Bill Pronzini: Blowback

“But the way Jerrold died was where you really blew it. He was an outdoors type and knew his way around guns; a man like that is too cautious to let the muzzle of a shotgun nose into mud or clay. And where would there be any mud or clay around here in the first place? The lake bottom is rocky in close to shore; there hasn't been any rain before today in quite a while and that damned red dust is everywhere.

“How did Jerrold know she and Cody were together at Cody's cabin? And why was he up in that glade? Why didn't he just confront the two of them and blast off at point-blank range? He had to have been programmed, that's the only answer-and you're the only one who could have done it. You said you didn't know where he was when I showed up, but you were coming back along the lakefront, and there's nothing else over past the beach except the path up to Cabin Six. You were there, all right, and you told him about her and Cody, and then you talked him into using the shotgun, gave him the idea of going up into the glade because you didn't want him anywhere near her when the blowback got him. It probably wasn't hard; he was ready for anything by then, he'd just come back from sealing me into the mine. What'd you say to him? ‘Oh, you don't want to kill them, Ray, just throw a little scare into them, just a warning shot or two.’ That about the way it went, Harry?”

He backed up another couple of steps and leaned heavily against the light pole. The bones in his face seemed to have collapsed; the skin looked shrunken, gouged with deep hollows. I stood staring at him, silent now. I had run out of words and run out of the desire to make him suffer-and run out of hate too. Emotion seemed to have deserted me entirely.

After a long time he said, “You don't know what it's like to fall in love with a woman like Angela. She gets inside you, you can't think and you can't sleep, she takes over your world. Nothing else matters. I didn't want to do any of it, you've got to understand that. I didn't want to drag you into it or to kill anybody.”

“So it was her then, right? Lay it on her.”

“No. She's not like that. We did it together, we did all of it together. It wasn't her and it wasn't me. We're one person.”

“Sure. One person.”

“We had to do it, there was no other way.”

“Think about Jerrold sitting up in the mine shaft, guarding Bascomb's corpse, and tell me that again.”

A shudder racked him; genuine pain. And yet he said, “I've got Angela now, that's all I'm letting myself think about.”

“You won't have her for long.”

“Yes,” he said, “oh yes.”

“I'm going into Sonora and get hold of Cloudman as soon as I can gather up my things. I'm going to tell him the whole story, every lousy bit of it.”

He straightened slightly and pushed away from the pole.

“Unless you want to kill me too,” I said. “You've got three on your conscience, what's another one? You think you've got the guts to do it? You'll have to try if you want to stop me.”

“I couldn't kill you.”

“Then you're going to jail, both of you.”

“No,” he said.

“For the rest of your rotten lives.”

“No,” he said again, and he seemed to draw himself together. “You've got no proof, no evidence, against Angela and me. Jerrold died accidentally by his own hand, nobody can ever prove different.”

He was right, I knew he was right.

“They'll break you,” I said, “or they'll break her.”

That brought a faint smile to his mouth-terrible, eviscerated. “No chance, old buddy. We're one person, I told you that; we're too strong. Too strong.”

I just looked at him.

“We love each other,” he said.

I kept on looking at him a moment longer, and then I shoved past him and went up to Cabin Three and threw my clothing and gear together. The restlessness was gone now, and I felt oddly calm, oddly unburdened. In a way I could not yet understand, I seemed to have been purged not only of emotion but of doubt and the specter of death-if only for a little while.

When I came back down, Harry was standing in front of his cabin with his hands at his sides and one of those thin cigars trailing smoke from a corner of his mouth. I did not look at him as I passed, and he did not move. He still had not moved when I got the car started and turned around and took one final glance at him in the rear-view mirror.

I came back across the Bay Bridge, into San Francisco, at three-thirty Wednesday afternoon.

At the western edge of the Bay, billows of fog were drifting in through the Golden Gate; I could just see the tips of the towers over mere, orange-red buried in gray. A wall of it was massing up above Twin Peaks too. I smiled a little. After the heat and dust of Tuolumne County, that fog was like coming home to a meal after a three-day fast.

I was still pretty tired, stiff and sore and in need of a good deal more sleep. I had spent part of the night in Cloudman's office in Sonora-a deputy had summoned him from his home after listening to what I had to say-and the rest of the night in a motel nearby. This morning I had gone back to the Sheriff's Department and signed more statements and listened to Cloudman tell me that he had had sessions with Harry and with Angela Jerrold, and had not been able to pressure through their stories. He seemed to think he might still have a case, might still break them down given enough time, but I did not agree.

They were going to get away with it, all right.

They had committed the perfect murder.

And yet, they were not going to get away with it in another sense, at least not Harry. It was eating him up inside, and how long would he be able to go on fighting off the guilt with only a warped love and the companionship of a hellish bitch like Angela Jerrold to console him? Not long. A man like Harry, a man with a conscience-not long. One of these days it was all going to blow back into his face like the blocked shotgun had blown back into Jerrold's, and it would destroy him and maybe her too, and then justice would be served after all.

I had done a lot of thinking, clear and mostly unemotional, lying awake last night and driving back today. The doubts and the specter of death had not come back, and I had reached an understanding of why I was purged of it, why I had felt purged after those few minutes with Harry on the pier. As a result, and at long last, I had come to something else too.

Terms with my own mortality.

A thing like that is not easy to translate into words, but it was as if the confrontation with Harry had taken the form of a final battle in a long series of battles with death-inside my head, and outside it with Terzian and Bascomb and Jerrold and the ordeal in the mine shaft. And death had lost, I had beaten it, because it had let me get too close, let me see it too vividly in that brief and awful glimpse into Hairy Burroughs' soul.

Death was a state of mind as well as a physical fact; you could be dead while you were still alive, or you could be dying and too full of life to let death inside you. What Harry had allowed to happen to himself-what I had been allowing to happen to myself in a different way-was the true essence of death, far more terrible than any potential void, any uncertain afterlife. Terminal lung cancer or not, I could not and would not wrap my own soul in that kind of blackness.

I took the Fremont exit off the bridge, and the Embarcadero Freeway, and got off at Front Street. Traffic was thick in the Financial District, and when I crawled past Sansome Street on my way to Grant I found myself thinking of Erika, who had been working in a building on Sansome the last time I saw her five years ago.

Erika. I remembered again her sharp words, her claim that the life and the profession I had chosen for myself were a lie. But I had reached an understanding with myself about that too.