Bill Pronzini: Deadfall

Terrific, I thought. As if this stakeout isn’t difficult enough. Now you’re having erotic thoughts and giving yourself an erection.

I forced myself to quit thinking about anything and stared out at the street some more. Most of the nearby houses were dark now; the only ones that showed light were the two directly opposite where I was parked-a smallish Spanish-style job with a red tile roof and a round, squat central tower that bisected it into wings, and its east-side neighbor, a bulky wood-and-brick structure that had an old-fashioned front porch. A chest-high hedge separated the two. The TV sounds-the droning voices of news commentators, now, replacing the canned laughter-were coming from one of them, but I couldn’t tell which.

Another set of headlights appeared, headed toward me this time from the other end of Cerritos. But they didn’t mark the appearance of Alfred Henry, either; they came past the Kyner house, past me without slowing, and eventually swung into a driveway back near Ocean Avenue.

I told myself I was not going to check the time again. I told myself it was pointless and counterproductive and besides, a watched pot never boils. So then, having convinced myself not to look at my watch, I proceeded to look at my watch.

11:37.

Across the street, in one of the two lighted houses, somebody fired a gun.

I sat up straight, tensing, on the seat. TV, I thought-but it hadn’t been the TV. I had heard enough guns going off in my life, too many guns going off, not to recognize the real thing even at a distance.

After a couple of seconds there was another bang, followed this time by a series of muffled noises that I couldn’t identify. I was out of the car by then, acting on impulse and instinct, running across the empty street. It was the Spanish-style house that the shots had come from; the television noise was pouring out of the bulky one next door. The lights in the Spanish house were at the back; the front part was obscured by darkness. I cut over onto an asphalt drive that paralleled the hedge, ran past a Chrysler parked there, through heavy darkness toward the rear.

I was twenty yards from the corner when I heard a door whack open around back, then the thud of running footfalls. But whoever it was didn’t come my way. I pounded around the corner, into a shrub-cluttered yard bloated with shadow. At the far end I could make out a human form pushing through a gate in a tall grape-stake fence-somebody wearing a floppy rain hat and a trench coat, the tails of the coat flapping like half-folded wings.

I yelled, “Hey, you there!” but whoever it was didn’t break stride or turn his head. Two seconds later he was gone, melted into the deeper blackness thrown by a yucca tree that leaned out above the fence. I ran across the yard, dodged past some kind of fountain… and something caught hold of my foot, pitched me sideways and down onto a damp patch of lawn. The thing still had hold of my foot when I rolled over onto hands and knees; I kicked loose of it-damned garden hose-and lumbered up and made it to the fence in time to hear a car engine surge to life, tires squeal on pavement a moment later. There was a narrow alley back there, of the type that runs through the middle of some residential blocks in this part of the city to give access to rear garages or parking spaces; the car, running without lights-another shapeless blob-was sawing along it forty yards away, pointed in the opposite direction. Then it was gone, too, and the night got quiet again except for vague disturbed sounds in the nearby houses.

My right knee began to throb: I had whacked it pretty good when I’d tripped over the hose. I limped back across the yard, bent over so I could rub it and so I could see to avoid any other obstacles. The rear door of the house was wide open; a wedge of light spilled out across a shadowed interior porch, coming from a brightly lit kitchen. I went that way, fighting myself a little because I didn’t want to have to go inside, I did not want to see what was in there.

I was ten paces from the open door when a window went up in the bulky house adjacent and a bald guy in a bathrobe leaned out and called nervously, “What’s going on over there? Who are you?”

“Detective,” I said, because I didn’t want to get into a discussion with him. “Everything’s under control, sir.” He took it the way I’d intended-that I was a police detective, not a private one. He ducked back inside and the window sash slammed shut. But he was still there behind the pane as I went ahead, peering out through it marble-eyed like a kid watching a bug do something ugly and fascinating inside a big glass jar.

When I got to the open door I stopped and poked my head inside and listened. Faint sounds, not quite identifiable-a kind of dragging, a kind of crunching. The hackles were up on my neck now; the sweat that came rolling down out of my armpits had a cold oily feel. I thought about calling out, but that would have been stalling, wasting time. Get it over with, I thought. And I went inside.

Laundry porch, with nothing in it to hold my attention. I kept going into the kitchen. Empty. Wall telephone, table with a coffee mug on it, chair with a dark blue gabardine suit coat draped over the back-I saw those things, and then I heard the dragging, crunching sounds again. They were coming from beyond an archway on the far side, past a breakfast bar that divided the kitchen into two halves. I went around the bar to the archway. The room on the other side was a lamp-lit formal dining room, and when I saw what was inside it my stomach heaved and I said something half reverent, half profane under my breath and then tried to swallow the bile that pumped up into my throat.

The room looked like a war zone.

Blood, that was the first thing that struck the senses-a trail of it, smeary and glistening in the ochre-colored light, like an obscene parody of a slug’s passage. Mahogany dining table broken in half, chairs overturned and two of them smashed, matching china cabinet lying face down across the other wreckage. Broken glass on the hardwood floor, broken china plates and cups and saucers, blue-and-white patterned stuff with some of the shards speckled with crimson. And the man crawling away toward another archway at the opposite end, a big man, fortyish, mane of gray-black hair, wearing dark blue gabardine trousers and a light blue shirt with a wet red front; one hand clawing at the wood, the other crooked under him in a vain effort to stem the flow of bright arterial blood. Dragging sounds, crunching sounds: trying to crawl away from death. Moaning, too, as he crawled, little rattles of sound that were not quite words.

For a couple of seconds I leaned hard against the inside of the arch, struggling to get the wall up between what I was seeing and my emotions. It wasn’t much of a wall, it never had been, but when I got it in place it allowed me to function. I took a couple of deep breaths, keeping my throat clamped shut against the bile, and picked my way across the room-avoiding the trail of blood, the shards of glass and china. When I reached the wounded man he was almost to the far archway. I got down on one knee beside him, gripped his shoulder gently and put my mouth close to his ear.

“Easy, I’m here to help you. Don’t move, just lie still while I call an ambulance. You’re going to be okay.”

A lie, that last; he wasn’t going to be okay. Up close like this I could see that his face was gray, pustuled with sweat, already waxlike-stamped with the unmistakable imprint of death. But the lie didn’t matter: shock and pain had deafened him. He kept trying to crawl, not getting anywhere now, just wriggling in place as the strength and the life ebbed out of him. Gut-shot once, maybe twice-I couldn’t tell for sure with all the blood. No exit wounds. And no sign of the gun. Standing in here when he got it, I thought; force of the slug knocked him back into the china cabinet and he pulled it over with him when he fell.