Blowback nd-4

by Bill Pronzini

  When the heat of the match flame touched my fingertips, I shook it out and went ahead five paces, ducked down and walked another couple of steps until I was certain I had gone beyond the suspended beam. Then I lit a second match. The amount of rubble was greater now, and the holes in the tunnel walls looked larger, the wood latticework less stable. Sections of wood jutted up from the floor at odd angles, like broken bones. Another half-dozen steps. Match. Half-dozen steps. Match. The poisonous clouds of dust had finally dissipated, but the air was still thick, stifling; I began to have trouble breathing again. Six paces. Match. And I was back near the place where I had lain-I could see marks on the floor and among the debris.

  But I still could not see any sign of daylight ahead.

  Eight feet farther on, the jumble of rock and wood and earth rose as high as three and four feet across the width of the tunnel. I held another match up over my head so I could judge the condition of the ceiling. Still intact, not too deeply pitted, half the supports holding in place; most of the rubble seemed to have come from the walls. But I had no way of telling yet how bad it would be near the entrance. I leaned down into one of the mounds and started to inch my way along, pulling larger rocks and lengths of wood aside gingerly with both hands-aware all the while of the danger of new slides, of upsetting the balance of the mass around me and getting myself buried as a result. Every yard or so I stopped to check my position and the configuration of debris by matchlight. I could hear myself wheezing in a kind of constant counterpoint to the rattling of rocks, the small sounds of movement; I was soaked with sweat. Panic stayed close to the surface, and now I had a growing sense of claustrophobia. The urge to scream was strong inside me: tension, fear and tension.

  I'm going to get out, I thought. I'm not going to die in here, not in here, I'm going to get out.

  The mounds became steadily larger, more tightly packed, and the hollows between them grew shallower. Inevitably, after ten or fifteen or twenty minutes, I reached the end of the line-a solid blockage sloping upward from floor to ceiling.

  Not as much oxygen here, the air still clogged with particles of dust; the burning sensation was back in my chest, and the feeling of giddiness had returned to make my thoughts sluggish-but that helped to keep the panic at bay. I struck a new match and held it up. Most of the ceiling had collapsed here. Not even a chink of daylight showed through.

  Think, remember. How far had I been from the entrance when the cave-in forced me off my feet? Less than ten yards maybe, and I had crawled another two or three. How far had I come from that place where I had lain? Difficult to judge, but it might have been as much as fifteen feet. That left… what? A minimum of five feet to the outside? Five feet of compressed earth and rock and all I had to dig with was my hands and as soon as I started to do that the rest of the ceiling might give way No. I'm going to get out of here.

  I am going to get out of here.

  I clenched the matchbook between my teeth and pulled myself up the slope on knees and hooked fingers. Earth slid away beneath me, a dislodged rock thumped down against my thigh and brought a stinging slash of pain. When one of my hands touched the edge of a timber, I anchored my body and managed to get a match free and flaming. Near the top, now, the ceiling was a foot over my head, scarred by a deep trough. The timber was edged at an angle into the trough, half-buried in the rubble, and on top of it was a huge oblong of broken limestone.

  I eased away from there, laterally to my right, and used another match-not many left now, have to ration them. Just rock and earth here, no shattered supports within a three-foot radius of what looked to be the sealed juncture of ceiling and debris. Dig at this spot, then-hurry! Air running out, time running out…

  I scraped at the earth, dug rocks loose and let them slide down past my body. Dust misted around me, and the dizziness got worse, and my thoughts seemed to break up into disjointed fragments; I could feel myself slipping back again into that timeless emptiness, conscious of little but the movement of my hands and the overwhelming need to get free.

  Depression opening up, widening into a kind of tunnel-tunnel within a tunnel. Use a match. No air for a match. And my hands digging, digging, body wiggling forward, if the ceiling is going to collapse, let it be now or let me get out, shifting earth, rocks thumping, can't breathe, oh God please don't let me black out Light.

