Bill Pronzini - Boobytrap

“Pining away for you the entire time.”

“Likewise.”

“We could always have phone sex.”

“At my age? The excitement would probably bring on a massive coronary.”

“Well, you call me when you get settled up there.”

“I will, soon as I can.”

“I’ll worry if you don’t,” she said. Then she said, “You know, I think I envy you.”

“Why?”

“A week of sitting in a boat, wandering the woods, soaking up all that peace and quiet.”

“Sounds good, all right.”

“Good? Compared to marinating in hundred-degree Texas heat, it sounds like heaven.”

“I’d still rather be in Cabo with you.”

“No, I think this is the better vacation for you right now. Exactly what you need. The past several months have been… well, pretty stressful.”

“Worst damn year of my life, so far.”

“That’s why the wilderness is the best place for you. Up there you’ll have to take it easy. Relax, regenerate, and have a great time doing it.”

Wed., June 26–10:30 P.M.

I’m ready to leave. Or I will be after a few hours’ sleep. Another long day, this one. But good, productive.

Third bomb, destructive device, boobytrap packed and ready. Check. Tools neatly put away in the Hefty Mate toolbox open on the floor beside me. Check. Soldering gun and spool of wire solder. Check. Aluminum canister. Check. Microswitch. Check. Six-volt battery. Check. Fresh tin of smokeless black powder, the last of the four I bought at the gun shop in Half Moon Bay. Said I was a duck hunter and loaded my own shotgun shells, clerk said happy hunting — hah! Shame, though, that I couldn’t have used C-4 plastic explosive instead. More pucker power and a hotter blast — BOOM! Send them all to hell in even littler pieces. But you need connections to get C-4 and all my military ties are long severed, long dead and buried. Like Cotter and Turnbull and the others will be pretty soon.

Check.

Cardboard box filled with the rest of the stuff I’ll need. Check. Car filled with gas so I won’t have to stop anywhere after I drop off the judge’s surprise package. Check. Alarm clock set for three A.M. Check. Suitcase packed except for my toilet kit and this notebook. The sixth one already, six in six months. I never realized I had such an aptitude for writing, for organizing my thoughts on paper. Sometimes I think I would have benefited from keeping notebooks all along, but mostly I’m glad I didn’t. I really had no use for them before they put me in prison, back when I had a life, and I want no record of the first four and a half years in that hellhole, I don’t even want to think about them. The only part of my existence that matters after Kathryn and those bastard legal eagles locked me up and threw me away, the only record I’ll ever need to keep, is the part since I devised the Plan.

Check.

Anything else? Nothing else.

All systems go.

I won’t be sorry to leave this place, despite its positive aspects. “Charming one-bedroom seaside cottage, completely furnished,” the ad in the paper read. Drafty Half Moon Bay shack with bargain-basement furnishings, no central heating, and a stove that doesn’t work right. Six hundred dollars rent, in advance, even though I told the agent I’d be here less than a month. Criminal. Even so, it’s better than the studio apartment in Daly City. And palatial compared to the cell in San Quentin. Away from that steel-and-concrete trap six weeks now and still the nightmares keep coming — the worst one again last night, the one where I’m still locked in that cell, crouching in a corner, the giant rats in guards’ and cons’ uniforms slavering, groping, biting.

This house has got plenty of privacy, at least. Nearest neighbor is a hundred yards away, and just as important, the sound of the surf is with me every minute I’m here. Freedom. All that bright blue freedom out there. And more waiting for me tomorrow, different kind but just as soothing — green and brown and blue mountain freedom, just long enough for destructive device number two to do its work. And then it’s off on the open road. Like one of those old Bob Hope-Bing Crosby movies. The Road to Indiana.

Lawler Bluffs, Indiana.

Kathryn.

Does she feel warm and secure tonight, snuggled up to that bastard pharmacist of hers? Does she think I don’t know she married Lover Boy after divorcing me and moved to his old hometown and had the brat she always wanted? Or is she afraid, huddled sleepless and shaking in the dark, knowing I’ll come for her sooner or later? I hope she’s afraid. Knows I’m out on parole, knows I’ll come, is waiting with some of the same asshole-puckered terror I felt behind prison bars for those five long long long long long years.

Big part of it is her fault, when you get right down to it. If it hadn’t been for her, the nightmare would never have happened. Bitch ruined everything, the good life we had together. Blew it all up as surely as if she’d set off a destructive device of her own. “Intent to wrongfully injure.” She’s the one who’s guilty of that, not Donald M. Latimer. She’s the one who should have suffered.

J’accuse, Mrs. Bitch.

Guilty as charged, Mrs. Bitch.

The sentence is death, Mrs. Bitch.

The fourth boobytrap, the one I’ll assemble after I’m settled at Deep Mountain Lake, the biggest and best and sweetest of them all, is for you, Kathryn — you and Lover Boy and the brat, too, back there in good old Lawler Bluffs, Indiana.

Patrick Dixon was half an hour late for our Thursday afternoon meeting in The Jury Room. Which is not a courthouse chamber but a bar and grill on Van Ness Avenue near City Hall — one of several hangouts for members of the San Francisco legal profession. The place had been crowded when I arrived at a quarter to four; by the time Dixon walked in at four-thirty, there wasn’t a barstool, table, or booth to be had.

Usually the atmosphere in places like The Jury Room is one of none-too-restrained conviviality. Lawyers may be serious, even solemn, in their offices and in court, but plunk them down among their own kind in a social gathering spot that dispenses alcohol and they shed their dignity as fast as any other group of imbibers. But that was not the case this afternoon. A pall of gravity and unease seemed to hang in the bar, as tangible as black crepe at an old-fashioned funeral. Talk was muted and no one laughed or even smiled much. It was like a gathering of mourners at a wake, and in a way that was just what it was. One of their fraternity had died this morning, violently and horribly. Judge Norris Turnbull, a well-respected jurist who had been on the bench for more than thirty years. Blown up by a bomb in the garage of his home in Sea Cliff.

Turnbull’s murder was bad enough, but what really had the lawyers spooked was the fact that he was not the first in their profession to be a bombing victim this week. Three days ago, a criminal attorney named Douglas Cotter had been ripped apart by an explosive device packed into a sprinkler on his front lawn. Two incidents so close together couldn’t be coincidence, they were all saying. It had to be the work of the same individual, and that indicated a serial bomber — a madman with some sort of grudge against the legal system. Bad enough if he was after individuals related to a specific case, but what if it was random? What if the bomber hated all attorneys, all judges? Then anybody could be next. Any one of them could be next.

I listened to their quiet voices, felt the thin undercurrent of fear, and by the time Dixon showed I was feeling a little uneasy myself. The threat of random, mindless violence does that to you if you’ve been exposed to it often enough. Does it to me, anyway. No threat to me personally in this case, but there had been other cases, other threats that had been intensely personal. Nothing messes with your head more effectively than the fear, however slight, that you might be the target of an unseen and unknown enemy.