Bill Pronzini: Betrayers

I couldn’t keep looking at those photographs; just the few random glances made my eyeballs feel seared. A low keening sound shifted my gaze toward the doorway. Ullman was slumped against the jamb, hanging on to it with both hands, tears leaking out of his haunted eyes. I’ve only hated one man as much as I hated him in that moment, and I’d been responsible for that man’s death. I had vowed never to let anything like that happen again, but it took effort to beat down a savage urge to hurt Zachary Ullman. Hurt him bad. If I hadn’t brought Jake along

I quit looking at Ullman. The desk was in my line of sight then, and on it next to the laptop computer was a bronze-colored, rough-textured tin box about three sizes larger than the one Emily had found and brought home-part of a set. I went over there, worked the lid up.

Runyon said, “What’s in there?”

“His cocaine stash. Full Baggie.”

“One more charge against-Bill!”

I swung around. Ullman was no longer hugging the jamb; the doorway was empty.

Runyon ducked into the hallway with me close behind. Ullman had made it into the living room by then-I could hear him bang into something in there. But he wasn’t trying to get out of the house, wasn’t anywhere near the front door. He was hunched at an end table next to a recliner, clawing open its single drawer.

I yelled his name and Runyon made a lunge in his direction.

Too late. Ullman straightened, pivoting, and he had a gun in his hand.

“Stay away! Don’t come any closer!”

Runyon pulled up short. So did I. We’d both missed the gun in the quick search earlier, too intent on hunting for the child porn. Hadn’t occurred to either of us that Ullman might have one, and it should have-Christ, it should have. The piece was a small-caliber automatic and he wasn’t just holding it; he was waving it wildly in front of him in a hand that trembled like somebody afflicted with Parkinson’s. The wildness was in his eyes, too; they bulged as if they might pop from the pressure.

I said, “Put it down, Ullman. Don’t make things any worse for yourself.”

“No! I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if you try to stop me. I will!”

“You can’t run,” Runyon said. “How far do you think you’d get?”

“Stay where you are, don’t come near me.”

He backed away from the recliner. We were between him and the front door, but he wasn’t going that way. He kept backing, waggling that damn gun, into the dining room, where he bumped into a chair and almost knocked it over. He didn’t seem to notice, just kept on backing.

The kitchen, I thought. That was where the door to the garage was.

Runyon and I were up on the balls of our feet, leaning forward a little, like sprinters waiting in the blocks. Ullman was halfway across the dining room now. Two more steps and he’d be into the kitchen, out of our sight. One more-

Go!

Him running in the kitchen, us running crouched through the dining room. Runyon, younger and faster, was ahead of me when we neared the kitchen arch. From there I could see Ullman at the garage door, yanking it open. He jabbed the automatic in our direction and we both ducked aside reflexively, but he didn’t fire. He plunged through, slammed the door behind him.

We were there in a couple of seconds, but when Runyon grabbed the knob it bound up in his hand. He said, “Snap lock. Won’t take long to break it.”

“I’ll try to stop him out front. Careful, Jake-don’t go up against that gun.”

He didn’t answer.

I ran back into the living room. There was a brass urn on a stand against one wall; I grabbed it on the way by. Not much of a weapon, but I had to have something. I could hear Runyon working on the door in the kitchen, thought I heard the lock snap free before I went charging outside.

Down the steps in three quick jumps, across a strip of lawn to the garage. The door was still all the way down and I didn’t hear anything to indicate it was about to come up. I stopped and stood there breathing hard, the brass urn slick in my fingers, while thirty seconds, a minute, ticked away and the foggy cold dried the sweat on me and made me shiver. Sounds filtered out from inside, faint, unidentifiable. None of them was the rumble of a car engine; I’d’ve been able to hear that clearly enough. What the hell was happening in there?

Another few seconds and I found out. The automatic opener finally whirred and the door began to slide up. There was plenty of light inside-the overheads were on. I took a firmer grip on the urn, set myself, and bent to look under the bottom edge.

Ullman’s Hyundai was sitting there dark and silent.

Then, as the door ground all the way up, I saw Runyon standing next to the car, the driver’s door wide open and Ullman unmoving inside. The little automatic was in Runyon’s hand; he semaphored it over his head to let me know he had it.

I let out a heavy breath, set the urn down, and went in there. Ullman was sitting with both hands on the steering wheel. All the wildness was gone; so were the tears. His eyes no longer bulged, didn’t even blink. His face was a literal mask of misery. Not self-pity-raw, naked misery.

I said to Runyon, “What happened?”

“He wasn’t trying to run. He came out here to kill himself.”

“I couldn’t do it,” Ullman said in an empty voice. “I thought this time I could, now finally I could, but I couldn’t. I can’t. I’m too much of a coward.”

“You’re a hell of a lot worse than that.”

“I know,” he said. “Don’t you think I know what I am?”

Runyon said, “He had the piece to his temple when I got in here. Just kept holding it there, didn’t move when I took it away from him. Took me a minute to find the door opener.”

“Let’s get him inside.”

Ullman said, “Why don’t you just kill me? Couldn’t you do that? Make it look like I killed myself?”

“You’re not going to get off that easy.”

“I’d rather die than go to prison. I want to die. I ache to die.”

Runyon and I traded glances. Somebody might accommodate Ullman someday in whatever prison facility he ended up in. Child molesters and child porn addicts were bottom of the barrel inside the walls, primary targets for con vengeance.

We dragged Ullman out of the car and back into the house, sat him down on the living room couch. While I called the Daly City cops and told them what we had, Runyon went to close the front door; I’d left it wide open. He bent to look at the hanging chain plate, beckoned me over when I was done with the call.

“Plate tore out clean,” he said. “I think I can screw it back in so the damage won’t show.”

“I doubt that it matters now.”

“Why don’t I do it anyway.” He got out one of those multi-bladed pocketknives and went to work with the screwdriver blade.

I took up a stand in front of Ullman. The way he was sitting, motionless, the haunted eyes staring out from under drooping lids, he might have been a propped-up cadaver. His face was corpselike, too: the color and consistency of white wax inlaid with filaments of blood.

“I know you hate me,” he said, his mouth barely moving, “and I don’t blame you. But you can’t possibly hate me as much as I hate myself.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Every day for the past fifteen years, loathing myself. Do you know how many times I tried to put a bullet through my head? Dozens. Literally dozens. I came close once, but at the last second I couldn’t do it. I’m too much of a coward.”

“You said that before.”

The words kept running out of him in a hushed, barren voice, almost a whisper, as if he were confessing cardinal sins to a priest. “Cowardice and self-hatred. That’s why I started using cocaine. I thought that if I got high enough, I could pull the trigger or swallow pills or poison… something, anything, to end it. But all the cocaine did was make me hate myself a little less. And after a while it had the opposite effect. It made the sickness worse, the cravings even more intense.”