The Hidden

by Bill Pronzini

  Macklin said, “No, he won’t,” making it sound definite. Then, “Why are you so sure he wants you dead?”

  “He swore he’d do it if I told on him, tried to leave him. But I knew he was planning to do it anyway, no matter what I said or did. Tonight, tomorrow … that’s why he was keeping me prisoner. Working himself up to it. I could see it in his eyes. It’s the only way he can ever be sure.”

  “Sure of what?”

  She didn’t answer. He couldn’t be certain in the weak light but he thought her eyes were shut.

  He stood, slowly walked to the couch. Leaned against it and asked again, “The only way he can ever be sure of what, Claire?”

  “That he’ll be safe.”

  “From what?”

  “The police.” Whispering now.

  “Why would the police want him?”

  “For murder.”

  “… Murder? Whose murder?”

  “Gene,” she said. “He’s the one who killed Gene.”

  T W E N T Y - T W O

  THE SUDDENNESS OF THE attack was alarming. Shelby’s first thought was that it must be the sheriff’s deputy, that he was protecting county property and would release her once he had her clear of the cruiser, but it didn’t happen that way. He twisted her sideways, kicked the door shut to cut off the dome light, and kept right on dragging her backward across the blacktop.

  Storm-blurred voice in her ear: “Don’t fight me.”

  The words had the opposite effect on her: They brought a rush of fear, and with it the instinctive responses taught by her self-defense training. She writhed in the strong grip, kicking backward and flailing with the flashlight.

  One of the hands let go of her long enough to punch up on her wrist; the force of the blow ripped the torch loose, sent it up and away in a spinning arc that threw the cruiser into weird relief for an instant before it smashed into the roadbed and went out. Thick, unrelieved blackness closed in around her and the man who held her pinned against him.

  Her fear ratcheted up a notch. She fought frantically, couldn’t break free. The blurred voice came again, harsh now, the same words, “Don’t fight me!” His breath was hot in her ear, the hard-muscled contours of his body straining against hers, the powerful hands still pulling her backward but also trying to turn her toward him. It was as if she were in a mad lover’s embrace, being drawn deeper into the roiling black, into a void, an abyss.

  Shelby kicked backward again, missed his wide-spread legs the first time, connected the second. The heel-blow on his shin hurt him enough to make him relax his grip. Squirming, she drove an elbow into some soft part of him that brought a grunt and finally allowed her to tear free.

  She ran.

  He shouted something behind her, a command or threat that was lost in the gibbering wind.

  Ran in a blind zigzag, sawing the air in front of her with both hands.

  The slick, pine-needled surface of the lane was under her feet and then it wasn’t. Flowing stream of water, ankle deep, that slowed her down to a high-stepping slog. The shadow shape of a tree loomed in front of her; she dodged just in time to avoid running into it head on, a move that brought her out of the water and onto solid ground again. When she caught hold of the bole to thrust herself around it, the rough bark ripped a slit in her glove and scraped skin off her palm.

  Behind her an arrow of light sliced the darkness. But it didn’t come anywhere near her and she almost welcomed it, for it drove away some of the claustrophobic panic and showed her where she was—at the edge of the woods on the inland side of the lane.

  The pines grew close together here, the spaces between them crowded with ground cover, deadfalls. She plowed through the undergrowth, managed to sidestep another tree. Something unseen clutched at her foot like bony fingers, toppled her to one knee a second or two before the flash beam swept past overhead, close this time. He hadn’t seen her because the light kept seesawing back and forth, but he’d guessed her approximate location.

  Shelby clawed at the nearest tree, regained her feet and stumbled ahead, the heavy resinous smell of the pines clogging her nostrils, her breath coming in ragged little gasps. Cold, wet, confused. Angry, too—furious.

  Why would a deputy sheriff attack her, chase her? Why would anybody do something like this?

