Bill Pronzini - The Hidden

She drove too fast back to the cottage, ran stumbling through the open gate and slipped quickly inside. Candle flames guttered; she half noticed that some of the candles were already melting into puddles of red and green wax. The focus of her attention was Jay. He was lying as she’d left him with the blanket and comforter pulled up beneath his chin, the cannula still clipped into his nose. Conscious and alert: He raised his head as she hurried across the room.

He asked in a scratchy voice, “What happened?”

Shelby told him in clipped sentences. “I think Lomax was lying. About the chain saw, about Claire being sick.”

“Bastard beat her up again.”

“Probably.” She went to one knee beside the couch. “How do you feel?”

“Better.”

“Pain anywhere? Discomfort?”

“No.”

His voice sounded strong, his color was good and his eyes clear. She removed her gloves, laid a hand on his forehead. Dry and warm, but not feverish. She checked his vital signs again. Lungs clear. Blood oxygen saturation up to 98 percent. Blood pressure holding now at 125 over 78.

The fire was already burning low. She stoked it with the last three small logs in the wood box, leaving the ones on the hearth where they lay. When she turned back to Jay, he said, “There’s something I have to tell you.”

“It can wait. Are you thirsty?”

“A little, but—”

She went to the kitchen, filled a small tumbler, and brought it back. Raised his head, let him swallow a little, then set the glass on the floor within his reach.

“You need to use the bathroom?”

“No.”

“Good.” She indicated the glass. “Small sips when you want more, so you won’t need to pee.”

“Shel, listen,” he said, his voice earnest now. In the firelight the planes of his face had a bronze cast and his eyes were like black opals. “This isn’t the first time I’ve had chest pains. I’ve been seeing a cardiologist.”

“Dr. Prebble. The nitroglycerine tablets. How long?”

“The week before Christmas. He ran tests … told me I need to have bypass surgery. He wanted to do it right away, but I said no, wait until after the first of the year. I didn’t want to spoil the holidays for us.”

Spoil the holidays. Good God.

She said, keeping her voice even, “Is that the real reason for this trip?”

“Yes. It seemed like a good idea … time alone together, maybe the last good time we’d ever have. Wasn’t that I thought I’d die, it was the way things will be after the surgery. Bad heart, unable to work, financial drain. I’ve been a burden on you so long, it can only get worse …”

“Were you trying to drive me away?”

“No. I knew you’d stay with me, at least for a while.”

“Out of pity? Is that the kind of person you think I am?”

“God, no. It’s just that … I can’t stand the thought of you having to take care of me the rest of my life. I may not be much of a man anymore, but I’ve got some pride left.”

Pride? Stupid male ego.

“Why couldn’t you tell me all this before?”

“I wanted to. I tried to. I’ve never meant to keep anything from you, but I didn’t have the words … no, that’s not true, I had the words but I couldn’t say them. Some kind of mental block … I don’t know, I can’t explain it …”

He was getting himself worked up, the worst possible thing for his heart. “All right, that’s enough,” she said. “There’s no time for any more of this now. I have to go and you have to rest.”

“… What’re you going to do?”

“The only thing I can do.” She had her raincoat rebuttoned, was pulling the hood up over her head again. “Hoof it out to the highway and flag down the first car that comes along. Or walk all the way into Seacrest if I have to.”

“Dangerous,” he said. “Woman alone on a night like this, lunatic running around loose—”

“I can take care of myself.” Can of Mace in her purse, self-defense tactics learned and internalized in a police-sponsored class she’d taken a few years ago. And the flashlight to keep the darkness from swallowing her.

He said, “I love you, Shel. No matter what happens, I’ll always love you.”

She said, “I love you, too,” because it was what he wanted to hear and it would help keep him calm, let him rest more easily. Then she turned quickly away, went back out into the hell-black night.

N I N E T E E N

MACKLIN DOZED. PULSES OF heat from the stoked-up fire, the smother of the blanket and comforter, the immobility, the recuperative demands of his body, the now-monotonous ravings of the storm—all combined to push him toward the edge of a deeper sleep. He struggled against it, blinking himself awake every time he reached the edge, because sleep was also an easy escape, another way of hiding, and he wasn’t going to hide anymore.

How much time had passed since Shelby left the second time? It seemed like an hour, probably wasn’t more than a handful of minutes. Out there braving the storm and her fear of the dark and Christ knew what else for him, while he lay here warm and comfortable and waited for her to come back with help.

The black despair had left him a while ago, replaced by a resignation that was no longer quite so fatalistic. Whatever happened, it was pretty much out of his hands now.

One good thing about the heart attack: He’d finally been able to tell Shelby about Dr. Prebble and the need for the bypass operation. The words, so clogged and clotted in him every time he’d tried before, had come spewing out tonight like dammed-up water released through a spillway. And he had a sense that the spillway would remain open; that the attack had rewired him somehow and if he was given the chance, he’d be able to confide some of the other private thoughts and feelings that he’d kept locked away from her. Even though it had taken a freakish set of circumstances and a faceup look at his own mortality to make it happen, it let him feel a little better about himself, gave him a measure of hope.

His eyelids grew heavy, too heavy to keep raised. He dozed again. Snapped awake. Dozed.

Slept, in spite of himself.

And rode the nightmare again.

The same, yet not the same this time. All the familiar components, only they were broken up into out-of-sequence fragments, like film clips spliced together by a child or a drunk. It wasn’t as though he were living it but as if he were an observer watching the spliced bits unroll across a screen. The terror was there, but muted and without the usual ravaging intensity. And it didn’t end with those yellow fangs devouring his body while his torn-off head looked on in horror; it ended with the monster’s roaring words jumbled but recognizable, sentence chunks that no longer fell like whispers but like cushioned blows against his ears.

For the first time he didn’t scream himself free of it; he was simply awake, tense, but not sweating or shaking or struggling for breath. An accelerated pulsebeat was the only physical effect. The dream creature’s words echoed and reechoed in his mind. He lay piecing them together, arranging them in a semblance of order, until with a mixture of awe and anger he began to comprehend what they meant, what the nightmare signified and why he’d kept having it all these years—

The sound of the door opening, the sudden inrush of frigid air, chased it all aside, compartmentalized it.

Shelby, he thought. Back already.

He lifted his head, and then blinked and stared because it wasn’t Shelby who came stalking across the room, dripping rainwater and leaving muddy splotches on the carpet, waving a lighted torch as if it were a weapon.

Brian Lomax.

There was no expression on the man’s blocky, beard-stubbled face, but his eyes had a distended look, as if from some internal pressure. Crazy eyes. Crazy drunk, Macklin thought. They held briefly on him, then shifted and darted from one point to another, following the erratic, tracerlike patterns of the flash beam around the living room, over into the kitchen. Lomax wore a heavy mackinaw buttoned to the throat but no hat; rain glistened on his spiky hair and pink scalp, dribbled down around the edges of his mouth and off the tip of his chin.