Boobytrap

by Bill Pronzini

  I told him. Quick and terse, not pulling any punches. The only things I didn’t go into were the missing shotgun and the fact that his son was very likely in Latimer’s company this minute.

  “Jesus!” he said when I was done. “You’re telling me Latimer’s been up there since last Thursday?”

  “Waiting for you to show, evidently. He must’ve found out somehow about your cabin up here and that you were going on vacation.”

  “I never made a secret of it. But why would he go after me at the lake instead of—Oh shit, you don’t think ...”

  “What?”

  “Not just me, Marian and Chuck, too?”

  “Easy. There’s no reason to believe that.”

  “You’ve got to get them out of there!”

  “I will. Just stay cool. He hasn’t done anything to them in four days, he’s not going to. It’s you he’s after.”

  “But why at the lake? There has to be a reason.”

  “Whatever it is,” I said, “it’s keeping him here. Tied in, maybe, with the reason he used different types of bombs on Cotter and Turnbull. Something different for you, too.”

  “Different. Bombs, boobytraps ...”

  The way he said that prompted me to ask, “Suggest something to you?”

  Span of silence. Then Dixon said, talking to himself as much as to me, “Tripwire, that’s how Cotter... and in the judge’s boobytrap, those sharpened steel rods... Christ almighty!”

  “Pat?”

  “Not rods, stakes—sharpened stakes! That’s why he’s up there waiting for me ... the sick son of a bitch!”

  I said sharply, “Make sense.”

  “His boobytraps, all three of them, must be tied to the penal code.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “The statute we convicted him on—the boobytrap statute, Chapter Three point Two of the California Penal Code. One of the section subdivisions reads... let me think... it says ‘Boobytraps may include but are not limited to explosive devices attached to tripwires or other triggering mechanisms, sharpened stakes, and lines or wire with hooks attached.’ Hooks. You see it?”

  I saw it, all right, the way Latimer had twisted the statute to suit his own perverted brand of revenge. My hand was slick on the receiver as I got to my feet. “Fishhooks,” I said.

  “Has to be. Something to do with fishhooks.”

  And in my mind, then, I was reliving a few minutes of yesterday. Seeing Chuck emerge from the storeroom under the deck, carrying his father’s heavy tackle box. Hearing him say Dad’s got a lot more junk in here than I remember. Feeling the weight of the box as I lugged it up into the cabin, set it on the floor. Not hard enough to jar it, but I could have, and if I had ...

  “Pat,” I said, “how fast can you get a bomb squad up here?”

  “... You have an idea where he put it?”

  “I think so. Yeah.”

  “Where, for God’s sake?”

  “Your tackle box, the one you keep in the storeroom.” That’s why the padlock was off the storeroom door, I was thinking. The second one, from the boathouse, was to confuse the issue. “How fast on the bomb squad?”

  “Nearest one’d be Sacramento. They’d have to assemble and fly in by helicopter... couple of hours, soonest.”

  “Okay. One thing, Pat. I’m not leaving here with your family until I’m sure Latimer has been neutralized.”

  “That’s not your problem. The county sheriff—”

  “It’ll take him and deputies a while to get here from Quincy.” My problem, all right, and for more reasons than that one. “You’ll have to call them, let them know. No time for me to do it, and you’ve got the authority.”

  “First thing. Where’ll they find Latimer?”

  I told Dixon which cottage he’d rented. “He may be there, he may not. I’ll try to pinpoint him. Have the sheriff look for me at Judson’s.”

  “You make sure Marian and Chuck are safe before you do anything else.”

  “I will. Have you talked to Marian?”

  “This morning? No.”

  “Well, I doubt they’re together. Chuck’s gone fishing at Chuck’s Hole. I’ll have to go get him.” Dixon said something but I kept talking through it. “You do the explaining to Marian—I’ll have her call you from Judson’s. Don’t tell her anything about Strayhorn being Latimer or about the boobytrap. She doesn’t need to know any of that yet.”

  “All right. Move, will you?”

  “Moving,” I said.

  I banged the phone down and went out of there on the run.

