Bill Pronzini: Nightshades

He’d known all along, I realized, about Helen O’Daniel’s affair with Randall. Sure he was glad Randall had died. Sure he was willing to be a party to the cover-up. Sure.

I said, “So Randall had it coming. But how about me?” The rage was thick in my throat, like a buildup of phlegm; I had to struggle to keep from shouting the words. “Did I have it coming too? You don’t know me, you don’t know anything about me. But you were going to let Gary kill me the way he killed Randall.”

“That’s not true,” Coleclaw said. “We didn’t know you were still here. We thought you’d left the valley.”

“Even if you didn’t know, you could’ve guessed. Come looking to make sure.”

Silence.

“Why?” I asked them. “I can understand the Coleclaws doing it, and Robideaux, but why the rest of you?”

“Outsiders don’t care about us,” Ella Bloom said, “but we care about each other. We watch out for our own.”

“More than neighbors, more than friends,” Penrose agreed. “Family. No one here lies to me. No one here thinks I’m repulsive.”

More silence. And as I studied them now, the skin along my back began to crawl. Robideaux had lifted his shovel, so that he was holding it in both hands across his chest; one of the men I didn’t know had done the same thing. Coleclaw’s big hands were knotted into fists. All of their faces were different in the firelight, and what I felt coming off them was something primitive and deadly, a vague gathering aura of violence-the kind of aura a lynch mob generates.

Some of the fear I’d felt during the fire came back, diluting my anger. I had a sudden premonition that if I moved, if I tried to pass through them or around them, they would attack me in the same witless, savage fashion a mob attacks its victims. With shovels, with fists-out of control. If that happened I could not fight all of them; and by the time they came to their senses and realized what they’d done, I would be a dead man.

I had never run away from anything or anyone in my life, but I had an impulse now to turn and flee. I controlled it, telling myself to stay calm, use reason. Telling myself I was wrong about them, they were just average citizens, good people with misplaced loyalties caught up in a foolish crusade-not criminals, not a mob. Telling myself they wouldn’t do anything to me as long as I did nothing to provoke them.

Time seemed to grind to a halt. Behind me I could hear the heavy crackling rhythm of the fire. There was sweat on my body, cold and clammy. But I kept my expression blank, so they wouldn’t see my fear, and I groped for words to say to them that would let me get out of this.

I was still groping when the headlights appeared on the road to the south, coming down out of the pass between the cliffs.

The tension had been like a silent scream; I felt it end, felt it let go of me, and I said, “Somebody’s coming!” in a clogged-up voice and threw my right arm out and pointed. Coleclaw and two or three of the others swiveled their heads. And the tension in them seemed to break too; somebody said, “God!” They all began to move at once. Shuffling their feet, turning their bodies-the mob starting to come apart like something fragile and clotted splitting into fragments.

The headlights probed straight down the road at a good clip. When they neared the bunch of us in the meadow Robideaux threw down his shovel and walked away, jerkily, through the grass. The others went after him, in ragged little groups of two and three. I was the only one standing still when the car slid to a stop twenty feet away on the road.

It was Treacle. And a man I didn’t know, a big flat-faced man in a business suit. They came hurrying over to me, and Treacle said a little breathlessly, “What happened? What’s going on?”

I shook my head at him. I was still having trouble finding words.

“That fire,” he said. “You look as though you were in it…”

“I was,” I said.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah. It’s over now-this part of it.”

“What’s over? For God’s sake, what happened?”

I glanced back at the raging fire. Then I looked up at the line of people trudging slowly toward Coleclaw’s mercantile, hunched black silhouettes outlined against the firelit sky.

“Musket Creek just died,” I said.

The flat-faced guy with Treacle was a Redding police officer named Ragsdate-the bodyguard Treacle had been demanding for the past two days. I felt better when I found that out. I did not think there was going to be any more trouble here tonight, but with Gary Coleclaw on the loose, and unpredictable, things were still a little dicey. Ragsdale was armed; that meant we didn’t have to get out of here immediately, that we could take the time to hunt up my car.

I told them what had gone down. Treacle did some vocal fussing, but Ragsdale was a professional. He wanted to know if I needed to get to a doctor; I said I was okay, even though my face hurt and my shoulder was still stiff and sore, and explained about my car, and he said looking for it was fine by him. He wasn’t willing to go looking for Gary Coleclaw, though, because he had no jurisdiction out here. And that was fine by me; I had no desire to join in on that kind of manhunt. Besides, Gary was not going to get away. He simply had no place to go, not now and not ever.

“Did he kill Frank too?” Treacle asked hopefully. “This crazy kid?”

“He’s not crazy,” I said, “he’s retarded. He only did what he thought the other people here wanted.”

“But he did kill Frank, didn’t he?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“He must-must’ve done it!”

“No. Two deaths, two separate murderers.”

And that was the key to the whole complicated business. All of us had assumed that if both Randall and O’Daniel had been murdered, the same person must be responsible. It was only when you realized they were separate cases, with what had to be entirely different motives, that you began to see the shape of things emerging.

Treacle said, “Then who-who blew up Frank’s boat?”

“I don’t know yet.”

There was a hollow, thundering crash from behind us; we all swung around to look. The upper story of the hotel had collapsed in a mushrooming shower of sparks and flame and smoke. The other buildings in the creekside row were a single line of fire. It was like watching a piece of the past-years, events, individual lives-being consumed. All those ghosts… if you listened closely to the crackle and roar of the blaze, I thought, you could almost hear them screaming.

I turned away first and went to Treacle’s Continental; he and Ragsdale followed. Except for lights here and there, the town had a deserted look and feel. The residents had all shut themselves away now, behind locked doors. A long night for each of them coming up-maybe the longest night of their lives.

In the car, with Ragsdale behind the wheel and Treacle between us, I said, “What brought you out here anyway?” I nudged Treacle. “You’re the last person I expected to see.”

“You can thank Miss Wade,” he said nervously. “It was-was her idea.”

“Kerry sent you?”

“Asked us to come,” Ragsdale said. He backed the Continental around on the road. “Any idea where the Coleclaw kid took your car?”

“No, but it can’t be too far away. Up in the woods to the west, maybe.” He pointed the car that way, and I asked Treacle, “Why did Kerry ask you to come looking for me?”

“She was worried because you didn’t come back when you said you would.”

“Did she call you or what?”

“No. Officer Ragsdale and I were at your motel. I wanted to talk to you again so we drove over there.”