  I heaved a rock out of the way and there was a blinding dusty ray of it two feet beyond my head.

  The illusion of timelessness vanished in a flood of wild relief, each of my senses heightened, I heard myself begin whimpering like a child just starting to awaken from a nightmare. My hands tore at the earth in a kind of controlled frenzy, and the light grew larger, larger, I could smell clean air, I could breathe, and my head came out into the air and the light, I wedged my shoulders free, and then I lunged and scrabbled the rest of my body through the opening and down the outside wall of the slide, felt it shift and grumble under my skidding weight, and lost my balance and rolled over twice amid a clattering of rock and finally came up on my hands and knees at the edge of the slope.

  Inside the mine there was a low-pitched rumbling; dust spewed out through the hole I had made, cut off again as the hole disappeared under a cascade of rock. The rumbling went on for ten seconds-and it was quiet again, I was wrapped in silence and heat and light and sweet fresh air.

  A little awed, I thought: I did it, I got out.

  I knelt there with the sun hot on my back, breath rasping in my throat. Then I pulled back on my knees, saw the torn and filthy fronts of my shirt and trousers, a thin cut on my left forearm matted with dirt and dried blood, the broken-nailed, bruised fingers on both hands. Reaction set in; tremors shook my body, left me weak and nauseated. The ordeal in the mine shaft seemed to recede in my memory, as if it were a surreal dream, as if it had happened only within the spaces in my mind.

  What if he's still out here somewhere?

  The thought came with alarming suddenness, cementing reality. I pulled my head around and pawed at the sweat blurring my eyes, got them focused on my surroundings. But there was nobody in sight; the flat and the crumbling outbuildings were still shrouded in heavy stillness, my car gleamed with bright reflections where I had parked it.

  Gone, long gone.

  Who, damn it? Who?

  Anger seeped into me, a good sharp purging fury that enabled me to move, to function. I got to my feet, swaying, but I was going to be able to walk all right, I would not fall down again. I went down the slope, feeding on the rage, using it to pull my thoughts into logical patterns. The sunlight faded, disappeared altogether for a moment as I crossed the flat in a stumbling run; the clouds I had seen massing above the high peaks had started to flow westward.

  I dragged the car door open, slid onto the sun-heated Naugahyde. And sat there fidgeting, going over it, going over it, while I stared sightlessly through the windshield. It began to come together, as I had known inside the mine it would-slowly at first and then rapidly, all of it clicking into place like bits of colored tile in a mosaic.

  I knew who he was then.

  Oh God yes, I Knew who he was.

  The back of my neck prickled; urgency made me reach out immediately to twist the key in the ignition. Into The Pines to call Cloudman? No, it had to be the camp, I had to know if he was there now. And if he was, I had to get Harry to help me put him under citizen's arrest. Not because it had become a personal thing, I could not let myself think that way; because he had killed two men and almost made me number three, and he was capable of anything at any minute-any damned thing at all. There was just no time to waste taking myself out of it and letting the authorities handle him.

  I jammed the gear lever into drive, not looking at myself in the rear-view mirror, because I did not want to see what I looked like just yet, and spun the car into a turn and took it bouncing down the wagon trail to the county road.

  Eighteen

  The need for urgency made me drive too fast, and my arms began to ache from fight
ing the wheel in and out of turns. I did not have much strength left. Far back in my mind was the thought that once I stopped functioning on tension, all the little hurts and the weakened condition of my lungs might lead to a serious collapse; but I held it away, kept my attention hard on the road and on what lay ahead.

  When I came finally out of the trees on the last long incline, to where I had a clear look at the gravel circle, I saw that all the cars were parked within it- all of them. There was something else drawn up there too, off on one side: a covered U-Haul trailer. So that's how he planned to get the Daghestan out, I thought. Wait until the time was right, make sure there was nobody around, and then carry it from its hiding place to the U-Haul…

  Somebody was walking along the beach toward the pier-Harry, it looked like-and he broke into a trot as soon as he saw me. I brought the car skidding into the circle, jerked on the emergency brake, and swung out before it quit rocking. Harry came running up; he stopped abruptly when he got a good look at me. His eyes widened into an incredulous stare.

