Nightcrawlers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Mystery) by Bill Pronzini Page B
Authors: Bill Pronzini
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“I’m not feeling very well . . . I’m still in a lot of pain and I took some Vicodinbefore you came and it’s making me woozy. If you don’t mind . . .”
“Sure, I understand. Just one more question. The argument was outside one of the clubs, you said. Which one?”
Hesitation. Another lie coming up? No. Zalesky held eye contact when he finally answered.
“The Dark Spot,” he said.
6
TAMARA
Nine-thirty, and still nobody home at 1122 Willard.
She was terminally bored already. She had her headset on, Norah Jones’s Grammy-winner, “Come Away With Me,” cranked up in the Walkman; the good pop-jazz kept her awake but it didn’t do much for the boredom. The enforced sitting in the small, cramped car was what was messing with her head. Messing with her rear end, too. Bill had told her stakeouts could be a pain in the ass, and now she was finding out that he’d hadn’t been kidding. And she’d only been here, what, not more than a couple of hours? He’d done surveillance work that lasted four, six, as many as eight hours. Whoo. Any job like that came up in the future, she’d be quick to hand it over to Jake Runyon.
She sighed and stared at the empty street and wondered if she ought to pack it in. Natural aversion to giving up on a job, even for one night, but much more of this and she’d be listening to complaints from her ass all day tomorrow. Besides which, shehad to pee. Not too bad yet, but before long it’d be a crisis. Pepsi and 7UP didn’t have a thing on Slim•Fast when it came to fast trips through your plumbing. One can equaled one trip to the can.
Another fifteen minutes, max. Then she was outta here.
Thinking about Slim•Fast made her wonder if maybe there was a Slim•Fast snack bar hiding in the bottom of her purse. Not that she was hungry, but nibbling one of those bars would make the fifteen minutes go by a lot faster. Small bites, let the chocolate melt on her tongue before she swallowed . . . that was the way to do it. Her mouth began to water. She pulled her purse over, rummaged around inside.
Damn! Ate the last one at noon, forgot to put another one in there.
So now she was not only bored, but she had chocolate on her mind. Tasted chocolate, craved chocolate. How could those Slim•Fast people make snack bars that were loaded with chocolate and tasted like Snickers bars but were still good for you and helped you lose weight?
Come Away with Me
had cycled through and was replaying. By feel she worked the buttons on the Walkman, ejected the CD, found another one in the case that she thought was Springsteen, and fired that one up. Oh, great, she’d grabbed the wrong one. Classical instead of rock. Beethoven, with Yo-Yo Ma on the cello.
Chocolate out, Horace back in.
No. She wasn’t going to think about Horace any more tonight. Hell with Horace. Vonda was better, Vonda and her new white, Jewish boy toy. In love with him? Sure, she was. She’d been in love with every guy she went to bed with, it was her sexual MO. Couldn’t do the nasty for the sake of doing thenasty, just because it felt good—no, there had to be all this emotional attachment.
Well, girl? You’re not much different, check out you and Horace—
Horace again.
Vonda. Vonda, dammit. The black-white thing. Yeah, that’d be a big problem, if by some miracle she actually was in love with this Ben Sherman guy. And him being Jewish made the problem twice as big. Her family was borderline racist, brother Alton not so borderline; they’d make her life miserable if they found out, a living hell if she moved in with him or went all the way and married him. Stupid. Not so much Vonda, you couldn’t help who you fell in love with, it was all a matter of chemistry and hormones. Her family, the us-versus-them bullshit. She’d felt that way herself once, all the militant hardass stuff, but not anymore. Everybody had to live with everybody else, what difference did it make what color you were? Or what religion? Or who
“Sure, I understand. Just one more question. The argument was outside one of the clubs, you said. Which one?”
Hesitation. Another lie coming up? No. Zalesky held eye contact when he finally answered.
“The Dark Spot,” he said.
6
TAMARA
Nine-thirty, and still nobody home at 1122 Willard.
She was terminally bored already. She had her headset on, Norah Jones’s Grammy-winner, “Come Away With Me,” cranked up in the Walkman; the good pop-jazz kept her awake but it didn’t do much for the boredom. The enforced sitting in the small, cramped car was what was messing with her head. Messing with her rear end, too. Bill had told her stakeouts could be a pain in the ass, and now she was finding out that he’d hadn’t been kidding. And she’d only been here, what, not more than a couple of hours? He’d done surveillance work that lasted four, six, as many as eight hours. Whoo. Any job like that came up in the future, she’d be quick to hand it over to Jake Runyon.
She sighed and stared at the empty street and wondered if she ought to pack it in. Natural aversion to giving up on a job, even for one night, but much more of this and she’d be listening to complaints from her ass all day tomorrow. Besides which, shehad to pee. Not too bad yet, but before long it’d be a crisis. Pepsi and 7UP didn’t have a thing on Slim•Fast when it came to fast trips through your plumbing. One can equaled one trip to the can.
Another fifteen minutes, max. Then she was outta here.
Thinking about Slim•Fast made her wonder if maybe there was a Slim•Fast snack bar hiding in the bottom of her purse. Not that she was hungry, but nibbling one of those bars would make the fifteen minutes go by a lot faster. Small bites, let the chocolate melt on her tongue before she swallowed . . . that was the way to do it. Her mouth began to water. She pulled her purse over, rummaged around inside.
Damn! Ate the last one at noon, forgot to put another one in there.
So now she was not only bored, but she had chocolate on her mind. Tasted chocolate, craved chocolate. How could those Slim•Fast people make snack bars that were loaded with chocolate and tasted like Snickers bars but were still good for you and helped you lose weight?
Come Away with Me
had cycled through and was replaying. By feel she worked the buttons on the Walkman, ejected the CD, found another one in the case that she thought was Springsteen, and fired that one up. Oh, great, she’d grabbed the wrong one. Classical instead of rock. Beethoven, with Yo-Yo Ma on the cello.
Chocolate out, Horace back in.
No. She wasn’t going to think about Horace any more tonight. Hell with Horace. Vonda was better, Vonda and her new white, Jewish boy toy. In love with him? Sure, she was. She’d been in love with every guy she went to bed with, it was her sexual MO. Couldn’t do the nasty for the sake of doing thenasty, just because it felt good—no, there had to be all this emotional attachment.
Well, girl? You’re not much different, check out you and Horace—
Horace again.
Vonda. Vonda, dammit. The black-white thing. Yeah, that’d be a big problem, if by some miracle she actually was in love with this Ben Sherman guy. And him being Jewish made the problem twice as big. Her family was borderline racist, brother Alton not so borderline; they’d make her life miserable if they found out, a living hell if she moved in with him or went all the way and married him. Stupid. Not so much Vonda, you couldn’t help who you fell in love with, it was all a matter of chemistry and hormones. Her family, the us-versus-them bullshit. She’d felt that way herself once, all the militant hardass stuff, but not anymore. Everybody had to live with everybody else, what difference did it make what color you were? Or what religion? Or who
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