  THIRTEEN

  MARIAN WAS THE FIRST HURDLE, THE EASY one. I hammered on the cabin door, different hopes colliding against one another in my mind: that the joint fishing trip had been canceled and the boy was home or had gone to Chuck’s Hole alone, that there hadn’t been anything sly or sinister in Latimer’s invitation yesterday, that Marian was here for me to talk to, that she wasn’t here because then I could get after Chuck, Latimer, both of them that much sooner....

  She was there. She opened up after a few seconds, started to smile when she saw me, turned it upside down when she got a good look at my face. “What is it?” she said, alarmed. “What’s the matter?”

  Not answering, I eased in past her and kept going into the front room. The tackle box was where I’d set it yesterday, against a side wall. Small, cold relief that it hadn’t been moved again and made even more dangerous. Latimer’s boobytrap bomb wasn’t the main worry right now.

  Marian had come up behind me. I turned to face her, tried to keep my voice neutral as I asked, “Chuck go fishing with Jacob Strayhorn this morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “To Chuck’s Hole?”

  “As far as I know. What in heaven’s name—”

  “Listen to me, Marian,” I said. “I’m going to ask you to trust me and do what I tell you, without question or argument. I just got off the phone with Pat. This is what he wants, too.”

  She opened her mouth, shut it again, and nodded once.

  “Take my car and drive to Judson’s.” I had the keys in my hand; I pushed them into hers, closed her fingers around them. “Call Pat from there—he’s home. He’ll explain what this is all about. Then stay there and wait for me. Okay?”

  Another nod. “Chuck?” she said.

  “I’m going to Chuck’s Hole right now. I’ll bring him to Judson’s as soon as I can.”

  Her eyes burned into mine, searching. Five, six, seven beats; neither of us blinked or looked away. Then, wordlessly, she caught up her purse from where it was looped over the back of a chair and headed for the door.

  I went to the side wall, avoiding the tackle box, and grabbed one of Pat’s sacked fishing poles to use for protective coloration. Marian didn’t say anything when I came outside with it, nor did she question me when I told her to lock up. Together we went over the rise and onto the Zaleski property, moving fast but not running. She gave me one last look before we parted, her for the car and me for the dock and Zaleski’s skiff; it told me what she was thinking and made me grit my teeth, the sweat run on my upper body.

  He’s in your hands. Don’t let anything happen to him.

  I won’t, I vowed. My fault if he’s harmed in any way and how could I ever forgive myself for that?

  I threw the sacked pole into the skiff, clambered in after it. The outboard was cold and cranky; it took three or four minutes and a string of cusswords to get it working. What if it quit on me before I got over there? No, the hell with that kind of thinking. If it quit, I’d fix it; the screwdriver Nils Ostergaard had given me was still wedged under the seat.

  Out on the lake, with the throttle wide open, I beat myself up a little more by wondering if I should have made the connection last night between what had been happening up here and the bombing threat against Pat Dixon. The missing padlocks, Ostergaard’s suspicions and his sudden death, the news that Strayhorn wasn’t Strayhorn... was there enough in that to intimate a plot against Dixon, a link wit
h the San Francisco bombings? Maybe not. Probably not. Quantum leap from one to the other without so much as a hint that Dixon was number three on the bomber’s hit list. I’m not psychic and I’m not Sherlock Holmes. Still ... I’d taken long speculative leaps before, made connections that at the time had seemed farfetched. Slipping. Losing the intuitive edge I’d once had. At the least I should’ve smelled enough wrong to keep the kid away from Strayhorn this morning....

  Get off that, too. What’s done is done, what’s coming is all that matters. No mistakes when you get to Chuck’s Hole, when you drop the fisherman’s pose and the gun comes out.

  The outboard sputtered and rattled a couple of times as I neared the far shore, but it didn’t conk out on me. No time lost on that account. Five minutes lost on another, though: I thought I was pointed straight for the inlet that led to Chuck’s Hole, but it had been pre-dawn when the boy took me into it, and coming out I had not had a good look at landmarks, so I missed it now by a couple of hundred yards. I had to swing back and forth twice before I spotted the right opening in the dense forest growth.

