Bill Pronzini: Hoodwink

A long time later-what seemed like a long time-I made another weakening swing … and broke through.

Along with adobe chips and powder, a shaft of daylight came slanting down into my face this time. I blinked at it, coughing, for two or three seconds. Then fresh determination and a sense of rage buoyed up my strength, and I hammered and scraped at the edges of the hole until I could feel the sun hot against the upper part of my body, see a good foot-and-a-half’s worth of the hazy sky. But I was careful not to send any pieces of adobe up onto the roof, where they might be seen in the air or heard clattering. All of it fell down around me:

the bed and the floor near it were half buried under shallow layers.

When I had the hole widened out to two feet I dropped the hatchet, came down off the bed, and leaned against one of the posts, dripping. I had known a guy once, in the Army, who had worked as a cowboy on a ranch in Wyoming, and his favorite expression was, “I feel like I been rode hard and turned loose wet.” That was how I felt right now. My right arm tingled with fatigue, my neck and back were stiff, my head throbbed, my throat burned from the dust and heat. Even if I were ready to drag myself up through that hole, which I wasn’t, my body was not yet ready to respond.

The room was full of light now, spilling in through the hole; I no longer needed matches to see where I was going. I dragged myself over to the right front window and squinted out through the boards. Absolute stillness, like looking at a slide picture on a screen. I went to each of the side windows in turn, and it was the same in those directions, too. If he had come down while I was working on the hole, he was somewhere around to the rear or behind one of the other buildings. But I did not think he’d come down; I couldn’t think it, because if he had, I was finished. No, he was still up there under the leaning rocks, still waiting.

So all right. Maybe he had heard me banging through the roof and wondered what I was doing, but now he was going to hear and wonder plenty. Now I wanted him to get suspicious and come investigate.

I went back to where the hatchet lay on the bed. My right arm was on the mend; I picked up the hatchet and started to beat on the nearest window boards with as much strength as I could muster. Then I moved to the front and beat on those boards for a while. Then I got some tin plates from the mess on the floor and pounded on them, yelling and screaming all the while like a lunatic. Then I used the hatchet to pry loose some of the boards on a side window and hurled them out through the bars. Every minute or so while I was doing all of this, I looked out toward the leaning rocks. But the son of a bitch didn’t bite. Maybe he suspected it was a trick. Maybe he had steel nerves. Maybe he was as crazy as I was pretending to be.

Maybe it was just a matter of time before he did bite.

I tore off more side-window boards, flung them outside. I found several unbroken glasses, cups, plates, and hurled them against the walls and the window bars. I screamed like Tarzan on a jungle vine and imitated a cackling laugh at the top of my voice. I used the hatchet to beat some more on the remaining window boards. I looked out toward the rocks for the fiftieth or hundredth time-

Movement.

Just a shadow at first, moving among other shadows. But after a few seconds he came out into the open, a man-shape in dark clothes-too far away for me to see who he was. Not that I was particularly interested in his identity right now. I kept watching him, yelling and banging things with the hatchet, as he started down out of the rocks. He was coming, all right. He was coming.

I hurried across to the bed, shoved it out of the way, and dragged one of the tables over under the hole. Then I went back, breaking more crockery on the way, hooting and cackling, and looked out again. Still coming. I might have been able to recognize him if I’d stayed there a little longer, but all I wanted was to make sure he was going to come all the way to this building. And it looked like he was-warily, slowly, but on his way just the same.

I picked up two of the tin plates and hammered on them as I went back to where I’d positioned the table. I found two more glasses, another cup, and laid them and the plates on the table. When I climbed up and poked my head out, the roof slant and front lip blocked my view in that direction; I could see part of the distant rocks but not the two where he had been hiding. I picked up the glasses and cup and plates and set them on the roof to one side, anchoring them in little potholes so they wouldn’t slide off; laid the hatchet beside them. Standing on tiptoe, I got my arms through the hole and wedged down on the roof. And then heaved and squirmed upward, head down, angling toward the rear wall so I wouldn’t reveal myself above the roof’s peak.

Doing it silently was my main concern, and I seemed to manage that well enough. But a sharp edge of adobe or chicken wire put a gash in my leg as I came through. I tried not to pay any attention to it, except that it stung and burned like fire. The roof’s surface was irregular, pocked with little holes, studded with bumps; I got my feet and hands braced and turned back to face the hole. Leaned down into it with the glasses and the cup and shattered them back under against the walls. Then I beat on the tin plates, down inside so the noise would come from in there. After ten seconds or so, I tossed the plates back against the wall, pushed out of and away from the hole, and began to crawl up the roof slant to the front, the hatchet in one hand, like an Indian in an old cavalry movie.

When I got to within a foot of the edge I lay still and listened. Silence. Have to chance a look, I thought; I’ve got to know where he is. I eased my head up, an inch at a time. And there he was, forty feet or so from the building, moving at an angle toward the left-hand corner-eyes fixed straight ahead, the rifle jutting out in front of him at belt level. I gawped at him a little as he cut past the corner and started around on that side.

It was clear enough what he had in mind. He could not see inside from the front, because I hadn’t broken any of the boarding off those windows. But he could look in through one of the unboarded side windows. Which was just what I wanted him to do-come right up close and peer through the bars.

I eased my body around to the left, teeth clamped against the pain in my leg, and crawled toward where I judged the near window to be. I had to do it even more slowly than before, because of his nearness and the risk of making noise. He was not trying to be quiet, though; I could hear the faint shuffle of his steps on the rocky ground.

Close to the side edge, I stopped again and lifted my head for another look. Twenty feet away now, still angling toward the window. A few more steps and he would be near enough for me to make my move, even if he didn’t go all the way up to the window.

I drew back onto my knees, got one foot down- the leg that wasn’t gashed-and unfolded myself in sections until I was standing up. My shoe scraped a little on one of the pebbly bumps; I froze in place. I could see him, his head and shoulders, and I thought that if he looked up, I would have to take an immediate running jump. But he did not look up. He moved forward one more pace, until only his head was visible.

I took a limping step myself, closer to the edge. The building was built low to the ground, but anything above three feet was too high for me; standing up there, looking down, made my stom ach queasy and more sweat roll out of my pores. I took a firmer grip on the hatchet. I was not breathing at all now.

He had stopped and I could see him crane his head forward as if startled: he was staring through the bars and I knew he had seen the hole in the ceiling. I took one more step-and as soon as I did, he jerked his body and his head back, looked up, started to bring the rifle up.