MIchael Prescott: The Shadow hunter

He drew a few quick, shallow breaths, over breathing like a diver preparing to submerge, then readied himself to go in.

In the adjoining hall-running footsteps.

She'd fled, using the first doorway.

He sprinted around the corner, the glow of his flashlight swinging down the hall and spotlighting a blurred, disappearing figure. He almost fired but didn't trust his aim, and then she spun and shot at him once, driving him back behind the wall. When he looked out again, she was gone.

There was only one exit she could have taken. The door to the stairwell. She was trying to get out.

She'd made a mistake. He knew it. He charged down the hall, the flashlight bobbing with the rifle in his arms.

Heading downstairs, she would be an easy target.

He would have the high ground. He could fire on her from the landing and finish her before she could take cover.

He reached the stairwell. Professional caution made him hesitate on the threshold of the landing. He swept the rifle downward, and the flashlight's beam picked out a small, familiar shape on the stairs descending to the lower level.

Abby's purse. She'd dropped it as she ran.

No, wait. Too obvious.

She hadn't dropped the purse. She'd thrown it there to mislead him into thinking she'd gone down, when actually-' She'd gone up.

Ambush.

Hugging the doorway, he aimed the rifle straight overhead and fired twice, gambling that she was in the doorway directly above him, leaning out to take her shot.

A cry, a clatter of metal on metal-Abby's.38, clanging on the steel staircase. He'd nailed her.

He burst onto the landing and took the steps two at a time to the tenth floor, expecting to see Abby's fallen body, but she wasn't there.

His flash swept the area and found no blood spatter.

He hadn't scored a hit after all. But she'd lost her weapon. She was disarmed, defenseless. She was finished.

Travis proceeded down the dark hallway at a run.

The game was nearly over. The tenth floor would be the killing ground.

Abby had liked to believe she was lucky, but that was before Travis saw through her ambush and literally shot the gun out of her hands. She didn't think she'd been hit, but the gun was lost, and now she was out of options and almost out of time.

She ran along a tenth-floor corridor, away from the stairwell into a wider hall that fed into an open floor plan occupying the front half of the building. Bands of plate glass stretched from floor to ceiling along the far wall. Through the windows came the glow of streetlights, starlight, the luminous haze of the city. The light allowed her to orient herself and to dimly see the space around her. When the tower was finished, where she stood would be a large work area partitioned into cubicles. Now it was an open expanse of concrete floor without walls or furnishings.

Nowhere to hide. She ran toward the windows, seeking light. Dying might be a little easier in the light.

In the corridor behind her, there were footsteps, charging hard.

She reached the windows. Past the glass lay Wilshire Boulevard and her condo building. By one of these windows Hickle had waited for the long-distance kill that had never come. Waited with the rifle in his hands, the rifle Travis was carrying now.

Ahead was a worktable, indistinct in the gloom.

Hickle must have dragged it near the window to have a place to sit.

She'd found his firing site.

"Abbyl" Travis, bursting into the room, the flashlight attached to his rifle like a bayonet, the beam stabbing the darkness as he pivoted from side to side.

He hadn't spotted her yet. She ducked low and kept running, thinking she could use the worktable for cover, buy herself a few more seconds.

The beam swept toward her, rippling across the broad sheets of glass.

She dropped to her knees and crawled under the worktable to hide.

The flashlight probing, licking the room's far corners, then drifting back to alight on the table and illuminate her small, huddled shape.

"You're dead, you bitch," Travis breathed, his voice eerie in the dark, and he was coming her way.

She scrambled out from beneath the table and collided with something shapeless and heavy on the floor.

Hickle's duffel bag. Not empty. Something was inside.

He had used the rifle in the stairwell. But the shotgun was his weapon of choice at close range. Why hadn't he used it? Because he'd left it here-left it in the bag.

Her shaking hands unzipped the flap, touched the sleekness of the shotgun's barrel.

Travis sprinting. Light expanding at her back.

She jerked the long gun free of the bag, braced the butt against her chest and spun in a crouch, pumping the action once. Her finger groped for the trigger, and the flashlight found her.

She couldn't see Travis, only the blinding glare. It was easier that way.

She fired at the light.

The recoil upset her precarious balance, blowing her backward onto her tailbone. The room spun in curlicues of yellow glare. She thought she was suffering some extreme onset of vertigo, then realized that what she saw was only the smeared beam of the flashlight as it spun with the rifle across the concrete floor.

The gun and the flashlight attached to it came to rest against a wall, by chance casting the beam at Travis, sprawled limp on the floor.

Abby knew he was dead even without taking a close look. She had fired at him from six feet away. The shotgun shell had cut him almost in half. She couldn't see his features and didn't want to. She imagined that the last look on his face had been one of surprise.

He had never thought he could lose to anyone and certainly not to her.

He was her mentor, after all, and she was only the gifted protegee.

She got to her feet, leaving the shotgun where it had fallen after she fired. She didn't need it any longer.

There were no more bad guys to kill.

Her first step was shaky, and she almost sank to her knees before steadying herself. On her way out of the room she stooped to pry the flashlight free of the rifle.

Its beam guided her to the stairwell. On the stairs below the ninth floor she found her purse with her cell phone inside.

She took out the phone and sat on the steps, taking a moment to compose herself before calling Wyatt at the Hollywood station.

"Hickle's dead," she said when he came on the line.

"And somebody else too. But I'm okay. I just wanted you to know."

"Abby, what the hell are you talking about? Where are you?"

"It doesn't matter where I am. I'll be calling nine-one-one after I'm through talking to you. Everything will be taken care of. But you have to stay out of it, all right? I mean completely out. Don't visit me, don't call me, at least for a while. I don't want your friend Detective Cahill putting things together-and he will, if anybody connects you with me."

"You still haven't told me what happened."

"Do you promise to keep your distance?"

"Yes, damn it, I promise. Now what's going on?"

She let her head fall back against the cold concrete wall.

"It's nothing. Vie, really." She sighed.

"Just another day at the office."

She ended the call before he could ask her anything more. ramedics delivered Abby to UCLA Medical Cener, where she was checked for injuries and released.

There were two detectives waiting for her outside the examination room.

They asked her to accompany them to the West LA station. She was relieved to learn that neither of them was named Cahill.

The first interview was brief. She was too tired to give more than a bare recitation of the facts, carefully edited. But she gave the detectives a present-the tape in her microcassette recorder. It was a fresh tape, which she had loaded immediately before Travis's arrival in Westwood; it contained his confession and nothing else.