Bill Pronzini: The Other Side Of Silence

“Why wouldn’t Young let you go?”

“He said he wasn’t ready to go back to San Diego yet, he needed time to regroup… there’d be nobody here but some men who take care of the date groves during the day and they wouldn’t bother us. He was so upset, I’d never seen him like that before. He couldn’t pull himself together. Couldn’t stop drinking, talking about the blood on his hands, blaming me…”

Guilt. Fear. And whatever else unhinged men like Vernon Young.

“I started drinking in self-defense and couldn’t stop and then tonight… tonight I killed him.” She swallowed with visible effort. Fuzzily she said, “Can I have something to drink?”

“No more booze.”

“Water. My throat’s dry.”

Fallon found his way to the kitchen, found a tumbler and filled it. Then he used his cell phone to call 911, gave the operator the ranch address and a brief explanation of what had happened here. He gave her his name, too; there was no way to avoid involving himself now.

When he came back into the dining room, Casey was bent forward across the table with her head pillowed on one arm. Passed out, he thought. He set the tumbler down, pulled her upright in the chair. Her head lolled to one side and he saw that her color wasn’t good. He used his thumb to raise one of her eyelids. The eyeball was half rolled up, the pupil fixed and the white blood-veined.

A coldness slithered across his shoulder blades. He slapped her four times, hard. No response, other than faint moans.

He ran to where the bedrooms and master bath were at the rear. The bathroom door stood open. The reason she’d taken so long to fetch the ice for Kevin’s ankle was that she’d been in here part of the time. In the sink were an empty plastic vial and a couple of small white tablets. He caught up the vial, read the label.

Ambien. Sleeping pills.

Shit! Why hadn’t he seen this coming too?

He ran back to the dining room. Casey was sitting as he’d left her, head lolling, eyes shut. If she wasn’t unconscious, she was close to it.

“No, goddamn it,” he said to her, “you won’t die this time either. Not this time either!”

HER PULSE RATE WAS irregular, her breathing shallow but not overly labored-no trachea blockage. He felt her forehead, her cheeks; her body temperature didn’t seem to have dropped. Again he slapped her face, rhythmically, back and forth, back and forth, the sound of the slaps echoing in the stillness. She moaned, rolled her head from side to side, finally began to struggle feebly. One of her eyelids lifted partway, then the other; her eyeballs had rolled up, showing mostly blood-flecked whites. She slurred the word “Stop.”

He dragged the chair back, hauled her out of it, swung her into his arms. In the bathroom again, he put her down on her knees in front of the toilet, held her there with one hand and slapped her several more times to make sure she was still conscious. Then he tilted her head over the bowl, opened her mouth and shoved the first two fingers of the other hand into her mouth, as far down her throat as he could force them. She struggled, moaned, gagged. When he felt her convulse, he pulled his fingers out just in time to avoid the spew of vomit.

Partially dissolved pills, gin, and not much else. Not good; her stomach was mostly empty and that meant the drug had gotten into her bloodstream more quickly. He used toilet paper to wipe her mouth inside and out, then induced her to puke again. The third time he did it, nothing came up except a thin whitish foam.

She was half awake by then, groaning and muttering words that Fallon didn’t listen to. He got her on her feet, but she couldn’t stand or walk; he dragged her out into the hallway.

Kevin was standing in the door to his room, staring wide-eyed. “What’re you doing? What’s the matter with her?”

“She’s sick, but she’ll be all right. Go back to bed. Stay in there until help comes.”

The boy was used to obeying orders. He retreated immediately, hobbling, and shut the door.

Casey stumbled in Fallon’s grasp, babbled something incoherent. He tightened his hold, feeling the bitter anger rise again.

“It was never really about Kevin, was it?” he said to her. “Only you- your need, your pain. All about you .”

She didn’t hear the words. It wouldn’t have mattered if she had.

Fallon walked her up and down the hall, dragging her until her legs began an automatic shuffling response, stopping every now and then to deliver more slaps. Time seemed to have slowed down to a crawl. Seconds were like minutes, minutes like hours.

Come on, come on, hurry up!

He was still walking her, still slapping color into her cheeks, when the county law and an ambulance finally arrived.

The ER doctors at the hospital in Indio flushed her system, put her on IV to rebalance the fluids and minerals in her body. Touch-and-go for a time, but they pulled her through. One of them told Fallon that the emergency procedures he’d learned in the army were the main reason she survived.

So his relationship with Casey Dunbar had come full circle, to end as it had begun-with the preservation of the life she’d tried to throw away. Or it would, if the Riverside County sheriff’s people believed the truth as he told it, with only the self-incriminating details omitted.

It took a while, but they believed it.

And he was free again.

OCTOBER AGAIN, ANOTHER OCTOBER. Still the best month in the Valley.

He stood on the rim of the Ubehebe Crater, looking across at the orange tints the oxidizing ores gave to the dark volcanic ash of the eastern walls. The afternoon temperature was in the high eighties, just right for hiking and exploring. No tourists in the vicinity, no cars visible on the nearby roads. The only sound was the murmur of a light breeze.

Hard to believe, he was thinking, that almost a full year had passed since that night on the Indio date ranch. An eventful year in many ways. Casey had been held for psychiatric observation, charged with second-degree manslaughter in Vernon Young’s death; pled no contest through her public defender, and been remanded to a state mental facility. So far, neither drugs nor psychotherapy had done much to help her overcome her severe depression and suicidal impulses. It would be a long time before she was deemed well enough for release, if she ever was. He felt sorry for her-in some ways more sorry, in some ways less, than he might have if the circumstances had been different.

For him it had been a good year. Very good. None of the small felonies he’d committed in Laughlin and Vegas and San Diego had come back to haunt him. He was still living on the other side of silence, still working for Unidyne, but he didn’t mind it so much now because it was only temporary.

Will Rodriguez was helping him look for another security job in one of the desert communities east and north of the L.A. basin; a position would open up eventually. And eventually, too, he’d have enough saved to buy a piece of California or Nevada desert property surrounded by nothing but open space and inhabited by creatures no larger or more dangerous than a javelina. All things considered, he was a lucky man. A damn lucky man.

He shifted his gaze to the fair-haired boy standing beside him. Kevin. His reward for all he’d done and tried to do last October, his redemption for the mistakes he’d made. His son now, by consent of the mother and by recent legal decree.

Casey had offered no objection to his petition for adoption. She had no family; and Vernon Young’s widow wanted no part of her dead husband’s bastard child, wouldn’t even acknowledge his paternity. So either the boy grew up with Richard Fallon, a known quantity, the man who’d twice rescued her from the brink of death, or in a foster home among strangers. She was mentally competent enough to understand and accept the fact that he was the best option for Kevin’s future. The children’s court judge in San Diego had agreed.