Blowback nd-4 Read online

  Blowback

  ( Nameless Detective - 4 )

  Bill Pronzini

  Bill Pronzini

  Blowback

  One

  Sunday Morning Coming Down…

  That's the title of a sad popular song by Kris Kristofferson, about a man with no wife and no children and nowhere to go and not much to look forward to on a quiet Sunday morning. On this quiet Sunday morning, I was that man. Nowhere to go and not much to look forward to.

  I carried a cup of coffee into the living room of my flat in San Francisco's Pacific Heights. It was a pretty nice day out, cloudless, a little windy-no sign of the heavy fogs that usually blanket the city during the month of July. The part of the Bay I could see from my front windows was a rippled ultramarine and dotted with sailboats, like a bas-relief map with a lot of small white flags pinned to it.

  I moved over to the tier of laminated wood bookshelves that filled the side wall beyond the windows, on which I kept most of my six thousand-odd detective and mystery pulp magazines by title, chronologically. I ran my fingers over some of the spines. Black Mask, Dime Detective, Clues, Detective Fiction Weekly, Double Detective. I had started collecting them in 1947, and that meant almost three decades of my life were on those shelves-nearly three-fifths of the time I had been on this earth. And next week, next Thursday, I would be fifty years old.

  I took one of the Black Masks down and looked at the gaudy thirties illustration, the cover list of authors. Gardner, Nebel, Cain. Old friends that usually I could have passed a quiet Sunday with, that would have lifted me out of most any depressed mood I might happen to be in. But not this Sunday The telephone rang.

  I keep the thing in the bedroom, and I went in there and lifted up the receiver. It was Eberhardt, a sobersided Lieutenant of Detectives on the San Francisco cops and probably my closest friend for about the same number of years as I had been collecting the pulps.

  “Hello, hot stuff,” he said. “Get you out of bed?”

  “No. I've been up for hours.”

  “You're getting to be an early bird in your dotage.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Listen, Dana is off to Sausalito for the day and I'm getting up a game-Hastings and Friedman from the Squad, maybe Larry Ballard from the Kearny Agency. You interested in a little poker and a lot of beer this afternoon?”

  “I don't think so, Eb.”

  “You working on something?”

  “Not since last Tuesday.”

  “Other plans?”

  “No. I'm just not in a poker mood today.”

  “You sound like you're in a mood, period.”

  “Maybe I am, a little.”

  “Private-eye blues, huh?”

  “Yeah-private-eye blues.”

  “Wouldn't happen to have anything to do with your fiftieth next week, would it?”

  “More or less,” I said.

  “Hell, fifty's the prime of life. I ought to know, tiger; I been there two years now. I haven't had any problem getting it up and neither will you.”

  “Getting what up?” I said.

  He made chuckling sounds. “You change your mind about the game, come on over around one. Beer's on me.”

  “Sure. Ciao, Eb.”

  We rang off, and I went back to the living room and looked around at the clutter in there: old newspapers and magazines and pulps, dirty dishes, clothing draped over the furniture; there was even a dust ball under the mahogany secretary in one corner. I had been living in this same Pacific Heights flat for twenty years, with the same furnishings, and for all anyone might have known or cared, the same bachelor's mess. Some of the women I had had relationships with had cleaned it up from time to time, but I had not had a relationship in quite a while now. So there was nobody to clean it up, nobody to care except me, and I was content with it the way it was.

  I sipped my coffee and tried not to think about anything. I might as well have tried not to breathe. I got up and paced around for a while, aimlessly.

  All at once, the cough started up. I sat down again, handkerchief to my mouth to catch the discharges of bitter gray phlegm from my lungs, and listened to the dry sounds echo through the empty room. I had had that cough for some while now, like an old enemy that came around to bother you now and again. Bronchial trouble, caused by too many cigarettes and air pollution and the cold San Francisco fog. Sure. But lately it had worsened, and the color of the phlegm had changed, and you can only lie to yourself for just so long. Then visceral fear takes over, and even if you have a paranoid reaction to doctors because of the things you saw in field hospitals in the South Pacific during World War II, you know there is no way you can continue to avoid medical attention.

