Michael Prescott: Blind Pursuit

Annie Reilly, sleepless in the dark.

Her bed creaked with each restless change of position. She lay on her left side, her right, on her stomach, on her back, under the covers, on top of the covers, the pillows pressed to her cheek, flattened under her belly, discarded on the floor.

Hell.

She couldn’t sleep.

Beyond her windows, higher in the foothills, a choir of coyotes lifted their voices in piping, ululant wails. A ghostly serenade.

Normally, Annie liked hearing those distant cries, the leitmotif of a desert night. She appreciated the reminder of her distance from the city, her closeness to the weathered peaks of the Santa Catalina range, rising like stone spires and broken battlements against the sky.

But tonight the songs disturbed her. She pictured a coyote band, lean and scruffy and ravenous, heads lifted as they sang of strange hungers and gnawing needs.

Blood songs. That was what they were. Songs that were the prelude to a kill.

A slow current of dread rippled through her like a fever chill.

She’d never envied Erin’s apartment over on the east side of town. Never wanted to live amid the strip malls and the auto lots. Preferred her townhouse in the lap of the Catalinas, remote from traffic and distraction.

But in town, at least, the desert’s wildness was held at bay.

Erin must be sleeping soundly now. No nocturnal predators sang to her.

Erin. Predators.

Her foreboding sharpened. It was less a thought than a taste, the bitter flavor of fear at the back of her mouth.

Her hand fumbled for the nightstand. She didn’t know what she was reaching for until her fingers closed over the plastic shell of the telephone.

Call Erin? In the middle of the night?

Crazy.

She released the phone, climbed unsteadily out of bed. In the kitchen she poured a glass of milk.

There was a phone in the kitchen. Again she felt the irrational impulse to call.

What are you going to say? That you had a premonition of danger, so you decided to wake her up at two-thirty?

Too bizarre.

The milk was cold and foamy. It relaxed her. A little.

Funny how she couldn’t shake her unease, though.

Of course, insomnia was nothing new to her. For most of her life she’d suffered occasional nights when she couldn’t sleep at all. More frequent were the nights of interrupted sleep, when nightmares would startle her awake; she often spent an hour or more chasing away their ugly afterimages before she dared shut her eyes again.

The bad dreams were always the same, always a replay of the worst night of her life, the pivotal trauma of her childhood.

Tonight, however, was different. Tonight her anxieties were not focused on the past.

It was Erin she was afraid for, though she had no idea why.

Well, they would laugh about it at lunch. Maybe Erin would offer some Freudian interpretation of her anxiety attack. Something to do with sex. It all had to do with sex.

Annie smiled, but the smile faded as another coyote call split the night.

She became aware of eyes watching her. Green eyes like her own, but unlike hers these were luminous in the moonlight. They studied her with an owl’s unblinking attentiveness.

“Can’t sleep either, huh, Stink?”

The colorpoint shorthair wound sinuously around her ankles, his fur ermine-soft.

“Those mean old coyotes keeping you up? They’re not after you.”

Stink didn’t answer.

“Maybe you want some milk. That it? Does Annie have milk and you don’t? Unfair, you say? You have a keen sense of justice, Stink.”

Stink did not really stink. His malodorous appellation commemorated a kittenish habit, fortunately now outgrown, of throwing up at the least excuse.

Annie fixed a saucer of milk for the cat. Stink sniffed it, sniffed again, almost declined the offering, reconsidered (perhaps out of politeness), and lapped the dish dry.

Finished, he nuzzled her leg in gratitude. She bent to caress his neck, his back. When he purred, he sounded like a very small person snoring.

Stroking him, Annie thought about the animals outside in the night, not safely sheltered like Stink, but huddling in dark burrows or flitting anxiously from one brushy hiding place to the next.

Bad to be alone and unprotected in the dark, with the coyotes keening.

Again she thought of Erin, though there was no reason for it.

Erin… and nocturnal hunters, stalking prey.

Sprawled on the lobby floor, she twitched and flopped.

He peeled off a glove, thumbed her carotid artery.

Heartbeat weak but regular.

She would live. For now.

The Ultron stun gun went into his coat pocket. A top-of-the-line model, complete with safety trigger and double shock plates. The battery would produce 150,000 volts when the trigger was squeezed.

On past occasions he had struck from behind. Curled a gloved hand over the victim’s mouth, rammed the gun into the nerve center of the base of the spine, and discharged the current. For some technical reason, explained by the Ultron’s manual but incomprehensible to him, the voltage could not pass into his own body even when he was in physical contact with his adversary.

This time he’d had no chance to grab her until after she’d spun around. Then he had delivered a five-second pulse directly to her solar plexus. The resulting disruption of her nervous system should keep her immobilized for at least ten minutes.

It was his first face-to-face encounter. He had found it interesting to watch her eyes roll up white in the sockets.

Despite everything, he had to admit that in the past he had enjoyed this phase of his activities. Using the stun gun, then exploring a woman’s body with his hand while she lay unconscious and unresisting… It had given him a shameful, furtive thrill of pleasure, had made him feel-for once-fully alive.

What had come later…

No pleasure then, only a compulsion he couldn’t override.

He pushed aside these thoughts. Must get moving. Someone might enter the lobby at any moment and find him here.

Kneeling by her, he scanned the tiled floor. A key ring lay near her jerking hand. Car keys were included in the set. Good.

The keys disappeared into another pocket. Then he lifted her in his arms. She was reasonably tall, perhaps five-eight, but slender, no more than 125 pounds. Slung over his shoulder, she was easy to carry, and the reflexive spasms trembling through her muscles created the pleasing illusion of a futile, panicky struggle against his superior strength.

He caught the scent of her hair as he lugged her to the side door. Faint fragrance. Not perfume. Bath salts.

The door opened on the parking lot that served the complex. Rows of automobiles, pickup trucks, and motorcycles were arrayed under metal carports. Fluorescent bars cast a pale, glareless glow on steel and fiberglass.

In the doorway he paused, surveying the area.

The moon, a waning crescent, hung low over the horizon, hooked in a mountain’s clawlike peak. It washed the asphalt in milky light. Anyone watching from a window or balcony would see him once he exited.

Fortunately, the blue Taurus was parked in one of the more desirable assigned spaces, only a short distance from the door.

He took a breath and carried her there, staying clear of floodlights. Behind him, the apartment building loomed dark against an icy spray of stars. On Pantano Road, safely screened from the parking lot by colonnades of oleanders in white bloom, cars shot by like comets, and a motorcycle whined past, mosquito-quick.

If a car should turn into the lot… if he should be pinned in the headlights…

He walked faster. His breath became hoarse and ragged, loud over the clicking of unseen insects.