Shackles (24 page)

I moved around the car, went to the inside door, pushed it open. Empty alcove leading to an empty kitchen. I eased through the rest of the house, using the gun as a pointer: living room, dining room, two bedrooms, one and a half baths, rear porch.

Nobody home.

After I checked the porch I relaxed a little, letting the revolver hang down at my side. All right so far. The place had a vaguely musty odor, an unlived in look, and clutches of old, mismatched, bargain-basement furniture. Furnished house that had sat unrented for a while before Tucker signed his lease; and since he’d taken possession, he hadn’t spent much time on the premises. For one thing, there were no dirty dishes anywhere in the kitchen and Tucker was the kind who would always leave dirty dishes lying around. The only room that showed signs of much habitation was the smaller of the bedrooms, and it was a mess of blankets, sheets, and soiled underwear.

It was the other, larger bedroom that I searched first. That one had a desk in it, as well as a TV and VCR combo and an eight-millimeter film projector and portable screen to boot. There wasn’t much in the desk, and only one item of any interest: a spiral-bound notebook containing a dozen names and addresses. But it wasn’t an address book. In addition to the names, street numbers, and towns—all in this general area—there were dates at the top of each page, along with dollar amounts ranging from $500 to $10,000. And at the bottom of each page were more dates and smaller dollar amounts. You didn’t have to be a cryptographer to figure out what all of this meant, or why Tucker had it in this nice respectable house he’d rented.

Tally book for a loan-sharking operation. Not Tucker’s; he wasn’t bright enough to have set up that kind of business. The toad king’s—Elmer Rix’s. How right I’d been when I thought of Rix as having a moneylender’s smile. Tucker had been brought in to do the collecting, and the enforcing if anybody got behind in his payment.

But loan-sharking wasn’t the only scam Rix and Tucker were working. They had at least one other, and it was far nastier than lending money at back-breaking interest rates. When I opened the closet door in there I found a cache of videocassettes, cans of eight-millimeter film, color photographs and color slides—all of it the worst kind of pornography, manufactured by and distributed to degenerates. Kiddie porn. Grown men engaged in atrocities with young children, some no older than two or three, most of them boys. High-priced filth for the exotic-minded voyeur and the discerning pedophile. No wonder there were TV and VCR, movie projector and screen in here. If Tucker didn’t watch this sort of garbage for kicks, he damned well used the machines to entertain potential buyers.

Rix and Tucker, entrepreneurs. Rix and Tucker, slimebags.

I slammed the closet door, went out of there with a sour taste in my mouth. Nothing in the other bedroom but Tucker’s mess. Nothing in the living room. But in the kitchen, in a drawer under a wall phone, I found a cheap Leatherette address book. Most of the entries were written in pencil in a childish hand. And under the letter B—

Brit
62 Cordilleras
Elk Grove
916–555–4438

I stood looking at the entry for several seconds. Brit, Brit. First name or last? I still had no idea. But one thing I did know now: If the address in this book was current, he wasn’t far away. Elk Grove was off Highway 99 south of Sacramento, a town I’d passed on my way to Carmichael from Stockton two days ago. Sixty miles or so from here—not far at all.

There was no need to copy down the address and telephone number; they were burned into my memory. I paged through the rest of the book, but the only names I recognized were Elmer Rix and “Maggie, Sacramento,” probably Maggie Barnwell. No entry for a Lawrence Jacobs or any other Jacobs.

I returned the book to the drawer, finished searching the house in case there was anything else for me here. There wasn’t. I went back into the garage, opened up the Toyota, and hauled Tucker out from under the blanket and across the garage floor and the kitchen floor to the living room floor, where I deposited him in the middle of an imitation oriental rug. He was still breathing painfully; I wouldn’t have cared much if he had stopped breathing altogether. I’d done a good job with the ropes: They were knotted so tightly that I couldn’t work them lose with my fingers. In the kitchen I found a butcher knife and used that to cut the ropes off his hands and feet. Then I gathered up the pieces, took them to the Toyota, and pitched them onto the floor in back.

