Double

by Bill Pronzini

  What I needed was a barrel cactus. And what I saw, on the other side of the wash, leaning toward a path of sun that streamed through the tree branches, was one of the cylindrical, spine-studded plants. To me, it was as good as finding a lake.

  I got up and stumbled over to the cactus, running my hand over its trunk, not caring that the thorns scratched my skin. It was a small one —around three feet high—but large enough to contain enough liquid to refresh me and get me back to civilization. Reaching into the pocket of my jeans, I found the Swiss Army knife. Thank God I’d stuffed it in there before I’d jumped out of the vent from the dungeon.

  I opened the knife to the largest blade and began sawing at the cactus a few inches below its crown. It was tough and fibrous, and the knife cut slowly. I gave in to my impatience and hacked at it. In a few minutes I yanked the crown off like the lid of a pot.

  Dropping the crown, I reached inside the cactus and scooped out a handful of the wet pulp. I pressed it to my mouth, sucking and gulping, feeling the moisture trickle down my face and throat and under my blouse. I reached in for more pulp, cupping my hands carefully now so I wouldn’t waste any. It was sticky and bitter-tasting and heavenly.

  My stomach gave a sudden contraction, and I warned myself to take it easy. There was nothing in it—hadn’t been for almost two days now —and I didn’t want to dehydrate myself further by getting sick. I took my time sucking the pulp and resting, and when I felt stronger, I cut out chunks of the cactus and stuffed them in my pockets. They would provide extra moisture in my trek back across the desert.

  Then I began moving toward the nearby outcropping of rock. I went slowly this time, telling myself that my earlier panic had cost me valuable strength and energy. Sugarman’s killer was not out here looking for me; he’d have been beating the brush in that wash long before this if he were. In all likelihood, he was waiting at the house, thinking I’d eventually double back that way.

  I climbed the rocky outcropping and stood shading my eyes and peering around. At first I saw nothing but the brush-dotted sand stretching to the hills. But then I made out a leaning black spire with a dark square next to it. And behind it, a series of lumps. It had to be the outlines of the water tower, the loading platform, and the house.

  I looked up at the sun, taking a fix on my position. Since the house was southeast of here, I’d be walking with the sun more or less at my back. It would beat down on my head and shoulders, but at least I wouldn’t be blinded by it.

  Scrambling down off the rocks, I began my long trek. I moved carefully, stopping in what shade I found to suck on the chunks of cactus I carried. The sun sank lower and its rays were less punishing. I judged the time to be about five o’clock.

  After what must have been an hour, I finally reached the sandstone outcropping several hundreds of yards away from the water tower. I paused beyond it, resting and sucking moisture from my last piece of cactus. Then I started up the steep, sandy slope and, when I had reached it, cautiously poked my head over the top.

  In the distance, the house lay quiet in the afternoon heat. The Cadillac was still parked in front. And beyond it now was a maroon car—some sort of compact. My spirits rose slightly. It could be help. If I could get to the shed beside the loading dock, I could watch and wait. And after dark, if nothing else happened, I could walk to the ranger station—maybe hitch a ride, if there was some traffic out this way—and summon the law.

  I stood, ready to drop to the ground if I heard any sound. All remained quiet. I slid down the other side of the outcropping, the rocks scraping my already battered flesh, and staggered toward the shed.

  I was about twenty yards away from it when the man stepped out from behind it with a gun in his hand and opened fire at me.

  A buzzing noise whined close to my ear, and then the shot cracked. Panic ripped through me. I whirled and ran back toward the outcropping, my feet churning on the rocky ground.

  A second buzzing noise. A second crack. My goal was too far away. I knew I wouldn’t make it—

  I felt a jarring impact in the middle of my body. It staggered me and pitched me forward as I heard the third shot. My face hit the sand. Numbness spread through me; the heat seemed suddenly gone, replaced by an icy, enveloping cold.

  I thought: My God, I’m going to die....

