Blowback (The Nameless Detective) (17 page)

All right, then. Try to get away from here as soon as possible, drive straight to White's office if you can get back before close of business; otherwise, first thing tomorrow morning. You
can
do it that way, can't you? You won't lose your nerve again?

I can do it that way, I thought, and knew that I was not lying to myself. This was not something you could run away from, or postpone for more than a few long hours. If you tried it, the not-knowing would become unbearable, and you would still have the answer to face eventually.

I began to feel a little better; I had myself under control again. After a time I got: up and found the restroom and washed my face with cold water, opened my shirt and used a wet paper towel to sponge off the drying perspiration on my chest and under my arms. The face in the mirror looked pale, all right. Pouches under the eyes, puffiness at the cheekbones and around the mouth. Old bear, Erika had called me, and I had thought then that it was a cute little pet name; I wouldn't have liked it at all now.

When I came back into the lobby and looked over at the desk clerk, I had a small twinge of embarrassment at the way I had treated him. I walked over there and said, “Look, I'm sorry if I snapped at you a while ago. I guess the heat is starting to get to me; I felt pretty dizzy there for a minute.”

“No need to apologize, sir,” he said, but there was still an injured stiffness in his tone. “Is there something I can do for you?”

“Well, you can get me Charles Kayabalian on the phone.”

“Certainly.”

We went through the switchboard-and-extension-phone routine, and Kayabalian was in and ready to see me in his room. So I climbed the stairs to the second floor, found the number he had given me, knocked, and went in when he called out that the door was unlocked.

He was wearing a sports jacket today, no tie, and he looked cool and rested. He could hardly have missed noticing the way I looked, but he had the grace not to say anything about it. Instead he motioned me to a chair and said, “I've got that list of names and addresses for you.”

“Right.”

The chair was one of those lumpy pseudo-Victorians, made for people with better posture than I had; I sat on it gingerly and watched Kayabalian open a briefcase that was sitting on a writing desk, take out two sheets of paper. He brought them to me and stood there while I glanced over them. Most of the addresses were in San Jose, but there were two in San Francisco and one in Fresno. Under each one he had written out a paragraph of information on the individual: occupation, connection with Terzian, relevant personal data.

I asked him a couple of questions, made a note or two of my own, and said finally that I guessed I had everything I would need for the time being.

He asked, “Would you like an advance against your fee and expenses?”

“That's not necessary,” I said. Under other circumstances I would have taken his check, but even though I kept telling myself I would follow through for him no matter what Dr. White had to tell me, I could not make myself forget the frightening possibility of things like hospitals and further tests and maybe even an urgent need for surgery. “We can take care of a retainer after I get to work.”

He nodded. “Do you know yet how you stand with your time?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “I'll let you know later today or early tomorrow, if that's all right.”

“Yes. You can reach me at my office, or at home after seven.”

He gave me another business card, this one with his telephone number written on the back. We said a few more things to each other, and then he got his briefcase and a small overnight bag—he was ready to check out—and we went downstairs together and shook hands and said good-by in the lobby.

Outside, the Hangtown Stagecoach had gone off with its first load of kids, but the fiddlers were still working on the veranda and there was still a crowd in front of the General Store. A guy in buckskins and an Indian headdress was circulating there, selling balloons and souvenirs—a red-haired guy with freckles. Nobody seemed to think it odd, or if they did, none of them cared.

And people wondered why native Amerinds were so angry these days…

I got my car and fought the main street traffic until the county road intersection; I was the only one who turned off. The temperature had picked up another few degrees, but there were clouds massing above the peaks to the east, restless and soiled-looking, and the sky in that direction had a kind of dull silvery sheen, like an old dime. If the high-altitude winds blew those clouds down here, it would rain later in the day. I wished it would rain right now—break the heat and clear the dryness out of the air and settle that damned red dust.

