The Stalker

by Bill Pronzini

  Kilduff let the screen door slam behind him, and both men turned to look at him. He went toward them, taking his wallet from his trouser pocket, fanning it open. His eyes were flashing and his mouth was grim.

  He said, “Listen, I want to rent a skiff for a couple of hours, you can name your own price . . .”

  The limping man had fashioned a sniper’s nest.

  A few yards from the wide clearing and the tan Volkswagen belonging to Orange’s wife, just to the right of the entrance road, he had matted a section of cord grass and milkweed directly behind a thick clump of tall rushes. On either side, the tule grass grew densely to a height of three feet or more. Kneeling in the flattened area, hunkered low, he was certain that he could not be seen from the road or from the clearing.

  Until it was too late.

  He had been in the nest for perhaps fifteen minutes now Immediately after he had called Orange from a motel-and-restaurant complex near Novato, he had returned here and parked the rented Mustang in a concealing grove of eucalyptus, well beyond the entrance to the second private road leading to Duckblind Slough. He had then walked back to this point, taking with him a tire iron from the Mustang’s trunk; he had used that to snap the padlock on the wooden gate. Then he had swung the gate parallel to the road and walked the half-mile to the clearing, not hurrying particularly, despite the increasing velocity of the downpour, paying no heed to his sodden clothing—and set about constructing the sniper’s nest. He had briefly debated waiting in the shack, but even though he knew almost exactly how long it would take Orange to reach Duckblind Slough from San Francisco, it would have been foolish to take even the remotest chance now, when it was almost over.

  He shifted his weight, and his knees made wet slithering sounds on the matted grass. He had the .44 Ruger Magnum in his gloved right hand, pressed against his rib cage just below the left armpit. His palm was sweating inside the glove, and he could feel a certain expectant excitement building inside him. Just a few more minutes, he thought. Just a few more minutes and Orange will be dead, Orange will be dead, Red and Blue and Gray and Yellow and Green and Orange, all dead, all gone.

  He wiped wetness from his face with the left sleeve of his overcoat, smiling a little now, thinking about how beautifully it had turned out. Orange had come home after all—no real matter where he had been all night—he had come home to answer his phone this morning. And he had suspected nothing wrong, nothing sinister; the news of his wife’s death had sent him into shock, despite the fact they had separated—that had been apparent; no hesitations, no suspicions, he was on his way.

  Beautiful, beautiful.

  Of course, it was too bad about the woman. It really was, even though she was a whore like all the rest. She had fit so perfectly into the scheme of things, being here at the fishing shack—the perfect lever with which to lure Orange to Duckblind Slough. Without her, things might have been much more difficult. Yes, it was too bad about the woman.

  He would have to kill her, nevertheless.

  But not until he had made her scream for him the way he had made Alice-slut scream for him on Tuesday night.

  It was only right, only fitting—his just reward—after all he had been through. But only after Orange was dead, only when it was all over. That was why he hadn’t killed her before, that was why he had only tied her up without touching her, and put her in that closet.

  The limping man looked at his wristwatch, listening to the rain falling on the morass, the wind howling, listening for the sound of an automobile. It wouldn’t be long now, no it wouldn’t be long now. Just a few more minutes, that was all.

  And his finger caressed the Magnum’s trigger as if it was the nipple on the breast of Orange’s wife.

  18

  Steve Kilduff had almost reached Duckblind Slough before he realized that he had no weapon of any kind.

  He sat drenched in the stern of a fourteen-foot, oak-hulled skiff—working the ten-horsepower Johnson outboard, fighting the craft through the roiling black water and through the cold, slanting rain—and told himself that he was a goddamned fool. He should have bought a gun, a knife, something, anything, at Talbert’s, but the son of a bitch with the thick mustache hadn’t wanted to rent him the skiff at all—“you’re crazy to want to put out on the river in this weather, buddy” —and he had had to fabricate a story about his wife (Jesus!) shacking up with a friend in one of the sloughs and wanting to confront them in the act, so to speak. Mustache had smirked and winked at the other one and finally agreed for twenty-five dollars and a signed blank check as a deposit against damage, but Kilduff knew now that if he had tried to buy some kind of weapon the deal would have been flatly off, Mustache wouldn’t have wanted any blood on his clean white hands. As it was, he had wasted fifteen minutes before getting the skiff out on the river, and all he had been thinking about was hurrying; time was growing more and more precious.

