Free Hellbox (Nameless Detective) by Bill Pronzini

out.”
    “Unless they have an accident—a bad fall so they can’t walk.”
    “Well, that’s possible. But she couldn’t have gone too far on foot. She’s still missing come morning, I’ll get one of the other deputies to start combing the area. Or do it myself if I can free up the time. She’ll turn up.”
    “Or I’ll find her.”
    “Right.” Then, as I took a step toward the door, “One thing you should know. Green Valley is a quiet place. Low crime rate. Very few assaults against women, and none against a nonlocal as far back as I can remember.”
    “I wasn’t thinking along those lines,” I said.
    But I had been. After what had happened to me, the three months of hell at Deer Run, how could I not think along those lines?
    *   *   *
    The house was just as I’d left it: locked door, dark windows, empty silence.
    Hurt to see it like that, but it didn’t make me feel any less hopeful. Kerry had told me that she’d never given up hope the entire three months I was missing and presumed dead; never once lost faith. She’d lived on it, and so would I.
    But I couldn’t just sit around doing nothing. Still a little daylight left. I unlocked the door, reached in just far enough to turn on the porch light, then locked it again, and put myself back into the car.
    I don’t know how long I drove the hillside and valley roads in the general vicinity, stopping at three lighted homes that had been unoccupied before, showing the portrait photo of Kerry I kept in my wallet, and watching heads shake and listening to voices saying the same words over and over: “No, sorry, haven’t seen a woman looks like that. No, sorry. No, sorry.” At least an hour, maybe two, until long past dark. A fat harvest moon made it easier to see what lay along the shadow-edged blacktops, but there was nothing to see. Every few minutes, I hit the redial button on my cell phone. Nothing to hear, either, except the empty ringing.
    The only reason I gave it up was vision-blurring fatigue. I lost my bearings and spent five minutes roaming around in a maze of darkness and distant flickering house lights before I came upon a street sign with a name I recognized. Then I misjudged a turn and nearly slid off into a ditch. Danger to myself and to others. And this kind of aimless search wasn’t going to find Kerry, no matter how long I kept it up. There were just too many places she could be, hidden by the night.
    Back to the house. I still couldn’t make myself go inside, wrap those unfamiliar walls around myself, so I sat out on the deck. The darkness was alive with the pulse of crickets, a soothing sound on previous nights, but one that had the opposite effect now. It had gotten cold, the kind of after-dark chill that descends on mountain country even in summer, but I noticed it only when the wind kicked up, and only then in a peripheral way. Same with a dull, throbbing headache.
    The section of woods I could see on the north side was a clotted wall of black rising up against the moonlit sky. What if that was where Kerry was? I should have gone in there earlier. Checked the timber on the south side, too, and down along the far side of Ridge Hill Road. She couldn’t have walked far from the house, Broxmeyer had said that himself. But there were so damn many copses and stands and wide stretches of timber within a radius of a couple of miles; she could be anywhere.
    If she wasn’t back by first light, I’d start combing the woods nearby and work my way outward and downward. As much ground as I could cover, by myself and with Broxmeyer or whoever he sent out to help search. If I couldn’t find her by noon, I’d appeal to Broxmeyer again for an organized hunt; and if that didn’t work, try to talk Sam Budlong into helping me prod the local politicians into it. Tourism was Green Valley’s major industry and the powers that be couldn’t afford the bad publicity that would come from letting too much time pass; a suddenly missing