Bill Pronzini: The Other Side Of Silence

“Vernon Young? Did he do something to you?”

“No. No.”

“Then what happened to make you run?”

No answer, just a shuddery inhalation.

Casey’s light was visible as they neared the lane. When they came out, she was only twenty yards away. She saw them and broke into an unsteady run.

“Kevin! Oh my God, is he hurt?”

“Turned his ankle.”

She tried to take the boy into her arms. Kevin went taut as a bowstring when she touched him. He said, “No!” and pressed his face against Fallon’s chest.

He could smell the sweat on her. Something else, too: gin fumes. He put the light on her face. Wet, ghost-pale; the hazel eyes were as wide and seemed as dark as Kevin’s had in the grove. Half drunk, he thought. And still terrified.

He pushed past her, went up the road in long, hard strides. Casey hurried after him, ran up alongside and tried to touch her son again. Kevin cringed and stiffened again. Fallon turned him away from her.

When they neared the Jeep, she said, “Put him in Vernon’s car, the front seat-”

“No! Don’t put me in there, don’t !”

“Please, Rick. Then give me back the keys.”

Fallon said, “No. Not yet.”

“Give me the keys. Move your Jeep so we can leave.”

“And go where?”

“A doctor, the ER in Indio…”

“He doesn’t need emergency treatment. And you’re not going anywhere except the ranch house.”

Kevin whimpered. “I don’t want to go back there, I don’t want to see him again.”

“You won’t have to see him, honey,” she said. Then, to Fallon, “He’s mine, I know what’s best for him-”

“The hell you do.”

She said with sudden fury, “Goddamn you, let me have him!” and tried to pull Kevin out of Fallon’s grasp. The boy growled at her like a whipped ani- mal. Fallon shoved her out of the way, went around to the Jeep’s passenger side, got the door opened and eased Kevin down on the seat. At first Casey clawed at him from behind, her nails once raking the side of his neck. But as soon as he shut the boy inside, she quit fighting and backed off. When he turned to shine the six-cell on her again, she was standing with her arms down at her sides, breathing in ragged little gasps. All at once, for a reason he couldn’t fathom, the anger and the fear seemed to have gone out of her. Her face had a blank look, like a slate that had been wiped clean.

Fallon said, “You wanted the keys? All right, here they are.” He pressed them into her sweaty hand. “Turn the car around and drive to the house. I’ll follow you.”

She just stood there, staring at him.

“Go on. Don’t give me any more argument.”

It was as if he’d pushed a button or thrown a switch to activate a mechanical device. She pivoted, slow, and walked to the BMW and closed herself inside. The engine throbbed into life. He waited until she backed up and was starting to turn before he slid into the Jeep.

The lane ran straight through the date groves for a tenth of a mile, then jogged left and widened out into a broad clearing. The ranch buildings were just beyond, packing and storage sheds first, all of them dark, the ranch house some distance beyond. The house showed lights inside and out, enough illumination for Fallon to tell that it was a rectangular, tile-roofed adobe with ornate iron balconies at the second-floor corners and outside staircases leading up to them. A four-foot-high adobe wall extended from the far corner to the edge of another date grove.

Casey bypassed a parking area in front, stopped alongside a gate in the adobe wall. Fallon pulled up behind her. Kevin stirred and made another small whimpering noise. “Do I have to go in there?”

“I won’t let anything happen to you.”

“I don’t want to see him again.”

“You won’t have to. I promise.”

Fallon went around to lift the boy out. Casey had the gate open; she didn’t say a word, just started inside. The wall enclosed a nightlit patio garden with a swimming pool at one end-a night image of the scene in her stash of pho- tographs. Sweet peas on trellises and some kind of white-flowered shrubs dominated the garden, their combined scents heavy in the warm night.

Two pairs of glass-paned doors, both closed, gave access to the house. Casey walked to the second, opposite the pool, and opened them and led the way down a tile-floored hall and through a doorway. She turned on the lights. Bedroom, with a single bed covered by a Mexican blanket. Kevin’s room while they’d been here: some of his clothing was neatly folded on the bureau.

Fallon laid him gently on the bed, sat down to untie the laces on his right sneaker. The ankle was already starting to swell. He spread the shoe wide open, eased it and the sock off as carefully as he could. The bruise from the instep to the ankle bone was already starting to discolor.

Casey stood watching him. She hadn’t said a word and her expression was still as blank as it had become on the road. Kevin wouldn’t look at her. Most of the time he lay unmoving with his eyes shut.

Fallon said, “Get some ice. And a towel to wrap it in.”

She went out, neither hurrying nor taking her time. Fallon sat beside the boy, smoothing the damp hair off his forehead. Warm, a little feverish. The thin lips were cracked and dry. The dark eyes looked up at him with a mixture of fright, pain, and need. Christ, what these people had done to him! Spicer, Young, Casey too in some way he didn’t understand yet.

She seemed to be taking a long time getting what he’d sent her after. Fallon was about to go looking when she came in with a hand towel and the ice in a mixing bowl. He spilled some of the ice into the towel, wrapped it around the swelling ankle, then covered Kevin with the bedsheet. He smiled at the boy, smoothed his forehead again. Those frightened, needy eyes had put a lump in his throat that he couldn’t seem to swallow.

He took Casey’s arm and prodded her out into the hallway, shutting the door behind them. “All right. Where’s Young?”

“In the front room.” Dull, flat voice.

“Show me.”

She led him through the house to a broad room with a black-throated stone fireplace and heavy Spanish-style furniture. Five feet into it, Fallon stopped abruptly. Casey moved around behind him, but his gaze held steady on the tile floor in front of the hearth.

An Indian throw rug was bunched up there, and sprawled on top of it was a man dressed in beige slacks and a blue shirt. The wavy brown hair on the back of the man’s head was bright with blood. More blood stained the rug, the tiles, the raised hearthstone.

“I killed him,” Casey said in her empty voice. “The only man I ever loved, and I killed him.”

FALLON CROSSED THE ROOM, bent to feel for a pulse in Vernon Young’s neck. Wasted effort. The eyes were open and sightless, the mouth twisted into a rictus. The blood on his head was still wet, but he hadn’t died from the wound. Spinal shock was the probable cause. The way the head was bent, the way it rolled loosely when Fallon touched it with a fingertip, told him that the upper cervical vertebrae had been cracked in the fall against the hearthstone. He hadn’t been dead more than an hour.

There was a low mahogany coffee table near the body, between the hearth and a long couch. An empty, long-stemmed martini glass stood on the table; the shattered remains of another were scattered on the floor beside Young’s outflung arm. Across the room, on a wet bar inlaid with colored tiles, Fallon could see a martini pitcher, bottles that would be gin and Vermouth, an open jar of olives.

He straightened, went back to where Casey was standing. She hadn’t moved. The vacant eyes stared straight ahead.