The Stalker (22 page)

And he knew other things then, just as certainly.

He knew that Andrea had not left him because of the money, that it had been, instead, because of Steve Kilduff—his weaknesses, the long endless string of failures. He had leaned on her, fed on her like a parasite, and she had dutifully carried him, loving him, never complaining, carried the weight of him on her shoulders all these years, the incredible weight of him, and finally the weight had simply become unbearable; what else could she do then
but
leave, leave quickly and quietly, sparing him the truth but unable to lie. And all along, he had blamed her in his mind, blamed her because of the money—and she was blameless, really; all along it was the man he had become, the man he had never known existed, the man the coward the weakling he had discovered and been appalled by for the first time just two days ago.

He knew that what had happened eleven years ago, the crime he had committed eleven years ago, had been the cause of it all, of what had happened to the man Steve Kilduff. He had been certain, so certain, that the incident had never affected him at all, when in reality it had been dragging him down by inexorable inches, destroying him, sapping his strength and his will and his initiative and his guts; latent guilt, hidden guilt, more deadly and more terrible than the kind which had been tearing Jim Conradin apart inside, because he had never known it was there, had thought he was free of it for those eleven long years. He had been living with guilt and with fear and he had never even so much as suspected it.

He knew all of these things, one after the other, like links in a chain being slowly drawn across his mind’s eye; knew them to be true and factual without dwelling on them, as if his brain, a faulty computer, had somehow been reprogrammed, redirected. He knew them, and they were important, vital, feeding his desperate need to reach Duckblind Slough as quickly as possible, effectively blocking the doubts that lingered peripherally in his mind—doubts of the wisdom of this headlong flight, alone, without the police, into what was surely intended to be a trap; doubts of his own manhood, his ability to function, to make decisions in moments of crisis.

Andrea was all that mattered now.

And time was running out.

He passed through San Rafael, and his luck was holding. There had been no sign of a black and white Highway Patrol car. He controlled the big Pontiac—with its unpredictable power steering, its too-binding power brakes—as if the machine was a sports car built for speed and maneuverability and bad road conditions; deftly, with a skill born of purpose and desperation. Ahead, through the arc-sweeps of the rhythmic wiper blades, he could see one of the suspended freeway signs gleaming dully in the now-heavy rain: VALLEJO NAPA EXIT I MILE.

Black Point, Kilduff thought, Black Point. He couldn’t use the county and private roads into Duckblind Slough—the only set of roads—because it was inevitably a trap and he would walk directly into it. If Andrea was still unharmed, what good could he do her dead, foolishly dead? His mind had not been calculating, weighing, coldly reasoning; he had allowed emotional reaction to rule. But it wasn’t too late, not yet; the idea had grown and taken shape and it was an answer.

Maybe.

If there was enough time.

There had to be enough time ...

He reached the Vallejo-Napa exit, just north of Ignacio. He left 101 east, oblivious to the red speedometer needle hovering near eighty now. When he had gone some eight miles by the odometer, he began to reduce his speed, looking for the Lakeville Highway turnoff. He saw it finally, the green and white freeway sign: PETALUMA and an arrow pointing due north, to his left.

He swung into the left-tum lane, waiting tensely for an opening in the westbound traffic. He saw an opportunity and took it, feeding gas to the Pontiac; the heavy rear end slewed a little on the rain-slippery macadam as he came onto the Lakeville Highway, but he fought the nose straight and bore down again on the accelerator. He was forced by the narrow expanse of the two-lane road to keep his speed under sixty, and it seemed as if time was at once, ambivalently, racing and sluggishly crawling. One mile passed, two, and finally three—and then he saw the black-lettered white sign, mounted on a tall silver-metal pole, looming against the dark morning sky:

He touched the brake pedal, slowing, sweeping off Lakeville onto a wide, smooth asphalt parking area that fronted a weathered clapboard building with a railed and slant-roofed side porch. Beyond the building, there was a wide, steep concrete launching site with a chain winch at the top; and a long narrow T-dock with two Richfield gasoline pumps, extending some fifty feet into the blackly moving waters of the Petaluma River. There were boat slips on either side of the dock, between a slender, shell-and gravel-dotted beach and the parallel T-bar; small power boats and skiffs and rowboats, each bundled in heavy tarpaulin and protected by rubber or styrofoam floats, oscillated in the wind-swept swells. On the left, past a marsh growth of tule grass and cattails, were several storage sheds with corrugated roofs for larger boats.

