Authors: Bill Pronzini
It was almost four when Andrea brought her little Volkswagen into the deserted clearing. She shut off the motor and sat staring at the wind-bent grass and thinking that she was probably crazy for having come all the way up to this desolate spot instead of simply calling her sister, Mona, who lived in suburban comfort in El Cerrito across the Bay. But the idea of having to answer all the questions Mona and her husband, Dave, would ask, and of having to put up with their three pre-school children whom she normally adored but who would undoubtedly send her clawing at the walls in this situation, had not appealed to Andrea at all. She had wanted to be alone—that was a very necessary part of things—and there was no better place for that than Duckblind Slough, where you were almost literally up a depository tributary without due means of locomotion, as a friend of theirs had laughingly suggested when Andrea told him about the shack’s location. Besides, Steve would never think of looking for her there; Andrea had never really been one for the spartan life. Oh, she had accompanied him up here a couple of times (anything to get away from the impossible rush of the city), but sitting in a rowboat with a five-horsepower motor and putt-putting in and out of sloughs looking for elusive bass and catfish was not exactly her conception of the ideal vacation. Still, the bleakness, the almost atavistic quality of Duckblind Slough in November, had a certain allure for her now. It was the first place she had thought of—the head shrinkers could make something out of that, all right.
She buttoned her cardigan sweater at her throat and stepped out of the Volkswagen. The wind blowing across the marshlands was gelid, making a low, mournful soul song as it played amongst the tules and cattails, bringing the vague smell of salt and an almost tangible smell of things long dead, as if she had suddenly been thrust backward in time to some primeval era.
Andrea shivered, and then smiled faintly. Next thing you know, she chided herself, you’ll be seeing a dinosaur or a tyrannosaur or something come lumbering up to the water to drink, perhaps even to drain the slough dry in its thirst. She shivered again; the thought of all the water being drained from the tributary, of the potential horrors, real or imagined, which lay half-hidden in the sucking mud at its bottom, made a chill twice as cold as the wind’s walk along her spine.
Quickly, then, she opened the trunk compartment of the Volkswagen and removed her two pieces of luggage and a cardboard box of food and supplies she had purchased before leaving San Francisco. She left the remainder of her belongings in the car. She carried the suitcases along the vegetation-choked path to the point, set them on the shack’s narrow, gap-boarded porch, and returned for the cardboard box, hurrying now. When she had completed the second trip, she fitted the old brass key into the lock and swung the door open.
Two distinct odors greeted her: dry rot and the lingering acridity of fish. Both seemed to flow outward in an unseen wave, as if waiting for escape into the free air, and Andrea recoiled slightly, holding the door open, her nostrils flaring with distaste. After a moment, she carried the suitcases and the box of foodstuffs inside. Shutting the door—her desire for warmth was stronger than her aversion to the shack’s smellshe stood surveying the interior. The walls were tar-papered inside as well, and the studs were exposed. In one corner there was an iron potbellied stove which Steve had bought from a junk dealer in San Francisco for fifty dollars three years ago; beside it, stacked neatly against the wall, were a dozen or so circular redwood blocks and some kindling and a pile of yellowed newspapers. A kerosene stove, of the two-burner variety, reposed next to a homemade tin sink in a wood frame. A row of makeshift cabinets hung on the wall above the sink, on both sides of the narrow curtained window there. There was nothing else in the room save for a half-table and two chairs, an ancient wicker chair with a plastic cushion on it, and a folding TV tray sitting off to one side. Through an open doorway leading into the other room —little more than an alcove, really—Andrea could see the wide Army cot that had served as their bed and a scarred, unpainted dresser with three drawers.
Home, she thought ruefully, looking with disrelish at the accumulation of dust and grit which covered the wooden floor. She rubbed her hands together briskly, passing through the doorway into the bedroom alcove. There were two closed doors side by side in the right-hand wall; the nearest, the door to the bathroom (bathroom, now that was really very funny, she thought, a john with a high wooden tank and a long pull-chain, for God’s sake, not to mention a cracked enamel sink and an exposed shower that sprayed water almost as muddy as that from the slough, even though the piping was supposed to connect with a county supply line). The other door was padlocked through a hasp: the storage closet.
