Deadfall nd-15

by Bill Pronzini

  He made the turn onto Sixth and I did the same. It was deserted and much darker down along here-drayage and freight-forwarding companies and part of the SP freight yards on the east side, and on the west, fenced-in lots mounded with creosote-soaked lumber and other materials that the railroad used for repair work. Here and there nightlights cast thin yellow wedges above empty loading docks. The only other illumination came from the beams on Dessault’s car and the beams on mine.

  We went about a quarter of a mile. Dessault was nearing the intersection with Sixteenth when he surprised me by making an abrupt left-hand turn; the Trans-Am disappeared between two of the warehouses. When I got to that point I found an unpaved, unmarked access road that served a drayage firm on one side and some kind of truck storage yard on the other: big diesel cabs and unhooked trailers looming up out of the darkness, both inside and outside a high chain-link fence. The Trans-Am was about seventy-five yards along, its lights picking up a low, metal Stop sign anchored where the road widened out past the warehouse and the storage yard.

  I slowed, thinking, Some kind of shortcut. He knows this area, he knows a faster way to get where he’s going.

  Up ahead, the Trans-Am moved on past the Stop sign and its lights splashed over rough ground that fronted a criss-cross of SP sidings; splashed over a string of oil tankers, another of boxcars, as Dessault veered to the right. I made the turn just before he passed out of sight, and when he was gone I punched the accelerator a little. I didn’t want him to get too far away.

  Even though the Trans-Am was no longer visible I could see the glow of its lights against the dark sky, bouncing erratically because of the uneven ground. And then, suddenly, they stopped bouncing and the glow wasn’t there any more… as if he’d braked fast and shut off the beams. And just as suddenly I knew that was what he had done-I knew this wasn’t a shortcut at all, I knew what it was, and the knowledge put the brassy taste of fear in my mouth.

  Trap, goddamn trap. And I had blundered into it like a witless amateur.

  I spun the wheel hard left, sent the car into a slashing turn that made the tires squeal and spin up gravel and dirt. But it was too late by then-too damn late. The trap car was hidden over that way, in the clotted black alongside the last of the drayage company’s loading docks; it came shooting out at me, dark and formless, like some kind of phantom. Before I could complete the U-turn, it banged into my right front fender… impact, crunch of metal… and the wheel twisted out of my hands and the car slewed around and came to a shuddering stop that stalled the engine. I shoved back off the wheel and reached for the door lock with my left hand, for the flashlight under the dash with my right — the only weapon I had in there.

  But it was too late for that, too. They weren’t all in the trap car; one of them had been hidden somewhere else nearby, on foot, and he got to my door before I could lock it and yanked it open and lunged in at me. I fought him, but he was big, bull-strong: I had an impression of youth, of mindless exhilaration at what he was doing. He got one hand on the collar of my suit jacket, the other bunched in my hair, and hauled me out of the car.

  The other two were there by then, big and young like the first one-faceless shapes in the darkness, without humanity of any kind, a trio of androids programmed for violence while the one who had activated them stood off somewhere, maybe watching, maybe not, depending on his stomach for this kind of thing. I fought all three of them in a kind of frenzy and for a few seconds I held my own, I did some damage: kicked one of them somewhere in the body, heard him grunt, hit another one in the face and felt his spittle spray my cheek. But I had no real chance against them, none at all. One of them kicked my legs out from under me and once they got me down on the ground I was finished.

  I kept trying to fight, trying to get my legs under me again-until one of them hit me or kicked me in the head, full-force, behind the right ear. Then everything went a little crazy. I heard somebody yelling… and it was me because there was blood in my mouth and throat and my voice got caught in it, mired in it, and I felt as if I were strangling. All three of them were using their feet on me now and out of the pain and the craziness a thought swirled up: Cover your head, cover your groin, don’t let them hurt you down there. I managed to roll onto my side, to curl up with one arm over my head, one hand covering my privates. And they kept kicking me, and after awhile I stopped feeling anything and just lay there curled like a fetus with the blood raging in my ears, gagging, fighting desperately not to cry or whimper, I will not cry or whimper, I will not give them the satisfaction of that. Then they weren’t kicking me anymore and one of them was shouting something; but I couldn’t understand him and when he realized that he got down beside me, rolled me onto my back, yelled his message in my ear. Even then the words were filtered through the blood-roar, so that only some of them got through to me.