  The wind was an ally now: He couldn’t hear the sounds she made over its whistles and whines. And he still couldn’t find her with the light. She kept moving, trying to stay close to the lane. Escape would be easier if she veered deeper into the woods; she could hide somewhere, under bushes, one of the deadfalls … he’d never find her, give up searching eventually and go away—

  No. It’d be even easier to get lost in there. She could wander around for hours, the whole night, looking for a way out of the blackness with the nyctophobia-induced panic slowly suffocating her.

  Her objective had to be the same as before: get away somehow and make it out to the highway. There’d be places to hide until a car came along that she could flag down. Help for her, help for Jay—

  One sliding foot caught in a tangle of undergrowth, threw her down again … into a nest of ferns this time, the fronds brushing cold and wet across her face. Her right hand slid into something yielding that had a clammy, spongy feel against her scraped palm and made her recoil. Dead animal? But then she realized it had crumbled apart at her touch and knew what it was—one of a cluster of fat mushrooms or toadstools growing in the soggy earth under the ferns.

  When she looked up, the light was bright and moving at right angles to where she lay. He was only a few yards away, walking along the flooded edge of the blacktop, probing for her in the timber.

  Shelby crawled forward, deeper among the ferns, and then lay motionless. The rain-fuzzed light was ahead of her now, moving away, until all she could see of it were quick little flicks among the trees …

  After a few seconds it brightened again: He’d turned and was coming back. But he didn’t find her this time, either. The beam slid on past, diminishing as he moved.

  And then suddenly it was gone, switched off.

  Utter blackness brought another surge of fear, like an electric shock on raw nerve endings. She had the same feeling of breathlessness Jay must have experienced earlier; it took an effort of will to keep from hyperventilating.

  I won’t give into this, I won’t!

  She shoved onto her knees, crawled until her hand touched the wet base of a tree. The trunk was thickly twined with some kind of vine … ivy, poison oak. She grasped handfuls of it, pulled herself upright and leaned against the wet leaves. The crying wind, rainwater plopping all around her—that was all she could hear except for the blood-beat in her ears.

  Why had he shut off the flashlight?

  Where was he, what was he doing in the dark?

  Minutes passed … what seemed like minutes. She crouched against the tree, wet to the skin and shivering, her toes numb inside her sodden running shoes. Fighting to keep the phobic terror from overwhelming her. The lane … where was the lane? It had to be close on her right. But if she went out there into the open and he was nearby, she might stumble right into him—

  The torch beam stabbed on again.

  Shelby saw it dimly, nowhere close … no longer aimed into the woods, she thought. She sucked in a moist breath, groped around on the other side of the pine; nearly tripped again as she stumbled past another looming tree trunk. Where was the lane? She couldn’t be more than a few yards away from it …

  Two more steps, and her foot splashed down into the runoff stream.

  She waded through, felt the blacktop under her feet again. Out in the open again. The rain seemed to be slackening; the sting of the wind wasn’t as strong now. But she still couldn’t see anything except for the whitish shaft off to her right, pointed away from where she stood. Unless she’d lost her bearings completely he was back near where the cruiser was parked—

  Another light, a second light cut through the darkness.

  She blinked,
blinked again. Definitely two flashlights now, one shaft bobbing up and down and side to side, the other stationary for a few seconds, then moving toward the other until they converged. Two men, both on the blacktop beyond the cruiser. Spectral shadow shapes, each pinned by the other’s light. Thirty or forty yards away, too far for Shelby to see their faces through the rain.

  She edged out farther onto the lane, moving sideways, feeling her way along. Still a long way to the highway … too far to try walking or even crawling blind along the blacktop. But what else could she do?

  The two figures remained motionless up there, outlined by each other’s torches. Talking, arguing—one of the lights kept moving in an agitated fashion. Their positions were such that she could no longer tell which was the newcomer, which was the one who’d been stalking her.

  She couldn’t keep standing there. Move!

  The estate fence, she thought.

