2
The blow and the impact with the floor created a wild roaring in my ears, distorted my vision, but neither stunned me enough to put me out or keep me down. I slid a couple of feet on my back, caught my momentum and scrabbled around on reflex until I was up on one knee, turning back toward the office. I saw the man-figure standing there, two of him, through wavering shadows and a blurred nimbus of light, saw him move and the object he had hit me with leap free of his hand. Reflex made me duck this time, and over the roaring in my head there was the explosive crash of glass shattering on the floor close by. Wetness and glass shards spattered my hands and arms, I could smell the sharp sourness of red wine — the son of a bitch had tried to brain me twice with a goddamn bottle of wine — and I let out a sound that was half grunt and half bellow of rage and pain, and heaved up onto my feet like a wounded bear.
The man-shape had spun and was running away along the corridor.
Shaking my head, pawing at my eyes, I staggered after him. Bounced off one of the stone walls before my vision wobbled back into focus and I could see where I was going, where the guy was. Hunched shadow forty yards away, racing past the entrance to the tasting room, heading toward the narrow corridor that led into the area where the aging tanks were. I locked my teeth against the pain in my head, the pain in my wrist, and kept on lumbering in pursuit.
He was halfway through the forest of redwood vats by the time I cleared the foyer. But then he seemed to slip on something and reeled into one of the tanks, almost fell, got his balance back and threw a look over his shoulder. I was thirty yards behind him then, but I could not see enough of his face in the murky light to get an impression of what he looked like; it was just a dim blur, and he was just a man-shape in dark clothing. I shouted at him, for no rational reason — I was still groggy, still caught up in emotional reaction — but he had already pushed away from the tank and was running again, this time in quick choppy steps like somebody trying to run across ice.
I saw the reason for that when I came into the vat area: the floor there had been hosed down sometime during the afternoon and the stones were wet and slick and puddled with water. I slowed in time to keep myself from slipping the way he had, adjusted my own strides to match his. The distance between us was still thirty yards.
There was an archway at the far end of the area, and beyond it, in another room, were the steel vats the wineries use for aging white wines. The floor in there was wet too, but the guy got across it all right and into a third room, this one lined on both sides with horizontally laid oak casks that had been stained a glistening black by millions of gallons of fermenting red wine. A rubber hose was stretched out loosely and carelessly along the stones, and I got my feet tangled in the damned thing and cracked my elbow against the rounded edge of a cask. I finally managed to kick loose just as the guy reached the far end of the room and vanished into a right-angle corridor toward the rear of the cellar.
The roaring in my ears had diminished and I could hear the hollow drumming echoes of his footfalls and of my own as I ran up there. When I swung around the corner he was just going into a big room with a shadowy maze of overhead refrigeration piping and metal catwalks, and a cluster of stainless steel fermentation tanks. I pounded after him, breathing through my mouth now because the dankness and the overpowering wine smell were beginning to make me nauseous.
In the room down there the guy broke stride and I saw his head jerk from one side to the other, as if he were looking for a place to hide or some sort of escape route. Then he made a quick glance back toward me again, and must have decided there wasn’t time to do whatever it was before I caught him or got close enough to identify him; he shifted back into a hard run. And when he got to the far end he made another turn, to his right this time and without slowing, into a second north-south corridor.
What turned out to be down there were areas filled with more oak casks, with smaller aging cooperage stacked in tiers on wooden chocks, with some type of shadow-obscured equipment. He went straight through them all, and I still could not get any closer to him than thirty yards.
Another archway loomed ahead. A few feet beyond it was a blank stone walclass="underline" he had reached the end of the building. But along that end wall was yet another east-west corridor, and the guy veered into it to his right, and two or three seconds later I heard a clattering metallic sound, followed by a sharp creaking — the creaking of hinges. There was a sudden draft of cool fresh air.
Panting, I stumbled to the archway and lunged through it. A heavy wooden door stood open five yards away; the corridor was empty. I thought something obscene, ran through the door onto the gravel surface of the yard. At first I didn’t see him and I thought he had gotten around to the front or the rear of the cellar; the night seemed dark and still and deserted. Then there was movement off to my right, in the shadow of a black oak growing between the south edge of the yard and a wide, shallow-looking pond. I picked him out then, running toward the pond or toward a dirt-and-gravel road near it that curved up through the open vineyards beyond. He had better than sixty yards on me now.
I went after him — across the yard, past the oak, over toward the pond. Once he got to the road he ran straight up the center of it, head down and body bent forward, feet kicking up thin puffs of dust. I came onto the gravelly bed and plunged upward in his wake.
It was rough going. The road climbed steadily up the hillside to a broken line of eucalyptus trees across the crown, and the loose gravel made it difficult to maintain traction. The night air was sweet after the winey dampness of the cellar and it had cleared the last of the grogginess from my mind; but it did not help the throbbing pain where I had been clubbed, or the tightness that was building in my chest from too much exertion. I could feel myself slowing up, starting to stumble like a drunk trying to follow a straight line. But he was slowing up too, I could see that — because he was somewhere around my age or because he was not in the best physical condition. It was all coming down to which one of us gave out first.
We were well up into the vineyards now — rows of old gnarled leafy vines curved out on both sides — and the guy was coming in on the line of eucalyptus at the brow of the hill. The road hooked near there, through the trees; I could not see from where I was the point at which it came out of them and went down the far slope. Which meant I was going to lose sight of him pretty soon, if only briefly.
And that was what happened: one second he was there, running through the curve, and the next he was gone into the deep shadows cast by the eucalyptus.
A bird screeched in a startled way up there, as if it had been disturbed from its sleep; the only other sounds were the scrape of my shoes on gravel and the wheezing rasp of my breath. I staggered finally through the hook in the road, to where it leveled off at the crest and the trees began. Then I could see the direction it took, and beyond the eucalyptus, in another hollow, I had an impression of lights glowing against the sky; but I still could not see the guy.
I started into the trees — and off to my left there was the faint rustling of leaves, the sound of a snapping twig.
I pulled up sharply, turning in that direction, sleeving sweat from my face and eyes. Blackness, crouching shadows. But then I heard the rustling again, and it was no more than fifteen yards away, back toward the slope I had just come up; he must have gone in there to hide and been too exhausted or too panicked to bring it off. A second later there was movement that I could perceive even in the darkness, the crunch and slide of retreating steps. He knew I had heard him and he was making a run for it again.