The Shadow Hunter (25 page)

The tape kept rewinding. It made a low hiss as it turned.

He wondered if he wanted to play it. Maybe he would be better off not knowing. If he could accept Abby as what she claimed to be, if he could put away all doubt and suspicion, wouldn’t he be happier?

He weighed the tape recorder in his hand, as if weighing the choice it represented. Then his finger pressed the button marked Play.

From the small speaker came Abby’s voice, faint as a whisper. Hickle stretched out on the bed, the tape recorder inches from his ear, and listened.

“Where is this going to lead?”

V V Howard Barwood paused in the act of pulling on his pants. He looked at Amanda, naked in bed.

“I told you,” he said, “I intend for us to be together.”

“When?”

“When Kris is out of the picture.”

“I’m a cynical big-city gal, Howie. And I’m starting to wonder if that’s ever going to happen.”

“It’ll happen.” He tugged his pants up around his waist and fastened the buckle. He hated it when she called him Howie.

The bedside lamp was the only light in the room. It was fitted with a three-way reading bulb, but the two higher wattages had burned out, and only the lowest setting was still functional. The bulb cast a wan, sallow glow over half the bedroom, leaving the far corners in shadow.

“You know,” Amanda went on as if he hadn’t spoken, “I’m starting to sense a certain proclivity toward procrastination on your part. You’ve had months to tell her.”

“There are other considerations.”

“Such as?”

“The timing of certain financial transactions.” It seemed safe to tell her that much.

“Sounds very mysterious,” Amanda purred, “and disturbingly nonspecific.”

“Let’s just say we’re not going to be poor.”

“Was that ever an issue?”

“Poor is a relative term. Poor by my standards might be rich by somebody else’s. We’ll have all we need.”

“And what will Kris have?”

Howard turned away.

“You don’t have to worry about Kris.”

He found his shirt and shrugged it on. He felt better when he was not bare-chested. As a younger man he had been proud of his muscular torso, but now his pecs were sagging and his abdomen had loosened as his waistline expanded. He was out of shape. He didn’t like to look in the mirror anymore. Or maybe there were other reasons why he preferred not to look at himself.

Outside, the siren of an emergency vehicle—police car, ambulance, fire engine—caterwauled down some nearby street. Sirens were a constant background noise in this neighborhood. Howard thought of the crash of the surf on the Malibu sand, the only noise he ever heard from the deck of the beach house, and briefly he wondered what he was doing in this place.

Well, it was a little late to be asking that question, wasn’t it?

Already he had set in motion a chain of events that would free him from his marital obligations and his life in Malibu. At times he might regret the course he’d taken, but he could not undo what he had done.

There was no turning back.

“What?” Amanda asked.

He realized he had spoken the last thought aloud.

“Nothing,” he said, buttoning his shirt.

“Okay, be secretive. It’s irritating, but manly in a reserved, nineteenth-century sort of way.”

She rolled onto her side, showing her back to him.

Tattooed above the left cheek of her buttocks was a red rose. Howard had been fascinated the first time he’d seen it. He had been with many women, but never one with a tattoo. It had seemed exotic and arousing.

Now he regarded it with indifference and the faintest touch of condescension. He wondered if he regarded Amanda herself the same way.

No, of course not. Where had that thought come from? He was serious about Amanda. She was exactly what he needed. She was young. She had energy, ambition, confidence. She talked fast and proposed a thousand ideas an hour. And she was—what was the word?—adventurous. Sexually adventurous, not to put too fine a point on it. She did things with enthusiasm, things Kris would have been reluctant or unwilling to do at all.

He remembered his first night with Amanda—how she had teased his pants down around his knees and taken him into her mouth, drawing him out to full extension with her tongue, and in that moment he had been twenty years old again, not a man in middle age with hair on his earlobes and a potbelly that left him winded when he climbed a flight of stairs.

Not that their whole relationship was about sex. Far from it. They had conversations. Take tonight, for instance.

He had talked with her for most of the evening over an anchovy pizza and a bottle of Merlot. Only afterward had they retreated into the bedroom for a different kind of intimacy. What he was doing with Amanda was no cheap fling. It was an affair of the heart. It had to be.

