Bill Pronzini - Boobytrap

“Reasonable chance the bomber will be identified and caught by then.”

“You think so? I hope you’re right.” She worked up a smile for me. “And call me Marian, will you? I’m Mrs. Dixon to my students — the more polite ones, anyway.”

Chuck came out of the house, a two-story California Spanish on the back side of Mt. Davidson, lugging an armload of fishing equipment. He was as slender as his mother, animated, loaded with energy; wearing a Giants uniform shirt and matching cap that he kept taking off and then putting back on, as if he couldn’t decide whether or not he wanted his head covered. He had one of those sculpted buzz cuts kids favor nowadays and he’d gotten a lot of sun recently: his scalp was a bright pink under the pale blond bristle.

Marian asked him, “Do you really need all that stuff?”

“Sure. I like to be prepared.”

“Poles and tackle at the cabin, remember.”

“Dad’s stuff. I’d rather use mine.”

“He’s a fishing junkie,” she said to me. “You should see his room — angling books and paraphernalia everywhere.”

“Hemingway in training, huh?”

“Who’s Hemingway?” Chuck said, but his grin told me he was kidding.

“He’s already making plans for a trip to the Florida Straits when he turns eighteen. Marlin fishing.”

“Sailfish and tarpon, too. You ever go after the big game fish?” he asked me.

“Nope, I never have. Must be a thrill.”

“Yeah. The biggest.” He loaded his gear into the trunk. “Hey,” he said, “you’ve got some neat stuff yourself. What kind of reel is that? Daiwa?”

“Right.”

“Cool.” He ran his fingers over my fly case. “You bring any PMDs along?”

PMDs were Pale Morning Duns, a type of fly. “No.”

“I’ve got one,” he said proudly. “A number eighteen Mathews Sparkle Dun with a Zelon chuck. My dad gave it to me last Christmas.”

“Nice,” I said.

“Yeah. I’ll show it to you when we get to the lake. Say, maybe we can go out together some morning, before Dad comes up. I know a couple of good spots.”

“Streams?”

“Sure. Lake fishing’s okay, but streams are where you get the big rainbows and cutthroats.”

“A man after my own heart. You pick the morning, sport.”

“Cool.”

I glanced at Marian as we all got into the car; her expression said she thought her son was pretty special. I agreed with her. In a day and age when a high percentage of urban twelve-year-olds take and sell drugs, pack heat to school, swagger and backsass and run wild, it was a pleasure to be dealing with one who was still a politely exuberant adolescent. Kids grow up too damn fast these days, in and out of the cities; they seem to race through childhood, truncate it, so that too many of its casual pleasures are lost to them. Chuck seemed to be growing up the better way, slowly, in a nurturing environment. Pat Dixon was a lucky man, all right, but it was the kind of luck that is mostly self-made, a product of strong genes and wise choices. The Dixons, from my limited experience with them, could have served as a family values poster unit.

We left the city via the Bay Bridge and followed Highway 80 east through Sacramento and up into the Sierras. Traffic was heavy most of the way, heavy enough for a slowdown climbing to Emigrant Gap — summer vacationers like us, cross-country travelers, gamblers on their way to the pleasure palaces of Reno. For a while

Chuck kept up a running chatter that helped pass the time. He asked the inevitable questions about my profession — “What’s it like being a private eye? Do you carry a gun? Have you ever shot anybody?” — and segued from there into a solicitation of my opinion on the Unabomber and what kind of individuals made bombs to blow up other individuals. After his mother put a stop to that he rattled on about fishing, about baseball. He was a Giants fan, naturally (“I hate the Braves, they’re the Dallas Cowboys of baseball, you know?”) and played shortstop on his Little League team (“I can field okay, but I can’t hit a damn curveball to save my butt”). Once we got up into the mountains he ran out of steam, finally turned on his boom box and donned a headset and sat back to enjoy both the scenery and whatever music was ruining his eardrums. Marian and I didn’t have much to say to each other, but there was no awkwardness in the silences. She was lost in her own thoughts and I was content to be where we were, on the way to where we were going.

We stopped for lunch in Truckee, then swung off onto two-lane Highway 89 and climbed some more across high-mountain plateaus ringed by peaks perennially crowned with snowfields. Beautiful country, this, sparsely populated, unsullied by the grimy handprints of man. Hard country, too, especially in winter, but there was no deceit or treachery in it, as there was in the cities; what you saw was what you had to deal with, no more and no less. With each passing mile I could feel myself unwinding a little more, losing fragments of the hard core of stress like shavings off a block of ice. A week or better up here, I told myself, and the block would have been shaved away to nothing.

It was not yet two o’clock when we rolled into Quincy, the Plumas county seat. Old-fashioned little town surrounded by high-mountain meadows and pine forests, by cathedral peaks and the long slopes and sharply cut valleys that formed the region’s watersheds. Big sky up here, like in Montana — a vast, deep blue broken only by clusters of cumulus cloud above the windward ridges. The town itself might have been worth a closer look, except that I was too busy to make the effort: its one-way main arteries were clogged with pickups, campers, cumbersome RVs. Jammed traffic and honking horns and gasoline fumes: little reminders of home and the problematical legacy of Henry Ford.

We stopped at a supermarket so Marian could buy a few things and I could stock up for myself. Then we drove on to the west end of town and picked up much less crowded Bucks Lake Road. Another ten miles or so on that two-laner, and we came to a side road that branched off to the north. A sign at the intersection read: Deep Mountain Lake — 6 Miles.

The first four of the six were a steady, winding climb on a rough-paved surface: the last two, the road still twisty but the terrain more or less leveling off, were on hard-packed gravel that showed signs of winter-snow erosion. You would not get many motor homes or campers coming in here. I thought, and said as much to Marian. She confirmed it. There were no camping or RV facilities at Deep Mountain Lake; during the six or seven months of the year that it wasn’t snow-locked and deserted, it was strictly the domain of summer residents and backcountry fishermen and hikers who lodged by the day or week at Judson’s Resort.

Thick lodgepole pine forest hid the lake from us until we were almost on top of it. Then, from Chuck: “There it is!” He’d shut off his boom box and rolled down the rear window; he was animated again, excited now that we were almost there. Off where he was looking I saw flashes of bright blue among the trees. As we came around a sharp bend, the pines thinned abruptly and most of the lake was visible ahead and below, cradled like an asymmetrical bowl in a green-and-brown nest.

There isn’t a High Sierra lake large or small that won’t dazzle the eye of even the most nature-challenged individual. But this one was something special even by Sierra standards, the way Fallen Leaf Lake near Tahoe is something special. It reminded me a little of Fallen Leaf, in fact, in its size and shape: a mile or so long, a third of a mile wide, tightly hemmed by trees along its northern and eastern shoreline. Its color was a midnight blue so rich and deep it seemed velvety black in patches of shade at the far edges. Sunlight glinted off the water, fashioning silver streaks so bright they made me squint even though I was wearing sunglasses. The entire surface was like polished crystal, marred only by a skiff anchored near the north shore and a small powerboat moving at the western end, its wake like a stroke from a glass cutter.