The Shadow Hunter (31 page)

Not far away he heard sirens. The local residents and the guard at the gatehouse must have called 911 when the shooting started. Malibu contracted its law enforcement services to the LA County Sheriff’s Department.

The nearest sheriff’s station was miles away in Agoura, but evidently a couple of squad cars had been in the area.

He looked up and down the road. The two TPS staff officers stationed at the guest cottage, Pfeiffer and Mahoney, were approaching fast.

Every light was burning in the homes that lined both intersecting streets. Nothing like a little midnight gun battle to wake up the neighborhood.

Circling the car, Travis found Drury sprawled on the macadam, his knees twisting slowly, blood soaking through the left sleeve of his jacket.

Hickle had unloaded the shotgun at the driver, but most of the spray had gone wide. A few steel pellets had caught Drury in the arm and shoulder. There was blood loss but no arterial spurting. The angle of the arm inside the jacket suggested broken bones, possibly a shattered elbow.

“It’s okay, Steve,” Travis said, knowing the man couldn’t hear.

“You’ll be fine.”

The sirens grew louder, then whirred to a stop.

Travis saw the gate rising to admit a pair of sheriff’s cruisers.

“Status?” That was Pfeiffer, arriving with his Beretta unholstered, his eyes glassy with an infantryman’s thousand-yard stare. Mahoney came right behind.

“Hickle ambushed us and fled,” Travis said crisply.

“I don’t think he’ll be back. He scored a lucky hit, incinerated the car. Nailed Drury in the shoulder. Mrs. Barwood is okay, just shaken up. Where’s the husband?”

“We told him to stay put,” Mahoney answered. He lowered his voice to add, “He didn’t need much persuading.”

Travis nodded, unsurprised that Howard Barwood was reluctant to throw himself in the line of fire.

A few yards from the smoking wreckage the squad cars rolled to a stop.

Two deputies, each riding solo, got out with guns drawn and eyes wary.

Travis met the men and summarized the situation.

“RA coming?” he asked. Rescue ambulance.

“En route,” a lanky red-haired deputy answered.

His nameplate read Carruthers. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five. His gaze kept darting to the shrubbery at the roadside.

Travis knew he was worried that Hickle would return for a second try, but there was little chance of that.

Hickle had taken his best shot and failed. Now he was heading for some dark corner where he could console himself and lick his wounds. But he hadn’t had time to go far.

“Either of you men care to join me in pursuit of an armed suspect?” Travis asked.

“I think we can pick up his trail.”

Carruthers wanted in on the action. The other deputy, less enthusiastic, elected to remain at the scene and wait for the paramedics.

Travis drafted Pfeiffer to complete the posse.

“Mahoney, you stand post over Drury and Mrs. Barwood.

See if you can find some blankets for them. Drury looks like he’s shivering.”

“Nice kid, Drury,” Pfeiffer said.

“He’ll be all right. Let’s move.”

The three of them set off together, Travis in the lead, Pfeiffer and Carruthers close behind.

“What kind of firepower this son of a bitch packing?” Carruthers asked.

“He used a shotgun in the assault. My information is that he also owns a rifle with a telescopic sight and laser sighting system. You wearing a vest. Deputy?”

Carruthers snorted.

“I wish. Thing is, this duty’s usually pretty quiet, and that vest gets hot.”

“Pfeiffer?”

“Yeah, I got on my Kevlar. How about you. Boss?”

“Left mine at home.” Travis snapped a new magazine into his Walther.

“Let’s hope Raymond doesn’t put up a fight.”

Hickle ran blindly, lugging the duffel like a heavy load of guilt.

Behind him there were sirens. He never looked back. He was afraid he would see a whole squadron of cops rushing after him.

This was bad. This was a complete mess. In his imagination he had always carried out the attack perfectly.

Yes, he had been arrested afterward, but only once Kris was dead and his immortality was assured.

It was Jackbnimble’s fault. In all his e-mail messages Jack had said not one word about armored plating on Kris’s car or bulletproof glass.

“Not one goddamned word,” he gasped, furiously indignant, and then he blundered into a steel fence topped with razor wire.

It was part of the fence that encircled the Reserve.