  Sweat soaked my shirt as I eased in there, turned clammy once I was out of the sun and into the dank, murky woods. I cut the engine, hauled up one of the oars and poled upstream the way Chuck had, through a hundred yards of twists and turns. I could hear the snowmelt bubbling down the terraced rise before I saw the series of steps themselves. The mud beach where we’d left the Dixon boat was hidden for another few seconds, then it slid into view—

  Empty.

  No sign of Chuck’s skiff or any other.

  Ripples on my back as I poled closer for a better look at the beach. What marks remained there were not fresh; no craft and no people had been here this morning.

  The shape of what Latimer was up to began to come clear then—and I damned myself again for not anticipating the possibility. Savagely I slashed at the water with the oar, slashed at the bank and the snarls of tree roots until I got the skiff turned around and moving downstream. The return trip seemed to take twice as long, even though the current helped carry me along. When I came into the sun glare on the lake, I was breathing hard and my head felt swollen, blood-heavy. The outboard fired instantly; I opened the throttle wide, heading southwest.

  There were other boats out now. Somebody hailed me from one—Cantrell, I think—but I barely glanced his way. I sat bowed forward, staring at the line of cottages along the south shore. Buildings seldom look the same from lakeside as they do from a shore road, despite the fact that each was different enough from its neighbors. It was not until I’d come to within a hundred yards of the shoreline, running parallel to it, that I was able to pick out the green-shingled A-frame with the dogwood bushes along its west side.

  A skiff was tied to the dock float, a piece of canvas thrown over it. The canvas failed to cover it completely; I could tell from forty yards off that it wasn’t the rented craft Strayhorn—Latimer—had been piloting last night. It was the Dixon boat. No question of that, either.

  I came in too fast, banged the prow and the port side against the float end before I got the power shut all the way down. The skiff bounced off, nearly capsized. I had to come in again, cussing myself, and it was another couple of minutes until I was on the dock with the bow line tied off. No hurry, I told myself, you know there’s no hurry—but the urgency remained strong in me just the same. I ran along the dock, dragging the .38 out of my jacket, then up along the side of the A-frame and around to the front.

  No Chrysler. Long gone by now.

  I started toward the front door, but what the hell good would a check inside do me? Latimer wouldn’t have left anything useful behind, and enough time had been wasted already. I ran back to the dock, untied the skiff. The outboard cooperated again; I went on a beeline to Judson’s.

  Marian stood waiting on the dock, as I’d expected she would be. Mack Judson was with her. They both hurried down as I powered in alongside the gas pumps, and Judson held the skiff steady as I clambered out. The tightness around his mouth told me he knew what was going on—as much as Marian knew, anyway. He had nothing to say, and that was good because after the one glance at him, I gave all my attention to her.

  She was drawn about as tight as you can get, the way a cocked crossbow is drawn tight. I didn’t touch her; I was afraid that if I did it would trigger her in some way. Not into hysterics—she was not the type—but into some other reaction that I would not know how to cope with.

  She said between her teeth, “Where’s Chuck?”

  “Marian ...”

  “Where is he? Where’s my son?”

  “I don’t know. He wasn’t at Chuck’s Hole.”

  “Not at Latimer’s cottage, either. I saw you stop there before you came here.”

  Latimer, she’d said. Not Strayhorn.

  My expression must have told her what I was thinking. She said, “I made Pat tell me, all of it. Latimer has Chuck, hasn’t he. Don’t lie to me. He has my son.”

  “It looks that way. Your boat’s tied at his dock and his car’s gone.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, popped them open again. And made a fist and slugged me in the chest, hard enough to hurt. It was a gesture of rage and frustration, but not one directed at me personally, even if it was deserved that way. She needed to lash out at something, somebody, and I was handy; she hardly seemed aware that she’d done it. It would have been all right with me if she’d belted me again, knocked me flat on my ass and then added a few kicks for good measure.

  Judson said, “I think I saw his car go by about six-fifteen, six-twenty. I was getting some firewood and I caught a quick glimpse. Didn’t notice if there was anybody in the car with him.”

