of it was mine. It came wafting up from the cot, from the canvas that had absorbed it from my body, and it seeped in through my nostrils, seemed to swell my head like a noxious gas. Gagging, I pushed onto my feet and stumbled to the door and pulled it open to let the night in.
But I didn’t go out into it yet. I leaned against the jamb, taking in cold clean air until I could breathe normally. The.22 was still in my hand; I shoved it into my jacket pocket. Then I went over to where Vining lay, hunkered down beside him.
He was quiet now; I turned him enough to tell that he had passed out. There was a ring of keys in his pants pocket. I took that to where the leg iron rested at the end of its chain, over near the bathroom. Only four keys on the ring, and the first one I tried opened the padlock. I brought chain and iron and padlock back to where Vining lay, looped the iron around his left calf, adjusted it to a tight fit, locked it in place. Then I straightened and put my back to him and went out of there, away from him, away from my prison for the last time.
I walked along the access lane, not fast and not slow. Walked with the night wrapped around me, the wind cold in my face, the sky immense and lunar-bright and frosted with stars. And I felt… free. It was a different feeling from the one last week, after I had squeezed out of the leg iron-as if that sense of freedom had been false, illusory, because it was incomplete. As if for the past seven days I had been dragging around another set of shackles, an invisible set whose binding weight had drawn me down inside myself, made me see things the way you see them through distorted glass, made me believe things the way you believe them in a dream or a delirium.
If I had shot him in there I would never have thrown off those shackles. I would have carried them until the day I died, and they would have grown heavier and more restricting until the burden of lugging them around became unbearable. Vining’s revelations and my own internal makeup had weakened the links, and by not killing him, by not being able to kill him, I had burst them. That was what the feeling of something tearing loose inside had been: the last set of shackles coming off, setting me free.
Now it was over, finally over.
Now I could go home.
Epilogue
I returned to San Francisco at eight P.M. on Thursday, March 10-seventeen hours after I had left the Deer Run cabin for the last time.
Not much happened in those seventeen hours; it was all anti-climax. I had driven to the Calaveras county sheriff’s office in San Andreas and told my story to the night deputy in charge, a man named Newell: who I was, what had happened to me, how I had tracked down Neal Vining, and that I had left him chained inside the cabin. The only things I omitted were my original purpose in going after him, and my breaking and entering and thefts from the Carder A-frame. Those were things I would never tell anyone, not even Kerry; they were private crosses for me to bear alone. I had locked the.22 in the trunk of the Toyota, and it would stay there until I could pack it in a box with a couple of hundred dollars in cash and mail it anonymously to Tom and Elsie Carder in Stockton.
Newell sent a couple of deputies up to Deer Run to take Vining into custody. He also notified the sheriff, who came down and listened to me tell my story a second time and then agreed to my request for a twenty-four-hour grace period before any of it was made public, so I could tell Kerry and Eberhardt myself, in person, instead of them hearing it through the media. I repeated the story a third time into the microphone of a tape recorder. After that they gave me a place to sleep, and I was unconscious until midafternoon. When I woke up I shaved off the beard, had something to eat, received permission to leave the area, picked up the Toyota, and spent two and a half hours driving due west to San Francisco.
And now here I was, coming into the city off the Bay Bridge. It was a cold, clear night, the same kind of night my last one here had been. The skyline struck me much the same way it had then: new and clean and bright, real and yet not real, as if it was some kind of elaborate stage set. Not San Francisco, San Francisco Land. But there was a difference in the illusion this time. Ninety-seven days ago, it had had a pleasurable, magical connotation. Tonight it was merely strange, as if I were entering a familiar place that had changed in subtle ways while I had been away. The strangeness was in me, however, in my perceptions; it was I, not the city, that had been altered in subtle ways. Yet even though I understood that, I could not quite make the city come alive for me.
I was home, but I wasn’t home. Not yet.
I took 101 south to the Army Street exit, Army to Diamond, then went on up into Diamond Heights. The cityscape, the gaudily lit bridges and the East Bay, had the same odd aspect from this vantage point. There was even a vague peculiarity to Kerry’s street and its usual lack of parking spaces.
For ten minutes I hunted for a place to put the Toyota, finally found one downhill two blocks away. Walking up the steep sidewalk to her building, as I had so many times before, I passed the spot where I’d left my car on that last night-and caught myself looking for it among those angled in against the curb. Long gone, of course. Where? What had Kerry done with it? What had she done with my flat? So many questions I had to ask her. So many questions to ask Eberhardt, too-about the agency, about his relationship with Bobbie Jean. And so many things I had to tell both of them.
It had occurred to me on the long drive from San Andreas that Kerry might not be home when I got there. It was a weekday night, but women sometimes went out on week nights-to the movies, to visit friends. A single woman who believed that her boyfriend must be dead might even have gone out on a date. Or she might still be working at Bates and Carpenter; she was a workaholic and she often stayed late at the office. But no sooner than I’d thought of these possibilities, I rejected them. She would be home, and she would be alone. I knew that, intuited it with the same certainty and inevitability that I had intuited Neal Vining’s destination last night.
I smiled when I reached her building, because there was a light on behind the drawn curtains in her bedroom. I let myself into the foyer with my key, climbed the stairs, and went down the hallway to her door. Stood there for a time, preparing myself. And then rang the bell, rather than using my key here too, because it would be easier for her that way.
Footsteps inside. She would look through the peephole; she always looked through the peephole. I heard her gasp when she did, even with the thickness of the door between us. The chain rattled, the lock clicked, the door jerked open.
And there she was.
At least five pounds thinner, a gauntness to her face, the skin drawn tight across her cheekbones and pale now, very pale. Shock in her green eyes, and relief and joy crowding up close behind it, pushing through.
“Kerry,” I said.
And she said, “Oh, thank God!” and came into my arms.
I held her tight, I stroked her hair, I kissed the softness of her neck, and she cried and I cried with her-and nothing was strange anymore, everything was familiar, everything was real.
And holding her, crying, I thought: It’s going to be all right. It may take some time, I may need some help, but it’s going to be all right.
About the Author
Bill Pronzini (l943 -) has was born in California and has been resident in that state for much of his life, although in his 20’s he lived in Furstenfeldbruck, Germany and Majorca. His first novel, THE STALKER, a suspense narrative of an old crime and its consequences through the lives of both victims and criminals, was published in l97l and was a finalist for the MWA Best First Novel Edgar. His second novel, THE SNATCH (l97l, an expansion of a story of the same title published by Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine) introduced the Nameless Detective who became the