Kilduff brought the Pontiac to a sharp halt, nose-up to the side of the weathered building. He threw open the door and ran across the wet asphalt, up onto the side porch. He pulled open the front door, the screen door behind it.

The interior was wide but not particularly deep, poorly lit, with a low beamed ceiling. The warped, unpainted walls were covered with shelves containing canned goods, fishing gear and equipment, boat repair and necessity items, dusty jars, bottles, tins of miscellany. A unit heater suspended above a short, bisecting wooden counter gave off waves of shimmering heat. There were two men at the counter, one behind it and one in front, both wearing heavy flannel shirts and faded blue Levis, the one behind the counter chewing on a long greenishblack cigar and sporting a thick dapple-gray mustache; they were arguing about the feasibility of dredging the river for the traffic of small freighters between Petaluma and the Port of San Francisco.

Kilduff let the screen door slam behind him, and both men turned to look at him. He went toward them, taking his wallet from his trouser pocket, fanning it open. His eyes were flashing and his mouth was grim.

He said, “Listen, I want to rent a skiff for a couple of hours, you can name your own price . . .”

The limping man had fashioned a sniper’s nest.

A few yards from the wide clearing and the tan Volkswagen belonging to Orange’s wife, just to the right of the entrance road, he had matted a section of cord grass and milkweed directly behind a thick clump of tall rushes. On either side, the tule grass grew densely to a height of three feet or more. Kneeling in the flattened area, hunkered low, he was certain that he could not be seen from the road or from the clearing.

Until it was too late.

He had been in the nest for perhaps fifteen minutes now Immediately after he had called Orange from a motel-and-restaurant complex near Novato, he had returned here and parked the rented Mustang in a concealing grove of eucalyptus, well beyond the entrance to the second private road leading to Duckblind Slough. He had then walked back to this point, taking with him a tire iron from the Mustang’s trunk; he had used that to snap the padlock on the wooden gate. Then he had swung the gate parallel to the road and walked the half-mile to the clearing, not hurrying particularly, despite the increasing velocity of the downpour, paying no heed to his sodden clothing—and set about constructing the sniper’s nest. He had briefly debated waiting in the shack, but even though he knew almost exactly how long it would take Orange to reach Duckblind Slough from San Francisco, it would have been foolish to take even the remotest chance now, when it was almost over.

He shifted his weight, and his knees made wet slithering sounds on the matted grass. He had the .44 Ruger Magnum in his gloved right hand, pressed against his rib cage just below the left armpit. His palm was sweating inside the glove, and he could feel a certain expectant excitement building inside him. Just a few more minutes, he thought. Just a few more minutes and Orange will be dead, Orange will be dead, Red and Blue and Gray and Yellow and Green and Orange, all dead, all gone.

He wiped wetness from his face with the left sleeve of his overcoat, smiling a little now, thinking about how beautifully it had turned out. Orange had come home after all—no real matter where he had been all night—he had come home to answer his phone this morning. And he had suspected nothing wrong, nothing sinister; the news of his wife’s death had sent him into shock, despite the fact they had separated—that had been apparent; no hesitations, no suspicions, he was on his way.

Beautiful, beautiful.

Of course, it was too bad about the woman. It really was, even though she was a whore like all the rest. She had fit so perfectly into the scheme of things, being here at the fishing shack—the perfect lever with which to lure Orange to Duckblind Slough. Without her, things might have been much more difficult. Yes, it was too bad about the woman.

He would have to kill her, nevertheless.

But not until he had made her scream for him the way he had made Alice-slut scream for him on Tuesday night.

It was only right, only fitting—his just reward—after all he had been through. But only after Orange was dead, only when it was all over. That was why he hadn’t killed her before, that was why he had only tied her up without touching her, and put her in that closet.

