Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories by Bill Pronzini Page A

work, purposeful or purposeless, was the only real antidote I knew for self-pity and depression.
    Valley Ford, Tomales, Point Reyes . . . the pickup did not alter its speed. We were maybe thirty miles from the Golden Gate Bridge then, and I was running low on gas. I had enough to get me into San Francisco, but not much farther than that.
    The problem of stopping to refuel turned out to be academic. Just south of Olema Village the pickup slowed and I saw its brake lights flash. Then it swung off onto a secondary road to the west, toward the Point Reyes National Seashore.
    When I got to the intersection a couple of minutes later, my headlamps picked up a sign with a black-painted arrow and the words Public Campground, 3 Miles. So maybe they were going to stop here for the night, or for supper anyway. I debated the wisdom of running dark. The fog was thinner along here, curling tendrils moving rapidly in a sharp, gusty wind, and you could see jagged patches of sky, like pieces in an astronomical jigsaw puzzle. Visibility was fairly good, and there did not figure to be much traffic on the secondary road, and I did not want to alert them. I switched off the lights, turned onto the road drove along at less than twenty.
    The terrain had a rumpled look because this area was a major San Andreas Fault zone. I passed a little "sag pond" where runoff water had collected in depressions created by past earthquakes. Exactly three miles in, close to the ocean—I could hear again the whisper of combers—the campground appeared on the left. Backed in against high sand dunes westward, and ringed by pine and fir to the east and south, it was a small, state-maintained facility with wooden outhouses and stone barbecues and trash receptacles placed in reminder every few yards.
    The pickup was there, lights still on, pulled back near the trees on the far edge of the grounds.
    I saw it on a long diagonal, partially screened by the evergreens. Instead of driving abreast of the entrance and beyond, where they might see or hear me, I took my car onto the berm and cut off the engine. Ten seconds later, the pickup's lights went out.
    I sat motionless behind the wheel, trying to decide what to do next, but the mind is a funny thing: all the way here I had been unable to clarify the reasons why I felt one or more of those three didn't belong, and now that I was thinking about something else, memory cells went click, click, click, and all at once I knew just what had been bothering me—three little things that, put together, told me which of them was the interloper. I felt myself frowning. I still had no idea what the situation itself was, but what I had just figured out made the whole thing all the more strange and compelling.
    I reached up, took the plastic dome off the interior light and unscrewed the bulb; then I got out of the car, went across the road. The wind, blowing hard and cold, had sharp little teeth in it that bit at the exposed skin on my face and hands. Overhead, wisps of fog fled through the darkness like chilled fingers seeking warmth.
    Moving slowly, cautiously, I entered the trees and made my way to the south, parallel to where the pickup was parked.
    Beyond the second of two deadfalls I had a glimpse of it through the wind-bent boughs, maybe forty yards away. The cab was dark and seemed to be empty; faint light shone at the rear of the camper, faint enough to tell me that both door windows were now draped.
    I crossed toward the pickup, stopped to listen when I was less than ten yards from it and hidden in shadow along the bole of a bishop pine. There was nothing to hear except the cry of the wind and the faint murmuring of surf in the distance. I stared in at the cab. Empty, all right. Then I studied the ground along the near side of the pickup: no gravel, just earth and needles that would muffle approaching footsteps.
    One careful pace at a time, I went from the pine to the side of the pickup. Near the end of the camper I