The Shadow Hunter (28 page)

Well, no. She doubted she would last that long. The explosion would kill her first.

“That’s me,” she groaned.

“Always looking on the bright side.”

The longer she waited, the weaker she would get.

She had to take action now, had to raise the bedroom window, draw some air into this death trap. But she couldn’t stand. All right, crawl.

The window was only six feet away. A baby could crawl that far.

She started to roll onto her belly. Something stopped her—a tug of resistance. Her left ankle had been fastened to a leg of the bureau by the chain and padlock from Hickle’s bedroom closet. He’d anchored her in place so that even if she regained consciousness, she couldn’t escape.

Nice touch, but the joke was on him. She knew the combination. Bending at the waist, she reached the padlock and lined up the numbers, then tugged on the shackle.

The padlock didn’t open.

But it had to. Unless… Hickle had changed the combination.

Abby shut her eyes.

“I take it back, Raymond. Looks like the joke’s on me.”

The greatest danger, Hickle knew, was that the cops had read his license plate during the chase. If they had, his plate number and a description of his Volkswagen would already have been radioed to other CHP units and to LAPD and Santa Monica PD patrol cars. He could outrun one car but not a dozen.

He reached Ocean Avenue and turned north into heavy traffic, typical on a Friday night. Bikers and low-riders surrounded him. Rough crowd, the sort that drew a lot of cops on patrol. He scanned the sea of car roofs for a light bar Couldn’t see one, but that didn’t mean police units weren’t out there—maybe behind him—maybe closing in.

Panic started his heart racing. He thought he might throw up.

The traffic thinned a little as he entered a better neighborhood. On his left was the park on the palisades, busy with tourists and teenagers. Hotels and restaurants and condominium towers rose on his right. It occurred to him that soon, even if things went exactly as planned, he would be either dead or in custody.

He would never again walk in a park or eat at a restaurant. He would not see the moon, which hovered over the ocean beyond the palisades, unless he saw it through the barred window of a cell.

But if he lived, he would see Kris in his memory. She would be with him every day, bloodied and torn, his victim, his sacrifice. Every time he closed his eyes, he would see her. He would give up the moon for that.

And if he didn’t survive… With death came immortality. He would be remembered.

His name, his face, would be known. He, not Kris, would be on the covers of magazines. He, not Kris, would stare out at a world of television viewers from a million picture tubes. And who could say?

Maybe there was a life after this one, when all destinies were fulfilled. If so, he would be with her forever, as he deserved.

But only if he killed her first. To do that, he had to get to Malibu, and time was ticking down.

Ahead was the incline to the coast highway. He eased into the turn lane, then got stuck behind a line of cars at a red light. A minute of waiting followed. He was helpless. If a patrol unit spotted him now, there was nothing he could do except go down shooting.

Finally the stoplight cycled to a green arrow. He followed the traffic downhill, breathing hard, his chest heaving with strain. There was sweat on his face, sweat pasting his shirt to his armpits and his underpants to his crotch. He smelled bad. But he’d made it at least this far.

He pulled into the fast lane, racing between the pale cliffs and the sea. Fear of attracting attention competed with the need to make up lost time. Urgency won.

Hickle accelerated—sixty-five miles per hour, seventy, seventy-five—breaking the speed limit as he hugged the curving shoreline of Santa Monica Bay on his way to Malibu.

Okay, think, Abby Think.

Plan A had proven unsuccessful. Time to go to Plan B—if there was a Plan B, other than just lying here till the whole place went kaboom.

She shook her head, rejecting pessimism. There was always a Plan B, and if that failed, a Plan C and D and so on through the alphabet for as long as she lasted.

Never give up, that was the spirit.

Plan B was to try variant combinations based on Kris’s birthdate—August 18, 1959. Abby moved the four cams to 0859, 1859, 5918, 5908. No luck. How about Hickle’s birthday? Travis had told her. It was October

7,1965.

The cams seemed to be getting slippery. No, it was her fingers that were slick with perspiration. She wiped her shaking hands on her blouse and spun the disks. 1007, 1065,0765, and reversals of all these sequences.

Nothing happened.

