Bill Pronzini - The Stalker

Only three of the two dozen tiny round tables—which cover with their chairs every available inch of floor space—are occupied. At one, a sailor in dress blues and a hooker in a green lamé dress sit holding hands and whispering; at a second, two more hookers in shimmering black, waiting, silent.

At the third table sits the limping man.

He holds a glass of draft beer tightly between his two hands, and stares with hot brightness at the red-haired girl on the stage. He watches her hips undulate in time to the pagan music, simulating the act of love, her eyes squeezed shut and her lips half-parted in an expression of abandonment, and while he watches he thinks of Sunday night and Yellow.

So simple it had been, so very simple, simpler even than Red and Blue and Gray. Yellow, Yellow, true to form, the habitual animal: a walk along Blind Beach, like so many walks before. So simple. He had known Yellow’s destination from the moment he turned onto Highway I, and he had slowed down then and driven leisurely, for there was no need to remain near, and when he had finally taken the rented car onto the turn-out high above the ocean, Yellow’s car had been parked there where it always was. So simple. So simple to hide in the fog on the ledge, to blend into the roiling eddies of mist and wait for Yellow to climb back up the face of the cliff after his walk and pause there, unsuspecting, so simple to reach out and very quickly thrust him into nothingness ...

A movement, a thin rustling sibilance, diverts the limping man from his thoughts. He takes his eyes reluctantly from the girl on the stage. One of the hookers in shimmering black has come to his table, and she stands now above him, smiling, tall and willowy and young, with black hair piled high on her head, with breasts that spill like white iridescent cream over the tight bodice of her dress. “Do you mind if I sit down, honey?” she asks in a voice as sibilant as the rustle of her garment.

The limping man looks up at her for a long moment. A whore, a cheap whore; but he feels hunger in his loins. “No,” he answers slowly, “I don’t mind.”

The girl sits down and crosses her legs, and the short skirt of the dress pulls up on her thighs: more iridescent white cream. His eyes linger there, and he can smell her perfume dark and musky. “I’m Alice,” she says.

“Hello, Alice.”

“Would you like to buy me a drink?”

“All right.”

“Well, groovy.”

“What would you like?”

“Bourbon and water.”

The limping man signals and the yellow-haired waitress moves toward them, her heavy thighs rippling beneath the dancing fringe of her skirt. She takes his order and returns to the bar, and Alice says, “What’s your name, honey?”

“Smith,” the limping man answers, and Alice laughs. A cheap whore, he thinks, but she’s almost pretty when she laughs.

“Where you from, old Smith?” Alice asks.

“Everywhere,” the limping man says. “And nowhere.”

Alice laughs again. “My, how poetic.” She puts her hand on his thigh very lightly and leans close to him and presses her white spilling breasts against his arm. “You wouldn’t be a poet, would you?”

Her hand is like hot fire on his leg. “No, I wouldn’t.”

“What would you be then?”

The limping man does not answer, and the yellow-haired waitress comes back with a tray containing a draft beer and a glass of tea. The limping man gives her three dollars. She nods, retreating. Alice sips the tea, and then puts the glass down and presses her breasts tighter against his arm. He feels them spongy-soft there and looks down into the shadowed valley between them and begins to breathe unevenly. The music builds to a crescendo from within the walls of the room, and the red-haired girl moves faster and faster on the stage, until her nude hips are a blur of motion. Alice strokes the limping man’s thigh, drawing her hand higher. “Do you like me?” she asks.

“Yes,” he answers, “I like you,” and he is thinking of Yellow again, Yellow screaming through the gray, damp fog.

“I’ve got a room down the street, honey,” Alice says softly. “We could go there if you like.”

Yellow screams and screams, but rhythmically now, in time with the beat of the music. The limping man breathes rapidly, irregularly, and her hand sets fire to his trouser leg.

“I’m very good, you know,” she says.

“Are you?”

“I’m very, very good.”

“How much?”

“Fifty dollars.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“I’m a lot of woman, honey.”

“I’ll give you twenty-five.”

“Compromise time,” she says. “Thirty-five.”

“Twenty-five or nothing.”

“Thirty-five or nothing.”

The music continues, but the scream ends abruptly and is replaced by a faint, faraway sound, the sound of a pebble tumbling down a mountainside. But then that sound, too, dies, and there is silence, and in his mind the limping man sees Yellow lying dead and broken and bloodied at the bottom of the cliff. Alice’s hand brands his thigh and she breathes into his ear, “I know a lot of things, old Smith honey, I know a lot of ways to make a man happy. Thirty-five dollars is a bargain price.”

“All right!” the limping man says urgently, standing. “All right, let’s go!”

Alice smiles. “You won’t be sorry.”

“Let’s go!” he says again, and pulls her to her feet. They make their way quickly toward the curtained entranceway.

Behind the bar, the light-skinned Negro watches them with his implacable stare, and smiles very faintly, and on the stage the nude girl dancer sinks to her knees with her head hanging down and her long red hair shielding her body like a gossamer cloak as the music terminates and the pink spotlight winks out.

Chicago lay cold and bright and aloof under a darkly overcast sky when Larry Drexel’s flight from San Francisco arrived at O’Hare Airport a few minutes past ten Tuesday night.

Immediately after claiming his single suitcase, Drexel entered a cab in front of the main terminal and instructed the driver to take him to one of the larger downtown hotels, where he had made telephone reservations that afternoon. He settled back against the rear seat as the cab began to make its way out of the airport, removed a cheroot from his suit pocket, and lit it carefully.

He thought: Who would have figured Kilduff to turn out the way he did? Crap-yellow, and running scared. He came undone at the seams this morning at Sebastopol; I shouldn’t have said anything to him at all about killing Helgerman, but how could you predict a reaction like that?

It turned his stomach remembering how he had had to patronize Kilduff: “It’s nothing as relatively unimportant as exposure, or even a prison sentence, facing us now, Steve. It’s life and death, kill or be killed—the law of the jungle. No judgments, no great moral decisions, Steve; kill or be killed, pure and simple.” But he’d finally gotten him calmed down on the drive back to San Francisco, telling him that they would talk it all out again when he got back from Chicago; but there was no figuring how long it would be before Kilduff got to thinking on the thing and made some damned-fool move that would blow the whole scene—like going to the police, spilling his guts . . .

He couldn’t let that happen. He had too many things going for him—El Peyote and Cantina del Flores, which he now owned one hundred percent as of Monday morning at 10:43—too many avenues opening up, each of them leading to golden rainbows, to allow one son of a bitch who didn’t have the balls for justifiable homicide to queer it all. He had thought it all out very carefully on the plane, and the way he saw it, he had just one way to go. The idea of tracing Helgerman back to San Francisco really wasn’t feasible, and he’d just be kidding himself if he actually thought he could determine his whereabouts that way; but if he could learn where Helgerman lived, where he called home now, then there was a good chance he could reverse the entire situation. Helgerman would have to come home eventually, wouldn’t he? And when he did, then he would become the hunted and Larry Drexel would become the hunter.