Bill Pronzini: Shackles

I watched the starlight and the city lights burn in the surrounding dark. And I thought: This is the right away to look at the city, from a place where you can’t see the ugliness. Yeah, I’ve got to try.

It was too cold to sit on the balcony; when Kerry reappeared with the drinks we had them inside. Then, without hurry, we went to bed and made love, and it was particularly good because of the kind of night this was.

Kerry’s digital clock said a quarter of one when I got out of bed and pulled on my clothes. She said sleepily, “You really want to go home?”

“No. What I really want to do is hump you all night long.”

“So why don’t you?”

“An old man like me? I’d be dead by morning.”

“Nice way to go.”

“I’ll consider it when I’m eighty-seven and you’re seventy-four.” I tucked in my shirt and zipped up my pants. “You have to get up early, remember? And I’d like to sack in tomorrow. Won’t hurt us to sleep alone one night this weekend.”

“Damn Saturday meetings,” she said. “I hate to work on Saturday.”

“You’re on your way up, kid. It’ll be Bates, Carpenter and Wade before long.”

She muttered something; she was half-asleep already. I leaned over and kissed her and said I’d call her around five, and she said, “Mmmm,” and turned over. I put on my jacket and overcoat, left the bedroom, and managed not to make any noise letting myself out.

Outside the street and sidewalk were both deserted. The wind had picked up and the temperature had dropped a few more degrees, but the night still had that hard, brittle clarity: December in San Francisco. Kerry and our love-making were still on my mind; I started to whistle off-key as I walked down toward my car. I felt fine-free and fresh, not sleepy at all. Alert.

Even so, I had no inkling that I wasn’t alone. He must have been waiting in the shadows in one of the cars parked along the curb, and he was quick and light on his feet. He didn’t give me a second’s warning as he came up behind me.

I was at the driver’s door of my car, getting the keys out of my coat pocket, still whistling, wondering idly if Eberhardt had managed to talk Bobbie Jean into bed, when I felt the sudden sharp pressure against my lower spine, heard the voice sharp and whispery close to my right ear, “Don’t move. This is a gun and I’ll use it if you force me to.”

I stood still, very still. It was so sudden, so unexpected, that my mind went blank for three or four seconds while it shifted gears. When it began functioning again I sucked at the inside of my mouth, to get saliva flowing, and said, “My wallet’s in the inside jacket pocket, left side. If you want me to take it out-”

“I don’t want your wallet,” the whispery voice said. There was something odd about it, something stilted, as if he were making a conscious effort to disguise it. “This isn’t a mugging.”

“Then what do you want?”

“You’ll find out. Turn away from the car. Walk back uphill until I tell you to stop.”

I had an impulse to twist my head, try to get a look at his face, but I didn’t give in to it. Turned and began to walk instead. The pressure remained tight against my lower spine; I could feel him crowded in close behind me. There was a faint medicinal odor about him, one that I couldn’t quite place.

My mind was hyperactive now, and one thought it whirled up was: Jesus, one of those random street things. Psycho out looking for an easy target. But he didn’t act or sound like a psycho: no edginess, no excitement. Calm, almost businesslike. Man with a purpose.

“Stop,” he said, and I stopped. The street was still deserted, the night hushed except for the murmur of the cold wind blowing in off the ocean. “The car on your immediate left-walk to it, open the rear door, and get inside. Lie facedown across the seat.”

“Listen, what-”

“Do as you’re told. I won’t hesitate to shoot you. Or don’t you believe that?”

I believed it. I pivoted without saying anything, walked slowly to the car at the curb. Medium-sized, dark-colored, probably American made-that was all I could tell about it in the starshine. There was fear inside me now, a cold steady seepage like trickles of icewater, but it was as much a fear of the unknown as any other kind. Who was he? Why was he doing this? Those two questions were raw in my mind as I tugged open the rear door, hesitated with my hand still on the handle. The dome light hadn’t come on; he must have unscrewed the bulb.

“Get inside,” he said in that odd whispery voice. “Lie facedown across the seat with your hands clasped behind you.”

“And then what?”

“Do as I say.”

He prodded me with the gun… I had no doubt it was a gun. I ducked down, dry-mouthed now, and crawled onto the seat and flattened out with my cheek against cold leather, my arms splayed back and the hands joined on my buttocks. He took the gun out of my back while I did that, but not for long; he shoved in after me, leaving the door open, and jabbed my spine again. I tried to turn my head enough to get a look at him, but it was thick-dark in there and the angle was wrong. He was just a peripheral man-shape hulked above me, doing something with his free hand.

Metal clanked and rattled; I felt the cold bit of it around my left wrist, heard a sharp snicking sound. Christ -handcuffs. He snapped the other circlet tight around my right wrist. But he wasn’t finished yet. The gun muzzle stayed firm against my spine.

I smelled the medicinal odor, sharper this time-and realized what it was just before he leaned forward, pressed something rough-textured and damp over my nose and mouth. “Don’t struggle,” he said, but I struggled anyway, fighting helplessly against the suffocating dampness, knowing I would lose consciousness in a matter of seconds. And then losing it, feeling it swirl away on the sickening fumes from a cloth soaked in chloroform…

I came out of it feeling dizzy, disoriented, sick to my stomach. It was seconds before I remembered what had happened, realized I was still lying prone on the backseat of the car, my hands still shackled behind me. We were moving now at a steady pace, not fast and not slow, traveling in a more or less straight line on an even surface. Highway of some kind, probably a freeway: I could hear the faint desultory passage of other cars. But when I opened my eyes I couldn’t see anything except heavy blackness. There was something over me, covering my head-a blanket of some kind. I could smell its coarse, dusty fabric, and the odor stirred the roiling nausea in my stomach.

I tried to move, to throw the blanket off. Pain erupted in cramped muscles all along my body, sharpest in my drawn-back shoulders and arms. More pain, a quick blaze of it, seemed to sweep through my head from temple to temple, then modulated into a fierce throbbing. That goddamned chloroform…

Bile pumped up into the back of my throat. I managed to twist my body enough to get my head off the seat, hang it down close to the floorboards, before the vomit came boiling up-spasm after spasm that left me weak and shaking. A thick hot sweat oiled my skin. My head felt as if it would burst from the thunderous banging pressure within.

“Christ, that stinks.”

Him up there behind the wheel, the son of a bitch with the whispery voice. He sounded offended. I heard him crank down his window, heard more clearly the sounds of light traffic outside. Chill air came into the car, but it didn’t reach under the blanket, didn’t ease the sweaty feverishness.

I needed that air, needed to breathe it; I was beginning to feel claustrophobic with the coarse wool of the blanket still draped over my head. Painfully I clawed up at the fabric with my fingers, got a grip on it and dragged at it until it came away from my head and neck. The wind was like a rejuvenating drug. I struggled onto my side, turning and raising my head, and sucked the cold air open-mouthed.