Yawning elaborately, Amanda slipped out of bed and brushed past him into the bathroom. She poured a glass of water and drank a long swallow before fussing with her hair. Unlike him, she had no problem with mirrors. He liked the trim economy of her body, her small breasts with their stiff nipples, her tight thighs and the tight space between them, a space he had grown to know well over the past six months.

He had met her during a visit to KPTI, months ago.

He had flirted, she’d responded. He was incapable of resisting temptation. Sometimes he told himself that Kris must have been familiar with his weakness, and if she had chosen to marry him anyway, she had known what was she getting into. As a rationalization it was not much good, but it was the best he could do.

The truth was that he had loved Kris once, but the feeling had ebbed.

He supposed she’d been right when she said that for him, a woman’s novelty wore off and she became another discarded toy. But there were always more toys to be bought if a man had the money… and if his previous possessions didn’t weigh him down.

“She suspects, you know,” Amanda said from the bathroom.

Howard, who had been hunting for his shoes amid the tangled bedspread on the floor, looked up in bewilderment.

“What did you say?”

“She thinks you may be having an affair. She told me so.”

The world seemed to freeze around him, or maybe it was simply that his breath froze in his chest.

“When?”

“Yesterday. It was True Confessions time, at least for her.” Amanda smirked, then turned grave.

“I shouldn’t find it funny. After all, she is my friend in some sense of the word.”

She stood nude in the bathroom doorway, hips cocked, arms akimbo. Her collarbone stood out against the pallor of her skin. She was not as pretty as Kris, Howard thought irrelevantly. But she was young.

“Why didn’t you tell me before now?” he asked.

An insouciant shrug.

“Slipped my mind.”

“Well, what did she say, exactly?”

“She thinks you’re fooling around. I promised her a heart-to-heart talk, but I didn’t follow through. It would be like a cat playing with a mouse. There might be a certain sadistic pleasure in it, but it’s not the sort of entertainment calculated to raise your self-esteem.”

“No.” His voice was flat.

“I guess not.”

“I’m not saying she knows anything for sure. She has a hunch, that’s all—feminine intuition or whatever.

Anyway, it’s good, isn’t it?”

Good. What a word for her to use.

“Is it?”

“It makes it easier for you to tell her about us.” A frown pinched her face.

“You are going to tell her, aren’t you, Howie?”

“At the appropriate time.” He knew it sounded perfunctory, and that she would be angry.

She was.

“I sincerely hope you’re not getting the proverbial cold feet. I’ve taken a serious risk, you know. Your wife has more clout with the station than I do. She’s the bionic news babe the six-million-dollar girl. What I’m trying to say is, she could get me canned, and if I don’t have anything to fall back on…”

He held up a placating hand.

“You’ll have plenty to fall back on. And you won’t be fired. It’s not going to work out that way.”

“So how is it going to work out?”

“For the best.” Howard sighed, suddenly tired.

“By the way, you’re not the only one who’s taken a risk.”

“No? What have you ever done, besides show up with a bulge in your trousers?”

“I’ve done more than you know. More than you need to know. Now where are my goddamned shoes?

I have to get—” Home, he almost said but caught himself.

“I have to get going.”

The time was almost ten o’clock, and it would take him an hour to get to Malibu from here. Kris would arrive at the beach house around midnight, and he wanted to be there well before she arrived. It had been awkward the other night, when he had come home later than usual, and she had already been there.

She had asked him questions then—questions about his imaginary drive up the coast, and about how restless and agitated he seemed. Of course she suspected him. It was obvious now, though at the time he hadn’t allowed himself to see it.

Well, it didn’t matter. It was too late for her, no matter what she suspected. Things were moving quickly to a conclusion, and soon everything would be resolved once and for all.

He found the shoes in one of the dark corners the lamplight couldn’t reach. When he bent to slip them on, involuntarily he grunted, an old-man noise. He hated making noises like that.

Amanda was his ticket to youth. Or if not Amanda, then some new companion, younger still and lacking any tattoos.