He had reached the perimeter of the compound.

Panic screamed in him. He was trapped.

He could turn around, try hiding in the woods, but they would find him before long. There had to be another way. Think.

The fence ran down to the water’s edge but no farther.

He could slip around it onto the adjacent public beach, then use the access path to get back to his parked car.

Limping on his bad ankle, he ran along the fence toward the sea. The last house on Malibu Reserve Drive loomed on his right. The space between the home’s side wall and the fence was narrow, but he crab walked through, pulling the duffel after him. The shotgun, he noticed, was in the duffel now. Sometime during his run he must have stuffed it inside the bag to free his right hand. He couldn’t remember doing this. He was operating on instinct like any hunted animal.

On the verge of the beach Hickle paused, afraid of the open space where he would be exposed and unprotected.

If the police had anticipated his escape route, somebody might be watching the beach even now. But he saw only white sand, the fringe of the surf, and above the water a few scattered rocks glistening with kelp. He risked going forward, kicking up sand as he ran. Where the fence ended, he sloshed into the tide and staggered ashore on the public beach.

As he climbed a hill of damp sand above the low tide mark, it occurred to him that he was leaving tracks.

He looked back. A line of shoe prints receded into the water. There must be a similar line on the other side of the fence and in the loose dirt of the woods. His enemies could follow him easily.

As if on cue, a glow of flashlights appeared in the shadows between the last home and the fence. They were coming. At least two of them, maybe more.

He ran for the path that led to the parking lot, but at the end of the path, beyond the trees and the dark roof of a ramada, danced a flickering glow of red and blue—the dome light of a police car.

Cops had pulled into the parking lot already. They’d found his car.

Hickle reversed course, retreating up the path toward the beach again.

The flashlight beams were nearer. The pursuers who’d followed him from the Reserve were closing in, following his shoe prints in the sand.

His every escape route was cut off—except one.

The lagoon.

It lay on his left, a dark spread of mud flats and low shrubs bordering two shallow ponds fed by Malibu Creek. Forty acres of wetland, Malibu Lagoon State Park. A nature preserve, a nesting spot for migrant birds and for him, a place to hide.

Hickle left the path and started running again. He wondered if he would ever be able to stop.

“He went into the lagoon.” Pfeiffer stood where the beach met the dirt path, staring down at a confusion of tracks.

“He ran for the parking lot, must’ve been spooked by the cop car, came back, and took cover in there.”

His flashlight beam picked out a zigzag line of shoe prints that vanished among the tall cattails and pickle weed their roots sunk in the muddy soil.

Travis and Carruthers stood beside him, guns and flashlights drawn.

“Might be hunkered down,” Carruthers said nervously, “drawing a bead on us right now.”

“This guy is too rattled to draw a bead on anyone,” Travis answered.

“He’s a scared rat on the run.” He looked at Pfeiffer, who had a good eye for a trail.

“Can we track him?”

“Don’t think so. Boss. He must’ve trampled the foliage, but it looks to me like it’s already springing back. And what with storm surges and careless hikers, there’s enough damage to cover whatever tracks might be left.”

Travis surveyed the ranks of cattails, then pointed at the bridge over Malibu Creek.

“He’s heading that way.

He’ll go in the water, cross under the bridge, and get out on the opposite side.”

Carruthers frowned.

“How can you be sure?”

“I know how these guys think. I was right about the car, wasn’t I?”

Travis had suggested the possibility that Hickle left his car in the beach parking lot. Carruthers had passed on the alert over his radio, and a CHP unit in the vicinity had taken the call. The highway cops had found Hickle’s Volkswagen Rabbit a couple of minutes ago.

“You were right,” the deputy conceded.

“Well, if the bridge is where our boy is going, we better stop him.”

He undipped the radio from his belt and, via the dispatcher, relayed a message to the CHP officers in the parking lot, reporting that the armed suspect had entered Malibu Lagoon and might attempt to make egress under the Cross Creek bridge. He really did use the words make egress.

“If those guys are done securing his vehicle,” he told the dispatcher,

“we could use’em on the bridge to keep an eye out.”

“Good idea,” Travis said when the transmission was over.