  I had come to that decision the past week, and I had gotten the name of a doctor from the retired fire captain who lived downstairs, and I had made an appointment for last Friday-Dr. White, whose appearance and whose offices on Geary downtown were as sterile as his name. There had been a long talk about symptoms and a lot of stern admonitions about the evils of cigarette smoking that did nothing except deepen my fear and bring out a cold sweat under my arms. There had been, finally, a chest x-ray. And then “You have a lesion on your left lung,” he said.

  What do you say? There is nothing you can say. You sit there and look at him, and you try not to let him see how much your hands are trembling.

  “It may not be malignant,” this white Dr. White said. “It could be an adenoma-a benign tumor. We'll have to do a sputum cytology.”

  So I coughed up phlegm for him into a sterile container, and he said he would get it over to the pathology lab at San Francisco General right away, but that we could not reasonably expect a report until Tuesday sometime. Meanwhile, I was not supposed to worry and I was not, for God's sake, supposed to smoke any more cigarettes.

  Close the barn door, I had thought, the horse is gone. But I had not had a cigarette since then.

  And now it was Sunday, Sunday morning coming down, and tomorrow it would be Monday and then it would be Tuesday. And when it was Thursday and I already knew the results of the sputum test, I would be fifty years old. Happy birthday, happy half-century, you have lung cancer.

  Jesus, Jesus.

  I had wanted to tell Eberhardt on the phone just now; I had wanted to tell someone since Friday. But just as there had been nothing to say to White, there was nothing to say to Eb, not yet. He would only work himself up into a lather-he was a good friend-and there was no sense in that. There was no sense in worrying myself, just as the doctor advised. It would not help matters, it would not change matters. The lesion on my lung was malignant or it was not malignant. I had cancer or I did not have cancer. Simple.

  From the beginning it had all been simple, I thought. You start smoking because all the other kids on the block have taken it up and you don't want to be considered a sissy. Then you start to enjoy it, it's a harmless little vice; you like the way a cigarette tastes after a hard day or with a beer or after making love. Later, you listen to all the warnings put out by the Surgeon General's Office, and you shrug, and with stupid blind faith you think that it's not as bad as they make it seem. That it can't do any damage to you. But what you don't think about until maybe it's too late is that you have been burning up an average of two packs a day for thirty-five of your fifty years, which works out to more than half a million butts, to more than ten million lungfuls of tobacco smoke-and maybe the human body is just not equipped to handle that kind of overload.

  Simple. Simple to give the things up when you find out about the lesion growing on your lung. Simple to sit here with your morning coffee, coughing, spitting up phlegm, and tell yourself there's no point in worrying, you either have cancer or you don't, and if you're lucky the lesion won't be malignant and everything
will work out after all.

  What isn't simple is fighting off the craving for a cigarette, just one, just one more cigarette because it always tasted so damned good with that morning coffee.

  I got to my feet again: all I seemed to be doing this morning was standing and sitting down. Well, I had to get out of there, that was all, before I became claustrophobic; I had to get my mind off cigarettes and off Tuesday. Go somewhere, do something. Bowling, maybe, some sort of physical activity The phone bell went off a second time.

  Now who the hell? I thought. The hell with it, there was nobody I wanted to talk to. But I was not one of those people who could let the telephone ring without responding. Too many years of conditioning. The telephone was an integral part of my job and always had been. Reluctantly I went in and answered it.

  A voice, vaguely familiar, said my first name. I frowned, and there was one of those awkward pauses where you try to place someone by his voice and can't quite manage it. I said finally, “Yes?”

  “This is Harry Burroughs, buddy.”

  “Well, Christ,” I said.

