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

The front bumper hit the hard bare slope and turned the machine in a loose somersault, and a second later the sound of impact reverberated on the dusky air; then the van crashed down on its top on the water and rule grass at the base of the bluff, spray geysering up twenty feet or more, the sound of that impact carrying hollowly across the lake. Finally it bobbed in the disturbed lake and tilted over on its passenger side and floated there like a badly wounded animal.
    Even before the last echoes of the crash died away, Harry had the outboard open full-throttle and we were skimming and bouncing toward the van. I grabbed onto the skiff's gunwales with both hands, glanced back at him and saw his mouth set hard, the same astonishment in his eyes that must have been in mine. The van kept rocking gently back and forth in the swells, but the water looked too shallow at that point for there to be any immediate danger of it sinking. It was floating nearly upright now, and as we came in on it I could see that there was printing on its wet white body.
    The printing said Vahram Terzian—Fine Oriental Rugs and Carpets: it was the same van beside which I had parked in The Pines that afternoon.
    Harry brought the skiff up to it on an angle across the driver's door, cutting power, throttling into reverse to hold us steady. I stood up with my feet spread wide for balance and reached out and caught onto the door handle. When I tugged down on it, nothing happened; it was jam-locked from the fall. The window was rolled up, too, and I had to lean my body forward, bracing it against the door, to get a look inside.
    What I saw put tracers of cold between my shoulder blades. There was one person inside the cab—a small nut-brown man with black hair that was dyed now a bright ugly crimson along the top of his skull. He was lying down on the floorboards, wedged between the steering column and the seat, and pressed in against his left shoulder was the upper half of an iron lug wrench.
    Behind me Harry said, “Anybody in there?”
    “Yeah, one guy.”
    “Can we get him out?”
    “Door's jammed. But it doesn't matter.”
    “Why doesn't it?”
    “Because he's dead,” I said.
    “Jesus,” Harry said. “You sure?”
    “I'm sure.” And I was thinking that both of us had been half-expecting violence to break loose at any time here in the bucolic quiet of Eden Lake; had been as prepared for it as anybody ever is. But neither of us had been prepared for it to come like this, from a totally unexpected, unrelated source, and in a way even more brutal than any we might have anticipated.
    “He was dead before the van went off that bluff up there,” I said. “Somebody caved in his head with a lug wrench.”

Five
     
    We beached the skiff at the foot of the slope and climbed up and went over onto the bluff. It was graveyard-still up there; nothing stirred anywhere in the hot, windless dusk. You could see the tracks made by the van's tires in the grassy earth, and they started back where a rutted trail hooked away through night-shadowed pine forest. There were no other tracks of any kind.
    I said, “Where does that trail lead?”
    “Connects with a fire road about a hundred yards back,” Harry said. “That one loops around the lake and picks up the county road into The Pines.”
    “Used much?”
    “Some. Tourists and local kids, mostly.”
    “But not around this time of day.”
    “Not usually, no.”
    “So whoever did it probably got away without being seen.”
    “If he isn't still around here somewhere.”
    “Not much chance of that, as much noise as we've made.”
    “What the hell could it be about?”
    I shook my head.
    We walked to the trail and followed it a short way into the woods. The ground there was hard-packed, covered with pine needles, and you could not tell if another vehicle had come along it or parked on it recently. The only indications of human presence—and human folly—seemed to be a scatter of rusting beer cans and