The Shadow Hunter

by Michael Prescott

  She was. “I sincerely hope you’re not getting the proverbial cold feet. I’ve taken a serious risk, you know. Your wife has more clout with the station than I do. She’s the bionic newsbabe, the six-million-dollar girl. What I’m trying to say is, she could get me canned, and if I don’t have anything to fall back on…”

  He held up a placating hand. “You’ll have plenty to fall back on. And you won’t be fired. It’s not going to work out that way.”

  “So how is it going to work out?”

  “For the best.” Howard sighed, suddenly tired. “By the way, you’re not the only one who’s taken a risk.”

  “No? What have you ever done, besides show up with a bulge in your trousers?”

  “I’ve done more than you know. More than you need to know. Now where are my goddamned shoes? I have to get—” Home, he almost said but caught himself. “I have to get going.”

  The time was almost ten o’clock, and it would take him an hour to get to Malibu from here. Kris would arrive at the beach house around midnight, and he wanted to be there well before she arrived. It had been awkward the other night, when he had come home later than usual, and she had already been there.

  She had asked him questions then—questions about his imaginary drive up the coast, and about how restless and agitated he seemed. Of course she suspected him. It was obvious now, though at the time he hadn’t allowed himself to see it.

  Well, it didn’t matter. It was too late for her, no matter what she suspected. Things were moving quickly to a conclusion, and soon everything would be resolved once and for all.

  He found the shoes in one of the dark corners the lamplight couldn’t reach. When he bent to slip them on, involuntarily he grunted, an old-man noise. He hated making noises like that.

  Amanda was his ticket to youth. Or if not Amanda, then some new companion, younger still and lacking any tattoos.

  But not Kris. Kris was the past. Kris was a dead weight dragging him down.

  He had to be rid of her. He would be.

  Soon.

  28

  After Hickle left, Abby opened her bedroom closet.

  The VCR and audio deck had been recording continually, but the TV was off, the audio console muted.

  She turned on the monitor and speakers, then sat on the floor in a sloppy lotus position, resting her back against the bed, watching the monitor. She saw Hickle pace his living room before fixing a meal in the kitchen. She wondered if eating was a response to stress or if he simply hadn’t had enough dinner.

  He ate standing in the kitchen, almost out of camera range. When he was done, he left the cookware in the sink and went into the bedroom. She checked her watch. It was 9:40. Kris’s newscast would start in twenty minutes. She assumed he wouldn’t miss it.

  But he didn’t emerge from the bedroom. The surveillance microphone picked up no sounds of activity. She waited, feeling a new, prickling intimation of trouble.

  Another glance at her watch. Nearly ten o’clock. Still no sign of him. Strange. Ominous. If any part of his daily routine was sacrosanct, it was the ritual of watching Kris at six and ten.

  “What’s going on, Raymond?” she whispered. “What are you up to?”

  She increased the volume. Dimly she made out a sound, something low and regular and ongoing, hard to identify. A murmur.

  Was he running an electric fan? She didn’t remember seeing one. Anyway, this sound had a different quality than a motor noise. It wavered, fluctuated.

  She leaned close to the speakers, maxing out the volume, but the noise floor—the ambient hiss that was part of any acoustical environment—rose to a high, steady sizzle, and the murmuring sound was barely more distinct than before.

  “He fastened on Kris because she represents his feminine ideal, what he calls the look. She exists in Hickle’s mind as a mature, perfected version of Jill Dahlbeck, who was also a blue-eyed blonde. But this time he’s chosen a woman unlike Jill in every other respect—a celebrity, married, rich, famous, older than he is. He wants her to be unattainable. He wants to pursue her and fail, because his humiliation will give him the excuse he needs to destroy her and destroy himself…”

  Supine on the bed, Hickle listened. Pain cramped his belly. Slowly he rolled on his side and contracted into a fetal curl.