  “Lay off,” he seemed to be saying. “No more investigate. Understand? No more, drop the Purcell, next time kill you, understand?”

  I passed out.

  I must have passed out because the next thing I was aware of was pain, savage and pulsing in my left side, my head, my left hand. But nobody was hurting me anymore, or looming over me or shouting at me, and I sensed they were gone. I was still lying on my back, choking a little on my own blood. I turned my head, coughed my throat clear.

  Quiet now, no more roaring in my ears, just the far-off warning blast from a locomotive. Hear that lonesome whistle blow, ask not for whom it blows it blows for thee, oh God they did a job on me, they beat me good, what if I wet my pants? I was suddenly terrified that I had lost control of my bladder. I felt down there-and I was dry. That calmed me, made me more lucid. I tried to open my eyes; the right one was stuck shut and when I put my hand up to it it felt swollen, sticky. Through the other eye I could see the clouds moving overhead, then a little of the crescent moon, then only the restless clouds again. The locomotive’s air horn sounded another time. Couplings clattered distantly; there was the steel-on-steel rattle of a train moving through the night.

  I rolled over onto my side. The pain was so bad I almost bit through my lower lip. But I couldn’t just lie there, it was cold, I was aware of the cold all at once and I started to shake. Freeze to death out here. I tried to get up; the pain drove me back down again. I looked around for my car and it was there, over near the loading dock, driver’s door shut; the headlights were dark, they’d shut them off before they left because lights might attract attention. It seemed a long way off, halfway across the world. Phone, the mobile phone… what if they’d disabled it? Can’t drive in this condition. Can’t even walk.

  I started crawling toward the car. It was slow work; I blacked out once, or maybe it was twice, and all the way the pain was like something eating at me, something tearing at me with claws and a muzzle that was smeared with my blood.

  Pay for this, Dessault. Make you pay for this.

  And I kept crawling, and finally I reached the door and pulled myself up a little at a time until I could take hold of the handle and depress the latch and pull it open. I crawled up onto the seat in stages, using the door handle and then the steering wheel. Lay there gasping, hurting.

  The phone, pick it up.

  Picked it up. Listened.

  Working, it still worked.

  I made a call somehow, didn’t even think about who I was calling, just did it. Please be home… and he was home. Eberhardt. I tried to talk to him but my mouth was broken, the words came out in little broken pieces that didn’t seem to make any sense. But they must have made sense to him, after a while, because I heard him say, “Don’t move, for God’s sake don’t move. I’ll call an ambulance. I’ll come there myself.”

  I lay on the seat feeling dizzy, feeling sick. Knew I was going to vomit and tried to push myself back out of the car and couldn’t do it and vomited on the floorboards.

  Passed out again.

  And came to when the ambulance got there, and talked to the medics, and talked a little to Eberhardt when he showed up
.

  And passed out for the last time on the way to Mission Emergency Hospital.

  Two cracked ribs. Concussion. Dislocated middle finger on my left hand. Bruises, cuts, abrasions too numerous to list. I was lucky, the doctor said. There didn’t seem to be any serious damage to my eye. Nor any internal damage. That was the main thing: no internal damage.

  That’s what you think, doc. There’s internal damage, all right-plenty of it inside my head. And somebody’s going to pay for it. Dessault, Melanie, the three sluggers, anybody else who might have had a hand in this.

  Lay off the Purcell case?

  No way. No frigging way!

