Bill Pronzini - A Wasteland of Strangers

I drove to her house. Her garage door was all the way up, her car slotted inside, but I didn’t think anything of it until there was no answer to my doorbell ring. I went around back, knocked on the door there and called her name; still no answer. Why would she go away and leave the garage door wide open? And where would she go in weather like this without taking her car? Not off somewhere in her boat; I could see the Chris-Craft, tarp-covered, on the lift inside the dock shed.

An uneasy feeling began to work inside me. The attempted break-in Thursday night, the threatening phone call yesterday morning... somebody stalking her. The feeling worsened when I found the piece of cardboard taped over the broken bathroom window. What’d happened here? I punched out the cardboard, climbed through, and took a quick look through the house.

No sign of her. Except for her car in the garage, there was no indication she’d been here at all last night after leaving my place. The furnace was off; the interior was chill and damp.

I climbed back through the window and went into the garage. The car’s hood was cold, too; it hadn’t been driven in several hours. The sense of wrongness was so strong now it was like a squeezing pressure in my chest and groin. I opened the driver’s door, checked the front seat, then the backseat. Nothing to find. I slammed the door, started to turn, and stepped on something. I looked down at the floor. Lipstick. I bent to pick it up, saw something else, and dropped to all fours to peer under the car.

Her purse was there, open, her wallet another of several items that had been spilled out of it. The one thing that wasn’t there was the Ruger automatic she’d told me she was going to carry for protection.

I woke up at dawn’s early light, but there wasn’t much of same, just gloom and rain, so I went back to sleep. I was awake again at nine, feeling fine, feeling fine. No hangover this a.m., whoop-de-doo. And some Good Samaritan of a sneak thief seemed to have made off with my heavy bag of sticks, whoop-de-dee. Walking unburdened, walking tall, I padded into the bathroom, shook some dew off the old lily, and had a squint at the Kent phiz in the mirror.

Amazing. I actually looked alive this morning. Doubly amazing, in fact, considering my morbid contemplations of last night. Eat your heart out, Richard Cory, you gentleman from sole to crown, you imperially slim rectal aperture. You may have put a bullet in your puddin’ head one fine night, but I didn’t and won’t be a copycat. My demons are better than your demons, my demons can lick your demons any old day of the week.

Out to the kitchen. More rain and gloom at the windows, but ’twas of no import, for I was bright and sunny inside. Keep your sunny side up, eh, Kent? Oyez, oyez.

One glass, relatively clean, plucked from the cupboard. Splash in approximately two inches of ice-cold, delicious orange juice. Add approximately six inches of crystal-clear, delicious salve. Stir lightly with index finger. Over the lips and over the gums... ahh! Quaff again until glass is empty. Ahh! Repeat process, once immediately and then as often as needed.

Had I remembered to turn on my answering machine before doddering off to the sack? Wonder of wonders, I had. No messages, however. So. Nothing new on the fate of Faith or young Jaydee would’ve rung up as promised. Too bad, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles. Heigh-ho! One thing at a time. All in due course, everything in its proper order. The Faith will be kept when the time comes to keep the Faith.

I chuckled. Kent really was in fine fettle this a.m.

“Yes you are, pal. In fine fettle, and for less we’ll not settle.”

I turned around. Pa Kent’s .38 was sitting in the center of the table where I’d left him. Old enemies? Hell, no. New friends. Bosom buddies. My pal, Roscoe. I winked at him; he winked back.

“We had a gay old time last night, didn’t we, pal?”

“Gay, of course, meaning lighthearted and carefree.”

“Of course.”

“Then we certainly did, pal.”

“Shall we reopen lines of communication? Shall we talk of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings? Shall we discuss the imminent collapse of Western civilization?”

“No,” Roscoe said.

“Why not?”

“Guns can’t talk.”

“Damn right they can’t,” I said.

We both laughed until my sides hurt.

Oyez, I hadn’t felt this cheerful since Pa Kent took his last late-night dive.

My mood wasn’t any better in the morning. The media cheating me the way they had kept right on rankling. I managed to be civil to my few Saturday-night guests when they checked out, but Maria was late again because of church. Missed the early Mass or something, some damn excuse that I didn’t pay attention to, and then instead of just skipping it altogether or putting her praying on hold until evening and coming to do her maid’s work on time, she went to the nine o’clock Mass and didn’t show up until quarter to eleven. I laid into her pretty good. More than I would have if I’d been in a better mood, probably, but those Indians have a way of setting me off. Say they’re sorry but they don’t mean it. Look at you with their big liquid eyes and you just know that behind them they’re thinking about how much they’d like to cut your throat or lift your scalp. Savages, the lot of them, and no amount of education or religion or government handouts will ever civilize them.

Maria knew better than to argue with me. Just stood there and took what I dished out and then went and did her work and left again without saying a word. I walked around after she was gone and checked up on her, to make sure she hadn’t sloughed off or done something else to get back at me, like stealing or damaging property, but there was none of that. And there better not ever be any of that if she wanted to keep her job and her fat ass out of jail.

Nothing much for me to do on a rainy Sunday except watch the morning NFL game on TV. In the middle of the first quarter Ella called. First time she’d bothered in a month. She’d been reading about the murder and everything, did I know any of the people involved? Gossip hound, like her mother. I cut her short on that subject, so then she started in with the kids’ lives and her own. Jason said this, Kim did that, she’d heard this really funny story at the salon but it was kind of risque so maybe she’d better not tell me over the phone, and all the while she was jabbering I could hear an unfamiliar male voice in the background, jabbering with my granddaughter. Somebody she’d just met, no doubt, and he’d spent the night like all the rest. My daughter, the slut. Try to raise your only kid right and this was what you got, a slut who was raising her daughter to be the same and her son to be a dope fiend. Jason had already been arrested once on a marijuana charge. I didn’t even ask her about “the new man in my life,” as she’d have put it; I said I got to go, the Packers were about to score another touchdown, and hung up on her.

The Packers scored, all right, and no sooner did they kick off to the Cowboys than I had another interruption. Chief Novak, to pester me again. I heard the bell go off on the front desk and thought it might be an early guest and went out to find him and his bruised and bandaged face. Nobody with him today. And looking about as hangdog as I felt. Tense, too, as though there’d been some new development that hadn’t set well with him.

“What’s up, Chief?”

“I’m looking for Audrey Sixkiller.”

“That so?”

“Have you seen her last night or today?”

“Nope.”

“Any idea where she might be?”

“Nope.”