Bill Pronzini: The Other Side Of Silence

“Would he try to run away if he had the chance?”

“No.”

“You sound pretty sure of that.”

“He’s always been cowed by Court. Afraid of him. If he tried to run and Court caught him… No, he wouldn’t do that.”

Fallon asked about the boy’s interests. Sports, outdoor activities?

“Well, he’s not good at team games. He’s quiet, shy, he doesn’t make friends easily. He’d rather read fantasy books like The Hobbit and play video games than anything else.”

“Good with computers?”

“Like all kids these days. But Court knows that. He wouldn’t let Kevin near a computer by himself.”

Fallon nodded. He let a few seconds pass before he said, “This isn’t going to be easy for you, but now I need to know about Banning.”

Her eyes slanted away again; he could see her steeling herself.

“You’re sure you never saw him before that day in the motel?”

“Positive,” she said.

“Never heard his voice before?”

“No. It was deep, growly… I’d remember if I had.”

“What exactly did he say to you on the phone?”

“He’d heard that I was looking for my son and ex-husband, that he knew Court and knew where they were living and he’d tell me for two thousand dollars. Bring the money to Las Vegas and he’d meet me and when I paid him, he’d tell me where to find them.”

“Did he say how he knew Spicer?”

“He said he’d tell me when he saw me.”

“Did he use Sam Ulbrich’s name?”

“No. Why should he?”

“No reason, unless he got your number from Ulbrich.”

“… Are you saying Sam Ulbrich helped set me up?”

“I don’t know Sam Ulbrich.”

“Neither did I, before I hired him. I picked his name out of the phone book. His office isn’t far from where I live.”

“He didn’t have to know you or Spicer to set you up,” Fallon said. “Detectives can be bought off during the course of an investigation.”

“I don’t believe it. He was very professional, he didn’t try to overcharge me or anything like that. For God’s sake, Court isn’t that powerful. He doesn’t have unlimited funds, he can’t corrupt everybody.”

“So we’ll assume Ulbrich’s clean. Let’s get back to Banning. You agreed to his terms, and he told you when and where to meet him.”

“The Rest-a-While Motel, room twenty, at three o’clock Wednesday afternoon.”

Fallon asked where the motel was located. North Las Vegas, she said, on North Rancho Drive. She didn’t remember the exact address. Small, old, nondescript-the cut-rate type of place.

“Was the room reserved in your name?”

“No, Banning said I was to check in and wait for him in number twenty. But I think the clerk may have been expecting me.”

“Oh?”

“I didn’t have to ask for room twenty. As soon as he saw my name on the registration card, he gave me the key.”

He asked if she’d gotten the clerk’s name. She hadn’t. But she remembered the man well enough: midforties, balding, slightly built but with a noticeable paunch.

“How long were you in the room before Banning showed up?”

“About ten minutes.”

So he’d either had surveillance on the motel, so he knew when she arrived, or he’d got a call from the clerk. He’d been somewhere close by, in any case. “Describe him.”

After a few seconds she said, “Not handsome, not ugly. About your height, six feet. Heavyset but not fat. Strong. I couldn’t fight him. I couldn’t even scream with his hand on my throat. He-”

“Don’t dwell on that. How old?”

“Thirties. Maybe thirty-five.”

“Hair color?”

“Black. Short and kinky.”

“Distinguishing marks? Scars, moles, anything like that.”

“A tattoo. On the back of his right wrist.”

“What kind of tattoo?”

“A dragon. Breathing fire.”

“What was he wearing?”

“Brown leather jacket. Slacks, shirt, cowboy boots…” She paused, frowning. “He had something odd in the jacket pocket. It fell out when he took the jacket off and he grabbed it and stuffed it back-quick, as if he didn’t want me to see it.”

“Did you get a good look at it?”

“No, but I’m pretty sure it was a garter. Gold, with black ruffles around the edge. I think it had writing on it.”

“Writing?”

“A name of some kind.”

Not a woman’s garter, then. A sleeve garter. Some casino employees- floor bosses, dealers, croupiers, stickmen, bartenders-wore them. The name on it could be that of a casino.

“Can you remember anything else about him?”

“He wore a ring, a big gold cat’s-eye ring. One of the times he hit me, it cut my cheek.”

“You’re doing fine,” Fallon said. “Now, what about his car?”

“I didn’t see it. I didn’t even hear him drive up.”

“Okay. What did he say to you when you let him in?”

“Just… ‘I’m Banning.’ He was smiling.”

“And then?”

“He asked if I’d brought the money and I said yes and took it out of my purse and gave it to him. He counted it before he put it in his pocket. Then… then his smile changed and he said, ‘All right, now you get what’s coming to you,’ and that’s when he grabbed me and threw me down on the bed. It all happened so fast…”

“When did he deliver the warning? While he was attacking you?”

“No. After he… afterwards.”

“Can you remember his exact words?”

She’d picked up her coffee cup; the question made her put it down again, hard, so that it rattled the saucer and nearly tipped over. “I’ll never forget it. ‘Message from your ex-husband. Stop looking for him and the kid. If you don’t, he’ll find you and do what I just did to you and then he’ll kill you. And if you go to the police, I’ll find you and fuck you again and then I’ll kill you.’ ”

“That all?”

“Isn’t it enough?”

She had begun to rock slightly, back and forth. There were goose bumps, he saw, rising on her bare arms. The conversation, the chilly air in the room, physiological reaction to the sunburns.

He said, “That’s enough for now. You’d better lie down for a while, get some rest.”

“I’m all right.”

“No, you’re not. Not yet.”

He got up to turn the air-conditioning unit down to medium cool. She wouldn’t let him help her to the bed. When she was lying down with a sheet over her lower body, she said, “What are you going to do now?”

“Go see about your car. It should’ve been towed in by this time and if it’s not too badly damaged, the mechanics ought to have it ready to drive by to- morrow. You won’t be ready to travel before then anyway. Probably not until Monday.”

“I can’t just sit around in this cabin for two more days…”

“You will if you want my help.” He went to the writing desk, found a piece of cheap motel stationery and a pen. “What’s your cell phone number?”

She gave it to him and he wrote it down. Then he tore the paper across the middle, pocketed the top half, and on the clean bottom portion wrote his cell number. He put that piece on the nightstand.

“Call me if you need to at any time. Otherwise I’ll call you.”

“From where? Where are you going?”

Fallon smiled wryly. “The other side of silence.”

“What?”

“Vegas,” he said, “where else?”

FALLON HAD ALWAYS THOUGHT of Vegas as a massive, amoeba-like creature slowly inching its way across the flat desert landscape, absorbing more and more of it in little nibbling bites. No head or tail, no intelligence, its only purpose to grow larger, fatter, like the others of its kind that had covered the Los Angeles basin and the Phoenix area and were now swallowing parts of the Mojave Desert. Its veins and arteries pulsed and glowed, new cells made up of housing developments and strip malls and big-box stores expanded in every direction as it grew. Heat radiated from it, but it wasn’t the dry, natural heat of Death Valley. It was sweaty, oily, carbonized. Body heat. Engine heat.