The Shadow Hunter

by Michael Prescott

  To use his phone she had to get inside his apartment. Picking the lock on his door was no good; the electric pick gun was too noisy to use in the evening when other tenants were around, and doing the job by hand would take too long. The only other means of entry was his bedroom window. She had seen him open both windows. He hadn’t closed them when he left. He’d been in a hurry.

  Abby pulled out of the gas station and headed back to the Gainford Arms, driving fast.

  The copy store rented computer use by the hour. Hickle paid in advance and seated himself at the machine farthest from the counter, where he was least likely to be observed.

  There was little activity in the shop. The tile floor and white countertops glowed under fluorescent lights. Folk music played on overhead speakers, drowned out when the big photocopy machines started to whir and drone.

  Hickle focused on the desktop computer in front of him, which brought up a browser frame when he connected to the Internet. He found ZoomMail’s homepage and typed JackBQuick and his password. There was one message in his Inbox. The sender was JackBNimble. The title was one word in capitals: URGENT.

  Hickle felt a prickle of dread at the back of his neck. He opened the message. The first two lines appeared in the message window.

  Your enemies are closer than you know. TPS is playing hardball. They’ve hired a spy.

  The hard, rhythmic chugging in Hickle’s ears was the beat of his heart. “A spy,” he whispered.

  One of the clerks at the counter glanced at him. Hickle realized he’d spoken aloud. Nervously he cleared his throat.

  There was more to the message, but he would have to scroll down to see it. For a moment he did nothing, merely stared at the screen, unwilling to read further. A kind of superstitious fear held him paralyzed. If he learned nothing more, then maybe the news would not be real. Maybe he could pretend he’d never come here. Maybe he could go back to his apartment, carry on with his daily routine, have dinner with Abby again—

  And then of course he knew.

  His new neighbor, so friendly, always bumping into him, first in the hall, then in the laundry room.

  The bottom seemed to drop out of his stomach, and he felt a wave of some indescribable feeling that was almost physical pain.

  Numbly he read the rest of the message.

  She moved in next door to you yesterday. Her job is to get close to men like yourself, learn their secrets, and report what she finds. She works alone, without backup. She is a threat to you and indirectly to me also. I hope you understand the gravity of what I am telling you.

  The words ran together. Hickle couldn’t concentrate. He was thinking that the story about her unfaithful fiancé had been a lie to win his empathy. He was thinking that she had never regarded him as a nice guy or somebody to have dinner with.

  He shut his eyes, shoulders slumping. The computer hummed. Behind the counter one of the copy machines shut off, and the background music became audible again, Joan Baez singing about the night they drove old Dixie down.

  His date tonight…the questions she’d asked…the things he’d told her. What had he said, exactly? Malibu—he’d mentioned how he liked it there. And he’d said he was going to be famous. How much could she determine from those clues? Enough to guess his intentions? Was she reporting to TPS now, telling Kris everything she’d learned?

  He looked at the clock. Quarter past nine. Abby couldn’t be meeting with Kris. Kris was still at KPTI preparing for the ten o’clock newscast. She would leave Burbank at eleven thirty, arrive home soon after midnight.

  He could get to Malibu well before then. The shotgun was already in his car. All he had to do was crawl through the drainage pipe, conceal himself near the beach house, and when Kris’s car pulled into the driveway—

  A pump of the shotgun, a spatter of brains and skull fragments.

  The copy machine drummed again, churning out paper, and Joan Baez was lost in its noise.

  He could do it. Do it tonight. Kill Kris—but first, detour back to the Gainford Arms and take care of Abby.

  Jack had said she worked without backup. There would be no one to save her when he caught her by surprise and snapped her neck.

  It would be easy. Almost too easy…

  “Too easy,” he whispered slowly.

  No one heard him. The clatter of the copy machine swallowed every other sound.

  He read the message twice more. He could be certain of this much—Jack knew that a woman had moved into apartment 418. Perhaps he even knew that Hickle had gone out with her tonight. He might have watched the building and seen them leave together.

  For weeks he had been goading Hickle to strike. Had he decided to try a more subtle approach, convince Hickle that his new neighbor was part of a conspiracy against him, launch him into a homicidal rage?

  Or was the information genuine? Was she really a spy?

  He didn’t know. His head hurt. He clutched his scalp and blinked at the light, which was suddenly too bright.

  There was no one he could trust. Jack claimed to be a friend, but his identity and motives were unknown. Abby presented herself as a young woman fleeing a bad breakup, but how much did he know about her? She might be a TPS spy probing his secrets. Or maybe it was Jack who was the real TPS agent, playing mind games to push him over the edge and get him arrested. Or were they both in it together?

  He read the message again. The words made no sense anymore. They spilled together and fell apart. Abby a spy? Ridiculous.

  On impulse he clicked the Reply link, then typed a furious declaration:

  I WON’T LET YOU PLAY WITH MY HEAD!

  But he didn’t send it. He stared at the crisp, explosive words, then deleted the text with a sweep of his mouse.

  He couldn’t assume Jack was lying. That was as foolish as blindly assuming he told the truth. He typed a new reply:

  Are you friend or foe?

