Bill Pronzini: Blowback

We had been there five minutes or so when Walt Bascomb put in an appearance. He saw us on the porch as he came past, but he did not say anything to either of us; he just went straight over to the parking circle and got into the '72 Ford. I noticed then that Cody had not returned with his Italian sports job, and that the new Cadillac was also absent.

As Bascomb took the Ford up onto the county road, I said to Harry, “That Caddy I saw when I came in-does it belong to the Jerrolds?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Why?”

“Well, it's gone now, and I'm wondering if they went out together or one of them alone. He wasn't in much condition for driving, but I'd like it better if he went by himself. If she went, and stays out late, one of us ought to be around to check up when she gets back.”

He nodded grimly. “We could take a walk over to their cabin now and see if anybody's home.”

“That's probably a good idea. If Mrs. Jerrold is there alone, I'll pull an excuse to leave the two of you together and you can get that talk over with.”

But when we got over to Six, there was nothing for either of us to do. The place was deserted.

Harry said as we started back to the lake, “This whole thing is playing hell with my nerves.”

“It'll work out,” I said.

“I'm trying to believe that. Listen, I don't feel like sitting around again, waiting. What do you say we take one of the skiffs for a run around the lake?”

“Sure,” I said, “I'm for that.”

We went out onto the pier and climbed down into a skiff, Harry taking the tiller. I untied the painter and got the bow turned and pushed us out while he cranked up the outboard. Then I sat facing him on the bow seat, and we planed away to the north at quarter speed, running in close to shore.

It was the time of night that is especially fine in mountain country like this. The air was cooler yet on the water-the deep stillness broken only by the hum of the outboard and the occasional buzz of a mosquito. Bass jumped desultorily near the rule grass shoreward; the red colorations had faded out of the sky and been replaced by the kind of peach-hued glow that presages another hot one for tomorrow; night shadows gathered in the denser sections of forest. The air smelled of pine resin and cold fresh water and, faintly, gasoline.

I could feel myself relaxing somewhat as we followed the rim of the lake, north to northwest to west, headed directly toward the falling lip of the sun like moths toward the dying flame of a candle. I put my hand over the side and let it drag through the water and kick up spray, the way kids do. Harry gave me a wan smile, and I gave one back to him, and I thought then of a night on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, Harry and me and two nurses from Hickam Field out on a borrowed sailboat off Diamond Head a few days after the Japanese surrender, drunk on warm beer and the end of the war, capsizing when a stiff breeze came up and then getting rescued by a Navy patrol boat-and I mentioned all of that, raising my voice over the sound of the engine. He laughed and nodded, and we began to jog our memories aloud, and for a few short minutes it was as if both of us were back in our twenties, those good carefree postwar years.

Only then, suddenly, Harry stopped talking in mid-sentence and jerked a little on his seat and stared past my left shoulder at something behind and above me. He said “Jesus Christ!” and the past lost itself again and I turned on my seat to follow the direction of his gaze, saw instantly what he had seen.

It was a car-no, a van, a big one-and it was up on the bluff that rose off the southwest shore, maybe five hundred yards from where we were in the skiff; but not just on the bluff, coming forward and off the damned thing, coming right off the edge as I looked and sailing out straight as an arrow until its back wheels cleared the earth and then dipping, nose slanting down, falling at a forty-five-degree angle. The front bumper hit the hard bare slope and turned the machine in a loose somersault, and a second later the sound of impact reverberated on the dusky air; then the van crashed down on its top on the water and rule grass at the base of the bluff, spray geysering up twenty feet or more, the sound of that impact carrying hollowly across the lake. Finally it bobbed in the disturbed lake and tilted over on its passenger side and floated there like a badly wounded animal.

Even before the last echoes of the crash died away, Harry had the outboard open full-throttle and we were skimming and bouncing toward the van. I grabbed onto the skiff's gunwales with both hands, glanced back at him and saw his mouth set hard, the same astonishment in his eyes that must have been in mine. The van kept rocking gently back and forth in the swells, but the water looked too shallow at that point for there to be any immediate danger of it sinking. It was floating nearly upright now, and as we came in on it I could see that there was printing on its wet white body.

The printing said Vahram Terzian-Fine Oriental Rugs and Carpets: it was the same van beside which I had parked in The Pines that afternoon.

Harry brought the skiff up to it on an angle across the driver's door, cutting power, throttling into reverse to hold us steady. I stood up with my feet spread wide for balance and reached out and caught onto the door handle. When I tugged down on it, nothing happened; it was jam-locked from the fall. The window was rolled up, too, and I had to lean my body forward, bracing it against the door, to get a look inside.

What I saw put tracers of cold between my shoulder blades. There was one person inside the cab-a small nut-brown man with black hair that was dyed now a bright ugly crimson along the top of his skull. He was lying down on the floorboards, wedged between the steering column and the seat, and pressed in against his left shoulder was the upper half of an iron lug wrench.

Behind me Harry said, “Anybody in there?”

“Yeah, one guy.”

“Can we get him out?”

“Door's jammed. But it doesn't matter.”

“Why doesn't it?”

“Because he's dead,” I said.

“Jesus,” Harry said. “You sure?”

“I'm sure.” And I was thinking that both of us had been half-expecting violence to break loose at any time here in the bucolic quiet of Eden Lake; had been as prepared for it as anybody ever is. But neither of us had been prepared for it to come like this, from a totally unexpected, unrelated source, and in a way even more brutal than any we might have anticipated.

“He was dead before the van went off that bluff up there,” I said. “Somebody caved in his head with a lug wrench.”

We beached the skiff at the foot of the slope and climbed up and went over onto the bluff. It was graveyard-still up there; nothing stirred anywhere in the hot, windless dusk. You could see the tracks made by the van's tires in the grassy earth, and they started back where a rutted trail hooked away through night-shadowed pine forest. There were no other tracks of any kind.

I said, “Where does that trail lead?”

“Connects with a fire road about a hundred yards back,” Harry said. “That one loops around the lake and picks up the county road into The Pines.”

“Used much?”

“Some. Tourists and local kids, mostly.”

“But not around this time of day.”

“Not usually, no.”

“So whoever did it probably got away without being seen.”

“If he isn't still around here somewhere.”

“Not much chance of that, as much noise as we've made.”

“What the hell could it be about?”

I shook my head.

We walked to the trail and followed it a short way into the woods. The ground there was hard-packed, covered with pine needles, and you could not tell if another vehicle had come along it or parked on it recently. The only indications of human presence-and human folly-seemed to be a scatter of rusting beer cans and the paper wrappings from fast-food chicken and hamburgers and at least two used condoms tied off like deflated carnival balloons. Lots of things lost here, I thought grimly. Virginity, hours and nights, laughter, another unspoiled piece of nature. And now you could add a man's life to the list.