The Shadow Hunter (42 page)

“Abby,” Travis called, “did I ever tell you how much I love you?” He was laughing.

She ignored his words. They meant nothing. But from the direction of his voice, she knew he was closer to the second doorway than the first.

It was all she needed to know.

Travis held the rifle in both hands, ready to fire. The flashlight was lashed to the long barrel with a strip of his shirtsleeve; its glow moved wherever the muzzle pointed. The Beretta was holstered again, to be wiped clean and left with Abby once she was dead.

He was ready. He would enter the office, and then it was a simple matter of kill or be killed. Either Abby would get him, or he would get her. He couldn’t hope to flush her out of hiding, and he could no longer force her to waste her ammo. Even if he had been willing to use the Beretta, he could not fire through one doorway while covering the other exit. That was a job for two men, and he was alone.

Still, he had the advantage. Abby’s survival instinct was strong, but her conscience was stronger, and it was her conscience that would make her hesitate for an instant before shooting him. He, on the other hand, would not hesitate at all.

He drew a few quick, shallow breaths, over breathing like a diver preparing to submerge, then readied himself to go in.

In the adjoining hall—running footsteps.

She’d fled, using the first doorway.

He sprinted around the corner, the glow of his flashlight swinging down the hall and spotlighting a blurred, disappearing figure. He almost fired but didn’t trust his aim, and then she spun and shot at him once, driving him back behind the wall. When he looked out again, she was gone.

There was only one exit she could have taken. The door to the stairwell. She was trying to get out.

She’d made a mistake. He knew it. He charged down the hall, the flashlight bobbing with the rifle in his arms.

Heading downstairs, she would be an easy target.

He would have the high ground. He could fire on her from the landing and finish her before she could take cover.

He reached the stairwell. Professional caution made him hesitate on the threshold of the landing. He swept the rifle downward, and the flashlight’s beam picked out a small, familiar shape on the stairs descending to the lower level.

Abby’s purse. She’d dropped it as she ran.

No, wait. Too obvious.

She hadn’t dropped the purse. She’d thrown it there to mislead him into thinking she’d gone down, when actually—’ She’d gone up.

Ambush.

Hugging the doorway, he aimed the rifle straight overhead and fired twice, gambling that she was in the doorway directly above him, leaning out to take her shot.

A cry, a clatter of metal on metal—Abby’s .38, clanging on the steel staircase. He’d nailed her.

He burst onto the landing and took the steps two at a time to the tenth floor, expecting to see Abby’s fallen body, but she wasn’t there.

His flash swept the area and found no blood spatter.

He hadn’t scored a hit after all. But she’d lost her weapon. She was disarmed, defenseless. She was finished.

Travis proceeded down the dark hallway at a run.

The game was nearly over. The tenth floor would be the killing ground.

Abby had liked to believe she was lucky, but that was before Travis saw through her ambush and literally shot the gun out of her hands. She didn’t think she’d been hit, but the gun was lost, and now she was out of options and almost out of time.

She ran along a tenth-floor corridor, away from the stairwell into a wider hall that fed into an open floor plan occupying the front half of the building. Bands of plate glass stretched from floor to ceiling along the far wall. Through the windows came the glow of streetlights, starlight, the luminous haze of the city. The light allowed her to orient herself and to dimly see the space around her. When the tower was finished, where she stood would be a large work area partitioned into cubicles. Now it was an open expanse of concrete floor without walls or furnishings.

Nowhere to hide. She ran toward the windows, seeking light. Dying might be a little easier in the light.

In the corridor behind her, there were footsteps, charging hard.

She reached the windows. Past the glass lay Wilshire Boulevard and her condo building. By one of these windows Hickle had waited for the long-distance kill that had never come. Waited with the rifle in his hands, the rifle Travis was carrying now.

Ahead was a worktable, indistinct in the gloom.

Hickle must have dragged it near the window to have a place to sit.

She’d found his firing site.

