Shackles (25 page)

9:20. Another pair of headlights turning in behind me—and another destination on the second block.

9:30. Midge got up and switched on a black and white TV. Sat down again, only to stand a minute later and walk to the window and draw thin patterned drapes: There had probably been some kind of glare from outside that affected her view of the television. I said aloud, “Shit!” Now maybe I wouldn’t get a look at Brit tonight after all.

9:50. Cramp in my right leg. I had to go through contortions to pull the leg up, maneuver it past the gearshift and straighten it out across the passenger seat.

10:05. Why didn’t he come? Out enjoying himself, probably; taking in a movie, playing cards, having sex … damn him! Damn his rotten soul to hell!

10:15. God, how I wanted this to be over with. Not just this waiting tonight—
all
of it. So I could stop hating, so I could go home, so I could see Kerry. So I could lick my wounds and start the healing process. So I could begin to live again.

10:30. Another cramp in my leg. I couldn’t keep on sitting here much longer….

I didn’t have to. Two minutes after I massaged the knot out of my leg, a third set of headlamps appeared behind me—and this time the car turned into Number 62’s driveway.

I sat up, gripping the bottom of the steering wheel with both hands. The car over there—I couldn’t tell the make, just that it was an older model—went dark and a slender man shape got out. The dome light was too dim and the night too dark for me to see him clearly. I watched him walk through the weedy front yard to the door, let himself in with a key. There was light inside, and when he stepped through the open doorway I had a quick glimpse of lank brown hair, pale face in profile, dark blue Windbreaker. Then the door closed off the light and he was gone.

Frustration was sharp in me for a few seconds, but then the edge of it rubbed off against the grindstone of fatigue. So close to him now, just a hundred yards or so separating us. And yet there was nothing I could do about it tonight. Tomorrow, but not tonight. Get out of here, go get some sleep, I thought, come back in the morning … but I could not seem to make my body respond. I didn’t trust myself to drive yet anyway. My hands twitched when I took them away from the wheel, as if I had contracted some sort of neurological disease: too much stress, too much time cramped up in this small space. I gripped the wheel again, harder this time. Sat like that, waiting until I felt able to handle the car without risk to myself or someone else.

More minutes crawled away—not many, ten at the most. When I let go of the wheel this time my hands were still. I had been taking deep slow breaths; I took several more, ran my tongue over dry lips, tested my reactions by pushing in the clutch, tapping the brake, working the gearshift. Okay now. I reached for the ignition key—

And the cottage’s front door opened and he came back out.

I froze with my fingers on the key. In the two or three seconds he was in the light I saw that he had changed clothes, or at least put on a different coat—something heavy and plaid—and some kind of cap on his head. Then he was a shadow shape walking across the yard, opening the car door, ducking inside. The starter ground, a whiny sound in the night’s stillness; the headlights came on. He backed the car out of the driveway and turned my way.

I drifted low on the seat, straightened immediately after he rolled past and reached again for the ignition key. He turned left at the corner behind me. I had the engine going by then, and I made a sharp U-turn and hit the headlight switch before I reached the corner. When I completed the turn after him he was only a block and a half away.

Adrenaline had taken away some of the dragging tiredness, made me alert again. I thought: Going after a pack of cigarettes or liquor, maybe. That was fine, as long as he went somewhere that wasn’t too crowded. I could wait in his car while he made his purchase; or if he locked it I could hang around in the shadows nearby until he came back.

But he
wasn’t
out on a late-night shopping errand. He led me to Elk Grove Boulevard, along it through the middle of town, and out past the chain of shopping centers and service stations and fast-food joints on the western outskirts. I knew by then that his car was an old green Mercury with a piece chipped off one of the taillights: easy enough to keep in sight.

Highway 99 came up ahead. He led me across the overpass, then onto the southbound entrance ramp. He drove in the fast lane; I stayed in the slow lane at a distance of a couple of hundred yards. But wherever he was going, he wasn’t in any particular hurry. His speed hovered between sixty and sixty-five.

We traveled down the freeway about ten miles. Then an exit sign loomed ahead—Highway 104, Jackson—and when he put on his directional signal and started off onto the ramp, I realized suddenly where he was going. Knew it in that instant the way you know or intuit certain things, with a sense of utter inevitability. Knew it with a feeling too dark, too full of bitter irony to be elation but close to elation just the same because it was fitting, it was a kind of cosmic justice. I could not have picked a better night to catch up with him or asked for a better place to have it all end.

Highway 104 leads to the central Mother Lode, connecting with Highway 49 just north of Jackson. And there could only be one possible reason for him to drive up to the Sierras alone at this time of night.

He was going to the cabin at Deer Run.

Traffic was sparse on 104—nothing much along most of it except flattish farmland and the Rancho Seco nuclear power plant—so I let the distance between Brit and me widen until the Mercury was out of sight ahead. No percentage in my hanging close to him now; headlights in his rear-view mirror might alert him to the possibility that he was being followed. And I wanted him to get to the cabin well ahead of me, to have time to skulk around outside, let himself in through one of the bedroom windows, find out I had escaped, and think about the implications of that before I walked in on him. Fifteen minutes’ head start, at least. That way I would ensure that the last act of our little two-man drama took place inside the cabin.

I drove at a steady fifty, and by the time I covered the twenty-five miles to the Highway 49 junction, he must have picked up ten of those fifteen minutes. Traffic on 49 was just as sparse but I held my speed down along there too. Jackson, Mokelumne Hill, San Andreas—little gold country towns that teemed with tourists in the summer, that were deserted clusters of old wood and brick and false-front buildings at this hour of a March night. No,
morning:
It was twenty past midnight when I made the turn off 49, just outside San Andreas, onto the twisty two-lane county road that climbed to Deer Run.

