Bill Pronzini - Hellbox

No, don’t. Go ahead, get it over with. No, please don’t!

He didn’t. Ripping sounds… he was using the knife to saw at the tape that held her against the bench support.

Another snick and the knife disappeared. His hands on her again then, pulling her away from the bench, turning her onto her back. A gurgling whimper came out of the hollowness inside as he bent over her, worked his hands under her and lifted her up tight against his body.

“Jesus, lady. You stink.”

His breath was no better. The sour spew of it in her face jerked her head aside.

Grunting, he carried her out through the open door. The glare of sunlight was like needles poked into her eyes; she squeezed them shut. The dog was close by, its barks and growls loud.

“Shut up, Bruno. Shut up!”

The animal noises stopped and Kerry could hear the engine rumble again. She opened her eyes to slits. Blurred images settled into focus.

Pickup with a camper top, the camper’s rear door open. He brought her up to it, lifted her inside, shoved her roughly across a hard floor. The back of her head thudded into something, her arm scraped against something else-cuts of pain that she barely felt. Things were piled up all around her… tools, camping equipment. And guns, big guns, rifles, automatic weapons, shoved into a space beneath a side-wall bench.

Balfour crawled in, up over her body, until he was kneeling astride her. He put his ugly face close to hers again, a white-and-black smear of beard-stubbled skin.

“Now you listen to me, lady. We’re going for a ride. Gonna be a long one, maybe, depends on you. We stop anywhere and you thrash around back here, make noise, I’ll kill you dead on the spot. You understand?”

She tried to tell him yes with her eyes. He didn’t get the message. Slapped her, hard-more pain that she barely felt.

“Understand?”

The gurgling whimper.

“Okay. You do what I say, maybe I’ll let you go later. Drop you off in the woods some place.”

Liar. You’re going to kill me.

He took something from his pocket, a roll of duct tape. Tore off a piece with his teeth and stretched it tight across her mouth.

Why don’t you just get it over with? Why torture me like this?

Another piece of tape torn from the roll, larger than the first. This one, he stuck down over her eyes.

Blind, now. Mute and blind.

Another slap, not as hard, and he slid back off her.

Sounds: Him dropping out of the camper. The hinged door slamming shut. The pit bull barking again. The cab door opening, banging shut. The engine revving up, gears meshing.

And they were moving, jolting over uneven ground. Then stopping again. Then moving. Then stopping. Then moving, winding left and right over a smoother surface. The constant shifting motion bounced her up and down, but the tight-packed space held her where she lay.

Gray-wrapped, living mummy trapped in a moving sarcophagus driven by a madman.

Hot, hotter than the shed. Exhaust fumes choking the air, making breathing difficult through congested nostrils. Dulled hurt in her head, all through her body every time the wheels passed over a bump.

Bill, she thought once. And imagined his face, his hand reaching out to her. Then he was gone, swallowed by darkness.

Body and spirit seemed to separate again. The spirit once more withering, losing awareness, until she drifted into the floating limbo state-deep into it, to a place where there was no pain, no fear, only mercy.

It took us a while to track down Ned Verriker. The first place we went was to the sheriff’s substation, but Broxmeyer was out somewhere, and the deputy manning the desk didn’t know or wouldn’t tell us where to find Verriker.

The man Runyon had talked to in the Buckhorn Tavern last night, Ernie Stivic, seemed to be the next best bet. We hunted up a public phone booth at one of the gas stations and looked him up in the directory. Listed, but there was no answer when Runyon tried his number.

Third stop: the Green Valley Cafe again. The plump blond waitress we’d talked to earlier knew where Verriker was, but wouldn’t give out the information no matter how much we pleaded with her. “I know you’re real worried,” she said to me, “and I feel for you, but how could Ned know anything about your wife? The man’s grieving bad, just wants to be left alone.” But we did get one thing out of her, the name and address of the place where Ernie Stivic was employed-a restaurant called Burgers and More, near the high school at the north end of town. He worked there as a fry cook.

Burgers and More turned out to be a cafeteria-style restaurant, small, with a lattice-covered patio area along one side. There were no customers when we walked in, just a young tattooed guy getting the patio tables ready for the lunch trade. A second man was visible through an open kitchen window behind the service counter. Stivic. Runyon called out to him, and he came out wiping his hands on a clean apron.

Sure, he remembered Jake from the Buckhorn. Even before I opened my mouth, he knew who I was, gave me a nod of what appeared to be genuine sympathy. He was willing enough to talk until we asked him for Ned Verriker’s whereabouts, then he closed up. “I don’t know,” he said. “Ned’s in pretty bad shape. He don’t want to be bothered right now.”

“It’s important we talk to him,” I said.

“Why? He was at work all day Monday, he can’t help you find your wife.”

“We think maybe he can. Answers to a few questions is all we want from him.”

“What kind of questions?”

“The private kind. Please, Mr. Stivic. There’s a lot more at stake here than you realize.”

“Like what?”

He’d already tried what was left of my patience. Before I started snapping at him, Runyon stepped in. “Like a criminal act, maybe more than one,” he said. “That’s all we can say at this point, except that Ned Verriker hasn’t done anything wrong and we mean him no harm. All we want from him is information.”

Stivic chewed his underlip, thinking it over. “Criminal acts, huh?” he said at length.

“That’s right. You wouldn’t want to impede our investigation?”

“No, hell no. Okay. Joe Ramsey’s letting Ned stay at his cabin up at Eagle Rock Lake.”

Eagle Rock Lake was the one in the mountains south of Six Pines that Kerry and I had driven around on Sunday, a lifetime ago. A mile or so in circumference, ringed by pine forest and roughly kidney-shaped like a giant’s swimming pool. Cabins and cottages, half hidden among the trees, dotted its shoreline at widely spaced intervals.

The Ramsey cabin, Stivic had told us, was on the southeastern shore. We found it all right from his directions and description-small, plain, built of pine logs and redwood siding more than a generation past judging from the weathered look of the place, with a distinctive front door painted a rust red. A newish, dirt-streaked Ford van was parked in a cleared area in front, visible from the road, the same van that had barreled up to the scene of the conflagration on Monday afternoon and disgorged Ned Verriker. Runyon parked next to it, and we got out into blistering heat. Temperature must already be pushing ninety.

Nobody answered my raps on the door. There was a discernable path along one side; we followed that to the rear. A short dock jutted out into the glistening water, and near the end of it, a man in T-shirt and Levi’s sat in a canvas sling chair staring out at the lake. Back straight, knees and feet together, hands resting palms up on his thighs-the rigid posture of a condemned prisoner about to be executed. Runyon and I made a little noise walking out onto the spongy wooden dock, but the man didn’t seem to notice until we looped around to stand in front of him and block his view. Then he blinked and focused on us. Otherwise, he didn’t move.