  This was no good either. What was Jack supposed to say? What more could he say to establish his bona fides? He had already pointed Hickle to the drainage pipe and the agents in the cottage and the chauffeur who carried a gun.

  He erased the second reply and stared at the screen. What was going on exactly? Was it simply that he didn’t want to believe in Abby’s betrayal? Maybe so.

  He had pursued Jill Dahlbeck, only to be rebuffed and humiliated and finally confronted by police officers warning him to back off. He had tried to reach Kris Barwood by every means available to him, but she would not meet with him or even acknowledge the reality of his feelings for her.

  But with Abby, things had been different. She was not like Jill or Kris. She was kind to him. She treated him like a human being. She made him feel like a man.

  But if it was all an act? If she was the enemy?

  Pounding violence filled his skull. He wanted to scream and smash things. He lowered his head. Had to think. Jack could be telling the truth or lying. Abby could be what she was or a fraud. There was no way for him to gauge Jack’s honesty directly. As for Abby…

  He knew her. She lived right next door. She was not merely a made-up name on a computer screen, a collection of pixels that mocked him. She was real and close, and he could learn the truth about her.

  He typed a third reply.

  I’ll check out your story and see for myself.

  This was the right thing to say. He clicked Send.

  He had no plan, but he would come up with one. He was smart. He would work something out. And if she had indeed deceived him…

  He’d kill her. Yes.

  First her, then Kris.

  If she had deceived him. If.

  Hickle clung to that word as he deleted Jack’s e-mail message and signed off.

  If.

  Such a little word, but Abby’s life hung on it.

  Abby climbed onto the fire escape and stepped across the narrow landing to Hickle’s bedroom window. The lights in his apartment were on, but because the blinds were drawn she couldn’t see in. A glance at his empty parki
ng space reassured her that he had not returned.

  Although his window was open, the screen was still in place. From outside, it proved difficult to remove. She wished she had brought her locksmith kit, which contained a thin, flexible celluloid strip that could slip into the crack of a door and open a latch. It might have allowed her the leverage to work the screen loose.

  She couldn’t take the time to go back inside her apartment and get the kit. Rummaging in her purse, she found a Swiss army knife. Among its spring-loaded tools was a pair of wire cutters. She snipped through part of the screen, inserted her fingers in the gap, and lifted the screen out of the window frame, then climbed into the apartment.

  The code for the call return service was the star key followed by six and nine. Abby punched the three buttons and listened as a synthesized voice gave her the most recent caller’s phone number. It was a local number with an unfamiliar exchange. She dictated it into her microrecorder. Later she could look it up. She subscribed to an online reverse directory service that offered a comprehensive listing of residential and commercial phone numbers.

  There was one more item of business in Hickle’s apartment. She’d brought an infinity transmitter from her tool kit; it broadcast on the same frequency as the two microphones she had already installed. Quickly she wired the transmitter into the base of the telephone. Hickle could see it if he took the trouble to look, but this was a chance she’d decided to take. If the mystery caller phoned again, she wanted his voice on tape. A voiceprint could then be made for purposes of identification.

  Done with the phone, she wiped off her prints. Mission accomplished. Time to blow this joint.

  She returned to Hickle’s bedroom, intending to make her escape through the window, then paused, noticing his laundry basket on the floor. It was still full to the brim. He had never put away his clothes.

  Odd. He’d had plenty of time.

  She knelt and rummaged through the clothes, not sure what she was looking for. Nothing was out of the ordinary, except that a few items seemed curiously damp, though the rest were dry.

  Almost as if a wet article of clothing had been stuffed into the basket…

  She touched the carpet and felt a wet spot, then another and another. The trail of drops led to the bathroom.

  In Hickle’s shower, hanging from the showerhead, dripping dry, was a pair of white high-cut Maidenform briefs.

  Hers, of course.

  When she’d sensed a presence in the laundry room, she had not been imagining things. Hickle had been watching her. He must have taken cover in the stairwell, and when she’d explored the boiler room, he had risked slipping past her and stealing this particular item right out of the washing machine.

  His prize. His little piece of her, to touch and smell and kiss…

  Abby shivered. She had a sudden urge to grab the poor, wrinkled, soggy thing that hung on the showerhead and abscond with it, but she couldn’t. If it was missing, Hickle would know she had been in here. She would have to leave it. And she would try not to think about what he would use it for.

  She left the bathroom and braced herself against the bedroom window, preparing to climb through, and then she looked past the railing, down at the parking lot.

  Hickle’s car was there.

  It was parked under the carport, headlights off.

  Hickle himself was nowhere in sight. He must already be inside the building, maybe riding the elevator to the fourth floor.

  Get out, a voice in Abby’s mind yelled.

  Hickle would be enraged to find her here. And he was armed; he’d taken the duffel bag. Her Smith & Wesson was a poor match for a shotgun. Unless she killed him instantly, he would have time to pump out a couple of shells, and at close range even a single shotgun blast would literally tear her apart.

  “Oh, that’s good, Abby,” she hissed, scrambling through the window. “Keep thinking those happy thoughts.”

