Bill Pronzini: Shackles

“Did I ask?”

“No, I mean I want to, I think she wants to, but I can’t ask her. I try but I can’t get the words out.”

“Give it time. Sex isn’t everything, pal.”

“I think I’m in love with her,” he said.

“Eb…”

“Don’t say it. I know what you’re gonna say.”

“All right, I won’t say it.”

“I’m not rushing into anything, believe me. But I think about her all the time. I never felt this way about anybody else, not even Dana. I mean that.”

“Eb, you heard how she feels about marriage-”

“Who said anything about marriage? I told you, I haven’t even been to bed with her.”

That struck me funny and I burst out laughing. He let me have a displeased glower. “Damn hyena,” he said, and gave his attention to the lights rippling on the water until the women came back.

There was some discussion about prolonging the evening-a drive, drinks in the city somewhere-but Eberhardt seemed to want to get back to his place. Maybe he had firmed up his resolve, as it were, and intended to pop the bed question to Bobbie Jean; or maybe he just wanted to be alone with her for platonic reasons. At any rate she didn’t seem averse to the idea and so we headed straight back across the Bay Bridge, bound for Noe Valley.

When we came through the bridge’s Yerba Buena tunnel, the lights of the city struck me as having a kind of magical quality tonight-towering skyward in squares and angles in the Financial District, strung out over the hills and down along the Embarcadero and Fisherman’s Wharf, outlining the familiar symmetrical shape of the Golden Gate Bridge to the north. Everything looked new and clean and bright, real and yet not real, as if this were a mock-up for a Disney realm called San Francisco Land. Fanciful notion, but that was the sort of mood I was in. I reached for Kerry’s hand, held it as I drove. It was a good night to be with someone you cared about, a good night to be alive.

It was almost ten-thirty when we dropped off Eberhardt and Bobbie Jean. We said our good nights in the car. Eb allowed as how he’d see me at the office in the morning, forgetting that tomorrow was Saturday and he never went to the office on Saturdays except in an emergency. I didn’t correct him; he had things on his mind, poor bastard.

As we pulled away Kerry said, “I like her,” as if she were still a little surprised by the fact. “Don’t you?”

“Quite a bit.”

“I think she’ll be good for him.”

“Me too. If he doesn’t screw it up.”

“By going too fast, you mean?”

“Well, you know how he is sometimes.”

“I wish I didn’t.”

“He says he thinks he’s in love with her.”

“Oh God.”

“Thinking with his crotch again, maybe. His number one priority right now seems to be getting laid.”

“I can relate to that,” she said.

“You can, huh?”

“Take me home and I’ll show you my etchings.”

“Good old etchings. I know ’em well.”

“Could be I’ve got some you’ve never seen.”

“I doubt that. But I’ll take a look, just to make sure.”

I swung over onto Diamond Heights Boulevard and drove up into the Heights. Kerry’s apartment house clung to one of the steeper hillsides, and like the others strung out on both sides, it had a minimum of parking facilities. Street parking could be a problem, especially on weekends-typical San Francisco neighborhood in that respect-but tonight I got lucky: There was a space less than a hundred yards downhill from her building.

Kerry’s place was pretty nice, if a little too feminine in the decor she’d chosen. Large rooms, large fireplace, and a twelve-foot-wide balcony that commanded a skyview of the city, the bay, and the East Bay. The view was worth about $300 a month extra, or so we estimated considering what an apartment of comparable size and amenities would go for in a neighborhood that didn’t offer a view. But she could afford it. My lady works as a senior copywriter for an advertising agency called Bates and Carpenter, and she pulls down more money in six months than I do in an average year of skip-tracing, insurance investigation, and general poking and probing into other people’s lives.

Her annual salary was one of the reasons I kept nurturing the notion that I could retire, or at least semiretire, within the next few months: It would help underwrite my Golden Years.

She went into the kitchen to get us something to drink and I went out onto the balcony. The night panorama was even more impressive from this vantage point. San Francisco really is a beautiful city when you see it like this, from high up, with the distance and the light-spattered darkness hiding the ugliness and the people who create the ugliness, who keep spreading it like a plague in ever-increasing numbers. Those were the people I had to deal with on a day-to-day basis. And they had put an ugliness in me, too-scars on my body that I could see when I stood naked before a mirror, invisible cankers on the inside, in the form of bitter memories and recurring nightmares, that pained me more with each passing year.

In not too many months I would be fifty-six years old; I had been a cop of one kind or another for nearly two-thirds of my life. I’d seen too much suffering, suffered too much myself. The time had come for a change, a new outlook, a saner way of living out my days. The time to turn the agency over to Eberhardt, who had no intention of ever retiring. For a while maybe I could go in one or two days a week and take care of paperwork and miscellany, just to keep a hand in, but I would draw the line there. No more field work. No more stakeouts, or prying questions, or physical skirmishes, or sudden confrontations with death. No more ugliness.

I’d already broached the idea to Kerry, in a tentative way, and she seemed all for it. In the time we’d been together, she had seen me shot up, beaten up, used up psychologically, and she’d grown to hate the kind of work I did. So why shouldn’t I retire, make us both happy? Money was no problem. The last few years had been good and I had some cash in the bank; I could draw a token salary out of the agency, and Kerry would willingly supply any more I might need. I had no male hangups about that sort of thing, because it had nothing to do with charity or an incapacity in me. She was much younger, talented, and more ambitious; the odds were good that she would one day be made a junior partner at Bates and Carpenter. And we were practically living together anyway, practically married even if she didn’t care to make it legal. She had her apartment and I had my flat in Pacific Heights, but we spent lots of nights together in one place or the other. None of that would have to change.

As for my time, I could find plenty of ways to fill it. Spend more hours with Kerry, doing the things we enjoyed doing together. Read, go fishing, take little trips, get out to sports events. Maybe teach a criminology course at UC Extension or take on some consultancy work if I found myself getting bored. In any case, relax, enjoy the rest of my life. Fifty-six years old, I’d put in my time, I was entitled, wasn’t I? Damn right I was. Damn right.

The whole idea scared hell out of me.

I couldn’t forget the period, not so long ago, when I’d lost my license for two and a half months. It had seemed as though I’d lost my reason and zest for living along with it: I had done little more than vegetate during those weeks. I kept telling myself this was different because it was voluntary, because I was older, more financially secure, and ready and willing to get shut of the full-time investigating grind. And yet there was the nagging fear that I would have the same reaction if and when I did get shut of it-the same sense of displacement, uselessness, emptiness. That I would be like the old firehorse put out to pasture and chafing constantly because he knew there were fires he could be helping to put out, and never mind that he might get burned in the process. Well, maybe I couldn’t do it; maybe I had grown so used to the harness that I could no longer live without it. But I felt that I had to try. And so I had set an arbitrary target date of January 15, a little less than six weeks from now. Holidays would be over then, and I’d have some things I was working on wrapped up. I hadn’t told either Kerry or Eberhardt yet, but I would before too much longer. Eb would need a few weeks’ notice to get used to the idea. He wouldn’t like it at first but he’d come around; eventually he would see it as a challenge, a way to prove what he’d always believed-that he was the better detective. And maybe he was, at that. Things didn’t bother him, fester in him the way they did with me. He did his job with a minimum of emotional involvement. I envied him that, because in the long run it is the one quality more than any other that allows you to survive in our profession.