The Shadow Hunter (6 page)

He started the car and drove away, avoiding the studio gate so the guard wouldn’t catch sight of his car.

He hooked up with the Glendale Freeway and proceeded north to the Angeles National Forest. Near the town of La Canada Flintridge there was a secluded section of the woods, which he had discovered during an aimless drive last year. A brook whispered through a sunlit glade at the end of a dirt road.

He parked. When he got out of the car, he took the duffel with him.

He marched a hundred yards into the woods, set down the bag, and removed a pair of sound-insulating earmuffs, which he slipped over his ears, and the shotgun and two boxes of shells.

His first shot scared up a flurry of birds. After the second shot there was only stillness and the muffled echo of the shotgun’s report.

The gun had a four-shell capacity. He emptied it and reloaded, then repeated the process. Deadfalls of timber and drifts of small stones were his targets. But really he had no targets. A shotgun was not a weapon to aim; it was a weapon to point. The wide spread of shot would wipe out anything in the direction of the blast.

What he sought was not accuracy but familiarity with the weapon. He needed a feel for its range, power, recoil. It must be part of him, an extension of his arm and shoulder. When the time came to use the gun for real, he would get only one opportunity, and he couldn’t fail.

The Wilshire Royal was one of the more expensive JL buildings in Westwood, and Abby’s mortgage payments were insanely high, especially given how little time she actually spent at home. But the place offered two features she prized: luxury and security.

Luxury was on display in the gushing fountain that ornamented the driveway, the gray marble expanse of the lobby floor, the excellent reproduction of Rodin’s Eve facing the elevator bank. Security was less obvious.

The doorman who greeted her when she headed up the front walkway, toting her carryon bag, didn’t look like a guard, but under his red blazer the bulge of a shoulder holster could be detected by a practiced eye. The two uniformed men at the mahogany sign-in desk wore their sidearms in plain view, but the array of closed-circuit video screens they monitored was hidden below the desktop.

“Hey, Abby,” one of them said.

She smiled.

“Vince, Gerry, how’s it going?”

“Slow day. Have a nice trip?” They thought she was a sales rep for a software firm, on the road a lot.

“Productive.” She asked if there was a Fedex Same-Day package for her, and they found it behind the counter. She tucked the box under her arm. It was good to have the gun back. She always felt a little naked without it.

“Thanks, guys,” she said with a smile and a wave.

“See you.”

The elevator that carried her to the tenth floor was equipped with a hidden TV camera. The control panel was rigged to set off a silent alarm at the front desk if the elevator was intentionally stopped between floors.

There were cameras in the stairwells and in the underground garage, access to which was controlled by a pass card-operated steel gate. The gate, too, was monitored by a surveillance camera. All that was missing was a crocodile-infested moat. She might bring up the idea at the next meeting of the condo board.

She wasn’t sure these precautions were necessary.

By LA standards Westwood was a safe neighborhood.

But she took enough chances in her work. She liked having a refuge to come home to.

Her apartment was number 1015. She opened the door and stepped into her living room, which took up half the floor space in her unit’s thousand-square-foot plan. A faint mustiness hung in the air; the place had been closed up for a week. Otherwise, it was just as she’d left it.

She dropped her suitcase and the Fedex package onto the ottoman of an overstuffed armchair. The apartment’s furnishings had been chosen primarily for comfort, with no concerns about consistency of style.

She liked a chair she could sink into, a sofa softer than a bed. Throw pillows and quilts were tossed here and there, along with the occasional stuffed polar bear and fake macaw, all contributing to a general impression of disorder. Her decorating skills were limited at best, but she had managed to find two paintings that pleased her. Both were prints purchased out of discount bins.

One was a late work by Joseph Turner, the landscape dissolving in a bath of light, and the other was one of Edward Hicks’s many studies of “The Peaceable Kingdom,” predator and prey as bedfellows. The Turner had a spiritual quality that touched a part of her she rarely accessed, and the Hicks, with its naive optimism, simply made her smile.

