Bill Pronzini - Boobytrap

He came up with a rock or dirt clod, flung it at me as I barreled in on him. It missed wide, but I would not have slowed unless it had struck me square in the face; I didn’t even turn my head aside.

That was the last straw for Latimer. He broke and ran again, this time in a veer toward the bluffs, as if his terror was driving him to seek escape by a plunge into the sea.

I caught him before he’d gone another twenty yards.

The rest of it was anticlimactic. He threw obscenities along with a few punches, but fighting with your hands and your mouth at the same time is a loser’s game. I hit him twice in the face and once over the heart, and the heart shot put him down on all fours. He crawled around in a confused way, like a wounded animal, until I put a foot in the middle of his back and flattened him. Then he quit moving and just lay there, sucking air in gasps louder than mine, while I straddled him and hauled out the handcuffs and snapped them over his wrists.

The next few seconds were lost time, a blackout period induced by intense stress and its sudden release. When I came out of it, I was on my feet and dragging Latimer back toward the fence, one hand bunched in the material of his jacket. We were almost there before I grew aware of the headlights fast approaching on Bluffside Drive.

Dixon, I thought. Better be. I’m in no shape to deal with strangers.

It was Dixon. Whatever he was driving bucked to a halt with the headlights shining close on my car and the Toyota. Not that he had any other choice; the way the impact had left the two machines jammed together, there was no room to drive around on either side. He came out in a hurry. He must’ve seen me — I was at the fence by then, the section of it that I’d knocked down — but he went straight to the station wagon, leaned his body inside. Looking for his son. I’d have done the same thing if the boy were mine.

Once he’d convinced himself Chuck wasn’t there, he backed out and headed my way. I was half dragging, half lifting Latimer’s limp form over the wire when he reached us. He looked at me, looked at Latimer, and said in anguished tones, “What happened, what’s Latimer doing here? Where’s Chuck?”

I tried to tell him, but my voice box wouldn’t work; all that came out of the burning in my throat was a barely audible croak. I touched my Adam’s apple to let him know I was hurt and he nodded jerkily. Then I gestured at Latimer, semiconscious and groaning; gestured at the cars, saying mutely that Dixon should help me haul the prisoner over there.

He understood, all right, but the only thing on his mind was his son. He wagged his head, backed off a step. “The house… how far is the house?”

I got words out this time in a broken whisper. “Pat, listen to me…”

He wouldn’t have listened if I’d shouted at the top of my voice. He said, “I have to know if he’s all right,” and turned on his heel and ran for the road.

Shit!

I let go of Latimer, hopped free of the fence, and went after Dixon.

On the blacktop his stride faltered briefly as his head swiveled toward his car and the other two blocking it. Then, like a long distance runner shifting gears, his body bent forward and he was into an all-out sprint. He was in good condition, and he had long legs and the impetus of a father’s fear for his child; he began to pull away from me immediately. Even before he reached the straight stretch beyond the curve, he was eating up ground and widening the gap between us at an alarming rate.

At first I ran with one hand massaging my throat, in an effort to work off the paralysis so I could yell the right words to make him stop. But even if I’d been able to start my larynx functioning, I didn’t have the wind for forceful shouting; the suck-and-blow of my breathing was like noise in a wind tunnel. It took all I had left, as badly used and hurting as I was, to keep up the pursuit. Dixon had left me no choice. I had to get to him before he got to Chuck and it didn’t matter right then if I collapsed, maybe blew out something vital, in the effort.

More than likely I would have lost the race if he’d known which of the houses was Latimer’s. He’d opened up better than a fifty-yard lead by the time he neared the cinder block, but because the fourth house was also lighted and he couldn’t be sure which was the right one, he stayed on the road and skidded to a halt at the mailbox in front, just long enough to read the number. I was off the road by then, racing in a long diagonal for the porch. When he came charging along the path and up the porch steps, the distance between us had been chopped nearly in half. Even so, he had the door open and was bulling inside before I reached the strip of weedy front lawn.

Survival instinct shrieked at me to cut it off then and there. Urgency kept me pounding forward. I hit the bottom porch step, used the railing as a fulcrum to propel myself up the rest of the way and into the open doorway. Lights were on all through the interior, but Dixon was nowhere in sight. Then I heard him, in one of the rooms off a short hallway to my left. Involuntarily I ducked my head, hunched my shoulders — and plunged inside, into the hallway.

“Chuck, oh God, Chuckie, it’s Dad, I’m here now…”

Second room on the left. I stumbled to the doorway, and Dixon was down on his knees beside a saggy bed with an old metal frame. Chuck lay supine on the bare mattress, spread-eagled with his arms and legs tied tight to the frame, gagged and blindfolded with rags. Dixon reached out to him, crooning.

I got in there, wheezing and shaking from the exertion, and laid both hands on his shoulders and heaved him backward before he could touch the boy. He lost his balance and landed on his buttocks, yelling. “What’s the idea? What the hell’s the matter with you?”

I put myself between him and the bed, dragging in air with my mouth wide open, rubbing again at my aching throat. The first time I tried to talk, nothing happened. The second time, I was able to make words, cracked but with some force behind them. They felt bloody coming out, as if they’d torn skin off the walls of my esophagus.

“Bomb in here.”

“What!” He stared at me in confused disbelief.

“Chuck… the bed… wired somehow. Latimer boobytrapped him.”

It took a cautious look under and around the bed to convince Dixon. The explosive device was on the floor underneath, packed in a cardboard carton with wires coming out of the far side and snaking, tight with tape, along the bed frame and along Chuck’s left arm to the rope that bound his wrist. Cut or pull on those wires and father and son — and me along with them — would’ve been torn apart by whatever Latimer had put into the carton. Judging from the size of the carton, there was enough black powder and frag in there to blow up the entire house.

“The dirty son of a bitch,” Dixon said. He was trembling like a man with palsy. “I ought to go back and kill him for this. I mean it, I ought to blow his miserable fucking head off.”

But it was just talk, an expression of the most intense kind of hatred one man can feel for another. He had himself more or less under control and I would not have to go chasing after him again. I left him with Chuck, found the phone in the kitchen and called the SFPD. My voice had come back strongly enough so that I had no difficulty explaining to the night chief of inspectors what we had here. He said he’d get the bomb unit out the fastest way possible, and that he’d take care of notifying the local authorities.

I went to tell this to Dixon, but he was kneeling again beside the bed with his head bowed in an attitude of prayer. He hadn’t touched the boy in any way, but he must have talked to him, let him know everything was going to be all right: Chuck lay relaxed now, waiting, secure in the presence of his father. I went away quietly, without saying anything to either of them.