When I came around one of the turns two miles from the camp, driving mechanically, half my mind on the road and half of it brooding about the abortive telephone call, a deer bounded out of the undergrowth thirty yards in front of me and darted across the road. I said something in alarm and jammed my foot down on the brake; the car slewed to the left and for an instant I thought it was going off into the trees. But when I pulled the wheel around and eased up on the brake pedal, the rear tires held traction and the thing settled on a point and came to a sharp stop. The deer had vanished into the woods on the other side.

I sat there for a minute and thought that that would have been all I needed, an accident with the car. Once I started moving again, I drove more slowly, watched the road ahead more carefully—and I was more aware of my surroundings than I might have been otherwise.

Ahead on the light, around another turn, was the bare hillside and the abandoned pocket mine partway up. High to the left of the mine were a few trees, and below the trees was the crumbling outbuilding, its roof sagging a little to the left. The hillside directly behind the building was bare, rocky—

I hit the brakes again, not quite so hard this time, and the car bucked to a halt in another swirl of dust. I shoved the shift lever into park and got out and stared up toward the mine. Then I opened my wallet, took out the folded triangle from Bascomb's sketchpad. Not much of the roof in the sketch showed, but it might have been canted to the left like the one up there. The trees and the rocky hillside looked about right too.

A few hundred feet farther along, at the side of the road, there was a short slope and then a flattish limestone shelf. A man could sit up on that shelf, and he'd have a good clear view of the mine entrance and the rotting building; it was the kind of thing, the kind of angle of perception, that might appeal to an artist like Bascomb. I had seen it from this angle myself half a dozen times since Sunday, and that would explain why that small part of the sketch had seemed familiar last night—something you saw without really thinking about, an image tucked away at the back of your mind.

All right. The sketch might have been of the abandoned mine. But what made it worth stealing and/or destroying? Something to do with the mine itself?

I stood motionless in the hot sun, peering at the hillside. Then I glanced at my watch, and the time was eleven twenty-five; still an hour and a half before the Jerrolds were due to leave Eden Lake. I hesitated for another fifteen or twenty seconds, but there was not any doubt about what I was going to do, not this time.

I got back into the car and went looking for the way up there.

Sixteen

A little ways beyond the shelf was a circular area, like a roadside turnaround, and then a steepening rise; between a series of outcroppings on one side and a man-made limestone cutbank on the other—if you looked closely—the eroded and grass-choked remains of a wagon road wound upward in a loose S. I swung the car onto the circular area and took it up to the cutbank. The road looked passable enough; some of the brown grass and underbrush had a crushed appearance, as though another car had come up it not too long ago.

I put the transmission into low gear and went up the trail at a crawl, tires thudding into deep ruts, springs complaining. The road ended pretty soon at a shallow, natural fiat. The weather-beaten building sat there, off on my left, and the mine entrance was at the far end and fifty feet above on sloping ground, like a broken doorway into the hillside. The rusted ruins of what had once been a steel-railed ore track came out of the shaft and down to the right, at a sharp angle, and terminated at the edge of the flat; there had at one time been a cut or incline below there, but it was filled now with tailings from the mine, half-reclaimed already by the forest

I let the car drift to a stop near the building and shut off the ignition and stepped out. The sun's glare up here was intense; mica particles glittered and winked in the rocks, almost blindingly in some places, and every piece of shade seemed to have a knife edge. It was so still I found myself straining to hear some kind of sound.

The palms of my hands were damp, and I wiped them on my trouser legs as I walked away from the car and alongside the building. Decaying timbers and strips of iron banding littered patches of grass and Indian paintbrush. There were huge gaps in the structure's walls, a jagged hole near the back where a window might once have been. I picked my way carefully up to the hole and peered inside. More debris, eerily displayed in a mosaic of dusky sunlight and shadow; from the look of it, the place had been a combination workroom and living quarters. One of the crossbeams for the roof hung at a forty-five-degree angle, and I thought that it would not be long before the whole thing collapsed. This, maybe, was the last summer of its existence.