Briskly she opened the curtains and the glass door to the balcony, airing out the room. Her apartment faced Wilshire; she was high enough to be out of earshot of most traffic noise.

In the kitchen she drank two glasses of water. Flying always left her dehydrated. She found blueberries and peaches in the freezer, defrosted them in the microwave, and dumped them into the blender along with a dollop of vanilla yogurt and some skim milk two days past its expiration date. A few seconds of whirring reduced the blender’s contents to a bluish, frothy sludge, which she poured into a tall glass and drank slowly, pausing to swallow assorted vitamin and mineral supplements.

Leaving the kitchen, she changed into a white terrycloth robe and ran the bathwater. Briefly she considered pouring bath oil into the tub, but ruled against this indulgence. She was about to strip off the robe when the intercom buzzed.

She answered it, irritated.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Stevens is here to see you,” one of the lobby guards said.

“Okay, Vince. Send him up.”

Stevens was the name Travis used when he stopped by. The guards weren’t supposed to know that Abby had any connection to the security field, and Travis’s name had been well publicized recently.

She waited, wondering why Travis had returned.

When the doorbell chimed, she opened the door, and he stepped inside without a word.

“Hey, Paul. Forget something?”

“Not exactly. I changed my mind.”

“About what?”

“The urgency of my return to the office.”

She smiled, relaxing and at the same time feeling a rush of pleasant tension.

“Did you?”

“What’s that they say about all work and no play?”

He took a look around the apartment.

“Place looks the same as I remember it.”

“Hasn’t been that long since you were here,” Abby said, then realized she was wrong. It had been weeks, and not only because she had been traveling. Even when she was in LA, she had seen less of Travis in the past few months—since the Devin Corbal case.

He circled toward the balcony.

“I see your view hasn’t improved.” Late last year an office tower had been erected across the street, coal-black and butt-ugly and, so far, unoccupied; some financial or legal screw up had interrupted construction during the finishing stages.

“I’m used to it,” Abby said, “though I have to admit, it doesn’t do a lot for the neighborhood. All that vacant office space…”

She stopped. Both of them were silent for a moment, and she knew Travis was thinking of the empty offices in the TPS suite. She wanted to kick herself.

But when Travis turned away’ from the balcony, he was smiling.

“Do I hear water running?”

“I’m drawing a bath.”

“Sounds intriguing.”

“I don’t think there’s room for two.”

“Have you ever tested that hypothesis?”

“Actually, no.”

“You should. Why don’t you see if the water’s gotten hot?”

“Why don’t I?”

She left him in the living room and retreated down the hall to check the tub. It was half-full and the perfect temperature. The air in the bathroom was sensuously humid, thick with steam. Bath oil didn’t seem like a bad idea anymore. When she added it to the water, a lather of white bubbles sprang up, reflecting the overhead light in a bevy of rainbows. She took off the robe, hung it on the back of the door, and lowered herself into the tub. The space was cramped, and she thought pessimistically that she’d been right: there wasn’t room for two.

Then he came in. He had left his clothes outside, and she saw him through the steamy haze. He bent over the tub and kissed her, and she felt a small disturbance in the water as he slid his hand into the bath to caress her breast. It was a slow circular caress—the light touch of his fingers, the firmer pressure of his palm-and then with his other hand he was stroking her hair, her neck, the lingering tension in her shoulders.

“I still think you won’t fit,” she said mischievously.

“We’ll see.”

Travis reached behind her and turned off the tap, then stroked the lean, toned muscles of her back. The bathwater, leavened with oil, was smooth, supple, some exotic new liquid, not ordinary water at all.

“I’ve missed you,” Travis said.

She was briefly surprised. He was never sentimental.

“I…” Why was this so hard for her to say?

“I

missed you too.”

The water rose around her. He entered the tub, straddling her, his knees against her hips, as the water sloshed lazily around them and stray bubbles detached themselves from the lather to burst in small pops.

“I’m not sure the circumstances allow for much finesse,” Travis said apologetically.

She giggled.

“Finesse isn’t always essential.”

