Bill Pronzini - Savages

Runyon let go of the door, first one hand, then the other. He could stand all right, but he couldn’t walk yet. Two wobbly steps and his knees sagged; he would’ve collapsed if Belsize hadn’t grabbed him and held him up.

“Take it easy, mister. Just sit down here until the ambulance comes.”

“No. Walk.”

“Better not try it.”

“Walk. Move.”

“… All right then. Lean on me.”

Belsize slid a muscled arm around him and they walked, slow, across the yard. His first few steps were clumsy, but on the way the last of the bloated feeling left his legs and his equilibrium came back. As they neared the farmhouse, ablaze with light now, he felt he could walk on his own. He pushed out of Belsize’s grasp and tried it. A little stagger, but otherwise okay.

He made it as far as the porch steps, sat down on one of them. Belsize left him there and went inside the house. Voices drifted out to him that he didn’t try to listen to. Most of his senses were working again, but the disorientation wouldn’t right itself, wouldn’t let him think. The strain of trying made his head hurt even more.

Wait. Just sit here and wait.

H e was feeling better until the noisy parade started. Sirens, red and blue flashers, glaring headlights. Ambulance, sheriff’s department cruisers, other cars filling up the farmyard. People milling around, talking in loud voices. More confusion that rekindled the fire in the firebox.

The EMTs took one good look at him and made him lie down on a stretcher. They checked his vital signs, and one of them mopped up the blood and put something stinging on his head wound while the other asked the usual questions: What’s your name? What day is it? Do you know where you are? How many fingers am I holding up? He answered them all right, but the response time was slow-a mental delay between hearing them and processing and voicing the answers. He could talk well enough now, with only a little slur to the words, but his thoughts still wouldn’t connect. Scrambled him up good, whoever had clobbered him.

One of the sheriff’s deputies, or maybe the sheriff himself, came over and threw some hard questions at him about the dead man in the tack room. Officious type, jut-jawed, one hand resting on the butt of his service revolver. Runyon’s slow responses didn’t satisfy him; the questions came faster, overlapping what he was trying to say. It made him angry. He might have said something harsh if the EMTs hadn’t intervened. Talk to the man later, one of them said, after the ER docs get a look at him. Which hospital? Red Bluff General, where else?

He didn’t want to go to a hospital. Practically lived in hospitals during Colleen’s illness, hated the damn places. But the EMTs wouldn’t listen to any argument. One of them said, “You don’t have a choice, man. Head injury’s nothing to fool around with, not for you, not for us.” They loaded him into the ambulance, and away they went, bouncing over the uneven farm road.

Good thing they didn’t use the siren on this trip. The ride was long enough and bad enough without the scream of a siren to make it a rolling nightmare.

A t the hospital the first thing they did as they were wheeling him in was take his wallet. Sure, right-find out if he had any medical insurance. More questions from a woman in scrubs, one about notification. Was there anyone he wanted notified of his “accident” and where he was? No, he said. Joshua wouldn’t care, and why burden Bill or Tamara with a nonagency matter?

More poking and prodding in the ER, amid the hospital stink of medicine and sickness and death, the humming and chirping machines, and the sudden cries that made your skin crawl. Kill himself before he died like Colleen had, in a place like this. But that wasn’t going to happen. He wasn’t terminal yet, just fuzzy, confused. He managed to summon the will to shut himself down, just let it all happen. Heard somebody say, “Skull doesn’t appear to be fractured. Vitals are strong. Eyes seem mostly clear.” Heard somebody else say, “Let’s get him to X-ray,” and off he went to have his head examined.

After that, they put him in a ward room with three other beds, all of them occupied, and rolled a curtain around him. A nurse came in and hooked him up to an IV and fed in some kind of sedative. He didn’t mind. The sooner he was rid of tonight, the better…

I had the white gift box under my arm when I walked into the condo. Kerry was curled up on the living room couch with a book and Shameless, the world’s laziest cat. When she saw the box she said with mock excitement, “For me? You shouldn’t have.”

“I didn’t,” I said. “It’s not for you.”

“Aha. One of your other women.”

“The only other woman in my life is Emily, and it’s not for her, either.”

I set the box on the coffee table, went over to kiss her. She’d put on fresh makeup, brushed her auburn hair to a silky gloss. She looked good and tasted good, and I told her so.

“I feel good,” she said. “The checkup did wonders for my spirits.”

“You didn’t try to do too much today?”

“No. Worked for a while, took a nap, had a long talk with Cybil on the phone. Oh, and Paula stopped by for a few minutes. She brought me this book.”

Paula was Paula Hanley, an interior designer friend of Kerry’s and a grade-A flake. To put it mildly. Among Paula’s none too endearing traits was a certainty that what was good for her was also good for everybody else; she mounted conversion campaigns at every opportunity. This was compounded by the fact that she was a faddist who believed passionately, at least for a while, in any harebrained new or old concept that came into current vogue. Scientology, Est, New Age tantric sex, holistic medicine, and most recently, God help us, some sort of weird offshoot of the Haitian voodoo religion.

“Don’t tell me,” I said as I sat down beside Kerry. “Let me guess. It’s a book about health and well-being through voodoo ritual. All you have to do is dance naked to the beat of drums and you’ll be good as new.”

“Hah.”

“Sacrifice a goat? Stick pins in a doll that looks like your worst enemy?”

She held up the book so I could read the title and author. The Magic Island by W. B. Seabrook.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“It’s not what you think,” she said. “It’s an early history of Haitian voodoo practices, first published in 1929-native accounts of all sorts of rituals and ceremonies, not to mention encounters with werewolves, zombies, and fire hags.”

“Terrific. In other words, pure fiction.”

“A lot of it is superstition, yes. Paula doesn’t think so, but to me it’s entertainment. I’m enjoying it.”

“Don’t tell me she just dropped it off without the usual proselytizing?”

“More or less.”

“Not even an invitation to watch a priest behead a chicken?”

“No, and don’t put her down-she’s been a good friend through all of this.”

“Sorry. I know she has. But I can’t help remembering all the past lunacies.”

“Of course,” Kerry said musingly, “there are some fascinating possibilities in voodoo rites. I could dress in a red robe, wear a hat in the shape of horns, carry a whip and a votive candle, and make an offering of food, drink, and money to Papa Legba, Baron Samedi, and the other voodoo gods while a bocor chants over a cemetery grave. That’s been known to cure all sorts of illnesses.”

I stared at her. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Not at all,” she said, and her mouth twitched and she burst out laughing. God, it was good to hear her laugh again. “You should see the look on your face.”

“… Had me going there for a second.”

She put the book down and gave me a long look that I couldn’t quite read. But her eyes were soft. “Another thing I’ve been doing today is thinking,” she said.