  42 “WOLF”

  The private road that led in and up to what the Darrows’ gardener had called the old Matthews place was full of ruts and holes and dislodged rocks, the product of countless winter rains and maybe a flash flood or two. The rental car had a lousy suspension system, so that I had to drive at a crawl in order to keep from banging the top of my skull on the headliner at each bump. It was a little like being inside a big box that somebody was shaking up and down, none too gently.

  After better than seven miles of this, I came up out of a dry wash to the top of a rise and saw the house. It was the one in Lauterbach’s photographs, all right, and an even weirder sight in reality. No wonder the gardener had called Leonard Matthews crazy as a coot; the place looked as if it had been designed and built by one of the mad characters in the old Shudder Pulps.

  There was a car parked on the big flat area in front and to one side, a dusty white Cadillac. Beyond it, in the empty desert that fell away to the northwest, I could see the remains of the water tower and the loading dock. The railroad spur track, too: broken up by time and the elements, pieces missing, ties missing, parts of it hidden by sagebrush and greasewood, making a snaky line toward the eroded, humpbacked hills that rose behind the house. I drove on down toward the house and parked next to the Caddy. My mouth was dry and dusty; before I got out, I drank some of the bottled water I’d bought in Borrego Springs on the advice of the gardener. It had been good advice: this definitely was not a place you’d ever want to be caught in without water.

  Nobody came out of the house. But then, if the Caddy’s owner was inside, he might not have heard me drive up; there were some big things on the roof that looked like air-conditioning units and they were making a hell of a racket. In contrast, the high rocks and the sunblasted desert were silent, motionless, empty.

  I went over to the Cadillac and looked through the driver’s window. The first thing I saw were wires hanging down from under the wheel—ignition wires, as if somebody had been trying to hot-wire the car. On impulse I tried the door. It was unlocked, and I opened it and leaned inside. The interior didn’t contain anything interesting that I could see. Neither did the glove box: no registration, nothing that told me who the Caddy belonged to.

  I continued on to the house. The front door was recessed in an opening that looked like the mouth of a cave, and it was standing wide open. I poked my head inside and called out a greeting.

  No answer.

  “Is anybody here?”

  No answer.

  I went into a wide foyer that had five archways opening off it. I took the one straight ahead and found myself in a sunken living room with a fireplace in the middle. The Darrows’ gardener had said the house was abandoned, but all the parked cars in Lauterbach’s photographs had indicated otherwise; and this room, full of expensive furniture and artwork, confirmed that people either lived or spent a fair amount of time here.

  When I didn’t get an answer to another hail I went prowling through the place. And it didn’t take me long, once I saw the other rooms, to figure out just what kind of place it was. A mirrored bedroom gave me the first hint, a room fixed up for the screening of what were clearly pornographic films expanded the idea, and a series of other bedrooms containing different personal belongings fleshed it out completely. The club McCone and I had kept hearing about wasn’t anything so mundane as a health spa; it was a private sex club, a place where a bunch of kinky people got together to look at X-rated movies and to hold orgies. People like Elaine Picard, Lloyd Beddoes, the Darrows, Karyn Sugarman, Rich Woodall.

  That Cadillac out front, I thought. Woodall’s?

  The last of the five foyer archways led to a close
d and locked door that might have been rescued from a medieval English castle: thick black oak, ironbound, with an old-fashioned latch and keyhole. On the floor nearby was a big brass key that looked as if it would fit the lock; I picked it up and tried it, and it worked, all right. I opened the door and went inside.

  It was like walking onto a stage set for a film about the Spanish Inquisition. Imitation-stone walls hung with chains, racks of whips and paddles and cats-o’-nine-tails, other stuff I didn’t recognize—all of it lit in a reddish glow from bulbs recessed in the ceiling. I could feel my flesh start to crawl. These people were into more than just orgies; they were into bondage and sado-masochism as well.

  The room was L-shaped, and I moved ahead to where I could see what was around of the ell. More of the same ... and a cross on the wall with a female figure hanging from it, a figure I thought at first was a dummy and then realized was human—had been human. In that bloody light I couldn’t tell the color of her hair or see her face, because the hair covered it, and I thought with a surge of horror that it was McCone. I ran back there but it wasn’t McCone; it was a woman I’d never seen before. Strangled. Dead a long time. Crucified with heavy rope in lieu of nails.

