Dragonfire Read online

  DRAGONFIRE

  Bill Pronzini

  Paperjacks LTD

  Toronto New York

  Published 1987

  Copyright 1982

  ISBN 0-7701-0503-3

  This one is for Sharon McCone,

  The best of the lady private eyes,

  And for her creator, Marcia Muller

  One

  Welcome to hard times …

  Sunday afternoon, mid-August. Eberhardt and I were sitting in the backyard of his house in Noe Valley, drinking beer and getting a little tight. It was a nice day— bright sunlight, warm, just a hint of breeze. The smell of burning charcoal was in the air; Eb had started the coals in the brick barbecue pit he’d built some years back and we were going to have steaks pretty soon. In one of the other yards beyond his fence, somebody was mowing his lawn; you could hear the faint ratchety whir of a hand-powered mower.

  It was all nice and pleasant: one of those lazy days of summer, a Sunday rite like thousands of others in San Francisco. The only problem with it was, neither of us was enjoying it. Eberhardt’s wife Dana had left him for another man three months ago, after nearly three decades of marriage, and he was lonely and bitter and rattled around in his house like a marble in a box. And I was even worse off. I had also lost a woman I loved, for different reasons—or it seemed I’d lost her from all indications the past month. Eberhardt, at least, had his job—he was a lieutenant on the San Francisco cops—and could bury himself in his work. But I no longer had mine. That was something else I’d lost a month ago: the only profession I had had for the past thirty years. My private investigator’s license had been suspended indefinitely by the State Board of Licenses, on recommendation of the chief of police.

  We had been sitting there guzzling beer for about three hours. Eberhardt had invited me over and I’d accepted for similar reasons; misery loves company and it was always easier to drown your sorrows with a friend and fellow sufferer. Neither of us had mentioned our respective troubles so far, but I knew that wasn’t going to last. And it didn’t.

  Eberhardt was over poking around in the barbecue pit. When he came back and plunked himself down again in his chaise lounge he said, “Another twenty minutes should do it.” Then he drank some beer and said, “You seen Kerry lately?”

  “Yeah, I saw her. Last week.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “Strained,” I said. “We had lunch in a place out at China Basin.”

  “So what did she say?”

  “She still hasn’t made up her mind. Hasn’t had enough time yet. My situation isn’t making it any easier for her, I guess.”

  “She still getting flack from her old man?”

  “She didn’t say. But you can bet she is; he’s a relentless bugger, Wade is.”

  “When’re you seeing her again?”

  “Who knows?”

  “You talking to her regularly?”

  “Once or twice a week.”

  “You call or does she?”

  “She does, for the most part,” I said. “I don’t want to put any more pressure on her. She’s worried about me so she calls to find out how I’m holding up.”

  “How are you holding up?”

  “Okay. Getting through.”

  We both fell silent. I watched him load tobacco into one of his pipes, a thing carved in the shape of a head that he had taken a liking to. The talk about Kerry made memories of her lie heavy on my mind. I’d met her back in May, at a pulp writers’ convention that had evolved into a double homicide case; her parents, Cybil and Ivan Wade, were both ex-pulp writers. We had established both an emotional and physical rapport almost immediately, and I’d fallen in love with her, and not long after that I’d asked her to marry me. That was when the problems started. Her father, Ivan the Terrible, as I called him, thought I was too old for her because I was fifty-three and she was thirty-eight; he didn’t like the fact that I was a private detective and he didn’t like me. So he’d started pressuring her. And then I’d started pressuring her too, and it became a kind of tug-of-war with Kerry in the middle.

  It had all come to a head during a crazy week in July— the worst week of my life because it contained a whole slew of other events that combined to bring about the suspension of my investigator’s license. I developed a stupid streak of jealousy and all but accused Kerry of fooling around with one of the owners of the advertising agency where she worked; we’d had words about that. Then her old man showed up at my flat and I had words with him too, angry words, and wound up threatening him and throwing him out. Kerry hadn’t liked that, either.

