Билл Пронзини - The Bags of Tricks Affair

But he wouldn’t. As far as he was concerned, this prison was escapeproof. And so far he was right.

If there were any other buildings nearby, they were untenanted. She had yelled herself hoarse, beat on the walls and corrugated iron doors with the length of pipe and other implements. There was no sense in trying again today — it would be a hopeless waste of time, energy, breath. Gaunt would not have confined her within shouting, noise-making distance of anyone who might hear and come to her rescue.

No one would come to her rescue. Not John, who must know by now that she was missing and that Gaunt was responsible. He would be frantic, trust in the hope that she was still alive, do everything in his power to find her — but how could he, when she herself didn’t know exactly where she was?

No, her only chance of survival lay in escape. Two days now, and she’d been over every inch of space half a dozen times without finding a way out or anything she could use to create one. But hope remained strong in her. There had to be some means of escape.

The cot was in what must have been the repair business’s office, walled off by plywood at the inner end of the building. There was nothing else in it except for a rickety desk, a broken chair, and a scattering of debris. The entrance to it was doorless.

Two sets of double doors, both of rusty corrugated iron, gave access to the building, one set next to the makeshift office, the other at the bayside end that Sabina judged would open onto some sort of pier. Both were tightly secured with padlocks. She knew that because the padlock on the bayside doors was on the inside, heavy and thick-stapled, and because no matter how long and hard she rattled and banged and pried at the other set, she failed to part them so much as an inch.

The hole in the roof was up near the peak; there was no possible way for her to climb up to it. The walls and floor were in warped condition, but the chinks that admitted daylight were too small to admit any tool larger than a screwdriver. If any such tools had been abandoned here, Gaunt had anticipated their use and disposed of them. The piece of pipe was the only object she’d found of any possible use, which thus far had been limited to frightening off the rats. The palms of both her hands were lacerated from vain attempts to batter loose wall boards and floorboards.

Another series of mournful wails from the foghorns, followed a few seconds later by the blast of a ship’s horn, goaded her into motion. She groped her way out of the office, into the center of the slightly down-slanted warehouse where she stood peering around, reorienting herself.

There was little enough to see in the gloom. Overhead, lengths of oxidized chain hung from a winchlike contraption strung across the beams, too high up for her to reach. The floor was strewn with various pieces of board lumber, a broken sheet of plywood, a coil of heavy rope so decayed the hemp fibers had crumbled when she tried to pick it up, the skeleton of a rowboat laid askew on a pair of sawhorses. She had examined the skeleton and the sawhorses, one of which had a fractured leg, with the thought of making some use of their bones, but she hadn’t sufficient strength, even with the pipe as a lever, to rip the loose, splintered ones free. Even if she’d succeeded, she knew now that the chunks would have been as useless to her as the rest of the scattered lumber.

A rusted metal drainage trough some eight inches wide extended down along the side wall. Shallow, empty except for rat droppings and dead insects and dust, it led to an opening in the bayside wall next to one of the corrugated door halves. The opening had been clogged with debris that she’d cleared out. Prying and chipping at the hole with the pipe had splintered off enough decayed wood to enlarge it slightly, but the vertical boards on both sides were thick and firmly nailed in place.

The gurgling of the bay water around the pilings beneath was a painful reminder of her thirst. Biting her lip, she commanded herself once again to ignore physical discomfort, focus on the task at hand. In slow shuffling steps she began to prowl through the gloom, feeling along the walls for any loose board she might have missed previously. There were none. Again she made a futile effort to create separation between the bayside doors. Again she scuffed over the length and width of the enclosure, avoiding the shadowy obstacles... no loose boards there, either, no overlooked tool or other useful object.

At the front set of doors she lost her composure for a moment, beat on them furiously with the pipe until the palm of her hand was slick with blood. A scream born of frustration welled in the back of her throat; it took an effort of will to keep it from bursting forth. If she were to give in to such an impulse, she might not be able to stop.

Slowly again she made her way back along the side wall where the drainage trough was. When she stepped up close to it, the toe of her shoe stubbed on an uptilted edge, causing her to stumble off balance, to drop the blood-slick pipe when she threw her hands out to brace herself against the wall. The pipe clattered into the trough, setting up ringing echoes that disturbed the nesting birds and sent one of them flying out through the roof hole. A gull loosed a raucous cry somewhere nearby.

She bent to fumble for the pipe, found it, and when she straightened, her toe again struck the protruding edge. In a kind of furious retaliation she kicked at it. The metal shivered, rattled at the impact.

She started to move ahead. And then stopped and stood still.

The trough, she thought.

The trough?

After leaving Russian Hill Sunday evening, he had driven to the Hall of Justice. Not to report Sabina missing — his distrust of the police and their methods was too deeply ingrained; there was nothing they could do that he couldn’t. And not to consult again with Lieutenant William Price. It was probable that Price would not be on duty, and if he’d received any new and important information on Jeffrey Gaunt, he would have sent word.

Quincannon went to the Hall of Justice because that was where the city morgue was located.

Before doing anything else, he had to cement his conviction that Sabina was alive. He said a silent prayer when he stepped into the morgue’s dank confines. Had any young women, as yet unidentified, been found and brought in since Friday night? Only one, the morgue attendant told him, the victim of a stabbing on Pacific Avenue. A soiled dove, according to the police report. Quincannon viewed the corpse anyway, just to be sure. And said another silent prayer, this one thankful, when he walked out.

The rest of Sunday night and all of Monday morning he spent checking the guest lists at a dozen hotels large and small — Gaunt was not registered at any of them, nor was any man answering his description — and roaming the Uptown Tenderloin, the Barbary Coast and its fringes, Tar Flat, the waterfront area. He questioned the “gypsy” fortune-teller who called herself Madame Louella, the bunco steerer who went by the moniker of Breezy Ned, the hoodlum named Luther James, the “blind” newsy Slewfoot, and other informants and information sellers with whom he and Sabina had had past dealings. He spoke to Charles Riley, owner of the high-toned House of Chance on Post Street, and the proprietors of other gambling halls from the semi-respectable to the meanest of the Coast’s deadfalls. He even paid brief visits to Madame Fifi’s Maison of Parisian Delights and Bessie Hall, the “Queen of O’Farrell Street,” on the off chance that Gaunt had been one of their customers.

He learned nothing.

No one had seen Gaunt. No one had seen Sabina.

The grim futility of his search had been pointed up in advance by Ezra Bluefield when Quincannon called on him at the Redemption Saloon, his first stop after leaving the Hall of Justice Sunday night. What the ex-miner, ex-Coast denizen had told him, after commiserating over Sabina’s disappearance and lamenting his inability to help find her or Gaunt, had not deterred Quincannon at the time. But by noon on Monday there was no gainsaying its bitter truth.