked her into it last night.”

  “Well,” I said, pleased. “How did she react to it?”

  “Skeptically. She’s still afraid. But she’ll think about it, if I know Cybil, and then she’ll want to talk about it some more. If I can just get her to see one of the volunteer parents …” Kerry sighed. “Nothing’s going to change before late spring at the earliest, I’m afraid.”

  “But it will change. That’s the important thing.”

  “Everything changes,” she said. “Including my building.”

  “Your building?”

  “It’s going condo.”

  “… Are you sure?”

  “Yep. On June first, unless I decide to make the other tenants hate me by trying to block it. They think it’s a great idea. I love my apartment but I don’t know if I love it enough to buy it, or even if I can afford the probable asking price. What if I can’t, and Cybil won’t go to a care facility after all? I’d have to find a new place and then move her and me both-”

  “Hey,” I said, “don’t start fretting prematurely. It’ll all work out. Even if there are problems, we’ll get through them.”

  “We?”

  “You and me together. Look at what we’ve been through in the past. One crisis after another, and we’ve weathered them all. Care facilities and condos are a piece of cake.”

  “Since when did you become such an optimist?”

  “I’ve been an optimist,” I said, “ever since I fell in love with you.”

  She fixed me with a long silent look. Then her face scrunched up and she burst into tears. Then, bawling and snuffling, she hurried off to the bathroom.

  I’m damned if I know what I said to upset her.

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  Bill Pronzini

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