Bill Pronzini: Shackles

Newell sent a couple of deputies up to Deer Run to take Vining into custody. He also notified the sheriff, who came down and listened to me tell my story a second time and then agreed to my request for a twenty-four-hour grace period before any of it was made public, so I could tell Kerry and Eberhardt myself, in person, instead of them hearing it through the media. I repeated the story a third time into the microphone of a tape recorder. After that they gave me a place to sleep, and I was unconscious until midafternoon. When I woke up I shaved off the beard, had something to eat, received permission to leave the area, picked up the Toyota, and spent two and a half hours driving due west to San Francisco.

And now here I was, coming into the city off the Bay Bridge. It was a cold, clear night, the same kind of night my last one here had been. The skyline struck me much the same way it had then: new and clean and bright, real and yet not real, as if it was some kind of elaborate stage set. Not San Francisco, San Francisco Land. But there was a difference in the illusion this time. Ninety-seven days ago, it had had a pleasurable, magical connotation. Tonight it was merely strange, as if I were entering a familiar place that had changed in subtle ways while I had been away. The strangeness was in me, however, in my perceptions; it was I, not the city, that had been altered in subtle ways. Yet even though I understood that, I could not quite make the city come alive for me.

I was home, but I wasn’t home. Not yet.

I took 101 south to the Army Street exit, Army to Diamond, then went on up into Diamond Heights. The cityscape, the gaudily lit bridges and the East Bay, had the same odd aspect from this vantage point. There was even a vague peculiarity to Kerry’s street and its usual lack of parking spaces.

For ten minutes I hunted for a place to put the Toyota, finally found one downhill two blocks away. Walking up the steep sidewalk to her building, as I had so many times before, I passed the spot where I’d left my car on that last night-and caught myself looking for it among those angled in against the curb. Long gone, of course. Where? What had Kerry done with it? What had she done with my flat? So many questions I had to ask her. So many questions to ask Eberhardt, too-about the agency, about his relationship with Bobbie Jean. And so many things I had to tell both of them.

It had occurred to me on the long drive from San Andreas that Kerry might not be home when I got there. It was a weekday night, but women sometimes went out on week nights-to the movies, to visit friends. A single woman who believed that her boyfriend must be dead might even have gone out on a date. Or she might still be working at Bates and Carpenter; she was a workaholic and she often stayed late at the office. But no sooner than I’d thought of these possibilities, I rejected them. She would be home, and she would be alone. I knew that, intuited it with the same certainty and inevitability that I had intuited Neal Vining’s destination last night.

I smiled when I reached her building, because there was a light on behind the drawn curtains in her bedroom. I let myself into the foyer with my key, climbed the stairs, and went down the hallway to her door. Stood there for a time, preparing myself. And then rang the bell, rather than using my key here too, because it would be easier for her that way.

Footsteps inside. She would look through the peephole; she always looked through the peephole. I heard her gasp when she did, even with the thickness of the door between us. The chain rattled, the lock clicked, the door jerked open.

And there she was.

At least five pounds thinner, a gauntness to her face, the skin drawn tight across her cheekbones and pale now, very pale. Shock in her green eyes, and relief and joy crowding up close behind it, pushing through.

“Kerry,” I said.

And she said, “Oh, thank God!” and came into my arms.

I held her tight, I stroked her hair, I kissed the softness of her neck, and she cried and I cried with her-and nothing was strange anymore, everything was familiar, everything was real. Now I was home.

And holding her, crying, I thought: It’s going to be all right. It may take some time, I may need some help, but it’s going to be all right.

Bill Pronzini (l943 -) has was born in California and has been resident in that state for much of his life, although in his 20’s he lived in Furstenfeldbruck, Germany and Majorca. His first novel, THE STALKER, a suspense narrative of an old crime and its consequences through the lives of both victims and criminals, was published in l97l and was a finalist for the MWA Best First Novel Edgar. His second novel, THE SNATCH (l97l, an expansion of a story of the same title published by Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine) introduced the Nameless Detective who became the narrator of twenty-five subsequent novels published over more than three decades, surely one of the most extensive and extended of all the mystery series.

Asked why Nameless had no name and why the author had taken that approach (just as Robert B. Parker has often been asked the first name of his series detective known only as “Spenser”) Pronzini has said that this character is so close in many ways to Pronzini’s own personality and interests that the name should be obvious. (He has also noted that the character is in fact named once, offhandedly, in his collaborative novel with Marcia Muller, DOUBLE.) Nameless’s spiritual odyssey has in many ways parallelled the author’s one, Pronzini has said, and to know the character or author is really to know them both.

As a mainstream novelist, Pronzini has published novels such as SNOWBOUND, MASQUES and BLUE LONESOME which have shown great technical range and detail; he has also published many science fiction stories as well as one science fiction novel, PROSE BOWL, in collaboration with Barry N. Malzberg. With his wife, the successful mystery novelist Marcia Muller, Pronzini now lives in his town of birth, Petaluma, California.