Shackles (6 page)

It’s all down on paper, everything that happened during the twenty-four hours between Friday night and Saturday night. Twenty-nine pages using both sides of a sheet to conserve paper. I spent most of yesterday working on it and half of today. My fingers are stiff—writer’s cramp. But the important thing is that I’ve included
all
the details, even the smallest one. You can’t forget something that might be vital when you’ve got it down in black and white. Or black and yellow.

I wonder if anyone else will ever read it.

It won’t be him. I’ll make sure of that.

I still don’t have an inkling of who he is. Men like me, men who have been in law enforcement work for better than three decades, touch thousands of lives directly and indirectly. We have a profound effect on some of those lives; we inflict pain on some, in most cases because they deserve it but, in a few unavoidable instances, even when they don’t. You can’t help that, no matter how hard you try, how many precautions you take. So he has to be someone I hurt once, intentionally or by accident, deservedly or otherwise … but that narrows it down not at all. He could be any one of a hundred or two hundred people out of my past.

What do I know about him? So damned little. He’s intelligent, well-spoken—white collar rather than blue. Average height, slim build. Caucasian. Age? Hard to tell from either his mannerisms or the disguised voice; say somewhere between thirty and forty-five. Drives an American-made car, make and model undetermined. Carries a snub-nosed revolver. Dresses unobtrusively. Owns or has rented or at least has access to a deserted mountain cabin, location undetermined, that he expects to remain unvisited for a minimum of four months. What else?

Nothing else.

He could be almost anybody.

The snowfall has finally quit. Not much wind now—it’s late afternoon—and the overcast doesn’t hang quite as low.

I tried the radio again a while ago. Mostly static, but I did find one station that comes through for ten or fifteen seconds at a time before it fades out again. That’s encouraging, even though it took me five minutes to bring it in the first time, almost twice as long to bring it back the second time. Country and western station, the honky-tonk variety. But even honky-tonk stations do news broadcasts now and then, don’t they?

Reception should be better when the clouds lift and the wind dies down. Tonight, maybe. Or tomorrow morning. I’ll keep fiddling with the dial until I can hold the signal for longer periods.

Soup for dinner. Split pea. And half a can of fruit cocktail.

While I was heating the soup, it occurred to me that I might be able to use the hot plate for another purpose. I could take some of the napkins and paper towels, roll them into a tight cylinder, and then set the cylinder on fire with the hot plate—make a kind of torch. Then I could try to’ burn or char the wall around the ringbolt. With enough burning or charring of the wood, maybe I could work the bolt loose.

But I didn’t consider the idea for more than a few seconds. It’s no good. In the first place, the wall is made of thick, smooth-sanded pine logs; there’s almost no chance that I could do much damage to a log like that even with repeated attempts. And in the second place, there’s the danger of accidentally starting a fire I couldn’t control. It could happen, no matter how careful I was. And what chance would I have of putting out a fire, chained up like this, the bathroom at a distance and nothing larger to carry water in than a saucepan? No. The possibility of being burned alive is even more frightening than the prospect of death by starvation.

There has to be another way.

Men have escaped from prisons for as long as there have been prisons. Escaped from fortresses, from isolation cells smaller and more barren than this one—from every kind of lockup there is or ever was. Whatever one man can think up, another man can find a way to circumvent. That’s the nature of the beasts we are.

I’m as bright, as clever, as resourceful as he is, damn him. There has to be a way out, something he overlooked, some little crack in this escape-proof prison that I can squeeze through. And I’m going to find it.

Sooner or later I am going to find it.

Why thirteen weeks?

Why not twelve—three full months, a more conventional number? Why
thirteen?

The possible importance of this didn’t occur to me until this morning, while I was exercising. I checked the written record I made and I’d put down more or less verbatim what the whisperer said on Saturday night:
There is enough food on those shelves to last thirteen weeks.

There must be some significance in the number, some reason for him to pick it as the optimum number of weeks for my survival. Is he someone I helped send to prison who served a total of thirteen years? This little corner resembles nothing so much as a jail cell; everything in it has a prisonlike function. He could be trying to replicate for me, in a thirteen-week microcosm, what he was forced to endure for thirteen years—with death being
my
release. But I can think of only one man who went to prison on my testimony and served exactly thirteen years; he was in his mid-fifties when he got out of San Quentin and he died three years later of natural causes.

Something that happened thirteen years ago, then? I’ve tried to think back, remember what I did, the cases I had, thirteen years ago, but it isn’t easy. Time distorts memory, and memory distorts time. There are a few things I’m sure took place just that many years back; others might have been thirteen or twelve or fourteen or fifteen. And of the ones I’m sure of, I can’t pick out any one person that he might be, any motive strong enough for this kind of revenge.

