Bill Pronzini: Deadfall

“I’ve got to get out of here,” she said. The bright stare shifted away from me for an instant, over to the side door that led outside; but the cockeye seemed still to be fixed on my face. “I can’t breathe, you’re not letting me breathe!”

I wasn’t breathing either. I might have confused her too much; the look on her face now was one of burgeoning paranoia, the kind that can explode into violence at any time. I stood rigid, poised, ready to throw myself at her. She could get a shot off before I reached her but the sudden movement might cause her to shy, to miss. It was the only chance I had if she decided to shoot and telegraphed her intent. If she didn’t telegraph it…

She didn’t decide to shoot. She said, “Get out, get out, ” talking to herself, not to me, and took a couple of herky-jerky steps sideways into the kitchen: parallel to me, toward the side door. Then she stopped, and bit her lower lip, and rubbed at her nose; and then she moved again, crossed to the door in that same herky-jerky way. Fumbled for the knob, got the door open. “Don’t come after me, I’ll kill you if you do.” And she was gone.

Some of the tension went out of me, just enough to loosen the rigidity of my body and let me move, too-without hesitation. I couldn’t let her go, the shape she was in, no matter what the risk to me; if she tried to drive she was liable to kill somebody else, an innocent party, with that MG of hers. And if my calculations were right, she only had one bullet left in the automatic’s clip. A Smith amp; Wesson. 38 wadcutter held five rounds; she’d fired four into Dessault and her stepmother, and in her condition she probably wouldn’t have thought to reload.

I got to the door, yanked it all the way open, stumbled through. She was thirty feet away, out from under the portico, half-running toward the front of the house. I yelled her name and the sound of my voice brought her up short, brought her around to face me. I saw her arm go up and I ducked instinctively, dodging sideways; the gun cracked, glass shattered somewhere to my right, and I banged into one of the metal garbage cans, upset it, almost fell over it with pain tearing in my side.

“Melanie!”

It came out like the ghost-echo of a shout, low and strangulated; I couldn’t seem to get enough air into my lungs as I righted myself. She was still standing a few feet away, the gun extended at arm’s length-pulling the trigger frantically now, the hammer making audible clicks as it fell on the empty chamber. I staggered toward her, and she threw the gun at me, just the way you see them do it on television, and turned and ran. But not toward the front garden this time; to the north, away from the house, into the black tangle of the woods.

I ran after her, with one thought boiling in my head: The cliffs, Christ, the cliffs! The trees swallowed her, but I saw through a blur of sweat where she went into them-the path, she was on the path. My side and my head were on fire when I got there and I was sucking air with my mouth wide open, still not getting enough; it felt as if something hot and dry was being forced down my throat, into my lungs. I plunged ahead, let the woods swallow me. Couldn’t see anything except grayness far ahead, the vague shape of her like something impaled against it, the tree trunks like prison bars in a nightmare. I tripped over something, fell, got up. I couldn’t run anymore because I couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe; I had to feel my way along, blundering off the trail, back onto it, one hand up in front of my face to fend off low-hanging branches. The dark pressed in on me, added to the feeling of suffocation, so that I had to fend off the cutting edge of panic as well.

I heard her somewhere ahead, or thought I did; then all I could hear was the blood pounding in my ears… no, it was the boom of wind-roiled surf, colliding with the rocks at the base of the cliff. Jog in the path-I almost ran into a tree before I realized it. And there she was, twenty yards away, out beyond where the trees thinned. Standing at the edge of the cliff, stiff and still against the fog like a condemned prisoner against a crumbling gray wall.

Melanie!

I yelled the word but only inside my head: I had no voice. I lurched to my left, threw an arm around one of the slender tree trunks just before my legs gave out. Clung there gasping, trying to clear the dizziness out of my head.

Melanie might have been some kind of alfresco statue, both arms down at her sides, unmoving. I couldn’t see her face clearly, couldn’t tell what was written on it. But she didn’t move, didn’t move, didn’t move-and my throat opened up, my lungs worked, the feeling of suffocation faded and strength came back into my arms, my legs. My mind was clear again. I let go of the tree and took a slow step toward her, still deep in the tree shadows so that she couldn’t see me. She couldn’t hear me, either, because of the wind and the surfs hissing cannonade.

Another step. Another-

And she moved, turned to her right abruptly and took a couple of small shuffling sidewise paces toward the edge. Leaned out a ways, with the wind whipping her frizzed hair, swaying her thin gangly body. Looked down, I saw her look down. Then she straightened again, and either saw or heard me somehow because she swiveled her head in my direction.

“I’m going to jump,” she said.

The wind caught the words, tore them apart almost instantly. But I heard them, the awful dull resignation in them. There was no doubt she meant it.

I yelled at her, “No, Melanie!” Hoarse croak: the words couldn’t have carried to her. I yelled them again, took another step.

“I have to,” she said, “I have to jump. Richie… Richie… I killed him. Oh God, I killed him!”

Coming down off the coke high, that was it. The full implications of what she’d done settling in on her, the weight of it building a suicidal depression. I took another step. She didn’t move. Another step, and I was at the edge of the clearing. No more than ten feet separating us. The twisted shape of the cypress growing up from the cliff face gyrated nearby… too far away from both of us for it to be of any use. Nothing anywhere near her except me. And the restless fog. And the black emptiness, waiting out there like something sentient, whispering to her, beckoning to her.

“Melanie, listen to me…”

“You can’t stop me,” she said. “I’m going to do it. I don’t have anything to live for now. I don’t want to live. He’s dead, I killed him. I loved him and I killed him.”

“Please, Melanie, please…”

She put her back to me, put her arms out at her sides like a bird about to take flight, and looked down, looked down… and I ran at her, full of terror that was as much for me as for her because this was a high place, because of my vertigo, and I reached her, clawed a hold on her sweater with my good hand and she jumped oh Jesus God she jumped with my hand on her and the sweater tore, I couldn’t hold on, and she she was gone, tumbling over and over, screaming, gone, and I

I staggered, teetered at the edge windmilling my arms

Deadfall! and somehow I managed to pitch my body backward and to one side… breath jarred out of me when I hit the ground… and I was sliding, I felt my legs go over the edge, I clutched frenziedly at the rough surface and caught onto something, a rock, something, and I wasn’t sliding anymore, I was pulling myself up and away from the edge…

Safe.

I lay with my head buried in my arms, my cheek against the rough sandstone, listening to the hungry feeding of the surf far below, crying a little. But not for Melanie. Not for Melanie, not for anyone in her God-damned family, not for Danny Martinez, not for any of them.

For me. The one I was crying for was me.