Bill Pronzini - With an Extreme Burning

Pellagrin day, he thought as he rode the elevator down to the main floor. Didn't make any sense. A pellagrin was a person who was afflicted with pellagra, a protein-deficiency disease that attacked the central nervous system. He didn't know anybody who suffered from pellagra. Another word instead … pelican? Pelican day. That didn't make sense either. How about Pelagian? he thought wryly. A Pelagian was one of the heretical followers of the British monk Pelagius, who denied the doctrine of original sin and held that man has perfect freedom to do right or wrong.

Babble phrase, he decided. Meaningless non sequitur. What could “pellagrin day” possibly have to do with Katy's “accident”?

On the way back from Santa Rosa Cecca detoured by Los Alegres Valley Hospital. And for the second time today she was refused visiting privileges. Bad timing: Eileen had had several callers and Dr. Mulford had decided not to allow any more. She'd been given a sedative.

Uptown Cecca stopped at Hallam's Bookshop to see if Amy was all right. Amy was fine. Uncommunicative but fine.

As she drove to Shady Court, she agonized again over the wisdom of letting Amy stay with her folks. Suppose the tormentor went after her there, did something to all three of them, blew up the house as he'd blown up the Harrells' cabin? The thought was chilling, and no more unlikely than anything else that had happened. But Amy wasn't safe in her own home, and there was nowhere out of town to send her—or Ma and Pop—that was safe either. No safe place for any of them.

The house was as she'd left it that morning. She called Better Lands to check her voice-mail. Nothing from the Hagopians yet; it was too early. Two messages from Elliot Messner, wanting an appointment “to take another squint” at the Andersen farm—that was all. She played back the first four messages on her own machine, none of which she cared to return. The fifth message was from the tormentor. As soon as she heard his voice saying her name, she shut off the machine and then rewound the tape.

In her bedroom she packed a small overnight case. Then she locked the house and got back into the car and went the only place she had left to go—the only place, really, she wanted to be. Up to the Ridge. To Dix's house. To Dix.

He sat up in bed, listening.

The dark in the room was heavy, clotted. Cecca was asleep beside him; he could hear the steady rhythm of her breathing. He glanced at the bedside clock. The red digital numerals read 3:04.

The last foggy remnants of sleep dissipated; he was fully alert now. He didn't know what it was that had brought him up out of a deep sleep. A sound? A psychic awareness of danger? Whatever it was, it had accelerated his pulse rate, put a clutch of tension across his shoulder blades.

A wallboard cracked somewhere; otherwise the house was still. Something outside? He swung his legs out of bed, stood up. An early-morning chill had penetrated the bedroom and he was conscious of it on his naked body; he'd meant to put on pajamas after he and Cecca made love, but a warm lassitude had kept him burrowed under the covers and eventually carried him off to sleep. Shivering a little, he peered through the window in the front wall. The sky was black, coated with a high overcast that blocked out moonshine and starlight. There was a wind, thin, gusty, rustling and flexing the branches of the heritage oak. Through the branches he had a view of streetlights and night-lights winking on the flat part of town below. Beneath the angle of the roof, the near corner of the garage was visible; its back door was shut, as was the gate nearby that led to the front yard.

Dix moved to the windows overlooking the side garden. Compressed shadows and vague shapes, all of them motionless except for the stir of the wind. The hillside with its tall, dry grass, rising beyond the boundary fence, seemed to harbor the same empty shadows. False alarm, he thought. He couldn't remember dreaming, but maybe he had been; maybe the feeling of menace had come out of a gathering nightmare—

Movement on the far side of the garage, where a low cement retaining wall separated it from the hillside.

A faint carrying sound—brittle, as of something breaking.

There was a clenching sensation in his groin; he leaned closer to the glass. The movement wasn't repeated and he couldn't penetrate the darkness. An animal? The Ridge was crawling with raccoons, possums, skunks, deer. No reason for a man to be prowling over there. Nothing on that side of the garage except bags of rotting leaves he'd intended to use as mulch in the vegetable garden, some discarded pieces of lumber, a stack of dried-out prunings from the oak tree that he'd meant to haul to the dump—

Sudden flare of light, down low to the ground.

And behind it, for just an instant, the silhouette of a man crouched or kneeling.

Almost immediately there was another flare, and this time it didn't wink out. It wavered, steadied—and began to blossom.

Oh Jesus!

He'd been frozen; now he whirled to the nightstand, bumped the drawer open, dragged out the little Beretta he'd brought in from the car on Wednesday night. The sounds he made woke Cecca. She sat up as he fumbled feet into slippers.

“Dix, what's the matter?”

“The son of a bitch is outside setting a fire.”

“ Fire ? The house—?”

“Garage.” He ran around the foot of the bed, yanked his robe off the door hook. “Quick, get down to the yard … garden hose beside the door. I'm going after him.”

Dix rushed downstairs in the dark, pulling the robe around him with one hand. Unlocked the side door and ran outside. The wind had caught the fire in the prunings and decaying leaves, was fanning it out low along the garage wall. If it got into the tinder-dry grass on the hillside …

He pounded up the cutout steps to the flagstone terrace built around the oak's massive truck. The fireglow lit up a small portion of the hill behind the garage: empty as far as he could tell. He pushed through a nest of ferns, climbed over the grapestake fence onto the slope, and ran parallel to the fence until he could see the front section of his property. The asphalt parking area, the driveway, were empty; so was the lower sweep of Rosemont Lane. He swung his head to peer up the hillside. Nothing moved up there except the wind-ruffled grass.

Which way? He stood shivering, aware but uncaring that his robe hung open and the breeze blew frigid against his bare skin. The rage in him was murderous, the gun cold and clammy in his fingers. Which way, goddammit?

He went ahead a few more yards. Trampled grass appeared on his left, an irregular trail of it leading at an angle uphill past the darkened bulk of the Bradford house, his nearest neighbors a hundred and fifty yards to the north. He started to run upward along the swath. Too late, too late—he knew that even before he heard the car engine throb into life in the distance. The tormentor had driven his car to the top of the dead-end street that ran up the west side of the hill, parked it just below the crest. From there it had been an easy walk over and down this side.

In frustration Dix slapped the flat surface of the Beretta against his leg. Part of him wanted to keep going, all the way to the top, even though the sound of the car was already diminishing. Reason and the crackle and smoke smell of the fire kept him from doing it. He turned back toward the garage.

The wind was blowing down from the west, pressing the fire in against the garage wall. Flames licked along the base of the wall, but they hadn't taken hold on it. Like the walls of the house, it was made of heavy cedar sheets treated with a fire-retardant chemical. The roof, too, was fire-resistant—a lightweight composition material that resembled shakes. There was enough time to get the blaze under control before it did serious damage to the garage. The only real danger, particularly if the wind shifted, lay in sparks jumping the retaining wall and setting off the dry grass.