Bill Pronzini - Labyrinth

I moved. The joints in my legs still felt stiff and there was a tight prickling sensation in my groin. I had an impulse to grab hold of the door on my way through, try to slam it shut between us; but it was standing too wide, and Greene had crowded up close behind me. The shed was full of boxes, tools, machine parts-none of them within reaching distance. I opened the outer door, kept my hand on the knob for a second. Greene jabbed me with the automatic. And I let go, struggling with my control, and went out into the cold darkness.

Fog crawled over the highway, obscured all but a three-hundred-yard strip of it. No headlights showed anywhere in the mist. Kellenbeck’s Cadillac was slewed in near one of the hoists a few feet away; the engine was running and the lights were on. Greene told me to get into the back seat, slide over against the far door-and waited until I did that before he got in with me, holding the Browning in close to his body so there was no chance of me making a lunge for it.

“Okay,” he said to Kellenbeck. “You know where.”

Nothing from Kellenbeck. His breathing was rapid and irregular; I could smell the sour whiskey fumes even from where I was. The shape he was in, I thought he might kick the accelerator hard enough to buck the car and throw Greene off-balance. I braced my feet and body, tensing. But Greene anticipated that too; he issued a sharp warning to take it easy, drive slow. And Kellenbeck, obeying, crawled the damned car out of the lot and onto the highway, northbound.

I sat with my hands fisted on my knees, watching Greene in the faint glow of the dashlights. He was sitting half-turned toward me and he still had the gun pulled in against his chest. I thought: God, if I could get my hands on him I’d tear him in half. I thought: I’m being taken for a ride, private eye being taken for a goddamn ride just like in the pulps. I thought: Is this how Jerry Carding felt-twenty-year-old kid, scared, shaking, on his way to die?

Wild thoughts. Breeding more wild impulses. The rage and the fear boiling inside me now like gases coming to an explosion point. I had to do something to keep the lid on my control; if I didn’t, if I gave in to the impulses I said, “Where are we going? Your boat, Greene, is that it? A little trip out into the ocean?” Talking was the answer. Making words to keep from making myself dead. “Sure. The deep-six. Take me out a mile or two, shoot me or knock me out, weight my body, and I’m gone without a trace. Just like Jerry Carding.”

Greene had nothing to say.

“Let’s see if I can put it together,” I said. “How did Jerry find out about the bootlegging? Overheard the two of you talking, maybe, when you didn’t know he was around. Sure, that makes sense. So he does a little investigating, gets hold of a bottle of hooch or the label off of one. But instead of going to the police right away he decides to write an article first; that way, when the story breaks, he can have it published immediately. He’ll not only be a full-fledged hero, he’ll be an overnight sensation as a journalist.

“He finishes the article on Sunday night, takes the original and his only carbon down to the post office. But he doesn’t mail both of them. Just the carbon, to somebody for safekeeping; the original he keeps with him. Then he heads straight for the-”

“Shut up,” Kellenbeck said. “Andy, tell him to shut the hell up. I don’t want to listen to this.”

Greene said, “Let him talk. The hell with it.”

“Then Jerry heads straight for the fish company,” I said. “Why? Because he’s found out Sunday is the night you take the boat out to pick up a load of whiskey-not every Sunday but once or twice a month, say-and he’s also found out you leave from the warehouse when you do go, sometime after ten o’clock. If you’re heading out that night he’ll call in the Coast Guard and have them waiting when you get back; and he’ll also have the original of his article ready to turn over to one of the San Francisco papers. If you’re not going out, he’ll carry the article back to his room and wait another week or however long it takes until you do.

“When he gets to the fish company he hides somewhere to watch and wait. And the two of you show up. Then something happens-maybe he makes a noise, maybe he’s not hidden as well as he thinks-and you grab him. You find the article, you read it, you know he’s onto you. It’s the kid’s death warrant.”

We had reached the north rim of the bay. Ahead, through the windshield and through swirls of fog, I could see the turnoff for the road that looped around to Bodega Head.

“But first you’ve got to know if there are any other copies of that article. You force him to tell you about the carbon, who he mailed it to, and it turns out to be his father down in Brisbane. You can’t get the carbon out of the post office; you’ve got to wait until it’s delivered. So the next day you go down to Brisbane and watch Victor Carding’s mailbox until the mail is delivered and then check for the carbon.

“Only it doesn’t show up on Monday, or on Tuesday or Wednesday either; the mail service being what it is, the envelope isn’t delivered until Thursday. But Carding gets to the box before you can, maybe because he’s looking for some word from his son. He picks up the mail-the article and a couple of bills-and opens Jerry’s envelope right away and starts to read. That leaves you no choice. You brace him with the. 38 you were carrying then, take him into the garage, and shoot him. Then you put the gun in his hand-make it look like suicide, keep the police from doing too much digging.”

Kellenbeck had made the turn and we were starting around toward the marina. I could just make out the ghost shapes of masts and hulls through gaps in the fog screen.

“But even if Martin Talbot hadn’t arrived a few minutes later to screw things up, it wouldn’t have worked. No nitrate traces on Carding’s hands or powder marks on his clothes: he couldn’t have shot himself. The police would still have known it was murder.

“You see how it is, Greene? It’s the little things people like you always overlook, the little things that trip you up. It’ll be some other little thing, or a combination of them, that finally puts your ass in the gas chamber.”

That got a small noise out of Kellenbeck. Greene said, “Smart guy. You like to listen to yourself trying to be smart? Go on, talk some more. Talk all you want while you still can.”

But I was through talking. And through teetering on the brink of panic. The wildness was gone; I had talked myself calm, gotten a lock again on emotions and impulses. Intellect was going to get me out of this if anything was. If I panicked, there was no way out: I was a dead man for sure.

We had drawn abreast of the marina now. Vague shimmers of light marked the location of houses along the Head, but there were no lights among the boats just pale night bulbs scattered above the ramp and the floating walkways. The road, as it had been all the way over from the main highway, was a wet empty stripe in the darkness.

Kellenbeck eased the Cadillac onto the shoulder opposite the ramp. Greene got out first, waited for Kellenbeck, and then motioned me across the seat. There was more wind here and it stung my cheeks with icy wetness; the air was painfully cold in my lungs. I glanced down the road, up at the outlines of the nearest house, over at the boat slips. Nothing stirred anywhere. No help anywhere.

We went across the road and up onto the ramp, Kellenbeck in front of me and Greene behind me by six paces. Sounds drifted out of the fog: the creak of caulked joints and rigging, the thud of a hull against a board float, the buoy bells. I kept moving my head in quadrants, looking for something, anything, to give me an opening, a chance for escape. Fog, wind, empty boats, black water-nothing.