Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 111, No. 1. Whole No. 677, January 1998

Zero Tolerance by Bill Pronzini

© 1997 by Bill Pronzini

This new story by Bill Pronzini also appears in a collection featuring his “Nameless” detective. (See Spadework; Crippen & Landru Publishers / P.O. Box 9315, Norfolk, VA 23505.) It is a mark of the author’s extraordinary talent that he has been able to develop his character in 25 years’ worth of stories and novels without ever giving him a name.

The little girl in the polka-dot playsuit was a holy terror. So was her mother. In fact, the kid wasn’t all that bad — just spoiled and rambunctious — compared to the mom-thing that had spawned her.

The whole sorry business was the mother’s fault. You couldn’t lay any blame on the child; she hadn’t been taught any better. You could lay a little of the blame on me, I suppose, but not much when you looked at it all in perspective. No, by God, the mother was the villain of the piece. An even nastier villain in some ways than the pudgy guy in the leather jacket.

It started with the little girl. She kept finding me out of all the other shoppers crowding the Safeway aisles, like some sort of pint-sized heat-seeking missile. First she charged out from behind a bin full of corn in the produce section, accidentally banged my shin with one of her cute red pumps, and then charged off without so much as an upward or backward glance. Next she showed up in the meat department, standing directly behind me when I turned with a package of ground round in my hand; I had to do a nifty juking sidestep to avoid tripping over her, but it wasn’t as nifty as it might have been because I dropped the package and the cellophane wrapping split and the right leg of my trousers took on the sudden appearance of clothing in a splatter movie. And finally there was the collision in the cat- and dog-food aisle.

I was pushing my cart near the end of the aisle, minding my own business, looking down unhappily at the hamburger-stained pant-leg when she came flying around the corner with her arms outflung at her sides — playing airplane or some damn thing. Neither of us saw each other in time; she banged into the cart with a startled yelp. Just as this happened, the mother — an attractive doe-eyed blonde in her twenties — pushed her cart around the corner. She let out a yelp of her own when the kid bounced off and flopped down on a chubby little backside. She wasn’t hurt; her face scrunched up but she didn’t cry or even whimper. But the way the mother reacted, you’d have thought her daughter had been mortally wounded. She rushed over, picked the child up, brushed her off, examined her with a probing eye, clutched her possessively, and then glared at me as if I were something she’d just found caked on the bottom of her shoe.

“What’s the matter with you?” she said accusingly. “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?”

Under ordinary circumstances I would have diffused the situation by smiling, muttering a polite comment, and sidling off to continue my shopping. But the circumstances tonight were not ordinary. There was my sore shin, and my bloody pantleg, and the facts that I’d had a long, tiring day and Kerry was working late and it was my turn to do both the shopping and the cooking of dinner, and the additional fact that I have zero tolerance for parents who allow their children to run wild in supermarkets, department stores, and other public places. I managed the smile all right, a tight little one, but not the polite comment or the sidling off.

“And why don’t you curb your kid,” I said, “before she really gets hurt?”

“What?” It came out more like a squawk than a word.

“Just what I said, lady. This is the third time your daughter’s run into me—”

“How dare you!”

“How dare I what?”

“Talk to me that way. Accuse Amy of attacking you.”

I wasn’t smiling anymore. “I didn’t say she attacked me—”

“Of all the insane things. A six-year-old child and an old brute like you.”

“Old brute?” I said. “Listen—”

“You practically run Amy down with your cart and then you...” Words failed her. She sputtered and said, “Oh!” and then realized that we’d drawn a small group of onlookers. This spurred her on; she was the type that would always play to a crowd. “Did any of you see it?” she asked the gawkers. “He almost ran my little girl down with his cart.”

Nobody admitted to having seen anything, but there were angry mumbles and a couple of hostile looks thrown my way.

“She lets the kid run loose,” I said, “play games in the aisles—”

“I never runned loose!” cute little Amy said. “I never did!”

Some guy came up and poked me on the shoulder. “Why don’t you pick on somebody your own size?”

“I wasn’t picking on anybody.”

“Nice family like this,” a henna-rinsed woman said. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

The nice family stood hating me with their bright doe eyes. The baby holy terror stuck her tongue out at me. The finger-poker did his annoying thing again. “Apologize to them, why don’t you?”

“Apologize? I’m the one who—”

I stopped because nobody was listening; I didn’t have a sympathetic ear in the bunch. Tiny warning bells went off in my head. A no-win situation if I’d ever found myself in one. Let it go on much longer and it would turn ugly and escalate into an incident. So? So I bit my tongue. I took a tight grip on my offended pride. And I lied and dissembled like a coward.

“Okay,” I said, “it was all my fault. The child’s not hurt. Suppose we just forget the whole thing.”

That satisfied the gawkers. Within ten seconds they were gone, though not without a few parting glances of dislike in my direction. The mother set the little girl down — as soon as Amy’s feet touched the floor she was off again like a Piper Cub taking wing — and turned back to her cart. She tried to jockey it past mine at the same time I tried to jockey past hers. This produced a mutter on my part, an exasperated sigh and another angry glare on hers. We finally managed to clear each other without clashing, and she went her way and I went mine — but not until we’d traded a couple more barbs, trite but heartfelt.

Hers: “The stupid jerks you run into.”

Mine: “No truer words, Mommie Dearest.”

I finished loading my cart in a dark funk, wheeled it to the checkout stands and into the shortest line. I had just transferred the last item onto the conveyor thing they have when something banged hard into the backs of my legs. I swung around.

The blonde with her cart, naturally. “Oh,” she said in a voice like maple syrup over arsenic, lying through her teeth, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to bump you like that.”

