Bill Pronzini - Boobytrap

The long walk back up the road left me weak-legged and shambling a little. I’d been running on reserves for some time now and the tank was almost empty. Latimer wasn’t where I’d left him, but he hadn’t gone far; I spotted him in the pumpkin field again, crawling along crab wise on his belly between two of the rows. He was in much worse shape than I was, still dazed and disoriented, mewling words to himself. I could make out some of what he was mumbling, and it was mostly gibberish dominated by phrases like “make them pay” and “blow him sky high” and “boom boom big boom.”

Wrong, Latimer, I thought. This is the way it ends for you.

Not with a boom but a whimper.

In the back of the Toyota wagon, among Latimer’s jumble of personal effects, the police found half a dozen thick 8½ x 11 spiral-bound notebooks. All were filled with chronological entries in a small, crabbed hand, dating back as far as Latimer’s last five months in San Quentin. Pat Dixon had access to the notebooks, and later in the week he let me look through them in the privacy of the D.A.‘s office.

They made chilling reading.

Madman’s diaries. Psychotic ramblings on every page. The most disturbing thing about them was not the references to me in what he’d written at Deep Mountain Lake and that last evening in Half Moon Bay, but the casual way he spoke of killing as the answer to all his problems — the assumption that he had a moral right to destroy lives, as many lives as he deemed necessary, simply because he felt he’d been wronged.

On the day of his release from prison he’d written, “Free at last. Except that I’m not free, not yet. I won’t be free until I make every last one of the bastards pay. Dixon, Turnbull, Cotter, Kathryn, Strayhorn, their brat, all of them for what they did to me. That’s all that matters. That’s the shining focus of my life from now on. I don’t even care if I die in the process as long as I get them first. Vengeance is mine, saith Donald Michael Latimer.”

Vengeance is mine. It’s an attitude that is becoming more and more prevalent these days — the lunatic’s battlecry, the mantra of the alienated, the dysfunctional, the outraged, the fanatical. Me, me, me! they shriek. I’m what’s important, nothing and nobody else. And all the while they’re stockpiling handguns and assault weapons and explosive materials, getting ready to Make Them Pay. And when the pressure becomes too great, the shrieks too deafening in their own ears, out they go to perpetrate as much carnage and mayhem as they can in the name of glorious retribution, in the sick, pathetic certainty that their deaths and the deaths of their victims will have more meaning than their empty lives.

There is something fundamentally skewed about a society that breeds so many psychos of this type; that teaches violence, or at least offers more than a modicum of tacit approval of it, as a viable problem-solving option; that allows some individuals to believe, actually feel morally justified in their belief, that it’s all right to slaughter innocent people as a means of Fighting Back or Getting Even.

Reading Latimer’s notebooks put all these thoughts in my mind, and led me to express them to Dixon. He agreed. But what can you do about it? he asked me. How do you go about altering the direction of a societal mindset that seems to be edging out of control?

I had no answer for him.

The only answer I had was personal. The one I’d come to accept for myself at Deep Mountain Lake; the one that said, among other things, that vengeance is not mine and never would be again. The one that had been around for thousands of years, long before Moses brought it down from the mountain with the nine other commandments.

Thou Shalt Not Kill.

A lot of people saw fit to thank me over the days following Latimer’s arrest and Chuck’s safe return home, in person and on the phone. Pat, Marian, Chuck, Callie Ostergaard, Mack Judson, even Sheriff Ben Rideout. All the expressions of gratitude embarrassed me; I still felt that if I’d been smarter, or quicker on the uptake, or more cautious, some of what had happened could have been avoided. But the thank-yous were nonetheless good to hear, and not because of any stroking of my ego.

They said to me that maybe society was not so bad off after all, and men like Donald Michael Latimer were only an aberration, not a proliferating mutant breed, and there was still hope for the future, for a genuine kinder, gentler world.

Maybe this was an answer, too. Or part of one.

Caring. Simple caring.

Kerry came home on Saturday afternoon. I picked her up at SFO. She took a long look at me when she got into my abused but still drivable car, one of her analytical studies, but she didn’t say anything then about the condition of my face — the bandaged cut over my eye, the bruise on my throat, the various abrasions and contusions. It was not until we’d been at the Diamond Heights condo for a while that she came over and sat on the arm of my chair and did some tender probing of a battered old phiz only she could love.

“Can’t even go away on a normal vacation, can you?” she said. More with sadness, I thought, than exasperation.

“Seems not.”

“Why do you always get mixed up in volatile situations like this latest one? Where you end up being hurt in some way?”

“If I knew how to avoid them, I would. I guess I’m a magnet — the negative-attraction kind.”

“Maybe, but that doesn’t explain why you let yourself become so deeply involved every time. What do you get out of it?”

“Do I have to get something out of it?”

“Well, you must or you wouldn’t let it happen.”

“What did you get out of roasting your pretty little hinder for eight days in Houston?”

“That’s hardly the same thing.”

“Bottom line, it is. Answer the question.”

“I told you last night. Milo Fisher signed on the dotted line.”

“So what you got out of it was a contract for the agency.”

“For a major ad campaign.”

“Right. A major ad campaign that means a lot more work for you. Eight days out of your life for a piece of paper and the thrill of putting in long hours to benefit a new client, not to mention Jim Carpenter’s bank account?”

“Of course not—”

“Money? A bonus or a big raise?”

“Money isn’t important to me, you know that.”

“Well, then? What did you get out of signing up old Milo Fisher? You personally, not Bates and Carpenter.”

“All right, smart guy, you tell me. That’s what you’re leading up to. What did I get?”

“Satisfaction,” I said.

“Oh, is that the payoff?”

“Sure it is. That’s what you get out of what you do and it’s what I get out of what I do. It’s why we work so hard, get so involved, care so much. And why we love each other, too. I satisfy you and you satisfy me, sexually and every other way.”

“You think so, do you?”

“Don’t you?”

We looked at each other. Seeing eye to eye, at last.

Pretty soon she said, “I guess you still hurt a lot.”

“Not much now. I guess you’re tired after the long trip.”

“Not too tired.”

“So?” I said.

“So?” she said.

So we went to bed. And some time later Kerry got up and I heard her singing in the shower. I grinned when I recognized the tune and lyrics. Yawned, stretched, and then laughed out loud.

The song was “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.”