The gas odor was worse than before. Her stomach coiled. Nausea threatened.

All right/ Plan C. Kicking off her shoe, she tried to slip her foot. through the chain. No use. The circle of steel links dug like small teeth into the skin above her heel, gripping fiercely. Either the chain was too tight, or her darned foot was too big.

Something like panic welled up inside her. She pushed it down. Mustn’t freak out. Freaking out was not a survival tactic.

Time for Plan D. So what was it? Well, she could pound the floor, scream for help. Trouble was, she didn’t think she could get enough air into her lungs to force out a decent scream, and if she banged on the floor, the downstairs neighbors would either ignore the noise or call the cops. And the cops would take hours to respond to a low-priority call in this district, if they responded at all.

She didn’t have hours. The gas was thick. Before long, it would reach the critical mass necessary to set off an explosion and a flash fire. The temperature in a flash fire could hit 1300 degrees. That was hot enough to fry her up pretty good.

“Damn it, Abby.” She blinked sweat out of her eyes.

“You’re supposed to be smart, right? And highly trained, with all these advanced skills…”

Skills. She did have skills. Among them was the skill of picking locks.

She had no tools, but maybe she didn’t need any.

She pulled the shackle taut, then fingered the cams.

The second one had tightened; it turned with difficulty.

That was the one to work on first. Carefully she dialed the cam through its ten-digit range. On 6 it loosened.

The second number in the combination was 6.

Her heart fluttered. Her vision was blurring in and out. Her general condition was not good, and the prognosis was poor. On the menu tonight, rotisserie Abby, served charred.

Quit it. She needed to concentrate. Easier said than done. Her head was squeezed in a vise of pain, and the bedroom had begun to imitate a carousel, and there was the stench of week-old diapers in her nose and mouth.

Maintaining pressure on the shackle, she tested the other three cams.

Now the first one resisted turning.

She worked it slowly, trying not to think about the gas and the pilot light and what 1300 degrees would feel like. Hotter than Phoenix in July, if such a thing was possible.

The cam loosened when it was set to 8. That was the first number in the combination. Six was the second.

Eight. Six. Put it together, Abby. Eight. Six.

Channel Eight. The news at six… and ten.

The last two digits were 1 and 0. 8610 was the combination.

Had to be. She set the cams in that sequence, and the padlock released. She was free.

Now get the window open. Hurry.

Prone on her stomach, she crawled across the floor.

Her breathing was awful to hear. Her chest heaved, and she couldn’t get oxygen into her lungs, and her head was sizzling, and there was pain like a crushing pressure at the back of her eyes. Sometimes, she thought, I really hate my job.

She came up against the bedroom wall. The window was just above her.

Close, but she couldn’t reach it, couldn’t raise herself off the floor.

Too weak. Come on, she chided silently, you can do a pull-up, can’t you?

With one arm extended, she got hold of the windowsill and, using it as leverage, lifted herself to her knees.

The window was locked. Hickle, the bastard, had actually taken the time to secure the latch. She fumbled at it, but her fingers, glazed with sweat, couldn’t find a grip. This whole situation was starting to get on her nerves in a big way. Nothing was easy. And time was running out.

Finally she got the latch open. Okay, lift the window.

She put both hands on the sash bar and strained.

Nothing happened. She had no strength. She battered the glass with her fists. Her blows fell like sighs. A kitten could have done more damage.

Again she tried to raise the window. Still no luck.

Weakness overtook her, and she lowered her head, coughing. God, she was tired. She wanted to sleep… Plenty of time for rest later.

Eternal rest, if it worked out that way. At the moment she was still alive. She would not waste whatever time she had left. The explosion could come at any moment. She had to dilute the fumes with clean air, or she was dead. Open the damn window. Do it now.

She put everything she had into a final effort, pushing upward with her last strength, and the window cracked open a few inches.

Success.

She rested her head on the sill and tried to draw a breath, but her throat had closed. There was air coming in, pure air, and she couldn’t breathe it. What the hell was wrong with her lungs?

But it was simple, really. Her vision was graying out, and her ears hummed, and she was going to lose consciousness.

She had driven herself to the point of collapse, and although she had forced the window ajar, it was not enough to save her.

