Bill Pronzini: Shackles

My first jab went in under his breastbone, stiffened him and knocked out what air he had left in his lungs. The second jab made him release my coat, staggered him. I got the club up over my head then and whacked it straight down the side of his head, almost tearing off an ear, and hard against the joining of his neck and shoulder. He grunted like a pig in a wallow. His knees buckled and he went down on them, hands scrabbling at the air, drool and blood coming out of one corner of his mouth. I pulled the wood back and this time I did swing it like a baseball bat: home run swing, all the power I had left in my arms and upper body. Too much power: The impact of the branch with the side of his head created a pulpy cracking sound and the wood splintered in my hands. Tucker went over on his back and skidded down the muddy bank again-headfirst, like an upended tortoise down a greased slide.

When he splashed into the brown water his head and shoulders went under and stayed there. No way it could be a ploy to draw me down to him so he could get his hands on me again; I had hit him too hard for that. I half slid down to where he lay, took hold of his belt, and dragged him out before he drowned or the current sucked him free of the bank and carried him off.

His mouth was open and there was silt-heavy water inside it, water in his throat that was choking him. I flipped him over onto his stomach, sank to the mud beside him, and did some CPR work until the last of the water dribbled out of his mouth. By then his breath was coming in a faint rasping gurgle. I put my fingers against the artery in his neck, felt his pulsebeat. Irregular but strong enough. I rolled him onto his side, pried one of his eyelids back. The eye had rolled up in its socket and the white had a glazed cast. Concussion. And maybe I had scrambled what few brain cells he had, too. The side of his head where I’d clouted him was pulpy and bright with blood, most of it from what was left of his ear.

Looking down at the ruin of him, I felt nothing except frustration. He was out and out good; it would be a long while before he was able to talk. If he could talk at all after what I’d done to his windpipe. Would I have felt anything else-remorse, regret-if I’d killed him? Probably not. Funny, but I had gone through the whole fight, start to finish, without fear or anger or emotion of any sort. And so far, none of the usual physical aftereffects of this kind of hand-to-hand combat had set in.

Wetness on my face, dripping down into my left eye: blood from the cut Tucker had opened on my forehead. I wiped it away, got up on my feet and climbed the bank, humped over and using my hands monkey-fashion to maintain my footing. At the top I paused for a few seconds to look around, to listen. Emptiness and silence. The crows were apparently the only ones who had heard the shot and the sounds of the fight, and they were long gone.

It took me the better part of five minutes to locate the.22. When Tucker banged it out of my hand it had skidded over against one of the scrub oaks and was partially hidden by the lower branches. I checked the inside of the barrel, the cylinder, the action; it hadn’t been mud-blocked or damaged. I started to put it into my jacket pocket, but the jacket was torn and caked with mud. So I took it to the Toyota, set it on the seat inside. Any man who walks around with a loaded revolver tucked into the waistband of his pants, the way you see them do it on TV, is a damned fool.

There was nothing in the Toyota that I could use to tie Tucker up. The keys were still in the Chrysler’s ignition; I took them out, found one that would open the trunk. Plenty of stuff in there, most of it tools of the professional slugger’s trade: a couple of lengths of galvanized pipe, an axe handle, some heavy chain, a coil of strong hemp rope. I took the rope down to the river’s edge, looped it around Tucker’s hands, tied his feet, tied the four appendages together. Then I slithered him up the bank and left him lying on his belly at the top, making little liquidy purling sounds in his throat.

Among the other items in the Chrysler’s trunk was a bunch of rags. I used a couple of them to clean mud off my hands. The hound’s-tooth jacket was a ruin; so were the rest of my new clothes and my new pair of shoes. But I hadn’t thrown away the outfit I’d taken from the Carder A-frame; it was bundled up in the Toyota’s trunk. I got it out, changed, threw the muddy stuff inside. Then I went to Tucker again, pried his wallet out of his Levi’s. A hundred and nine dollars in cash, a driver’s license-that was all. Nothing to tell me where he was living in this area. The address on the license was an unfamiliar street in West Sacramento. Old address, the one he’d had in 1987 when the license was issued.

Back to the Chrysler. The glove compartment was full of junk; I rummaged around in it until I came up with a folded piece of pink paper. It was what I was looking for-a receipt from a Yuba City realty outfit, dated twelve days ago and made out to Frank M. Tucker for payment of three months of a one-year lease on property located at 1411 Freestone Street, Yuba City. The total of the payment was $2250. Nice piece of change for somebody in Tucker’s line of work, somebody who had been living in a low-income apartment building in Vacaville two weeks ago, to be shelling out in a lump sum. The year’s lease was interesting, too, considering Tucker’s penchant for moving around from place to place. Mixed up in something with Elmer Rix, I thought-something a lot more lucrative, and a hell of a lot more illegal, than buying and selling junk.

Nothing else in the glove box told me anything. Nor did any of the car’s other contents. On the dash was a Genie garage door opener, I looked at it for a couple of seconds and then put it into my pants pocket. In a pouch on the driver’s door I found a Yuba City-Marysville street map, put that into my pocket as well.

The trunk yielded one more item I could use-a car blanket, new and from the looks of it, never opened. I brought it over to the Toyota, set it on the roof, opened the rear door, then went and got Tucker. He was too big, too much dead weight to carry; I took a wrestler’s grip on him, under the arms from behind his head, and dragged him to the car and muscled him in across the seat. I checked to make sure he was still breathing-he was-and then shook the blanket out and covered him with it.

Reaction was beginning to set in now, though not nearly as much as in the past. A little weakness in my legs, some shortness of breath, sweat running on my face. Or maybe the wetness was more blood; I pawed at it, looked at the fingers. A little of both.

I got in under the wheel. Thought about taking a look at myself in the rear-view mirror and didn’t do it. The hell with what I looked like. No, that wasn’t smart. What if a cop saw me driving with a bloody face and stopped me to ask questions? I stepped out again, found one of the rags I’d used earlier, took it back into the Toyota and held it against my forehead until the bleeding began to diminish. Then I persuaded myself to look in the mirror. Inch-long gash above the eyebrow, not too deep and not too noticeable as long as I kept blotting it with the rag. Spots of mud here and there that I’d missed, a blob of it matting the beard on my left cheek; I rubbed those away. My eyes… I refused to look at my eyes. Instead I took out the area street map and concentrated on locating Freestone Street.

It was in the southern part of town, not all that far from the Catchall Shop. Easy enough to get to from here. I put the map on the seat, leaned up and around and lifted a corner of the blanket for another look at Tucker. Still out, still making those purling sounds in his throat. The whole left side of his face was wet with leaking blood and his torn ear had swelled up to twice its normal size. I said aloud, “I wish you were Brit, tough guy,” and let the blanket fall again.