Shackles

in the room-along the fireplace, in the open doorways, in the corners, among the trappings of what had been my prison cell. Like phantoms. Like memory ghosts screaming in voices just beyond the range of hearing.

“You!”

“Keep your hands where I can see them. If you move you’re a dead man.” The gun was clenched so tight in my right hand I could feel its surfaces cutting into finger pads and palm. Just the slightest additional pressure on the trigger…

But he didn’t move; he stood rigid, staring at me. “You can’t have got free. Goddamn you, you can’t have!”

“But I did.”

“How? How?”

“Turn around, lean against the wall with your feet spread.”

He didn’t obey. He just kept staring at me out of the shadows that hid his face.

“Do what I told you. Now.”

Another five seconds of frozen defiance-and then the rigidity left him all at once and he went slack, seemed almost to shrink an inch or two. In a duller, more controlled voice he said, “I’m not armed.”

“Face the wall. Do it!”

He did it. I used my left hand to shut the door, then went over to him and kicked his legs back and put the.22’s muzzle against the back of his neck. I took my finger off the trigger entirely while I patted him down one-handed; I did not trust myself to leave it there.

He hadn’t been lying: He was unarmed. I backed off from him, around on the other side of the cot. “All right,” I said then. “Come over here and sit down in the light where I can see you.”

He did that, too, without resistance. And for the first time I stood looking into the face of the enemy.

I knew him, of course, yet it was several seconds before I recognized him. He was thinner than I remembered, his face gaunt, the pale, ascetic features pinched and stamped with changes-ravages, maybe. His eyes were those of a fanatic: wide, shiny, savage with hate.

The look of him was a surprise, but a bigger one was his identity. For more than a week I had been laboring under a complete misapprehension: He had never had anything to do with Jackie Timmons, and his revenge against me had nothing to do with Jackie Timmons either. Our paths had first crossed less than six years ago. I had never once considered him for that reason, and because the circumstances did not seem to warrant such a maniacal vengeance, and because the number thirteen had nothing to do with those circumstances. And yet there had been clues, a string of little clues over the past three days that should have told me the truth.

His name wasn’t Brit; he was a Brit. That was why his voice had sounded so odd and stilted to me. He had disguised it, Americanized it, to keep me from realizing that he was British.

His name was Neal Vining.

Expatriate son of a London antiquarian book dealer. Twenty-six years old, married to an American woman and working for a San Francisco bookseller named John Rothman when I exposed him as a thief and a near murderer. He had devised an ingenious plan to steal rare books, maps, and etchings from Rothman’s shop, after which he’d sold them to unscrupulous collectors; he was intelligent, well educated, amoral, and totally ruthless. When he’d realized that I was onto him he had tried to use his car to run me-and Kerry, who had been with me at the time-off a steep, curving street into Glen Park Canyon. It had been luck as much as anything else that had kept him from succeeding and almost cost him his own life instead.

But none of that, none of it, warranted or explained what he had done to me here the past three months.

“Recognize me, eh?” he said. He was making no effort now to conceal his accent and it was discernible enough, if blunted somewhat by his years in this country and in prison. “I can see it in your face.”

“I recognize you, Vining.”

“I thought you would. It’s too soon for you to have forgotten who I am.”

“I never forget a man who tries to kill me,” I said. “When was it you tried the first time? Five years ago?”

“Almost six.”

“The judge gave you ten years’ hard time. But how many did you serve? Four, five?”

“Four years, ten months, thirteen days.”

“You’re young-that’s not much time behind bars.”

“Isn’t it?” He shifted slightly on the cot, so that the lamplight struck his eyes; the hate in them burned like foxfire. There was so much hate in this room that it was almost a third entity, a force comprised of pure negative energy. “How did you get free of the leg iron? I still can’t believe you managed it.”

“Look at me. That ought to give you an idea.”

“… You’re thinner. Much thinner.”

“Close to forty pounds.”

“I don’t… Christ, you lost enough weight to slip it off?”

“With the help of some soap and Spam grease.”

“When? You were still shackled in mid-January. And there’s hardly any food left…”

“A week ago.”

“You stayed here waiting for me to return? No, you couldn’t have… you got that pistol somewhere…”

“Another cabin nearby,” I said. “And no, I didn’t wait here for you. I tracked you down. Followed you up here tonight from Elk Grove-Sixty-two Cordilleras Street, Elk Grove.”

The hate in his eyes seemed to burn hotter for a few seconds. “How did you find out I’ve been living with Midge?”

“Frank Tucker.”

“Oh, of course. I might have known. I don’t suppose you shot Tucker, killed him?”

“No. I hurt him some, though.”

“Did you? Good! How did you hurt him?”

“I busted his head with a piece of wood.”

He smiled; it seemed almost to cheer him. “Will he die?”

“I doubt it.”

“Too bad. A slow lingering death-that’s what I wish for him.”

“I thought the two of you were friends.”

“My God-friends!”

“You stayed with him last October, in his apartment in Sacramento.”

“Yes, well, I’d just been released from Folsom and I needed a place. I didn’t know Midge then.”

“What about your wife?”

“My ex-wife,” he said bitterly. “She divorced me after I went to prison. My father disowned me at the same time. Not a bloody word from either of them since.”

“Why did you stay with Tucker, if you hate him so much?”

Vining smiled again-a dark, unreadable smile this time. “I had my reasons,” he said.

“Such as establishing an address so you could rent this cabin.”

“That’s one.”

“Where did you get the money?”

“Oh, I had a bit put away.”

From selling the rare books and other items he’d stolen from John Rothman, probably. I remembered that not all of the money he’d received had been recovered. At his trial he’d claimed to have spent it and refused to budge from that story.

I said, “Is that what you’ve been living on since you got out? Or are you in on Rix’s loan-sharking and pornography scams too?”

“I don’t know anyone named Rix.”

“You gave him as a personal reference to the real estate outfit in Carmichael.”

“Did I? Yes, that’s right-Tucker’s friend. I asked Tucker for the name of someone who would lie for me and he provided this fellow Rix. He also provided the gun I used to abduct you. He was very accommodating, Tucker was.”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me, is he involved in those scams you mentioned?”