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:
Boat Launching Boat Rentals
TALBERT’S-ON-THE-RIVER
Winter Storage Live Bait
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.
18
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
