The Hidden

Minutes passed … what seemed like minutes. She crouched against the tree, wet to the skin and shivering, her toes numb inside her sodden running shoes. Fighting to keep the phobic terror from overwhelming her. The lane … where was the lane? It had to be close on her right. But if she went out there into the open and he was nearby, she might stumble right into him—

The torch beam stabbed on again.

Shelby saw it dimly, nowhere close … no longer aimed into the woods, she thought. She sucked in a moist breath, groped around on the other side of the pine; nearly tripped again as she stumbled past another looming tree trunk. Where was the lane? She couldn’t be more than a few yards away from it …

Two more steps, and her foot splashed down into the runoff stream.

She waded through, felt the blacktop under her feet again. Out in the open again. The rain seemed to be slackening; the sting of the wind wasn’t as strong now. But she still couldn’t see anything except for the whitish shaft off to her right, pointed away from where she stood. Unless she’d lost her bearings completely he was back near where the cruiser was parked—

Another light, a second light cut through the darkness.

She blinked, blinked again. Definitely two flashlights now, one shaft bobbing up and down and side to side, the other stationary for a few seconds, then moving toward the other until they converged. Two men, both on the blacktop beyond the cruiser. Spectral shadow shapes, each pinned by the other’s light. Thirty or forty yards away, too far for Shelby to see their faces through the rain.

She edged out farther onto the lane, moving sideways, feeling her way along. Still a long way to the highway … too far to try walking or even crawling blind along the blacktop. But what else could she do?

The two figures remained motionless up there, outlined by each other’s torches. Talking, arguing—one of the lights kept moving in an agitated fashion. Their positions were such that she could no longer tell which was the newcomer, which was the one who’d been stalking her.

She couldn’t keep standing there. Move!

The estate fence, she thought.

It paralleled the lane for part of the remaining distance to the highway, she remembered, with only a few yards of separation on that side. Tall grass, an occasional tree, some shrubbery, otherwise nothing between fence and blacktop until the lane made a sharp inland bend. If she could get over there without being seen, she could pull herself along the boards … blind travel by the braille method.

The quickest way to the fence was a crab scuttle on all fours; if she tried to get there standing up she was liable to lose her footing, blunder into something, make noise that might carry over the diminishing wind. She dropped and began to crawl, weight on her forearms, hands brushing through the storm debris. Her cold fingers tingled, anticipating the end of the blacktop and the touch of the high, wet grass.

Sudden flare like a camera flash.

Faint popping noise.

One of the flashlight beams jerked skyward, pinwheeling, then dropped straight down and extended outward—an elongated yellow streak along the littered surface of the lane.

Gunshot! One of them shot the other!

Shock held Shelby rooted for two or three seconds. Urgency released her, propelled her forward, scrabbling at the lane now, her head turned toward the two figures. The one still standing swept his light over the motionless form of the other, over the pavement nearby; then the beam foreshortened as he bent or knelt, probably to make sure the one he’d shot was dead.

He took his victim’s torch, too: One bolt of light reappeared, followed by a second. Both swung around in Shelby’s direction, then steadied into wavering parallel lines.

Before either one found her she was off the lane and into the high grass, wiggling through it flat on her belly, her arms making awkward swimming motions in front of her. One sweeping hand encountered an obstruction; she detoured around it, but so close that part of whatever it was plucked at her raincoat, cut painfully into her cheek.

The flash beams separated, one probing the woods, the other swaying back and forth along the lane. Coming closer.

The fence, it couldn’t be much farther—

There! One hand touched it, then her forehead bumped solidly against one of the vertical stakes.

The nearest light flicked away from the blacktop, hunting through the grass not more than a few feet behind her.

She found a chink between two boards, used it to lift onto her feet. Hung there for a moment to steady herself. The direction she wanted to go was where the light was; she had no choice but to pull herself away from it. Three steps, four, and all at once she was out of the grass and onto pavement again. But she hadn’t lost the fence; one of her nails tore on the splintery wood—

No, not on wood … on a rounded projection of metal. Her gloved fingers traced over it, identified it.

Hinge, gate hinge.

The entrance gates. If she could get over them …

The one light was almost directly behind her.

She groped ahead of it to the joining of the two gate halves, searching for a foothold so she could make the climb. But in the next second she discovered she didn’t need a foothold, she didn’t need to climb—the halves were joined together but not locked.

She yanked them apart and plunged through.

T W E N T Y - T H R E E

IT’S TRUE,” CLAIRE LOMAX said. Her eyes were open now, rounded, the pupils dilated and the whites that sickly clabbered-milk color in the fireglow. “I don’t care who knows it now, I don’t care what the police do to me if I live through tonight. It wasn’t the Coastline Killer who shot Gene, it was Brian. And not down the coast, in our own living room. Brian, Brian, Brian!”

A sick metallic taste had formed in Macklin’s mouth. He said, “For God’s sake, why?”

“He blamed it all on me,” she said. Talking to herself now as much as to him. Her gaze had shifted away, was fixed on something only she could see. “But it’s not my fault, it’s his, his. None of it would’ve happened if he hadn’t started treating me like a … a toy he was tired of, a piece of useless baggage. I was faithful to him until then … I swear I was, I never even looked at another man. But you can only stand so much. That’s why I had the affair, to get back at him.”

“Decker? He’s the one you had the affair with?”

“I didn’t have any feelings for Gene,” she said, “I never even liked him very much. But he’d been after me for a long time and finally I just … I let it happen. Twice, that’s all. Only twice.”

“How’d your husband find out?”

“I don’t know how he found out … something Gene said, the way he kept looking at me with that smarmy smile of his … I don’t know. But Brian knew and he kept on hitting me until I admitted it. He wouldn’t listen when I told him I was sorry, just hit me some more, then sat up most of the night drinking and brooding. Paula must’ve heard us, that’s why she left. Brian accused Gene after she was gone. Gene laughed at him and Brian hates to be laughed it, he went and got that fucking gun of his, but Gene the stupid drunken fool kept right on laughing. You won’t use that, he said, quit playing Dirty Harry, he said, and Brian … Brian …”

She shuddered, hugged herself before she went on. “Afterward he put the … the body in Gene’s car and made me take it down to that rest area so it would look like the Coastline Killer did it. All that way with Gene dead beside me and Brian just ahead so I couldn’t get away, so he could bring me back here and beat on me some more.”

It had been Claire driving Decker’s Porsche Monday afternoon, grinding the gears because she was scared or unused to a stick shift. He hadn’t heard the SUV because Lomax, leading, had already passed by.

“Threatened to kill me too if I didn’t do what he told me, if I didn’t lie to the police when they came. But he’s going to do it anyway—I knew he would, I knew it. He’s crazy, he’ll kill anybody who gets in his way …”

Shelby!

What if Lomax went all the way to the highway and she’s still there and he finds her, tries to stop her from