Dragonfire

by Bill Pronzini

“Why should it scare you?”

  “I don’t know. But it does.”

  “Forget it. It’s nothing for you to worry about.”

  “Yes, it is. I care for you, you know that.”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  “I believe you.”

  She took her hand away from mine, brushed the back of it across my cheek. When I looked at her I saw that there were tears in her eyes.

  “It’s so damned unfair,” she said. “What’s happened these past few weeks, what people have done to you. What I’ve done to you.”

  Same words I had said to Eberhardt on Sunday. But they did not seem to mean much anymore; they were just words. I stared up at the flourescent ceiling lights, not saying anything.

  “I’m sorry,” Kerry said. “I really am.”

  “All right.”

  “I’ll make it up to you. Will you let me do that?”

  “How?”

  “By being with you. By not running away from you anymore.”

  “I don’t want your pity,” I said.

  “I don’t pity you. That’s not it.”

  “You don’t love me either. Do you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I can.”

  “And maybe you can’t.”

  “Don’t you want me to try?”

  “I’m not sure what I want right now. Except to see the bastard who shot Eb and me behind bars.”

  “There’s nothing you can do about that.”

  “No,” I said, “I guess there isn’t.”

  More silence. She got a handkerchief out of her purse and wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Then she said, “Do you want me to go?”

  “No.”

  “But you don’t seem to want to talk… .”

  “Not right now. Just sit here with me for a while.”

  “Yes. All right.”

  So she sat there and we looked at each other from time to time and the silence grew heavy, a little awkward. I tried to dredge up some of the old feelings for her—the tenderness, the warmth, the love. They were still there but they would not come to the surface; anger and bitterness sealed them off like an iron door. I needed her, I wanted to believe what she’d said to me, and yet the needing was not central. Too many things had happened. Too many things.

  At least ten minutes passed without either of us saying a word. Finally she got up and leaned over and kissed me gently on the mouth; her lips, like her fingers, were damp and cold. “I think I’d better leave now,” she said.

  “Will you come back tomorrow?”

  “If you want me to.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I want you to.”

  “Can I bring you anything else?”

  “There’s nothing else I need.”

  She tried the smile again; it was a little wobbly but it stayed in place. “It’ll be all right,” she said. “You’ll see.”

  “What will?”

  “Everything. You, me—Eberhardt.”

  “Sure.”

  She seemed to want to kiss me again, but she didn’t do it. She said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” and gathered up her purse and went to the door. I got one more look from there, the poignant kind. Then she was gone.

  I spent some more time staring up at the ceiling, not thinking about much. But my mind wasn’t blank; I kept getting little blips of memory, scenes from Eberhardt’s living room yesterday. Eb lying bloody and twisted on the floor. The Chinese gunman backlit by the sun. The glistening red smears on my hand when I swiped it across my chest. The way the shadows came into the room and swallowed the sunlight. I felt a sudden pain in my right palm, and when I turned the hand over and looked at it I saw little gouged half-moons where I had dug my nails into the skin.

  Pretty soon a nurse came in—not Bella Abzug; a black woman, younger and much more attractive—and announced that I had another visitor. I asked her who it was and she said, “Mrs. Dana Eberhardt. Will you see her?”

  “Yes. Send her in.”

  Dana entered the room a couple of minutes after the nurse went away. She was three years younger than Eb and me, just turned fifty, but she didn’t look her age; she looked no older than forty. Still slender, except for heavy breasts and wide hips. New hairdo: cut short and curled. There had been gray in the brown hair the last time I’d seen her; she had dyed it away. She looked sleek and fit, despite the gravity of her expression and the dark smudges under her eyes. Life in Palo Alto with a Stanford law professor must be agreeing with her.

  “Hello, mug,” she said.

  Mug. Her pet name for me in the days when she had tried to play matchmaker and marry me off to a variety of eligible women. “You’re a mug,” she used to say. “You don’t know what’s good for you. Marriage is a wonderful thing.” And now she was living with a law professor, and Eberhardt was lying in a coma with his insides and maybe his head scrambled by a pair of bullets.

  I think I hated her a little in that moment.

  She came over and stood near the foot of the bed, as if she were afraid to move any closer. “I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me,” she said.

  “It’s always nice to see old friends.”

  I made no effort to keep the bitterness out of my voice, but she took it without flinching. One of her characteristic gestures was to pick at her chin with thumb and forefinger; she did that. Then she made a throat-clearing sound and wet her lips. They were painted a glossy rust-red color, like drying blood. I had never seen her wear that shade of lipstick before.

  “Don’t condemn me,” she said.

  “Why should I condemn you?”

  “I still care for Eb. I never wanted to hurt him.”

  “Then why did you?”

  “I couldn’t live my life for him any longer. I needed a change, a new direction; I needed to be me.”

  “So now you are.”

  “Yes. I’ve been happy these past few months, mug—”

  “Don’t call me mug.”

  “All right. I didn’t think you minded the name.”

  “Well, I do mind it.”

  “All right.”

  “Listen, Dana, why’re you here? What do you want from me?”