  But McCone had been here. There was a purse lying on the floor, and when I grabbed it up and rummaged through it I found her identification. Torn strips of wallpaper lay on the floor too. And high up on the wall, near the ceiling, sunlight streamed in through a hole that led to the outside.

  The whole scene was like a warped and distorted religious painting from the Middle Ages—the crucified body, the bondage-and-torture implements, the shaft of sunshine like a divine light cutting through the bloody pagan darkness. Chills skittered along my back. I tasted bile and gagged it down, backing away.

  McCone—where was she now?

  I turned and ran out of the room, out of the house and into the broiling desert heat. The windows and hood of the Cadillac blazed with reflected sun rays. McCone must have been the one who’d tried to hot-wire it, I thought. But she’d failed for some reason. And then what?

  I started toward the Caddy, to give it a more thorough search. I was thinking of McCone locked for God knew how long in that simulated dungeon with the woman’s body. It was the stuff of madness. What if she—

  Somewhere on the desert below, there was the dull echoing crack of a gunshot.

  It brought me up short, with my head jerking this way and that; sound carries in open spaces, gets distorted by distance so you can’t always tell which direction it comes from. I ran ahead, beyond the Cadillac and my rental car, past a clump of greasewood to where I had a better view of the buff-colored landscape spread out below. Nothing moved that I could see, but the sun glare was intense; it burned painfully against the retinas of my eyes, blurred the edges of everything more than a couple of hundred yards away.

  The gun cracked a second time. Hand weapon, I thought; it didn’t have the resonance of a rifle or a shotgun. But I still couldn’t place its source. I thought it might have come from over by the ruins of the water tower and loading dock, and I was looking that way when the third shot came. This time I saw movement, somebody running out in that direction. Five seconds later the figure was gone again, hidden from my view behind the dock and its adjacent shed.

  Without thinking what I was doing, I started to run. The ground was hard-packed for the most part, rocky, but there were sandy patches and clusters of spiny cholla cactus and greasewood and sagebrush, so that I had to take a weaving course instead of going in a straight line. There weren’t any more shots. No further movement either; but the dock and the shed were directly ahead of me—the person I’d seen was still somewhere behind them.

  I had covered half the distance, with the hot dry air like fire in my lungs, before it registered that I was unarmed and had no idea of what might be waiting for me. But it might be McCone I’d seen—that was the thing that kept me running. She’d escaped the house, she hadn’t been able to start the Cadillac . . . where else was there for her to go except into the desert?

  The half-collapsed framework of the water tower loomed on my left, its tank stays canted at odd angles like a pattern of crooked bars against the bright hot sky. I was within a hundred yards of it now; through the shimmering heat waves I could see that the ground ahead was strewn with pieces of splintered boarding, lengths of iron and steel, the crumbling segments of a wooden duct. Still no movement out there. And no sounds either, except for the thin scrape of my steps and the labored rasp of my breathing.

  The heat had begun to sap my strength; as I went past the tower I could feel myself starting to falter, slowing down at the same time I was trying to run faster. I kept waiting for the sound of another shot—and not hearing it, kept thinking that the target of those first three had been hit, killed, so that another bullet wasn’t necessary.

  I skirted what was left of a platform that had once housed the tower’s water pump. Ahead, the loading dock was nothing more than a decaying skeleton, but the shed alongside it was still more or less whole. I veered toward the shed, and when I finally reached it there was a stitch in my side and I was out of breath. I leaned against the sagging wall, struggling to take in air. There were gaps in the siding big enough for a man to squeeze through; I rubbed my eyes clear and peered through to the desert beyond.

  A man stood twenty to twenty-five yards distant, half turned away from me and bent a little at the waist, a pair of binoculars hanging from around his neck. He was peering at a huddled mass on the ground. A woman—I could see the long dark hair fanned out around her head. McCone.