  “What is Kris Barwood to him, really? She’s his fantasy lover, his dream wife, and not to get all Freudian about it, his mother too—an older authority figure who has a home and a husband. She represents all aspects of the female presence in the world, from erotic temptress to domestic companion to nurturing parent. And she’s big enough to play all these roles—larger than life, in fact. Her face appears on TV sets, billboards, magazine covers. She’s everywhere. She is Woman. Lashing out at her, Hickle will strike at the archetype of the other sex, the sex he hates and fears. No vive la difference for him.”

  Abby’s voice, coolly analytical, dissecting him. No, vivisecting. That was when the surgery was performed on a living body. Sometimes it was done without anesthesia—nothing to deaden the pain.

  “He has zero concern for Kris as a human being, because to him she’s not a human being, only a symbol. Hickle lives in a world of symbols and images and fantasies, connected to society only through the TV set and People magazine. I guess he’s not much different from a lot of us these days, and I might even feel sorry for him if he didn’t pose a measurable threat…”

  Feel sorry for him. Feel sorry.

  Who was she to say that, to pass judgment on him? She was the one who ought to be ashamed of who she was and what she did. She was the one who made up stories about a failed relationship and bumped into him in the laundry room and got him to talk about the TV news. She was the one who burrowed her way into other people’s lives and poked around and uncovered secrets. She was a liar and a snitch and a sneak and a conniving little whore, and what she deserved…what she deserved…

  The shotgun.

  That was what she deserved, yes, the shotgun, absolutely.

  Hickle sat up, ignoring the cassette as it continued to play.

  She was a goddamned bitch. She had deceived him, manipulated him, served as a tool of his enemies, spied on him and reported to Kris. And she had done it so skillfully that if not for his friend JackBNimble, he might never have known.

  His anonymous informer hiding behind a nursery-rhyme name was the only person he could trust, the only person who had been honest with him all along. Every item of information Jack had passed on had proven true. Every word of advice had been sound. And he had told Hickle what to do, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he?

  First Abby, then Kris.

  The two of them—dead.

  Now, without further delay.

  He got off the bed and unlocked his bedroom closet. He took out his duffel bag and unzipped it, removing the shotgun. He checked to be sure it was loaded.

  Blammo. No more Abby.

  Blammo. No more Kris.

  Everything would come to its proper end tonight. He would win, and they would lose.

  The tape kept playing, Abby’s voice a whisper amid the folds of his bedspread, but he didn’t need to hear it anymore.

  To isolate the mystery noise, Abby first used the lowpass filter on her audio deck to remove all frequencies higher than eight kilohertz. This cut off part of the hiss but not enough. She fiddled with the ten-band graphic equalizer, pulling down the sliders on the higher frequencies while boosting the midrange tones.

  She tried to minimize the hiss without losing the murmur. It was hard. The two sounds were at similar frequencies. But as she made fine adjustments, the murmur came through a bit more sharply, and she identified it as a voice.

  Was Hickle muttering to himself under his breath?

  She didn’t think so. Maybe he was listening to the radio, but she didn’t recall seeing a radio in his bedroom.

  Then she heard new noises. She paused, kneeling on the floor alongside the console, her ear close to the speakers.

  Creak of
the bed, thump of footsteps. A door opening. Something being dragged briefly on the floor.

  “What are you up to, Raymond?” she breathed.

  Footsteps again. She glanced expectantly at the monitor, but he did not enter the living room.

  Then a rattle of activity, a thump that was not a footfall…and silence except for the lingering room-tone hiss and, behind it, the murmuring sound that might have been a voice.

  The frequency of the human voice falls mainly between 1.5 and 2.5 kilohertz. She boosted this range, rolling off the higher frequencies, and the background hiss dropped away, leaving the mystery sound isolated and distinct.

  It was her own voice.

  “…all depends on whether or not he has the nerve to follow through on what has been, until now, only a detailed fantasy of violent revenge…”

  The thoughts she’d dictated into her microrecorder.

  Hickle must have taken the recorder, stolen it.