  Toward the end of that week we’d gone out to dinner, and the evening degenerated into a fight. She said we didn’t know each other as well as we thought we did; she said I had old-fashioned macho tendencies and couldn’t deal with a relationship unless it was on my terms; she said that maybe I wanted her just because her parents were pulp writers and the pulps were a central part of my life. A few days later she’d come to my office on Drumm Street and told me she needed time to make up her mind, a sense of freedom, and it would be better if we didn’t see each other for a while. That had more or less finished things. In the month since that day, I had spoken to her maybe eight times on the phone and seen her twice. And it just wasn’t the same between us; it wasn’t even close. I did not see how it could ever be again.

  Eberhardt had his pipe going and was making fierce sucking noises on the stem. His face, with its odd mix of angles and blunt planes, had a dark broody look. He seemed to be in the same kind of grim mood I was in today.

  I said, “How’re things with you, Eb?”

  “Lousy. Too much on my mind.”

  “Heavy work load?”

  “Yeah. I hate my goddamn job sometimes. It’s a hell of a thing being a cop, you know that?”

  “Somebody’s got to do it. And you’re one of the best.”

  “Am I? I don’t know about that.”

  “Anything wrong?”

  He gave me a look. “Why do you think anything’s wrong?”

  “I don’t think it. I was just asking.”

  “Well, I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “All right. Sure.”

  He scowled at his pipe and put it down. “Then there’s Dana,” he said. “My ever-loving whore of a wife.”

  “She’s not a whore, Eb.”

  “The hell she’s not. Don’t tell me about whores; I know all about whores.”

  “Have you talked to her recently?”

  “Not in weeks. Last time she called, she wanted a couple of things—furniture for her new apartment. She didn’t even ask me how I was.”

  “Where’s she living?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me. Wouldn’t give me her phone number, either.”

  “You think she’s living alone?”

  “Hell, no. Moved in somewhere with her boyfriend.”

  “You ever find out who he is?”

  “No. And I hope I never do. If I did …”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know what. Shoot the bastard, maybe. Her too. Blow both of them away.”

  “Come on, Eb.”

  “You think I’m kidding?”

  “You’ve been a cop too long for a thing like that.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. You don’t know what I’m liable to do; neither do I. Bastards like that deserve to get shot. So do whores. Whores are better off dead anyway. Who cares about a damned whore?”

  I didn’t say anything; the subject was depressing and I wanted to get off it. I finished my beer. “You ready for another one of these?”

  “Yeah.”

  I went into the kitchen and got two more cans out of the refrigerator. When I came back out he was at the barbecue pit again, poking the charcoal aroun
d; most of the briquettes were already glowing and white. I gave him his fresh beer and wandered over and leaned against his board fence, in the shade of a Japanese elm. I was feeling the effects of the beer, but it wasn’t a good kind of high; it made me melancholy and added to the lost, empty, aimless state I had been mired in for the past month.

  I no longer had any purpose in life, no reason for my existence. It wasn’t a suicidal frame of mind; just an emptiness, a vacuum in which I seemed to be drifting. If I’d had Kerry, if things had been the way they were for us in the beginning, I could have weathered the suspension and found a way to go on. As it was I had nothing to hang on to, no enthusiasm for anything. It was as if all meaning had been cut out of me and the operation had turned me into an emotional vegetable.

  At the barbecue Eberhardt said, “You got any job prospects lined up yet?”

  “No. I haven’t been looking.”

  “Why not?”

  “What the hell am I going to do, Eb? Being an investigator is the only thing I’m qualified for.”

  “There must be something else you can do.”

  “Sure. Wash dishes, run errands, become a clerk in a cigar store. I’m too damned old for anything like that.”

  “You got to eat.”

  “I still have some savings left.”

  “Sure. How much?”

