Nightcrawlers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Mystery) Read Online Free PDF Page B

if ever. And neither was Horace.
    They talked on the phone once a week, exchanged e-mails, said all the right things about how much they missed each other and loved each other, made tentative plans to get together here or back east. But they still hadn’t done it. Something got in the way every time. And the phone calls were getting shorter because they didn’t seem to have as much to say to each other, couldn’t relate long distance to all the changes that made up their new, separate lives.
    She’d known it would be this way. Three-thousand-mile relationships might work for a while, but without personal contact, days and nights together to pump some fresh blood into the relationship, it’s bound to start withering. Sooner or later it would wither past the point of saving. Just dry up and croak, like a plant without water.
    It was already happening to her. She felt it, fought it, couldn’t stop it. All the lonely nights in the Outer Richmond flat they’d shared . . . she’d got so she hated going there afterwork. Stayed later and later at the office, started taking on after-hours field jobs like this deadbeat dad case tonight. Better that than staring at the walls or the boob tube and throwing pizza and junk food down her neck, which she’d done for about a week after Horace left. After that she’d gone the other way, started to lose her appetite. That was the main reason she’d dropped twelve pounds, not any real desire to shed the flab; she just wasn’t interested in food anymore. Or much of anything else except work.
    Now that’s a lie, she thought as she pulled out to pass a slow-moving truck. She was still interested in sex, oh Lord yes. On her mind more and more lately. Tonight, thanks to Vonda. Three and a half months is a long time to go without it when you’re used to getting it regularly. So damn horny sometimes she felt like she was ready to explode. Vonda might’ve gotten in over her head with a white, Jewish dude, but at least Vonda was getting
laid
.
    Maybe Vonda would loan out Ben Sherman for a night. Or maybe he had a friend who wanted to change his luck. She’d never slept with a white guy herself—or a Jewish guy, for that matter. Might change
her
luck.
    Stupid thoughts.
    Come on, Tamara. You want to do the nasty so bad, you know you can find somebody to do it with without even trying. Half a fox now that the love handles were slimmed down. Sleek and sassy. Must be a few hundred guys in the city that wouldn’t mind getting into her pants for a night or two, no strings. Pick a night, pick a club, pick a dick.
    More stupid thoughts.
    She sighed. She was off the bridge now, moving toward theinterchange and 880 south, but she could still hear that damn shushing hum.
    Horace. Horace, Horace, Horace . . .
    T he house George DeBrissac’s cousin owned in San Leandro was on Willard Street, 1122 Willard. She’d looked it up on the Netscape MapQuest site before leaving the office: Willard was in the wide trough between the 880 and 580 freeways, closest to 880 off San Pablo Avenue. Simple directions, should be pretty easy to find.
    It was. Blue-collar residential neighborhood, not much different from dozens of others in the East Bay—that was apparent even on a dark night in an area without many streetlights. Old houses, mostly frame, a few stucco, on pretty good-sized lots. Probably an ethnic mix of whites, blacks, maybe a few Latinos and Asians.
    Finding 1122 was a little harder. No numbers on the street signs, no reflector curbside numbers for the headlights to pick up, the houses set far enough back from the street so it wasn’t easy to read the numbers on them. Tamara drove slow, with the driver’s window down, until she passed a house with the porch light on: 906. Which way did the numbers run, up or down? Down—the next block was 800. She made a U-turn, came back to the 1100 block, finally pinpointed the right one.
    Boxy frame house, hedges hiding most of the front porch, low-maintenance