  Harry Burroughs was a guy I had met in the Pacific theater during the early years of the war, when I was in Military Intelligence and he was attached to a combat supply unit. We had gotten to be friends, had done a good deal of drinking and carousing together, and had come back stateside on the same ship in 1946. Since we were both from California, we had stayed in touch over the years; he owned and operated a small fishing camp up in the Sierra Nevada, on Eden Lake in the southern Mother Lode.

  He said the same thing I was thinking, “Been a long time. Too long.”

  “Four years at least. You in town, Harry?”

  “No, I'm calling from The Pines.” That was a small village not far from Eden Lake. “Listen, buddy, you couldn't get away for a few days, could you? Come up and do a little fishing and kick over old times?”

  I hesitated. “Well-I don't know.”

  “Be good to see you,” he said. “And the bass are big and hungry this year.”

  I've got a lesion on my left lung, I thought. I might have lung cancer. I said, “Maybe I can swing it next week. I'm not sure yet.”

  “No chance you could make it right away?”

  “You mean today?”

  “The sooner the better.”

  There was something in his voice that told me he had more on his mind than fishing and kicking over old times. I said as much, and then I said, “You got some sort of problem, Harry?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” he admitted.

  “Urgent?”

  “It could be.”

  “You want to tell me about it now?”

  “It's a little complicated,” Harry said. “Has to do with some of the people staying at my camp. You'd have to see the situation yourself to get a real handle on it.” He paused. “Hell, I hate to come out of the blue like this after four years and ask a favor, but I don't know anybody else. And it'd be good to see you again anyway, believe that.”

  “Harry-look, I just don't know. I'll have to see if I can get away. Can I call back a little later?”

  “I'll be here for another hour. That enough time?”

  “Maybe. If not, I could leave a message.” There were no telephones at the camp; even though it was less than five miles from The Pines, Harry liked to maintain the illusion of wilderness and isolation.

  “Fair enough.” He gave me the number: The Pines General Store. “I hope you can manage it, buddy.”

  “I'll call,” I said.

  I put the phone down and went out into the kitchen and poured another cup of coffee. I stood with it, staring down into the sink and its overflow of crusty-looking dishes.

  You can't do it, I thought. You've got to go in on Tuesday and find out the results of the sputum test-find out that the lesion is benign.

  Or malignant.

  I don't want to know the results of that frigging test, I thought.

  Tuesday.

  You'll go crazy sitting around here, waiting for Tuesday.

  Well, you could go up to Eden Lake and you could be back by Tuesday, couldn't you?

  Unless Harry's problem took longer than that.

  All right, suppose it did. I could always call White from The Pines; I did not necessarily have to go in and see him. Besides, I was in a sorry mental state right now and I needed activity, a place and a direction to concentrate my sensibilities. I had always been motivated by my work, and it was a tried and true antidote for self-pity and depression. So was fishing for lake bass and reliving some of the good moments of the past with an old friend. And I owed Harry a favor because of our friendship, if for no other reason.

  Sunday morning coming down.

  In the living room again I sat and stared at the walls and listened to the silence. After a while I said aloud, “You're a damned fool.” Then I got up and did what I had known all along I was going to do: I went in and called Harry Burroughs at The Pines General Store and told him I would be up later that day.

  Two

  The Mother Lode extends one hundred and fifty miles north and south along the western slopes of the central Sierra Nevada. In the Southern Mines of Tuolumne County, due east of Modesto where Eden Lake was located, hundreds of thousands of men had used picks, washing pans, rockers, hydraulic rams, sluices, and crude and modern machinery to extract billions of dollars' worth of placer and quartz gold during the last half of the nineteenth century. Some of the towns that had sprung up then had long since died, become ghosts or nothing at all except historical memories. Others remained to the present, carefully preserving their heritage so that tourists could peer at the old brick-and-fieldstone and false-fronted buildings, prowl the nearby abandoned diggings, and study the relics left by those who had come long ago in search of dreams. And maybe a hundred years from now, if the world lasted that long, tourists of that era would come to gape and gawk at what was left of our dreams…