But there was nothing out of the ordinary in there, and I turned away finally and walked a few more paces. Another building squatted behind the larger one—a shed of some kind, probably, hidden from sight of the wagon trail and the county road below. One side of it had folded in, giving it an oddly triangular shape, like a partially collapsed house of cards. I made a circle of it, looked inside along the one wall still erect. Nothing to see there either.

Turning, I looked up the slope at the mine entrance. Then I ran my tongue over dry Lips and went back to the car and got my flashlight out of the glove compartment. I crossed to the slope, climbed it past the skeletal remains of an ore cart—shoes sliding on the hard rock, stirring up small puffs of dust that seemed to hang in the air behind me, mistlike. When I got up in front of the entrance I stopped and stared at a large metal sign that somebody had wired to one of the framing timbers. It said:
WARNING! DANGEROUS PREMISES—DO NOT ENTER
.

I hesitated, and then moved forward cautiously until I was standing just outside the entrance. The wood frame was rotted and insect-ridden, one of the vertical supports half-splintered out in the middle so that the horizontal beam above was canted at a lopsided angle. When I extended my arm inside and clicked on the flashlight, the beam penetrated far enough to let me see small mounds of fallen earth and rock, two or three collapsed timbers scattered across the floor. Ceiling supports tilted downward in places, a wall support leaned drunkenly toward the tunnel's center.

Unsafe, all right, I thought. You're a damned fool if you go in there.

But I kept on standing where I was, moving the flashlight up and down, from side to side. Bits of mica—or maybe bits of gold—gleamed dully in the rock. Within the range of my light, I saw nothing you would not expect to find in an abandoned mine shaft.

And yet there was an odd sour musty smell in there; part of it was dust and dry rot and animal or bird droppings, but there was something else, too, that I could not quite define. I dried my palms again, switching the flash from hand to hand.

Somewhere nearby, a bird made a sudden whickering cry, and it was loud enough in the heavy stillness to jerk my head around and up. At first I did not see anything in the glazed sky; then, off to my right, a hawk came wheeling down across the flat, made a long gliding loop as though reconning the area, whickered a second time and then vanished. Silence resettled, and the emptiness seemed so complete again that it was as if the hawk had never been there at all, was nothing more than a figment of my imagination.

Hawk, I thought.

And all at once I was thinking of the hawk I had seen yesterday circling up here above the mine—the hawk and the two ravens. I felt myself frowning, and there was a tickling sensation at the edge of my mind. Unusual to see birds like that in the same vicinity at the same time, now that I considered it. Unless …

Jesus.

The hair went up on my neck, and I could feel my stomach knot up in an empty, hollow sort of way. I tasted bile on the back of my tongue.

Jesus!

I swiveled my gaze to the mine entrance, rubbed a forearm across my eyes. I had to go in there now, no choice in the matter. Even though I was abruptly and painfully certain of what I was going to find, I wanted to be wrong—and I had to
know
.

Another moment of hesitation; then I stepped through the entrance and made my way forward heel-and-toe, swaying the light in front of me, not touching anything with my body, stepping over the mounds of rock and earth, avoiding the fallen and leaning timbers. The deeper into the shaft I went, the sharper the smell became—and I could recognize it now, and I began to breathe through my mouth to keep from gagging.

The ore track rails were intact here, extending into the blackness ahead like a pair of brownish-red ribs. Shadows wavered at the perimeter of the flash beam; timbers and the head of a pick and another toppled ore cart seemed to leap into the cone of light. A chunk of rock the size of a beach ball glittered briefly with squares of yellow metal: iron pyrites, fool's gold. Thirty feet in, the latticework of support timbers appeared to be in a more stable condition, and there was less rock, less debris, spread across the rough stone floor. The ceiling, more than seven feet high to that point, sloped abruptly downward until it was only a couple of inches above my head. I bent a little at the waist, shuffling-stepping; sweat matted my shirt to my torso, the sultry air put the tightness back into my chest.