Zigzag by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online

way into Daly City. I’d known the neighborhood well at one time, the Outer Mission being where I was born and raised, but it had changed quite a bit since I was a kid. Once mainly an Italian and Irish enclave, it was now a polyglot of ethnic groups—Chinese, Mexican, Central American, and Filipino predominating—and working-class Caucasians, most of whom had been longtime residents. It has been described as a kind of urban Main Street, U.S.A., with restaurants, coffee shops, markets, bakeries, boutiques, hair salons, and hardware stores all within a range of several blocks, but then you could say the same about other San Francisco neighborhoods. For me it had become less and less familiar over the years. Whenever I went there, I couldn’t help feeling pangs of nostalgia for what it used to be—for the old days even though they hadn’t all been good old days growing up.
    The Bighorn Tavern, to my surprise, was a relic of those old days. Tucked between an Asian market and a dry-cleaning business, it had an old-fashioned, neon-free façade, its only advertisement being its name imprinted on the opaque window next to the entrance door. Ray Fentress had probably been drawn to it because it was located within a couple of blocks of where he’d lived with his wife on Lisbon Street, and because it would cater to his type of nonethnic clientele—a blue-collar white man’s comfort zone.
    The interior bore out my external assessment. Weakly lit, musty with the smells of beer, alcohol, ingrained traces of tobacco smoke from the days before the no-smoking laws were passed. As you’d expect from its name, the walls were decorated with deer heads and racks of antlers, all very old and dusty looking; otherwise there was nothing to distinguish it from dozens of similar watering holes in the city, thousands of others spread across the country. The foot-railed bar extended the length of the right-hand wall; a line of high-backed wooden booths ran along the wall opposite. Two pool tables and two pinball machines were stuffed into an alcove at the rear.
    The Bighorn had been in business for a lot of years, obviously. It might even have been in operation when I was growing up not far away with my alcoholic father and long-suffering mother. Hell, the old man might even have hoisted a few here himself on one of his all too frequent pub crawls.
    There weren’t many customers now, at a few minutes past one o’clock. The booths were all empty and only four people, three men and a woman, occupied the cracked leatherette stools at the bar. The men, all middle-aged and dressed in work clothes, were drinking beer; the woman, a blowsy blonde whose age could have been anywhere between forty and sixty, was sipping on something that, judging from the shape of the glass and the pale color of its contents, was either a gin or vodka martini. She gave me a blearily hopeful look as I slid onto a stool as far from her and the men as I could get, but when I didn’t return her smile she wiped it off and put her attention back on her drink.
    The man behind the plank looked to be in his mid-forties, thick through the chest and shoulders, lantern jaw, a tonsure of light-colored hair around the back of his skull and a lone patch in front like a tiny island in a dry lake bed. He looked me over long enough to determine I was a stranger, but he seemed welcoming enough when he said, “Afternoon. What’ll it be?”
    â€œAnchor Steam, draft if you have it. And some conversation.”
    â€œThe beer I got.”
    He moved down the bar to fill a glass. When he brought it back and set it down, I said in a lowered voice, “Are you Joe Buckner?”
    â€œThat’s right. Why?”
    â€œI’d like to talk to you about Ray Fentress.”
    That put him on his guard. “Why?” he said again.
    â€œYou know what happened to him?”
    â€œYeah, I heard. Who’re you?”
    I said, “The