Bill Pronzini: Scattershot

I kept on going, made the turn and drifted onto a second, tree-shadowed turnaround just beyond the intersection. Diagonally in front of me I could see Hornback ease the Dodge across the flat surface of the lookout, bring it to a stop nose-up against a perimeter guardrail. The distance between us was maybe seventy-five yards.

What’s he up to now? I thought. Well, he had probably stopped over there to take in the view and maybe do a little brooding. The other possibility was that he was waiting for someone. A late-evening rendezvous with the alleged girl friend? but the police patrol Twin Peaks Park at regular intervals, because adventuresome kids had been known to use it as a lovers’ lane and because there had been trouble in the past with youth gangs attacking parkers. It was hardly the kind of place two adults would pick for an assignation. Why meet up here when the city was full of hotels and motels?

The Dodge gleamed a dullish black in the starlight; there was no moon. From where I was I could see all of the passenger side and the rear third of the driver’s side. The interior was shrouded in darkness. Pretty soon another match flamed, smearing the gloom for an instant with dim yellow light. Hornback was not quite a chain-smoker, but he was the next thing to it-at least a three-pack-a-day man. I felt a little sorry for him, considering my own bout with the specter of lung cancer.

I slouched down behind the wheel, tried to make myself comfortable. Five minutes passed. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Behind me, half a dozen sets of headlights came up or went down the hill on Twin Peaks Boulevard; none of them turned in where we were. And nothing moved that I could see in or around the Dodge.

I occupied my mind by speculating again about Hornback. He was a puzzle, all right. Maybe a cheating husband; maybe a thief; maybe an innocent husband and an innocent man-the victim of a loveless marriage and a shrewish wife. He had not done anything of a guilty or furtive nature tonight, and yet here he was, parked alone at 11:10 P.M. on a lookout in Twin Peaks Park. It could go either way. So which was it going to go?

Twenty minutes.

And I began to feel just a little uneasy. You get intimations like that when you’ve been a cop as long as I have, vague flickers of wrongness. The feeling made me fidgety, — I sat up and rolled down my window and peered across at the Dodge. Stillness. Darkness. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Twenty-five minutes.

The wind was chill against my face, and I rolled the window back up. But the coldness had got into the car; I drew my coat tight around my neck. And kept staring at the Dodge and the bright mosaic of lights beyond, like luminous spangles on the black-velvet sky.

Thirty minutes.

The uneasiness grew, became acute. Something wrong over there. A half-hour was a long time for a man to sit alone on a lookout, whether he was brooding or not; it was even a long time to wait for a rendezvous. But that was only part of the sense of wrongness. Something else …

Hornback had not lighted another cigarette since that one nearly a half-hour ago.

The realization made me sit up again. He had been smoking steadily all night long, even during his walk along Upper Grant after dinner. When I was a heavy smoker I could not have gone thirty minutes without lighting up; it seemed funny that Hornback could or would, considering where he was and that there was nothing else for him to do in there. He might have run out, of course- but I remembered seeing a full pack in front of him at Dewey’s Place.

What could be wrong over there? He was alone in the car, alone up here except for my watching eyes. Nothing could have happened to him. Unless-

Suicide?

The word popped into my mind and made me feel even colder. Suppose Hornback wasn’t playing around and suppose he was also despondent over the state of his marriage, maybe over his alleged theft. Suppose all the aimless wandering tonight had been a prelude to an attempt on his own life- a man trying to work up enough courage to kill himself on a lonely road high above the city. It was possible; I didn’t know enough about Hornback to be able to judge his mental stability.

I wrapped both hands around the wheel, debat ing with myself. If I went over and checked on him, and he was all right, I would have blown not only the tail but the job itself. But if I stayed here, and Hornback had taken pills or done Christ knew what to himself, I might be sitting passively by while a man died.

Headlights appeared on Twin Peaks Boulevard behind me. Swung in a slow arc onto the spur road. I drifted lower on the seat and waited for them to pass by.

Only they didn’t pass by, — the car drew abreast of mine and came to a halt. Police patrol-I sensed that even before I saw the darkened dome flasher on the roof. The passenger window was down, and the cop on that side extended a flashlight through the opening and flicked it on. The light pinned me for three or four seconds, bright enough to make me squint; then it shut off. The patrolman motioned for me to roll down my window.

I glanced past the cruiser at Hornback’s Dodge. It remained dark, and there was still no movement anywhere in the vicinity. Well, the decision on whether or not to check on him was out of my hands now, — the cops would want to have a look at the Dodge in any case. And in any case the job was blown.

I let out a breath, wound down the glass. The patrolman-a young guy wearing a Prussian mustache-said, “What’s going on here, fella?”

So I told him, keeping it brief, and let him have a look at the photostat of my investigator’s li cense. He seemed half-skeptical, half-uncertain; he had me get out and stand to one side while he talked things over with his partner, a heavyset older man with a beer belly larger than mine. After which the partner took out a second flashlight and trotted across the lookout to the Dodge.

The younger cop asked me some questions and I answered them. But my attention was on the older guy. I watched him reach the driver’s door and shine his light through the window. A moment later he appeared to reach down for the door handle, but it must have been locked because I didn’t see the door open or him lean inside. Instead he put his light up to the window again. Slid it over to the window on the rear door. And then turned abruptly to make an urgent semaphoring gesture.

“Sam!” he shouted. “Get over here, on the double!”

The young patrolman, Sam, had his right hand on the butt of his service revolver as we ran ahead to the Dodge. I was expecting the worst by this time, only I was not at all prepared for what I saw inside that car. I just stood there gawking while the cops’ lights crawled through the interior.

There were spots of drying blood across the front seat.

But the seat was empty, and so was the backseat and so were the floorboards.

Lewis Hornback had disappeared.

One of the two inspectors who arrived on the scene a half-hour later was Ben Klein, an old-timer and a casual acquaintance from my own years on the force. I had asked the patrolmen to call in Lieutenant Eberhardt, who was probably my closest friend on or off the cops, because I wanted an ally in case matters became dicey; Eb, though, was evidently still on day shift. I had not asked for Klein, but I felt a little better when he showed up.

When he finished checking over the Dodge we went off to one side of it, near the guardrail. From there I could look down a steep slope dotted with stunted trees and underbrush. Search teams were moving along it with flashlights, looking for some sign of Hornback; so far they didn’t seem to be having any luck. Up here, the area was swarming with men and vehicles, most but not all of them official. The usual rubberneckers and media types were in evidence along the spur and back on Twin Peaks Boulevard.