MIchael Prescott - The Shadow hunter

Now he wondered if she had kept quiet after all.

Maybe she had said something to Kris. Maybe that was why Kris now suspected his affair.

Courtney shut the door.

"How was your ride?" she asked.

"Terrific. I went all the way to Santa Barbara. That car hypnotizes me." He said it as jauntily as he could, but she merely murmured,

"Sounds like fun."

She didn't believe him. She knew he hadn't been out cruising the coast road. She could guess what he'd been up to. And so could Kris.

It was obvious now.

Perhaps, to a more perceptive man, it would have been obvious all along.

"I think I'll unwind out on the deck," Howard said.

"It's a beautiful night."

"Sure is." She seemed relieved to be rid of him.

He walked to the rear of the house, thinking he'd been insane to think he could fool either his housekeeper or his wife. Women had a sixth sense about these things. They could tell when a man was fooling around, the way dogs could sense an earthquake before it hit. It was uncanny, the way women's minds worked. They should all be detectives and fortunetellers and shrinks.

Still, Kris hadn't guessed all his secrets, had she?

Hickle had sped from freeway to freeway, taking the 101 to the 110 to the 10, in a desperate rush for the coastline. Now he was traveling through West LA on the Santa Monica Freeway, the gas pedal on the floor, the needle of the Rabbit's speedometer pinned at eighty-five.

Time was his enemy. He had to be in position outside the beach house by 11:50 at the latest.

He checked the dashboard clock. The readout glowed 11:21. He was still four miles from Pacific Coast Highway. It was going to be tight.

He pulled around a slower car, passing illegally in the right-hand lane, not giving a damn, and then in his rearview mirror he saw the blue-red sparkle of a light bar CHP unit. After him.

Disaster.

He could not afford a speeding ticket. Simply being pulled over would take five or ten minutes, costing him any chance of reaching Malibu in time. Worse, the cops might want to know what was inside the duffel bag. Possession of the guns was legal, but he was sure the authorities would find an excuse to hold him for questioning-and while they did, a report would come in about an explosion at his address.

No.

He had failed at everything he'd ever tried. But tonight he would not accept defeat. Tonight nothing would stop him. Tonight, just this once, he would win.

Hickle accelerated, veering from lane to lane, whipping around slower traffic. The CHP car accelerated in pursuit, and an amplified voice came over a loudspeaker, giving orders that he didn't even hear.

"Fuck you," he breathed. He had taken orders all his life. He had submitted meekly to the demands of carwash proprietors and supermarket managers and Mr.

Zachareas of Zack's Donut Shack. He had been quiet and punctual and reliable, and he had never talked back. Well,"he was talking back now, talking back to the whole goddamned world.

The cops were trying to keep up as he skidded from lane to lane, but they had to worry about the safety of other drivers, and he had no worries at all. The dome light shrank in his rearview mirror, and directly ahead he saw an off-ramp.

Swerving into the exit lane, cutting off traffic with a blare of horns, Hickle veered onto the surface streets.

The cops would want to follow, but when he'd last seen them, they'd been in the fast lane, and he doubted they could cut over to the exit in time.

Even if they did, they wouldn't find him. He was too smart to travel in a straight line. He detoured down side streets, swung through residential neighborhoods, drove along alleys, until he was sure the patrol car had been left behind.

Her first awareness was of pain.

Blinking, Abby raised her head, then shut her eyes against new agony.

It throbbed from the back of her skull to the bridge of her nose. It pulsed behind her eyes.

"Man," she muttered, "this is one bad hangover."

The words came out raspy and blurred. Her tongue was an immense cotton wad blocking her throat.

She was sprawled on the floor alongside her bedroom bureau, and there was a bad smell in the air, a smell like two dozen kinds of garbage blended together on a hot day, a smell like a swamp. She'd been knocked out-couldn't remember how. Her last memory was of Hickle.

Looming over her, the shotgun in his hand.

Had he shot her? She didn't think so. She wasn't aware of any holes in her body, but somehow he'd rendered her unconscious and left her here.

And that sour, brackish smell… Gas. The apartment was filling with gas.

Natural gas had no smell of its own, but the gas company added an odor ant as a warning agent in the event of a gas leak. Gas leaks could be dangerous, could be fatal. Any spark or open flame could ignite an explosion.

Open flame. The furnace pilot light.

She saw it then-exactly what Hickle had planned for her.

What she had to do was obvious. Open the windows, shut off the gas.

Simple, except she couldn't move. Every muscle in her body had gone slack. Her pulse was rapid and faint. Swooning ripples of dizziness ballooned through her head.

She tried to prop herself up, but her arms would not support her, and she collapsed, gasping. There was no air to breathe, only the swamp stench. Natural gas was an enemy of respiration. It inhibited the blood's ability to carry oxygen. The more she inhaled, the more labored and irregular her breathing would become. Her muscles, starved of oxygen, would lose all remaining strength. Her awareness would flicker and fade out.

Well, no. She doubted she would last that long. The explosion would kill her first.

"That's me," she groaned.

"Always looking on the bright side."

The longer she waited, the weaker she would get.

She had to take action now, had to raise the bedroom window, draw some air into this death trap. But she couldn't stand. All right, crawl.

The window was only six feet away. A baby could crawl that far.

She started to roll onto her belly. Something stopped her-a tug of resistance. Her left ankle had been fastened to a leg of the bureau by the chain and padlock from Hickle's bedroom closet. He'd anchored her in place so that even if she regained consciousness, she couldn't escape.

Nice touch, but the joke was on him. She knew the combination. Bending at the waist, she reached the padlock and lined up the numbers, then tugged on the shackle.

The padlock didn't open.

But it had to. Unless… Hickle had changed the combination.

Abby shut her eyes.

"I take it back, Raymond. Looks like the joke's on me."

The greatest danger, Hickle knew, was that the cops had read his license plate during the chase. If they had, his plate number and a description of his Volkswagen would already have been radioed to other CHP units and to LAPD and Santa Monica PD patrol cars. He could outrun one car but not a dozen.

He reached Ocean Avenue and turned north into heavy traffic, typical on a Friday night. Bikers and low-riders surrounded him. Rough crowd, the sort that drew a lot of cops on patrol. He scanned the sea of car roofs for a light bar Couldn't see one, but that didn't mean police units weren't out there-maybe behind him-maybe closing in.

Panic started his heart racing. He thought he might throw up.

The traffic thinned a little as he entered a better neighborhood. On his left was the park on the palisades, busy with tourists and teenagers. Hotels and restaurants and condominium towers rose on his right. It occurred to him that soon, even if things went exactly as planned, he would be either dead or in custody.

He would never again walk in a park or eat at a restaurant. He would not see the moon, which hovered over the ocean beyond the palisades, unless he saw it through the barred window of a cell.