The Hidden

by Bill Pronzini

  But he hadn’t. The beam circled like a predatory bird seeking prey, slid off to hunt elsewhere.

  Down, down … and at last she was on level ground. The spaces between the trees seemed even wider now, nothing underfoot but wet, spongy earth. No place to hide in here. The trunks were tall and straight and impossible to climb in the dark. No chance of escape unless she could get to the buildings—

  Ahead there, to the left … what was that?

  Another light?

  Yes! Below, not behind. Pale, unmoving, fuzzed by the rain. Beacon in the night.

  Shelby sidestepped another tree, then two more, and finally she was out of the grove, coming into a broad clearing. Vague bulky shapes loomed ahead and to her left. The massive one farthest away was the estate house, the nearest, small and squat, an outbuilding of some kind; that was where the light was coming from.

  Somebody was here, help was here …

  She ran toward the stationary light, away from the moving ones.

  Slipped once, almost fell again. For several strides she was back on pavement—the driveway—and then off it again onto more rain-soaked ground. From there she could see that the beacon light was leaking out through a window and a half-open door in the front wall of a small, square cabin.

  As she neared it another stationary shape materialized beyond the pale yellow glow, touched by its outer edges.

  Parked car. Escape, help for Jay.

  Shelby hobbled to the doorway, caught hold of the jamb. Started inside with a cry forming in her throat.

  Dying in her throat.

  What came out instead was a half-strangled moan. She stopped dead still, sucking air, staring in at the floor.

  A man lay sprawled next to the table that held an oil lantern, face down, motionless—a man wearing the uniform of a sheriff’s deputy. Arms drawn together behind his back, wrists bound with duct tape … ankles, too. Blood from a wound on the side of his head gleamed blackly in the saffron glow.

  Reflexively she took a step toward him. The holster on his Sam Browne belt was unbuttoned and empty. His head was half turned toward her, so that she saw his face clearly in profile—a face she recognized. Ferguson, the mustached deputy they’d encountered in Seacrest that first night, who’d showed up at the cottage yesterday with the highway patrol investigator.

  But if Ferguson was here, hurt, tied up, then who had dragged her out of the cruiser, who was chasing her? And who was the second man who’d been shot?

  Panic tore at her again. Run, get out of here before it’s too late!

  She turned away from the door. And froze once more, with the fear congealing inside her.

  It was already too late.

  T W E N T Y - F I V E

  MACKLIN DONNED THE HEAVIEST sweater he’d brought, then sat on the edge of the bed to pull on wool socks and lace up his shoes.

  “What’re you doing?” Claire Lomax had followed him, stood in the bedroom doorway with a hand at her throat.

  “What it looks like—getting dressed.”

  “Why? For God’s sake, you’re sick, you can’t leave here—”

  “But that’s what I’m going to do.”

  “With no gun and Brian out there? You must be out of your mind!”

  Maybe he was. But the bad feeling he’d had since she told him Lomax had murdered Gene Decker kept getting worse. Prodding him, filling him with a sense of dire necessity. Shelby might be perfectly safe, alone at the highway or in somebody’s car on the way for help by now, but there was just as much chance that she wasn’t; that Lomax had gone out that way hunting his wife. If he found Shelby instead, there was no telling what he might do. Coastline Killer or not, he was unhinged and unpredictable.

  “Maybe so. But I can’t keep on sitting here doing nothing,” Macklin said. “He’s out there and so is Shelby.”

  “What about me?” Claire’s voice had risen to that hysterical edge again. “You can’t leave me here alone.”

  “Come with me.”

  “No! I told you, he’ll kill me if he finds me, he’ll kill both of us if he finds us together—”

  “Then stay here with the door locked.”

  “He’d break it down.”

  “Hide somewhere else then. One of the sheds behind the carport … he won’t think to look in there.”

  “I couldn’t stand it, trapped in a place like that. Please, please, I don’t want to be alone.”

