label carried the name of a popular brand and was brown with a black-lined square around the edges-the same colors, the same pattern, that was on the torn corner from Jerry Carding’s room. Which was part of what I had remembered earlier. The first thing, the one that had been itching at the back of my mind, was the way Kellenbeck had kept looking at the bottle while I was talking to him, the way he had caught it up so quickly by its bare neck and put it away inside the drawer. I had already seen him drinking from it during business hours; why hide it unless there was something about it he did not want me to notice. Something I had noticed, but without realizing it at the time.
The bare neck: it had no tax stamp.
And the label would be counterfeit.
Bootleg liquor.
That was where Kellenbeck’s profits were coming from and that was what Jerry Carding had found out: Kellenbeck was an illicit-whiskey distributor.
Most people think of bootlegging as something that went out with Prohibition; but the fact is, it’s still a multimillion dollar business in the United States. And not just in the South. It goes on along the West Coast too, just as it used to in the days of the Volstead Act when ships outfitted as distilleries-big stills in their holds, bottling equipment, labels for a dozen different kinds of Canadian whiskey-were brought down from Canada and anchored twenty-five miles offshore. Nowadays the stuff was probably made at some isolated spot across the border and carried down the coast by freighter or large fishing boat. But it would still be handled in pretty much the same way: picked up by small craft, stored somewhere nearby until it could be trucked out to customers throughout the state.
Kellenbeck’s big mistake was committing murder to keep his activities a secret; his little mistake was drinking his own hooch instead of the genuine stuff. Maybe he liked it because it packed a heftier wallop. Yeah, well, it was going to help wallop him right into San Quentin.
I made a hurried check through the rest of the desk and through the papers on top of it. Everything seemed to pertain to the fish company operations, as did everything in the single file cabinet. But I did find two more bottles of bootleg tucked away inside a small storage closet. On impulse I took one of them and wedged it out of sight behind the file cabinet. Just in case the bottle missing from his desk made Kellenbeck suspicious and he decided to get rid of the rest of it. In a sense I was tampering with evidence, but that was a technicality and the hell with it; I was in pretty deep as it was. And it would insure that the Justice Department investigators found something incriminating when they showed up with search warrants.
Time for me to get out of here, I thought. Past time: I had been in the building for half an hour-I was more nervous than ever now, and sweating like the proverbial pig. I caught up the desk bottle, swept the flash over the office once more: everything looked as I had found it. Then I went out, closed the door behind me, shielded the flash beam again and trailed it back across the warehouse.
When I reached the window the cold air from the refrigeration unit and the icy wind blowing in from outside made me shiver. I hunched my shoulders, switched off the flash. Out on the dock fog swirled around the crab pots, giving them an insubstantial, surreal look in the darkness. Quickly I lifted one leg over the sill, straddled it, and started to swing out.
Movement behind the nearest of the crab pots.
A board creaked.
Somebody there -
Blinding white light errupted out of the mist, pinned me, made me recoil and crack the back of my head against the window sash.
“Stay where you are, asshole,” a harsh voice said behind the glare. “I’ve got a gun; I’ll blow you away if you move.”
But it was not Gus Kellenbeck.
The voice belonged to Andy Greene.
EIGHTEEN
I stayed frozen, half in and half out of the window, the damned bottle in my right hand and hanging out where Greene could see it. Fear climbed up into my throat and lodged there like a glob of bitter mucus. The light burned against my eyes; I squeezed the lids down to slits.
“All right,” he said. “Let go the bottle.”
“Listen, Greene-”
“Now, goddamn it!”
I released the bottle, heard it clatter on the dock and roll back in against the wall. At the same time I turned my head a little so I was no longer looking directly into the glare. Tendrils of fog curled through the beam, capered at its edges like will-o’-thewisps. And gave Greene, behind it, a dark ectoplasmic look, as if he were something only half-materialized. The wet touch of the mist against my face made my skin crawl.
“Back inside,” Greene said. “Nice and slow. Then turn around and walk away from the window.”
The muscles in my arms and legs were cramped with tension; the joints did not seem to want to bend, so that when I forced myself back off the sill it was in awkward, mannequin-stiff movements. The jet of light dipped lower, came forward through the opening. I pivoted away from it, blinking, licking at the gun-metal taste in my mouth. And then began to pace toward the shellfish tanks.
Behind me Greene made scraping sounds as he climbed through the window. The skin on my back was still crawling; it was bad enough to face a man with a gun, even when you couldn’t see him, but to have him behind you in the dark was twice as unnerving.
When I reached the first of the tanks, ten paces away, Greene’s voice said, “That’s far enough.” I stopped, made a careful three-quarters turn back toward him. He was moving laterally to his left, along the inner wall; the flash beam stayed centered on me, flickering a little with his movements. Then he came to a standstill, and seconds later there were a series of faint clicks. The darkness shrank into random pockets of shadow as high-wattage bulbs strung along the rafters winked on.
I did some more blinking. Greene shut off a big four-cell flashlight, jammed it into the pocket of a blue pea jacket; then he motioned me over toward the locked entrance doors, where there was nothing for me to get my hands on, and halved the distance between us when I got there. His face was expressionless. But the deep-sunk eyes looked as cold and flat and deadly as the Browning 9 mm automatic in his right hand.
Looking at him, I felt swirls of black rage under the fear. Rage at him, at Kellenbeck, at what had been done to Jerry Carding and his father. And rage at myself for coming here like a damned fool, breaking the law, getting caught up this way. Stupid. Stupid.
We stood watching each other for eight or ten seconds. Then I said, “What happens now, Greene?” My voice had sounded cracked when I started to speak at the window, but these words came out in the same hard monotone he had been using.
“What do you think happens?”
“You call up Kellenbeck. He calls up the county police and has me arrested for breaking-and-entering.”
Greene showed me his teeth. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you,” he said.
“Why should I like it?”
“Go ahead, play dumb if you want. But you don’t bluff your way out of this.”
“Neither do you,” I said. “Not any more.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means I’m not the only one who’s onto you.”
“Bullshit. Cops knew anything, they’d be here, not you.”
“They’ll be here before long. Count on it.”
“Not tonight. Not while you’re still around-”
There was a sudden banging sound in the front part of the building, where the tacked-on shed was. Greene tensed. I half turned, looking up toward a closed door adjacent to the bank of machinery-but the glimmer of hope inside me died in the next second when the door opened and Gus Kellenbeck came shambling through.
