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Bill Pronzini: The Stalker

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Bill Pronzini The Stalker

The Stalker: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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This is a fast paced mystery/thriller. Men who participated in a never solved robbery of an armored truck are being picked off one-by-one 11 years after the crime.

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Fingers again working in metronome cadence on the surface of the briefcase, he spoke to the polite, if somewhat bored, hotel clerk and signed the register. An aging bellhop with a faintly sour smell about him responded to the clerk’s summons, picked up the limping man’s suitcase, and led him over to a self-service elevator at the near end of the lobby. On the fourth floor, the bellhop unlocked the door to Number 412, placed the key on the lacquered dresser inside, laid the suitcase on an aluminum luggage rack near the window, and then returned to the doorway. He stood waiting. The limping man’s eyes, unblinking, met the bellhop’s liquidy blue ones; after a moment, the bellhop coughed nervously, averting his gaze, and retreated into the hallway.

When he had closed and locked the door, the limping man sat on the wide double bed and opened the briefcase with a tiny key from the breast pocket of his suit. From inside, he extracted a thick ten by-thirteen manila envelope and put it on his lap; he did not touch the heavy Ruger .44 Magnum Blackhawk revolver which lay in a chamois cloth at the bottom of the case.

Opening the manila envelope, he removed two sets of three folders each, both sets being fastened with thick, sturdy rubber bands. The folders were of the type used by college students for term paper assignments, and were of different colors. Those in one set were blue, gray, and red; those in the second were yellow, green, and orange. He glanced cursorily at the first set—blue and gray and red—and then returned it to the manila envelope. He slid the rubber band from the second set and placed its three folders side by side on the floral bedspread.

Each contained several sheets of ruled notepaper filled with lines of writing in an almost illegible backhand, and a Mobil Oil Travel and Street Map. The writing consisted of daily journal-like reports, over a two-week span, which the limping man had made on his first trip to California two months previous; they were detailed with names, numbers, dates, places, habits, and observations.

He sat staring at the names inked in large block letters on the front of each folder. Which one next? he asked himself silently. Well, it didn’t really make a great deal of difference, it would all be over within the week anyway—for him, and for each of them.

At length he selected the yellow folder, lay back on the bed, and began to study its contents, even though he had long since committed to memory each fact represented there.


It wasn’t the money at all.

But Steve will believe it is, Andrea Kilduff thought. Oh yes, that’s exactly what he’ll believe.

She drove the little tan Volkswagen carefully, allowing five carlengths between herself and the station wagon ahead. She was just coming into San Rafael now, some twenty miles north of San Francisco, and the Saturday afternoon traffic on U.S. Highway 101 was badly congested. Andrea wished she hadn’t put off leaving the city so long—what had she expected to happen, sitting there in that virtually empty café on Parnassus for more than two hours: her conscience or guardian angel or something to come and sit on the stool beside her like in those silly television commercials and talk her out of it? Well, it wouldn’t be long before she reached Duckblind Slough, and she was thankful that Steve hadn’t decided on Antioch or Stockton, both of which had also been under consideration that summer six years ago; driving in heavy freeway traffic always unnerved her, especially when any appreciable distance was involved.

Tiny, almost doll-like, she possessed that type of finely boned, aesthetic face which is coveted by fashion photographers and portrait painters. She felt, without vanity, that her mouth was just a little too small, her luminous black eyes under feathery natural lashes just a little too large; but each, in fact, contributed subtly yet prominently to a fragile, almost Dresden beauty. Her legs were perfectly proportioned in relation to her size, and her breasts were well defined, if rather small—she had always thought men disliked small breasts, but Steve had told her once, in bed, that the big-boob myth was just that, a myth, propagated by some Madison Avenue ad agency with a brassiere account, anything more than a mouthful was just wasted anyway. On this day, she wore a pair of tailored tweed slacks, a cardigan sweater, and a pale green silk scarf over her short ebon hair.

Watching the car ahead of her cautiously, she thought: He won’t recognize the real reason I’ve gone. If it enters his mind at all hell reject it, because he doesn’t know, hasn’t any idea, what has happened to him these past few years. And the terrible thing is, no matter what I do, he almost surely never will.

A person is able to endure just so much—emotionally as well as physically—wasn’t that a true fact? Alone in the apartment last night—listening to silence, waiting for Steve to call and knowing that he hadn’t gotten the cannery job, of course, that he was brooding childlike in his motel room the way he had done before—Andrea had been struck with the realization that since this was by no means the final failure, was in fact simply another link in the chain, it was also by no means the final night she would be left listening to silence, waiting for him to call or to come home with the news that still another job hadn’t gone through, still another opportunity had been cast adrift on the wind. She saw herself twenty years hence, hair graying, skin already crosshatched with furrows and lines and purplish wrinkles; she saw herself without hope, dying inside by degrees—the way it had already become with Steve—and she was terrified.

Even though she still loved him deeply, the thought of watching him become less and less of a man through the coming days and months and years was inconceivable. And there was nothing she could do to prevent it; failure in the past precluded success in the future, how long could you beat your head against the proverbial stone wall without even so much as chipping the mortar? She had to leave then, quickly and quietly, like a thief in the night, without tearful good-byes, bitter good-byes, without the painful, useless explanation. Andrea knew that if she waited for Steve to come back, and came to that final confrontation, she would not be able to handle things, would not, very possibly, be able to leave at all. She had tried to write him a short note, but the right words refused to come; after five attempts, five “Steve darling” salutations, she had given it up. When she had had time to prepare herself, after a few days alone to put it all together, she would call him and tell him the simple truth—even though he wouldn’t believe it. Then ...

Well, she would have plenty of time in the next few days to consider then.

Shivering a little, even though the windows were tightly rolled up and the Volkswagen’s heater was turned to high, and with a conscious effort of will, she gave her full concentration to driving.

It wasn’t until she had gone another five miles, leaving San Rafael behind her, that Andrea felt the wetness on her cheeks and realized she was crying.

3

It was a voice out of the past, dimly remembered in that first groping effort at placement but then becoming violently, jarringly, familiar; an insinuating, phlegmatic voice saying very distinctly over a telephone wire, “Steve? Steve Kilduff?”

Standing in the hallway, between the kitchen and the bedroom, Kilduff gripped the receiver so tightly that the tendons in his wrist began to ache. The back of his neck had suddenly grown cold.

“Steve?” Drexel asked again. “Is that you?”

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