What else could thirteen represent, if not years? An occurrence on the thirteenth of the month—the thirteenth of December, maybe? If he’d snatched me on the thirteenth of this month, then yes, that might be it. But he hadn’t. He’d made his grab on December 4—Friday, December 4. Some sort of correlation between four and thirteen? No, that’s reaching too far.

Look at it another way: Why
did
he pick December 4? Why not December 3, or December 5 or any other damn day? Could have been nothing more than random selection—the day he was ready, when all his preparations were made. But it could also be that there’s an underlying meaning to the date too. Something that happened on December 4 thirteen years ago? Possible. But if I can’t be sure entire cases took place in a given year, how the hell can I remember something that might have happened on a specific date that long ago?

Thirteen. Thirteen. A superstitious symbol, an unlucky number for some and lucky one for others. Suppose it’s a lucky one for him? The thirteen weeks might not have any meaning beyond that. I might be trying to make too much out of it, stumbling around in a blind alley….

Let it go for now. The thirteen weeks means something or it doesn’t, and if it does I’ll figure it out eventually. That’s the way my mind has always worked. Let it alone, let it simmer on a back burner and one day it all comes boiling up to the surface.

Gnawing in my belly—it’s time to eat. Spam. I used to hate Spam when I was a kid; I haven’t eaten it in twenty years or more. But I looked at a can while I was making coffee this morning, and it started my mouth watering. Funny.

Why should I crave Spam after all these years, in a place and a situation like this?

Good weather this morning. Blue sky, sunlight slanting in through the window at an oblique angle. I stood at the window for a long time, watching the sun sparkle on the snowdrifts and the snow-heavy tree branches and the icicles hanging from the near eaves of the shed roof. Snow looks so clean and fresh with the sun on it; everything looks clean and fresh, untouched, unsullied, and it gives you hope. Not that I’m losing hope. No. But with the day bright like this, so clean-looking, the loneliness is a little easier to handle and I don’t have to work so hard to keep my spirits up, to keep on believing.

I fiddled with the radio again while I was at the window and had better luck. The honky-tonk station came in for a visit and hasn’t left yet, at least not for more than a few minutes at a time. It’s staticky and it keeps fluctuating, but it’s audible enough.

Station KHOT, out of Stockton. That gives me some idea of where I am. A Stockton country station doesn’t figure to have all that much range, so that puts this cabin somewhere in the Sierras to the east of Stockton. Yosemite’s to the southeast; so are clusters of little Mother Lode towns and ski resorts. Doesn’t figure he’d have taken me down that far. More likely, this place is in Amador or Calaveras or Alpine county; lots of wilderness in that section of the Sierra foothills, not too many towns, and a sparse population in winter. And the traveling time would be just about right, if my memory hasn’t distorted those long, painful hours on the road.

All right: the Sierra foothills east or northeast of Stockton. That isn’t much, but it’s something. Not having
any
idea of where you are is like existing in limbo, as if you were already dead.

So I’ve been listening to KHOT and its honky-tonk music. One of the songs they played was “You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille,” and for some reason it brought a sudden, vivid image of Kerry. The hurt got so bad so quickly I had to move the dial to get away from it. I found another station, somebody talking, but it was so static-riddled that I could only make out random words and sentence fragments—not enough to understand much of what was being said. When I switched back to KHOT I caught most of a news broadcast. All sorts of things happening on the international and national and local scenes, but no mention of me. That’s not surprising, though. I’m yesterday’s news by now.

The radio is still on, still playing country music. “Silver Threads and Golden Needles.” Very spritely, even though the lyrics themselves aren’t too cheerful. It’s good to hear the sound of another human voice, even a singer’s over a staticky radio. The silence was beginning to get to me a little. Much more of it and I might have started talking to myself just to relieve it.

Music, and the sun shining off clean snow outside. This day won’t be too difficult to get through. Not too difficult.

* * *

There are forty-three books in the carton of paperbacks—forty-two different titles. Eleven mysteries, four by Agatha Christie, including two dog-eared copies of
Sleeping Murder.
Two spy novels. Five adult Westerns and four traditional Westerns and one pioneer-family saga. Two science fiction novels. Six historical romances. Three Harlequin romances. Two sex-in-the-big-city novels. Two show-business biographies. One book on organic gardening. One fad diet book. One history of jazz. And one book on how to avoid stress.

In the carton of old magazines there are a total of thirty-seven issues and seven different titles. Five issues of
Vogue,
all from the late seventies. Six issues of
Sports Illustrated
from 1985 and 1986. Twelve issues of
Time,
random over a five-year period beginning in 1976. Two issues of
The Yachtsman,
dated June and July of 1981. Eight issues of
Arizona Highways,
six from the late seventies and two from 1980. Three issues of
Redbook,
dated March, May, and August of 1986. And one issue of
Better Homes and Gardens,
dated January 1985.

