Bill Pronzini: Shackles

Then I started the engine and went to find out what awaited me at 1411 Freestone Street.

It was a brown wood and stucco house in a quiet, older residential neighborhood. Attached garage, wide front porch, budding tulip tree in the front yard and an acacia tree at the rear. Not fancy; substantial, respectable. The kind of place somebody like Tucker would never choose for himself, but just the sort somebody like Elmer Rix would choose for him.

I drove by once, slowly, made a U-turn at the corner, and came back for another look. No car in the driveway or on the street in front, no sign of activity inside or out. But that did not necessarily mean the house was unoccupied. Tucker had lived alone in Sacramento except for Brit’s brief stay, and alone in Vacaville, but this place was a couple of rungs up the ladder from either of those. If he liked company, and now that he was in the money, he might have moved a friend or two in with him.

I circled the block. When I came back along Freestone Street to 1411 I had the.22 on the seat beside me and the garage door opener in my left hand. Without hesitating, just like somebody who belonged there, I turned into 1411’s drive and pushed the Genie at the same time. The garage door went up-the interior was empty-and I pulled inside, braked, hit the Genie again as soon as the up cycle ended, and was out of the Toyota and leaning over the hood, the.22 aimed at the inside door to the house, before the garage door was halfway down.

Nobody appeared at the inner door. The garage door clicked shut and the Genie switched off; I stood listening to the tick of the Toyota’s engine, the faint fluttery rattle of a furnace… nothing else. But I stayed where I was for another three minutes, waiting in the thick shadows. No sounds from the house. Nobody home-maybe.

I moved around the car, went to the inside door, pushed it open. Empty alcove leading to an empty kitchen. I eased through the rest of the house, using the gun as a pointer: living room, dining room, two bedrooms, one and a half baths, rear porch.

Nobody home.

After I checked the porch I relaxed a little, letting the revolver hang down at my side. All right so far. The place had a vaguely musty odor, an unlived in look, and clutches of old, mismatched, bargain-basement furniture. Furnished house that had sat unrented for a while before Tucker signed his lease; and since he’d taken possession, he hadn’t spent much time on the premises. For one thing, there were no dirty dishes anywhere in the kitchen and Tucker was the kind who would always leave dirty dishes lying around. The only room that showed signs of much habitation was the smaller of the bedrooms, and it was a mess of blankets, sheets, and soiled underwear.

It was the other, larger bedroom that I searched first. That one had a desk in it, as well as a TV and VCR combo and an eight-millimeter film projector and portable screen to boot. There wasn’t much in the desk, and only one item of any interest: a spiral-bound notebook containing a dozen names and addresses. But it wasn’t an address book. In addition to the names, street numbers, and towns-all in this general area-there were dates at the top of each page, along with dollar amounts ranging from $500 to $10,000. And at the bottom of each page were more dates and smaller dollar amounts. You didn’t have to be a cryptographer to figure out what all of this meant, or why Tucker had it in this nice respectable house he’d rented.

Tally book for a loan-sharking operation. Not Tucker’s; he wasn’t bright enough to have set up that kind of business. The toad king’s-Elmer Rix’s. How right I’d been when I thought of Rix as having a moneylender’s smile. Tucker had been brought in to do the collecting, and the enforcing if anybody got behind in his payment.

But loan-sharking wasn’t the only scam Rix and Tucker were working. They had at least one other, and it was far nastier than lending money at back-breaking interest rates. When I opened the closet door in there I found a cache of videocassettes, cans of eight-millimeter film, color photographs and color slides-all of it the worst kind of pornography, manufactured by and distributed to degenerates. Kiddie porn. Grown men engaged in atrocities with young children, some no older than two or three, most of them boys. High-priced filth for the exotic-minded voyeur and the discerning pedophile. No wonder there were TV and VCR, movie projector and screen in here. If Tucker didn’t watch this sort of garbage for kicks, he damned well used the machines to entertain potential buyers.

Rix and Tucker, entrepreneurs. Rix and Tucker, slimebags.

I slammed the closet door, went out of there with a sour taste in my mouth. Nothing in the other bedroom but Tucker’s mess. Nothing in the living room. But in the kitchen, in a drawer under a wall phone, I found a cheap Leatherette address book. Most of the entries were written in pencil in a childish hand. And under the letter B-

Brit

62 Cordilleras

Elk Grove

916-555-4438

I stood looking at the entry for several seconds. Brit, Brit. First name or last? I still had no idea. But one thing I did know now: If the address in this book was current, he wasn’t far away. Elk Grove was off Highway 99 south of Sacramento, a town I’d passed on my way to Carmichael from Stockton two days ago. Sixty miles or so from here-not far at all.

There was no need to copy down the address and telephone number; they were burned into my memory. I paged through the rest of the book, but the only names I recognized were Elmer Rix and “Maggie, Sacramento,” probably Maggie Barnwell. No entry for a Lawrence Jacobs or any other Jacobs.

I returned the book to the drawer, finished searching the house in case there was anything else for me here. There wasn’t. I went back into the garage, opened up the Toyota, and hauled Tucker out from under the blanket and across the garage floor and the kitchen floor to the living room floor, where I deposited him in the middle of an imitation oriental rug. He was still breathing painfully; I wouldn’t have cared much if he had stopped breathing altogether. I’d done a good job with the ropes: They were knotted so tightly that I couldn’t work them lose with my fingers. In the kitchen I found a butcher knife and used that to cut the ropes off his hands and feet. Then I gathered up the pieces, took them to the Toyota, and pitched them onto the floor in back.

In the kitchen again I lifted the wall phone off its hook, dialed 911 and asked for the police, got through to a sergeant named Eales. “Two things,” I said to him. “I’m only going to say them once, so listen carefully. First, an ex-con named Frank Tucker, fourteen-eleven Freestone Street, Yuba City-somebody beat him up and he’s in a pretty bad way. You’d better send an ambulance. Second, Tucker and a man named Elmer Rix, R-i-x, owner of the Catchall Shop on Percy Avenue, are involved in at least two illegal activities: loan-sharking and distributing child pornography. Some of the porn is in a back bedroom, in the desk, there’s a notebook full of information on the loan-sharking operation. Have you got all that?”

“I’ve got it. Who is this, please?”

I said, “Fourteen-eleven Freestone Street, Yuba City, don’t waste any time,” and hung up.

I went out to the car, leaned in for the Genie and pushed its button to raise the garage door, then tossed the thing onto a nearby workbench. Might as well leave the door up, make the cops’ job easier when they got here. I had the car started by the time the opener finished its up cycle; I backed out and drove off along the street without seeing anybody except a couple of housewives who weren’t paying any attention to me. Drove out of the neighborhood without seeing any police cars. If they used sirens getting to Tucker’s house I never heard them. But then, I might not have heard sirens if they had been a block away. I was too intent on my driving, on getting out of Yuba City, on covering the distance between here and Elk Grove.