Билл Пронзини - In an Evil Time

Into the car, start the engine.

Drive.

Don’t think, just drive.

Saturday Evening

The ride across the city to the Golden Gate Bridge: splintered, freakish, as if he were making it dead drunk. Little flashes of awareness — somebody honking at him because he was going too slow on Nineteenth Avenue, another car cutting him off inside the park, the murkiness of the tunnel under the Presidio, the lighted line of tollbooths and the wall of fog obscuring the bridge towers. Followed by blank periods, lost time during which he functioned in an unconscious state. It was not until he was halfway across the bridge, poking along in the slow lane, that he came jolting back to himself to stay. The gaps in his recent memory frightened him. What if he’d hit a pedestrian, had some other kind of accident? Concentrate, Hollis. Get off the road if you can’t drive without blanking out.

He was all right after that. Too aware, if anything: the white lane markings, the noisy traffic, the big shopping malls and strip malls and housing tracts flanking the freeway, the fogbanks giving way to cloudy blue once he reached the foot of Waldo Grade — all of it too sharply detailed, too bright, too loud, as though his sense perceptions had been cranked up to the maximum.

Despite the urgency in him, he could not make himself drive past fifty. Every time the speedometer edged above that mark, his foot eased up on the accelerator. Slow, slow... lines of cars whizzing by. None of the other drivers paid any attention to him, but he still felt nakedly exposed. As if the car bore external signs of the trunk’s contents.

The trip seemed interminable. Corte Madera, San Rafael, Terra Linda, the Napa-Vallejo cutoff, Novato... each creeping by. Maximum fifty all the way. The sun slid down behind the hills west of Novato, light began to fade out of the sky. It would be near dusk by the time he reached Los Alegres; full dark when he finished the long climb through the hills to the Chesterton site. Burial by flashlight. Bad enough in the daytime, but in the dark... ghoul’s work.

I must be crazy, he thought. Cassie was right — I must’ve been crazy all along.

Paloma County line. And finally, finally, Los Alegres. He took the first exit, Main Street, get off the damn freeway. Long loop along the river and beneath the highway overpass into town. Right on D Street, across the drawbridge, out Lakeville past the industrial parks and housing tracts and onto Crater Road. Headlights on now, boring into the gathering darkness. Oncoming beams reflecting off the windshield, jabbing his eyes with bright splinters. Stop and go, stop and go, and the Paloma Mountains did not seem to be getting any closer, seemed instead to be moving farther away. Optical illusion: stress, the light, the dark.

What am I going to say to Eric? Letting himself think about it now, for the first time. Come right out and tell him I know? Hint around, prod him into confessing what happened? Or pretend that nothing happened? A thing like this ... there’s no right way to handle it. Father and son, conspirators no matter what either of us says or does. No, wait, suppose his conscience gets the best of him and he decides to turn himself in? Taught him the difference between right and wrong, my own damn moral code turned upside-down. Can’t let that happen—

Sudden flickering light in the car.

Red and white pulsing light.

His gaze jerked upward to the mirror. Frosty prickles on his neck and back, body going rigid, hands in a death grip on the wheel. Behind him, close... rooftop pulsars throwing out red and white, red and white.

Police!

A wildness surged through him. He came close, very close, to jamming his foot down on the accelerator, turning himself into a fugitive in the single twitch of a muscle. Don’t panic! Like a shriek in his mind.

He jerked his foot off the gas pedal, onto the brake. Easy, tap it, that’s right. Tap it again, ease over to the side of the road. The police car did the same. He shoved the shift lever into Park, his breath rasping in his throat. Slide the window down — inhale, exhale, slow and deep. Don’t say or do anything to give himself away. The old man: Cops are like dogs, let ’em see fear and they’ll jump all over you.

Footfalls, flashlight beam slanting past; shape outside the window moving closer, swinging the light, bending down. In the reflected glare the cop’s face was young, not much more than twenty-five, his expression neither friendly nor hostile. Neutral voice to match: “Evening.”

“Good—” The word caught in Hollis’s throat; he coughed and got the answer out on the second try. “Good evening, Officer.” His voice sounded all right, the strain an undercurrent too faint to be discernible. “Did I do something wrong?”

“That stop sign back there. You ran it.”

Stupid! “I didn’t see it. I guess... I guess I wasn’t paying enough attention.”

“License and registration, please.”

He removed the license from his wallet, handed it over. No choice then but to open the glove box. He leaned over, trying desperately to remember if he’d wrapped the Woodsman in the chamois cloth earlier. The flash ray followed his movements. Even if he had wrapped it, and the light picked up the shape and made the cop wonder—

Open. The bulb light inside showed him that the gun was wrapped and that he’d shoved it back deep; the flash beam didn’t reach it, because the cop didn’t say anything. He let out the breath he’d been holding, fumbled up the registration, quickly shut and locked the compartment again.

The cop studied his license, then the registration. “Mr. Hollis. Jackson Hollis.”

“Yes.” His voice shook, but the cop didn’t seem to notice. “Yes, that’s correct.”

“Keokuk Street address current?”

“Yes.”

“West side. Not on your way home, then?”

“Out for a drive. Truth is, Officer, I had a fight with my wife. A real screamer. If you’re married, you know how it can be sometimes.”

“I’m married.” Empathy in his tone? Maybe a little. “Alcohol involved? Before, during, or since?”

“No. Nothing all day.”

“Mind stepping out of your car?”

“Not at all. If you’d like me to take a Breathalyzer test...”

“Just step out, sir.”

He obeyed, unbending in slow segments, standing ruler-backed with his arms at his sides. The cop held the light on him for a few seconds, then told him to wait there and returned to his cruiser. Hollis squinted against the glare of the headlights. He couldn’t see what the cop was doing inside, but he thought he knew: checking to see if there were any outstanding warrants against him.

Another car crept by, the driver’s face framed briefly in the side window, gawking. Felon by the roadside, caught . He shook the thought away, tried to will himself into a kind of sleep mode the way a computer is programmed to do. No good; his mind kept churning. Was there anything to make the cop suspicious? No, not even an unpaid parking ticket on his driving record. He had nothing to worry about if he just cooperated, kept his head, masked his emotions.

It seemed a long time before the cop emerged again. He didn’t approach Hollis; instead he stood just off the Lexus’s rear bumper, in the headlight wash, and began writing in a slender book. Ticket... writing out a ticket. He took his time doing it, glancing up a couple of times. One of the glances seemed to hold on the trunk. No, not the trunk, the license plate. Hollis could feel sweat trickling on him, in spite of the cold night air. Less than five feet between the cop and what lay inside the trunk... what if a sixth sense told him something was wrong? What if he came up and said, “Mind opening your trunk, Mr. Hollis?” All over then. Nowhere to run, nothing more to cover up except Eric’s involvement. He’d say that he killed Rakubian, he’d say he went to the city to talk to him and they argued and Rakubian attacked him and he’d acted in self-defense...