Bill Pronzini: Spook

Tamara had maneuvered her hand and arm onto the keyboard, and her fingers were slowly loosening the mouse cord-connector. Runyon’s gaze met mine again; when Valjean made a turn away from him he nodded once, as imperceptibly as Tamara had, to let me know he was ready.

I moved another few inches to my left on Valjean’s next turn. For most of his back-and-forth path, my desk was between the two of us; but when he went into his pivot at the near wall, there were a dozen feet of open floor space separating us. A dozen feet... like a hundred yards of no man’s land. I waited until he turned back the other way, looked at Runyon and made a couple of small motions with my head, one at the wall, the other at the floor.

Tamara had the mouse connector free of its socket.

Valjean was still pacing, not as rapidly now, no longer muttering to himself.

Runyon’s fingers closed around the mouse.

I widened my stance slightly, slid my left foot back a few inches, and held a breath, thinking Here we go.

Valjean was looking halfway between me and the others, so that he could keep all three of us within the range of his vision. If he saw any of the calculated movements we made, they didn’t register, didn’t put a hitch in his step. Three paces from the near wall, he about-faced again, an almost military heel-and-toe turn.

And in that second—

Runyon swept up and threw the mouse sidearm, all in one motion — not at Valjean but past and behind him, its cord flapping and twisting like the tail of a whip.

Tamara cut loose with a banshee shriek, so loud and shrill it was a pressure in the ear.

Valjean pulled up short, his stubbled face registering confusion, his attention caught by her and Runyon and the flying mouse — no longer seeing me at all.

I charged him, head down, body bent as low to the floor as I could get and still make speed.

He heard me coming halfway, spun in my direction. The machine pistol was a semiautomatic; it chattered two or three times, but confusion and haste and the weight of the thing and the high angle of its muzzle threw all the slugs past me by a couple of feet. Runyon was coming by then; I didn’t see him until he slammed into Valjean, throwing the gunarm up just as the pistol hammered again. I barreled into Valjean from my side, the two of us sandwiching him, and we all went down in a wild tangle of arms and legs and squirming bodies. Behind us something heavy and metallic made a thunderous crashing noise; I could feel the vibration in the floorboards as I clawed a grip on the gun... hot metal, burning my fingers. I yanked it loose of Valjean’s grasp, threw it behind me.

Runyon had the other arm and the big struggling body pinned. I heaved up and back to get leverage and hit Valjean in the face with as much force as I could muster. It hurt him, brought a grunt of pain and weakened his struggles. I slammed him again, a side-swipe blow to the temple so solid that it popped one of my knuckles — a sharp pain I barely felt. The fight began to go out of him. Runyon’s turn: one, two shots to the face, the second on the point of the jaw. Valjean stiffened for an instant, went limp all at once. Down and out.

It was over.

The two of us lay draped over him for a few seconds, sucking wind. Then I lifted up again, onto my knees, and yelled, “Tamara!” Tried to yell it, but it came out in a hoarse croak.

I saw her before she answered. She must’ve thrown herself down and under her desk after she screamed; now she came crawling out. “Not hurt. You? Jake?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

There was a pair of handcuffs in the bottom catch-all drawer of my desk. I didn’t have to tell Tamara to get them; she was already crawling that way. Runyon rolled Valjean over, and I yanked his arms behind him and snapped steel around both wrists a few seconds later.

It took a couple of tries to get up on my feet, a little effort to stay there. I leaned a hand against the desk to steady myself, jerked back because of a flash of pain in my popped knuckle, and switched support to the other hand. Runyon was up, too. Except for a grayish tone to his skin, you couldn’t tell that he’d come within inches of dying. Tamara’s eyes were huge, a lot of white showing, and there was blood on her lower lip that hadn’t been there before — fresh blood where she’d bitten through the skin.

Runyon said to her, “Good job with that scream. Helped with the distraction.”

“Yeah, well, wasn’t all good. I think I peed in my panty hose.”

“Damn lucky, all of us. If we hadn’t been on the same page...”

“But we were,” I said.

There were noises out in the hallway, but nobody tried to come inside. The air was hazy with aftersmoke from the fired rounds and foul with the stink of burnt powder. I saw holes in the plaster next to the door, another in the door itself. Saw something else, then — the source of the booming crash of metal that had shaken the floor. One or more slugs from that last burst had taken down the old, ugly chandelier that had hung between the skylights. It no longer looked like an upside-down grappling hook surrounded by clusters of brass testicles; now it was just a mangled pile of scrap.

Tamara said, “I always hated that thing.”

“So did I.”

“Place’ll never be the same again.”

“No. No, it won’t.”

The three of us stood there, looking at each other.

“Sweet Lord Jesus,” she said.

She hadn’t been looking forward to Christmas Eve, but it turned out all right. Better than all right. Everybody being nice to her because of what’d happened on Tuesday, tiptoeing around, avoiding the subject. Good thing; wasn’t anything to say that hadn’t already been said ten times. Like Ma going off about criminals and lunatics running loose and how she couldn’t sleep as it was, worrying about Pop all the time; Pop saying okay, if his youngest daughter insisted on doing detective work, then she’d better start keeping a handgun and learning how to use it; Claudia rapping about the evils of guns and urging her to join the gun-control group she and Brian belonged to; Horace trying to talk her into going into another line of work, any kind of computer job where her life wouldn’t be at risk.

But not tonight. Tonight there was a tree big as ever, all tinseled and strung with lights, and wine, and too much food — ham, roast beef, salads, cookies, pumpkin pie, sweet potato pie — and talk about music, politics, football, all sorts of neutral stuff. Ma was happy because the family was all together and she was doing her homey thing; Pop was happy because Sweetness wasn’t being smartass and disruptive; Horace was happy because of all the food and because his girlfriend wasn’t being smartass and disruptive; Claudia was happy because her little sister wasn’t being smartass and disruptive and because she was with her oreo (no, be fair now, Brian wasn’t so bad once you got him out of a three-piece suit and away from a lawsuit), two of them holding hands and eye-humping each other the whole time. And she was happy because she’d quit letting everything get under her skin, quit fighting herself and the people around her, just started going with the flow.

Ever since Tuesday, she’d felt like a different person. Scared as hell while it was going down, shaken up for a while afterward, and then cool with it. Somehow easy in her mind. Sort of... what was the boss man’s word? Mellow. Right, sort of mellow. Even if it didn’t last, she liked the feeling. It was like when she was a teenager and she and her girlfriends used to smoke J’s, only this was a legal high, a natural high.

Dinner, presents, talk, dessert, more talk: the time slid by fast and easy. Seemed they’d just got there and then they were at the door, exchanging hugs and kisses, saying good-bye. She even let Brian kiss her, half on the mouth. Whoo. She must be about half stoned.