Shackles (16 page)

The interior of the store looked and smelled like country groceries everywhere: weak lighting, closely set aisles, rough-hewn floor; mingled odors of damp and dust, brewing coffee, refrigerated meats and overripe cheese and stale bread. A woman sat behind a long counter area, half of it a meat and deli case and the other half a checkout counter, along the right-hand wall. She was in her sixties, grossly fat and encased in a bulging dress much too small for her. A cigarette in a black holder slanted from one corner of her mouth.

The guy said, “Mary Alice, who you think I got here?”

She gave me an impersonal glance, the kind you’d give a side of beef to see how much fat there was on it. “Never saw him before.”

“His name’s Canino, been staying at one of the cabins up on Indian Hill. His wife run off with his car last night and stranded him.”

“Stranded him, eh?”

“Can you beat that?”

“Known it to happen,” Mary Alice said, and shrugged. The aftertremors of the shrug ran down her layers of fat like an earthquake’s along a fault line.

“He lives in Stockton but he don’t know how to get home,” the guy said. “Thinks maybe he can get a bus from Sonora.”

“Suppose he can.”

“Offered me fifty bucks to drive him but I can’t do it. You know somebody?”

“Jed, maybe. Fifty bucks, you say?”

I was getting tired of the two of them talking about me as if I weren’t there. And that damned dog was still poking my legs with his slobbery muzzle. I said to Mary Alice, “Fifty dollars, that’s right. It’s all I’ve got to spare so I won’t haggle.” Then I said to the guy, “You mind calling your dog away from me?”

“What for? He won’t do nothing to you unless I tell him.”

“Get him away from me.”

“Now listen, pal—”

“Get him away from me.”

There was something in my voice or my face that wiped away his amused expression, stiffened him a little. He scowled, seemed to think about taking offense, looked at me in a new way, and then moved a shoulder and said, “What the hell,” and called the dog over to where he was standing.

The fat woman was looking at me in a new way, too, as if she were seeing me for the first time. She probably was. And it was as if the guy’s amusement had lodged in her after it left him, because a faint smile kept tugging at one corner of her mouth. I had the impression then that she didn’t like the asshole any more than I did.

She said to me, “I’ll ring up Jed, see if he can take you. You want anything before I do?”

“I could use some hot coffee.”

The guy said he could use some too, and she went and poured two cups from an urn behind the deli case. She gave me mine first. I drank it standing at the counter; he drank his wandering up and down the aisles, throwing things into a grocery basket, the shepherd following him like a shadow. He caught my eye once but he didn’t hold it. Whatever else he thought of me now, he’d changed his mind about one thing: He didn’t think I was such a schmuck anymore.

It was not somebody called Jed who drove me to Sonora; it was a gnarly old geezer named Earl Perkins. Jed was out somewhere, two other people Mary Alice called couldn’t or wouldn’t do the job, even for fifty dollars, and it was almost one o’clock before she rounded up this Perkins character. The asshole and his dog were long gone by then. I was so impatient to get to Sonora, ask my questions at Rite-Way Plumbing and Heating before it closed for the day, that I paced the store aisles to work off some of the nervous tension. Only then I found my thoughts turning to Kerry, to how much I wanted to hear her voice and know that she was all right, and the telephone began to draw my attention, and this just wasn’t the time or place to make that kind of call. So I took myself outside and paced the parking area instead, trying not to think about anything at all.

Perkins showed up in a newish Jeep Cherokee that had snow tires on it but no chains. He was an easy seventy, small and gristled and tough-looking, like a piece of old steak. He looked me up and down, said to my face that I was a damned fool for letting a woman screw me instead of vice versa (Mary Alice laughed at that), and demanded the fifty dollars in advance. I gave him two twenties and two fives. Mary Alice had charged me a dollar for two coffees and a blueberry muffin, so that left me with eighteen dollars cash.

