by John Dunning
We were going to Taos, over Pruitt’s dead body if that’s how he had to have it.
No time for cops: no help there. By the time Seattle checked me out, my flight would be somewhere over Wyoming.
Move.
Move now and move fast.
I called out for a cab. The dispatcher said she had drivers in the neighborhood. The wait would be five minutes, ten tops.
Cover your ass.
I called the desk. Yes, the Hilton ran a shuttle service to the airport. It ran twice each hour, at seven minutes past the half hour.
It was now 9:55.
The key.
Crystal would need my room key to get in here and take out my stuff. Had to hide it somewhere so she could find it.
In the car.
Out there in the garage, all logic dictated, Pruitt would be waiting.
Good. Face the bastard head-on.
Eleanor sat rigidly in the chair. She looked terrified, her knuckles white as she gripped the armrests.
“Wh-why’re you…d-do-ing this?”
I reached out to her but she recoiled. “I’m on your side, kid,” I told her, but it didn’t help.
“Th-at m-man in the hall…”
“His name is Slater. He’s gone now.”
“He’s with the d-darkman.”
“He’s nothing. He’s out of here.”
“Darkm-man.”
I squeezed her shoulder. “Cheer up now, you’re in good hands.”
I turned off the light, flipped off the TV. Nobody was fooling anybody anymore.
“Let’s go,” I said.
We went with the clothes on our backs. I hung a do not disturb sign on the door.
“Stay close,” I said as we came into the garage.
She was shivering so violently she could barely walk. Our footsteps echoed as we crossed to the far wall where I had left my car.
He was with us all the way, I could feel him out there in the dark. “Oh, please.” Eleanor’s voice quaked with fear. She too had sensed him there, and Slater had it right, he was her bogeyman: just the thought of him made her incoherent and numb.
“Darkman,” she whispered. “D-d…kman.”
I put an arm over her shoulder. “Everything’s cool. We’ll laugh about it on the plane.”
“Darkm-m-an’s‘s-here.”
“Hush now. We’re heading for the land of sunshine.”
I jerked open the door and hustled her into the car. I looked over the roof, my eyes sweeping down the ramp and across the garage to the door. Just for show, I moved around the car, opened the driver’s door, and slid under the wheel.
I kept watching through the mirrors. I put the key in the ignition and turned it. It did nothing but click.
Eleanor whimpered faintly in the seat beside me.
“It’s okay, I expected that,” I said calmly. “Just sit tight, we’ll be out of here in a minute.”
I got out of the car, locking the doors.
Went through some motions, with peripheral vision working like sonar.
Raised the hood.
Scanned the garage.
Looked at my watch while pretending to look at the engine.
Ten oh one. The shuttle took off in six minutes.
Got down on the garage floor. Pretended to look under the car. Palmed the key to my room and slipped it behind the front bumper.
Scanned the garage from there. With my back to the wall, I could see everything under the wheels of fifty automobiles.
Two pairs of feet…two men, coming my way.
I came up slowly, an Oscar-winning performance. It was a fat man with dark hair, flanked by a young, muscular guy in jeans. The fat man wore a business suit and waddled my way with an air of sweet benevolence.
I slammed the hood and wondered why I wasn’t surprised when they came to the car in the slot next to mine.
“Hey, buddy,” the fat man said. “You know how to get to Queen Anne Hill?”
“I think it’s on the west side, just north of town. I’m a stranger here myself.”
He looked at me over the roof of his car. “Got trouble?”
“Yeah. Damn thing won’t start.”
“I’ll have the guy downstairs call you a tow truck if you want.”
“Won’t do much good. I’m in kind of a hurry.”
“Might be something simple. Bobby here’s good with cars. Why don’t you just let him take a peek under your hood?”
“That can’t cost me much.”
