Bill Pronzini - A Wasteland of Strangers

I licked the inside of my dry mouth. Tried swallowing again, and this time I was able to do it. No crushed cartilage or damage to my trachea. Vocal chords?

“Pretty sure I’ve seen him somewhere before,” John Faith said. “You get a look at his face? Know who he is?”

It took a few seconds and two tries before I was able to speak. My voice was stronger than I’d expected.

“I know him,” I said. “His name is Munoz. Mateo Munoz.”

The rain woke me up. Not that I’d been in a deep sleep; I was too depressed to get a decent night’s rest. Damn rain only made it worse.

I could’ve had another full house tonight if it hadn’t been for the weather and the couldn’t-care-less media. Just three cabins occupied on a Saturday night, and none by a newshound. Still a few of them around, but they were all over in the town proper — and they’d be gone, too, soon enough, if John Faith’s body didn’t turn up pretty quick. Well, good riddance. Liars, users, full of phony promises that got a man all stirred up and hopeful and then left him high and dry, with his expectations hanging out limp as a flasher’s cock.

I rolled out of bed and put on my robe and went to the kitchen to find something to eat. Nothing much in the refrigerator appealed to me. Finally I dragged out a couple of powdered-sugar doughnuts I’d bought at Miller’s, poured a glass of milk to wash them down with. Comfort food. That was what Dottie used to call milk and doughnuts. Cake and chocolate eclairs and butter toffee and hot fudge sundaes and every other calorie-rich thing you could think of, too. All that comfort food was what blew her up to two hundred and eighty-seven pounds, what killed her quick that hot July night ten years ago. Quick and comfortable.

Dottie. Wasn’t often anymore that I thought about her, much less missed her, but tonight I wished she were sitting there across the table, helping me eat the powdered-sugar doughnuts. I’m not the kind of man who gets lonely; I like being by myself, doing for myself, not having to answer to anybody else. But sometimes, when I’m down like this, I crave other company besides my own. And I get mad as hell at Dottie for dying hog-fat the way she did, leaving me to run the Lakeside all by myself, put up with ten years’ worth of hassles and frustrations and limp expectations and then for a reward be forced to sell out and go live with an ungrateful, man-crazy daughter and her rotten teenage kids for the rest of my life. She’d gone easy, easy and comfortable; she hadn’t suffered. I was the one who’d suffered, who’d keep right on suffering. And when my time came I’d go hard, sure as God makes little green apples. Hard and uncomfortable.

I wedged half a doughnut into my mouth and the crumbs and sugar spilled down inside my pajama top and that made me so mad I smashed the plate against the wall and the glass of milk after it. Let fat-assed Maria clean up the mess tomorrow. Let it lie there until it rotted, for all I cared.

Those bastards. TV newswoman saying my interview was one of her best, promising it’d be shown today, and not even a whisper of my name much less the interview on the noon or seven o’clock or eleven o’clock news programs. Plenty of other Pomo residents and businesses getting attention, but not Harry Richmond and the Lakeside Resort. Chronicle reporter swearing he’d use my name and give the resort a plug in his story, and did he? Hell, no. Not a word. They wouldn’t show the interview or mention me tomorrow or any other day, either. Not the way my luck was running.

All I’d asked for was one lousy little break, a few seconds in the spotlight, some free publicity. A small businessman fighting to survive, a hardworking, taxpaying citizen, is entitled to that much, isn’t he? Why should others get some good out of what’s happened in Pomo and not me?

It’s not fair. It’s just not fair!

“Don’t be afraid.” John Faith had found the Ruger automatic and was tucking it into the waistband of his trousers. “Munoz won’t be back and I won’t hurt you.”

“I’m not afraid.”

He flicked the flash beam over my face. “No, you’re not, are you? Of me or of him. He didn’t do anything to you before he brought you here?”

“Rape me? No.”

“Choked you, though... those marks on your throat. You breathe okay?”

“Yes. I’ll be all right.”

“Where’d he take you from?”

“My garage. Hiding inside when I came home.” Some of the shock was wearing off; I felt relief now, a loosening of the tension in my body which created a tingling weakness in the joints. “My hands,” I said. “They’re numb.”

“Roll over on your side so I can get at the tape.”

When I’d done that he knelt and set the flashlight down. I could feel his fingers at my back, on my upper arms, but I was numb below the elbows.

He asked, “Why’d he bring you here?”

So no one could hear my screams. “I’m not sure where we are.”

“Nucooee Point Lodge.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“He must’ve been here before. Seemed to know his way around.”

“So do you,” I said.

“Be glad I’m alive and I picked this place to hole up in.”

“I am. If you hadn’t been here...”

“Don’t think about it.”

“I can’t think about anything else.”

“Yeah. I wanted to jump him sooner, but I had to make sure I took him by surprise. I’m hurting and I wouldn’t have done you or me any good if I’d lost the fight. But I’d feel better if he was lying on the floor right now with a broken head.”

I said nothing.

“Bad choice of words,” he said. “You probably won’t believe it, but I didn’t kill Storm Carey.”

“All right.”

“Gospel truth. Okay, your hands are free.”

“I can’t feel them.”

“Here, I’ll help you.” He lifted one arm, laid it across my hip. Turned me by the shoulders, gently, and propped me against the couch’s side rest, then lifted the other arm onto my lap. Both hands felt like blobs of dead flesh. He took them in his big fingers and began to massage them. “Tell me when they start to tingle.”

It took three or four minutes.

He kept it up for another minute or so after I told him, then let go and got slowly to his feet. Light from the flash caught his face and upper body; red smears stained the bandage on his chest.

“You’re bleeding.”

“Wounds tore open again during the fight.”

“Bullet wounds?”

“Oh yeah. Good old Chief Novak. His aim was a little off.”

“You broke his nose.”

“Did I? Good.”

“He believes you’re guilty. Really believes it.”

“Sure he does.” John Faith switched off the other torch, sat wearily at the far end of the couch; the beam from his flash lay at an oblique angle between us. “Pomo’s a hell of a deceptive place,” he said then.

“Deceptive?”

“Looks nice and peaceful, but underneath it’s a snake pit. I’ve been in wide-open boomtowns that weren’t as hostile.”

“It isn’t that bad.”

“Wasn’t until I got here, you mean.”

I didn’t answer, and he misunderstood my silence.

“Yeah. Right,” he said. “What the hell, you might as well blame me for what Munoz tried to do to you.”

“I don’t blame you. You’re not one of his kind.”

“What kind is that?”

“The ones who hate and fear women, who use sex as a weapon.”

“That the only reason he went after you? Or was it something personal?”

“Well, I was responsible for him being expelled from school two years ago. Another teacher and I caught him using cocaine in an empty classroom. The other teacher wanted to let him off with a warning. I thought it was too serious for that.”