The Stalker

tonelessly.

“Listen,” Kilduff said, “all I’m trying to say is that I can’t accept the idea that Helgerman is going around picking us off one by one because we robbed an armored car eleven years ago and he ended up on disability. If you believe it, then you can do what you want.”

“But you’re not going to do anything.”

“No,” Kilduff said. “I’m not.”

Without looking at him, Drexel said to Conradin, “And what about you, Jim? Is that your position, too?”

“I don’t know,” Conradin answered slowly. “I don’t know what my position is.”

“All right, then,” Drexel said. Abruptly, he got on his feet. “You’re both damned fools, curled up in your secure, complacent little worlds like a couple of foetuses and you think you’re inviolate, you think nothing out of the past can reach you any more. Well, all right. I don’t much care what happens to either one of you, but I care about my own neck and I’m going to do something.” He took two small white business cards from the inside pocket of his jacket and threw them on the coffee table. “If you decide to face reality, you can reach me at either of the numbers on those cards.”

Without waiting for either of the others to say anything, he crossed to the door and went out, slamming it shut behind him.

Kilduff and Conradin sat in unbroken silence for several moments, a pair of sculpted figures in some impressionistic museum exhibit. At length, Kilduff said quietly, “It’s impossible. You know that, too, don’t you, Jim? The whole idea of it is inconceivable.”

Conradin gave a slow, tremulous sigh. “Is it?” he asked. “Is it really, Steve? Or are we too afraid to admit the chance of it to ourselves, like Drexel said? Are we too afraid that we wouldn’t be able to cope with it if it were somehow true?”

“No,” Kilduff said emphatically.

Conradin picked up one of the white cards from the coffee table and put it into the pocket of his sheepskin jacket. “I’d better be going now.”

“What are you planning to do?”

“Nothing,” Conradin answered. He started toward the door, and Kilduff stood and followed him there. “Except maybe say a prayer that Drexel is wrong and you’re right.”

“I’m right,” Kilduff said.

“I hope to God you are.”

“We don’t have anything to worry about.”

“Don’t we?” Conradin asked, opening the door.

“No, nothing.”

“Except maybe ourselves,” Conradin said. “Good night, Steve.” And he was gone.

Except maybe ourselves.

Kilduff shut the door and returned to the living room and sat in the chair again, he seemed to be doing a lot of sitting in that chair. He sat there and stared at nothing and thought about Drexel and what he had said, and Conradin and what he had said, and about Cavalacci and Wykopf and Beauchamp lying in cold dark boxes beneath the cold dark earth; he thought about them for a long, long time ...

... And Andrea came to him in the darkness of the tiny cottage bedroom, nude and unashamed, an alabaster naiad haloed in sweet innocence, diminutive and Elysian and proud in the so very pale honeymoon- shine drifting in through the minute apertures in the bamboo blinds. She came to him with her arms held wide and her mouth scrubbed free of rouge, her eyes lidded with unaffected, loving sensuality, her breasts small-white and tense, the nipples and aureoles fine exquisite black diamonds, the melanoid triangle of her pubic hair a swath of the softest velvet demurely hiding the pure still waters beneath. She came to him with his name on her lips and lay beside him on the conjugal bed, breathing warm honey against his neck, warm honey, and there was the taste of her, feel of her, an aching of acute pleasure in his genitals. He was moving within her now—strange, there seemed to have been no virginal obstruction, no innocence, strange. And then he was saying her name over and over, “Andreal Andrea! Andrea!” moving faster and faster and faster but she began to dissolve beside him, no no no, began to fade into a nebulous shadow, no no, and then she was gone, no, gone, and he was alone again, alone not in the tiny cottage bedroom with its honeymoon-shine but alone in a dank, fetid cave, so very dark, and the smell of millenniums of decay was in his nostrils. He shrank into a corner and felt the viscid slime of subterranean stone against his nude body, and then from across that malefic cavern there came a movement, a slithering of something unimaginable, a foul sucking, crawling sound, and he shrank deeper into the corner, terrified, seeing a fulvous pinpoint of light appear before him, gradually expanding, illuminating a shape within the hazy glow, a shape which became a faceless, monstrous thing of such unspeakable horror that he opened his mouth and began to scream with his very soul, for the nameless faceless thing was coming nearer, coming closer, reaching for him with an extremity that dripped putrefaction . . .

Kilduff came up out of the chair in a single convulsive leap, standing with his heart plunging impossibly in his chest and the length of his body encased in a thick mucilaginous sweat. At first he was still in that cave, still cowering just beyond the reach of the horror in his dream; but then his mind began to clear and the trembling of his body ceased and he realized it had been only that: a dream. His eyes moved upward to the sunburst clock on the wall: twelve-fifteen. He had mesmerized himself, sitting in the chair, into the nether world of the subconscious.

He went into the kitchen and drank a glass of ice water from the refrigerator; his throat was raw and parched. In the bedroom he undressed and slid between the clean, cool sheets of the bed and closed his eyes. And when fatigue brought sleep flooding over him finally—

Andrea came to him in the darkness of the tiny cottage bedroom ...

6

The limping man left the Graceling Hotel at eleven o’clock Sunday morning. He walked through heavy damp fog—one hand firmly grasping the handle of the American Tourister briefcase, and suspended over his right shoulder by a thin carrying strap, a cracked vinyl case containing an inexpensive pair of Japanese-manufactured binoculars— to the parking garage on Geary, where he had left the rented Mustang the previous afternoon.

He presented his claim check to the attendant on duty, and when the car was brought down from one of the upper floors, he locked the briefcase and the binoculars inside the trunk. Moments later, he drove up to the street.

It was still early, of course, he knew that—there really was nothing he could do until after dark—but leaving now assured him of plenty of time to select a place of concealment from which he could observe Yellow’s movements. Besides, Yellow’s moment was close at hand now—very close, perhaps as close as that very night— and the limping man was possessed with a certain nervous excitement, the same excitement he had experienced prior to Red and Gray and Blue. He could not simply remain in his hotel room for the entire day.

With his right hand he manipulated the dials on the automobile radio until he found a station which played old standards. He turned up the volume, thinking of Yellow as he drove with cautious rapidity through the chill, mist- shrouded San Francisco morning.

In the shack in Duckblind Slough, Andrea Kilduff sat bundled in her wool jacket at the wooden half-table, drinking a cup of hot black coffee. She had not slept well at all—had lain shivering beneath the heavy blankets on the Army cot, listening to that damned wind howl across the morass and across the expanse of the slough like the collective wail of souls in purgatory—and she felt chilled and cross and very much alone on this Sunday morning.

She had cleaned the shack from top to bottom the previous day, going over everything with mop and broom and dustcloth and soapy water at least twice, putting herself into the chore with an almost mechanized fervency, making it last until day had receded into night. As a result, the two-room interior was spotlessly fastidious—almost, she thought, surveying now her labor in the light of morning, comfortably livable. Almost.