I raised the hood and the three of us crowded into the space between the car and the wall. Here they were, close enough to kiss. I could see a fresh scrape on the fat man’s neck where he’d cut himself shaving. The meat quivered around his ears like vanilla pudding. The kid was carrying his right hand in a fetal position, curled inward toward his belt. He was cradling a roll of quarters, I thought—almost as effective as a set of brass knucks if he got his weight behind it.
Here I am, I thought, take your best shot. When the kid moved, I took a fast step to one side. His closed fist smacked against the car, the roll broke open, and the coins clattered across the floor. I hit him a hard right to the jaw and he went down like a sack of laundry. I could sense the fat man groping for something under his coat, but I was faster and I had the same thing under mine. I whirled around and kneed him in the groin. I punched his wind out, and the next time he blinked I had my gun in his jowls, half-buried in fat.
He was breathing hard through his nose, his eyes wide with fear and surprise. I slapped him across the mouth and spun him around, slamming him against the wall. I took a .38 snub-nose out of his belt and put it in mine. The kid was still cold. I knelt down, frisked him, and got another gun for my arsenal.
I manhandled the fat man back around the car. “Where’s Pruitt?”
“I don’t know any Pruitt.”
I grabbed his necktie and jerked him silly. He tried to roll away: I hammered him under the ribs and he doubled over, wheezing at the floor. I grabbed his hair and smashed his head hard against the car, got down there with him between the cars, and said, through gritted teeth, “You wanna die in this garage, fat man? You wanna die right now, here on this floor?” I had the gun jammed between his jawbone and his eardrum, and I had his attention.
He rolled his eyes down the ramp, into the spiraling darkness.
“That’s better. Lie to me again and you’re dog food. Tell me now, are there any more rats down there with him?”
He shook his head none.
“Gimme your keys.”
He fished them out of his pocket.
“Which one’s for the trunk?”
He held it up. I took the ring and opened the trunk.
“Get in and lie down.”
He looked at me with pleading eyes. I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and spun him around and sat him down hard in the trunk. I motioned with the gun and he swung his legs over the rim, curling his butterball body around the spare tire.
I slammed the trunk. It was 10:08, and the enemy himself had delivered us from evil.
I got Eleanor moved over and threw the guns on the seat between us. We careened down the ramp in the fat man’s car. Eleanor sat frozen, gripping her knees like a kid on her first roller-coaster ride. I reached the street just as the shuttle pulled out. I pealed rubber turning north into Sixth Avenue. I was soaring, I was high enough to hit the moon. I had to rein myself in, force myself to stop for a red light. The last thing I needed, now that I had the game all but won, was to get stopped by a traffic cop, and me with a car full of guns.
I was trolling the side streets looking for an on-ramp. I stopped for another light. “Darkman,” Eleanor said, but I looked and the street was empty.
“He’s gone. We kicked his ass, Rigby. It’s time to start thinking about what you’ll do when you get to New Mexico.”
I leaned over the wheel and looked at her. She looked like a stranger, mind-fried with fear.
“We won,” I said.
She looked like anything but a winner. She looked like the thousand and one women a cop meets in a long and violent career. A victim.
“Darkman…”
“Is he your stalker?”
She looked at me. “He’s everywhere. I can’t turn around…”
“He’s a wrong number, honey, a guy in a gorilla suit. He’s only scary if you let him be.”
“He was in New Mexico.” She closed her eyes and quaked at some private demon. “No matter where I go he finds me. I pick up the phone and he’s there, playing that song.”
The guy behind us blew his horn. The light was green. I moved out, giving her shoulder a little rub, but she seemed not to notice.
“He’s there,” she said. “I saw him.”
I scanned the street in my mirrors and saw nothing.
“Oh, God,” she said. “Oh God oh God oh God…”
“We beat him. We’re gettin‘ out of here.”
“Take me back to jail.”
“We’re going to New Mexico.”
“No!…No…take me back to jail…”
“I want you to listen to me.”