“Abbyl” Travis, bursting into the room, the flashlight attached to his rifle like a bayonet, the beam stabbing the darkness as he pivoted from side to side.

He hadn’t spotted her yet. She ducked low and kept running, thinking she could use the worktable for cover, buy herself a few more seconds.

The beam swept toward her, rippling across the broad sheets of glass.

She dropped to her knees and crawled under the worktable to hide.

The flashlight probing, licking the room’s far corners, then drifting back to alight on the table and illuminate her small, huddled shape.

“You’re dead, you bitch,” Travis breathed, his voice eerie in the dark, and he was coming her way.

She scrambled out from beneath the table and collided with something shapeless and heavy on the floor.

Hickle’s duffel bag. Not empty. Something was inside.

He had used the rifle in the stairwell. But the shotgun was his weapon of choice at close range. Why hadn’t he used it? Because he’d left it here—left it in the bag.

Her shaking hands unzipped the flap, touched the sleekness of the shotgun’s barrel.

Travis sprinting. Light expanding at her back.

She jerked the long gun free of the bag, braced the butt against her chest and spun in a crouch, pumping the action once. Her finger groped for the trigger, and the flashlight found her.

She couldn’t see Travis, only the blinding glare. It was easier that way.

She fired at the light.

The recoil upset her precarious balance, blowing her backward onto her tailbone. The room spun in curlicues of yellow glare. She thought she was suffering some extreme onset of vertigo, then realized that what she saw was only the smeared beam of the flashlight as it spun with the rifle across the concrete floor.

The gun and the flashlight attached to it came to rest against a wall, by chance casting the beam at Travis, sprawled limp on the floor.

Abby knew he was dead even without taking a close look. She had fired at him from six feet away. The shotgun shell had cut him almost in half. She couldn’t see his features and didn’t want to. She imagined that the last look on his face had been one of surprise.

He had never thought he could lose to anyone and certainly not to her.

He was her mentor, after all, and she was only the gifted protegee.

She got to her feet, leaving the shotgun where it had fallen after she fired. She didn’t need it any longer.

There were no more bad guys to kill.

Her first step was shaky, and she almost sank to her knees before steadying herself. On her way out of the room she stooped to pry the flashlight free of the rifle.

Its beam guided her to the stairwell. On the stairs below the ninth floor she found her purse with her cell phone inside.

She took out the phone and sat on the steps, taking a moment to compose herself before calling Wyatt at the Hollywood station.

“Hickle’s dead,” she said when he came on the line.

“And somebody else too. But I’m okay. I just wanted you to know.”

“Abby, what the hell are you talking about? Where are you?”

“It doesn’t matter where I am. I’ll be calling nine-one-one after I’m through talking to you. Everything will be taken care of. But you have to stay out of it, all right? I mean completely out. Don’t visit me, don’t call me, at least for a while. I don’t want your friend Detective Cahill putting things together—and he will, if anybody connects you with me.”

“You still haven’t told me what happened.”

“Do you promise to keep your distance?”

“Yes, damn it, I promise. Now what’s going on?”

She let her head fall back against the cold concrete wall.

“It’s nothing. Vie, really.” She sighed.

“Just another day at the office.”

She ended the call before he could ask her anything more.

ramedics delivered Abby to UCLA Medical Cener, where she was checked for injuries and released.

There were two detectives waiting for her outside the examination room.

They asked her to accompany them to the West LA station. She was relieved to learn that neither of them was named Cahill.

The first interview was brief. She was too tired to give more than a bare recitation of the facts, carefully edited. But she gave the detectives a present—the tape in her microcassette recorder. It was a fresh tape, which she had loaded immediately before Travis’s arrival in Westwood; it contained his confession and nothing else.

The police allowed her to leave by 8 a.m. She had not seen her condo in daylight for a week. She slept until two in the afternoon, then fixed a meal. At three the guards in the lobby said two men from the LAPD were here to see her.