  “Good God,” he said, “what happened to you?”

  “Never mind that now. Where's Jerrold?”

  “But you look-”

  “Come on, Harry, where the hell is Jerrold?”

  “I don't know. At his cabin, maybe. He just came back twenty minutes ago with that U-Haul trailer, and I've been on edge ever since; he looked in pretty bad shape-”

  “He's in bad shape, all right,” I said grimly. “He's killed two people in the past three days.”

  “What!”

  “You heard me. Jerrold is the one who murdered Terzian, and he did for Bascomb the same way.”

  Harry looked numb; his face had lost some of its color. “Bascomb's dead?”

  “Yeah. Listen, we've got to find him and put him under wraps-quick. He's a dangerous lunatic, there's no telling what he might do next.”

  “You sure of all this?”

  “Dead sure.”

  “Oh my God,” he said, “I never thought…”

  “It'll take the two of us,” I said. “We'll get one of the others to go in and call Cloudman. I don't like it, but it's got to be that way. You with me?”

  He passed a hand across his face. His eyes had the kind of sick, pained look that comes with the acceptance of an ugly truth. “Yeah,” he said, “I'm with you.”

  “All right. We'd better be armed when we brace him.”

  “Rifles in my cabin,” he said.

  We ran across to it and up onto the porch and inside. Harry dragged the. 22 rifle down, handed it to me, and then took the Marlin lever-action for himself. There was ammunition in a drawer at the bottom of the rack; we stood there feeding shells into the guns. The. 22 felt awkward and alien in my hands; I had not handled firearms much since quitting the cops, and I had never cared for the things anyway because I had seen too often and too graphically what they were capable of doing to the human body.

  I said, “If Mrs. Jerrold is with him, we get her out of the way first. Same goes for anybody else that might be around. We carry the weapons muzzle down, we don't do or say a thing until he's alone and vulnerable. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “And no shooing if it can be avoided. There's been enough killing around here.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

  “Let me handle it. You follow my lead.”

  He nodded jerkily, snapped and locked the Marlin.

  Outside again, we went along the lakefront at a fast walk. The clouds had blanketed the sky now, and the afternoon light had a bright grayish, metallic tint. The air smelled of ozone; that, too, seemed faintly metallic. The stillness had a breathless quality; you could not even hear the cry of a bird.

  When we came up through the woods near the Jerrolds' cabin, I led Harry off the path and through the trees to where we had a screened look at the front of it. The door was open and two packed suitcases were sitting side by side at the top of the porch steps, but there was nobody in sight.

  Harry said, “What now?”

  “One of us goes over to see if he's there, or if she is. Jerrold thinks I'm dead-never mind why for now-so if he sees me too soon, he might panic. It had better be you, then; I'll cover you from here.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Get him out and down off the porch. Alone and unarmed. Tell him you want to talk to him about the loan, something like that.”

  A quick dip of his head, and he made his way out of the woods and crossed toward the front of the cabin. I moved closer to the perimeter, to where I could lean against the bole of a spruce and get a clear angle on the entire width of the place. Tension made taut ropes of the muscles in my shoulders and back; the taste in my mouth was metallic-it felt the way the sky looked and the air smelled.

  I watched Harry climb slowly onto the porch, holding his Marlin vertically at his side. He hesitated, and then peered in. Seconds later he turned and came down the steps and moved briefly around to the rear. Then he hurried back toward where I was, motioning for me to come out.

  He said as I joined him, “Nobody there.”

  “Any idea where he could have gone?”

  He shook his head.

  “What about Mrs. Jerrold?”

  “No. She was down by the lake a little earlier.”