The limping man looked at his wristwatch, listening to the rain falling on the morass, the wind howling, listening for the sound of an automobile. It wouldn’t be long now, no it wouldn’t be long now. Just a few more minutes, that was all.

And his finger caressed the Magnum’s trigger as if it was the nipple on the breast of Orange’s wife.

Steve Kilduff had almost reached Duckblind Slough before he realized that he had no weapon of any kind.

He sat drenched in the stern of a fourteen-foot, oak-hulled skiff—working the ten-horsepower Johnson outboard, fighting the craft through the roiling black water and through the cold, slanting rain—and told himself that he was a goddamned fool. He should have bought a gun, a knife, something, anything, at Talbert’s, but the son of a bitch with the thick mustache hadn’t wanted to rent him the skiff at all—“you’re crazy to want to put out on the river in this weather, buddy” —and he had had to fabricate a story about his wife (Jesus!) shacking up with a friend in one of the sloughs and wanting to confront them in the act, so to speak. Mustache had smirked and winked at the other one and finally agreed for twenty-five dollars and a signed blank check as a deposit against damage, but Kilduff knew now that if he had tried to buy some kind of weapon the deal would have been flatly off, Mustache wouldn’t have wanted any blood on his clean white hands. As it was, he had wasted fifteen minutes before getting the skiff out on the river, and all he had been thinking about was hurrying; time was growing more and more precious.

Still, there was the fact that he was completely unarmed. Even though he was coming in the back way, by water, with surprise in his favor, there was the chance that he would be seen; and if he was, he had no way to defend himself, he would be naked, a proverbial sitting duck in Duckblind Slough . . .

The shack?

Yes . . . the shack! There would be some kind of weapon there—a fish knife (he remembered having one) or at least a steak knife from the larder. If he could get to the shack, and inside, it might still be all right. He didn’t think the killer would wait inside the cabin because there were, of course, no Marin County Sheriff’s vehicles parked in the vicinity; realizing this, that it could arouse immediate suspicion—especially after the story he had told on the telephone—the killer would want to wait somewhere outside, possibly near the parking clearing, where he could make his move quickly and silently. That was the most logical place, the most logical decision.

But how could you really be sure about the reasoning of an insane mind?

And what about Andrea?

If she was all right, where did he have her? With him? In the shack? The shack seemed likely, because the killer wouldn’t want to take the chance of her somehow giving warning from whatever concealment he had established on the marshland; yes, if she was alive she almost surely had to be in the shack. Then, if he could get there undetected, he could get her out, get her to the skiff, to safety.

If she was still alive . . .

Kilduff forced his mind away from the possibilities, from Andrea, forced it to key on what he was doing and what he was about to do. He peered through the driving rain and saw the entrance to the slough coming up on his right. He maneuvered the skiff in that direction, feeling, down the length of his body, the sharp jolts of the bottom slapskipping across the rushing current. Once he had edged the craft into the narrow mouth, he began immediately to probe the left bank, looking for the small dock set into a miniature tule cove which belonged to Glen Preston—an investment broker from Santa Rosa who owned the nearer of the slough’s three shacks. He would bring the skiff in there, he had decided, moor it to the dock and follow the shoreline on foot to his own cabin on the point; the thick marsh growth would conceal him from anyone at a distance inland—if he was careful.

He almost missed the cove, and he had to swing the skiff in a wide loop to bring it back, cutting the throttle as he did so. The craft settled and began to drift with the strong current, and he fed the Johnson more gas to bring it in close to the jerry-built structure; he cut back again, then goosed the throttle a little, cut back, and goosed a second time. The skiff’s bow was almost touching the forward edge of the dock now. He gathered up the bow line, kicked the engine off, and gained his feet; he took two steps, using the fore seat as leverage for his jump to the dock. The skiff tilted dangerously in the roiling water, but he managed to land safely on the wooden planking. He wound the line around one of the vertical pilings and made it fast, pulling the skiff’s bow up tightly against the edge of the dock to minimize as much as possible the strong threat of damage to the craft.