Blue Lonesome by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online

no desire to go out again. Tired from all the driving; and there would be plenty of time tomorrow to look the town over, see what it had to offer, before he asked his questions.
    He was aware of a need to draw out his stay here as long as he could, to postpone what was likely a final dead end. That was why he hadn’t questioned Mrs. Padgett. As much as he wanted his freedom from Ms. Lonesome, letting go of her would not be easy. It would be like losing a small part of himself. A nonessential part, a little piece of self-indulgence, but something meaningful just the same.
    IN THE EARLY-MORNING sunlight Beulah had a drowsy, mildly schizoid appearance. New, modern buildings standing cheek by jowl with wooden false-fronts, aging brick structures, a three-story gray stone hotel that had to be well over a century old. Traffic lights, dust-dulled cars, and lumbering motor homes parked and passing through, a gaudy, red-neon stallion rearing high above the entrance to the Wild Horse Casino; and meandering among the low, tawny hills that flanked the central part of town, rutted dirt roads that looked as if they would be more hospitable to ore wagons and buckboards than to any twentieth-century vehicle. Beyond the outskirts to the north, the main highway ran straight across empty desert flats, narrowing until it became a pencil-thin line where a pair of black-shadowed mountain ranges seemed to converge in the far distance.
    A dry breeze fanned Messenger’s cheeks as he walked from the motel to where a two-block-long main drag lanced off to the west. The air was still night-cool, heavy with the scents of sage and dust, but a gathering heat licked hard at its edges; another couple of hours and it would be hot enough to draw sweat. Everything—sky, desert, man-made objects—had a clarity and brilliance that made him squint. But the combined effect of it all was appealing. One of those mornings and one of those places that made you glad to be alive. And made you ravenously hungry too, he was surprised to discover. It was the first time in as long as he could remember that he’d had any kind of appetite before noon.
    Mrs. Padgett had told him the Goldtown Café was the best place in town for breakfast. The café was on Main, just off the highway intersection, its plate-glass front window advertising “beer-batter pancakes, Nevada’s finest.” Inside he found an atmosphere at once similar and dissimilar to that in the Harmony Café. The smells were the same; despite the ever-present slot machines, much of the decor was the same. But there was more conversation, more laughter, more obvious pleasure in eating among the men and women filling the booths and strung out along the counter; and the faces, whether they belonged to locals in Western garb or travelers on their way to or from Las Vegas, seemed on the whole more cheerful, more open and inclined to make eye contact.
    He wondered if the significance of this was that a city like San Francisco enclosed people who seldom if ever left it, weighed so heavily on them and made them so guarded after a while that they closed themselves off without even realizing it—turned into Hemingway’s metaphoric islands in the stream. Whereas an environment like this was so big, so unbounded, that it allowed for an expansion rather than a contraction of self. He’d felt such an expansion in Death Valley. Not that you had to live out here to keep the self from shriveling. It was the perspective that mattered, the knowledge that there were places you could go that actually could help to lift your spirits.
    He ordered the pancakes and a side of ham. Ate every scrap and took refills on his coffee. When he paid the bill he asked his waitress, a heavy-bosomed strawberry blond whose name tag read Lynette , for directions to the library.
    She said, “Block south and two blocks east, on Tungsten. But it doesn’t open until ten.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Sure thing.” Her smile was friendly, even a little