In an Evil Time

by Bill Pronzini

  Footfalls, flashlight beam slanting past; shape outside the window moving closer, swinging the light, bending down. In the reflected glare the cop’s face was young, not much more than twenty-five, his expression neither friendly nor hostile. Neutral voice to match: “Evening.”

  “Good—” The word caught in Hollis’s throat; he coughed and got the answer out on the second try. “Good evening, Officer.” His voice sounded all right, the strain an undercurrent too faint to be discernible. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “That stop sign back there. You ran it.”

  Stupid! “I didn’t see it. I guess … I guess I wasn’t paying enough attention.”

  “License and registration, please.”

  He removed the license from his wallet, handed it over. No choice then but to open the glove box. He leaned over, trying desperately to remember if he’d wrapped the Woodsman in the chamois cloth earlier. The flash ray followed his movements. Even if he had wrapped it, and the light picked up the shape and made the cop wonder—

  Open. The bulb light inside showed him that the gun was wrapped and that he’d shoved it back deep; the flash beam didn’t reach it, because the cop didn’t say anything. He let out the breath he’d been holding, fumbled up the registration, quickly shut and locked the compartment again.

  The cop studied his license, then the registration. “Mr. Hollis. Jackson Hollis.”

  “Yes.” His voice shook, but the cop didn’t seem to notice. “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “Keokuk Street address current?”

  “Yes.”

  “West side. Not on your way home, then?”

  “Out for a drive. Truth is, Officer, I had a fight with my wife. A real screamer. If you’re married, you know how it can be sometimes.”

  “I’m married.” Empathy in his tone? Maybe a little. “Alcohol involved? Before, during, or since?”

  “No. Nothing all day.”

  “Mind stepping out of your car?”

  “Not at all. If you’d like me to take a Breathalyzer test …”

  “Just step out, sir.”

  He obeyed, unbending in slow segments, standing ruler-backed with his arms at his sides. The cop held the light on him for a few seconds, then told him to wait there and returned to his cruiser. Hollis squinted against the glare of the headlights. He couldn’t see what the cop was doing inside, but he thought he knew: checking to see if there were any outstanding warrants against him.

  Another car crept by, the driver’s face framed briefly in the side window, gawking. Felon by the roadside, caught. He shook the thought away, tried to will himself into a kind of sleep mode the way a computer is programmed to do. No good; his mind kept churning. Was there anything to make the cop suspicious? No, not even an unpaid parking ticket on his driving record. He had nothing to worry about if he just cooperated, kept his head, masked his emotions.

  It seemed a long time before the cop emerged again. He didn’t approach Hollis; instead he stood just off the Lexus’s rear bumper, in the headlight wash, and began writing in a slender book. Ticket … writing out a ticket. He took his time doing it, glancing up a couple of times. One of the glances seemed to hold on the trunk. No, not the trunk, the license plate. Hollis could feel sweat trickling on him, in spite of the cold night air. Less than five feet between the cop and what lay inside the trunk … what if a sixth sense told him something was wrong? What if he came up and said, “Mind opening your trunk, Mr. Hollis?” All over then. Nowhere to run, nothing more to cover up except Eric’s involvement. He’d say that he killed Rakubian, he’d say he went to the city to talk to him and they argued and Rakubian attacked him and he’d acted in self-defense.…

  The cop finished writing and moved toward him. Hollis stood rigid.

  And the cop said, “Okay,” and extended the ticket. He took it automatically; a little gust of wind tried to tear it from his fingers and he tightened his grip. “Sorry to have to write you up, but running a stop sign the way you did can cause a serious accident.”

  “Yes.

  “Better be more careful from now on.”

  “Yes.”

  “Might want to go on home instead of doing any more driving around. Patch things up with your wife.”

  “Yes.” As if his brain had slipped into a one-word loop.

  “Good luck,” the cop said, and made a little gesture with his forefinger that was half warning and half salute, and turned away.

  Hollis shut himself inside the Lexus. Good luck. Jesus, good luck! It took him two tries to turn the ignition, a few seconds more to steady himself before he eased out onto the road.

