Bleeders

6

I did not lose consciousness even for a second, but I was cockeyed and disoriented, trying to crawl and get up at the same time. I heard and felt him scrabbling above me, the onion-laden hiss and pant of his breath. He tore the briefcase out of my grasp. I tried to fight him, but my body wouldn’t obey the command; the only motor responses it seemed capable of in those first few seconds were crawling and struggling to rise.

My head bumped into something, wall, and just as that happened, his weight came down hard on my back, crushed me flat to the floor. I heard myself gasping and choking for air. A knee bored between my shoulder blades, something hard jabbed the nape of my neck. Words filtered through the addled haze, the noise I was making: “Lay still, you old fuck.” I’d been squirming; I quit that, not because he’d told me to but because my wind and strength were starting to come back. The object moved higher on my neck, to the bone above my left ear. Steadied there, digging into skin and hair. I knew what it was then: the muzzle of a short-barreled revolver.

“All right,” he said.

Clicking sound, soft and yet as loud as an explosion — the hammer being thumbed back to cock.

He’s going to kill me!

Terror mushroomed. My body surged in a wild effort to twist, turn, roll away, get my hands up.

He squeezed the trigger.

The hammer fell, I heard or thought I heard the click as it fell. Then I heard him say “Shit!” because nothing had happened, the gun hadn’t fired, it must have jammed jammed jammed—

There was a great, savage tearing sensation inside me, as if I were ripped apart and put back together whole all at once. Fury consumed terror, burned the haze out of my mind. I heaved up, bellowing like an animal, and pitched him off to one side. Flopped half around so I could see him through a smear of blood and pain — big, dark, thick bushy eyebrows, bald on top, nobody I’d ever seen before.

He clubbed at me with the useless gun, missed, connected glancingly off my shoulder as I lunged up from the waist. I clawed at his face, dug in nails, ripped a deep furrow in his cheek. He made a screeching noise, missed me again with a reflexive swipe. By then I was on my knees, still bellowing, my hands like pincers groping for his throat. Rage-crazy, all reason flayed out of me... if I’d succeeded in getting him by the throat I think I might have kept on squeezing until his face and tongue were swollen black and he was as dead as he’d tried to make me.

But he got that goddamn gun in under my clutching fingers and kicked it up against my jaw, solidly enough to snap my head back, leave me exposed. A second direct jolt drove me backward into the wall, scrambled my head again. If he’d followed up he might have been able to finish what he’d started, only he didn’t realize it. He’d had enough of me, enough hurt of his own. And the money was all he really cared about anyway. I heard more than saw him stagger to his feet, stumble over something, regain his balance, and lurch out of there with the briefcase.

As much as I hungered to chase after him, my body would not permit it. Too much abuse and my supply of adrenaline used up. I knelt there with my head hanging, shaking it, spraying droplets of blood. The door was open; the cold, moist night air started me shivering. I rubbed wet out of my eyes, found that I was in the living room doorway. It took a little time, seconds, minutes, to gather my feet under me and haul myself upright along the jamb. The rage had ebbed some. Now my head was clearing and I could think again...

Emily!

The wildness came rushing back. I shoved off the wall, took two or three rubber-legged steps toward the door.

And she was there, Emily, materializing phantom-like out of the foggy dark. I had to blink and stare to be sure I was really seeing her. She was running, but her steps faltered as she came inside; one hand splayed up against her mouth. “Daddy! Oh, God, you’re hurt!”

I stood swaying, weak again, draining again. If she hadn’t caught hold of my arm and steadied me, I might’ve gone down. Little girl, thin, weighed no more than ninety pounds, but she had surprising strength — adult strength.

“Daddy, you’re bleeding...”

The first time she’d called me Daddy, it hadn’t really penetrated; this time it did, made me want to grab her and hug her close. Made me want to cry. Why it affected me that way, given the condition I was in, I don’t know. Maybe because it revealed just how deeply her feelings for me ran.

“Not as bad as it looks,” I said. The words had a liquidy sound, as if they were bleeding too.

“Should I call nine-eleven?”

“No, nobody yet. Let me sit down for a minute.”

She helped me into the living room, to a chair in there. I was able to lean on her a little, another measure of her strength. In the lamplight I could see the blood on my hands and the front of my coat; more wetness trickled down into the collar of my shirt. My jaw ached in two or three places and my ear had a cauliflowered feel. I explored gingerly with the tips of two fingers. Half a dozen cuts and abrasions, all more or less superficial.