This time she gave the detectives the full story, staying close to the truth but not too close. Fatigue made lying easy; it was as if her body was too worn out to register any of the usual discomfort that a lie detector or a trained observer could catch.

“Travis hired me to move in next door to Hickle. I was there to track his movements, make note of when he came and went. We wanted to get a feel for his daily routine. That was what I was told, anyway. But in fact, I was being set up. Travis told Hickle I was spying on him, and it drove Hickle over the edge. He tried to kill Kris. After he failed, Travis gave him my home address in Westwood. I guess you know what happened after that.” They asked what had led her inside the office building.

She said she had begun to suspect Travis. Suspecting an ambush, she’d checked out her neighborhood and found evidence of illegal entry to the office tower.

She’d thought Hickle might be inside.

“That’s when you should have called the police,” the older of the two detectives said in an almost fatherly tone.

“I wasn’t sure Travis was guilty. I wanted proof. I wanted it on tape.”

The younger detective, less sympathetic, pointed out that her words on tape and the condition of Howard Barwood’s gun, recovered from Travis’s body, served as evidence that she had broken into Barwood’s Culver City bungalow and tampered with his property.

Abby admitted to this.

“If Mr. Barwood wants to press charges against me, he’s entitled.” She allowed herself a sweet smile, aimed mainly at the older cop.

“Think he will?”

“Considering that you’ve cleared him on multiple felony counts, ma’am, I think he’ll give you the damn gun if you ask for it, and the bungalow too.”

The younger detective wouldn’t give up.

“On the tape Travis seems to hold you responsible for the death of Devin Corbal. What have you got to say about that?”

“Travis hired me to follow Sheila Rogers, Corbal’s stalker, and report her movements. That particular, night, I lost her. I didn’t know where she had gone, and so I wasn’t able to give Travis’s men a heads-up when she entered Lizard Maiden, the club where Corbal was hanging out. Travis never forgave me for it.”

“But you weren’t actually present at the scene of Corbal’s death?” the younger detective asked.

“No.”

“Suppose we were to round up some of the people who were in the club that night and show them your photo. What do you think they’d say?”

“Probably that the club was crowded and dark, and it’s been four months since the incident, and under the circumstances their memories aren’t likely to be reliable.

That’s what a defense attorney would say, don’t you think?”

The younger detective had no answer to that. He and his partner left shortly afterward. Before they left, Abby made them promise that her name would be kept out of the media.

They returned twice in the next two days, asking her to fill in details. At first Abby thought they were leading her on, pretending to believe her version of events while preparing charges against her, either in the Travis shooting or in the Corbal affair. Eventually she realized that the truth was somewhat different. They didn’t entirely believe her, but they had no clear idea of how badly she had misled them, and they didn’t particularly care.

On Wednesday morning, they paid their last visit and informed her that they were closing the case. Her identity had not been made public.

“There was a close call,” the younger cop said. By now he was friendlier.

He had grown to like her, at least a little.

“Channel Eight got hold of your name through a departmental leak. They were set to run with it, but the story got killed. I think we can guess who did you that favor.”

“Probably not Amanda Gilbert.”

“Amanda Gilbert is no longer with the station. But Kris Barwood’s still there.”

All of the following day, Abby lazed around, listening to soft music and fixing simple meals. She did a little redecorating. After some deliberation she took down her print of The Peaceable Kingdom and put it in her closet. It no longer amused her to see the lion snuggle up to the lamb.

On Friday morning she drove to Travis’s house.

She parked her Miata a block away and walked to the house, lugging a light backpack. Outside the house she waited a few minutes until a Lincoln Town Car arrived, Kris at the wheel. She was driving again—no need for a bodyguard now.

“Abby,” Kris said when she got out of the sedan, “I just want to say—I mean, I know everything you did for me—well, maybe not everything, but enough…”

“It’s okay, Kris.”

“Thank you. That’s what I’m trying to say. Thank you so much.”

Abby smiled.

“You may not quite understand this, but all the things I did—I didn’t do them for you. I did them for me. No gratitude is required.”