Fever: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Novels) by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online Page A

Runyon pulled his coat collar up against the chill. Out on the bay a freighter from the Port of Oakland was moving slowly under the arch of the Bay
    Bridge, heading toward the Gate. He watched it while he waited. Colleen had always wanted to take a vacation cruise on a freighter, in the days when you could still book passage on one—down through the Panama Canal to the Caribbean. Another cruise she’d tried to talk him into was on one of the luxury ships that went up the Inside Passage to Ketchikan, Juneau, and other ports along the Alaskan coast.
    No answer. He pressed the bell again.
    But shipboard travel wasn’t his idea of a good time. Too confining, too regimented. He’d put her off, made excuses, steered her into other, landlocked vacations that allowed him freedom of movement. Selfish. She’d never said anything, she was never one to complain or wheedle or argue, but she must have been disappointed. Someday we’ll do it, he’d said. Only someday never came, not for either of them. Every time he thought about it, he felt like a shit for having denied her a simple pleasure that would have made her life, while she still had a life, a little happier.
    Still no answer.
    One thing he knew now, anyway: Youngblood wasn’t hurt badly enough to stay at home on a Saturday morning.
    H e decided he might as well see what, if anything, Dré Janssen could tell him. He drove to Chestnut Street in the Marina, wasted nearly half an hour hunting up a legal parking space, and got exactly nothing for the effort. Janssen didn’t work on Saturdays. Neither of the two clerks on duty in the video store could or would tell him where the manager lived.
    Neither could the phone directory. Everybody had unlistednumbers these days, it seemed—hunger for what little privacy remained to the average citizen in the Big Brother age. One more thing that would have to wait until Monday.
    L ong drive down the spine of the Peninsula on Skyline Boulevard, a swing over to the coast, a grilled cheese sandwich in Half Moon Bay, and back into the city on Highway 1.
    Another pass by the Duncan Street address. Brian Youngblood still wasn’t home. Or he was home and not answering his doorbell.
    The hell with it. Tomorrow was another day to fill up, get through.
    O n his way to the apartment, he saw the woman in the scarf again.
    It was after six and he was stopped at the Taraval light on Nineteenth Avenue. He chanced to glance over just as she was coming out of the coffee shop on the southwestern corner. Same black-and-white checked coat, different-colored scarf, but tied in the same way over the left side of her face. Her, no doubt of it. She was walking away to the west when the light changed.
    He drove three blocks before impulse made him turn and loop back around to Taraval. By the time he crossed Nineteenth, she was nowhere in sight. No sign of the chocolate-colored Scion, either. One more pass around, same results, before he gave it up and drove on to Ortega.
    Just as well. What would he have done if she’d still been there? What could he say to her?
    Crazy coincidence, that was all it was. You live in a big city neighborhood, you can go months or years without seeing the same person twice. So she occupied space somewhere in his neighborhood, so what? He’d probably never see her a third time. Didn’t matter if he did, did it?
    Not in the long run, no, but it seemed to matter right now. Seeing her again had put her in the forefront of his mind. Her, and the intense pain that had radiated from her good eye the night before. That was why he’d given in to the impulse. Drawn to pain and suffering, like a moth to candle fire. Colleen. Risa Niland, who resembled Colleen, whose sister had been brutally murdered. Drawn to their hurt and then ultimately repelled by it because it was the same as his own and there was nothing he could do to ease it, much less put an end to it.
    He’d let himself believe there might be a way with Risa Niland, given