  She was on the fire escape. Her instinct was to scurry to the safety of her bedroom, but she couldn’t leave until the window screen had been replaced.

  Installing the screen from outside was harder than she’d expected. She got hold of it through the gap she’d cut in the mesh, then jammed the top of the screen into the frame, but the bottom stubbornly refused to snap into position. The panel was large and awkward, difficult to maneuver, especially with the Venetian blind in the way, jangling and clattering.

  She heard a squeal of hinges. Hickle’s door, opening in the other room. He was home.

  With a last effort she wedged the screen in place.

  Footsteps inside the apartment. He was coming into the bedroom, probably to put away the duffel bag.

  She ducked low. No time to crawl away. She hugged the wall.

  The blind swung and rattled in the bedroom window. Hickle would surely notice. He did. She heard the complaint of the floorboards as he approached to investigate. She unclasped her purse and curled her finger over the Smith’s trigger.

  The blind opened, brightening the fire escape. She pressed close to the brick wall under the windowsill. Across the iron railing loomed Hickle’s shadow, large and misshapen. His head tilted at a funny angle. He was peering out, surveying the night.

  If he glanced down, he would see her. She waited, not breathing. She thought again of what a shotgun shell would do to her at this distance. Like a grenade going off in her chest.

  He might have spotted her already. Even now he might be removing the shotgun from his duffel, preparing to fire, while she huddled like a child playing hide-and-seek. It took all her willpower to remain motionless.

  His shadow shifted. She saw a movement of his arm as if lifting the shotgun—

  Then there was a metallic clatter and a fall of darkness, and she realized he had merely reached up to pull the cord that closed the blind.

  The tramp of his footsteps retreated. He had not seen her. He must have concluded that a gust of wind had set the blind swaying.

  Close one, Abby thought. Kind of thing that really gets the blood circulating.

  She slipped inside her apartment, then spent the next few minutes reacquainting herself with the experience of being alive and intact and ambulatory. Her throat was dry, and the back of her neck was stiff with tension.

  When she checked the current programming on the closed-circuit TV monitor, she saw Hickle pacing his living room. He was agitated. He was angry.

  She dialed up the volume, trying to catch the words he muttered under his breath. “Can’t trust anybody,” he was saying. “Can’t trust him…or her. Can’t trust either one.”

  Abby didn’t like the sound of that.

  21

  Travis stepped out of the shower, throwing on his robe, and heard the chime of his doorbell.

  Seven thirty in the morning seemed early for visitors. He rarely had company anyway. He lived on a twisting dead-end street in the Hollywood Hills, in a ranch-style house cantilevered over a canyon—a good house for entertaining, but he preferred to pass his time alone.

  He wedged moccasins onto his feet and padded down the hall, pausing in an alcove before a video monitor that displayed a view of the front steps. Abby stood there in a rumpled blouse and jeans. His first thought was that she looked different. There was something about her expression, something hard to define. Then he realized it was the first time he had ever seen her looking scared.

  He shut off his alarm system and opened the door. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  She entered without another word. She hardly seemed to see him at all. “Everything okay?” Travis asked, knowing it wasn’t.

  “Not exactly.” Abby sidestepped into the living room and tossed her purse on the sofa but didn’t sit. “Hickle may have an accomplice.”

  “Accomplice?”

  “Or an informant. I don’t know for sure. Actually I don’t know anything for sure.” She paced, her Nikes squeaking on the hardwood floor. Sunbeams slanting through the deck’s glass doors lit her trim, nervous fig
ure.

  She had been to the house many times over the years, though rarely without calling first. Travis was always struck by how well she fit in here. His decor was sleek and functional in a starkly modernistic style, and Abby suited it—Abby with her slender legs and narrow waist and supple, elongated neck.

  “I think you should sit down,” Travis said quietly. “You seem a little stressed.”

  She ignored him. “I should be stressed. I was up half the night. Couldn’t go to sleep until Hickle did. I watched him on the monitor till finally he nodded off after three a.m.”

  “Okay, slow down and take it from the beginning.”

  She let out a rush of breath and made an effort to speak calmly. “Hickle got a phone call last night around eight thirty. He left his apartment, taking his shotgun, and drove off. I lost him. I don’t know where he went or who he might have made contact with. When he returned, he was obviously upset. The surveillance mikes picked up a lot of murmuring about not being able to trust anyone. It’s possible somebody tipped him off.”

  “About you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You think he knows you’re a plant?”

  “He may.”

  Travis approached her slowly. “If he knows about you…”

  “It could send him over the edge. I’m aware of that. See why I didn’t sleep until he did? Even then I maxed out the volume on my audio gear so if he got up in the night, I’d hear him. I was afraid he’d do something extreme.” She took a breath. “There’s something else.”

  “Yes?”

  “The night before last, I used the hot tub at the apartment complex. Somebody snuck up on me and pushed me under.”

  “Tried to drown you?”

  She nodded. “I scared him off with a broken beer bottle. Never saw him. Don’t think it was Hickle—he seemed otherwise occupied, from what I could tell. But maybe it was his accomplice. If there is an accomplice. I just don’t know…”