Bill Pronzini: The Stalker

He came around a hump in the shoreline, and he could see his cabin then, squatting desolately with its odd, tired list, on the point. He paused, raising his body up slightly, searching the area immediately surrounding the shack. There was no sign of life, no movement save for the windswept marsh grasses. He turned his gaze inland, toward the clearing, but the rushes grew to heights of five and six feet—clumps of anise, of cats, almost as high—and he could detect nothing.

The shoreline bellied inland just ahead, and then drew outward sharply to form the point; at the center of the concavity, he would be less than a hundred yards from the clearing. If he had been correct as to the killer’s approximate place of concealment, he would run the greatest risk of being seen when he passed along there. Well, all right, he told himself, just keep low, head down, let the growth hide you. Nice and slow, don’t panic, don’t blow your cool. All right, now, all right.

He started forward again.

The Marin County Civic Center—a sprawling, modernistic, turquoise-domed, gold-spired construction, distinctive in that it was the last creation of architect Frank Lloyd Wright—is located just north of San Rafael, directly off Highway 101 on San Pedro Road. Among other county and city offices, it houses the Marin County Sheriff’s Depart ment in a new annex on one of the upper levels.

Inspectors Commac and Flagg, having received a go-ahead from Chief of Detectives Boccalou, arrived at the Center a few minutes before ten. They passed beneath one of the tunnel archways to the rear parking facility, and then rode an escalator up to the annex. They were met there by a plainclothes investigator named Hank Arnstadt—ashort, balding man with sad hound eyes—who would accompany them in a jurisdictional capacity.

After the amenities, Commac asked him, “What did the property check turn up, Hank?”

“Your subject owns a small fishing cabin in Duckblind Slough,” Arnstadt said. “Tributary of the Petaluma River.”

“How far is it from here?”

“Just north of Novato.”

“Fifteen miles, maybe?”

“About that, right ”

“How many roads in?”

“Just one,” Amstadt said. “Or if you’d rather, one set. One county and two private.”

Commac nodded. “That’s something, at least ”

“Well, you can get there by water.”

“In this weather?” Flagg said.

“Sure.”

“I don’t think we have to worry about that angle,” Commac said.

“Do you want company on this?” Arnstadt asked.

Commac looked at Flagg. “What do you think, Pat?”

“We should be able to handle it.”

“Yeah, I think so.”

Arnstadt said, “I’ll put a couple of units on stand-by, how’s that?”

“Good enough.”

“Are we ready, then?”

“Any time.”

They used the unmarked sedan, Flagg driving. Arnstadt sat in the back. When they had pulled onto 101 northbound, he stared out through the rain-fogged side window and said in a morose way, “Lousy rain.”

“Yeah,” Commac agreed.

“I hope there’s not going to be any trouble.”

“So do we.”

“How did he seem to you?”

“Kilduff, you mean?”

“Uh-huh.”

“An average sort,” Commac said. “Just a guy who made a bigger mistake than most when he was a kid.”

“And got away with it for eleven years,” Flagg put in. “Now that it’s caught up with him, he doesn’t know how to cope with it.”

“Not a hardcase, then.”

“No,” Commac said.

“What about if he’s backed into a corner?”

“Do you mean, would he fight?”

“Yeah.”

Commac thought about it for a time. “No,” he said finally. “No, I don’t think he would.”

There was someone inside the cabin.

Every nerve in Andrea Kilduff’s small body seemed to contract, to become as thin and taut as piano wire, and she lay rigid in the darkness of the storage closet, her ears straining for a recurrence of the surreptitious, but nonetheless discernible, sounds she had heard only moments earlier: the muffled grate of the hinged window being slowly pulled outward; the scrape of hands, of feet, on the shack’s outer wall and on the sill; the creak of the old, damp boarding as a certain weight settled gingerly on the floor inside.

But now she heard only silence.

Her heart seemed to be skipping every other beat within her chest; it seemed as loud to her as a child’s arhythmic thumping of a drum. Whoever had come in was standing in the room, outside the closet door, only a few feet from where she lay, standing and—what? Waiting? Listening, as she was listening? Who was it? The limping man? But if so, why had he come in through the window? Why hadn’t he used the front door? And if it was him, what would he do now? Would he kill her? Would he shoot her, would he—?

Creak ...

Oh God, he was moving now. She sucked in her breath silently, holding it, her eyes wide and staring upward.

Creak . . .

Footfalls, light and slow, coming closer, coming toward the closet door.

Creak ...

He was right outside the door now, right outside, and almost immediately she heard the rattle of the lock in the hasp, and another rattling sound, different—keys?—and there was a soft clicking noise and the rattling of the lock against the hasp again, and then the door was being opened, slowly, slowly, and a shaft of bright gray light appeared, growing wider and wider, and a man’s hand and arm, the arm encased in a muddied topcoat, a topcoat that looked—and in that moment she saw the man’s face, unshaven, rain-streaked, saw his face, and her heart gave a surging leap, and warm stinging liquid came from nowhere and filled her eyes, so that she was looking at his face through a glistening film, like looking at someone under water—but it was his face.

Steve’s face.

It was Steve.

He saw her at that same instant, and his eyes went wide and his lips parted, and there was a mixture of clear relief and a half-dozen other emotions mirrored plainly on his visage. He reached down and lifted her in his arms, strong arms, gentle, and she could smell the rain on him and the pungency of sodden wool and the warm, familiar maleness of him. He stood her on her feet, holding her tightly against him with his arms circling her body, his hands fumbling at the knot in the rough cloth gag, and then it was free and his name was on her lips as she kissed him, kissed his mouth and his eyes and his cheeks and the hollow of his throat, whimpering a little.

He nuzzled her hair, holding her, saying “Shh, baby, shh, it’s all right, baby” very softly. After a time, tenderly, he moved her away from him and his eyes went to the shelves inside the closet, probing them left and right, pausing finally on a large green tackle box with chrome catches and a chrome handle. He stepped inside the closet, opening the box, taking from inside a long, bone-handled, wide-bladed fish knife with a double-edged, one-half-serrated point. He bent to cut the twine binding her ankles, and rose again to free her hands. He stepped back to put the knife into the pocket of his topcoat, and Andrea raised her partially numbed arms to encircle his neck. She pressed close to him again, clinging to him.

“Did he hurt you?” he said against her hair. “Did he touch you, honey?”

“No, no . . .”

“Where is he now?”

“He . . . left an hour or two ago, I don’t know where he went.”

“How long was he here?”

“Just since . . . this morning, after five . . . oh, Steve, who is he, who is that awful man?”

“I don’t know, baby, I don’t know.”

“He wanted to know where you were,” she said. “His eyes . . . his eyes were mad and he had a gun, Steve . . .”