The sky was clean and moonlit up here, too, the air cold but without the sharp wintry bite of last week. There had not been any snowfall since I’d left; in fact the weather must have stayed warm and dry. Once I got up past the snowline, the road was not only clear but in places the windrows along it had melted completely. There were dark patches and furrows in the open meadows where the snowpack had thawed and water had begun to run off.

It was fifteen miles to Deer Run this way. In all that distance I saw no sign of Brit, encountered no other car traveling in either direction. Here and there I saw lights from cabins built on ridges or down in hollows or back among trees, passed through a little cluster of lights that marked the tiny hamlet of Mountain Ranch; but mostly I drove through black and moonstruck white, alone in the night, not thinking much now because there was no longer any need to think. Transition, that was all this was. Dead time—the long empty minutes before the condemned man and his executioner come together.

But there was one thing I should have thought about; I realized that when I reached Deer Run. The place had an eerie look at this hour of the morning, everything still and empty. The only lights anywhere were nightlights inside Mary Alice’s general store. The through road and the ones that branched off it were all clear, shiny in the moonlight like bands of black silk loosely arranged among the hill folds. As with the terrain below, what had been mostly unbroken snowfields just last Sunday now showed ragged black at the edges, as if with some encroaching fungus, and spotted black in low places that could be reached by both the wind and the sun.

It was the roads that made me think of the access lane to the cabin. Last week it had been choked with snow. What was it like now? And how would Brit travel it—on foot or in his car?

I made the turn onto Indian Hill Road, braked, cut the headlights but not the engine. If the access road was still packed with snow, and he wanted to go up by car, he would have to stop and put chains on the rear tires; and if he wanted to go up by foot he would have to use snowshoes. Even if the snowpack had thawed enough so that the road was passable without either chains or snowshoes, traversing it would be slow work. So no matter how he did it, it would take time—probably more time than I had allowed him so far. If I could help it I did not want him to see me coming before he got to the cabin.

I made myself sit there, fidgeting, for ten minutes. I had intended to take a full fifteen but the stress was getting to me again, bunching muscles, putting the twitch back in my hands. Without even making a conscious choice I put the transmission in gear and flicked on the headlights and went on up Indian Hill Road.

Its surface stayed clear and dry all the way up. There was evidence of thaw on the access lanes to other cabins in the area, including the one to the Carder A-frame. All the visible cabins I passed were dark; the only illumination came from the Toyota’s headlamps probing the road ahead, the moon glinting off stretches of open snow.

When I climbed to where the tree-clad hillside walled the road on my right I slowed to twenty and rolled my window down for a better look at the snowfield that was opening up on the left. I saw the Mercury as soon as I came around the last bend below the access lane to the Lanier cabin. He had pulled it into the lane by ten feet or so and it sat there dark. If I had seen any sign of him on the road or anywhere else in the vicinity I would have driven on past and out of sight above—just a local resident coming home late—and then waited another few minutes before doubling back. But there was no sign of him.

I eased over behind the Mercury, stopped at an angle that blocked it off from Indian Hill Road. The thaw had had its effect here, too: Parts of the lane’s surface were visible and the skin of snow on the rest looked to be no more than eight to twelve inches deep. I could also see that he’d gone along it on foot, without snowshoes; in the moonshine his tracks in what was left of the snowpack were clearly outlined.

I shut off engine and headlamps, got out of the car. The wind made a thin, preternatural murmur as it blew across the meadow, but it carried no other sounds with it. I buttoned the bush jacket to my throat, slid my hands into the pockets and gripped the butt of the .22, and tramped ahead along the lane.

The footing was slick in places and I had to move at a retarded pace. But that was all right because he would have had to do the same thing. Twice on the climb to the top of the first hill I blundered into pockets of deeper snow, but I got out of them again without doing any damage to myself. The cold wind slapped at my ears and cheeks, numbed them a little; but it also braced me, kept me alert and in control for what lay ahead.

Near the crest I slogged over to one of the spruce trees and went up the rest of the way in its shadow, to keep from skylining myself in the moonlight. But I needn’t have bothered. I could see all the way to the cabin from there and Brit wasn’t in sight. His tracks went right up near it on the left, then vanished among the trees. He must be inside by now—but the cabin was still dark. Good. My timing had been just right. He hadn’t found out yet that I was gone. When he did he was certain to put the floor lamp on to investigate.

I moved downslope, hurrying as much as I could. I was halfway up to the cabin on the other side when the light went on; I could see the glow obliquely through the shutters on the front window, more clearly where it spilled out across the snow from the side window. I started to draw the .22, remembered how cold can numb bare fingers in a short space of time, stick the flesh to metal surfaces, and let it stay where it was.

Snow crunched under my boots as I moved up the last stretch of ground to the cabin, but the wind’s murmurings were loud enough to cover those sounds. The ground directly in front of the cabin door had been thawed and wind-scoured enough so that I didn’t have to walk on snow at all to get to it. I put my left hand on the latch and stood listening: the wind, little unidentifiable noises from inside, the pounding of blood in my ears. The door should be unlocked; I had left it that way and he wouldn’t have had any reason to lock it. I took the gun out, drew and held a breath. And opened the door and went on through in a shooter’s crouch, both arms out and both hands on the .22.

“Hello, Brit,” I said.

He was over near the shelves that contained the remaining few provisions. He whirled, froze with one hand up in an unintentional mockery of a greeting. But I couldn’t see him clearly enough yet to identify him. The lamp was in front and to one side of him so that his face was shadowed under the bill of his cap. Shadows crouched everywhere 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.”