A wasteland of strangers by Bill Pronzini Page A

aimed when the hook popped free, making a thin, jangling sound as it dropped. The screen door started to creak inward.
    "Don't come any farther. I have a gun and I'll use it."
    My voice rising so suddenly out of the darkness froze him. Four or five seconds passed; then the door creaked again, louder, and the lumpy shapes of his head and shoulders appeared around its edge.
    "One more step, I'll shoot."
    Creak.
    He didn't believe I was armed, so I made him believe it. I raised the Ruger slightly and to the left and squeezed the trigger.
    The report, magnified by the closed space and low ceiling, was a heavy pressure against my eardrums. The bullet went into the wall alongside the jamb, and in the muzzle flash I saw him duck his head below an upraised arm. That brief glimpse caused me to suck in my breath. I saw his eyes, bulging, wild, but that was all I saw.
    He was wearing a ski mask.
    In the darkness the screen door banged shut as he let go of it and backed off on the landing. Then he was thumping down the steps, off onto the brick path that angles down to the dock. It was a few seconds before my legs would work; then I was at the screen, yanking it open and rushing outside. By then he was off the path, running toward the low fence that separates my property from the closed-up cottage on the north that belongs to summer people. The absence of any nearby lights and the low, thick cloud cover made him little more than a moving shadow; his clothing was dark, too, so I couldn't even tell what he was wearing. He vaulted the fence, stumbled, righted himself, and disappeared behind the junipers that grew at the rear of the cottage.
    The wind off the lake was icy; I was aware of it all of a sudden, stabbing through the thin cotton of my pajamas, prickling my bare feet and arms. Back inside, quickly. I put the porch light on, and when my eyes adjusted I peered at the door lock. Scratched, the wood around the plate gouged; but it still worked all right. I set the button, closed the door, then rehooked the screen door. The splintered hole in the wall was about twelve inches from the jamb, at head height—exactly where I'd intended the bullet to go.
    I switched on the kitchen light, entered the front room, and turned on a lamp in there. The clock over the fireplace said that it was one-thirty. The gunshot had seemed explosively loud, but the house on the south side of me was also empty—up for sale—and the noise hadn't carried far enough to arouse any neighbors farther away on this side or across the street. When I drew back an edge of the front-window curtain, Lakeshore Road was deserted and all the houses I could see were dark. Everything looked normal, peaceful, as if the entire incident might have been a dream.
    Goose bumps still covered my arms; there was a crawly sensation up and down my back. In the bedroom I put on my woolly slippers, the terry-cloth robe that was the heaviest I owned. The chill didn't go away. I turned the furnace up over seventy and stood in front of the heat register until warm and then hot air began to pulse out.
    I kept seeing his image in the muzzle flash, the upflung arm, the wild eyes bulging in the holes of the ski mask. Burglar? There hadn't been a nighttime break-in of an occupied house—what Dick calls a "hot prowl"—in Pomo in as long as I could remember. The penalties were much more severe for that kind of crime than they were for daylight burglaries. Besides, thieves weren't likely to wear ski masks.
    Rapists wore ski masks.
    Rape wasn't uncommon in Pomo County. The home invasion kind was, but still, it happened elsewhere—it could happen here, too. Young woman living alone, a man with a sick sexual bent decides to take advantage—
    If you d like some company ...
    My God. The stranger on the pier tonight?
    Big, and a little odd. And I'd told him we didn't have much serious crime in Pomo. I hadn't told him I lived alone, but when I'd said I had to take the boat home or walk two miles and