Читать онлайн «Deadfall»
Автор Билл Пронзини
Bill Pronzini
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Bill Pronzini
Deadfall
Chapter One
Stakeouts are a pain in the ass.
On rolling night stakeouts this is true literally as well as figuratively. During the day you can people-watch, read a little, get out of the car and walk around for short periods. After dark you’re pretty much confined, particularly when the weather is bad and even more particularly when you’re staked out in a residential neighborhood. Citizens might not notice a strange car, or somebody hunkered down in the shadows inside, but once you start prowling around on foot they notice you damned quick-and the next thing you know, you’re exchanging amenities with a couple of prowl-car cops. About all you can do on a rolling night stakeout is sit and think and try not to fall asleep while you wait for something to happen.
That was what I was doing for the second night in a row, on Cerritos Street in San Francisco’s Ingleside District, at eleven???o’clock of a cold, overcast, but no longer rainy November Thursday: bored to tears, developing calluses on my backside, and reflecting on the metaphysical nature of stakeouts. I had been in the neighborhood since 8:15, at three different locations within two blocks, from all of which I could watch a particular gray-stucco house that belonged to a woman named Eileen Kyner. She hadn’t shown up yet; neither had the guy I was waiting for, one Alfred Henry Umblinger, Jr. For all I knew they had run off to the North Woods or the North Pole, never to be seen or heard from again. Another long, dull, empty night. And for what? Was I suffering like this in order to apprehend a dangerous felon? I was not. Nothing half so glamorous or noble as that.
I was sitting here waiting to swipe a car.
Admittedly, Alfred Henry Umblinger, Jr. , was what they used to call a blot on society’s escutcheon.
Not that he was a crook, not precisely. Alfred Henry was, in fact, a deadbeat of the first magnitude. He had a charming habit of buying things on credit and then forgetting to pay for them. He also moved around a lot, so that when people like me got hired by finance companies and/or various merchants to either collect what was owed them or repossess the goods, Alfred Henry was nowhere to be found. Why merchants kept selling things to him was beyond me, but they did; and of course he kept disappearing. He was very good at disappearing, Alfred Henry was. It had taken me almost a week to get a line on him, the line being Eileen Kyner. La Kyner, a recent divorcee, was reputed to be his current lady friend; she was also reputed to be harboring his silver 1985 Mercedes XL in her garage. Said Mercedes having been purchased by Alfred Henry from a dealer in Burlingame, and said dealer now wanting it back because Alfred Henry had neglected to pay him a dime on it in four months. The Mercedes had not been in Eileen Kyner’s garage yesterday morning, when I’d first come out here, and it hadn’t been there last night or today at any time. Neither had Eileen Kyner or Alfred Henry or anybody else, so far as I knew. I was beginning to view the past two days as a wild-goose squat. Still and all, I was getting paid to sit here, and so here I would sit for at least one more day and night, if necessary, gathering additional proof (as if I needed any) that stakeouts are a pain in the ass and that the life of the private eye is generally overrated as far as excitement is concerned.