  I glanced at my watch. A few minutes past eight-thirty. “Little better than two hours ago,” I said, and thought but didn’t say: They could be in Nevada by now, anywhere within a hundred-and-fifty-mile radius.

  “The law ought to be here any minute,” Judson said. “Sheriff Rideout can put out... what’s it called? All points bulletin?”

  “There’s already one out on Latimer. We’ll need a two-state bulletin on the kidnapping, and the FBI has to be notified. Pat can get that done faster than the sheriff. He’s got to be told in any case.”

  “Use the phone in my cabin. Rita’s there, she can look after Marian—”

  “I don’t need looking after,” Marian said. She sounded better, back off the edge; the punch she’d thrown had taken some of the quivering tension out of her. “Where would he take Chuck?” she asked me.

  “No idea.”

  “Why did he take him? Why... kidnap ...”

  I had a couple of notions about that, but I was not about to get into them with her. I let her have a half-truth instead: “No telling what’s in the head of a man like Latimer.”

  “If he hates Pat so much...” She let the rest of it trail off. I could feel the shudder that went through her. At least one of the notions had crossed her mind, too.

  I had her arm now, and the three of us were moving off the dock. There was nobody else around. Except for Rita Judson we were the only ones who knew what was about to go down here, but that would change as soon as the sheriffs contingent showed up. They’d come in force; there was no other way for county law to respond to the presence of a suspected serial bomber, an armed boobytrap, and the imminent helicopter arrival of a bomb squad.

  Judson said awkwardly, “The boy’ll be all right, Marian. You got to believe that. He’ll be back to you safe and sound.”

  Hollow words, as heavy as stones dropped in the bright morning. Marian didn’t respond to them, and neither did I.

  At the cabin Judson led us into the kitchen where their phone was. Rita tried to steer Marian into another room, but she wasn’t having any of that. She stayed close beside me, her fingers digging into my arm.

  I asked her, “Pat say he’d be waiting at home?”

  “Yes. For one of us to call about Chuck.”

  She read the number off to me and I
made the call. Dixon must have been sitting on the phone; his voice said “Yes?” a fraction of a second after the first circuit ring sounded. I explained the situation, straight and fast and in as emotionless a tone as I could muster.

  Long silence. Coming to terms with it, I thought, getting himself in hand. When he finally spoke, his voice was hard, raspy. “If I have the chance,” he said, “I’ll make Latimer pay for this. I’ll make him pay in blood.”

  “Pat—”

  “I’m all right,” he said.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m all right. County sheriff get there yet?”

  “Not yet. Any minute.”

  “You haven’t called his office, notified them about the... about Chuck?”

  “I just got back. You’re the first call.”

  “Keep it that way. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Two-state APB, and the FBI—”

  “You don’t have to tell me what to do.”

  “Easy, Pat.”

  “Sure, easy. What kind of car is Latimer driving?”

  “Ten-year-old Chrysler LeBaron. Tan, pretty beat up.”

  “License number?”

  I gave it to him from memory.

  “Okay,” he said. Then he said, “Marian? Does she know?”

  “Yeah. She’s right here, I’ll put her on—”

  “No. Wait... all right, let me talk to her. But you get her out of there as soon as you can. Bring her back to the city.”

  “Your place?”

  “No. The Doyles’. She’ll give you the address.”

  “Where’ll you be?”

  “Don’t know yet. Maybe here, maybe the D.A.’s office.”

  “What about the bomb squad?”

  “On their way from Sacramento.”

  “Yeah, I figured that. I meant the SFPD bomb unit. For the sweep of your house.”

  “Oh ... been and gone. They didn’t find anything.”

  “Then why don’t I just bring Marian home?”

  “Goddamn it, do what I tell you!” Sharp, borderline savage. “The Doyles’, understand? Now put her on.”

  I handed her the receiver, went out of the kitchen to give her some privacy. Both Judsons followed me, but I had nothing to say to them just then and I kept on going, outside. I stood in the direct sunlight, waiting for its heat to warm me. It didn’t happen; I could not even feel it on the bunched skin of my neck and shoulders.