  Still, there was the fact that he was completely unarmed. Even though he was coming in the back way, by water, with surprise in his favor, there was the chance that he would be seen; and if he was, he had no way to defend himself, he would be naked, a proverbial sitting duck in Duckblind Slough . . .

  The shack?

  Yes . . . the shack! There would be some kind of weapon there—a fish knife (he remembered having one) or at least a steak knife from the larder. If he could get to the shack, and inside, it might still be all right. He didn’t think the killer would wait inside the cabin because there were, of course, no Marin County Sheriff’s vehicles parked in the vicinity; realizing this, that it could arouse immediate suspicion—especially after the story he had told on the telephone—the killer would want to wait somewhere outside, possibly near the parking clearing, where he could make his move quickly and silently. That was the most logical place, the most logical decision.

  But how could you really be sure about the reasoning of an insane mind?

  And what about Andrea?

  If she was all right, where did he have her? With him? In the shack? The shack seemed likely, because the killer wouldn’t want to take the chance of her somehow giving warning from whatever concealment he had established on the marshland; yes, if she was alive she almost surely had to be in the shack. Then, if he could get there undetected, he could get her out, get her to the skiff, to safety.

  If she was still alive . . .

  Kilduff forced his mind away from the possibilities, from Andrea, forced it to key on what he was doing and what he was about to do. He peered through the driving rain and saw the entrance to the slough coming up on his right. He maneuvered the skiff in that direction, feeling, down the length of his body, the sharp jolts of the bottom slapskipping across the rushing current. Once he had edged the craft into the narrow mouth, he began immediately to probe the left bank, looking for the small dock set into a miniature tule cove which belonged to Glen Preston—an investment broker from Santa Rosa who owned the nearer of the slough’s three shacks. He would bring the skiff in there, he had decided, moor it to the dock and follow the shoreline on foot to his own cabin on the point; the thick marsh growth would conceal him from anyone at a distance inland—if he was careful.

  He almost missed the cove, and he had to swing the skiff in a wide loop to bring it back, cutting the throttle as he did so. The craft settled and began to drift with the strong current, and he fed the Johnson more gas to bring it in close to the jerry-built structure; he cut back again, then goosed the throttle a little, cut back, and goosed a second time. The skiff’s bow was almost touching the forward edge of the dock now. He gathered up the bow line, kicked the engine off, and gained his feet; he took two steps, using the fore seat as leverage for his jump to the dock. The skiff tilted dangerously in the roiling water, but he managed to land safely on the wooden planking. He wound the line around one of the vertical pilings and made it fast, pulling the skiff’s bow up tightly against the edge of the dock to minimize as much as possible the strong threat of damage to the craft.

  The
wind lashed at his face, fanning his wet hair like a windsock, billowing the saturated material of his topcoat. The rain on his skin was like particles of ice. He turned to peer inland, and he could see Preston’s cabin—a spectral gray blur—something more than one hundred yards distant. The path leading there was almost completely obliterated by the choking marsh growth. A natural drainage gulley, with three-foot densely grown banks, cut a jagged diagonal line to the cove from between Preston’s shack and his own; its narrow expanse was swollen with muddy rainwater, which emptied into the slough ten feet beyond the dock. The cattails and tule grass grew down to the water’s edge, and there was perhaps a foot of oozing black mud visible between the vegetation and the rain-lashed slough. Footing would be treacherous; you could easily become mired in that volatile muck if you weren’t cautious. You had to use the thicker clumps of grass as stepping stones, and even then you took the chance that they weren’t growing on mud islands or directly out of undetectable bog holes.

