Bill Pronzini: Blowback

I asked Harry for a glass of milk and something else light to put in my stomach, since I had not eaten all day and I was bothered by hunger pangs on top of the rest of it. He found half a melon to go with the milk, and stood watching me while I ate it. Neither of us said much; I sensed that he wanted to be alone as badly as I did. Exposure to horror has a way of driving a temporary wedge between even the closest of friends-you need time to get over the aftershock of it, time to blot out its effects inside yourself.

Back at my cabin, I undressed and crawled into bed. Sleep came before long, and with it a jumbled dream of falling things and blood and faces without eyes and voices screaming behind a sloping wall of darkness. I half-awoke, bathed in perspiration and with the bedclothes bunched around my ankles, and then drifted off again. Only this time I was in a coffin and I could not get out, I kept tearing at the satin lining with my fingers, whimpering, choking because there was no air in there and I could feel myself slowly suffocating, and all the while a voice whispered beyond the lid, “I'm afraid I have some bad news for you, the lesion is malignant…”

I came out of that one convulsively, swinging my legs down to the floor, my chest swelling and deflating in a rapid tempo. When the dream remnants slid away, I realized that it was dark outside, that the room was sultry, thick with stagnant air. I got up and went into the bath alcove on sore, stiff legs and splashed my face with icy water, and that brought me fully awake. But I felt logy, temples throbbing in a dull way, eyes sore and gritty in their sockets. And restless too, jittery. Dark things moved across my mind like running shadows.

I lay down on the bed again and tried to recapture sleep, but it was pointless. I did not want any more of those dreams, and with the hot motionless air I sensed they would come again as soon as I dropped off. The restlessness would not go away either, and the dark things continued to flit around as though looking for light, as though wanting to make themselves seen and perceived.

At the end of ten minutes I got up and pulled on shirt and trousers and went outside-in and out of that cabin endlessly since Sunday, back and forth between it and the lake. All the clouds were gone now, and the sky was brilliant with stars and the slice of moon; but there was a breeze tonight, like a residue of the brief drizzly rain, and it cut into the heat and made breathing a little less uncomfortable.

I walked aimlessly along the beach, found myself at the edge of the pier, and passed through the fan of light from the pole there and out to the end. I sat with my legs dangling down, looking over the water. A bass jumped off on the right, spreading shiny ripples, and my nerves jumped with it. The dark things ran and ran-and one of them danced into my awareness and I saw that it was Jerrold, Jerrold lying up there in the glade with his head nearly severed and the blackened shotgun at his side.

Then the rest of them came out, one by one, like a parade of actors onto a stage, and I sat very still and stared at them. All the heat seemed to fade out of the night; the breath of wind seemed suddenly cold-cold.

Ah no, I thought. Ah God, no.

Yes.

Yes, damn it to hell, yes.

Emotions churned inside me; I felt sick to my stomach. This was the final horror, the final ugliness, the absolute bottom-line truth buried under a sea of lies and half-truths and partial resolutions; the real ending and the real beginning. This was what I had to face, this bitter truth, on top of all the other things physical and mental.

I sat there a moment longer, and then I got up and turned and took one step, And stopped and went rigid, and the only emotion in me was a kind of revulsion.

He was walking toward the pier, coming at a slow tired pace to the pool of fight.

I started toward him, watched him pause to wait for me, half in and half out of darkness. He said heavily, “I saw you sitting out here; I couldn't sleep either-” but he cut it off as I reached him, when he saw my face and the way my hands were knotted into fists.

“Harry, you son of a bitch,” I said. The words were hard and ugly in my ears. “You sick cold-blooded son of a bitch.”

“Hey,” he said, “what…”

“Jerrold's death was no goddamn accident,” I said. “You killed him-you and Mrs. Jerrold.”

He took an involuntary step backward so that he was full in the light. My friend, the man I had known for thirty years, the man I had shared so many memories with-was a stranger, a total stranger. Because it was all there in his face, it had all been there from the moment I came back to the camp and told him that Jerrold had murdered Terzian and Bascomb; I had been too wrapped up in the tenseness of the situation, too blinded by my own reactions, to see it for what it was-the ravished face of guilt.

“It was the two of you all along,” I said, “ you're the one who's been screwing her, not Talesco or Knox or Cody or anybody else. Screwing her and plotting Jerrold's death, driving him right over the edge so he'd do the job for you with a shotgun you'd sealed the barrel on.”

He did not say anything, but I saw his shoulders slump and his mouth twist into a grimace of pain. There would be no denials, I realized then, no more lies-and that was good because I could not have stood lies and denials, I think I would have lost control of myself and slammed them back down his throat.

But I wanted to hurt him anyway, with words if not with my hands. I said, “Only you got more than you bargained for. The two of you turned him into a psychotic, all right, but you did such a bang-up job of it that he started killing other people before you were ready for him to kill himself. Jerrold may have been the one who crushed Terzian's and Bascomb's skulls, but you're twice as guilty because you pulled the strings. You killed them all, Harry, goddamn you, you murdered three men instead of just one.”

He put up a hand like a man warding off blows. “Buddy…”

“Don't call me that,” I said, “I'm not your buddy any more. You used me just like you used all the rest of them, you son of a bitch, you used me to help you get away with murder. Whose idea was it to bring me in? Hers? Yeah, it would have been; you're not devious enough for that. Maybe the whole thing was her idea, maybe she planned it from the start and you just went along for the ride. You want to cop out that way, Harry? Put all the blame on her?”

“Shut up,” he said, but there was no malice in it. “Shut the fucking hell up, can't you?”

“No.” Relentless now, hating myself and hating him more. “So damned clever, the whole scheme. Work on his jealousy, make it look like she was playing around with every guy in sight, while you pretended to be his confidant and stiffed him up every chance you got with a load of crap about what you'd seen or heard or suspected. How long did it take the two of you to turn him into a lunatic? Weeks, months, a year or more?”

Headshake. His eyes held mine as though each pair was a magnet.

“Yeah, clever,” I said. “ Too clever-too elaborate. A simple hunting accident wasn't good enough, you had to get fancy; that's where people like you always screw up, so that people like me can eventually figure the truth. You get fancy and you make mistakes, you either leave little holes unplugged or you overdo things. Like the way you worked it after I got here: Jerrold's sudden convenient attack on Cody Sunday, when the kid and I happened to be together and I'd be sure to see right away what kind of shape he was in; you always keeping the pressure on-a little too worried, a little too uptight; the phony twosomes Angela Jerrold kept arranging between herself and Talesco and Bascomb and Cody so I couldn't help but stumble in on a few of them; the personal things she told me about Jerrold to cement the picture of him as an obsessive; her immediate agreement to get him to go home, the apparent concern for him, and then in spite of that, continuing to see Cody without trying to hide it.