  He finished tying his shoes, stood up in slow, measured movements. Shelby had left the bottle of nitroglycerin pills on the bureau; he slipped it into his pants pocket. Claire clutched at his arm as he moved past her into the hall and he could smell the sweaty, fetid odor of her terror. He was sorry for her, but he couldn’t do anything for her if she refused to cooperate.

  She trailed him to the utility closet behind the front door, stood watching him paw through the shelves by candle flame. No other flashlight in there. The closet on the porch? Yes … on a lower shelf among a bunch of canned goods. But it stayed dark when he thumbed the switch; the batteries must be dead.

  There was a package of D batteries in the utility closet. He grabbed his raincoat and hat from where Shelby had hung them, threw the coat around his shoulders as he went back to the living room. Claire was in his way; he pushed her aside, not roughly, but the contact made her flinch and moan.

  He found the batteries, dropped the dead ones out of the flashlight and shoved in the replacements. Held a breath when he thumbed the switch this time, released it hissing between his teeth when the bar of light stabbed out. He shut it off, then quickly buttoned himself inside the coat, pulled on his gloves, yanked the hat down tight on his head.

  Claire plucked at his arm, pleading with him again not to leave her. He said, “I’m going. You’ll be better off coming with me.”

  “No, I can’t go out there, I tell you, I can’t …”

  “Then go to the woodshed. Take one of the knives with you.”

  Macklin picked up the fireplace poker. Take the other knife along, too? He decided against it; he’d have to carry it in his coat pocket and it was liable to get hung up in the cloth. He might even accidentally stab himself with it.

  He went to the door. A feral sound came out of Claire; she ran after him, dug her fingers into his arm to try to hold him back. He pulled away from her, flipped the dead bolt with the hand holding the flashlight, eased the door open a crack.

  “Last chance, Claire.”

  “No!” She flung more words at him, called him a son of a bitch and something else he didn’t listen to, and then he was outside.

  Immediately the door banged shut behind him and he thought he heard the bolt slide home. He had a fleeting moment of concern for her. But she was beyond his help now. Shelby was his main worry, his only worry.

  He stood studying the darkness, not thinking about Claire Lomax anymore. No light of any kind visible from here. The storm had lost some of its wildness; the wind had died down to intermittent thrummings, the rain to a light, misty drizzle. Even though it was well after nightfall, it didn’t seem quite as cold as it had earlier. The boom and crash of the surf was all there was to hear.

  His throat and mouth were dry, otherwise he was all right. A voice in his head reminded him that it didn’t make any difference how he felt or thought he felt, he could still have another attack any minute. But he could drop dead waiting in the cottage, too. Anybody could suddenly drop dead any time … coronary, stroke, massive cerebral hemorrhage. You could get run over by a car or break your neck in a fall. You could get shot by a lunatic. If he didn’t survive tonight, at least he’d die doing something important for the first time in a long time—die a man instead of a helpless invalid.

  He made his way to the open gate. Visibility was poor—he could barely see where he was going—but he wouldn’t put the flash on until he made sure Lomax wasn’t roaming somewhere in the vicinity. He groped out past the carport, careful of his footing. Down the short drive to the half-flooded lane.

&
nbsp; Still no lights anywhere.

  He turned right on the lane, holding the poker down along his right leg, the flashlight in his left hand. The torch was necessary now or he’d run the risk of stumbling over something, hurting himself in a fall. He aimed the lens down at his feet, flicked it on and held it so that the pale yellow blob was no more than a yard ahead of him, just far enough to pick out obstacles to be avoided.

  The Prius was parked close to the fallen tree. Macklin detoured around it, playing the flash over the pine’s trunk and branches, looking for a way to climb over that wouldn’t require too much effort. One place toward the upper end looked manageable, but when he tried it, a branch heavy with decayed cones snagged his coat and forced him to back off. He found a different spot, tried that. Another dead branch broke under his foot as he stepped up and over; he saved himself from sliding onto the splintered end by digging the tip of the poker into wet wood.