“Take me back to jail…take me…take me…”
No more talk, I thought: the less said at this point the better. I thought if I could get her on the plane, I could win her back: then we’d have the whole ride into Albuquerque to calm down and start digging the truth out. I gave her a long sad look. She had covered her face with her hands, but I could see her eyes looking at me through her fingers.
I gunned the car and banked south into the freeway. I was almost up to thirty when she wrenched open the door and, with a shriek of madness, jumped.
17
I hit the brakes and the car spun across the wet pavement and slammed into the guardrail. I leaped out on the rim, running along the edge of a dark gulf. She was somewhere down in the street: I couldn’t see her, but I heard her scream as I skidded down the slope. I had a long clear look at the street running back downtown: she hadn’t gone that way, so she had to have ducked under the freeway to the east. This led me into a dreary neighborhood of shabby storefronts and dark flophouses. The rain had kept people off the street and the hour was late…the block was as dead as an old graveyard. The wet clop of my feet punctured the steady hiss of the rain, but I was chasing a ghost. She was gone.
I reached a cross street still clinging to a shred of hope. She could be blocks away by now, going in any direction. Guess wrong and kiss her good-bye: the next time she stuck her head up, she’d be scouting books in Florida. She could make a pauper’s living forever in that anonymous subculture, never pay taxes, never have her name recorded on any official docket, never be seen again by friend or foe. I pushed on into the rain, as if she had suddenly materialized in the block ahead. But the street was as empty as ever. I came to another intersection and stopped to look. No use running anymore, I could just as likely be running away from her. I walked along a dim wet block looking in cracks and crevices. Gone with the goddamn wind, son of a bitch. I passed the flickering light of a neighborhood bar and looked at my watch: 10:23. It was still possible to make the plane, if she came to her senses this very minute, if we stumbled into each other in the murk, if the car was still on the ramp where I’d left it, if I was all paid up with the man upstairs, if pigs could fly and I could break every speed limit going to Sea-Tac and get away with it. I stopped and leaned against a mailbox and longed for a break, but Luck had gone her fickle way.
I looked into the bar on a hunch. Nobody there but the neighborhood drunk, who’d been holding up his end of the bar since Prohibition ended. I walked up the street in the rain, unwilling to admit that the fat lady had sung her song. Something could still happen. Something can still happen, I thought again, but my watch was pushing ten-thirty, and it had to happen now.
What happened wasn’t quite what I had in mind. A car turned into the street and I knew it was Pruitt half a block away; I had the color and shape of that Pontiac cut into my heart forever. I stepped into the shadows and watched him roll past me. Apparently he hadn’t seen me: he cruised by slowly; I stood still and watched him go the length of the block. He was hunting, same as me: he would drive a bit, slow, occasionally stop and look something over. It seemed she had given us all the royal slip. Pruitt stopped at the corner and turned. I broke into a full run, reaching the cross street well before he had turned out of the next block. He was taking it easy, trying to miss nothing as he worked around one block and into another. The block was dark: a streetlight was out, and I thought I could run along the edge of the buildings without being seen. Something might still be salvaged from this rotten night, if I could get close enough to pull that door open and jerk Pruitt’s ass out of that car.
A pair of headlights swung toward me two blocks away. I flattened into a doorway as the two cars flicked their brights on and off. It was the fat man’s car—I could see the crushed fender where it had hit the guardrail. I patted my pocket and knew I had left them the keys, a stupid mistake, and I’d left their guns there on the seat as well. The two cars pulled abreast for a confab. Then Pruitt turned right, went on around the block, and the fat man was coming my way. He passed and I could see there were two of them in the car—the kid, riding shotgun, was slumped in the seat as if he hadn’t yet come back to the living. Lacking Pruitt, I’d be thrilled with another shot at these two. I wanted to put somebody in the hospital, and any of the three were okay with me.