  “Enough to last me another month.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll worry about that when the time comes.”

  “You could sell off some of those pulps of yours.”

  “Last resort,” I said. “If it gets to that I might as well throw in the towel.”

  He put down the poker he’d been using and came over to stand next to me at the fence. “You give up your office yet?”

  “Not yet. Rent’s paid until the end of this month.”

  “What about the furniture and stuff?”

  “I guess I’ll sell it. Or give it away to the Salvation Army. I can’t afford to put it into storage, that’s for sure. And even if I could, why bother? I’ll never need office furniture again.”

  “You don’t know that,” he said. “The State Board promised a review in six months, didn’t they?”

  “Sure. A review. Even if they lift the suspension, which they won’t, how do I pick up the pieces? All my steady clients are gone and they wouldn’t come back. And where do I get new ones? Nobody’s going to want to hire a private detective who’s had his license suspended and been raked over the media coals the way I was.”

  “People forget. New people come into the city all the time. You could build up business again.”

  “Maybe. But I’d starve to death in the meantime.”

  “You’re going to starve as it is.”

  “Look, forget it. It’s not going to happen anyway. I’ll never be given a license again in California.”

  “You could try getting one in another state.”

  “With this hanging over me here? They’d turn me down flat, you know that, no matter where I went.”

  “It’s still worth a try.”

  “So maybe I will,” I said, but I knew I wouldn’t. I could not afford to move somewhere else and start over; it just wasn’t in me even if I could swing it.

  Eberhardt finished half of his beer; his eyes were starting to take on a faintly glassy sheen. “What’re you doing with your days, if you’re not out looking for work?”

  “Not much. Reading, moping around, drinking beer.”

  “I guess I know all about that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. He tilted the can to his mouth again.

  A maudlin indignation seemed to be creeping through me. I said, “It’s so goddamned unfair, Eb. What the hell did I do to deserve a suspension? Got mixed up in some things that weren’t my fault, did my job in each case, resolved them all. They took away my license because I’m good at what I do.”

  “Too good. You couldn’t stay out of hot water.”

  “For Christ’s sake, none of it was my fault.”

  And none of it was. During that crazy week in July I had taken on what looked to be three simple cases; and all three had turned into bizarre felonies—two murders involving the theft of a large sum of money and an extortion plot, and the robbery of a diamond ring. One of my clients, the lunatic wife of the first homicide victim, had publicly accused me of criminal negligence and threatened a lawsuit; that had only made things worse. The media had had a field day. First I was a possibly shady character, and then I was a kind of Typhoid Mary who left a wake of disaster everywhere I went, and then, after I managed to come up with solutions in all three cases, I was a supersleuth, Sam Spade and Sherlock Holmes all wrapped up in one package.

  As a result, the chief had claimed I was upstaging the police, interfering with the Department’s public image, attracting too much crime and too much publicity; it was a matter of public relations, he’d said. And so he had thrown me to the wolves on the State Board, and the wolves had agreed with his view and gobbled up my license. Never mind my unblemished record as a police officer and private investigator for over thirty years; never mind that I had always worked carefully within the law; never mind that I had to eat and had no other means of support. Indefinite suspension. End of hearing, end of reputation, end of career.

  Eberhardt clapped me on the shoulder. “Coals are ready,” he said. “Come on, we’ll go get the steaks.”

  “I’m not hungry, Eb.”

  “Me neither. But we got to eat. Otherwise we’ll both get shitfaced and start bawling on each other.”

  “We could quit drinking instead.”

  “I don’t want to quit drinking. I just want to put some food in my belly along with the rest of the beer I plan to swill down.”

  “All right. I guess it’s a good idea.”

  We went into the kitchen and Eberhardt took the steaks out of the fridge and put them on a plate. Then he got a couple of potatoes, cut them open, smeared them with butter. He was wrapping them in tinfoil, and I was opening two more beers, when the doorbell rang.