  “I don’t want anything from you,” she said. She sounded hurt. “I just wanted to see you—”

  “Give me a little sympathy, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Or maybe you’re looking for forgiveness, somebody to tell you you’re not a bad woman and none of this is your fault. Well, I’m not that person. Try a rabbi, if that’s what you’re after.”

  This time it got to her and she winced. “That’s not fair,” she said.

  “No? Is it fair what happened to Eb?”

  She half-turned away from me. But her eyes were clear; she never cried. Maybe that was a significant thing about her, maybe that explained a lot: she never cried.

  “Don’t you think I feel badly enough as it is?” she said.

  “He must have said terrible things about me. That’s why you’re acting this way.”

  “He never said much of anything about you. Except that he thought you were a whore.”

  “I’m not a whore.”

  “Maybe not. But you still walked out on him for somebody else.”

  “It was over between us. He knew that as well as I did.”

  “The hell he did. You blew him right out of the water, Dana. You tore him up inside.”

  She put her eyes on me again and I watched anger flash in them. “You weren’t married to him. You don’t know how he could be.”

  “I’ve known him as long as you have.”

  “But you didn’t live with him. You think it’s easy, being a cop’s wife? Waiting for something like this to happen, some crazy with a gun to show up on your doorstep?”

  “You put up with it for twenty-eight years.”

  “Yes,” Dana said, “and I got tired of putting up with it. I got tired of his long hours and his moods and his silences. We never talked anymor
e. We never went anywhere. We weren’t going anywhere, can’t you understand that? It was over. It had been for a long time.”

  The rage was thick and hot inside me, tightening my muscles, making the wound in my shoulder throb painfully. But it was not really directed at Dana; she was just a handy object. It was blind, all-encompassing. I was angry at everybody and everything and I wanted to lash out, to hurt someone else.

  “Leave me alone, will you,” I said. “Go carry on your deathwatch somewhere else. Go back to your goddamn law professor, let him tell you what a poor, misunderstood woman you are.”

  She pinched her chin again with tremulous fingers. “Damn you,” she said. “I came in here feeling sorry for you. I thought we were still friends; I thought you’d understand; I thought we could give each other some comfort. But I was wrong. God, how wrong I was.”

  “You’ve been wrong before,” I said. “You were wrong three months ago when you moved out of Eb’s life.”

  She pivoted from the bed and went to the door in hard, thumping steps. With the knob in her hand, she looked back at me. “I don’t care what you think,” she said. “David is a good man, a kind man, and I love him and he loves me. I’m not ashamed of what I did.”

  “David can go to hell,” I said. “So can you.”

  That stung her too; I saw the pain register in her face before she twisted her head around. She pulled the door open, went through it. When she shut it behind her there was a click like the hammer of a gun being cocked.

  It took me a while to calm down, to get myself tightly wrapped again. Then I thought: You were too hard on her, she’s suffering too. But I could not seem to feel sorry for her. Eberhardt, yes, but I had no compassion left for anyone else. Least of all myself.

  My back hurt from lying in one position; I shifted around on the bed until I was resting on my right hip. But the movement aggravated the pain in my shoulder. A yell formed in my throat and I had to clamp my teeth together to keep it from coming out.

  There was one of those hospital buzzers attached to the top of the bed. I grabbed hold of it and jabbed my thumb down on the button. Two minutes later, the young black nurse poked her head inside the door.

  “I could use some coffee,” I said.

  “No coffee. I can bring you some tea.”

  “Okay. Some tea, then.” She started to withdraw, but I stopped her by asking, “Is there any change in Lieutenant Eberhardt’s condition?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “He won’t die,” I said. “He’ll pull through.”

  She just looked at me.

  “He’ll pull through, you hear?”

  “I’ll bring your tea,” she said, and when she closed the door it made the clicking sound again—the sound of a .357 Magnum being cocked.

  Four

  TUESDAY. Greg Marcus came to see me in the morning, alone this time. He still looked haggard and he hadn’t bothered to shave the blond stubble off his cheeks. But he had no news, no fresh leads; he only wanted me to go over things again, on the chance that I had forgotten or overlooked something. Grabbing at straws. The police were dead-ended and he knew I knew it. He did not even try to pretend otherwise.

  A couple of reporters tried to get in to see me, but I told Abrams and the nurses that I didn’t want to talk to them.

  Kerry came again in the afternoon. There was less strain between us this time, mainly because she did not try to cheer me up. She just sat and held my hand and endured the protracted silences between the words we said to each other. I was glad when she was there—she was the only person I wanted to see, except for Marcus or Klein with some word on the gunman—but I was just as glad when she was gone and I was alone again.

  The nurses fed me three meals and let me get up twice to use the toilet. The rest of the time I slept or stared at the walls. I didn’t even make an effort to read the pulp magazines Kerry had brought; I had no interest in reading, no interest in fictional crime or fictional detectives.

  Eberhardt was still in a coma, still in critical condition.

  And I was still angry.

  Wednesday.

