Bill Pronzini - Bleeders

The stoplight at 36th and Fulton glowed a misty red when the sports job reached the exit. The driver, without slowing, made a sliding right turn through the red, narrowly missing one oncoming car and causing another to brake and skid sideways. The MG came close to spinning out of control and into a roll that probably would have killed the reckless damn fool at the wheel. Caught just enough traction as horns brayed angrily, and disappeared, swaying and roaring on Fulton to the east.

The near-accident shook me up a little. If I tried to continue pursuit, somebody — an innocent party, maybe — was liable to get hurt or killed, and that was the last thing I wanted to happen. High-speed car chases are for lunatics and the makers of trite action films. I pulled over to the side of the road, still inside the park, and sat there for a minute or so until my pulse rate slowed to normal. Thinking I should have anticipated something like this, should have handled the whole thing differently. Too late now. Be thankful that somebody hadn’t got hurt or killed and that my overloaded conscience had been spared yet another heavy burden.

Cohalan threw a fit when I rang him on the car phone and told him what had happened. He called me all kinds of names, the least offensive of which was “incompetent idiot.” I let him rant. There were no excuses to be made and no point in wasting my own breath.

He ran out of abuse finally and segued into his old self-pitying lament. “What am I going to do now? What am I going to tell Carolyn? All our savings gone, and I still don’t have any idea who that blackmailing bastard is. What if he comes back for more? We couldn’t even sell the house, there’s hardly any equity...”

Pretty soon he ran down again. I waited through about five seconds of dead air. Then he said, “All right,” followed the words with a gusty sigh, and added, “But don’t expect me to pay your bill. You can damn well sue me, and you can’t get blood out of a turnip.” He banged the receiver in my ear.

Some Cohalan. Some piece of work.

And now, by God, it was my turn.

The apartment building was on Locust Street a half block off California and close to the Presidio. Built in the twenties, judging from its ornate brick-and-plaster facade; once somebody’s modestly affluent private home, long ago cut up into three floors of studios and one-bedroom apartments. It had no garage, forcing its tenants — like most of those in the neighboring buildings — into street parking.

I drove by slowly, looking for two things: a parking place and the low-slung black MG. I found the car easily enough — it was squeezed into a too-narrow space at the end of the block, its front wheels canted up onto the sidewalk — but there wasn’t space for my car on that block, or the next, or anywhere in the vicinity. Back on California, I quit hunting and pulled into a bus zone. If I got a ticket, I got a ticket.

Not much chance I’d need a weapon for the rest of it, but sometimes trouble comes when you least expect it. So I unclipped the .38 Colt Bodyguard from under the dash, slipped it into my coat pocket before I stepped out.

The building on Locust had a tiny foyer with the usual row of built-in mailboxes. I found the button for 2-C, leaned on it. This was the ticklish part; I was banking on the fact that one voice sounds pretty much like another over an intercom. Turned out not to be an issue: The squawk box stayed silent and the door release buzzed instead. Cocky. Hyped on drugs, adrenaline, or both. And just plain greedy-stupid.

I pushed inside, climbed the stairs to the second floor. Apartment 2-C was the first on the right. The door opened just as I reached it, and Annette Byers poked her head out and said with shiny-eyed excitement, “You made real good—”

The rest of it snapped off when she got a clear look at me; the excitement gave way to confusion and sudden alarm, froze her with the door half open. I had time to move up on her, wedge my shoulder against the door before she could decide to jump back and slam it in my face. She let out a bleat and tried to kick me as I crowded her inside. I caught her arms, then gave her a shove to get clear of her, and nudged the door closed with my heel.

“I’ll start screaming,” she said. Shaky bravado, the kind without anything to back it up. Fright showed through the bright glaze in her eyes. “These walls are paper thin, and I got a neighbor who’s a cop.”

That last was a lie. I said, “Go ahead. Be my guest.”

“Who the hell do you think you are—”

“You know who I am, Annette. And why I’m here. The reason’s on the table over there.”

In spite of herself, she glanced to her left. The apartment was a none-too-clean or tidy studio, and the kitchenette and dining area were on that side. The big cowhide briefcase sat on the dinette table, its lid raised. I couldn’t see inside from where I stood, but then I didn’t need to.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

She hadn’t been back very long; she still wore the heavy coat and a wool stocking cap that completely hid her streaky blond hair. Her cheeks were flushed — the cold night, money, lust, methamphetamine, now fear. She was attractive enough in a too-ripe way, intelligent enough to hold down a job with a neighborhood travel service, and immoral enough to have been in trouble with the law before this. Twenty-three, single, and a crankhead: She’d been arrested once for possession and once for trying to peddle meth to an undercover cop. Crystal meth, the worst kind there is.

“Counting the cash, right?” I said.

“... What?”

“What you were doing when I rang the bell. It’s all there — seven hundred and fifty hundred-dollar bills, according to plan.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You said that already.”

“Fuck you.”

“Uh-huh.”

I moved a little to get a better scan of the studio. Sitting area on my left, sleeping arrangement behind that with a Chinese-style folding screen hiding the bed. I located the telephone on the breakfast bar that partitioned off the kitchenette, one of those cordless types with a built-in answering machine. The gadget beside it was a portable cassette recorder. She hadn’t bothered to put the recorder away before leaving tonight; there’d been no reason to. The tape would still be inside.

I looked at her again. “I’ve got to admit, you handle that MG pretty well. Reckless as hell, though, the way you went flying out of the park on a red light.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You came damn close to causing a fatal accident. If you had, you’d be facing a manslaughter charge right now. Think about that.”

“I don’t know what—” She broke off and backed away a couple of paces, one hand rubbing the side of her face, her tongue making snakelike flicks between her lips. It was sinking in, how it had all gone wrong, how much trouble she was in. “You couldn’t’ve followed me. I know you didn’t.”

“That’s right, I couldn’t and I didn’t.”

“Then how—?”

“Think about that, too. You’ll figure it out.”

Silence. And then sudden comprehension, like a low-wattage bulb coming on behind her eyes. “You... you knew about me all along.”

“You, the plan, everything.”

“The plan? But... how could you? I don’t—”

The downstairs bell made a sudden racket. Her gaze jerked past me to the intercom unit next to the door. She sucked in her lower lip, bit down hard on it.

“Now I wonder who that can be,” I said.

“Oh God...”

“Don’t use the intercom, just the door release.”

She did what I told her, moving as if her joints had begun to stiffen. I went the other way, first to the breakfast bar where I popped the tape out of the cassette player and slipped it into my pocket, then to the dinette table. I lowered the lid on the briefcase, fastened the catches. I had the case in my left hand when she turned to face me again.