The Year's Best Mystery & Suspense Stories 1994 by Edward D Hoch

Author:Edward D Hoch [Hoch, Edward D]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

BILL PRONZINI

BURGADE’S CROSSING

Another series sleuth new to these pages—and new to most mystery readers, too—is Bill Pronzini’s Quincannon, a former U.S. Secret Service agent who is now a partner in a San Francisco detective agency that might one day rival Pinkerton’s. The year is 1895 in this particular story, which takes Quincannon to a ferry crossing on the Sacramento River where the plaintive sounds of a calliope are heard as he waits in a storm to protect a man marked for murder. Quincannon has appeared previously in two novels and at least one short story. We expect to see more of him in the pages of the new Louis L’Amour Western Magazine.

Quincannon heard the calliope ten minutes before the Walnut Grove stage reached Dead Man’s Slough. The off-key notes of “The Girl I Left Behind Me” woke him out of a thin doze; he sat up to listen and then peer through the coach’s isinglass window. He saw nothing but swamp growth crowding in close to the levee road. Sounds carried far here in the river delta, particularly on cold, early-winter afternoons such as this one. And the rusty-piped sound of the calliope was familiar even at a distance: The Island Star had drifted downriver and tied up at Burgade’s Crossing, just as he’d expected.

The stage’s only other passenger, a mild little whiskey drummer named Whittle, lowered the dime novel he’d been reading and said tentatively, “Sounds festive, doesn’t it?”

“No,” Quincannon growled, “it doesn’t.”

Whittle hid his face again behind the book. It was plain that he was intimidated by a man twice his size who wore a bushy, gray-flecked freebooter’s beard and was given to ferocious glowers when in a dark mood. He was pretending to be a drummer himself, of patent medicines, and Whittle had tried to engage him in brotherly conversation by telling a brace of smutty stories. Quincannon had glowered him into silence. Ordinarily he was friendly and enjoyed a good joke, but today he had too much on his mind for frivolous pursuits. Besides, Whittle’s stories were graybeards that hadn’t been worth a chuckle even when they were new.

The Island Star’s calliope stopped playing for a time, started up again with the same tune just before they reached the north-bank ferry landing at Dead Man’s Slough. The coach’s driver clattered them off the levee road, down an embankment steep enough to cause the rear wheels to skid and the brake blocks to give off dry squeals. Quincannon had the door open and was already swinging out when the stage came to a halt.

A chill wind assailed him. Overhead, dark-edged clouds moved furtively; the smell of rain was heavy in the air. The coming storm would break before the passenger packet Yosemite, bound upriver from San Francisco, reached Burgade’s Crossing at midnight. There were possible benefits in a stormy night, Quincannon thought bleakly, but the potential dangers far outweighed them.

He took a pipe from the pocket of his corduroy jacket, packed and lit it as he surveyed his surroundings.

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