  It paralleled the lane for part of the remaining distance to the highway, she remembered, with only a few yards of separation on that side. Tall grass, an occasional tree, some shrubbery, otherwise nothing between fence and blacktop until the lane made a sharp inland bend. If she could get over there without being seen, she could pull herself along the boards … blind travel by the braille method.

  The quickest way to the fence was a crab scuttle on all fours; if she tried to get there standing up she was liable to lose her footing, blunder into something, make noise that might carry over the diminishing wind. She dropped and began to crawl, weight on her forearms, hands brushing through the storm debris. Her cold fingers tingled, anticipating the end of the blacktop and the touch of the high, wet grass.

  Sudden flare like a camera flash.

  Faint popping noise.

  One of the flashlight beams jerked skyward, pinwheeling, then dropped straight down and extended outward—an elongated yellow streak along the littered surface of the lane.

  Gunshot! One of them shot the other!

  Shock held Shelby rooted for two or three seconds. Urgency released her, propelled her forward, scrabbling at the lane now, her head turned toward the two figures. The one still standing swept his light over the motionless form of the other, over the pavement nearby; then the beam foreshortened as he bent or knelt, probably to make sure the one he’d shot was dead.

  He took his victim’s torch, too: One bolt of light reappeared, followed by a second. Both swung around in Shelby’s direction, then steadied into wavering parallel lines.

  Before either one found her she was off the lane and into the high grass, wiggling through it flat on her belly, her arms making awkward swimming motions in front of her. One sweeping hand encountered an obstruction; she detoured around it, but so close that part of whatever it was plucked at her raincoat, cut painfully into her cheek.

  The flash beams separated, one probing the woods, the other swaying back and forth along the lane. Coming closer.

  The fence, it couldn’t be much farther—

  There! One hand touched it, then her forehead bumped solidly against one of the vertical stakes.

  The nearest light flicked away from the blacktop, hunting through the grass not more than a few feet behind her.

  She found a chink between two boards, used it to lift onto her feet. Hung there for a moment to steady herself. The direction she wanted to go was where the light was; she had no choice but to pull herself away from it. Three steps, four, and all at once she was out of the grass and onto pavement again. But she hadn’t lost the fence; one of her nails tore on the splintery wood—

  No, not on wood … on a rounded projection of metal. Her gloved fingers traced over it, identified it.

  Hinge, gate hinge.

  The entrance gates. If she could get over them …

  The one light was almost directly behind her.

  She groped ahead of it to the joining of the two gate halves, searching for a foothold so she could make the climb. But in the next second she discovered she didn’t need a foothold, she didn’t need to climb—the halves were joined together but not locked.

  She yanked them apart and plunged through.

  T W E N T Y - T H R E E

  IT’S TRUE,” CLAIRE LOMAX said. Her eyes were open now, rounded, the pupils dilated and the whites that sickly clabbered-milk color in the fireglow. “I don’t care who knows it now, I don’t care what the police do to me if I live through tonight. It wasn’t the Coastline Killer who shot Gene, it was Brian. And not down the coast, in our own living room. Brian, Brian, Brian!”

  A sick metallic taste had formed in Macklin’s mouth. He said, “For God’s sake, why?”

  “He blamed it all on me,” she said. Talking to herself now as much as to him. Her gaze had shifted away, was fixed on something only she could see. “But it’s not my fault, it’s his, his. None of it would’ve happened if he hadn’t started treating me like a … a toy he was tired of, a piece of useless baggage. I was faithful to him until then … I swear I was, I never even looked at another man. But you can only stand so much. That’s why I had the affair, to get back at him.”

  “Decker? He’s the one you had the affair with?”

  “I didn’t have any feelings for Gene,” she said, “I never even liked him very much. But he’d been after me for a long time and finally I just … I let it happen. Twice, that’s all. Only twice.”

  “How’d your husband find out?”