  Kilduff drew a labored, tremulous breath, and stepped down off the dock, jumping over the narrow mouth of the drainage gulley. He began to make his way along the edge of the slough, leaning his body forward into the harsh north wind, his hands spread out from his sides, palms down, for balance in the stooped position. His street shoes, with their smooth rubber soles, slipped and skidded precariously on the wet grasses; it was as if he were attempting to make his way across ice. Almost inevitably, he lost his footing and went to his knees, his right leg splaying outward into the frigid slough, his hands clutching desperately at the vegetation to keep his body from sliding into the heaving water. He managed finally to regain his feet, to move forward again, slower now, eyes cast downward, measuring each step.

  He came around a hump in the shoreline, and he could see his cabin then, squatting desolately with its odd, tired list, on the point. He paused, raising his body up slightly, searching the area immediately surrounding the shack. There was no sign of life, no movement save for the windswept marsh grasses. He turned his gaze inland, toward the clearing, but the rushes grew to heights of five and six feet—clumps of anise, of cats, almost as high—and he could detect nothing.

  The shoreline bellied inland just ahead, and then drew outward sharply to form the point; at the center of the concavity, he would be less than a hundred yards from the clearing. If he had been correct as to the killer’s approximate place of concealment, he would run the greatest risk of being seen when he passed along there. Well, all right, he told himself, just keep low, head down, let the growth hide you. Nice and slow, don’t panic, don’t blow your cool. All right, now, all right.

  He started forward again.

  The Marin County Civic Center—a sprawling, modernistic, turquoise-domed, gold-spired construction, distinctive in that it was the last creation of architect Frank Lloyd Wright—is located just north of San Rafael, directly off Highway 101 on San Pedro Road. Among other county and city offices, it houses the Marin County Sheriff’s Depart ment in a new annex on one of the upper levels.

  Inspectors Commac and Flagg, having received a go-ahead from Chief of Detectives Boccalou, arrived at the Center a few minutes before ten. They passed beneath one of the tunnel archways to the rear parking facility, and then rode an escalator up to the annex. They were met there by a plainclothes investigator named Hank Arnstadt—ashort, balding man with sad hound eyes—who would accompany them in a jurisdictional capacity.

  After the amenities, Commac asked him, “What did the property check turn up, Hank?”

  “Your subject owns a small fishing cabin in Duckblind Slough,” Arnstadt said. “Tributary of the Petaluma River.”

  “How far is it from here?”

  “Just north of Novato.”

  “Fifteen miles, maybe?”

  “About that, right ”

  “How many roads in?”

  “Just one,” Amstadt said. “Or if you’d rather, one set. One county and two private.”

  Commac nodded. “That’s something, at least ”

  “Well, you can get there by water.”

  “In this weather?” Flagg said.

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t think we have to worry about that angle,” Commac said.

  “Do you want company on this?” Arnstadt asked.

  Commac looked at Flagg. “What do you think, Pat?”

  “We should be able to handle it.”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  Arnstadt said, “I’ll put a couple of units on stand-by, how’s that?”

  “Good enough.”

  “Are we ready, then?”

  “Any time.”

  They used the unmarked sedan, Flagg driving. Arnstadt sat in the back. When they had pulled onto 101 northbound, he stared out through the rain-fogged side window and said in a morose way, “Lousy rain.”

  “Yeah,” Commac agreed.

  “I hope there’s not going to be any trouble.”

  “So do we.”

  “How did he seem to you?”

  “Kilduff, you mean?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “An average sort,” Commac said. “Just a guy who made a bigger mistake than most when he was a kid.”

  “And got away with it for eleven years,” Flagg put in. “Now that it’s caught up with him, he doesn’t know how to cope with it.”

  “Not a hardcase, then.”