In the kitchen again I lifted the wall phone off its hook, dialed 911 and asked for the police, got through to a sergeant named Eales. “Two things,” I said to him. “I’m only going to say them once, so listen carefully. First, an ex-con named Frank Tucker, fourteen-eleven Freestone Street, Yuba City—somebody beat him up and he’s in a pretty bad way. You’d better send an ambulance. Second, Tucker and a man named Elmer Rix, R-i-x, owner of the Catchall Shop on Percy Avenue, are involved in at least two illegal activities: loan-sharking and distributing child pornography. Some of the porn is in a back bedroom, in the desk, there’s a notebook full of information on the loan-sharking operation. Have you got all that?”

“I’ve got it. Who is this, please?”

I said, “Fourteen-eleven Freestone Street, Yuba City, don’t waste any time,” and hung up.

I went out to the car, leaned in for the Genie and pushed its button to raise the garage door, then tossed the thing onto a nearby workbench. Might as well leave the door up, make the cops’ job easier when they got here. I had the car started by the time the opener finished its up cycle; I backed out and drove off along the street without seeing anybody except a couple of housewives who weren’t paying any attention to me. Drove out of the neighborhood without seeing any police cars. If they used sirens getting to Tucker’s house I never heard them. But then, I might not have heard sirens if they had been a block away. I was too intent on my driving, on getting out of Yuba City, on covering the distance between here and Elk Grove.

Here I come, Brit.

Here I come.

Sixty-two Cordilleras Street, Elk Grove.

I had trouble finding it, not because Elk Grove is a big place—it isn’t—but because neither of the two Elk Grove Boulevard service stations I stopped at had a local street map and none of the people I talked to knew where the hell Cordilleras Street was. My third stop was a 7-Eleven store; the woman clerk said she
thought
Cordilleras was on the south side, by the cattle auction yard, but she just wasn’t sure. She did tell me how to get to that part of town, and once I got there I found somebody—a liquor store clerk—who could pinpoint it for me. It was 7:35, almost two and a half hours after I’d left Tucker’s house, when I made the turn onto the street where Brit lived.

It wasn’t much of a street. If he was mixed up with Rix and Tucker in their loan-sharking and child-porn scams, or into some other kind of crooked deal, he wasn’t making much money out of it. Two blocks long, Cordilleras, dead-ending in a fence beyond which was the cattle auction yard and some kind of rental facility for heavy equipment. Run-down, low-income houses and trailers on both sides, a couple with the rusting corpses of automobiles in their weedy front yards, one with a boxy-looking homemade boat up on davits. Number 62 was a squat wood-shingled cottage with an uneven roof line and the remains of some long dead flowering vine climbing a trellis to one side of the front door. On the other side was a plate glass window, undraped, so I could look into the lighted front room as I drove past. Nobody occupying it just now. But somebody was home: The light and a car obscured in shadow at the rear of a gravel drive made that plain enough.

I went on to the corner, U-turned, came back for another look. Still nobody in the front room. Across the street and a little way down was a vacant lot choked with weeds and high grass and a scattering of refuse; an ancient black oak grew at the near end, its gnarled branches overhanging a cracked sidewalk and root-buckled curb. I made another U-turn at that end of the block, came back and parked under the low-hanging oak branches. It was the best kind of place for a stakeout: dark, protected. And the angle was such that I could still see into most of Number 62’s lamp-lit front room.

I shut off the lights and the engine, rolled down my window to let some air into the car. It was warmer here than it had been in Yuba City, the sky clear and bright with stars and a three-quarter moon, but the night breeze was still cool. And I was tired, keyed up, stiff from driving and from the fight with Tucker.

I sat low on the seat, staring across at the cottage. What if he wasn’t alone? What if he had a visitor, or he was living with somebody? This thing was between him and me, just the two of us—beginning to end, just the two of us. No way I was going to hurt an innocent bystander. If I did that I would be no better than he was, no better than Tucker and Rix and all the other predators that walk the earth in human skin. Stupid to involve another person anyway—let somebody here get a look at me, maybe identify me to the police later on.

So before I could even think about bracing him over there, I had to make sure he was alone. Another few minutes, another few hours, even another day or two … what did it matter? Locating him had been the big job, and now that that was done, he wasn’t going to get away.

