Shackles by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online Page B

day to day. Don’t look ahead; don’t think about this afternoon, much less tonight, and never about tomorrow. Don’t think about death, or any more about madness. Believe that I will survive this somehow, never stop believing it for a second.
    I will survive.
    I
will.
    Get up then, get moving. It’s what you do every morning, isn’t it? This is no different, you can’t allow it to be any different. Lying here passive like this invites brooding, invites self-pity—invites cracks in the dike.
    I sat up, disentangled myself from the blankets, swung my legs off the cot. There was a furrow of pain along the back of my left calf where the leg iron had somehow bitten into the flesh. I leaned down to rub at the spot, and to see if I could loosen the thing a little. It was tight around the calf but not so tight that I was unable to work it downward half an inch or so. That was far enough. I didn’t want it all the way down to my ankle, where the lower edge would ride against my heel and maybe open a sore that would make walking painful.
    It was cold in the room—still snowing outside—but not so cold here in my corner, because I had left the space heater on all night. The coils glowed, radiated warmth, made faint ticking sounds.
Better use it sparingly. It’s old and the coils might burn out on you.
Well, he was right, goddamn him. If they did burn out, and the temperature dropped far enough below zero, the blankets and my clothing wouldn’t be enough to prevent me from freezing to death.
    I reached over, switched the thing off. From now on I’d keep it off during the daylight hours. Use it only at night, and not all night unless the weather conditions were bad enough to warrant it. Bundle up in the blankets, drink plenty of hot tea and coffee and soup—keep warm that way.
    Up on my feet. A few stretches, a few squats, a few toe touches: the kind of light calisthenics I sometimes indulged in to loosen stiff muscles, get the circulation flowing on cold mornings. Yes, and what if I adopted a regular exercise program, did a series of calisthenics every day? It would be another way of keeping warm, another way of passing time. And by preventing my body from atrophying in these confines, I would be helping to prevent my mind from doing the same.
    The exercise put a sharp, spasmodic clenching under my breastbone. How long since I’d eaten anything? Almost thirty-six hours. Almost a day and a half since the dinner at the Rusty Scupper with Kerry and Eberhardt and Bobbie Jean—
    Kerry, I thought.
    No, I thought, no, not yet.
    I put on my sport jacket and overcoat—I had taken them off last night because it had been warm enough to sleep without them—and then went around the card table, dragging my chain like a fat ghost, and plugged in the two-burner hot plate. Took the coffee pot into the bathroom and filled it with water and brought it back out and put it on the stove. Hunted through the canned goods, settled on beef stew. Opened the can, dumped the stew into the saucepan, put the saucepan on the other burner. Spooned a little coffee into the enameled mug, then added a little more because this was my first morning, I didn’t need to worry about conserving it just yet. Set out the one bowl and a plastic fork and spoon, opened a package of saltines, opened another package of paper napkins. Did all of that slowly, carefully, establishing a routine.
    While I waited for the water to boil and the stew to heat, I picked up the radio and checked to see if he’d put in batteries. He had; the packet in the cardboard carton was a spare set. I flipped the On switch and listened to a steady spewing of static. It was the same from one end of the dial to the other—heavy static, with here and there a murmur of voices or music that I couldn’t distinguish. I carried the radio to the window, held it up to the glass, and fiddled with the dial again. Same thing. But the wind was up, whipping and bending the nearby trees, and it was