Bill Pronzini - Zigzag

“Orcutt! Stop or take a bullet!”

It might as well have been a whisper as a shout. Either he didn’t believe me or he was caught in the grip of panic; he didn’t break stride, just kept running with his head down. The footing on the driveway was bad; his feet slid in the mud, throwing him into a stagger as he lurched around the side of the Ford. I was out through the door by then, into the slashing rain. He was no more than twenty feet ahead of me. A warning shot might have pulled him up short, but I was not about to risk firing out here in the open even though there was nobody else in sight. I had no authority for that kind of action.

I yelled at him again to stop, making another empty threat to fire, and again he ignored me. He lunged between the Ford and his wheels, a four-door black pickup. I cut over so that I was facing toward him as he tried to yank open the driver’s door. But the rain had made the handle slick and the ground a quagmire; he slipped and slid again, lost his grip, and nearly fell.

He threw a look in my direction. I made a menacing gesture with the automatic, still advancing, to keep him from another attempt to get into the pickup. His eyes were as big as cocktail onions, his mouth twisted and his vulpine features fear squeezed. Like so many murderers, he was a coward when he was on the other end of a firearm. Once more he neither attacked nor stood his ground but gave in to his panic and fled.

I chased him down to Old Wood Road. The downpour was heavy enough to make the going slow, as if we were both running in that kind of retarded motion you have in dreams, and I had to keep wiping the rain blur out of my eyes to hold him in sight. Orcutt stumbled into the middle of the deserted road, his head swiveling from side to side, then around for another look in my direction. He had nowhere to go, the damned fool, but the panic drove him ahead just the same, at an angle to the left and onto the far verge.

Tall grass and a tangle of blackberry vines separated a pair of homes on the high riverbank, one on a small lot, the other twice as large, with a side yard of pines and shrubbery. Orcutt fought his way around and through the thorn-ridden blackberries — I could see the vines ripping at his coat and pants — and then broke free into the side yard.

I shoved the gun into my coat pocket, panted my way across the road. At first I couldn’t see him, but when I moved farther over toward the larger home there he was, clambering down an outside staircase toward the river. The risers were rain slick; toward the bottom he lost his footing and skidded down the last few steps on his ass.

When he was up and running, onto a thin strip of rocky beach, I lost sight of him again. The river, what I could see of it, was a chocolate-brown swirl, its surface pocked with raindrops and spotted with debris. If he tried to cross it, or stumbled and fell into it, he’d drown like the proverbial rat.

The hell with him. No way was I going to chase after him down there. If he didn’t end up in the river, he wouldn’t get far on foot, wouldn’t get far even if he owned or stole another vehicle. I turned back across the road, slogged up the access lane. By the time I reached the black pickup I was soaked to the skin. And wouldn’t you know that was when the rain began to let up into nothing more than a light mist.

Orcutt had left his keys in the ignition. I confiscated them. Another Saturday night special and a box of cartridges were stuffed inside the console compartment; I confiscated them, too. Either he was a gun collector or he had a ready source of outlaw weaponry. Hell, maybe both.

There were two suitcases and a duffel bag on the backseat. I left them where they were without touching them, made sure all the doors were locked. A car went past on the road just then, a woman driving and a toddler in the seat beside her; she didn’t slow or glance in my direction. When they were out of sight, I turned and reentered the cottage.

Marie Seldon was still lying in a supine sprawl atop the table wreckage, her limbs twitching a little, her eyes open and rolled up with most of the whites showing, a bubble of foamy spit at one corner of her mouth. All the signs of a concussion, possibly a skull fracture.

I did not want to risk moving her, but I couldn’t just leave her there like that; I was afraid she might have convulsions, maybe even swallow her tongue. I found a pillow and a blanket in the bedroom, gently eased her over on her side, and propped her head up. Before I covered her I felt the pockets of her windbreaker; her keys were in one of them and I slipped them out. Then I called 911, asked the operator to send an EMT unit.

After that I went outside again to lock the Ford Focus. Where was the money? I wondered. Among all the belongings she’d stuffed into the back? In that duffel bag in Orcutt’s pickup? Or had they divvied it up out of lack of complete trust in each other and there was some in each of the vehicles? Right in front of me in any case; they would not have been getting ready to travel without it. I would’ve liked to search for it, but it was not within the scope of my job to do so. Too bad. I’d never seen a quarter of a million in cash and surely would never have another opportunity.

Back inside, leaving the door open, I checked on Marie Seldon again. Semiconscious now, moaning, still twitching; she was not going to give me any more trouble before the EMT unit arrived. I used a none too clean towel from the bathroom to dry off, hunted up a plastic bag in the kitchen, and deposited the Saturday night special and box of cartridges inside. Then I dragged a chair over in front of the open doorway, where I could sit and watch the yellow car and the pickup and the road beyond, and put in a call to the county sheriff’s department in Santa Rosa.

My luck was still holding. This time Lieutenant Heidegger was in.

They caught George Orcutt that same night, just outside Ukiah in a stolen car. He tried to outrun the Highway Patrol and ended up in a ditch with minor injuries. He hadn’t managed to find himself another firearm and so he’d been taken into custody with a whimper, not a bang.

Marie Seldon suffered a traumatic head injury but no serious damage to what little brain she had. Once she was hospitalized and the initial symptoms treated, she was lucid again — or as lucid as she would ever be.

The two of them fell all over themselves blaming each other for the murders of Ray Fentress and Floyd Mears.

Criminals as a breed are remarkably stupid. Nearly all of them — white-collar, blue-collar, no-collar — fall into the mentally challenged category. The only exceptions are the morally bereft mega-rich, who seem able to misappropriate millions if not billions with casual impunity.

This bunch, to a man and woman, were a classic example. Even though they’d managed initially to pull off a successful caper, it had been doomed to fall apart sooner or later through multiple acts of stupidity. The original crime, kidnapping, and the subsequent one, homicide, are two of the most simpleminded of all felonies; the risk of getting caught is sky-high in both cases and the penalties among the most severe.

Boiled down to essentials, the abduction of Melanie Joy Holloway and its bloody, greed-fueled aftermath happened this way: Ray Fentress, while working on the Holloway estate, overheard the girl talking to a friend about one of her periodic solo gambling trips to the Graton Casino. For some reason he mentioned this in conversation with his new buddy, Floyd Mears, during the last of their joint hunting trips. Later Mears and Marie Seldon commingled half a dozen functioning brain cells and came up with the kidnapping scheme. Fentress was brought into it late. At first he balked at the idea, but the lure of twenty-five thousand dollars for doing nothing more than finding out when Melanie Joy was to make her next solo trip and then pointing her out at the casino was too much for him to resist. The convincer was Mears’ assurance that the girl would not be harmed before or after her father ponied up the quarter-mil ransom. Keeping that promise and not spending any of the money were the only smart decisions any of the connivers had made.