Andrea unlocked it with another key. From the shelves inside she removed several wool blankets, an old Coleman pressure lantern and a tin of kerosene. She put the blankets on the cot and carried the lantern and kerosene into the other room. Then she found the box of kitchen matches she had bought and took them to the stove and began to build a fire inside, remembering how Steve had done it with bits of kindling from the pile and some of the newspapers. Before long, she had one of the redwood blocks burning; she closed the iron door and stood with her back to the stove, trying to warm herself.
This week alone here was going to be very good for her in a lot of ways, she reflected; she was going to be on her own for a long, long time, having to fend for herself, and there was nothing like disciplining right from the beginning.
When the fire began to crackle hotly inside the potbelly, Andrea found a broom and a mop in the storage closet and began systematically to clean the interior of the shack.
In the bedroom of her small three-room apartment in Santa Clara, Fran Vamer sat moodily sorting her week’s laundry and thinking of Larry Drexel.
He could be so strange at times, she thought, putting an orange bath towel into one of the two wicker baskets on the floor at her feet. Like this afternoon, like the way he had yelled at her, practically chased her out of his house, for no reason at all that she could see. She was almost frightened of him at times like that—of course, he’d never hit her or anything, but he had such a violent temper, he’d fly off the handle like a little boy having a tantrum when everything didn’t go his way. And he could be so cold and distant, too, as if nothing ever reached him deep inside, as if nothing ever moved him. The only time he was truly warm, truly demonstrative, the only time she really felt spiritually close to him, was when they were making love; when he was inside her, moving, his lips on her breast . . .
Fran’s cheeks burned furiously. Oh, you’re terrible, she told herself; you’re really a wanton, immoral thing. Abruptly, she stood and went to the bedroom window, staring past the frilly curtains at the rear courtyard of the apartment complex. A group of laughing teen-agers, voices raised in shrill merriment, were swimming in the oblong pool beyond the parking area. She watched them for a time, ducking one another in the chill water, making cannonball dives off the low board at one end, oblivious to the cold and the overcast sky, to all but them selves and the very present, the wonderful immediacy of youth.
She had been that way once. A good girl—God, such a meaningless term!—playing good-girl games, thinking good-girl thoughts, pure and innocent, knowing in her heart that when she gave herself to a man it would be on her wedding night ...
With the carefree incorruption of the young, knowing a foolish lie. Because she had met Larry Drexel.
And fallen blindly in love with him.
Whatever he was, whatever he felt for her, whatever he said and did to her, she loved him and she would go on loving him.
Fran turned from the window to look toward the near bedroom wall, to where a small calendar hung. There were lines drawn with a red felt pen, through the dates starting with August 28th and running to the present.
Two months and six days.
She was still waiting.
She couldn’t put off going to a doctor much longer, she knew that. And if it were true, if the reason she had not had her period in two months and six days was because she was pregnant, it was better to know it for certain—wasn’t it?—than to keep falsely hoping she was late because of some hormone imbalance or simple nervousness.
The thing that was bothering her most, of course, the real reason she had put off seeing a doctor for this long, was not the mere fact that she might be pregnant. No, it was having to tell Larry that she had lied about taking the birth control pills, that she had foolishly succumbed to an inbred religious belief that you did not prevent the conception of human life, that she had been going to his bed for the past year on irrational faith alone. It was having to see his face when she told him that, and about the child, having to hear his reply when she asked him not to allow the baby to be born out of wedlock.
She was almost certain what he would say.
He would say that she had done it on purpose, to get him to marry her. And he would refuse.
Fran returned to the bed and sat down again, lighting a cigarette from the pack on the nightstand. No, now no, she couldn’t think about such things, she had to put it out of her mind. Maybe she wasn’t pregnant after all, maybe everything would be all right given enough time; things always worked out, didn’t they?