  I asked for the Chronicle and Examiner for the past three days and read all the news stories on the shooting and the police investigation. No facts that I didn’t already know. But a lot of crap about my background, the loss of my license; I was hot news again and the journalists were making the most of it. I threw the papers on the floor when I was done with them.

  Two visitors showed up. One was Litchak, the retired fire inspector who lived in the flat below mine in Pacific Heights. The other was Kerry. I couldn’t seem to find much to say to either of them and they didn’t stay long.

  No change in Eberhardt’s condition. Or in mine.

  Thursday.

  They let me get up and stay up for a while, with my left arm in a sling. As long as I didn’t make any sudden moves, I felt almost no pain in my shoulder. But the arm was still stiff; I kept having to make an effort to straighten out all but the little finger on that hand.

  Kerry didn’t come. She called the head nurse, who passed along a message that she had business obligations at her ad agency and she would come again tomorrow. It mattered that she couldn’t make it, and yet it did not matter. I was better off by myself.

  Two other guys I knew came to see me. One of them worked on the Examiner and the main reason he paid his visit was to get himself an exclusive interview; I threw him out verbally after five minutes.

  Eberhardt remained the same. And the police remained stymied: the gunman was still unidentified and still at large.

  Friday.

  Abrams removed half the stitches and allowed as how the wound seemed to be healing satisfactorily. I asked him when I could get out of there. Tomorrow morning, he said.

  Kerry came in the afternoon, very chipper, and made a conspiratorial thing out of giving me a pastrami sandwich she had hidden away in her purse. It was a nice gesture. I told her I was starved for some real food and would wolf the sandwich down after she left, but that was a lie; I had no appetite. I said I would be going home tomorrow, and she said she would drive me and offered to stop by my flat again to pick up some clothes.

  Everything else was status quo.

  Saturday.

  Ben Klein showed up at ten o’clock. Nothing to report. The investigation was not going well, he admitted; nobody in Chinatown was talking, R&I hadn’t turned up any possibles on their computer checks, there weren’t any leads in Eberhardt’s case file or past history or personal effects. He offered to keep a police guard on me for a few more days, but I told him I didn’t want that.

  After Klein left, Abrams came around with a bunch of instructions on how to care for myself, what I should and shouldn’t do, when to come back to have the rest of the stitches taken out. He also gave me some Empirin-and-codeine pills to take if I was bothered by pain.

  At eleven-thirty, Kerry arrived with my clothes. I had some trouble getting into the shirt; she had to help me, and afterward she tied on the sling.

  And at twelve-fifteen I walked out of the hospital with Kerry hanging on to my good arm. We left through the emergency entrance to avoid any reporters who might be lurking around out front. It was a gray day, foggy and cold, and that was good. I was gray inside, shading toward black; sunshine would only have fueled my anger by reminding me of the Chinese gunman backlit and half-invisible in the doorway of Eberhardt’s house.

  Kerry kept up a running stream of chatter on the way crosstown. She had had one of her friends pick up my car, she said, and take it up near my flat; she told me where it was parked. I didn’t pay much attention to the rest of what she said.

  She had also cleaned up the flat. The dustballs and dirty dishes were gone; the furniture gleamed with polish; the place smelled of lemon-scented air freshener. It didn’t look or feel right and it annoyed me. It was like walking into another hospital room—too neat, too antiseptic.

  I said, “Why did you clean the place?”

 
“Well, it was pretty messy… .”

  “I like it messy. It makes me feel at home.”

  “I’m sorry. I thought you’d be pleased.”

  She sounded uncertain and a little hurt. I did not want to be angry at her, of all people; I tightened the wraps on myself and managed a small smile. “It’s all right. I’m glad you were concerned.”

  She came over to kiss me on the cheek. “Are you hungry? I can make something… .”

  “No. I don’t want any food.”

  “Some coffee?”

  “Okay. Some coffee.”

  She went out into the kitchen. I crossed to the pseudo-Hepplewhite secretary that serves as my desk, rummaged around in one of the drawers with my good hand, and came up with the envelope of old photographs. Eberhardt and me on a fishing trip at Black Point. Eberhardt and Dana in his backyard, with their arms around each other, grinning at the camera. Eberhardt, looking awkward and festive, trimming a tree in his living room one Christmas. A tightness formed in my chest; I put the photographs back into the envelope and the envelope away in the drawer. Taking them out had been a morbid thing to do. I was not even sure why I had done it.

  Kerry came in with the coffee and we sat on the couch and looked at each other. She said, “Do you want to talk?”

  “About what?*’

  “About what’s bothering you.”

  “You know what’s bothering me.”

  “Yes, but it’s doing things to you I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t understand them myself,” I said.

  “So you don’t want to talk?”

  “No. Not now.”

  “It’s just that I feel—”

  “What?”

  “That you’re shutting me out. Shutting everybody out, withdrawing into yourself. It scares me.”

  “You said that on Monday.”

  “I can’t help it. I’ve felt that way all week.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said.

  “But I do.”

  “I’ll be fine. When Eberhardt wakes up, when the bastard who shot us is locked away … then I’ll be just dandy.”

  “What if either or both of those things don’t happen?”