The Year's Best Mystery & Suspense Stories 1991 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

STAKEOUT

The life of a private investigator isn’t always quite so glamorous or exciting as the books and films of the past six decades may have led us to believe. Often it’s a matter of sitting alone behind the wheel of a car on a rainy night, watching for someone to come out of a house. Bill Pronzini’s Nameless, one of the most realistic of today’s private eyes, knows what a stakeout can be like. In this unusual tale, virtually the entire story comes to us while he sits behind the wheel of that car in the rain.

Four o’clock in the morning. And I was sitting huddled and ass-numb in my car in a freezing rainstorm, waiting for a guy I had never seen in person to get out of a nice warm bed and drive off in his Mercedes, thus enabling me to follow him so I could find out where he lived.

Thrilling work if you can get it. The kind that makes any self-respecting detective wonder why he didn’t become a plumber instead.

Rain hammered against the car’s metal surfaces, sluiced so thickly down the windshield that it transformed the glass into an opaque screen; all I could see were smeary blobs of light that marked the street lamps along this block of 47th Avenue. Wind buffeted the car in forty-mile-an-hour gusts off the ocean nearby. Condensation had formed again on the driver’s door window, even though I had rolled it down half an inch; I rubbed some of the mist away and took another bleary-eyed look across the street.

This was one of San Francisco’s older middle-class residential neighborhoods, desirable—as long as you didn’t mind fog-belt living—because Sutro Heights Park was just a block away and you were also within walking distance of Ocean Beach, the Cliff House, and Land’s End. Most of the houses had been built in the thirties and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their neighbors, but they seemed to have more individuality than the bland row houses dominating the avenues farther inland; out here, California Spanish was the dominant style. Asians had bought up much of the city’s west side housing in recent years, but fewer of those close to the ocean than anywhere else. A lot of homes in pockets such as this were still owned by older-generation, blue-collar San Franciscans.

The house I had under surveillance, number 9279, was one of the Spanish stucco jobs, painted white with a red tile roof. Yucca palms, one large and three small, dominated its tiny front yard. The three-year-old Mercedes with the Washington state license plates was still parked, illegally, across the driveway. Above it, the house’s front windows remained dark. If anybody was up yet I couldn’t tell it from where I was sitting.

I shifted position for the hundredth time, wincing as my stiffened joints protested with creaks and twinges. I had been here four and a half hours now, with nothing to do except to sit and wait and try not to fall asleep; to listen to the rain and the rattle and stutter of my thoughts.

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