Bill Pronzini: Hoodwink

Carefully I picked my way across to the largest building. Enough sunlight came through the haze to put a gleam on the cracked plaster facing; it looked like thin icing on a crumbled and petrified cake. There was a door cut off-center in that front wall, and when I got close enough I could see that it was made out of heavy timbers reinforced and bound with rusted iron straps. Above the latch was the hasp for a padlock, and set into the adobe was the ring that it fastened over. But it was not fastened now; the hasp stood out from the door at right angles. And lying in the dust to one side was the remains of a thick Yale lock.

I leaned down to pick up the padlock. It had been sawn through with what might have been a hacksaw, and recently: the cut ends were still shiny. Had the local police done it when they were here? Or had someone else been around?

I dropped the padlock where I’d found it, moved over to try the door. It opened, creaking a little like the door in the old Inner Sanctum radio show. At first I couldn’t see anything except gloom streaked with thin shafts of light that came through gaps in the window boarding. I stepped inside, blinked several times to help my eyes adjust from the outside glare. Then the ulterior began to take shape-a low single room beneath a slanted beam ceiling-and I got my second surprise of the past few-minutes. Or second and third, because this one was double-barreled.

The first thing was the way it was furnished. What I had expected to find was spartan prospector’s digs: bunk beds, and old potbellied stove, a table and a few chairs-that sort of thing. What I found instead was something out of an 1890s whorehouse. The room was jammed with wine-red, velvet-covered settees and chairs, rococo tables, glassed-in cabinets, a four-poster bed with a lace canopy, a fancy nickel-plated, high-closet stove, even a hanging oil lamp with what looked to be a Tiffany shade. The wine-red carpeting on the floor was worn and coated with dust, but you could tell that it had once been expensive. Colodny may have moved out here into the middle of nowhere, but it was not to live in squalor; he had taken esoteric New York tastes with him. And created a kind of decadently elegant private world for himself and his wife.

The second part of the surprise was that the place was in a shambles-it had been turned upside-down by somebody looking for something. The bed and most of the cushions had been ripped open, the canopy was in tatters, the carpet was strewn with hundreds of hardcover and paperback books that had once occupied space inside the glass-fronted cabinets; drawers had been pulled-out and emptied, the stove emptied of ash and charred wood fragments; wall cupboards stood open and their contents lay scattered everywhere. A four-foot stack of pulp magazines in one corner was about all that had been left undisturbed.

The Cochise County law would not have done anything like this. So who, then? The person who had killed Colodny and Meeker, the accomplice in the “Hoodwink” plagiarism? It added up that way. And what he’d been looking for figured to be the same thing I was here to look for: evidence that would ruin him as a plagiarist and establish his motive for murder. The big question was, had he found it?

Either way, I was here now and I was not going to leave without conducting my own search of the premises. Technically I was trespassing, but with Colodny and his wife both dead, and no next of kin, there was nobody to prosecute me. This was one time I could bend the rules a little with a clear conscience.

But even with the door open it was gloomy in there, full of shadows. I didn’t have any matches, or any particular inclination to light the oil lamps, so I would need the flashlight clipped under the Duster’s dash before I started in. I went back to the open door, through it into the hazy afternoon glare. I stood for a moment, squinting, rubbing wetness off my forehead, as my eyes readjusted to daylight. Then I took three steps toward the car.

On the fourth step something went whistling over my right shoulder, just under the ear, and made a chinking sound in the plaster facing behind me. At almost the same time, noise erupted from the rocks across the clearing, a small echoing clap of it like thunder from a long way off.

Gunshot.

Somebody’s shooting at me! And then I moved, on reflex and instinct- turned and dove headfirst back through the open doorway just as a second bullet slashed the air above me, rained chips of plaster down on my back, and another hollow explosion rolled out of the rocks like the Biblical crack of doom.

I landed on my forearms on the rough wood floor beyond the threshold, scrambled forward until I had my ass-end out of the doorway. A third bullet came winging inside, but it was well over my head; I heard it smack into something on the far side of the room. I rolled out of the wedge of light that slanted in through the open door, across the carpet, and into the shadows, — came up on my knees. And caught the edge of the door and threw it shut so hard it rattled in its frame.

Shaky-legged, I got up and stumbled over to the wall beside it. There was no key latch or tumbler lock on the door, but what it did have was a pair of angle irons bolted to the wood, with another pair on the wall parallel; and down on the floor was a heavy two-by-six about four feet long. I caught up the bar and shoved it through the angle irons. Once it was wedged in tight, ten men wielding half a tree couldn’t have battered the door down. Then I leaned hard against the wall, grip ping it with my hands, and tried to get my breathing and my pulse rate under control.

A minute or two passed in silence. There had not been any more shots, and that made me wonder if he’d left his hiding place up in the rocks, come down onto open ground. If so, I wanted to know it. And I wanted a look at the son of a bitch in any case-Ivan Wade or whoever he was. He must have been here all along, searching the damn place, and he’d heard me coming down that winding road. He’d had enough time to get his wheels and himself out of sight before I appeared-and more than enough time to draw a bead on the front of.this building. If he had been a marksman, I would not be alive to think about it right now.

A pair of narrow windows flanked the door; I went to the nearest one and peered through one of the chinks in the boards. The clearing-what I could see of it-looked as still as before, and nothing seemed to stir among the rocks beyond. But the sun had broken through the milky haze, and its glare off the Duster’s hood was dazzling enough to create blind spots from this vantage point.

I moved across to the other window and found a gap to look through there. A little better; I had a wider range of vision and not so much reflected glare. As I looked, something glinted up above, between a pair of boulders that leaned toward each other at forty-five degree angles, like two drunks on a park bench, to form a cavelike open space at the bottom. Two or three seconds later, I heard the report of the rifle as he squeezed off, saw the pale muzzle flash. But he was not shooting at me or the building this time; he was shooting at the Duster. It was a stationary target and he had better luck with it than he’d had with me: he hit what he’d been aiming at, which was the right front tire. The faint hiss of escaping air was audible after the echoes of the shot faded.

His reason for flattening the tire was obvious enough, and it made me dig my nails into the palms of my hands. He did not want me opening the door and making a run for the car and driving the hell away from here. He wanted me right where I was, trapped inside, where he could finish me off one way or another, sooner or later.

He put a second shot into the right rear tire, just to make sure the Duster was crippled good and proper. When he did that I shoved away from the window and went groping through the dark room, looking for matches and some kind of weapon. The matches were no problem; I found a box on top of the stove’s high closet. But a suitable weapon was a lot harder to find. There was a rifle lying half under the canopied bed, but the firing pin had been removed; I threw it into a corner. Over against the south wall, I found a wood hatchet with a rusted blade-and that was all I found. A hatchet against a rifle. Some odds.