Read Online Blowback (The Nameless Detective) by Bill Pronzini - Free Book Online Page B

there was one man in it, but I could not tell who it was. Otherwise, I was alone in absolute quiet.
    At the end of an hour I still had not had a bite. I told myself that was just as well, and reeled in and broke the gear down again and cranked up the engine to head back. The excursion had been a bust; I hoped that was not how it had worked out for Harry.
    Both he and Mrs. Jerrold were gone from the beach when I came in. I did not see anybody at all. Once I had the skiff tied up I went over to Harry's cabin, started up the porch, and then changed direction when I heard the sound of running water. It was coming from around back, where there was a cement laundry tray and a butcher's block on a wooden platform that Harry provided for fish-cleaning purposes.
    The man working there was Karl Talesco. He was using a saw-bladed knife to bone the last of three bigmouth bass, each of them about two pounds, but he was doing it in a savage and methodical way, as if the fish were a hated enemy. Blood and scales spotted the block and his hands and the front of his white T-shirt. His lips were pulled in against his teeth and the cords in his neck bulged with tension each time he hacked down with the knife.
    He did not notice me until I came within a couple of feet of him. Then he jerked slightly, snapped his head around, and scowled at me. Beads of sweat clung to his Prussian mustache; his eyes had a hard glazed look, like those on the bass heads that stared up from inside the sink.
    “Christ,” he said. “You walk quiet for a big man.”
    I said nothing. I was staring at the fresh yellowish bruise along his left jaw and the wide burnlike scrape on the opposite cheek.
    “Don't bother asking,” Talesco said. He put the knife down, carefully, and shook himself a little, the way weight lifters do to relax themselves. “It's none of your business.”
    “Sure. Harry around?”
    “He went somewhere with the kid, Cody.”
    “Where, do you know?”
    “No.”
    He looked away from me and started cleaning up after himself. Man in a hurry now—the last thing he seemed to want was my kind of company. He wrapped the bass fillets in one sheet of newspaper, the heads and tails and bones in another. When the sink was empty, he held his hands under the tap for all of five seconds before shutting off the water and reaching for the tray rack. Only there were no towels there; the rack was empty.
    “Shit,” he said. He dried his hands on his Levis.
    I said, “How about a poker game tonight?”
    “Sorry. I've got other plans.”
    “They include your friend Knox?”
    That got me a fast sharp look. “No,” he said.
    “Maybe you could ask him if he'd like to play—”
    “Ask him yourself,” Talesco said, and caught up the newspaper bundles and stalked past me without a parting word or gesture.
    I stood looking after him as he went up onto the path beyond the shed. He had obviously been in a fight, and I would have given odds that Knox had been the other one involved. Had the cause of it been Angela Jerrold? Women and money were about the only things that would make two close friends start banging each other around. Jealousy, then? Both wanting her, but only one getting next to her? Then which one? Or was it just one after her, maybe scoring and maybe only trying to, and the other had decided to knock some sense into him? But again, which was which?
    Well, any way you looked at it, it spelled more trouble. This thing just seemed to keep on building, degree by degree. Both the Jerrolds had to be gotten away from here as quickly as possible, even if it meant jeopardizing Harry's position on the five-thousand-dollar loan—there just wasn't any other way. The longer we waited, the worse it was likely to get.

Seven
     
    The sky was a glistening blue now, the rising sun laying veins of raw gold across the lake, the odor of dust beginning to permeate the air. My mouth and throat felt abruptly dry. I had not been bothered by the coughing since