Bill Pronzini: The Stalker

He knew that Andrea had not left him because of the money, that it had been, instead, because of Steve Kilduff—his weaknesses, the long endless string of failures. He had leaned on her, fed on her like a parasite, and she had dutifully carried him, loving him, never complaining, carried the weight of him on her shoulders all these years, the incredible weight of him, and finally the weight had simply become unbearable; what else could she do then but leave, leave quickly and quietly, sparing him the truth but unable to lie. And all along, he had blamed her in his mind, blamed her because of the money—and she was blameless, really; all along it was the man he had become, the man he had never known existed, the man the coward the weakling he had discovered and been appalled by for the first time just two days ago.

He knew that what had happened eleven years ago, the crime he had committed eleven years ago, had been the cause of it all, of what had happened to the man Steve Kilduff. He had been certain, so certain, that the incident had never affected him at all, when in reality it had been dragging him down by inexorable inches, destroying him, sapping his strength and his will and his initiative and his guts; latent guilt, hidden guilt, more deadly and more terrible than the kind which had been tearing Jim Conradin apart inside, because he had never known it was there, had thought he was free of it for those eleven long years. He had been living with guilt and with fear and he had never even so much as suspected it.

He knew all of these things, one after the other, like links in a chain being slowly drawn across his mind’s eye; knew them to be true and factual without dwelling on them, as if his brain, a faulty computer, had somehow been reprogrammed, redirected. He knew them, and they were important, vital, feeding his desperate need to reach Duckblind Slough as quickly as possible, effectively blocking the doubts that lingered peripherally in his mind—doubts of the wisdom of this headlong flight, alone, without the police, into what was surely intended to be a trap; doubts of his own manhood, his ability to function, to make decisions in moments of crisis.

Andrea was all that mattered now.

And time was running out.

He passed through San Rafael, and his luck was holding. There had been no sign of a black and white Highway Patrol car. He controlled the big Pontiac—with its unpredictable power steering, its too-binding power brakes—as if the machine was a sports car built for speed and maneuverability and bad road conditions; deftly, with a skill born of purpose and desperation. Ahead, through the arc-sweeps of the rhythmic wiper blades, he could see one of the suspended freeway signs gleaming dully in the now-heavy rain: VALLEJO NAPA EXIT I MILE.

Black Point, Kilduff thought, Black Point. He couldn’t use the county and private roads into Duckblind Slough—the only set of roads—because it was inevitably a trap and he would walk directly into it. If Andrea was still unharmed, what good could he do her dead, foolishly dead? His mind had not been calculating, weighing, coldly reasoning; he had allowed emotional reaction to rule. But it wasn’t too late, not yet; the idea had grown and taken shape and it was an answer.

Maybe.

If there was enough time.

There had to be enough time ...

He reached the Vallejo-Napa exit, just north of Ignacio. He left 101 east, oblivious to the red speedometer needle hovering near eighty now. When he had gone some eight miles by the odometer, he began to reduce his speed, looking for the Lakeville Highway turnoff. He saw it finally, the green and white freeway sign: PETALUMA and an arrow pointing due north, to his left.

He swung into the left-tum lane, waiting tensely for an opening in the westbound traffic. He saw an opportunity and took it, feeding gas to the Pontiac; the heavy rear end slewed a little on the rain-slippery macadam as he came onto the Lakeville Highway, but he fought the nose straight and bore down again on the accelerator. He was forced by the narrow expanse of the two-lane road to keep his speed under sixty, and it seemed as if time was at once, ambivalently, racing and sluggishly crawling. One mile passed, two, and finally three—and then he saw the black-lettered white sign, mounted on a tall silver-metal pole, looming against the dark morning sky:

Boat Launching Boat Rentals

TALBERT’S-ON-THE-RIVER

Winter Storage Live Bait

He touched the brake pedal, slowing, sweeping off Lakeville onto a wide, smooth asphalt parking area that fronted a weathered clapboard building with a railed and slant-roofed side porch. Beyond the building, there was a wide, steep concrete launching site with a chain winch at the top; and a long narrow T-dock with two Richfield gasoline pumps, extending some fifty feet into the blackly moving waters of the Petaluma River. There were boat slips on either side of the dock, between a slender, shell-and gravel-dotted beach and the parallel T-bar; small power boats and skiffs and rowboats, each bundled in heavy tarpaulin and protected by rubber or styrofoam floats, oscillated in the wind-swept swells. On the left, past a marsh growth of tule grass and cattails, were several storage sheds with corrugated roofs for larger boats.

Kilduff brought the Pontiac to a sharp halt, nose-up to the side of the weathered building. He threw open the door and ran across the wet asphalt, up onto the side porch. He pulled open the front door, the screen door behind it.

The interior was wide but not particularly deep, poorly lit, with a low beamed ceiling. The warped, unpainted walls were covered with shelves containing canned goods, fishing gear and equipment, boat repair and necessity items, dusty jars, bottles, tins of miscellany. A unit heater suspended above a short, bisecting wooden counter gave off waves of shimmering heat. There were two men at the counter, one behind it and one in front, both wearing heavy flannel shirts and faded blue Levis, the one behind the counter chewing on a long greenishblack cigar and sporting a thick dapple-gray mustache; they were arguing about the feasibility of dredging the river for the traffic of small freighters between Petaluma and the Port of San Francisco.

Kilduff let the screen door slam behind him, and both men turned to look at him. He went toward them, taking his wallet from his trouser pocket, fanning it open. His eyes were flashing and his mouth was grim.

He said, “Listen, I want to rent a skiff for a couple of hours, you can name your own price . . .”

The limping man had fashioned a sniper’s nest.

A few yards from the wide clearing and the tan Volkswagen belonging to Orange’s wife, just to the right of the entrance road, he had matted a section of cord grass and milkweed directly behind a thick clump of tall rushes. On either side, the tule grass grew densely to a height of three feet or more. Kneeling in the flattened area, hunkered low, he was certain that he could not be seen from the road or from the clearing.

Until it was too late.

He had been in the nest for perhaps fifteen minutes now Immediately after he had called Orange from a motel-and-restaurant complex near Novato, he had returned here and parked the rented Mustang in a concealing grove of eucalyptus, well beyond the entrance to the second private road leading to Duckblind Slough. He had then walked back to this point, taking with him a tire iron from the Mustang’s trunk; he had used that to snap the padlock on the wooden gate. Then he had swung the gate parallel to the road and walked the half-mile to the clearing, not hurrying particularly, despite the increasing velocity of the downpour, paying no heed to his sodden clothing—and set about constructing the sniper’s nest. He had briefly debated waiting in the shack, but even though he knew almost exactly how long it would take Orange to reach Duckblind Slough from San Francisco, it would have been foolish to take even the remotest chance now, when it was almost over.