Perkins was a fast driver, even on snow-slick roads; he was also a damned good driver, and once I accepted that, I was grateful for the speed. The impatience was still in me; I sat forward on my seat and touched the .22 in my jacket pocket and thought again about Rite-Way Plumbing and Heating and what I would find out there. A name I would recognize or one I wouldn’t? A lead or a dead end? Either way, I would know soon.

Once we passed through Murphys, the stark winter landscape began to disappear. What had been snowfields and snow-laden spruce and fir became, in these lower elevations, a mosaic of patchy white, dry brown, the dark green of oak as well as evergreen, and hints of spring verdure. When we turned onto Highway 49 at Angels Camp, Perkins drove even faster. There weren’t many cars on the road and he zoomed around most of the ones we came up behind, as if he were trying to win some kind of high-speed rally. It put a little of the edginess back into me then because I was worried about us getting stopped by a county cop or a highway patrolman, of my having to show ID. But I didn’t say anything to him. He would have resented it and probably driven even faster.

It was two-fifteen when we came into the outskirts of Sonora. I knew the town a little, or had a few years ago, but my memories of it weren’t pleasant. An old friend named Harry Burroughs used to live near there and he had hired me to do a job for him and it had turned out badly, very badly. That had been my last visit to this area. It had been summer then and the town had been teeming with tourists come to gawk at “an authentic Mother Lode gold town.” Now, in early March, it was all but deserted—oddly so, I thought. A few cars creeping along the main drag, no pedestrians on the steep sidewalks, most of the stores wearing Closed signs. It might have been dying—a venerable relic rescued and born again for the tourist trade, now enfeebled once more and ready to take its place beside all the other ghosts of the California Gold Rush.

I said as much to Perkins: “Looks like a ghost town.”

“Well?” he growled. He wasn’t much of a talker—he hadn’t spoken a dozen words to me on the drive—and he seemed to resent my wanting to start a conversation now that we had arrived. “Why shouldn’t it be?”

“I don’t know. I was just commenting.”

“What’d you expect on a weekend this time of year? A parade?”

“Weekend?”

“Well?”

“What day is this?”

He gave me a sideways glare, as if he thought I might be joking. When he saw that I wasn’t, the look changed shape, as if now he thought maybe I wasn’t quite right in the head. “Mean to tell me you don’t know?”

“No. What day is it?”

“Sunday. What day’d you think it was?”

Sunday! The guy in the Bronco hadn’t mentioned the fact; neither had Mary Alice nor any of her customers. And it had been so many days since I’d looked at the calendar, I had lost track of which day it was. I’d done all that pacing in and around the Deer Run store, I’d been sitting on the edge of the seat all the way here … and it was Sunday, and most places were closed and Rite-Way Plumbing and Heating was sure to be one of them. Two-fifteen now—eighteen or nineteen hours before I could ask my questions, maybe learn some of the right answers….

“Say,” Perkins said, “what’s the matter with you? You havin’ some kind of seizure?”

“No, no, I’m all right.”

“Don’t look it to me.”

Sunday, Sunday. It was almost funny in a crazy way and I wanted to laugh, but I didn’t do it. I was afraid that if I let the laughter come out I wouldn’t be able to stop it.

Perkins said, “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Where you want me to let you off? Bus station’s closed on Sundays, or didn’t you know that either?”

“… A motel, I guess.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know any motels here. The first one you see.”

Perkins shook his head. “Mister,” he said in his irascible way, “you got fog in your head, you know that? How do you get along in this world, anyhow? How’d you live so many years?”

Eighteen or nineteen hours …

I sat in my room at the Pine Rest Motel on Highway 49 near the fairgrounds, staring at the TV without really seeing it. The only reason I’d put it on was for noise. A while ago, after twenty minutes under a steamy shower, I had gone down to the restaurant adjoining the motel and eaten an early steak dinner with all the trimmings. I had put away all of it, though it might have been Spam and canned fruit cocktail for all I’d tasted and enjoyed it, and I had been full when I came back up here. I was still full, but I was also empty. Full and empty at the same time. The impatience had drained out of me, leaving a temporary emotional cavity. Tomorrow it would fill up again. Tomorrow, when the hunt officially began.

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.