At five-thirty, the limping man walked to O’Farrell Street and entered a small coffee shop. He sat in an ersatz-leather booth at the rear. A chubby waitress with eyes like slick black buttons took his order: a fried ham sandwich and coffee, no cream.
When the coffee came, the limping man sat watching the steam spiral upward in thin wisps. At the booth across the aisle from him, a young man in a bright blue blazer was talking in low tones to a pretty flame-haired girl. They were holding hands under the table, their knees pressed tightly together. The girl laughed loudly and happily at something the young man said, showing even white teeth and the long slender column of her throat.
Traffic noises filtered in from the street outside in a regular, almost monotonous, rhythm. The limping man lifted his coffee cup, wondering: How am I going to do it this time?
The first one—Blue, in Evanston—had taken the cleverest planning thus far. Blue always went to the Urban Betterment League meeting on Thursday nights, the limping man had discovered; and invariably, he parked his car at the rear of the lot adjacent to the Elks Club, where the meetings were held. The lot was shadowed, unattended during that time, and the limping man had been able to slip quietly and unobtrusively through the parked cars to Blue’s new Camaro.
He had waited there for some time, to make sure the lot was completely deserted; then, using a small pipe wrench, he had reached beneath the car and removed the drain plug at the bottom of the gas tank. The resultant flood of gasoline—only six or seven gallons—had been greatly absorbed by the dry, gravelly surface of the lot; the spreading stain was hidden almost completely beneath the Camaro and in the deep shadows. When only a few drops remained in the tank, he had replaced the drain plug. Then, with a Phillips screwdriver, he had extricated the left rear taillight and carefully broken the stop-light bulb with the blade of the screwdriver, to expose the filaments. From his pocket, he had taken a three-foot length of lamp cord, slit on both ends, and, with an alligator clip, attached one side of one end of the cord to the positive portion of the filament in the broken bulb. Using another alligator clip, he had grounded the second side of the cord to the metal taillight frame, first having bent it slightly inward so as to take the clip. The opposite ends of the cord had been stripped bare, and he taped those ends together with electrician’s plastic tape, so that the exposed wire tips almost, but not quite, touched—like a spark gap. Then he had removed the gas cap and inserted the cord inside the tank until the wire tips touched bottom, lifted them perhaps a half-inch above it, and then taped the cord in that position with more of the electrician’s tape. The entire operation had taken less than ten minutes.
He had been waiting on a side street when Blue and the others came out of the Urban Betterment League meeting. As was usually the case when a man got into his car, simultaneous with starting it, Blue had depressed the brake pedal. The resultant spark from the stop-light filament to the exposed ends of the cord had ignited the fumes in the tank—and the gasoline puddled under the car—and the ensuing explosion had eliminated all traces of the rigging.
The limping man smiled thinly, thinking about the brilliant orange flash which had illuminated the Illinois sky that night, and the booming concussion of the blast. The chubby waitress brought his fried ham sandwich and departed silently. He chewed thoughtfully on the sandwich, his eyes bright and clear as he visualized the violence.
Gray and Red had offered no real challenge. Gray, for example, had been in the habit of working late at his trucking concern three nights each week. The limping man simply waited in the shadows of the garage, having gained entrance through a rear window with a simple spring catch, until Gray made his usual cursory night check of the premises before leaving. Then he had slipped up behind him and wielded a sand-filled stocking. Propping the unconscious Gray against the concrete wall in front of one of the trucks, he had then released the vehicle’s hand brake; he had already begun climbing through the rear window again when the loud, satisfying sound of truck and Gray and wall fusing into one reached his ears.
Red had kept his private plane at a small airport on the outskirts of Philadelphia, in a hangar which a child could have gained access to. The small cold-expander bomb, which had taken the limping man no time at all to construct in his motel room, had fit neatly out of sight beneath one of the wings. When Red had taken the plane up to a certain altitude, when a pre-set atmospheric temperature had been reached, the bomb—and the aircraft—had exploded. There had been, of course, no trace of the small device in the subsequent wreckage.