“Nice try, girlfriend,” Abby murmured, “but no lollipop.”

The floor rushed up, and she fell away into the dark.

“… vehicle is a VW Rabbit wanted for felony evading, license plate…”

Wyatt heard the call on his radio as he cruised back to Hollywood Station after supervising a crime scene on Highland—drugstore hold-up, nobody injured.

The suspect had taken a hundred bucks out of the cash register and three packages of Trojans. Apparently he had a big night planned.

It was nothing major, and Wyatt had passed the time pondering what to do about Abby. He had decided on a confrontation tomorrow. Call her, arrange a lunch meeting, then demand to know what she’d gotten involved in. And once she told him? He didn’t know. His planning hadn’t made it that far.

At 11:40 he had been relieved of responsibility for the crime scene by the arrival of a bored detective, accompanied by an equally bored forensic photographer.

Now he was driving down Melrose, listening to the dispatcher report a CHP stop gone awry on the Santa Monica Freeway, miles away, twenty minutes ago. He wondered why the BOL was going out over a Hollywood Division frequency. As he turned onto Wilcox, he got his answer.

“… registered to a Hollywood resident…”

That explained it. There was a fair chance the suspect would be stupid enough to return home. Patrol units in Hollywood were advised to watch for a VW Rabbit with the reported plate number, and to keep an eye on the suspect’s residence.

“… address, 1554 Gainford…”

Wyatt stiffened. The Gainford Arms.

“… name, Hickle, Raymond, that’s Henry Ida Charles…”

It was Hickle who had been speeding on the freeway, Hickle who had fled a traffic stop. Wyatt had no idea what this might mean, except that Hickle was out of control and dangerous and crazed.

“Abby,” he breathed, a cold feeling in his gut.

The time was 11:48 when Hickle abandoned his car in a small beach parking lot off Pacific Coast Highway.

He’d made it. He was in Malibu, on Kris’s territory.

The police had not intercepted him.

The access path to the public beach was never closed. He lugged his duffel down the dirt path, then headed into the woods that bordered Malibu Reserve, his flashlight probing the foliage.

Midnight was close, the time frame tight, but he no longer feared failure. He was destined to succeed. He could feel it. Kris had messed with him, and she would pay, as Abby had paid.

Thinking of Abby made him wonder if she was dead yet. Fifty minutes had passed since he’d released the gas. By now she must have been asphyxiated or blown to bits.

Now it was Kris’s turn to die.

Not far from the Reserve’s perimeter fence, he located the mouth of the drainage pipe. The pipe was two feet in diameter, jutting out of a mound of earth under a eucalyptus tree. There was a small brackish pond nearby, and evidently the pipe had been laid down as a flood control device, its purpose to channel overflow from the pond away from the path and into the ravine that ran through the fenced compound.

On hands and knees Hickle bellied inside, dragging the duffel after him. The bag got stuck in the opening, and briefly he was afraid it wouldn’t fit—he’d never brought weapons on his previous outings, only the Polaroid camera—but when he turned the bag sideways it slipped through. He crawled over leaves, twigs, candy wrappers, and other detritus washed in by storms. Beetles skittered out of his path. Some backtracked and flitted over him, tickling like light fingers.

He didn’t mind. He had come this way before, and there were always bugs.

He’d never made the passage at night, though. His flashlight traced pale loops and whorls on the pipe’s soiled interior. Past the light there was only darkness, not the reassuring glow of sunshine that had drawn him forward on past occasions. He guessed he had come halfway, which meant he was under the fence.

Inside the Reserve.

Kris had surrounded herself with a fence and a gatehouse, a bodyguard at the wheel of her car and other bodyguards stationed in her guest cottage, yet all these precautions had proven useless against him. He was unstoppable. He was a force of nature, a man of destiny.

He crawled faster.

Wyatt parked by a fire hydrant outside the Gainford Arms and mounted the front steps two at a time. The lobby door was locked, and he didn’t have a master key. He buzzed Abby’s apartment, got no answer.

He went around to the rear door, locked also. He scanned the parking lot and saw her white Dodge Colt in its assigned space.