  He was listening to the tape.

  He knew everything.

  Abby’s gun was in her purse, and her purse was in the living room. She twisted upright, spun away from the closet—

  Too late.

  Framed in her bedroom window was Hickle. On the fire escape, shotgun in his hands.

  He swept the barrel toward her. She ducked behind the bed, denying him a clear shot, but she’d bought herself no more than a couple of seconds. The window was open. He only had to punch through the screen and climb in.

  Distantly it occurred to her that the last question on her mental checklist had been answered.

  Would fear deter Hickle from taking action?

  It would not.

  Prone on the floor, she heard the crunch of the wire mesh, the rattle of the screen as it fell out of the frame. The unidentified noises from his bedroom—she understood them now—rattle of the screen being removed, thump of the screen as it fell. He had slipped through his window onto the fire escape.

  Now he was climbing into her bedroom. She heard the rustle of his clothes.

  Had to get past him, reach her revolver in the living room. If she left cover, he would kill her with one shot.

  Okay, so crawl under the bed. She might have time to wriggle out the other side before he figured out where she’d gone.

  Good plan, except the bed was too low—she couldn’t squirm under it.

  She was trapped, and he was coming, his footsteps vibrating through the floorboards.

  Her only chance was to fight. She had been trained to respond to an attack from a position of disadvantage, and if her current circumstances didn’t qualify as a position of disadvantage, nothing would.

  As Hickle came around the bed, she sprang to her feet and ducked under the shotgun’s barrel, then brought up her right arm with her hand closed to the second finger joint and aimed a straight blow at his larynx.

  He dodged, she delivered a glancing strike to the side of his neck, and he stumbled back, raising the gun.

  She snapped a kick at his right arm. It caught him near the elbow.

  His fingers splayed. The shotgun fell.

  Before he could pick it up—finish him.

  She let out a yell of rage and drove her open palm at his face, but he darted sideways, the strike missed, and now she was off balance.

  He seized her by the hair and flung her onto the bed, then dipped out of sight and came up with the shotgun in his hands.

  She tried to scramble clear, but already he was on top of her, the shotgun muzzle in her face.

  “They’ll hear you,” she gasped. “Fire one shot and everybody in the building will hear.”

  The words had come out of nowhere, and she didn’t think they had reached him.

  There would be a flex of his index finger, and her life would be gone. She braced for it.

  He didn’t shoot.

  The shotgun withdrew a few inches.

  She waited.

  “That’s a good point, Abby,” Hickle said so softly that she could barely hear him above her roaring pulse. “If that’s your real name. Is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. That’s one thing you didn’t lie about.”

  “We have to talk, Raymond.”

  “So talk.”

  She licked her lips. She smelled lubricant on the shotgun’s muzzle. Absurdly it made her want to sneeze. “Could you put that thing down? I think I’m allergic to it.

  He took a step away from the bed, shifting his grip to hold the gun by the barrel, not the stock.

  “Okay,” she said. “It looks like you found me out.”

  “Looks like.”

  “You’re smart, Raymond. I underestimated you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now that I know how smart you are, things will be different. I can be straight with you.”

  “Go ahead, tell me what’s going on.”

  “I will. I’ll tell you everything.” She was starting to get matters under control. She’d had a bad moment there, but it had passed, and now she had options, possibilities.

  She sat up, choosing her next words with care, and Hickle slammed down the shotgun on the back of her skull.

  29

  Abby fell off the bed and collapsed on the floor. She shuddered once, then did not move again.

  “No more lies, whore,” Hickle whispered.

  He stood over her, wary of a trick. She could be playing possum, though he doubted it. The shotgun’s buttstock had clipped her pretty good. Even so, he kept a tight grip on the gun as he crouched beside her and peeled back one eyelid. Her eye was rolled up in the socket. She was out cold. Breathing, though. Still alive. Well, not for long.

