Bill Pronzini - The Lighthouse

“If we panic, it’s all over. You know that as well as I do. Stay calm.”

She took several deep breaths with her mouth open wide; the last thing she needed now was to start hyperventilating. Outside she could hear shouts, whoops, lunatic laughter; she shut her ears against the sounds. And some of the constriction left her chest, the rising terror checked and then began to abate. The wild moment was over. She had her control back again.

“I’m okay,” she said, and her voice no longer trembled on the edge of a shriek. “Better now. How many of them are there?”

“Four. Novotny, Barnett, Reese, and Seth Bonner. All of them drunk.”

“Have they all got guns?”

“Reese has a rifle; he’s the one who’s been shooting. I couldn’t tell about the others.”

Reese… that evil, smirking little man. She suppressed a shiver, heard herself say, “We’ve got to protect ourselves.”

“With what?”

“Knives. Butcher knives.”

“Knives won’t be much good against four armed men.”

“They might not all be armed. Jan, we’ve got to have some kind of weapons…”

“Okay. You’re right.”

He put his arm around her, turned her into the kitchen, bent her low under the sill of the window. Most of the glass had been ripped out of it by the rifle bullet, she saw; only a few shards, like broken snaggleteeth, remained in the frame. Fog blew in through the opening in gray wisps. Fog, and the icy wind, and the loud drunken voices of the four men out there.

“Did you pack the knives?” Jan said against her ear.

“Yes. In the carton with the pots and pans.”

They found the carton, squatted beside it, began to rummage inside. Alix found the elongated newspaper-wrapped bundle that contained the butcher and carving knives. She pulled it from the carton, started to unwrap it.

Outside, Reese’s rifle cracked again. Almost instantaneously there was a violent whooshing explosion-a thunderous roar that seemed to rock the house. And a mushrooming flash of light and flame turned the night beyond the broken window as bright as noon.

Adam had blown up the Ryersons’ station wagon. Drawn a bead on it with that 30.06 of his, put a bullet in the gas tank, and blown it sky-high.

They’d all backed off when they saw what he was going to do, Mitch dragging Hod by one arm. But the heat of the explosion had seared him anyway, driven him farther back; he could still feel it hot and pulsing against his face, still hear the thudding echo of the blast. The fireball had rolled up fifty feet or more, boiling through the fog, staining it bright orange, bright red at the edges like blood. The fire was still burning hot; in the center of it, the car was nothing but a black cinder shape. The flames hadn’t reached any of the buildings yet, but the garage and the pumphouse were close by, and the wind was already swirling sparks like pinwheels through the darkness and the mist. The outbuildings could torch off any minute. The lighthouse too… with Ryerson and his wife in there.

Adam and Bonner were watching the car burn, Adam hopping from one foot to the other, Bonner letting out whoops like a goddamn Indian. Bonner was tetched in the head, they should never have brought him along, but Adam… it was like he’d gone crazy, too. All the shooting he’d done, blowing up the car like that, and now he was laughing, head thrown back and the laughter bubbling out of him like this was fun. like it was a party or something.

Christ, Mitch thought, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Come out here, get Ryerson, force him to talk, take him to Coos Bay-do what the fucking sheriff and state troopers wouldn’t do. But this… all this… this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.

His head hurt; he felt woozy, sick to his stomach. Shouldn’t have drunk all that whiskey. Shouldn’t have come out here at all. But it seemed like the right thing to do… nobody else was doing anything, were they? Poor Mandy lying dead in her coffin… what Ryerson had done to the other girl… and Red, too… it was the thing to do, goddamn it. Ryerson was an animal, a mad dog. They had every right to be here, doing this. Every right…

“Ryerson! We’re coming in, Ryerson! You can’t hide, you can’t get away!”

It was Adam doing the yelling, just like before. Why? What was the sense in that? Don’t talk about it, just do it.

“Don’t talk about it, Adam,” he called over the thrumming beat of the fire, “let’s just do it.”

“Damn right we’re gonna do it.”

“Bust down the door,” Bonner yelled. “That’s it, that’s what we’ll do, ain’t it, Adam? Bust down the door.”

“The door or one of the windows. Mitch, run back to the van, get that big six-cell of mine. They ain’t got guns but maybe they got something else, knives or something. We don’t want him coming out of the dark at us.”

Mitch hesitated. “Let Seth get it.”

“No, you got steadier hands. Hurry it up, Mitch, come on.”

Who’re you to give me orders? Mitch thought. But he didn’t say it, didn’t argue. The hell with arguing, just get it over with. He turned, ran back to where Adam’s van was parked outside the lighthouse gate. He found the six-cell flashlight in the rear. Thought about looking for the bottle-he needed another drink, bad-and remembered they’d finished it on the way out here. He slammed the rear door, viciously, and ran back uphill with the flashlight.

Hod was down on one knee, puking into the grass. Mitch veered over to him, squatted, put his hand on Hod’s shoulder. “Hod? You all right, buddy?”

“Sick,” Hod muttered. “Jesus, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” Mitch said. And he realized that he didn’t, not anymore. He didn’t know what the hell was going on.

“Mitch! Bring that six-cell!”

He didn’t want to leave Hod, didn’t want to break into the lighthouse after Ryerson, didn’t want to do any of this anymore. But he had to. He couldn’t stop himself now, it was too late. Just get it over with. He straightened, moved ahead to where Adam and Bonner were waiting, firelight dancing over their faces, making them look odd and unreal. Like strangers, men he’d never seen before.

The wind had kicked up, was blowing sparks in swirls and showers like some kind of crazy Fourth of July show. One corner of the garage was already starting to burn.

They were in the kitchen, backed up against the wall next to the cloakroom, Alix clinging to his arm. Through the broken window, he could see the four men moving around, backlit by the flames of the burning station wagon. The pulsing glow of the fire made the fog look like luminescent smoke, made it seem as if the very fabric of the night were burning.

“Jan, we can’t just stay here-waiting.”

Fear in her voice, tension, but no panic. She was good in a crisis, always had been. She wouldn’t come apart. And him? What about him?

His fingers moved spasmodically around the blade of the butcher knife. He wanted to let go of it; it felt alien in his hand, no longer a tool, not even a weapon-more a symbol of menace that crackled as loudly as the fire out there. “We can’t fight them,” he said grimly. “Four against two. And they’ve got guns.”

“We could go up in the tower… the lantern. That trapdoor is made of solid oak.”

“I’ve been thinking the same thing. But not you, just me. You’ve got to get out of here before it’s too late.”

“Get out? There’s no way…”

“Yes there is.”

“How?”

“By hiding down here while I make them think we’ve both gone up into the tower. They’ll chase me, and when they do you get out through the pantry, run for help.”