seeing it. The only reason I’d put it on was for noise. A while ago, after twenty minutes under a steamy shower, I had gone down to the restaurant adjoining the motel and eaten an early steak dinner with all the trimmings. I had put away all of it, though it might have been Spam and canned fruit cocktail for all I’d tasted and enjoyed it, and I had been full when I came back up here. I was still full, but I was also empty. Full and empty at the same time. The impatience had drained out of me, leaving a temporary emotional cavity. Tomorrow it would fill up again. Tomorrow, when the hunt officially began.
Every now and then I would catch myself glancing over at the telephone on the bedside table. The very first thing I’d done when I took this room was to pick up the phone and dial Kerry’s number. And the line had rung and rung and kept right on ringing until I replaced the receiver. I’d tried twice more, once before and once after dinner, and there was no answer those times either.
It didn’t have to mean anything. She was out somewhere, that was all; she would be home later. Besides, it wasn’t as if I was going to talk to her, tell her I was alive and safe and that pretty soon I would be coming home. I only wanted to hear her voice, to know that
It was a selfish thing, to want to relieve my mind and not hers. Nor Eberhardt’s; I had no intention of calling him. How could I talk to either of them, with the hate festering inside me and my life still in a kind of limbo? What could I say to them? Could I confide that I intended to kill the man who had abducted me and made my life a hell for the past three months? Try to explain that I couldn’t rest, couldn’t begin to pick up the pieces of a normal existence, until I had done this thing? No, of course not. They would only try to talk me out of it, and that would do none of us any good. Or instead of telling them the truth, could I just say I was alive and well, I would be home soon, don’t worry, and then hang up? That would make it even harder for them, not having any of the answers; it would open wounds that must be just now starting to heal, and keep them open for days or even weeks until I finally showed up.
Better this way. Better for all of us if I let them go on knowing nothing for a while longer. Then, when I did get in touch with them, it would be all over and they would never have to know the whole truth. I could bury the final chapter along with the whisperer’s corpse, just as he had planned to do after my death, and nobody would ever have to know the whole truth except me.
I stared at the TV, listened to the noise… waited. It was warm in the room but I was still cold; I would probably be cold for months to come. After a time I got up and ran a hot bath-I still felt unclean, too-and soaked in it for half an hour. The patches of frostbite on my toes and finger seemed to be shrinking, and I had regained feeling in all three digits. No more danger there. I seemed to be getting over the other physical effects of exposure, too. The weakness was mostly gone from my arms and legs, I was no longer plagued by chills, and the sore throat was gone.
The noise of the TV had become an irritant, and when I came out of the bathroom I switched it off. The phone beckoned; I went to it and punched out Kerry’s number and let it ring a dozen times. Still no answer.
Without thinking about it, I dragged out the journal pages and got into bed with them. I told myself that scanning through them, reliving even a few of those agonizing days in the cabin, was a form of masochism and would serve no purpose. But I did it anyway.
Jackie Timmons. Car thief, shoplifter, dope runner, burglar-all those things and more at age sixteen. Hay-ward street kid, tough and not very bright; if he’d lived he would surely have ended up in San Quentin after he reached the age of legal majority. But he hadn’t lived, because his path had crossed mine one dark April night, on a rainslick street in Emeryville.
A man named Sam McNulty had a wholesale jobber’s warehouse there: TVs, stereo equipment, large and small appliances that he supplied to small dealers in the East Bay. It was long gone now-McNulty had died in the mid- seventies and his relatives had mismanaged the operation into bankruptcy-but it had been thriving in April of 1969. And McNulty had been having trouble with thieves. The police couldn’t catch them, even with stepped-up patrols, and the thieves had swiped half a dozen color TVs from under the nose of a sleeping nightwatchman. So McNulty had hired me to see what I could do. I had brought in another private cop, Art Baker, because a job like that is always better worked in pairs, and Art and I staked out the warehouse. The fourth night we were there, Jackie Timmons and two of his pals showed up in a battered Volkswagen van, cut through a chain-link fence just as they had twice before, and then jimmied a warehouse window. Art and I were waiting for them. They ran, and we chased them, and in the confusion Jackie got separated from the other two; they took off in the van, the way punks like that will, and left him to fend for himself. I didn’t know that when I slid in behind the wheel of my car and Art clambered in on the passenger side. And I never saw Jackie come out through the dark hole in the fence, start to run after the van, because I was intent on chasing it myself and getting the license number. One instant there was nobody in front of the car; the next instant he was there, running, and there was nothing I could do, there was no time to swerve or brake. I hit him head-on doing thirty and accelerating.
The impact threw him thirty feet into a construction company’s dumpster. He was still alive when I got to him; still alive when the emergency ambulance arrived; still alive for the next twelve days. But he had suffered massive brain damage as well as internal injuries and he died on the thirteenth day of his coma, without regaining consciousness.
I was exonerated of any blame, of course-any legal blame. But Jackie Timmons had a mother and she didn’t exonerate me. He had a twenty-two-year-old pregnant sister and she didn’t exonerate me. He had street friends, neighbors, and they didn’t exonerate me. And I didn’t exonerate myself, not at first, because no matter what Jackie Timmons was and might have become, he had been sixteen years old and he was dead and his death was on my conscience. It was a long time before I could sleep at night without seeing him lying broken and bloody next to the dumpster on that rain-slick Emeryville street.
His mother screamed at me in the hospital when I went there to check on him a couple of days after it happened; she called me a damn murdering pig and worse. His sister spat in my face. But that had been the end of it. I did not see either of them again; I didn’t see any of his friends, either, including the two who had been with him that night, because the van turned out to be stolen and they were never identified, never made to answer for those particular crimes. There were no threats on my life, no attempts at reprisal-no repercussions of any kind. It was just a tragic incident in a profession filled with tragic incidents, buried under layers of scar tissue. You have to forget; you can’t go on doing my kind of work unless you learn how to forget.
Only now it looked as though somebody
Sixteen. Jackie had been that many years old when he died; was there some kind of correlation between the two? Possibly. But what kind of madman waits sixteen years to avenge the death of a sixteen-year-old kid?
Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I start to find out.
Part Three. Hunt