  “Now who the hell is that?” he said.

  “You could answer it and find out.”

  “One of the neighbors, probably. I got sympathetic neighbors since Dana walked out. I’ll be right back.”

  “Take your time.”

  He went through the swing door that led into the living room. I finished opening the beer, drained what was left in my previous can, and tasted the fresh one. At the front of the house I could hear Eb opening the door.

  Then I heard him say, loudly and clearly, “What the hell—?”

  And then there were two sharp echoing reports—gunshots, they could only have been gunshots.

  Sudden fear and confusion jerked me around; I went cold all over. In the other room there was the dull sound of something hitting the floor. I slammed the beer can down on the counter, banged the swing door with my shoulder, and charged through into the living room without thinking what I might be letting myself in for.

  It was like running onto a Hollywood sound stage where a scene from a gangster movie was being filmed; all sense of reality vanished instantly. Eberhardt was lying on the floor ten feet from the open front door, there was a bleeding hole in his belly, blood all over him, blood on his head, and framed in the doorway was a man standing in a shooter’s crouch with a big revolver extended in both hands; I couldn’t see much of his face, because the sun was setting on that side of the house and he was just a looming silhouette backlit by its glare, but I had the impression he was Chinese.

  I had just enough time to think: Oh my God! before he shot me.

  He swung the gun in my direction, I saw him do that and I started to throw myself toward the sofa on my left, and all in the same space of time the bullet jarred into the upper part of my chest and I heard the gun crack and the force of impact knocked me sprawling across the carpet. Momentum skidded me behind the sofa; I was aware of burning sensations along my cheek
and forearm where they bit into the rough carpet fibers. There was another shot, the metallic whine of a ricochet, the sound of something shattering. A long way off footsteps began to pound on wood, diminishing, gone.

  I flopped over on my side, clawed at the back of the sofa with one hand and swiped the other across my chest. That hand came away bloody—bright primary red glistening, dripping. But there was no pain; the entire upper half of my body felt numb, as if I had been pumped full of a local anesthetic.

  Jesus he shot me I’m shot.

  Eberhardt, lying over there …

  I tried to climb the back of the sofa but my legs wouldn’t support my weight, the bones and sinew had all melted, my hand kept slipping off the fabric because of the blood, oh, the blood. I slid down again, still with that sensation of melting, as if all of me was dissolving into a puddle of crimson fluid. Outside, far away, people were yelling. My vision turned cloudy; shadows swirled into the room and swallowed the sunlight. But the air stank of burnt gunpowder and spilled blood—I was sharply aware of that.

  I crawled out from behind the sofa, swimming through blood and shadow. People were still yelling outside; more footsteps pounded on the porch. And I kept crawling, kept swimming, dragging myself on forearms and knees. I could see Eberhardt in front of me, his body seemed to be the only thing left now in the room. Blood and shadow, blood and shadow. Hole in his belly, wound on the side of his head: torn flesh, scorched flesh. He wasn’t moving. Move, Eb, move! And I kept crawling, and his face was the color of ashes.

  God, I thought when I got to him—a clear, cold, savage thought—God, he looks dead.

  And then there were hands on me, voices all around me, and I let go of the last threads of perception and melted away into the blood and shadow.

  Two

  The first time I struggled up into consciousness, the room was empty.

  It was a hospital room, not the living room in Eberhardt’s house. White, sterile, windows with night on the other side; shadows, but no blood. No pain, either—a kind of tingling numbness all over. I moved my feet, moved my right arm, but I could not move my left arm. Fuzziness in my head, as if it had been stuffed with cotton, and a thought pushed its way through and lay in the cotton like something red and pulsing: They cut off my arm. Moment of panic. I struggled on the bed, struggled for more awareness. Then I saw my left arm lying there on the sheet and the panic went away. I kept trying to move my fingers, only nothing happened; the arm just lay there stiff and lifeless.