  “Was anybody else there?”

  “Cody, I think.”

  “Did Jerrold see them together?”

  “I don't know, he might have. You don't think-”

  “He's a madman, Harry, you bet that's what I'm thinking.”

  We ran back to the path and up through the trees past Cabin Four. When we came out in front of Five, Knox and Talesco were piling their gear at the foot of the steps, making preparations to leave. As soon as they saw us-the rifles, the condition I was in-they both came hurrying over.

  Knox said, “What's going on?”

  I said, “Ray Jerrold-you see him in the past few minutes?”

  “Yeah, not long ago,” Talesco said. “Looked like he was going hunting.”

  “What?”

  “He had a shotgun with him.”

  Harry made a sound between his teeth.

  Talesco said, scowling, “Hey, what the hell is-?”

  He did not finish the sentence; he did not finish it because in that same instant there was a sudden low booming explosion, a sound so ominous on the dead-still air that my skin crawled and my stomach heaved in convulsive reaction.

  And I was running again, without thinking, just running up the path full speed while I dragged the rifle up across my chest. I could hear Harry at my heels, Knox and Talesco pounding after us. We raced past my cabin, raced through the woods toward Cabin Two; my ears strained for more sounds, something to give me an idea of what to expect, but it was quiet again, a quiet so intense it was like a scream just beyond the range of human hearing.

  The moment I ran around a hook in the path and saw Cody's cabin, I could also see two people standing off to one side of it at the rear, looking up along a steep incline to the near side. It was Cody and Mrs. Jerrold, and they were just standing there, the kid with a drink in his hand, neither of them looking frightened or excited-just curious, a little confused.

  They either heard or saw us corning, and turned. Cody said, “You hear that noise? It-” He stopped short, staring at the rifle in my hands, at my face, as I barreled up to him.

  I said, “It came from up that slope?”

  Cody blinked at me. Harry was there now, and Talesco and Knox: all of us grouped on the grass, tension crackling among us as tangibly as raw electricity.

  “Where did it come from, damn you!”

  Mrs. Jerrold's face had gone suddenly pale, and there was the beginnings of fright in her eyes. She said, “Up there, yes, it came from up there,” and pointed at the incline.

  I ran up the slope, shoving my way through underbrush, trampling a high patch of ferns, holding the rifle up and ready; the rest of them followed. Two-thirds of the way up, I could see a small flattene
d-out area, a kind of curving glade surrounded by the high boughs of spruce and lodgepole pine. It was dark in there, but you could see well enough.

  Yeah, you could see well enough.

  I stopped at the edge of the glade-stopped and turned, looking for Mrs. Jerrold, reaching for her when I realized she was close by. But I was too late; she had gotten to where she could see what lay in there. She made a horrified whimpering noise, and her eyes rolled up and she staggered, started to go down. Harry caught her, turned her immediately and pulled her away down the slope.

  Cody and Knox and Talesco and I stared mutely at what was left of Ray Jerrold. He lay stiffly on his back, arms flung out; his face and head and the entire upper third of his body were covered with black scorch marks and ribbons of blood, and the head itself was nearly severed. Beside him on the grass was the shotgun he had been carrying the first time I'd seen him, its barrel curled back into blackened strips. The air was foul with the stench of cordite, of charred metal.

  Beside me Knox said softly, “Blowback.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Blowback is what happens when somebody fires a weapon like Jerrold's with a solid blockage of the barrel. The unreleased load causes the thing to explode, splitting and peeling the barrel, and the shooter takes the full charge in his face and upper body. It happens to hunters sometimes, when they're not careful and they let the muzzle nose down into thick mud or clay. The stuff dries and expands and seals the barrel: blowback.

  There might have been a certain terrible irony in the way Jerrold had died, but if there was, I could not pursue it now. The anger had drained out of me, and I felt empty, a little sick; fatigue was seeping into every corner of my body. I could not seem to think clearly any longer.