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

the paper wrappings from fast-food chicken and hamburgers and at least two used condoms tied off like deflated carnival balloons. Lots of things lost here, I thought grimly. Virginity, hours and nights, laughter, another unspoiled piece of nature. And now you could add a man's life to the list.
    I stopped to listen, but there was still nothing to hear; the area was deserted now, all right. Then my eye caught and held on something multicolored lying on the grassy hump between the ruts a few yards ahead. I went up there and sat on my haunches and looked at the thing without touching it. It was a couple of feet long, iridescent green and gold ornamented with eyelike markings in rich dark blue—and it had no more business being there at Eden Lake than a murdered dealer in Oriental rugs and carpets.
    “Peacock feather,” Harry said beside me.
    “Yeah.”
    “Funny thing to find in a place like this.”
    “I was thinking the same.”
    “Could it've belonged to whoever did for the guy in the van?”
    “Maybe,” I said. I leaned down close to the feather, still not touching it. Free of dust or pine needles or water stains; colors sharp, vane smooth and new-looking. “One thing's sure—it hasn't been here very long.”
    Harry frowned as I stood up, “Doesn't make much sense,” he said. “Why would anybody carry around a peacock feather?”
    “Yeah,” I said, “why?”
    When we came out onto the bluff again, the last reflections of sunset were gone from the lake and the water had turned a dusty gray color. The sky was a velvety purple, studded with hard un-winking stars and the fingernail slice of a gibbous moon. You could tell that it was not going to get any cooler than it was now until the hours just before dawn.
    I said, “You'd better take the skiff back and report this to the county sheriff.”
    “What about you?”
    “I'll stay here and keep watch.”
    “You sure? It'll take a couple of hours.”
    “I don't mind if you don't.”
    “Whatever you say, buddy.”
    I went downslope with him and held the skiff while he got in, and then shoved it off. When he jerked the outboard to life, mosquitoes and gnats gliding through the heavy stillness seemed to dart away in all directions, like shards of the suddenly broken quiet. I stood at the water's edge and watched until he had the skiff turned and the throttle opened up; then I sat down in the grass to wait and think a little.
    The dead man in the van, and the Oriental rug angle, and the peacock feather, made the whole thing a can of worms—the county sheriff's, not mine or Harry's. Guesswork wouldn't buy me anything, then, and I had enough on my mind as it was: the results of the sputum test, and Harry's troubles at the camp. The thing to do was to stay aloof from what had happened here.
    Sure.
    At the base of the bluff, fifty yards away, the van sat motionless among the rule reeds, canted forward slightly onto its passenger side; all four wheels were submerged. The white body gleamed cold and pale in the gathering darkness.
    Like marble, I thought. Marble slab, marble crypt.
    A feeling of uneasiness began to creep over me, and it had nothing much to do with sitting alone in the dark. I could not stop thinking about the small nut-brown man lying over there with the top of his head shattered; in my mind I could still see his face, the staring eyes and the waxy features void of life force.
    I had seen death before, too much of it—kids with their bodies torn open and limbs blown off by grenades and mortar shells, a woman with forty-two stab wounds in her face and torso, the living room of a house in San Francisco's Sunset District in which a man had gone berserk and taken an axe to his wife and family. I had never become immune to the sight of it, as some cops did—that was one of the reasons why I had finally resigned from the force—but I had learned how to block it out of my mind after a while, how to keep my attitude totally objective. Death was an abstract,