  The cop followed him. He’d expected that; he drove well within the legal limit, straight down Crater Road to the intersection with East Valley Road. Full stop at the sign there, flick the turn signal for a left onto East Valley. He made the turn, and again the cop followed, hanging back by a hundred yards or so and matching his speed as he accelerated.

  Hollis’s eyes kept skipping between the road and the rearview mirror. What if he follows me all the way home? I can’t go home with Rakubian in the car, I can’t do that. Have to stop somewhere, 7-Eleven, service station … shake him somehow and pray I don’t run into him again. If he spots me driving back this way he’ll wonder what I’m up to, maybe pull me over again, demand to look inside the trunk. …

  The trailing lights abruptly cut away: the cop had turned off onto the road paralleling Crater, heading back toward town.

  He was alone again, safe again, with Rakubian’s corpse.

  The corkscrew climb into the hills seemed to go on and on endlessly. He felt exposed up here, too, like a bug crawling across a piece of glass; headlights on these mountain roads could be seen for miles, all across the valley and the town. But not tonight—he kept reminding himself of that, for all the good it did. Tonight there was haze in the valley and along the spine of the hills, a thin river of fog flowing down from the north that blurred the distant lights. Another thing in his favor, another reminder: nobody paid any attention to headlights in the Paloma Mountains, took them for granted. If he came upon another car, even a county sheriff’s patrol, the occupants would assume he lived here or was visiting someone who did. The only thing he had to worry about now was driving slow and careful on the sharper turns.

  He was still afraid.

  The encounter with the cop had solidified his fear, jammed it down tight inside him. It would not break loose until he was finished with Rakubian, maybe not even then. He wondered if it would stay with him long after tonight, for as long as he lived, a different kind of cancer inexorably eating away at him.

  He needed to pee again. His bladder felt huge, an overinflated sac with needles attached to the outside … bloated and stabbing pains both. Partway up the winding road, in a little copse of trees, he stopped the car and got out and unzipped. The burning, this time, was acute enough to make him grit his teeth. But he was done quickly for a change, and the pains were gone by the time he started driving again.

  He reached the gate to the Chesterton property without seeing another set of headlights. Unlock the gate, drive through, relock it behind him. Tires crunching gravel as he crawled along the newly built road. The construction site loomed ahead, dead-still and full of broken shadow shapes. Thin curls of mist drifting through the headlamp beams made it seem an even eerier place—like a cemetery in the dead of night. Some of the shapes appeared and disappeared as he swung in among them, and his mind turned them into graveyard images: foundation slabs and staked sections became burial plots, portable toilets became headstones, Dulac’s trailer and the heavy equipment became chimerical crypts.

  His mouth was dry, his face hot, as if he might be running a fever. His consciousness began to shrivel again. Defense mechanism, and he didn’t fight it this time. The only way he would be able to get through what lay ahead was to do it mechanically—an android drone functioning on programmed circuitry.

  He braked long enough to orient himself, crawled ah
ead at an angle toward the wine cellar excavation. The beams picked it out; it might have been a mine shaft cut into the hillside, or an unfinished mausoleum. Tiered rock and dirt gleamed a short distance to the right. He drove as close as he could to the hillside, turning the wheel to bring the rear end around and his lights full on the earth dump. When he shut them off, the darkness pressed down so thickly it was as though he’d gone blind. The illusion brought a brief twist of panic; he opened the door to put the dome light on, kept it open for several seconds after he swung out. Then he stood blinking, scanning left and right, until his eyes adjusted.

  Cold up here, but not as cold as it had been in San Francisco. Not as much wind, either, the fog moving in slow, sinuous patterns. Cricket sound rose and fell; the wind carried the faint rattle of disturbed branches, the odors of pine, madrone, damp earth. The lights of Los Alegres were smeary pinpricks in the ragged veil of fog.

  Top of the world, Ma.