  “No,” Commac said.

  “What about if he’s backed into a corner?”

  “Do you mean, would he fight?”

  “Yeah.”

  Commac thought about it for a time. “No,” he said finally. “No, I don’t think he would.”

  There was someone inside the cabin.

  Every nerve in Andrea Kilduff’s small body seemed to contract, to become as thin and taut as piano wire, and she lay rigid in the darkness of the storage closet, her ears straining for a recurrence of the surreptitious, but nonetheless discernible, sounds she had heard only moments earlier: the muffled grate of the hinged window being slowly pulled outward; the scrape of hands, of feet, on the shack’s outer wall and on the sill; the creak of the old, damp boarding as a certain weight settled gingerly on the floor inside.

  But now she heard only silence.

  Her heart seemed to be skipping every other beat within her chest; it seemed as loud to her as a child’s arhythmic thumping of a drum. Whoever had come in was standing in the room, outside the closet door, only a few feet from where she lay, standing and—what? Waiting? Listening, as she was listening? Who was it? The limping man? But if so, why had he come in through the window? Why hadn’t he used the front door? And if it was him, what would he do now? Would he kill her? Would he shoot her, would he—?

  Creak ...

  Oh God, he was moving now. She sucked in her breath silently, holding it, her eyes wide and staring upward.

  Creak . . .

  Footfalls, light and slow, coming closer, coming toward the closet door.

  Creak ...

  He was right outside the door now, right outside, and almost immediately she heard the rattle of the lock in the hasp, and another rattling sound, different—keys?—and there was a soft clicking noise and the rattling of the lock against the hasp again, and then the door was being opened, slowly, slowly, and a shaft of bright gray light appeared, growing wider and wider, and a man’s hand and arm, the arm encased in a muddied topcoat, a topcoat that looked—and in that moment she saw the man’s face, unshaven, rain-streaked, saw his face, and her heart gave a surging leap, and warm stinging liquid came from nowhere and filled her eyes, so that she was looking at his face through a glistening film, like looking at someone under water—but it was his face.

  Steve’s face.

  It was Steve.

  He saw her at that same instant, and his eyes went wide and his lips parted, and there was a mixture of clear relief and a half-dozen other emotions mirrored plainly on his visage. He reached down and lifted her in his arms, strong arms, gentle, and she could smell t
he rain on him and the pungency of sodden wool and the warm, familiar maleness of him. He stood her on her feet, holding her tightly against him with his arms circling her body, his hands fumbling at the knot in the rough cloth gag, and then it was free and his name was on her lips as she kissed him, kissed his mouth and his eyes and his cheeks and the hollow of his throat, whimpering a little.

  He nuzzled her hair, holding her, saying “Shh, baby, shh, it’s all right, baby” very softly. After a time, tenderly, he moved her away from him and his eyes went to the shelves inside the closet, probing them left and right, pausing finally on a large green tackle box with chrome catches and a chrome handle. He stepped inside the closet, opening the box, taking from inside a long, bone-handled, wide-bladed fish knife with a double-edged, one-half-serrated point. He bent to cut the twine binding her ankles, and rose again to free her hands. He stepped back to put the knife into the pocket of his topcoat, and Andrea raised her partially numbed arms to encircle his neck. She pressed close to him again, clinging to him.

  “Did he hurt you?” he said against her hair. “Did he touch you, honey?”

  “No, no . . .”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He . . . left an hour or two ago, I don’t know where he went.”

  “How long was he here?”

  “Just since . . . this morning, after five . . . oh, Steve, who is he, who is that awful man?”

  “I don’t know, baby, I don’t know.”

  “He wanted to know where you were,” she said. “His eyes . . . his eyes were mad and he had a gun, Steve . . .”

  His hands tensed on her back, but he said, “Shh, now, it’s all right”

  “Steve, how did you know I was here?” she asked suddenly. “How did you know . . . that man had been here? Steve, what is it, what’s happening?”