Bill Pronzini: Deadfall

I rolled over onto my side. The pain was so bad I almost bit through my lower lip. But I couldn’t just lie there, it was cold, I was aware of the cold all at once and I started to shake. Freeze to death out here. I tried to get up; the pain drove me back down again. I looked around for my car and it was there, over near the loading dock, driver’s door shut; the headlights were dark, they’d shut them off before they left because lights might attract attention. It seemed a long way off, halfway across the world. Phone, the mobile phone… what if they’d disabled it? Can’t drive in this condition. Can’t even walk.

I started crawling toward the car. It was slow work; I blacked out once, or maybe it was twice, and all the way the pain was like something eating at me, something tearing at me with claws and a muzzle that was smeared with my blood.

Pay for this, Dessault. Make you pay for this.

And I kept crawling, and finally I reached the door and pulled myself up a little at a time until I could take hold of the handle and depress the latch and pull it open. I crawled up onto the seat in stages, using the door handle and then the steering wheel. Lay there gasping, hurting.

The phone, pick it up.

Picked it up. Listened.

Working, it still worked.

I made a call somehow, didn’t even think about who I was calling, just did it. Please be home… and he was home. Eberhardt. I tried to talk to him but my mouth was broken, the words came out in little broken pieces that didn’t seem to make any sense. But they must have made sense to him, after a while, because I heard him say, “Don’t move, for God’s sake don’t move. I’ll call an ambulance. I’ll come there myself.”

I lay on the seat feeling dizzy, feeling sick. Knew I was going to vomit and tried to push myself back out of the car and couldn’t do it and vomited on the floorboards.

Passed out again.

And came to when the ambulance got there, and talked to the medics, and talked a little to Eberhardt when he showed up.

And passed out for the last time on the way to Mission Emergency Hospital.

Two cracked ribs. Concussion. Dislocated middle finger on my left hand. Bruises, cuts, abrasions too numerous to list. I was lucky, the doctor said. There didn’t seem to be any serious damage to my eye. Nor any internal damage. That was the main thing: no internal damage.

That’s what you think, doc. There’s internal damage, all right-plenty of it inside my head. And somebody’s going to pay for it. Dessault, Melanie, the three sluggers, anybody else who might have had a hand in this.

Lay off the Purcell case?

No way. No frigging way!

I spent Monday and Tuesday in bed, my bed. I saw no one except Kerry and, briefly on Tuesday, Eberhardt; I ate nothing other than some soup Kerry insisted on feeding me. Mostly I slept. A beating like I’d taken is a shock to the nervous system, a trauma to the psyche, an embarrassment to the ego; no matter how much rage, how much desire for revenge there might be inside you, you don’t just slap on some tape and liniment and walk away from it, the way people do in movies and crappy novels. You need rest, time to heal. For a man my age, anything else would have been like playing Russian roulette with more than one bullet in the gun.

Kerry hung around part of the time, even while I was sleeping and even though I did not really want her there. She put on a nice smiley front, but the fact of the beating, the physical evidence of it, had shaken her-almost as badly as that time I’d got shot in Eberhardt’s house. Eberhardt didn’t take it too well, either. He’d gone to Mission Creek Sunday night, after taking me home from the hospital, and braced both Dessault and Melanie. I’d told him it wouldn’t do any good and it hadn’t. The girl admitted to calling me but said she’d done it out of a momentary fit of pique, no ulterior motive and not because Richie had told her to; she also said the two of them had made up after he’d explained his absence the past couple of days-he’d gone on a fishing expedition with a friend who owned a boat. Dessault said he didn’t know anything about any thugs, or that I had been following him through the freight yards. That was a shortcut he used all the time, he’d said, was it his fault if the goddamn city was full of creeps and muggers? We had nothing on either of them and they knew it; they thought the law couldn’t touch them. And they were right: the law couldn’t.

But I could.

Not for a few days, though-not until the busted up Humpty-Dumpty put himself back together again. So I slept, and little by little I mended. And sometimes while I slept I dreamed. Most of the dreams were bad: distorted replays of the assault jumbled together with images of Leonard Purcell crawling through blood that was no longer his, that was now mine. Once I woke up yelling and found myself thrashing around on the floor, fighting off the shades of those faceless attackers. Kerry wasn’t there at the time, and it was a good thing she wasn’t. Not only because the incident would have frightened her, but because I would not have wanted her to see my face just then, the naked truth of what I was thinking.

If any of them had been in the room-Dessault, the three sluggers, any of them-I would have killed them all.

But I had other dreams too, much less fearful and without any psychotic aftermath. They were like film montages: faces, objects, juxtaposed and often superimposed in no apparent order. Leonard Purcell, the Hainelin snuff box, Melanie, Alicia, the photograph of Danny Martinez and his family, the cliff behind the Purcell home, Dessault, Tom Washburn, Elisabeth Summerhayes sitting alone among the ruins on Sutro Heights, Margaret Prine, Alejandro Ozimas smiling at me across his breakfast table while the freaked-out blonde picked her cinnamon roll apart and his house boy mouthed the words Fuck you behind his back, Eldon Summerhayes, the housekeeper Lina, the Martinez farmhouse and the crucifixes on the wall, Dessault running away from the barn… other images that I couldn’t quite identify. There were voices, too, but I could only hear parts of them, the way I had only been able to hear parts of the one slugger’s shouted threats. “Deadfall so sorry fall how could you I know who pushed him two thousand dollars extortion the big gold rush fuck anything in pants disgusting little shit challenge man of my tastes whosoever toucheth her shall not be innocent lousy goddamn pervert once bitten twice shy lust is what binds them claws like cats like challenges like proof like profit like deadfall… ” None of it made any sense, and yet it did, I knew it did, it was all there and all I had to do was take the montages apart piece by piece, find the missing images, separate the voices and add the missing words. Except that I couldn’t, not while I slept and dreamed and not while I was awake because I couldn’t think clearly yet, my mind and my body were both still healing.

On Wednesday morning I felt well enough to get up for a while. My left side, where I had the two cracked ribs, gave me hell whenever I moved too suddenly. So did my concussed head. I had tape around my middle, adhesive and gauze here and there, a splint on my sore finger; when I looked at myself in the mirror I thought I resembled a mostly unwrapped mummy with a three-day growth of beard. But it wasn’t funny. Nothing was funny right now.

Kerry had insisted on unplugging the phone the past two days and I hadn’t argued with her. A few people had called Eberhardt at the office, including Tom Washburn; Eb had told me that when he stopped by on Tuesday evening. Nothing new on the case, though. Everything on hold, waiting for me to wade into it again, stir it up again.

I plugged the phone back in and called the office. Eberhardt said, “You sound better today. Feel better too?”