Snowbound by Bill Pronzini Page A

embrace on the blanket, she naked and he with just his pants and shoes on, when the two motorcycles came roaring down onto the beach.
    Startled, they broke apart, and Charlene fumbled for her clothing and made the mistake of standing up to put it on. The moonlight had been bright, and as clearly as he could see the cycles approaching, the two riders could see him and Charlene and Charlene’s nakedness. The bikes swerved toward them. He had an instant premonition of danger; he grabbed her arm, tried to pull her away in a run toward the bluff path. But the cycles swung in hard turns, cut them off, forced them back to the overhang.
    He saw, as the bikes pulled up in front of them and stopped, that the two riders were young, in their late twenties or early thirties, dressed in black metal-studded denim and heavy boots, one bearded, the other wearing a gold hoop earring. Charlene was crying, terrified; she had most of her clothing on again, but it was much too late—he knew it had been too late from the moment they’d been seen. He tried to talk to the two cyclists, and it was useless; they were either very drunk or flying on drugs. The bearded one told him to move away from Charlene, and he said no, he wasn’t going to do that, and the one wearing the earring dropped a hand to his boot and came up with a long, thin-bladed knife.
    “Move now, boyfriend,” the bearded one said, “or both of you going to get cut. And we don’t want to cut nobody, really.”
    Charlene screamed, clinging to him. The bearded one grabbed her wrist, spun her to him and held her. Instinctively he started to move to help her, but the knife jabbed forward, darting, pushing him back against the dirt and rock of the bluff. Charlene’s cries then were near hysterical.
    “Soggy seconds for you, man,” the bearded one said to the other. “Watch boyfriend here until I’m done.” And turned to Charlene and slapped her several times and pulled her over to the blanket and threw her down on it; tore her clothes off again, dragged his own trousers down. She kept on shrieking, and he kept on hitting her, trying to force her legs apart to get himself inside her. The one with the knife divided his attention between them and Tribucci, giggling softly.
    He stood it as long as he could, held at bay by the knife and by fear. And then he simply forgot about the knife and forgot about being afraid and waited until the earringed one’s attention had drifted once more to the struggle on the blanket, pushed out from the bluff at that moment, and kicked him between the legs with all his strength. The earringed man screamed louder than Charlene, dropped the knife, and bent over double. He kicked him in the face, kicked him in the head once he was down, turned. The bearded one had released Charlene and was trying to stand, trying to pull his pants up from around his ankles. He ran toward him, shouting, “Run, Charlene, run!” and saw her fleeing half-naked toward the path, and reached the bearded one and kicked him three times in the head and upper body and then threw himself on top of the man and hit him with his fists, rolled his face in the sand, hit him and hit him and hit him and hit him—
    And stopped suddenly, because he had become aware of the man’s blood spattered warm over his hand and forearm. He struggled to his feet, gasping. The bearded cyclist did not move. He turned to look at the other one: not moving either. One or both of them might have been dead, but he did not care one way or the other then; he just did not care. He walked to where the surf frothed whitely over the sand, knelt and washed the blood off himself; then he found his shirt, put it on, and went slowly up the path to the road. Charlene and the car were gone. He walked along the road for a mile or so to where three teen-agers in a raked station wagon responded to his outthrust thumb and gave him a lift down the coast to Fort Ord. He had been very calm the entire time; reaction did not