Bill Pronzini - Labyrinth

Which brought me to the moment of reckoning. The only way I was going to get inside was through this window; so I either forced it or gave the whole idea up. All I was guilty of so far was trespassing. But if I forced the window it was felony breaking-and-entering-a crime that would cost me my license and maybe put me in prison if anybody found out about it.

If anybody found out, I thought. Who was going to find out? If I discovered what I expected to, I could tell Eberhardt I came by it in a legal fashion. A little white lie. And Kellenbeck’s arrest and conviction for murder would go a long way toward appeasing my conscience.

I wiped moisture off my face, hunched my shoulders against the wind blowing in across the water, and laid both hands on the sash frame. Bent my knees and heaved upward. The lock creaked again; the window pane rattled. I dipped lower, locked my elbows, heaved a second time. A third. A fourth There was a loud groaning noise, then a sudden snapping, and the sash wobbled upward.

The noise made me jerk my head around and look furtively around the empty dock. A seagull screeched somewhere in the fog-a cry that sounded almost mocking. I took a couple of deep breaths; my heart was pounding as if I had just run the quarter-mile. Then I eased the sash up as far as it would go, swung my leg over the sill. And ducked under and up into blackness heavy with the odors of fish and brine.

With my back to the window, I got the flashlight out, shielded the lens with my hand, and switched it on. Shellfish tanks, a massive refrigeration unit that gave off palpable waves of cold. Beyond, where Kellenbeck’s office was, the bank of machinery and conveyor belts formed a mass of shadowy outlines.

I shuffled away from the window and around the nearest of the tanks, holding the flash pointed downward at thigh level. The light glistened over the fish scales speckling the floor, picked out a stack of crates just in time to keep me from plowing into them. My mouth was dry; I worked saliva through it as I stepped off to the left, lifted the flash and unshielded it long enough to make a single horizontal sweep. Open floor past the crates, except for the machinery and four big weighing scales set side by side like a row of deactivated robots. In the gloom ahead there was a dullish reflection of the beam: the window in the office cubicle.

Following the light, I made my way over there. The closer I got to it, the more hushed the warehouse became; I could no longer hear even the muffled ringing of the fog bells. The scraping of my shoes on the slick floor was the only sound.

The door to the office was closed. Locked? No; it opened silently when I rotated the knob. I stepped inside, leaving the door open, and let the light flicker over Kellenbeck’s desk. Same clutter of papers and junk that I had seen yesterday. Except for one thing. And I found that right away, in the bottom desk drawer where I had watched Kellenbeck put it.

The bottle of Canadian whiskey.

The evidence.

I hauled it out by its cap so I would not smear any clear fingerprints on the glass. Shined the flash on it. The label carried the name of a popular brand and was brown with a black-lined square around the edges-the same colors, the same pattern, that was on the torn corner from Jerry Carding’s room. Which was part of what I had remembered earlier. The first thing, the one that had been itching at the back of my mind, was the way Kellenbeck had kept looking at the bottle while I was talking to him, the way he had caught it up so quickly by its bare neck and put it away inside the drawer. I had already seen him drinking from it during business hours; why hide it unless there was something about it he did not want me to notice. Something I had noticed, but without realizing it at the time.

The bare neck: it had no tax stamp.

And the label would be counterfeit.

Bootleg liquor.

That was where Kellenbeck’s profits were coming from and that was what Jerry Carding had found out: Kellenbeck was an illicit-whiskey distributor.

Most people think of bootlegging as something that went out with Prohibition; but the fact is, it’s still a multimillion dollar business in the United States. And not just in the South. It goes on along the West Coast too, just as it used to in the days of the Volstead Act when ships outfitted as distilleries-big stills in their holds, bottling equipment, labels for a dozen different kinds of Canadian whiskey-were brought down from Canada and anchored twenty-five miles offshore. Nowadays the stuff was probably made at some isolated spot across the border and carried down the coast by freighter or large fishing boat. But it would still be handled in pretty much the same way: picked up by small craft, stored somewhere nearby until it could be trucked out to customers throughout the state.

Kellenbeck’s big mistake was committing murder to keep his activities a secret; his little mistake was drinking his own hooch instead of the genuine stuff. Maybe he liked it because it packed a heftier wallop. Yeah, well, it was going to help wallop him right into San Quentin.

I made a hurried check through the rest of the desk and through the papers on top of it. Everything seemed to pertain to the fish company operations, as did everything in the single file cabinet. But I did find two more bottles of bootleg tucked away inside a small storage closet. On impulse I took one of them and wedged it out of sight behind the file cabinet. Just in case the bottle missing from his desk made Kellenbeck suspicious and he decided to get rid of the rest of it. In a sense I was tampering with evidence, but that was a technicality and the hell with it; I was in pretty deep as it was. And it would insure that the Justice Department investigators found something incriminating when they showed up with search warrants.

Time for me to get out of here, I thought. Past time: I had been in the building for half an hour-I was more nervous than ever now, and sweating like the proverbial pig. I caught up the desk bottle, swept the flash over the office once more: everything looked as I had found it. Then I went out, closed the door behind me, shielded the flash beam again and trailed it back across the warehouse.

When I reached the window the cold air from the refrigeration unit and the icy wind blowing in from outside made me shiver. I hunched my shoulders, switched off the flash. Out on the dock fog swirled around the crab pots, giving them an insubstantial, surreal look in the darkness. Quickly I lifted one leg over the sill, straddled it, and started to swing out.

Movement behind the nearest of the crab pots.

A board creaked.

Somebody there -

Blinding white light errupted out of the mist, pinned me, made me recoil and crack the back of my head against the window sash.

“Stay where you are, asshole,” a harsh voice said behind the glare. “I’ve got a gun; I’ll blow you away if you move.”

But it was not Gus Kellenbeck.

The voice belonged to Andy Greene.

I stayed frozen, half in and half out of the window, the damned bottle in my right hand and hanging out where Greene could see it. Fear climbed up into my throat and lodged there like a glob of bitter mucus. The light burned against my eyes; I squeezed the lids down to slits.

“All right,” he said. “Let go the bottle.”

“Listen, Greene-”

“Now, goddamn it!”

I released the bottle, heard it clatter on the dock and roll back in against the wall. At the same time I turned my head a little so I was no longer looking directly into the glare. Tendrils of fog curled through the beam, capered at its edges like will-o’-thewisps. And gave Greene, behind it, a dark ectoplasmic look, as if he were something only half-materialized. The wet touch of the mist against my face made my skin crawl.