When I glanced up, Emily was gone. I called her name; she answered from a distance. Then she was back with a dripping dishtowel from the kitchen. She swabbed gently at my face and neck, turning the towel red. Her face was pale, strained, the big luminous eyes wide and moist.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“Are you sure? You don’t look very good.”

“I don’t feel so good, either.”

“A doctor?...”

“I don’t need one. I’ll be all right.”

“But your head... you might need stitches...”

“Emily, did you see the man who ran out of here?”

She bit her lip before she said, “Yes.”

“Did he see you?”

“No. He wasn’t looking at the car and I stayed inside until he was gone.

“Where’d he go?”

“Down the street. A car parked there.”

“Could you tell what kind or color?”

“No, it was too dark.”

“Can you describe what he looked like?”

She shook her head. “Who was he?”

“I don’t know.” I heard those clicks in my head again, the revolver’s hammer cocking and then falling. I could be dead right now. My stomach twisted; I said between my teeth, “But I’m going to find out.”

I got slowly to my feet, took a couple of tentative steps. Still shaky, but I could function. Full reaction hadn’t set in yet; when it did, I was not going to be worth much for a while. Do what needed to be done now, as fast as possible.

“Emily, I want you to go out and get in the car, lock the doors, and wait for me. Don’t open the door for anyone else, no matter who it is. If anybody comes, blow the horn and keep blowing it.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“Make a couple of calls. I won’t be long.”

I went with her to the front door, out onto the porch. The street and sidewalks were empty, no one visible anywhere. It seemed that the bald son of a bitch and I had made enough noise to wake up half of Daly City, but sounds become magnified during a skirmish like that. If they’d carried to the nearby houses, the neighbors had chosen to ignore them: the Great Unwritten Code of Noninvolvement. I watched until Emily had locked herself inside the car, her face a white blur pressed close to the window glass. Then I drew back inside and shut and locked the door.

Except for the uneven rhythm of my breathing, the house was still. Too still. The air felt charged. There was nothing to see in the living room; and nothing in the kitchen or Emily would have reacted. One of the bedrooms, then. Or the back porch. Or the garage. I took a tight hold on myself and went looking.

It didn’t take long. Second of two bedrooms — the master bedroom, though it was no larger than the other. The bed was a big double, one of those modern four-posters, and Carolyn Dain was lying facedown in the middle of it. I did not have to go any closer than the doorway to know she was dead. Bloody, powder-scorched hole behind her right ear, blood in her pale yellow hair, blood splattered on the sheet under her head. He’d used a pillow to muffle the shot; it lay beside her, black-burned and leaking kapok or whatever they use to stuff cheap pillows nowadays.

Execution. Pushed facedown, knee in the back, gun muzzle pressed tight to the bone above the ear, bang you’re dead.

The way I would have died if the revolver hadn’t misfired. The way I’d look right now, lying on the hallway floor. My blood. My stillness, that terrible final stillness like no other.

My gorge had risen; I had to swallow half a dozen times to keep the sickness down. The rage had gone cold in me, like a deep-driven wedge of ice. I kept standing there, staring over at the bed. I could not seem to make myself move.

Carolyn Dain. Teacher, music lover, music historian. Average woman with average needs and average feelings, living an average life in an average neighborhood of an average city. Human being. Victim. Dead before her fortieth birthday on account of a philandering, corrupt husband and a cold-blooded, merciless thief. And sure to be too little mourned, too soon forgotten.

Seventy-five thousand dollars. She’d been killed for nothing more than that; I had almost died for nothing more than that. Two human beings — sacrifices on a subhuman’s altar of greed.

I have hated, truly, primitively hated, only a handful of men in my life. The bald man, whoever he was, had joined that select few. I no longer believe in capital punishment, but standing there then, looking at what was left of Carolyn Dain, hearing those hammer clicks again and again in my mind, I yearned to see him as dead as she was, as he’d tried to make me. I ached to dance on his grave.