They rocked gently in the water and steam. She let her head fall back, her mop of wet hair cushioning her.

against the tiled wall. In the ceiling the exhaust fan hummed. The faucet dripped. She heard her heartbeat and Travis’s breath.

“Abby,” he said.

She shut her eyes.

“Abby.”

He was inside her.

“Abby…”

Pumping harder. Driving deeper.

Her back arched, lifting her halfway out of the water, and her hair spilled across her face in a dark tangle, and distantly she was aware that she’d banged her head on the damn tiles, but it didn’t matter.

He withdrew himself and held her, the two of them entwined amid soapsuds and lacy, dissipating tendrils of steam.

“Told you I’d fit,” Travis said.

She couldn’t argue.

In late afternoon Abby woke in the familiar half darkness of her bedroom. She propped herself up on an elbow and looked for Travis, but he was gone, of course. He had returned to the office. She supposed it was considerate of him to have departed without waking her.

Dimly she recalled leaving the bathtub when the water had gotten cold.

She and Travis had toweled each other dry, and the vigorous rubbing had segued into more sensual contact, and then they were on top of her bed, and somehow the covers got kicked off and things had proceeded from there. This time the circumstances had allowed for considerable finesse.

She had dozed off afterward. And he had made his exit, gathering his clothes from the living room, where no doubt they had been neatly folded and stacked. He had fit her into his schedule, at least. He had found a slot for her between lunchtime and his afternoon appointments.

She shook her head. Unfair. What had she expected him to do? Cancel everything, spend the day with her?

He was trying to salvage a damaged business—and not incidentally, keep some of the most famous people in LA alive.

Anyway, she had never asked for more from him.

She liked her space, her freedom. Maybe she liked it too much for her own good.

She got out of bed and threw on a T-shirt and cutoff shorts. Barefoot, she wandered into the kitchen and opened a can of tuna fish. Slathered between thick slabs of date bread, it made a pretty good sandwich.

Normally, when eating alone she would watch TV or read, but there was nothing on TV at this hour, and the only immediately available reading matter was Travis’s report. She almost got it out of her suitcase, but stopped herself.

“All work and no play,” she mused.

Travis had said that. He’d been right. She could permit herself a break from work. Even so, she found her53 self eyeing the suitcase as she ate her sandwich at the dining table.

“You’re a workaholic,” she chided.

“This job’s gonna kill you if you don’t let go of it once in a while.”

Unless, of course, it killed her in a more literal fashion first.

A lot of negative energy was in the air all of a sudden.

She popped a CD into her audio deck. The disc, selected at random, was a Kid Ory jazz album from way back when. She listened as the Kid launched his trombone into “Muskrat Ramble,” but she knew the song too well to fully hear it, and her thoughts drifted to other things.

College. A January thunderstorm, and in the rain she broke up with Greg Daly. He was pushing too hard, getting too close. Even then, she’d needed her space. For her, it had always been that way.

She had talked about it with her father once. In memory she could see him clearly, squinting into the Arizona sun, nets of creases edging his calm hazel eyes. She had inherited those eyes, that exact shade, and perhaps the quality of remoteness they conveyed.

Her father had been a contemplative man, given to long illnesses He ran a horse ranch in the desolate foothills south of Phoenix. One evening she sat with him in the russet tones of a desert sunset, watching massed armies of saguaro cacti raise their spiked arms against the glare, and she asked why the boys in school didn’t like her. She was twelve years old.

It’s not that they don’t like you her father said. They’re put off a bit. Intimidated, I think.

This was baffling. What’s intimidating about me?

Well, I don’t know. What do you suppose might be intimidating about a girl who can climb a tree better than they can, or shoe a horse, or mm and shoot a rifle like a pro?

She pointed out that most of them had never seen her do any of those things.

But they see you, Abigail. He always called her that, never Abby, and never Constance, her middle name. They see how you carry yourself.

Anyhow, you don’t give them much encouragement, do you? You keep to yourself.

You want solitude and privacy.

She allowed that this was so.