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I spent Monday and Tuesday in bed, my bed. I saw no one except Kerry and, briefly on Tuesday, Eberhardt; I ate nothing other than some soup Kerry insisted on feeding me. Mostly I slept. A beating like I’d taken is a shock to the nervous system, a trauma to the psyche, an embarrassment to the ego; no matter how much rage, how much desire for revenge there might be inside you, you don’t just slap on some tape and liniment and walk away from it, the way people do in movies and crappy novels. You need rest, time to heal. For a man my age, anything else would have been like playing Russian roulette with more than one bullet in the gun.

  Kerry hung around part of the time, even while I was sleeping and even though I did not really want her there. She put on a nice smiley front, but the fact of the beating, the physical evidence of it, had shaken her-almost as badly as that time I’d got shot in Eberhardt’s house. Eberhardt didn’t take it too well, either. He’d gone to Mission Creek Sunday night, after taking me home from the hospital, and braced both Dessault and Melanie. I’d told him it wouldn’t do any good and it hadn’t. The girl admitted to calling me but said she’d done it out of a momentary fit of pique, no ulterior motive and not because Richie had told her to; she also said the two of them had made up after he’d explained his absence the past couple of days-he’d gone on a fishing expedition with a friend who owned a boat. Dessault said he didn’t know anything about any thugs, or that I had been following him through the freight yards. That was a shortcut he used all the time, he’d said, was it his fault if the goddamn city was full of creeps and muggers? We had nothing on either of them and they knew it; they thought the law couldn’t touch them. And they were right: the law couldn’t.

  But I could.

  Not for a few days, though-not until the busted up Humpty-Dumpty put himself back together again. So I slept, and little by little I mended. And sometimes while I slept I dreamed. Most of the dreams were bad: distorted replays of the assault jumbled together with images of Leonard Purcell crawling through blood that was no longer his, that was now mine. Once I woke up yelling and found myself thrashing around on the floor, fighting off the shades of those faceless attackers. Kerry wasn’t there at the time, and it was a good thing she wasn’t. Not only because the incident would have frightened her, but because I would not have wanted her to see my face just then, the naked truth of what I was thinking.

  If any of them had been in the room-Dessault, the three sluggers, any of them-I would have killed them all.

  But I had other dreams too, much less fearful and without any psychotic aftermath. They were like film montages: faces, objects, juxtaposed and often superimposed in no apparent order. Leonard Purcell, the Hainelin snuff box, Melanie, Alicia, the photograph of Danny Martinez and his family, the cliff behind the Purcell home, Dessault, Tom Washburn, Elisabeth Summerhayes sitting alone among the ruins on Sutro Heights, Margaret Prine, Alejandro Ozimas smiling at me across his breakfast table while the freaked-out blonde picked her cinnamon roll apart and his house boy mouthed the words Fuck you behind his back, Eldon Summerhayes, the housekeeper Lina, the Martinez farmhouse and the crucifixes on the wall, Dessault running away from the barn… other images that I couldn’t quite identify. There were voices, too, but I could only hear parts of them, the way I had only been able to hear parts of the one slugger’s shouted threats. “Deadfall so sorry fall how could you I know who pushed him two thousand dollars extortion the big gold rush fuck anything in pants disgusting little shit challenge man of my tastes whosoever toucheth her shall not be innocent lousy goddamn pervert once bitten twice shy lust is what binds them claws like cats like challenges like proof like profit like deadfall… ” None of it made any sense, and yet it did, I knew it did, it was all there and all I had to do was take the montages apart piece by piece, find the missing images, separate the voices and add the missing words. Except that I couldn’t, not while I slept and dreamed and not while I was awake because I couldn’t think clearly yet, my mind and my body were both still healing.

  On Wednesday morning I felt well enough to get up for a while. My left side, where I had the two cracked ribs, gave me hell whenever I moved too suddenly. So did my concussed head. I had tape around my middle, adhesive and gauze here and there, a splint on my sore finger; when I looked at myself in the mirror I thought I resembled a mostly unwrapped mummy with a three-day growth of beard. But it wasn’t funny. Nothing was funny right now.