I swallowed eight or nine choice words. Sweet young Amy was clutching Mommy’s skirt; she showed me her tongue again. I resisted an impulse to answer in kind, reminding myself that I was above such childish behavior, I really was. I put my back to the nice family and kept it there the entire time my purchases were being rung up and paid for. I didn’t look their way as I left the store, either, for fear that I wasn’t as far above childish behavior as I cared to believe.

It was a cold, foggy night outside, but the air tasted good and it had a soothing effect on my abused feelings. The parking lot at the Diamond Heights Safeway is almost always full in the evening, and tonight was no exception; I’d had to park toward the back of the lot, near the exit onto Diamond Heights Boulevard. All I could see over that way, through the swirls and eddies of fog, were vague shapes and outlines.

I spotted the pudgy guy in the leather jacket at about the same time I located my car. He was wandering around in the general vicinity, about three cars north of mine. He stopped when he saw me, turned his head partway as I neared with my rattling cart. When I was close enough for him to get a good look at me, his head turned again and he moved away. Not far, though, just over to a backed-in Ford Econoline van new enough to still be wearing dealer plates. He bent and peered at the van’s front end, as if something about it had snagged his attention.

There was a furtiveness about him that I didn’t like. I kept watching him while I put the groceries away in the trunk. He straightened after about ten seconds, went around on the far side of the van without looking my way again. I shut the trunk and approached the driver’s door. The van was bulky enough and the fog thick enough so that I couldn’t tell where the pudgy guy had gone. He might have continued on toward the far north end of the lot, or he might still be lurking somewhere near the Ford.

I got into the car. The fog had laid thick films of wetness over the windows; I couldn’t see through them. I scooted over on the passenger side, rolled the window down about two inches. The van was visible again through the narrow opening, as was the empty asphalt lane in front of it. There was still no sign of the pudgy guy.

Nothing happened for about three minutes. I was still trying to make up my mind what to do when somebody materialized out of the fog over that way.

It was the blond woman pushing her grocery cart, little Amy skipping along beside her.

And where they went was straight to the Ford van.

The thing had four doors; the woman unlocked the rear one and began shoving sacks inside while the baby holy terror ran back and forth in front. It’s all right, I told myself, nothing’s going down. But I had my hand on the door handle, my shoulder butted up against the door itself.

The woman finished loading her groceries, slammed the rear door. As she unlocked the driver’s I heard her call, “Amy, you come here this instant. I’ve had enough of your—”

That was as far as she got. The pudgy guy appeared around the front of the van, something dark and pointy in one hand that could only be a gun, moving with such suddenness that Amy shrieked and ran to her mother. He got there at the same time she did, yanked the keys out of the woman’s hand, and then slugged her hard enough to pitch her backward into the grocery cart.

I was out of the car by then, running. The guy was half inside the van when he saw me; he tried to squirm back out instead of going all the way in and locking the door, and that was his mistake. I hit the half-open door with my shoulder before he could slide clear of it, knocked him back against the side of the van. He struggled to get the gun up on me, but I pinned his arm with my left hand, slammed him in the belly with my right, and brought my knee driving upward at the same time. He made a thin squealing noise that blended right in with the screaming of the woman and the shrieking of the child. I smacked him in the belly again, twisted the gun out of his fingers, then punched him on the jaw as he was starting to sag. It was a good, solid, satisfying punch: He went all the way down and lay twitching at my feet.

Things stayed somewhat chaotic for the next couple of minutes. Some people came running up out of the fog, three or four of them asking alarmed questions. The woman had quit yowling and was on her feet again, tending to Amy, who was still going off in up-and-down riffs like a busted fire siren. I stuffed the gun into my coat pocket, started to lean down to make sure the pudgy guy wasn’t going to give me any more trouble, and somebody pushed in close enough to jostle me.

It was the finger-poker from inside. Glowering, he said, “What’s going on here? What’d you do this time—”

I gave him back his glower and told him to shut up.

“What?” he said. “What?”

“You heard me. Shut up and go call the police.”

“The police? What—”

It was my turn to do the poking, hard under his sternum. It gave me almost as much satisfaction as the punch to the pudgy guy’s jaw. “The police. Now.”

He spluttered some, but he went.

I glanced at the blond woman, who was clutching her daughter and staring at me with one eye as round as a half dollar; the other, where the guy had slugged her, was already puffy and half closed. Then I returned my attention to her attacker. He was lying on his side, moaning a little now, his legs drawn up and both hands clutched between them; there was a smear of blood on his jaw and his pain was evident. I felt mildly sorry for the woman. I didn’t feel a bit sorry for him.

Carjackers are something else I have zero tolerance for.

The cops came pretty quick, asked questions, put handcuffs on the pudgy guy, and hauled him off to jail. The crowd that had gathered gradually dispersed. And I was alone once more with a calmed-down Amy and her calmed-down mother.

The woman hadn’t said a direct word to me the whole time, and she didn’t say anything to me now. Instead she pushed the kid into the van, hoisted herself in under the wheel. Well, that figures, I thought. I walked away to my car.

But before I could get in, the woman was out of the van again and hurrying my way. She stopped with about four feet separating us. Changed her mind, I thought. Thanks or an apology coming up after all. I smiled a little, waiting.

And she said, “I just want you to know — I still think you’re a jerk.”

After which she did an about-face and back to the van she went.

I stood there while she fired it up, switched on the headlights, swung around in my direction. The driver’s window was down; I saw her face and the little girl’s face clearly as they passed by.

Amy stuck out her tongue.

And the mom-thing gave me the finger.

Right, I thought with more sadness than anger as I watched the taillights bleed away into the fog.

Zero tolerance night in what was fast becoming a zero tolerance world.