Bill Pronzini: Shackles

9:20. Another pair of headlights turning in behind me-and another destination on the second block.

9:30. Midge got up and switched on a black and white TV. Sat down again, only to stand a minute later and walk to the window and draw thin patterned drapes: There had probably been some kind of glare from outside that affected her view of the television. I said aloud, “Shit!” Now maybe I wouldn’t get a look at Brit tonight after all.

9:50. Cramp in my right leg. I had to go through contortions to pull the leg up, maneuver it past the gearshift and straighten it out across the passenger seat.

10:05. Why didn’t he come? Out enjoying himself, probably; taking in a movie, playing cards, having sex… damn him! Damn his rotten soul to hell!

10:15. God, how I wanted this to be over with. Not just this waiting tonight- all of it. So I could stop hating, so I could go home, so I could see Kerry. So I could lick my wounds and start the healing process. So I could begin to live again.

10:30. Another cramp in my leg. I couldn’t keep on sitting here much longer…

I didn’t have to. Two minutes after I massaged the knot out of my leg, a third set of headlamps appeared behind me-and this time the car turned into Number 62’s driveway.

I sat up, gripping the bottom of the steering wheel with both hands. The car over there-I couldn’t tell the make, just that it was an older model-went dark and a slender man shape got out. The dome light was too dim and the night too dark for me to see him clearly. I watched him walk through the weedy front yard to the door, let himself in with a key. There was light inside, and when he stepped through the open doorway I had a quick glimpse of lank brown hair, pale face in profile, dark blue Windbreaker. Then the door closed off the light and he was gone.

Frustration was sharp in me for a few seconds, but then the edge of it rubbed off against the grindstone of fatigue. So close to him now, just a hundred yards or so separating us. And yet there was nothing I could do about it tonight. Tomorrow, but not tonight. Get out of here, go get some sleep, I thought, come back in the morning… but I could not seem to make my body respond. I didn’t trust myself to drive yet anyway. My hands twitched when I took them away from the wheel, as if I had contracted some sort of neurological disease: too much stress, too much time cramped up in this small space. I gripped the wheel again, harder this time. Sat like that, waiting until I felt able to handle the car without risk to myself or someone else.

More minutes crawled away-not many, ten at the most. When I let go of the wheel this time my hands were still. I had been taking deep slow breaths; I took several more, ran my tongue over dry lips, tested my reactions by pushing in the clutch, tapping the brake, working the gearshift. Okay now. I reached for the ignition key-

And the cottage’s front door opened and he came back out.

I froze with my fingers on the key. In the two or three seconds he was in the light I saw that he had changed clothes, or at least put on a different coat-something heavy and plaid-and some kind of cap on his head. Then he was a shadow shape walking across the yard, opening the car door, ducking inside. The starter ground, a whiny sound in the night’s stillness; the headlights came on. He backed the car out of the driveway and turned my way.

I drifted low on the seat, straightened immediately after he rolled past and reached again for the ignition key. He turned left at the corner behind me. I had the engine going by then, and I made a sharp U-turn and hit the headlight switch before I reached the corner. When I completed the turn after him he was only a block and a half away.

Adrenaline had taken away some of the dragging tiredness, made me alert again. I thought: Going after a pack of cigarettes or liquor, maybe. That was fine, as long as he went somewhere that wasn’t too crowded. I could wait in his car while he made his purchase; or if he locked it I could hang around in the shadows nearby until he came back.

But he wasn’t out on a late-night shopping errand. He led me to Elk Grove Boulevard, along it through the middle of town, and out past the chain of shopping centers and service stations and fast-food joints on the western outskirts. I knew by then that his car was an old green Mercury with a piece chipped off one of the taillights: easy enough to keep in sight.

Highway 99 came up ahead. He led me across the overpass, then onto the southbound entrance ramp. He drove in the fast lane; I stayed in the slow lane at a distance of a couple of hundred yards. But wherever he was going, he wasn’t in any particular hurry. His speed hovered between sixty and sixty-five.

We traveled down the freeway about ten miles. Then an exit sign loomed ahead-Highway 104, Jackson-and when he put on his directional signal and started off onto the ramp, I realized suddenly where he was going. Knew it in that instant the way you know or intuit certain things, with a sense of utter inevitability. Knew it with a feeling too dark, too full of bitter irony to be elation but close to elation just the same because it was fitting, it was a kind of cosmic justice. I could not have picked a better night to catch up with him or asked for a better place to have it all end.

Highway 104 leads to the central Mother Lode, connecting with Highway 49 just north of Jackson. And there could only be one possible reason for him to drive up to the Sierras alone at this time of night.

He was going to the cabin at Deer Run.

Traffic was sparse on 104-nothing much along most of it except flattish farmland and the Rancho Seco nuclear power plant-so I let the distance between Brit and me widen until the Mercury was out of sight ahead. No percentage in my hanging close to him now; headlights in his rear-view mirror might alert him to the possibility that he was being followed. And I wanted him to get to the cabin well ahead of me, to have time to skulk around outside, let himself in through one of the bedroom windows, find out I had escaped, and think about the implications of that before I walked in on him. Fifteen minutes’ head start, at least. That way I would ensure that the last act of our little two-man drama took place inside the cabin.

I drove at a steady fifty, and by the time I covered the twenty-five miles to the Highway 49 junction, he must have picked up ten of those fifteen minutes. Traffic on 49 was just as sparse but I held my speed down along there too. Jackson, Mokelumne Hill, San Andreas-little gold country towns that teemed with tourists in the summer, that were deserted clusters of old wood and brick and false-front buildings at this hour of a March night. No, morning : It was twenty past midnight when I made the turn off 49, just outside San Andreas, onto the twisty two-lane county road that climbed to Deer Run.

The sky was clean and moonlit up here, too, the air cold but without the sharp wintry bite of last week. There had not been any snowfall since I’d left; in fact the weather must have stayed warm and dry. Once I got up past the snowline, the road was not only clear but in places the windrows along it had melted completely. There were dark patches and furrows in the open meadows where the snowpack had thawed and water had begun to run off.

It was fifteen miles to Deer Run this way. In all that distance I saw no sign of Brit, encountered no other car traveling in either direction. Here and there I saw lights from cabins built on ridges or down in hollows or back among trees, passed through a little cluster of lights that marked the tiny hamlet of Mountain Ranch; but mostly I drove through black and moonstruck white, alone in the night, not thinking much now because there was no longer any need to think. Transition, that was all this was. Dead time-the long empty minutes before the condemned man and his executioner come together.