MIchael Prescott - The Shadow hunter

"Now give me the flashlight/ She let him take it with his left hand. He took a half step back, the gun shifting to the spot between her shoulder blades.

"All right," Travis said, "let's go."

"Where?"

"Up."

"Is there some advantage to killing me on a higher floor?"

"As a matter of fact, there is. Now get going."

Abby climbed the stairs, guided by the flashlight and the gun in her back.

"I'm betting that gun isn't silenced," she said.

"True."

"When it goes off, the report will echo through the building. Hickle will hear it. He'll panic and flee, maybe take a different stairwell."

"And I may not be able to intercept him. Very good.

You get an A plus."

"I'm not your student anymore, Paul."

They reached the third-floor landing and continued higher. Abby noticed that the fire doors on the landings had not yet been installed.

Dark halls lay beyond the doorways. They looked like the narrow passageways of a pharaoh's tomb, the kind of place where ghosts walked.

But there were no ghosts here. Not yet.

"It's Howard Barwood's gun," she said quietly, "isn't it? You stole it from his bungalow this morning, after you left the hospital."

"That's right."

"Was that before or after you planted the cell phone in the beach house?"

"Oh, I took care of that chore several weeks ago, during one of my visits to Kris to update her on the case. The phone, of course, is registered in the name of Western Regional Resources, though poor Howard never knew anything about it."

"If you planted the phone back then, how did you use it to call Hickle on Thursday night?"

"I didn't. I used a different phone, which I'd programmed with the identical code. It's not hard to do.

Some people make a nice living by stealing cellphone codes."

"What happened to this other phone?"

"It's at the bottom of the canyon behind my house. I threw it off the deck earlier this evening. I had no further use for it."

"Just as you have no further use for me… or Hickle."

"You catch on so fast. It's what I've always loved about you."

They had passed the fourth-story landing.

"I guess pretty soon you'll have everything you want," Abby said.

"I'll be dead. Hickle will be dead.

Howard will be in jail or running for his life. And if your luck really holds, you may get to marry Kris."

Travis was behind her, and she couldn't see his face, but from his tone of voice she knew he had registered another small shock.

"You even figured out that part of it?"

"It didn't take any major intuitive leaps. Kris told me you've made yourself available. She's under the impression you haven't been seeing anybody. I didn't disillusion her, by the way."

"That's good of you, Abby. I appreciate your discretion."

On the fifth-floor landing now. Halfway to Hickle's firing site.

"I'm sure you do," she said quietly.

"It would ruin that part of your plan if Kris found out she's not your one and only. She wouldn't be so receptive to your proposal of marriage. Not that marriage is an essential ingredient in the scheme.

More like icing on the cake, correct?"

"Correct."

"You wouldn't mind having her money, her lifestyle, her connections, and with Howard out of the picture, you'd have a pretty good shot at all that. But the main thing has always been rescuing the reputation of TPS. And with the Barwood case, you saw a way to do it. When did you first get the idea? When you did the background check on Howard?"

"That's right. From what I learned, I could see it was obvious that he was fooling around and preparing for a divorce. That's when it occurred to me that if Hickle was believed to have an accomplice, Howard would be the logical suspect."

"You made your move on Kris…"

"Just to lay the groundwork for future possibilities.

The icing on the cake, as you called it." They were above the sixth-floor landing.

"Then I started contacting Hickle via e-mail, feeding him information, prepping him for the attack."

"Did you know about the incident with Jill Dahlbeck?"

"No. If I had, I might have hesitated to use Hickle. I knew he was potentially dangerous, but I didn't realize he was that unstable, that impulsive. I wouldn't have wanted him splashing acid on Kris."

"Or shooting her in the head, for that matter. You couldn't afford to let him succeed."

"Of course not. I wanted Hickle to make his attempt-and fail. Kris had to survive unharmed, or the whole plan would be ruined. Despite everything, her safety really was my highest priority. That's why I switched to the armored staff car and rode shotgun-to be sure Kris was fully protected."

"Then in the aftermath, TPS gets a media makeover.

Now you and your staff are the heroes of the hour, a fact that Channel Eight will exploit to the max on their top-rated newscast-thus canceling out the Devin Corbal story, reviving your prospects, and making you the golden boy all over again."

"Something like that. But we needed a scapegoat. If Hickle had been captured alive, he would have revealed the existence of an informant with inside information.

Even if he had been killed in the attack, the police might have found evidence of the e-mail account I'd set up for him, and they would have known he was working with somebody. I couldn't afford any suspicion falling on TPS itself, and certainly not on me personally."

"So Howard was framed as the accomplice."

"Why not? He was the perfect candidate-cheating on Kris, out every night with no good alibi, hiding her assets, preparing for a divorce.

When they catch him, he'll never be able to talk his way out of it.

Especially when the police find Howard's own gun in Raymond Hickle's cold, dead hand."

"And a bullet from that gun-in me."

"Exactly. And one of your bullets in poor Raymond.

Bang bang. You went after Hickle on your own. He shot you, and you shot him. Two corpses. End of story."

They'd reached the seventh floor. Each flight consisted of eighteen stairs; she'd counted. Fifty-four stairs to go.

"Not quite the end," she said.

"You haven't explained why you brought me into the case."

"Can't you guess? There were two reasons. The first was of a practical nature. I had to do something to set Hickle off. I'd tried goading him, pushing his buttons, but he kept hesitating. I needed a way to make him crazy-even more crazy than usual. I knew he was paranoid. If he found out the new woman in his life was a spy…"

"He'd snap."

"So I sent you in… and set you up."

"Nice. But you said there were two reasons. Mind if I take a stab at the second one?"

"Be my guest."

"Devin Corbal."

"Bingo."

"You told me a hundred times that it wasn't my fault."

"I lied. That night four months ago, you fucked up.

You fucked up, Abby."

She heard the surge of raw hostility in his voice, and for a moment she was reminded of Hickle inveighing against the people he hated, the people with "the look." They were not so different, Paul Travis and Raymond Hickle. Both knew all about hatred and little else.

"You had a job to do," Travis was saying, "and you failed. In one moment of carelessness you jeopardized everything I've worked for, brought me to the edge of bankruptcy. I started in a Newark housing project, and I made it this far-and you nearly took it all away. And you expected me to forgive you! To say it's okay, don't worry your pretty head about it? You're supposed to know all about people, Abby.

Didn't you know me?"

"Not as well as I'd thought," she said quietly.

"There's no forgiveness in matters of this kind," Travis breathed.

"That's one lesson I learned on the street a long time ago. Nobody fucks with me. Nobody takes what I have. And if they hick up, they pay. They pay."