Bill Pronzini: Blowback

“What?”

“He had a shotgun with him.”

Harry made a sound between his teeth.

Talesco said, scowling, “Hey, what the hell is-?”

He did not finish the sentence; he did not finish it because in that same instant there was a sudden low booming explosion, a sound so ominous on the dead-still air that my skin crawled and my stomach heaved in convulsive reaction.

And I was running again, without thinking, just running up the path full speed while I dragged the rifle up across my chest. I could hear Harry at my heels, Knox and Talesco pounding after us. We raced past my cabin, raced through the woods toward Cabin Two; my ears strained for more sounds, something to give me an idea of what to expect, but it was quiet again, a quiet so intense it was like a scream just beyond the range of human hearing.

The moment I ran around a hook in the path and saw Cody's cabin, I could also see two people standing off to one side of it at the rear, looking up along a steep incline to the near side. It was Cody and Mrs. Jerrold, and they were just standing there, the kid with a drink in his hand, neither of them looking frightened or excited-just curious, a little confused.

They either heard or saw us corning, and turned. Cody said, “You hear that noise? It-” He stopped short, staring at the rifle in my hands, at my face, as I barreled up to him.

I said, “It came from up that slope?”

Cody blinked at me. Harry was there now, and Talesco and Knox: all of us grouped on the grass, tension crackling among us as tangibly as raw electricity.

“Where did it come from, damn you!”

Mrs. Jerrold's face had gone suddenly pale, and there was the beginnings of fright in her eyes. She said, “Up there, yes, it came from up there,” and pointed at the incline.

I ran up the slope, shoving my way through underbrush, trampling a high patch of ferns, holding the rifle up and ready; the rest of them followed. Two-thirds of the way up, I could see a small flattened-out area, a kind of curving glade surrounded by the high boughs of spruce and lodgepole pine. It was dark in there, but you could see well enough.

Yeah, you could see well enough.

I stopped at the edge of the glade-stopped and turned, looking for Mrs. Jerrold, reaching for her when I realized she was close by. But I was too late; she had gotten to where she could see what lay in there. She made a horrified whimpering noise, and her eyes rolled up and she staggered, started to go down. Harry caught her, turned her immediately and pulled her away down the slope.

Cody and Knox and Talesco and I stared mutely at what was left of Ray Jerrold. He lay stiffly on his back, arms flung out; his face and head and the entire upper third of his body were covered with black scorch marks and ribbons of blood, and the head itself was nearly severed. Beside him on the grass was the shotgun he had been carrying the first time I'd seen him, its barrel curled back into blackened strips. The air was foul with the stench of cordite, of charred metal.

Beside me Knox said softly, “Blowback.”

“Yeah,” I said. Blowback is what happens when somebody fires a weapon like Jerrold's with a solid blockage of the barrel. The unreleased load causes the thing to explode, splitting and peeling the barrel, and the shooter takes the full charge in his face and upper body. It happens to hunters sometimes, when they're not careful and they let the muzzle nose down into thick mud or clay. The stuff dries and expands and seals the barrel: blowback.

There might have been a certain terrible irony in the way Jerrold had died, but if there was, I could not pursue it now. The anger had drained out of me, and I felt empty, a little sick; fatigue was seeping into every corner of my body. I could not seem to think clearly any longer.

Cody, standing white-faced on my left, made a gagging sound and jerked his head away. He said in a shrill, shaken voice, “What… what was he doing up here? What was he going to shoot up here?”

I looked at him, and then I looked down the incline, gauging a trajectory from where Jerrold lay. You could see the backside of Cody's cabin without obstruction, less than forty yards away, and there were two chairs set up there in the shade of a young oak.

He followed my gaze. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, as if it were undergoing some sort of paroxysm. “Angela and me?” he said disbelievingly. “He was shooting at us, at me? ”

I did not say anything.

“No,” Cody said. “No, listen…”

But I did not listen. I spun around and shoved past him and made my way down the slope. When I got around to the front of the cabin, I saw that Harry was sitting there on the steps, one arm draped awkwardly around Angela Jerrold's shoulders. She was sobbing in a broken way, and she did not look beautiful or alluring any more, not any more. I had no sympathy for her; it was what she was, to a greater or lesser degree, that had been the catalyst for all this blood and pain and horror.

Harry looked up at me with dull eyes, and I said, “I'm not up to a drive into The Pines right now. You want to take care of calling Cloudman?”

“All right,” he said.

He stood up, got Mrs. Jerrold on her feet, and then did not seem to know what to do with her. I motioned to the cabin door, put the. 22 down-the feel of it in my hands was like something unclean-and took one of her arms even though I did not want to touch her. Together we guided her inside and down onto Cody's rumpled bed. I pulled a sheet over her, watched her curl herself up and lie there making those sobbing sounds. Then I got out of there, Harry right behind me.

Neither of us had anything to say to each other; he moved away to the path. Cody had come down from the glade. I saw him walk shakily to the rear of the cabin, heard the clink of glass on glass a moment later. Knox and Talesco had come down too, and they were standing around as if they had momentarily lost all purpose and direction, like people in a daze.

I walked past them and straight to my cabin. Even with the fatigue, the loss of tension, I still seemed to be in no immediate danger of a collapse; I was coughing again, though only in a thinly sporadic way. Inside the cabin, I stripped off my filthy clothing, took a long shower alternately hot and cold, brushed my teeth and ran a comb through my hair without looking at myself in the mirror, and put on the stuff I had worn yesterday because I did not have any more clean clothes. I did it all mechanically, mindlessly.

Then I went out and down to Harry's cabin, but not to the front of it-around to the rear and inside the shed there. I stood for a moment next to the skiff that was up on davits, letting my eyes adjust, scanning the interior. And finally I crossed to the rolls of heavy canvas at the rear and knelt in front of them and began to tug at each one in turn.

The Daghestan carpet, bound with cord in a long tight cylinder, was hidden inside a fold of the third roll.

I did not untie it, or even touch it; it was Cloudman's baby-and Kayabalian's. I thought briefly of the twenty-five-hundred-dollar reward that was probably going to be mine. A lot of money, more money than I had seen in one chunk in a long time. And yet it did not mean anything to me at that moment; it was an abstract, and it was tainted with the blood of three men.

I used the canvas to re-cover the Daghestan, straightened up, and went outside again and got a beer from the cooler and sat on Harry's front steps to drink it and wait for Cloudman.

While I waited, the sky got darker overhead and the wind picked up and eventually a few drops of rain started to fall. I watched them make tiny ripples on the steel-colored surface of the lake, darken the reddish hue of the earth. It did not get any cooler, though; if anything, the air took on a damp sultriness that was even more oppressive than the dry heat of the past few days. Here and there I could see patches of blue between rifts in the lowering clouds, and I knew that the rain would not last long, that the sky would probably be clear again by nightfall.