  I could also see the squarish snout of the automatic in the man’s hand. He was pointing it straight down at her.

  A kind of desperate rage settled into me. I got my breathing under control; shoved away from the wall and around the side of the shed, picking my way through another litter of splintered wood and pieces of eroded metal. When I got to the front corner I had a better look at the man. Rumpled iron-gray hair, stiff military bearing. Not who I’d expected to see, not Rich Woodall—

  Henry Nyland.

  McCone wasn’t moving. There was blood on her; I could see it glistening bright crimson in the hard white sunlight. Sounds came to me, like whispers at first, disjointed and indistinct. Then they got louder, and I realized Nyland was talking to her: “I didn’t want to do this. Don’t you understand? I didn’t want to do anything to you. It was the other one, that Sugarman bitch—she killed Elaine, she was evil. I had to kill her, didn’t I? For Elaine?” And all the while he kept aiming the automatic at Sharon’s unmoving head.

  Better than twenty yards separated us—too far, too damned far. If I made a rush at him, he’d hear me coming and have all the time he’d need to turn and set himself, and blow me away too. I could try to catfoot it out there while he was still focused on McCone, but the risk would be the same....

  Do something, for Christ’s sake!

  Hurriedly I scanned the ground where I stood, then picked up a chunk of sandstone about the size of a baseball and stepped away from the shed with it. Nyland was still babbling to McCone, saying now, “I’ll bury you out here. Both of you. They’ll never find your bodies. What choice do I have? You see that I don’t have any choice, don’t you?”

  Hit him in the head, I thought, knock his frigging head off—and I threw the rock with all the force I could muster.

  It missed him by ten feet, but he heard it go by and spun around jerkily with the automatic swinging up in front of him. I was moving by then, and he saw me and yelled something and fired. I went down, hugged the ground alongside the shed, but the shot was wild, not even close. On hands and knees I scrambled around to the rear, came up and looked through one of the gaps. Nyland was running toward the shed. Even at a distance I could see the wildness in him, the look of a man out of control.

  I stumbled around to the other side, dodged out far enough to let him see me again. He fired on the run, as I’d hoped he would, and that one missed badly too. Three sho
ts at McCone, two at me; most automatics had six-bullet clips: one shot left. Maybe.

  Back against the shed wall, I yelled at him, “Nyland! You’ll have to kill me too!”

  No answer. But I heard him running; he was close to the shed now. I backpedaled fast, jumped over a jumble of rusted pulleys and cables, and ran in a crouch toward the loading dock. Over my shoulder I saw Nyland come into view alongside the shed, saw him slow when he spotted me and raise the gun. I threw myself sideways onto a patch of barren sand; the gun cracked as I landed bouncing and sliding and banged my chin and hand against more abandoned machinery. Another miss. Then I was scrambling around, coming up, and Nyland was a dozen yards away, still running with the gun out at arm’s length.

  If I’d been wrong about the number of bullets in the automatic’s clip I would have been a dead man. But I wasn’t wrong. I heard the empty click of the hammer; heard it twice more. I was up on my feet by then, and I saw him hurl the gun away in frustration. But he was still moving, closing the gap between us—hands out in front of his body now, the fingers wiggling like fat white worms. Except for the way his eyes bulged, there was a kind of terrible blank calm about him.

  We were both a couple of old military men, which meant we’d both had training in hand-to-hand self-defense, but for all I knew he had superior strength and skill. I wasn’t about to try slugging it out with him.

  I could only think of one other thing to do. I started toward him, brandishing my fists like Muhammad Ali coming out of his corner at the bell, yelling, “I’ll smash your face in, Nyland!” Some ten feet separated us. I moved sideways a couple of steps, and he did the same thing, and now there were five feet between us—and I stumbled, grimaced, grunted as if in sudden pain, and clutched my chest and went down hard to my knees. It wasn’t much of an acting job, but he was half out of his head and not alert to tricks: it froze him for an instant, just long enough for me to catch up the short length of warped strap iron I’d been angling for and swing it sideways in the same motion, down low at his legs.