I’ve put all of the them, books and magazines, into little separate piles along the wall next to the cot. No reason for that—I can’t reach most of them easily without sitting or lying on the cot—or for cataloguing them as I have, other than to pass the time. The first couple of days, I didn’t read anything. I tried once, the second day, but I couldn’t concentrate, could not sit still. Monday morning I forced myself to page slowly through an issue of
Sports Illustrated.
And Monday evening I looked at a couple of issues of
Arizona Highways,
until the photographs of wide-open spaces caused the loneliness and the trapped feeling to well up and I had to stop.

On Tuesday I picked out a traditional Western novel called
Gunsmoke Galoot.
Silly title, but it was originally published in 1940 and that was the sort of title they put on Westerns back then. I managed to get through one chapter in the morning, another in the afternoon, and still another before I went to sleep. Yesterday I was able to sit still long enough to read two chapters at a time until I finished it. I remember very little about the plot or characters—just that the writing had a nice pulpy flavor that was comforting, almost soothing.

I’ve never read Westerns much, books or pulps, though I don’t have the attitude of some people that they’re childish and inferior to most other kinds of fiction. Of the more than six thousand pulp magazines I’ve collected over the years—

My pulps. What will happen to them if I don’t get out of here? What will Kerry do with them? Sell them off? Put them in storage? And the rest of the things in my flat … books, clothing, furniture, the accumulated detritus of a man’s life? And the flat itself, what about that? The rent is paid until the first of the year; my landlord is a generous sort, he won’t start pressing for back rent until February, but what then, when he does start pressing? Will Kerry pay the rent, on the slim hope that I’ll be found alive or return on my own? or will she—

No, dammit, it’s not going to work out that way. Stop trying to look ahead! Today is what matters. The here and now.

Of the 6,000 pulps in my collection, only about 50 or so are Westerns.
Dime Western, Star Western, .44 Western, Western Story.
All are issues from the thirties and forties, most with stories by writers who also wrote detective stories: Frederick Brown, Norbert Davis, William R. Cox. A few have stories by Jim Bohannon, a writer who used to contribute Western detective stories to
Adventure.
I met him at a pulp convention in San Francisco a few years ago—the same convention at which I met Kerry and her parents, Cybil and Ivan, both former pulp writers themselves. Cybil wrote hard-boiled private-eye stories under the male pseudonym Samuel Leatherman; Ivan wrote horror stories—still writes them at novel length. It’s an appropriate field for him because he’s something of a horror himself. He hates me because he thinks I’m not good enough for Kerry, and too old for her besides; I hate him because he’s a grade-A asshole and how did I get off on Ivan Wade? The subject here is Westerns, for Christ’s sake.

I used to like Western films and serials when I was a kid. Every Saturday my ma would give me a quarter and send me off to the neighborhood movie theater, alone or with friends. That way, I wouldn’t be home when my old man … the hell with my old man, I’m not going to write about
him.
I liked the crime films best, the serials about detectives like Dick Tracy, superheroes like the Spider and Captain Marvel, but I would sit just as engrossed through a Gene Autry or Roy Rogers or Three Mesquiteers film, or chapters of Western serials. I remember one serial, I think it was called
Adventures of Red Ryder.
It had an Indian boy in it—Little Beaver. I envied that kid as much as I envied the pulp private eyes when I got older. I wanted to
be
Little Beaver, run around having exciting adventures, wear a headband with a feather in it, Jesus that film made an impression on me. I must have been eight at the time, maybe nine. Little Beaver …

Now I seem to have drifted into childhood reminiscences. What the hell is the point in that? Or in wasting any more paper on the subject of Westerns? It may pass the time but it doesn’t seem to be doing me much good otherwise. Besides, my fingers are starting to cramp up.

Station KHOT has faded out again and I should try to tune it back in. Then something to eat, and a chapter or two of another paperback, and then maybe I’ll wash out my shirt and underwear. They’re starting to smell, and with the sun out it’s not as cold in here as it has been; I can wrap myself in one of the blankets while the clothing dries in front of the heater.

I wish I could shave, too. My beard is growing out and it itches. But there’s nothing I can use for a razor, except maybe a can lid and that would cut hell out of my skin. I’ll just have to endure the discomfort until my facial hair gets long enough and the itching stops.

Tuna, crackers, and some Oreo cookies for lunch—a regular feast. But I’ve been on short rations from the first, and I’ve got to stay on them just in case. I’ve even taken to reusing one tea bag three and four times, and making coffee with just half a teaspoonful of instant.

Clouds in the sky now. The sun is hidden and it won’t be long before it sets. There are long shadows, night shadows, on the drifted snow outside. I can see other shadows in the trees—crouching in the trees like animals, predators hiding there waiting for nightfall.

Cold in here again. And wouldn’t you know it, my shirt and underwear still aren’t dry.