Five minutes passed. Ten.

And somebody walked into the lighted room—walked in and sat down in a chair and picked up a magazine. A woman. Thin, angular blond wearing a quilted housecoat and of an age that I couldn’t determine at this distance.

My hands were damp; I scrubbed them dry on the legs of Tom Carder’s Levi’s. Relative of Brit’s? Girlfriend? Barnwell had claimed the man was a homosexual, but Barnwell was a dimwit and dimwits make lousy witnesses. Was Brit in there with her, in one of the other rooms? Could be. But it could be, too, that he was out for the evening, or away from Elk Grove altogether, or even in another damn state. If he
was
on some kind of trip I could sit here waiting for days …

On impulse I started the engine, swung the car around, drove back to the same liquor store I’d stopped at a while ago to ask directions. There was a phone box out front; I put a quarter in the slot and punched out the number that had been in Tucker’s address book.

A woman’s low-pitched voice said, “Hello?”

“Is Brit there?”

“No, not right now.”

“You expect him back tonight?”

“I guess. He comes and goes.”

“What time do you think he’ll be home?”

“I don’t have any idea.”

“Who is this?”

“Midge.”

“Midge who?”

“… Do I know
you?
”

“I’m a friend of Brit’s.”

“Uh-huh. You want to leave a message?”

“No,” I said, “no message.”

I cradled the receiver. Midge. Girlfriend, probably. The important thing was that he wasn’t out of town or out of state, that he was due back home tonight. But how was I going to get him alone? Lure him out by phone? Foolish move; if I didn’t handle it just right it might put him on his guard. Chances were, he hadn’t been back to the Deer Run cabin yet. In which case he believed I was still chained up inside, and as long as he believed that he had no reason to be looking over his shoulder, to stay cooped up at home with Midge. Sooner or later he would go out again—sometime tomorrow, probably. Sooner or later there would be a time and a place where he was alone and I could take him the way he’d taken me that long ago night in San Francisco.

I debated finding a room for the night, coming back and staking out the cottage early in the morning. No point in returning to Cordilleras Street now, was there? No … except that I wasn’t ready yet to close myself up in some box of a motel room, do my waiting in absentia. I ached for a look at him, at his face without the ski mask to hide it. Maybe I could accomplish that much tonight, at least.

Back to Cordilleras, back into the tree shadows next to the vacant lot. The cottage’s front window was still un-draped, and the blond woman was still sitting there reading her magazine. Brit hadn’t come home in the brief interval between my phone call and now: The driveway still had just one car parked on it and the curb in front was deserted.

I waited. I have always hated stakeouts—the monotony, the dribbling passage of time, the tension—and this one was twice as bad as any other in thirty years. I was so tired my eyes ached and watered and I had to keep knuckling them to clear my vision. So wired already that my neck and shoulders felt as though they were being compressed in a vise. Hunger pangs under my breastbone, too … I should have bought something to eat at the liquor store. Still not thinking things out as carefully as I used to, still not planning ahead. But Jesus, I was so close to the end of it now, so
close.
It was like an obstruction in my mind that I had to keep squeezing past to get at anything else.

8:30. Headlights behind me, turning into Cordilleras. I eased farther down on the seat, watched the lights approach in the side mirror. But the car went on past Number 62, ahead into the next block, and turned into a driveway midway along.

8:45. The woman, Midge, got up and left the front room. It was ten minutes before she came back, carrying a plate of something and a glass, and sat down again.

8:55. A man came out of a mobile home adjacent to the cottage and directly opposite where I was sitting, took something from his car and then went back inside without looking my way. If he knew I was there he didn’t want to know it. That was one good thing about staking out an area like this, as opposed to a middle-class residential district: no neighborhood watch program, no overwrought fear of strangers who might have designs on the family silver, no self-righteous busybodies eager to pick up the phone and call the police at the slightest provocation. People here minded their own business. They had no family silver to protect, shunned the law except in cases of emergency, and avoided hassles whenever they could because their daily lives, scratching out existences on streets like this one, were hassle enough, thank you.