“Yeah, if you’re right about where he’s headed. If you’re wrong, then we’re watching the bridge while he circles back to the beach and hightails it out of here in any of three directions.”

“So how do we proceed?” Travis asked. He had to defer to Carruthers because the kid was the only law enforcement officer on the scene.

“We split up, cover the whole lagoon. If he’s hiding in there, we flush him out.”

Travis nodded.

“It’s a plan.”

“Who checks out the creek under the bridge?” Pfeiffer asked.

“I do.” Travis shrugged.

“My theory, so I get to prove it.”

“Watch your back,” Carruthers said.

Travis sketched him a wave and headed into the lagoon, holding his flashlight down at his side to conceal its beam.

Hickle crawled through the ranks of high, waving cattails, dragging the duffel. His elbows and knees were slimed with mud. Gnats buzzed at his ears.

Twice he had blundered close to nesting waterfowl, which had flapped their wings at him, squawking angrily.

He didn’t know if his pursuers could pinpoint his position from the noise.

The ground turned softer. He smelled brackish water. One of the ponds was just ahead. He scrambled forward, sloshing up thick clumps of ooze, and finally burst out of the cattail forest into the open space at the edge of the estuary.

The pond joined the mouth of Malibu Creek, which flowed under the bridge that was part of the coast highway.

Bridge traffic flashed past with a rattle and hum.

On the far side of the highway no one would be looking for him.

This thought impelled him off the muddy bank into the pond. He stayed low, bending almost double as he slogged through the shallow water, kicking up swirls of silt. Mud sucked at his waterlogged shoes, sending jolts of pain through his bad ankle. He kept going, his attention fixed on the bridge and the safety beyond it.

The duffel bag was an increasingly difficult burden, but he would not relinquish it. He might need the guns. As the water deepened, he hoisted the bag higher to keep it dry. He couldn’t afford wet ammunition.

The bridge was close. When a faint current moved against him, he knew he had left the pond and entered Malibu Creek. The creek wound inland through forest and scrub. He could follow it as long as he liked, exit whenever he felt sure he’d shaken off his pursuit. Then he would need a car. He would steal one. He knew how to hot-wire an ignition. He had seen it done on television a thousand times. One of Kris’s newscasts had detailed the procedure in a report on auto theft.

He hated to think of Kris. It stirred up too much anger and pain. He consoled himself with the thought that at least Abby was dead.

Under the bridge now. Traffic thrumming overhead.

No moonlight or starlight reached into the concrete grotto. Dark water sloshed fitfully against the pylons, its wet slaps repeated in a train of soft echoes. He could hear his own breathing, amplified by the peculiar acoustics of the place.

He was rearing the far side of the bridge when he heard a car stop directly above him. Instinct froze him in place. A moment later a spotlight snapped on, sweeping the water straight ahead.

The car was a patrol unit, maybe the same one from the parking lot, and it was angling its spotlight down into the creek. He couldn’t go forward. If he left the cover of the bridge he would be seen instantly. Had to retreat, conceal himself in the lagoon until the way was clear.

He headed in that direction, then stopped as a flashlight beam shone down from the bridge on that side, panning the water.

There must be two cops. Highway patrol officers, probably; they rode in pairs after dark. Between them, they had both sides of the bridge covered. He was safe only as long as he stayed hidden underneath.

Trapped.

He backed up against one of the rusty pylons and huddled there, a scared animal. Minutes earlier he had been the predator lying in ambush. Now he was the prey, hiding from those who hunted him.

With trembling hands he removed the shotgun from the duffel, then felt inside the bag until he found a box of ammo. He fed four Federal Super Magnum shells into the gun. If the cops figured out where he was, he would open fire. The twelve-gauge was a better weapon than the rifle at close range. He might kill one of them, at least, before the sound of gunfire led his other pursuers to the bridge.

He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. If Kris had died, his own fate would no longer matter. But as long as she lived, there was still a purpose to his life.

Travis saw him there, under the bridge.

The poor son of a bitch was pinned between one highway cop’s downcast flashlight beam and the spotlight from the CHP car itself. He couldn’t leave without being seen. All he could do was brace himself against a pylon and sit tight.