Blowback (The Nameless Detective) by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online

uncomfortable tonight.
    We had been there five minutes or so when Walt Bascomb put in an appearance. He saw us on the porch as he came past, but he did not say anything to either of us; he just went straight over to the parking circle and got into the '72 Ford. I noticed then that Cody had not returned with his Italian sports job, and that the new Cadillac was also absent.
    As Bascomb took the Ford up onto the county road, I said to Harry, “That Caddy I saw when I came in—does it belong to the Jerrolds?”
    “Yeah,” he said. “Why?”
    “Well, it's gone now, and I'm wondering if they went out together or one of them alone. He wasn't in much condition for driving, but I'd like it better if he went by himself. If she went, and stays out late, one of us ought to be around to check up when she gets back.”
    He nodded grimly. “We could take a walk over to their cabin now and see if anybody's home.”
    “That's probably a good idea. If Mrs. Jerrold is there alone, I'll pull an excuse to leave the two of you together and you can get that talk over with.”
    But when we got over to Six, there was nothing for either of us to do. The place was deserted.
    Harry said as we started back to the lake, “This whole thing is playing hell with my nerves.”
    “It'll work out,” I said.
    “I'm trying to believe that. Listen, I don't feel like sitting around again, waiting. What do you say we take one of the skiffs for a run around the lake?”
    “Sure,” I said, “I'm for that.”
    We went out onto the pier and climbed down into a skiff, Harry taking the tiller. I untied the painter and got the bow turned and pushed us out while he cranked up the outboard. Then I sat facing him on the bow seat, and we planed away to the north at quarter speed, running in close to shore.
    It was the time of night that is especially fine in mountain country like this. The air was cooler yet on the water—the deep stillness broken only by the hum of the outboard and the occasional buzz of a mosquito. Bass jumped desultorily near the rule grass shoreward; the red colorations had faded out of the sky and been replaced by the kind of peach-hued glow that presages another hot one for tomorrow; night shadows gathered in the denser sections of forest. The air smelled of pine resin and cold fresh water and, faintly, gasoline.
    I could feel myself relaxing somewhat as we followed the rim of the lake, north to northwest to west, headed directly toward the falling lip of the sun like moths toward the dying flame of a candle. I put my hand over the side and let it drag through the water and kick up spray, the way kids do. Harry gave me a wan smile, and I gave one back to him, and I thought then of a night on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, Harry and me and two nurses from Hickam Field out on a borrowed sailboat off Diamond Head a few days after the Japanese surrender, drunk on warm beer and the end of the war, capsizing when a stiff breeze came up and then getting rescued by a Navy patrol boat—and I mentioned all of that, raising my voice over the sound of the engine. He laughed and nodded, and we began to jog our memories aloud, and for a few short minutes it was as if both of us were back in our twenties, those good carefree postwar years.
    Only then, suddenly, Harry stopped talking in mid-sentence and jerked a little on his seat and stared past my left shoulder at something behind and above me. He said “Jesus Christ!” and the past lost itself again and I turned on my seat to follow the direction of his gaze, saw instantly what he had seen.
    It was a car—no, a van, a big one—and it was up on the bluff that rose off the southwest shore, maybe five hundred yards from where we were in the skiff; but not just on the bluff, coming forward and off the damned thing, coming right off the edge as I looked and sailing out straight as an arrow until its back wheels cleared the earth and then dipping, nose slanting down, falling at a forty-five-degree angle.