Bill Pronzini - Shackles

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.

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.