  He shivered, swung around to open the trunk. He didn’t touch the body, not yet. Pick, shovel, disassembled push broom from the garage at home. Utility lantern. Pair of bib overalls, pair of heavy work gloves, pair of old galoshes to protect his shoes, a worn khaki shirt. When he had all of these on the ground, he shed his jacket and pullover and tossed them onto the front seat; donned the shirt, overalls, galoshes, and gloves. Then he lighted the lantern, followed its beam to the earth dump.

  The wheelbarrow wasn’t where he’d seen it on Thursday. Took him a couple of minutes to track it down, over on the far side. He ran it back to the car, the lantern riding inside so that its long ray jumped and wobbled and threw crazy shadows against the fog. He loaded the tools, humped the barrow over bare ground, over a pair of poured slabs and inside the excavation.

  In there he positioned the lantern so the beam held steady on the center section of the floor. Lifted one of the plywood sheets, propped it against the wall out of the way; did the same with a second sheet. The cleared space … long enough and wide enough? Yes. He flexed the muscles in his arms and back. Not thinking now, all but shut down inside.

  He hefted the pick and began to dig.

  10

  Saturday Night

  PICK. Shovel. Loose dirt piled on the plywood to one side. Clods and chunks of rock into the wheelbarrow. Pick. Shovel. Loose dirt. Clods, chunks. Full barrow out to the dump and back again empty. Pick. Shovel …

  He lost all sense of time. His perceptions narrowed to light and dark, cold and sweat-heat, aching strain in arms and shoulders and lower back, chink of metal on stone, thud of metal biting into earth. One barrow full, two barrows full, three barrows full. And the hole growing wider, deeper—standing in it, climbing out, dropping back in until one loose, sloping side touched him at mid-thigh. Deep enough. His strength was flagging by then; the pick had grown as heavy as a ten-pound sledge.

  He tossed it out, sent the shovel after it and himself after the shovel. His body begged for rest. Instead he lifted the barrow’s handles, grunting, and slogged it out and across to the earth pile; emptied it, then wheeled it around to the rear of the Lexus. His eyes stung with sweat and grit. He wiped them clear on his shirtsleeve as he opened the trunk.

  Getting the body out of there and into the wheelbarrow was a grim struggle. It had stiffened in full rigor and he couldn’t unbend it from the S curve. Wielding the pick and shovel had weakened his arms and back, so that he was unable to lift the deadweight as easily as he had at Rakubian’s house. He jerked, pulled, finally got it over the lip, but when he tried to lower it, it slipped down and upended the barrow with an echoing clang. Blank period after that. He had no memory of righting the carrier, hoisting Rakubian into it; he was halfway to the excavation, wheeling his heavy load, before he came back to himself.

  The hole was too narrow. He realized that as soon as he pushed the wheelbarrow alongside. A sound like a hurt animal’s whimper came out of him. More digging, another foot or so of width before the bent and bag-wrapped remains would fit into the hole.

  Upturn the barrow, body thumping on plywood. Pick. Shovel. Loose dirt onto the side pile. Clods, chunks of rock into the carrier. Pick. Shovel. Dirt, clods, chunks. Wide enough now? Almost. Pick, shovel, dirt, clods, chunks. Pick shovel dirt clods chunks. Climb out and take up the handles and wheel the barrow out of the way.

  Roll the dead thing into its grave.

  Prod and pull until it was wedged on its side.

  It fit in there, just barely. Tight squeeze. The Sarouk carpet still had to go in, but that shouldn’t be a problem because the hole was deep enough and overlong by a couple of feet. Plenty of room to spread it and tuck it around the corpse.

  He went and got the rug, stumbling a little on enervated legs. Untied and unrolled it and covered the body, working to find room along the sides, wadding its fringed ends into the two-foot open space. He was panting when he finished; he couldn’t seem to take in enough air. He looked at the shovel, said “No” aloud, and crawled over to the side wall and sat motionless with his legs extended, trying to breathe.

  Sat there.

  And sat there.

  Outside somewhere, a night bird made a low screeching sound. It roused him from an exhausted near-doze. His chest ached but he had his wind back. He heaved upright and picked up the shovel, a lead weight in his hands. He plunged the blade into the pile of loose earth, began to fill in the grave.