  When he was down on the other side, he leaned back against the bole to rest. His pulse rate had climbed with the effort and there was a tightness like a contracting band inside his chest. Not now, he thought, not now! Slow, shallow breaths. The tightness didn’t get any worse and there was no pain. A minute, two minutes … and his heart beat more slowly, the clamping sensation eased.

  He made himself slog ahead at the same pace as before. The light picked out a torn-off pine bough six or seven feet long lying half on the lane, half in the stream of rainwater that gushed alongside it. He sidestepped the bough, into a gradual left-hand curve, and when he was halfway through that the outer reach of the shaft touched something else in the roadway.

  It was just a shapeless lump until he closed the gap and the light brightened on it, gave it definition. Macklin pulled up short. Not an object—a man. Lying crumpled there, one arm outflung as if it were pointing down the lane. He took two more steps and then he could see the bare head, the rain glistening on the pink scalp visible through the close-cropped hair.

  Lomax.

  Fell, hit his head, knocked himself out?

  Cautiously he moved up close, around the huddled body. The light was on Lomax’s side-turned face then—on the open eye staring up blankly into the drizzle, on the gaping hole in his throat.

  Christ! Dead. Shot, from the look of the wound. Dead for a while, long enough for the rain to have washed away most of the blood.

  Macklin shook his head to clear it. Shelby? he thought then. Ran into Lomax here, he pulled that gun of his and there was a struggle and it went off? That must be it. And after it happened she must’ve continued onto the highway—which meant she was all right, she hadn’t been hurt.

  He almost turned back. Lomax was no longer a threat to Shelby, or to him or Claire; there was no reason to continue risking cardiac arrest out here in the rain and cold.

  But then he thought: If that’s what happened, where’s the gun? It wasn’t anywhere near the body, and when he moved Lomax enough to shine the light under him, he didn’t find it there either. Shelby wouldn’t have taken it with her … she wouldn’t have any reason to with Lomax dead.

  He lifted the light off the body, fanned it around and then moved farther along the blacktop. The appearance of the car parked beyond the jog surprised him almost as much as finding Lomax’s corpse. He took a few steps toward it—and the torch beam glinted off the bar flasher on the vehicle’s roof.

  What was a sheriff’s cruiser doing here?

  Macklin went ahead to the cruiser, ran the light over it and through the side window. Empty. He made a three-sixty sweep with the torch: no sign of anybody in the area. Maybe Lomax hadn’t died in a struggle with Shelby, maybe he’d been shot by a deputy … but then where the hell was the deputy?

  He tried the driver’s door, found it unlocked, jerked it open and poked his head and the light inside. And when he saw what lay on the passenger side of the front seat, his breath caught, his heartbeat jumped and stuttered.

  Shelby’s purse.

  T W E N T Y - S I X

  HE COULDN’T MAKE UP his mind what to do with the woman. Or with the deputy.

  So much weird shit happening all of a sudden, coming at him from different directions the way it had in that desert hellhole halfway around the world. Everything quiet, smooth-running since before the holidays, nobody bothering him so he could go on about his business unmolested, and then … bam!

  Started to get weird when he found that guy dead in the Porsche down the coast—shot in the head and left on that overlook by somebody else—and had to beat it out of there quick before one of the police patrols came along. But that was nothing compared to all the heavy-duty crap that’d gone down tonight. First the deputy showing up, then the woman, then that drunken bastard up on the lane—one, two, three, out of the storm, out of nowhere, all in less than a couple of hours. It was like being ambushed by mongrel-dog snipers, the ones that came at you from doorways and basements and collapsed buildings when you least expected it.

  He’d handled it all so far, the way he’d handled the snipers in Iraq. You did what you had to do to protect yourself, stay alive. You blew them away.

  Except that he didn’t want to do that to the woman and the deputy. The guy up on the lane hadn’t given him any choice, ranting like a buck-wild recruit and then pulling a sidearm, for Chrissake, forcing him to use the Glock, get in the first kill shot. React or die. Justifiable self-defense. But these two weren’t armed and they weren’t his enemies. Blow them away and he’d be guilty of murder, and he wasn’t a murderer. Soldier on a mission. Preservationist. But a cold-blooded psychopath? No freaking way.

