Bill Pronzini: Hoodwink

I took it and the matches over to where the Tiffany-shaded lamp hung from the ceiling. But there was no oil in the fount, and the wick was dry as dust. The only other lamp in there lay shattered near the bed; it was matchlight or nothing.

I went back to the window, peered out again. Stillness. What was he up to now? Sit up there and watch and wait? If he had water, food, and enough time and patience, he could wait for days until thirst and starvation forced me out; there wasn’t anything at all to eat or drink among the wreckage. There were other things he could do, too. He could come down and break through the boards over one of the windows and shoot me through the bars. Or toss in some sort of incendiary device, then sit outside and pick me off when the fire drove me out.

And how was I going to prevent him from doing any of those things? How was I going to get out of here alive, armed with a hatchet and with all the windows barred and the only exit this one door?

The irony of it was bitter. Both Colodny and Meeker had. been killed in locked-room situations, and now the murderer had me trapped in similar circumstances-closed up inside a box, with no evident means of escape. He didn’t need any gimmicks this time; the juxtaposition of events had done it all for him. All he needed was that frigging rifle of his and a little patience, and afterward he could bury my body up in the rocks somewhere or toss it into a ravine. Who would ever find out what had happened to me? Who would ever know I had become victim number three?

It seemed futile, hopeless, but I refused to let myself think that way. If I did, it would lead to panic, and as soon as you panicked in a crisis like this, you were a dead man. I leaned back against the rough adobe wall and shut my eyes and tried to concentrate on ways and means.

I managed the concentration part of it all right, and right away my mind began to throw up answers. Click, click, click, like tumblers falling one by one in the combination lock to a safe. The only problem was, my brain works in mysterious ways, and none of the answers had to do with a way out of here.

What they did have to do with was the deaths of Colodny and Meeker. Inside of five minutes I knew-Christ, I finally knew-how both of them had been killed, or seemed to have been killed, in locked rooms. Both of them, because the answer was the same in both cases. Not who, yet-I still wasn’t sure if it was Ivan Wade or not. But Who was outside and I was in here, and how the hell could I tell Eberhardt or anybody else how Colodny and Meeker had died if I couldn’t get myself out of this locked room?

I began to prowl again, chain-lighting matches. The furniture shapes reared up out of the gloom; the flickering matchlight crowded shadows into corners and up against the ceiling beams. There was no window in the back wall, where the bed was, but one was cut into each of the left-and right-hand walls. Getting the boards off them would be no problem; could I get the iron bars off too? Maybe. The adobe was old and cracked and I might be able to chip the bars loose with the hatchet. But then what? Even if I could get out through the window, I still had a good sixty yards of open space to cross, no matter which direction I took, before reaching any kind of cover. He could sit up there with his rifle and pick me off when I-

The ceiling, I thought.

Not the windows-the ceiling, the roof.

I fired another match and followed it back to where the bed was. The downward slant of the ceiling’s construction put it about seven feet from the floor where it joined the rear wall; the space between the last beam and the joining was a good three feet wide. I was getting old, not to mention fat and scruffy, but I still had some strength and dexterity of movement left. And I could still fit through a hole a couple of feet wide.

If could make the hole in the first place …

When I climbed onto the bed, dust blossomed upward from the velvet coverlet, clogging in my sinuses, clinging grittily to my face and arms. The heat in there was stifling; sweat drenched me, and I had to pause to wipe it out of my eyes before I lit another match. I was half crouched, but I saw in the matchglow that I could stand all the way up. And when I did that, my head was a couple of inches below the ceiling, between the beam and the wall joining. Which made an awkward position to try doing demolition work. Even crouched again, it would not be easy to get any leverage into my swings.

I held the burning match up close to the ceiling and banged on the adobe with the hatchet’s blunt end. Dust and small chips showered down on me, put out the flame, and set me off into a spasm of coughing for the next several seconds. Another match showed me gouges in the adobe, a seaming of small cracks that spread out from them. I could break through it all right for the first few inches, but what if it had been reinforced with wood or heavy wire? What if it was too damn solid for me to penetrate all the way to daylight?

The hell with that, I told myself. Get to work, for God’s sake. You think too much.

The match had gone out; I scraped another one alight and started to bring it up. But I was looking past the gouges I’d made, toward the beam, and in the wobbly flame I saw something that caught and held my attention. It was a three-sided mark near the top of the beam, where it was set into the adobe; it shone up faintly and blackly in the matchlight, like a scar. When I moved the flame closer to it I realized that it wasn’t a mark but three cutlines sanded smooth and painted over so that you had to be where I was to see them. From down on the floor and away from the bed, they would be invisible.

I switched the hatchet to my left hand and probed over the cutout area with my fingertips. And as soon as I pushed against the upper left-hand corner, the whole section popped out like a lid on a hinge. Inside was a space-a hidden cache-that had been hollowed out of the top of the beam and part of the ceiling. And inside the space was an iron strongbox about eight inches long and six inches wide.

With the aid of another match, I fumbled the box out of there and managed to get it open; it wasn’t locked. It contained several papers, some of them yellowing, at least two photographs, three small gold nuggets, and a packet of ten-and twenty-dollar bills that looked as if they would add up to at least two thousand. I closed the box again, without looking at the photographs or any of the papers, and laid it down on the pillow end of the bed. Then I straightened back up and went to work on the ceiling.

It was slow, hard going. Pieces of adobe and clouds of powder poured down on me, forcing me to duck away after every swing, to stop every minute or two until the air cleared. The muscles in my arm and shoulder began to ache from the awkward strokes. My chest tightened up, the way it used to when I was still on cigarettes; I could feel each breath, little shoots of pain in the lungs. I made a lot of noise, too, but I did not care if the sounds carried up to where he was in the rocks. He wouldn’t know what I was doing, and unless I kept it up too long and made him suspicious, I doubted he would come to investigate. The real worry I had was whether he could see the back part of the roof from his vantage point. Those two leaning boulders had not seemed that high up, but from ground level height angles can be deceiving. None of this would do me any good at all if he had vision of the roof from front to back.

But I was making progress with the hole, widening it out to better than two feet. I came across a layer of chicken wire, but it was so old and brittle that I had no trouble whacking through it with the hatchet. At the center of the hole, where I had penetrated farthest, it felt four or five inches deep. I told myself the roof couldn’t be any more than six inches thick and kept on methodically slugging away at the adobe.