  He had no idea, afterward, how long it took. The pile shrank, Rakubian and the Sarouk and the sides of the hole gradually disappeared. And the cellar floor was once more pounded flat and even. He leaned on the shovel, staring down. Gone. Dead and buried and soon to be gone forever. Not to be forgotten, though, not until Jack Hollis was ready for his own fine and private place.

  He felt like puking again.

  Still work to be done. Screw the push broom handle into the base, sweep the section of earth so it looked as though it had never been disturbed. Replace the two plywood sections. Sweep out the remaining loose dirt. Carry the tools outside, then shine the lantern around to be sure there was nothing to make Pete Dulac or anyone in his crew suspicious. It seemed all right, but how could he really be certain? So tired, used up—he had no judgment left. Have to take it on faith. They had no reason to suspect anything wrong, did they?

  Take the barrow out to the dump, empty it, leave it where he’d found it. Disassemble the broom, load it and the pick and shovel into the trunk. Gloves off, galoshes off, overalls off and into the trunk. Take out the blanket, get his pullover and jacket from the front seat, find his away across to the trailer. Water hookup there, fed by the well that had been dug on the property. He stripped to the waist and splashed icy water on his face and upper body, gasping and shivering, to rid his flesh of the stink and residue of his grave digging.

  He dried off quickly with the blanket, yanked on the pullover and jacket. Back at the car, he started the engine, put the heater on high. Sat hugging himself as warm air began to flood the interior. Kept on sitting there because he did not trust himself to drive yet.

  What time was it? He held his watch up to peer at the dial. After ten. Three hours up here. That was how long it took to bury the dead—three hours.

  He sat. The chill in him was bone deep; the heater did no more than warm his skin, make him drowsy. His arms and legs, his torso, tingled with fatigue. He shut off the engine—low on gas and he couldn’t chance running out on the way home. But his eyelids stayed heavy, his mind dull with torpor. Don’t go to sleep, for God’s sake.

  He slept.

  Jerked awake, slept a little more, woke up and stayed awake. Reaction, regeneration: still exhausted but with the edge off, no longer sleepy or muddle-headed. Good because now he was ready for the drive home; bad because his thoughts were focused again.

  I did it. I did this. How could I have done a thing like this?

  The fear still lived in him. Revulsion, too. And now something close to self-hatred.

  He shrank from the thought of facing Eric, Cassie, Angela. If he had to
do it tonight … His watch told him he’d slept for ninety minutes; it was 11:45. Four and a half hours up here. It would be 12:30 by the time he got home. The kids would likely be in bed, but Cassie? Worried that he was out so late, that he hadn’t called, she might wait up for him. Could he hide the truth from her? Not a question of could—he had to. Bad enough what he’d done tonight, but what Eric had done … keep that from her at all cost.

  He’d be all right in the morning, clearheaded and able to deal with the situation. Just get through the rest of tonight the best way he could. The worst was already over … almost over.

  Wasn’t it?

  Except for the porch light, the house was completely dark. So Cassie had gone to bed, too. Even if she was still awake, it would be easy enough to plead exhaustion and go right to sleep.

  Dark house, uneventful drive home … he should be feeling better now, safer. Instead he felt … strange. So drained he’d had to open the window, turn the heater off and the radio on to keep himself alert, but inside he was still wired tight. The tingling that had been in his limbs earlier seemed to have passed by some weird osmosis through skin and flesh, become an internal sensation like a steady, low-voltage electrical pulse. He could feel it in his throat, his chest, down low in his belly.

  He let himself into the house. No light in the hall; that meant Cassie was angry as well as anxious. The ticking of the grandfather clock seemed overloud to him; the odors of cooked meat, furniture polish, air freshener, Cassie’s perfume were strong in his nostrils. As if his senses had become heightened somehow. He took the stairs in an old man’s climb, one riser at a time. Paused in front of Angela’s door, resisted the urge to look in on her and Kenny, and moved ahead to the open door to his bedroom.