MIchael Prescott - The Shadow hunter

After a moment the light winked out.

Hickle was now sure he had been wrong about the car. It must have belonged to some maid or some teenage kid-anybody but Abby. She had not come home yet.

But she would. Soon.

He simply had to wait. He would not give up. This time he would not fail.

Abby left the condo, locking the door. As she rode the elevator, she took a quick inventory of the contents of her purse. Gun, spare ammo in a speed loader micro recorder mini-flash, cell phone.

On the ground floor she bypassed the lobby and ducked into the small gym, empty on a Saturday night. The gym's rear door opened on the street behind the Royal, which Hickle couldn't see from his firing site. She headed down a side street, intending to cross Wilshire a few blocks away and circle around to the tower.

As she walked, she fished the phone out of her purse and, after a moment's hesitation, speed-dialed the second number in the unit's memory.

Ringing at the other end. Two rings, three, and the click of a pickup.

"Hello?" Travis said. She had reached him at home.

"Paul, I've located Hickle. He's in Westwood.

He's-well, he's stalking me. Nice turn of events, huh?"

"Abby, slow down-"

"No time to slow down. I've found him, Paul, I've found him… and now I'm going to need your help."

Travis arrived in Westwood fifteen minutes after Abby's call and saw her standing, purse in hand, on a back street behind the office tower. The building loomed over her, sixteen floors of unfinished commercial space, untenanted except for one very temporary occupant.

He couldn't decide whether to be angry or pleased.

True, he had expected Hickle to take care of this job.

Travis's instructions had been explicit, and even an amateur ought to have been able to fire a laser-sighted rifle accurately at a distance of a hundred feet. Something had gone wrong, though in their brief phone conversation Abby hadn't revealed any details. Still, she was alive when she ought to be dead, and this fact disturbed him.

On the other hand, things hadn't worked out so badly, had they? He had been given the opportunity to take care of matters personally. He expected to enjoy it.

Travis parked his Mercedes down the street, then patted himself to be sure neither of the handguns he was carrying had printed against his jacket. In his shoulder holster was a Beretta 9mm, the gun issued to most TPS personnel. If Abby noticed the Beretta, it was no big deal; under the circumstances she would expect him to be armed. The second gun was the one he couldn't let her see.

Tucked inside his waistband near his spine, hidden by the jacket's flap, was the Colt.45 from Howard Barwood's bungalow.

He got out of the car, closing the door quietly, and approached Abby at a brisk walk.

"Where is he?" he asked, keeping his voice soft, as if he had no idea that Hickle was on the tenth floor of the tower, well out of earshot.

Abby glanced at the building.

"Up there."

"You sure?"

"I saw him sighting me with the laser beam on his rifle. He's staking out my condo, planning to make like a sniper."

"How could he-" Travis knew it was a mistake to play dumb.

"Of course. Barwood's in real estate. And he knows your last name. He passed along your home address."

"Looks that way."

"You said you actually saw the laser? Then Hickle must have seen you."

"No, I kept my place dark and peeked through the curtains. I don't think he's fled yet."

"Why didn't you call the police?"

"And tell them what? That I think a strange man is aiming a laser beam at me from the building across the street? They'd send out the men in white coats with the butterfly nets."

"You could've told them it's Raymond Hickle."

"Sure. How many reports about Hickle do you suppose they've received since this story hit the airwaves?

My bet is, he's been spotted everywhere from Oxnard to La Jolla." She looked at him, her face upturned in a streetlight's glow, her expression hard.

"The only way I could convince them to take me seriously is if I explain my involvement in the case. And that's more than I want them to know."

"They'll know it anyway, once Hickle is in custody and starts to talk."

"But maybe they'll be inclined to go easy on me, overlook some of the various felonies I've committed over the past few days-if I'm the one who brings him in."

A minivan burred past, headlights sweeping the pavement. Neither of them spoke until was it gone.

Then Travis said, "You want to capture him? Personally?"

"I was thinking more along the lines of us. As in you and me together.

We go up into the building, and we find a way to make Hickle come along quietly."

"We're not vigilantes, Abby."

"Speak for yourself. Besides, it's a citizen's arrest, that's all. We get the jump on Hickle, disarm him, and drive him to the West LA police station."

"Unless he gets the jump on us first."

"It's a risk, admittedly." She puffed her cheeks and blew out a jet of breath.

"Everything I've done in the past few days is a risk. So how about it?

You with me?"

Travis made a show of indecision, though of course there was nothing to debate. On the drive over, he'd plotted gambits to get Abby inside the tower, where he could deliver the fatal shot with no risk of being heard by anyone but Hickle. Now she was volunteering to go in, even insisting on it. It was perfect.

"Oh, hell, I'm with you," he said finally.

"Of course I am."

Chris was glad she lived at Malibu Reserve. The J -gated complex had not protected her from Hickle, but tonight it served the almost equally important function of keeping out the crush of reporters stationed beyond the fence.

As a reporter herself, she understood the desperation that drove her colleagues to camp out on the shoulder of Pacific Coast Highway, or dial her home number sixty times an hour until Courtney disconnected the phone, or buzz overhead in helicopters taking footage of her deck, or slip onto the beach and focus long lenses on her windows. She had done such things herself during the earlier stages of her career when she had delivered reports from the field.

She risked opening the vertical blind on her bedroom window far enough to see a slice of the moonlit beach and the pale, restless tide. She supposed she couldn't complain too loudly about her present circumstances.

She was, after all, alive. Her heart still pumped, and her face in the mirror had lost some of its haunted, harried strangeness. She had begun to feel almost like herself again. The strain of waiting for something to happen had finally been relieved. Now there were only the broken pieces of the aftermath that had to be picked up and put together.

She wondered where Howard was.

The police had confirmed what Abby had told her-he'd been hiding their joint assets in overseas accounts.

The accounts had been opened in the Netherlands Antilles. It was possible Howard had made his way to the islands already. Of course he need not go there. He could travel anywhere in the world and still be within reach of his money. Martin Greenfeld, Howard's lawyer, had speculated that he might have headed south to Mexico, but Kris couldn't picture her husband in a Third World country. He was too accustomed to the good life.

She doubted he'd ever planned an escape. He had fled out of sheer panic. He would be caught before long. Her husband had his areas of competence, but running from the law was not likely to be among them.

Luckily for her, in conspiring with a stalker to have her killed, he had proven equally inept.

"To have me killed," she whispered. It still didn't seem real. An extramarital affair she could believe all too easily. But to plot her murder… to rendezvous with a man like Hickle, a lunatic, a fanatic Her husband, the overgrown child with his toy trains and radio-controlled model airplanes, was a killer. Or a would-be killer anyway, foiled only by Travis's foresight.