  She’d been right about firing the shotgun in a crowded apartment building. Had he been thinking more clearly, he would have recognized the danger himself. But there were other ways to kill her. Cut her throat with a kitchen knife. Yes, that would do it. He was halfway out of the bedroom before he remembered that all her eating utensils were plastic.

  Break her neck, then. He knelt and gripped her by the throat, tensing for a lethal twist of his wrists, but something in him recoiled from the hands-on intimacy of the act. There had to be another way.

  Suffocation. He could smother her.

  He turned toward the bed, reaching for a pillow, then stopped.

  Beyond the bed was the closet, the door standing open, a cache of electronic gear inside. In the frenzy of his attack and its aftermath, he hadn’t even noticed the stuff.

  It seemed odd to have audiovisual equipment set up in a closet, and what was odder still was that the image on the TV screen was his own living room.

  How could his living room be on TV?

  Then he understood that he was looking at a closed circuit broadcast. The TV must be receiving a signal from a camera Abby had planted.

  But that meant she had been inside his apartment. She had broken in, bugged the place. Then she had sat and watched him when he thought he was alone.

  “Watched me,” he breathed. It seemed horrible, obscene.

  Stiffly he approached the closet. Beneath the TV was a VCR, recording the live video feed. Next to it, an audio console, tape reels turning. When he’d talked to himself as he often did, she must have recorded his voice. She knew his every thought. She hadn’t simply invaded his life in the obvious ways. She had intruded on his most private moments, his solitude. She had watched and listened and recorded it all.

  A new thought struck him. An awful thought. When exactly had she been in his apartment? Before or after he’d sneaked into the laundry room? Because if it was after…

  Then she would have seen the thing he stole out of the washing machine. The white high-cut panties that had once been worn on her body. Her panties.

  She would have seen them, would have known he’d taken them, would have guessed what he wanted them for.

  Or maybe…maybe she didn’t need to guess. Maybe she had set up a camera in his bedroom as well.

  Maybe it had an infrared lens, so she coul
d watch him in the dark.

  Had she watched him late last night, when he had taken those panties into his bed, when he had used them the way other men used pornographic pictures? Had she seen that? Had she gotten it on tape?

  Rage seized him.

  He pawed at the VCR’s Eject button, cracked open the cassette, pulled ribbons of tape off the spool in tangled handfuls.

  Maybe she had recorded the sound effects too—the creaking of his mattress springs, the low shudders of his breath.

  He wrenched loose the audiotape reels, unwinding them, spewing tape everywhere until the reels dropped from his shaking hands.

  Useless. He’d accomplished nothing. Somebody could wind the tape back onto the spools and view the video, hear the sound.

  Objectively he knew it didn’t matter what anybody saw or heard. There was a good chance he would die in his assault on Kris. Even if he lived, he would be arrested, his guilt undeniable.

  Still, he couldn’t stand the thought of strangers having a window into his most personal moments. Watching him like an exhibit at a sideshow. Laughing at his perversity. Or worse, feeling sorry for him, feeling pity for the sick, lonely freak.

  No. He would make sure that nobody ever saw or heard the tapes. He would get rid of the goddamned things, erase them or something.

  But first he would remove the bugs she’d planted. He couldn’t let anybody see what she had done.

  He confirmed that Abby was still unconscious, then returned to his apartment via the fire escape. He searched his living room first. The TV camera’s vantage point had clearly shown that it was stationed above the couch. He pried loose the smoke detector and found a lens and transmitter, but no microphone. He stomped the camera under his heel and scanned the room for a microphone’s likely hiding place. The telephone? He turned the phone upside down, saw what might be a bug of some kind, and battered the phone to pieces against the kitchen counter.

  There could be other bugs in the room. He peered behind the couch, behind the TV, in his kitchen cabinets, in the refrigerator. He didn’t even know what he was looking for. An eavesdropping device might be in front of his face and he wouldn’t recognize it. The tricky little bitch might have planted a dozen microphones or a hundred. He had no way to know.