I let the fat man go on into the next block. I moved out in the rain and ran after Pruitt. He was still the grand prize in this clambake, but by the time I reached the next corner he was gone. Again, I could go off in any direction and be right or wrong, or wait right here while the wheel took another spin. When nothing happened, I crossed to the dark side of the street and walked along slowly, hoping they’d all catch up. For a time it seemed that the action had moved on to another stage. No one came or went. I worried about it, and I was worrying three blocks later when Eleanor turned a corner far ahead and walked briskly up the street toward me.
She was two blocks away but coming steadily. I stood flat in a shallow doorway and egged her on in my mind. I peeped out and she was still there. She passed a light in the next block and I could see her clearly now, looking none the worse for her tumble down the slope. Her hair had come down but that was good: I could get a grip on it and hold her that way if I had to. She was close enough now that I could catch her, but I let her keep coming, each step a little added insurance. If she kept on, she’d pass so close I could grab her without a chase. I had pushed myself as far back in the doorway as I could get: I didn’t dare even a peep as she came closer. I thought sure I’d have her, then everything seemed to stop. I had lost the sense of her, I had to look. She was still a block away, stopped there as if warned off by intuition. I waited some more. With a long head start and terror in her heart, she could still make it though.
She crossed the street. Something about the terrain was bothering her: an alarm had gone off in her head and she was like a quail about to be flushed. I buried my face in the crack and held myself still as death. But when I looked again, she was walking in the opposite direction, back up the street the way she had come.
I leaped out of the doorway and ran on the balls of my feet. I stretched myself out and ate up the block, trying to make up lost ground before she turned and saw me. She ducked into an alley. I clopped up and looked down a dark, narrow place. Something moved a block away, a fluttery blur in the rain. She was spooked now, going at a full run: I gave up stealth and chased her through the dark. I hit a row of garbage cans and went down in a hellish clatter, rolled with the momentum, came up running. But I didn’t see her anymore, didn’t see anything in the murk ahead.
I came out into a street lit only by a distant lamp. It was high noon on Pluto, a world bristling with evil. She screamed, a shriek of such ungodly terror that it smacked me back in my tracks and damn near stopped the rain. Far down the block I saw Pruitt’s kid manhandling
her into the car. The fat man stood by the driver’s door, smoking a cigarette down to his knuckles. I had no chance to catch them. The fat man gave me the long look as I ran up the block. He flipped his smoke, flipped me off, got in the car, and drove away in a swirl of mist.
18
I walked under the freeway and up toward Sixth Avenue. I no longer felt the rain. The specter of Pruitt dogged my steps, spurring me along the deserted street. I saw his face on storefront mannequins and felt his eyes watching me from doorways. I heard his voice coming up from the drains where the water ran down off the street. Then the heat passed and I felt curiously calm. I had remembered something that might be his undoing: I had a sense of urgency but none of defeat. The night was young, the game wasn’t over yet, I was more focused with each passing block. I wasn’t going to sit in my room all night knitting an afghan.
I had a pretty good idea what Pruitt would be thinking. In the morning I would call the court, file a complaint, and put the cops after him. This meant he’d be on the move tomorrow but perhaps holed up tonight. As far as they knew, I was a Denver knuckle-dragger who couldn’t find my way around Seattle at midnight if the mayor suddenly showed up and gave me his chauffeured limo. This was good: this was what I wanted them to think.
By the time I was halfway up Sixth my juice was pumping. I stopped at the Hilton, fetched my key, and let myself into my room. I didn’t bother changing clothes—this was just a pit stop, I’d be going out again, I’d be on foot, and I was going to get wet. I sat on the bed with the Seattle phone book and did the obvious stuff first. There was no listing for a Ruel Pruitt or an R. Pruitt in the white pages: nothing under his name under Detective Agencies or Investigators in the yellow. In a strange way, this too was good: it contributed to that sense of security that I hoped Pruitt was counting on for tonight.
Now to find him.
I dug through my dirty clothes, and in the pocket of the shirt I’d worn that first day, I found the scrap of paper I had used to jot down his license number.