  The Pines was one of those towns rich in history, situated in the foothills off the Mono Highway east of Twain Harte and set against a backdrop of forested mountains and snow-capped crags thirteen thousand feet high and more. The surrounding countryside was rolling, hilly grassland and placer-pocked limestone-the town had been built on mining claims-and a spur of the Old Sierra Railroad passed through it and up into the mountains to where lumberjacks still felled trees and cut logs for the sawmills at Standard and Tuolumne.

  When I came into The Pines a few minutes before three, the main street was crowded with cars and people. Traffic had been heavy all the way from San Francisco, and especially heavy into and out of Sonora on the Mono Road, mostly transient tourists and vacationers from the resorts at Long Barn and Pine Crest and local families on a Sunday outing. It was very hot, up in the nineties; the hot-metal glare of the sun made the trees on Buck Horn Hill look as though they were aflame. I had my window rolled down, and the air was redolent with the scents of pine and wood smoke and summer dust.

  There was not much to the town-a two-story, false-fronted hotel with double porch posts and a sign hanging from the second-floor veranda that said it had been built in 1882; the General Store, a couple of souvenir shops, three restaurants, a simulated Old West saloon that dispensed “genuine sarsparilla” instead of alcoholic beverages, a white frame church, and The Pines Museum-the last nearly dwarfed by a pair of seventy-foot, partially dismantled tailing wheels along its near side. Down the side streets were a few houses, open pasture land, and at least one example of gold-rush architecture that nobody had seen fit to restore-a low square building with a brick front and stone sides and heavy iron doors.

  I wedged my car into a space in front of the General Store, between a VW bus and a big Dodge van that seemed curiously out of place in these surroundings because it had the words Vahram Terzian-Fine Oriental Rugs and Carpets painted on the side. I bought a fishing license and a few things I would need in the way of groceries: a small jar of instant coffee and a salami and some hard rolls. The place was jammed and the prices
were exorbitant and the fat woman who waited on me wore a broad smile; I thought that she was probably the owner.

  At the far end of the village was the dirt-and-gravel county road that led to Eden Lake. Nobody seemed to want to go there except me-the road was deserted. It wound upward past cuts of bluish limestone and the ancient, crumbling outbuilding of a pocket mine that lay against the hillside like an old scar that had never healed; then, after three dusty miles, it began to climb sharply into heavy sugar and digger pine. When it finally crested I could see Eden Lake shimmering ice-blue in the sunlight below.

  The lake was small, maybe a half-mile wide and a quarter-mile long. Forestland grew to the water's edge in a full half-moon to the north and east; to the west there was a high bluff and a grassy meadow rising in a gentle slope beside it. Harry Burroughs' fishing camp was at the south end, and its buildings were the only ones anywhere on or near the lake. All of the surrounding land was owned by either the state or the county, I couldn't remember which, and through a friend on the real-estate board Harry had managed a long-term lease for the portion on which he had built his camp. One of these days, though, at least some other parts of the lakefront property were going to undergo development-a fact he did not much care to think about.

  The first view you had of the camp was when you came down out of the trees and neared the graveled circle that served as a parking area. There were six cabins, set into a rough wide horseshoe shape and sweeping inland from the lake, but the only one visible from here was Harry's, the largest and the one nearest the parking circle; the others were hidden by pines and other forest growth. Extending into the lake fifty yards from Harry's front door was a short narrow pier, and tied to the end of it were two fourteen-foot, oak-hulled skiffs with five-horsepower outboards.

  His ten-year-old jeep was parked in the circle, along with four cars: a new dark-brown Cadillac, a dusty Rambler station wagon, a 1972 Ford, and an expensive yellow Italian sports job. I pulled my car in beside the Rambler and got out into the hot, dry mountain air.