Bill Pronzini - Boobytrap

“Doesn’t sound bad to me.”

“It’s not. I work hard enough at home — my wife sees to that. The one week a year she lets me off by myself, I take full advantage.”

“Where’s home?”

“Pacifica. Not far from your bailiwick.”

“I know it well.”

“Not a bad little town, but the fog gets to you after a while. That’s why I come up to the mountains on my fishing trips. I’m in real estate, by the way. I’d give you one of my cards, but I don’t suppose you’re in the market for coastal property?”

“Not right now. Someday, maybe.”

“Well, look me up if that day comes. San Mateo Coast Realty, Pacifica. Put you on to something nice and affordable.”

“I’ll remember that.”

He finished with his outboard, shut off the pump, and peered at the total. “Thirteen-sixty,” he said, shaking his head again. “Pay inside. Judson’s on the honor system.”

“Faith in his fellow man.”

“Wish I had it,” Cantrell said. “I’ll bet he gets underpaid or stiffed altogether more than a couple of times a season. At three bucks a gallon, I’m tempted to under-report myself.”

“But you won’t.”

“Nope. I’m not into petty crime.” A grin stretched the broad oval of his face. “The big stuff, now…”

“Big stuff?”

“You know, major scams. That’s what I’d get into. If you’re going to run a risk, you might as well do it for the biggest possible return.”

“And the biggest possible penalties.”

“If you get caught.”

“Most scam artists do.”

“But not all of them,” he said. “You don’t think I might’ve already taken the plunge, do you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You tell me.”

Another grin; he put his right hand over his heart and said solemnly, “In the famous words of a famous man, T am not a crook.’ “

“A famous man who didn’t get away with it.”

“No? He got caught, sure, but then he was pardoned and handed plenty of money and a comfortable retirement and a library to house his papers, and when he died he was eulogized as a great statesman by a bunch of other statesmen who claimed they weren’t crooks, either. Who says crime doesn’t pay?”

Cantrell wandered off to pay his tab, and I thought as I unhooked the hose: Another strange bird. Deep Mountain Lake seemed to attract them; something in the thin air, maybe — a migratory lure similar to the smog or whatever atmospheric mixture brought wackos from all over the country flocking to L.A. I wondered how many more of the apparently well-wrapped folk I’d met last night would turn out to be flakes once I got to know them better. I wondered if Nils Ostergaard and Marian and Pat and even Chuck would turn out to be flakes. I wondered if I’d wound up at Deep Mountain Lake because I was a strange bird myself.

After that, I stopped wondering. There are some avenues of speculation that are better left barricaded with Do Not Enter signs.

Sun., June 30–12 noon

That private cop worries me.

I’m not sure why. He’s porky, he must be close to sixty, he moves as though he’d have trouble getting out of his own way, and he’s got a soft side, yet there’s something about him that makes me nervous. Something in his eyes. You look into them and you can see that he’s intelligent, good at what he does, but it’s more than that, it’s a kind of steel inside all that flab and sentimentality. Like the old cons in prison, the ones who’d seen it all and done it all that you didn’t dare provoke, no matter how frail they seemed. This one, this private cop, would make a deadly enemy.

I keep thinking about yesterday afternoon, when the kid found the boathouse padlock missing and first the cop and then old man Ostergaard started nosing around. They had no idea I was watching through my binoculars, anchored over on the far shore, but I can’t chance a regular surveillance or one of them is sure to become suspicious. The old codger worries me a little, too, but mainly it’s the private cop. He’s the one I’ve really got to watch out for.

Careful. Very careful from now on. I’m just another fisherman. Keep everybody thinking that, keep the stage set just as it is, and when Dixon shows next Tuesday or Wednesday it’ll be party time. A surprise blowout nobody around here will ever forget.

Tom Zaleski’s boat, like Tom Zaleski’s summer tenant, had seen better days. It was a twelve-foot aluminum skiff, dented on the starboard side and on the prow; but it didn’t seem to have any holes in its bottom, and when I floated it out alongside the dock and then stepped down gingerly into the stern, it wobbled and sank a few inches but stayed afloat. The ten-horsepower Johnson affixed to it was at least twenty years old; Zaleski seemed to have taken reasonably good care of it, though, and had thought to wrap it with plastic sheeting for the winter. A pair of emergency oars tucked under the seats looked as if they had been hand-carved in the days of King Arthur and then made the principal weapons in a series of violent jousting matches. I hoped I would not have occasion to use them.

I gassed the outboard, primed it, and yanked the starter rope. An emphysemic cough was all the response I got. I sat there in the hot midday sun and primed the thing twice more and yanked on the rope maybe fifteen times before it finally came alive in a chattering rumble, only to croak again four or five seconds later. Three more pulls resurrected it, and this time it clung precariously to life, hacking and wheezing all the while. I held its tiller for a minute or so, trying to decide if I really wanted to risk taking the old fart out onto all that bright blue water and having it expire on me once and for all somewhere in the middle. Well, what the hell. A little adventure is good for the soul, right?

I pushed away from the dock, eased the throttle up to crawling speed. The Johnson kept right on muttering and stuttering. So I throttled up a little more and worked the tiller and pretty soon we were scooting right along, the engine seeming to gather strength and vigor from the exercise. At least it no longer complained as loudly as it had at the dock.

Out on the lake the air was cooler and the breeze felt good on my face. By the time I’d veered over toward the west shore I was a fine old hand at the helm, Captain Somebody-or-other. There were only two other boats out, both on the east end near Judson’s; I had this section all to myself. I skimmed along a hundred yards offshore, checking out the summer homes down that way. A couple were large; one had a terracelike dock that jutted forty feet into the water. Some people were having their lunch out there; they waved and I waved back. Ahab in his longboat, saluting the crew. More waves came from an elderly couple sitting on the deck of the last cottage at that end: Nils Ostergaard and his wife, Callie. Ostergaard had a pair of binoculars looped around his neck and I’d have given odds that he’d been watching me during most if not all of my launching difficulties. He didn’t miss much, especially with other forms of entertainment at a premium up here.

I swung around and turned in close to the north shore. Forest primeval along there, so thickly grown that you couldn’t see more than a few yards into the jungly green shadows. Some of the pines overhung the water; the shoreline and a series of narrow inlets where the watershed creeks emptied into the lake were matted with ferns, weeds, snarled roots, collections of dead brush and decaying vegetable matter. The fishing would probably be pretty good in the deeper inlets. So would the kind of beer-for-breakfast, sin-contemplating morning Hal Cantrell had had for himself. Maybe I’d try some of that lazy-man’s style of angling myself later in the week.