Bill Pronzini - Labyrinth

“Back inside,” Greene said. “Nice and slow. Then turn around and walk away from the window.”

The muscles in my arms and legs were cramped with tension; the joints did not seem to want to bend, so that when I forced myself back off the sill it was in awkward, mannequin-stiff movements. The jet of light dipped lower, came forward through the opening. I pivoted away from it, blinking, licking at the gun-metal taste in my mouth. And then began to pace toward the shellfish tanks.

Behind me Greene made scraping sounds as he climbed through the window. The skin on my back was still crawling; it was bad enough to face a man with a gun, even when you couldn’t see him, but to have him behind you in the dark was twice as unnerving.

When I reached the first of the tanks, ten paces away, Greene’s voice said, “That’s far enough.” I stopped, made a careful three-quarters turn back toward him. He was moving laterally to his left, along the inner wall; the flash beam stayed centered on me, flickering a little with his movements. Then he came to a standstill, and seconds later there were a series of faint clicks. The darkness shrank into random pockets of shadow as high-wattage bulbs strung along the rafters winked on.

I did some more blinking. Greene shut off a big four-cell flashlight, jammed it into the pocket of a blue pea jacket; then he motioned me over toward the locked entrance doors, where there was nothing for me to get my hands on, and halved the distance between us when I got there. His face was expressionless. But the deep-sunk eyes looked as cold and flat and deadly as the Browning 9 mm automatic in his right hand.

Looking at him, I felt swirls of black rage under the fear. Rage at him, at Kellenbeck, at what had been done to Jerry Carding and his father. And rage at myself for coming here like a damned fool, breaking the law, getting caught up this way. Stupid. Stupid.

We stood watching each other for eight or ten seconds. Then I said, “What happens now, Greene?” My voice had sounded cracked when I started to speak at the window, but these words came out in the same hard monotone he had been using.

“What do you think happens?”

“You call up Kellenbeck. He calls up the county police and has me arrested for breaking-and-entering.”

Greene showed me his teeth. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you,” he said.

“Why should I like it?”

“Go ahead, play dumb if you want. But you don’t bluff your way out of this.”

“Neither do you,” I said. “Not any more.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means I’m not the only one who’s onto you.”

“Bullshit. Cops knew anything, they’d be here, not you.”

“They’ll be here before long. Count on it.”

“Not tonight. Not while you’re still around-”

There was a sudden banging sound in the front part of the building, where the tacked-on shed was. Greene tensed. I half turned, looking up toward a closed door adjacent to the bank of machinery-but the glimmer of hope inside me died in the next second when the door opened and Gus Kellenbeck came shambling through.

“Andy? I saw the lights, I-” He quit talking and pulled up short, gaping at me and at the gun in Greene’s hand. His eyes had a glassy look and there was a slackness to his mouth; he seemed to sway a little. “Jesus, Andy,” he said in a different voice. “Jesus.”

I moved sideways a couple of steps, carefully, so I could see both of them without swiveling my head back and forth. The Browning moved with me.

When Greene looked at Kellenbeck again his upper lip flattened in against his teeth. “You goddamn drunk,” he said, and that told me all I needed to know about how things stood between the two of them. Maybe the bootlegging had been Kellenbeck’s scam in the beginning, and he had brought Greene in for the use of his boat; but whether or not that was it, Greene was the one running the show now.

“I only had a few,” Kellenbeck said, “I lost track of the time.” He slid a hand across gray-stubbled cheeks, across his slacked mouth. “What’s he doing here, Andy? Why’d you bring him here?”

“I didn’t bring him here. I saw him snooping around your house and decided to follow him, see what he was up to. Good thing I did. He came straight here, busted in, and searched your office; I nailed him on the way out.”

Damned fool, I thought again. It must have been Greene in that low-slung sports job in Carmet. And him again in the car that passed after I parked down the highway; I had been too intent on getting into the building, on playing the souped-up detective, to notice it was the same car both times.

“He knows, then,” Kellenbeck said. He sounded sick and frightened.

“Sure he knows. What’s the matter with you?”

“How did he find out?”

“How do you think? You and that fucking hooch. I told you not to keep any of it around.”

Kellenbeck moved forward a couple of steps. A belch came out of him; he wiped his mouth again. “Andy,” he said, “Andy… ”

“Shut up.”

“Let him say it, Greene,” I said. The rage was stronger, blacker, inside me now-and that was good because it smothered the fear. Blood made a surflike pounding in my temples.

“You shut up too.”

I looked at Kellenbeck. “He’s planning to kill me, all right. Is that what you want? Another murder on your conscience?”

“Andy, for Christ’s sake…”

“Killing me won’t get you off the hook,” I said. “What do you think will happen if I disappear like Jerry Carding-two disappearances within a week? The cops will be all over this place. And they’ll find out, Kellenbeck, just like I did-”

“One more word,” Greene said, “I’ll blow you away right now.”

He meant it; I could hear it in his voice and see it in his eyes when I faced him. I locked my teeth together, made myself stand still. Made myself not think about dying, because if I did the rage and the thin edge of panic would prod me into doing something crazy, like trying to jump him for the gun.

“He’s right, Andy,” Kellenbeck said. His face had a collapsing look, as if all the muscles had loosened at once. “You know he is.”

“The hell he’s right. We can cover this one too.”

“How?”

“Get rid of any more hooch you’ve got stashed, stay out of touch with the people up north. Let the cops come around; there won’t be anything for them to find.”

“But suppose he’s told somebody something?”

“He hasn’t told anybody anything. He’s just a smart-guy private dick, that’s all. Working on his own.”

“I don’t know, Andy. Another killing… I don’t know if I can handle it, face the cops again, all those questions…”

“Sure you can, Gus. You’ll be fine, baby.”

There was something in the way Green said that, something in his voice that jarred an insight into my mind. Kellenbeck was a drunk and he was coming apart; it was a good bet he would let something slip to the police, maybe even blurt out a confession, when the pressure got too heavy. And Greene knew that as well as I did.

He was planning to kill Kellenbeck too.

I wanted to say something to Kellenbeck, try to turn him against Greene. But I knew if I did that, Greene would use the gun on me without hesitation. He was in total command; there was nothing I could do and nothing Kellenbeck could do.

Not yet, I told myself. Not yet.

Kellenbeck belched again, sickly. “Okay,” he said. “I guess we got no choice. But Jesus, let’s get it over with.”

“Your car right out front?”

“Yeah.”

“You sober enough to drive?”

“Yeah.”

“Head out, then. Get the car started.”

Kellenbeck nodded, put his back to us, and went into the shed with uneven jerky strides. When the outer door banged a few seconds later Greene said to me, “Your turn. Move.”