  “I don’t know how he found out … something Gene said, the way he kept looking at me with that smarmy smile of his … I don’t know. But Brian knew and he kept on hitting me until I admitted it. He wouldn’t listen when I told him I was sorry, just hit me some more, then sat up most of the night drinking and brooding. Paula must’ve heard us, that’s why she left. Brian accused Gene after she was gone. Gene laughed at him and Brian hates to be laughed it, he went and got that fucking gun of his, but Gene the stupid drunken fool kept right on laughing. You won’t use that, he said, quit playing Dirty Harry, he said, and Brian … Brian …”

  She shuddered, hugged herself before she went on. “Afterward he put the … the body in Gene’s car and made me take it down to that rest area so it would look like the Coastline Killer did it. All that way with Gene dead beside me and Brian just ahead so I couldn’t get away, so he could bring me back here and beat on me some more.”

  It had been Claire driving Decker’s Porsche Monday afternoon, grinding the gears because she was scared or unused to a stick shift. He hadn’t heard the SUV because Lomax, leading, had already passed by.

  “Threatened to kill me too if I didn’t do what he told me, if I didn’t lie to the police when they came. But he’s going to do it anyway—I knew he would, I knew it. He’s crazy, he’ll kill anybody who gets in his way …”

  Shelby!

  What if Lomax went all the way to the highway and she’s still there and he finds her, tries to stop her from bringing help?

  Another chilling thought jolted Macklin.

  What if Lomax was the Coastline Killer?

  T W E N T Y - F O U R

  THE ESTATE DRIVEWAY SLOPED downward, flanked closely by timber on the south side. The darkness here wasn’t quite as impenetrable as it had been on the other side; Shelby could make out the faint luminosity of frothing waves and high-flung spindrift below and to her right, and that the north side of the property was mostly treeless, the land folded into a long, deep crease. Half-seen tree trunks flicked past like black ghosts as she staggered ahead. The nyctophobia kept nibbling at her mind, radiating panic that threatened to send her into a disastrous headlong flight. The fight against it, the effort it took to move at a retarded pace and trust to the feel of pavement under her feet, had pushed her near the edge of exhaustion.

  Had he seen her come through the gates?

  No lights behind her yet. Maybe he hadn’t—

  Yes, he had. One beam appeared, then the other, splitting the night with short and then elongated streaks.

  Without thinking she lengthened her stride.
One foot slid on something yielding; she lost her balance and went down awkwardly, jamming her left knee this time, scraping more skin off her right palm. Pain flared and ran hot up into her crotch as she slid, then rolled half onto her side. She had to dig fingers and elbows into the sloping blacktop to check her forward momentum.

  Neither of the shafts had found her yet, but they were drawing closer. Any second now.

  The skidding fall had torn a long slit in the front of her raincoat; the oilskin flapped like loose skin, got in her way as she tried to stand. She fought free, finally gained her feet, biting down hard against the throb in her knee, and flung herself off the driveway into the timber.

  She hobbled between two trees, up close against another. The bared part of her hand touched rough bark, softer, thicker, stringier than on the pines by the lane … redwood bark. Mixed growth in here, pines and redwoods. She grasped a handful, pulled herself around behind the thick trunk a couple of ticks before one of the beams swept past.

  There was more spacing between the trees here, and less ground cover. Ink-black in among them nonetheless, with only blips from the traveling lights to keep her oriented.

  The thought crossed her mind that she’d trapped herself by coming onto the estate grounds. No other choice, he’d have caught her outside the fence if she hadn’t—but unless she found a place to hide he’d catch her even more easily in here.

  Jay—

  But she couldn’t help him unless she saved herself.

  She groped her way blindly through the trees, dodging or plowing through obstructions, her knee still giving off shoots of pain, the muscles in both legs quivering with fatigue. Not thinking at all now, functioning on adrenaline and a savage determination not to give in to the fear.

  The terrain kept sloping downward … toward the estate buildings? Had to be; the big, weirdly shaped house she and Jay had seen from the beach had been backed by woods. The rays crisscrossed behind her, moved up alongside, then out in front: Her pursuer must still be on the driveway. Shelby ducked as one flicked past, steadied, drew back. He’d seen her …