  Oh, he could try to rationalize it. Threats to his safety … popping them was just another kind of self-defense. Like that afternoon in Baghdad when he and Charley Stevenson had been on patrol in what was supposed to be a secure neighborhood; were about to recon an abandoned store, watchful as always but not watchful enough because all of a sudden Charley’s head exploded. Standing right there next to him, blood and brains and bone splinters flying everywhere. He didn’t remember going into the store, just being in there and flushing the two civilians, middle-aged guy and a kid in his teens, no weapon in evidence but no question one of them had fired the burst that killed Charley, so when the pair started to run he’d burned them both. React or die, the officers drummed that into you from the get-go and you never forgot it. Only that time, in his dead-check afterward, he’d found an empty Tabuk assault rifle that made his kills righteous. Mongrel-dog snipers, two and out.

  The pair of insurgent soldiers he’d shot in the firefight weeks later had been righteous kills, too. For a reason, for a purpose. Same here with the kid polluters in the sleeping bag and the drunk molesting the three sea lions and the clear-cutting caretaker and the abalone poacher. And with the loony up on the lane a few minutes ago. Justified.

  The woman and the deputy wouldn’t be. Not righteous no matter how much of a spin he tried to put on it.

  Still, what else could he do?

  He couldn’t just leave them here trussed up and hit the road. Somebody’d find them, or the woman would find a way to work herself loose. They’d both seen his face, they could identify him. And the deputy had seen the car, could identify that, too. He wouldn’t get far even if he picked up a different set of wheels.

  Besides, there was still work to be done. Not along this part of the coast anymore, he’d have to move on no matter what and that was a damn shame because he loved it here, really loved it, it was the first place that’d ever felt like a real home. But there was more pristine coastline up north—the Lost Coast, the whole length of Oregon—and just as many spoilers to be dealt with up there.

  The woman was saying something to him again. He looked over at her sitting on the edge of the lumpy brown sofa in her torn raincoat, hands and face scratched and blood-marked, legs pressed together and fingers gripping her knees. She looked wet and miserable and she had to be scared, but she didn’t show her fear. He felt sorry for her. It wasn’t her fault she’d got herself snagge
d up in this craziness tonight, any more than it was his.

  “I’m not lying to you,” she said for the second or third time. She’d started talking to him in a low, steady voice as soon as he sat her down and had kept it up ever since, saying pretty much the same things over and over—that she was from the cottage next door and she’d been out alone in the storm because her husband had had some kind of attack and she couldn’t drive out for help because a tree had blown down and was blocking the road. “If he doesn’t get medical attention soon, he could die.”

  Medical attention.

  Flashback. Sudden and bright white the way they always came to him, like when a rocket exploded and lit up the night sky: Men down, soldiers and civilians dying all around him from the roadside bomb. Blood everywhere, bodies and body parts torn up like butchered meat. Medic! Medic!

  The scene flared out. He rubbed his eyes, and he was seeing the woman and the room again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “there’s nothing I can do for your husband.”

  “So what, then? What’re you going to do to me?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Kill me?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  She was quiet again, but not for long. “How long have you been here?”

  “On the coast? Six months.”

  “Not living in this cabin the whole time?”

  “No. The last two and a half weeks. Campgrounds, mostly, before that. But I needed a place for when the weather turned bad.”

  “Whose cabin is it?”

  “Caretaker. Old man who was clear-cutting trees so the owners could have whitewater views. I hate that kind of crap.”

  “Where’s the caretaker now?”

  “He’s dead.” And buried in the woods behind the cabin. Always clean up your messes.

  “Did you kill him?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “You killed the man on the lane tonight.”

  “That wasn’t my fault. He was acting crazy. Waving a gun, yelling something about his wife. Didn’t leave me any choice.”