  Kerry had insisted on unplugging the phone the past two days and I hadn’t argued with her. A few people had called Eberhardt at the office, including Tom Washburn; Eb had told me that when he stopped by on Tuesday evening. Nothing new on the case, though. Everything on hold, waiting for me to wade into it again, stir it up again.

  I plugged the phone back in and called the office. Eberhardt said, “You sound better today. Feel better too?”

  “Enough to get out of bed for a while.”

  “How’s the eye? Swelling down on it yet?”

  “Yeah. I can see out of it all right.”

  “Another few days, you’ll be back in harness.”

  “Another few days, hell. Tomorrow, maybe.”

  “Hey, come on, hero, they cut you up pretty bad-”

  “And now it’s my turn to cut somebody up. Don’t argue with me, Eb; I’m in no mood for it. Anything new this morning?”

  He sighed. “Washburn came by twenty minutes ago. Dropped off that photograph he found.”

  “What’s it of?”

  “Alicia Purcell, he says. You want me to bring it over there?”

  “When you get a chance. Anything else?”

  “Nada. Well, Ben Klein got a lead on the whereabouts of Danny Martinez’s in-laws in Mexico-Cuernavaca, he said. But you know how it is with the Mexican cops. Be days before Ben gets word, even if Martinez is there and they pick him up.”

  “No other calls?”

  “That’s it.”

  “If there’s anything else let me know right away, will you? I’m not unplugging the phone anymore.”

  “Will do. Just take it easy, okay? Thing’s will keep for the time being.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But I won’t-not much longer.”

  I went back into the kitchen and heated up the rest of Kerry’s soup and ate it with a slice of bread. I wasn’t hungry, the food had no taste, and chewing the bread made my face hurt; but I ate it all just the same, for strength. Afterward I moved around for the same reason, shuffling from room to room; I was so damned stiff and sore from the beating and from lying in bed two days that I needed the exercise.

  I got tired before long and sat in the living room and tried to think it all through. Still no good. Too quiet in there: I could hear the silence and it made me restless, edgy. I turned on the TV and stared at a movie that I didn’t really see. That made me drowsy, and I went back to bed and slept some more, and when I woke up it was dark outside and Kerry was there. I found her in the living room, curled up on the couch, reading one of my pulps.

  “Hey,” she said when she saw me come out in my robe and slippers, “you sure you should be out of bed?”

  “I was out for three hours earlier,” I said. “Didn’t do me any harm.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Not too bad. I’ll live.”

  “Well, you’d better.” She let me have one of her chipper sm
iles. I didn’t smile back; I did not feel like smiling, even for her. “Want something to eat?” she asked.

  “Pretty soon. How long have you been here?”

  “Couple of hours. Since five.”

  “Eberhardt didn’t come by yet, did he?”

  “He did. I wouldn’t let him wake you up.”

  “You should have, if he had something to tell me-”

  “He didn’t have anything to tell you. He just left you an envelope-a photograph, he said.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Over there on your desk.”

  I went to the desk-an old secretary that I had bought a long time ago, before sixty-year-old Sears, Roebuck junk became “antiques” and quadrupled in value-and opened up the manila envelope that was sitting on it. The photograph was an eight-by-ten color glossy, professionally done. A full-length portrait of Alicia Purcell wearing a slinky black low-cut gown with glittery stuff on it; she had struck a provocative pose and was smiling moistly at the camera. I turned it over to look at the back. And there was an inscription, in green ink, that said: For Leonard. Love, Al.

  Things moved around inside my head-but that was all they did; nothing came of the movement. I looked at the photo for a time. Then I said to Kerry, “I want to make a call,” and went back into the bedroom and dialed the number where Tom Washburn was staying.

  When I got him on the line I let him tell me how sorry he was about what he called my “ordeal,” and then I said, “I’ve just seen the photo of Alicia Purcell. Where’d you find it?”

  “In Leonard’s study. It was tucked away in one of his business files.”

  “That’s an odd place, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. If she gave it to him, I can’t imagine why.”

  “They weren’t close, as far as you know?”