But not Kris. Kris was the past. Kris was a dead weight dragging him down.

He had to be rid of her. He would be.

Soon.

After Hickle left, Abby opened her bedroom closet.

The VCR and audio deck had been recording continually, but the TV was off, the audio console muted.

She turned on the monitor and speakers, then sat on the floor in a sloppy lotus position, resting her back against the bed, watching the monitor. She saw Hickle pace his living room before fixing a meal in the kitchen. She wondered if eating was a response to stress or if he simply hadn’t had enough dinner.

He ate standing in the kitchen, almost out of camera range. When he was done, he left the cookware in the sink and went into the bedroom.

She checked her watch. It was 9:40. Kris’s newscast would start in twenty minutes. She assumed he wouldn’t miss it.

But he didn’t emerge from the bedroom. The surveillance microphone picked up no sounds of activity.

She waited, feeling a new, prickling intimation of trouble.

Another glance at her watch. Nearly ten o’clock. Still no sign of him. Strange. Ominous. If any part of his daily routine was sacrosanct, it was the ritual of watching Kris at six and ten.

“What’s going on, Raymond?” she whispered.

“What are you up to?”

She increased the volume. Dimly she made out a sound, something low and regular and ongoing, hard to identify. A murmur.

Was he running an electric fan? She didn’t remember seeing one.

Anyway, this sound had a different quality than a motor noise. It wavered, fluctuated.

She leaned close to the speakers, maxing out the volume, but the noise floor—the ambient hiss that was part of any acoustical environment—rose to a high, steady sizzle, and the murmuring sound was barely more distinct than before.

“He fastened on Kris because she represents his feminine ideal, what he calls the look. She exists in Hickle’s mind as a mature, perfected version of Jill Dahlbeck, who was also a blue-eyed blonde. But this time he’s chosen a woman unlike Jill in every other respect—a celebrity, married, rich, famous, older than he is. He wants her to be unattainable. He wants to pursue her and fail, because his humiliation will give him the excuse he needs to destroy her and destroy himself ” , Supine on the bed, Hickle listened. Pain cramped his belly. Slowly he rolled on his side and contracted into a fetal curl.

“What is Kris Barwood to him, really? She’s his fantasy lover, his dream wife, and not to get all Freudian about it, his mother too—an older authority figure who has a home and a husband. She represents all aspects of the female presence in the world, from erotic temptress to domestic companion to nurturing parent.

And she’s big enough to play all these roles—larger than life, in fact. Her face appears on TV sets, billboards, magazine covers. She’s everywhere. She is Woman. Lashing out at her, Hickle will strike at the archetype of the other sex, the sex he hates and fears. No vive la difference for him.”

Abby’s voice, coolly analytical, dissecting him. No, vivisecting. That was when the surgery was performed on a living body. Sometimes it was done without anesthesia—nothing to deaden the pain.

“He has zero concern for Kris as a human being, because to him she’s not a human being, only a symbol.

Hickle lives in a world of symbols and images and fantasies, connected to society only through the TV set and People magazine. I guess he’s not much different from a lot of us these days, and I might even feel sorry for him if he didn’t pose a measurable threat…”

Feel sorry for him. Feel sorry.

Who was she to say that, to pass judgment on him?

She was the one who ought to be ashamed of who she was and what she did. She was the one who made up stories about a failed relationship and bumped into him in the laundry room and got him to talk about the TV news. She was the one who burrowed her way into other people’s lives and poked around and uncovered secrets. She was a liar and a snitch and a sneak and a conniving little whore, and what she deserved

what she deserved… The shotgun.

That was what she deserved, yes, the shotgun, absolutely.

Hickle sat up, ignoring the cassette as it continued to play She was a goddamned bitch. She had deceived him, manipulated him, served as a tool of his enemies, spied on him and reported to Kris. And she had done it so skillfully that if not for his friend Jackbnimble, he might never have known.

His anonymous informer hiding behind a nursery rhyme name was the only person he could trust, the only person who had been honest with him all along.

Every item of information Jack had passed on had proven true. Every word of advice had been sound.