It might have been a long time, or only a minute or two, before I grew aware of the bedroom itself. It had been thoroughly searched. Drawers pulled out, articles of clothing and other items strewn over the shag carpet, clothing and boxes spilling out of a small walk-in closet. Carolyn Dain’s purse was there, too, riffled and emptied. Predator’s hunt for more money, jewelry, anything else of value. Before or after he killed her? Depended on whether he’d come here with her or gotten into the house some other way and been waiting when she arrived. Depended on who he was and how he’d found out about the money.

The friend she’d spent the night with? Not likely. Somebody connected to Cohalan or Annette Byers or both of them? Good bet. It seemed out of character for Cohalan to arrange or collude in his wife’s murder; but I could see him setting up a robbery to get his hooks on the cash, and not knowing or wanting to know how blood-sick his accomplice was. Byers... same thing. Or one or the other of them might have inadvertently tipped Baldy off. Or Carolyn Dain might have in some way, if she’d known him.

Possibilities. I told myself it was up to the cops to explore them, not me. I told myself I was going to be out of it soon enough, and a good thing, too. I told myself I was a lucky survivor, and I’d damn well better let it go at that. And all the while I kept hearing those clicks, the hammer being drawn back to cock, the hammer falling as he squeezed the trigger.

I’d had enough of this room, of the death it contained. I made myself turn away, took a quick look through the rest of the house and then returned to the living room. A desk with a computer on it stood in one corner; I hadn’t noticed it before. A couple of the drawers were pulled partway out, and papers littered the surface. He’d been in there, too, hunting for valuables. I started over that way, drawn by the swarm of papers.

The telephone rang.

It brought me up short, the noise scraping at my nerves like the blade of a rasp. I located the thing on a stand beside the desk, listened to it ring twice more. Then there was the sound an answering machine makes when it kicks in, and Jay Cohalan’s recorded voice said, “Hello. I am Jay and Carolyn’s machine. I am the only one here right now. At the beep tell me who, what, where, when, and why, and I will pass it on as soon as I can. Have a nice day.” Just like him, that message. Smart-ass and verbose.

“Carolyn? It’s Mel. If you’re there, pick up.” Male voice, youngish, deep-pitched, with a note of urgency in it. There was a pause, and then: “You were supposed to call me, remember? Give me a buzz as soon as you get this message and let me know if everything’s all right. You know how worried I am after last night.”

Mel. “How worried I am after last night.” Was he the friend she’d gone to spend the night with? Sauce for the goose?

I went ahead to the desk. The one thing you never do, if you’re a private investigator who wants to keep his license, is disturb anything at a crime scene. Special circumstances here, though, oh yeah. I pawed through the papers and drawers, doing it carefully, using my handkerchief whenever I touched a surface that would take fingerprints. Bills and receipts, mostly. No personal correspondence. No Rolodex or address book. Nothing with the name Mel on it.

Back to the master bedroom. I kept my eyes off the bed as I picked my way in and squatted where the contents of her purse had been dumped. It took a few seconds to find a thin red leatherette address book under a fold of the bedspread. Fewer than twenty entries in a small, neat hand — pathetically few for a woman in her late thirties. Most seemed to have some connection to White Rock School: teachers, a principal, a vice principal. No relatives, or at least no one named Dain or Cohalan. Initials and surnames only, three of the initials M. I thought about copying those three names and addresses into my notebook, but I was beginning to feel shaky, a little disoriented. Reaction setting in; I’d experienced that sort of thing too often not to recognize the symptoms.

When I straightened, using a bureau corner for support, a wave of vertigo came over me and the rubbery feeling returned to my legs. I leaned against the bureau until the dizziness passed, then groped my way to the living room and collapsed into the desk chair.

Bad now, worse than I could remember. Tingling weakness in my limbs and fingers. Nausea. Pounding in both temples, intensifying the hurt in my ear and jawline. My hearing had gone out of whack — external sounds tuned out, the hammer clicks so clear and loud they might have been happening here and now. I could feel the hard muzzle of the revolver as if it were again... still... jabbing the bone above my right ear.

Sweat oozed out of me. Blood, too, trickling again from one of the wounds, like a worm crawling on my neck. I still had the wet dishtowel; at some point Emily or I had draped it over my shoulder. My hand trembled as I mopped my face and neck. Panic climbed in me. I fought it down, willing myself calm so I could call the police, call Kerry and have her come and take charge of Emily.

And kept on sitting there, fighting and willing and sweating and shaking, listening to the clicks.