'No? What have you ever done, besides show up with a bulge in your trousers?'
'I've done more than you know. More than you need to know. Now where are my goddamned shoes?
I have to get-' Home, he almost said but caught himself.
'I have to get going.'
The time was almost ten o'clock, and it would take him an hour to get to Malibu from here. Kris would arrive at the beach house around midnight, and he wanted to be there well before she arrived. It had been awkward the other night, when he had come home later than usual, and she had already been there.
She had asked him questions then-questions about his imaginary drive up the coast, and about how restless and agitated he seemed. Of course she suspected him. It was obvious now, though at the time he hadn't allowed himself to see it.
Well, it didn't matter. It was too late for her, no matter what she suspected. Things were moving quickly to a conclusion, and soon everything would be resolved once and for all.
He found the shoes in one of the dark corners the lamplight couldn't reach. When he bent to slip them on, involuntarily he grunted, an old-man noise. He hated making noises like that.
Amanda was his ticket to youth. Or if not Amanda, then some new companion, younger still and lacking any tattoos.
But not Kris. Kris was the past. Kris was a dead weight dragging him down.
He had to be rid of her. He would be.
Soon.
After Hickle left, Abby opened her bedroom closet.
The VCR and audio deck had been recording continually, but the TV was off, the audio console muted.
She turned on the monitor and speakers, then sat on the floor in a sloppy lotus position, resting her back against the bed, watching the monitor. She saw Hickle pace his living room before fixing a meal in the kitchen. She wondered if eating was a response to stress or if he simply hadn't had enough dinner.
He ate standing in the kitchen, almost out of camera range. When he was done, he left the cookware in the sink and went into the bedroom.
She checked her watch. It was 9:40. Kris's newscast would start in twenty minutes. She assumed he wouldn't miss it.
But he didn't emerge from the bedroom. The surveillance microphone picked up no sounds of activity.
She waited, feeling a new, prickling intimation of trouble.
Another glance at her watch. Nearly ten o'clock. Still no sign of him.
Strange. Ominous. If any part of his daily routine was sacrosanct, it was the ritual of watching Kris at six and ten.
'What's going on, Raymond?' she whispered.
'What are you up to?'
She increased the volume. Dimly she made out a sound, something low and regular and ongoing, hard to identify. A murmur.
Was he running an electric fan? She didn't remember seeing one.
Anyway, this sound had a different quality than a motor noise. It wavered, fluctuated.
She leaned close to the speakers, maxing out the volume, but the noise floor-the ambient hiss that was part of any acoustical environment-rose to a high, steady sizzle, and the murmuring sound was barely more distinct than before.
'He fastened on Kris because she represents his feminine ideal, what he calls the look. She exists in Hickle's mind as a mature, perfected version of Jill Dahlbeck, who was also a blue-eyed blonde. But this time he's chosen a woman unlike Jill in every other respect-a celebrity, married, rich, famous, older than he is. He wants her to be unattainable. He wants to pursue her and fail, because his humiliation will give him the excuse he needs to destroy her and destroy himself ', Supine on the bed, Hickle listened. Pain cramped his belly. Slowly he rolled on his side and contracted into a fetal curl.
'What is Kris Barwood to him, really? She's his fantasy lover, his dream wife, and not to get all Freudian about it, his mother too-an older authority figure who has a home and a husband. She represents all aspects of the female presence in the world, from erotic temptress to domestic companion to nurturing parent.
And she's big enough to play all these roles-larger than life, in fact.
Her face appears on TV sets, billboards, magazine covers. She's everywhere. She is Woman. Lashing out at her, Hickle will strike at the archetype of the other sex, the sex he hates and fears. No vive la difference for him.'
Abby's voice, coolly analytical, dissecting him. No, vivisecting. That was when the surgery was performed on a living body. Sometimes it was done without anesthesia-nothing to deaden the pain.
'He has zero concern for Kris as a human being, because to him she's not a human being, only a symbol.
Hickle lives in a world of symbols and images and fantasies, connected to society only through the TV set and People magazine. I guess he's not much different from a lot of us these days, and I might even feel sorry for him if he didn't pose a measurable threat…'
Feel sorry for him. Feel sorry.
Who was she to say that, to pass judgment on him?
She was the one who ought to be ashamed of who she was and what she did.
She was the one who made up stories about a failed relationship and bumped into him in the laundry room and got him to talk about the TV news. She was the one who burrowed her way into other people's lives and poked around and uncovered secrets. She was a liar and a snitch and a sneak and a conniving little whore, and what she deserved what she deserved… The shotgun.
That was what she deserved, yes, the shotgun, absolutely.
Hickle sat up, ignoring the cassette as it continued to play She was a goddamned bitch. She had deceived him, manipulated him, served as a tool of his enemies, spied on him and reported to Kris. And she had done it so skillfully that if not for his friend Jackbnimble, he might never have known.
His anonymous informer hiding behind a nursery rhyme name was the only person he could trust, the only person who had been honest with him all along.
Every item of information Jack had passed on had proven true. Every word of advice had been sound.
And he had told Hickle what to do, hadn't he? Hadn't he?
First Abby, then Kris.
The two of them-dead.
Now, without further delay.
He got off the bed and unlocked his bedroom closet.
He took out his duffel bag and unzipped it, removing the shotgun. He checked to be sure it was loaded.
Blammo. No more Abby.
Blammo. No more Kris.
Everything would come to its proper end tonight.
He would win, and they would lose.
The tape kept playing, Abby's voice a whisper amid the folds of his bedspread, but he didn't need to hear it anymore.
To isolate the mystery noise, Abby first used the low pass filter on her audio deck to remove all frequencies higher than eight kilohertz. This cut off part of the hiss but not enough. She fiddled with the ten band graphic equalizer, pulling down the sliders on the higher frequencies while boosting the midrange tones.
She tried to minimize the hiss without losing the murmur. It was hard.
The two sounds were at similar frequencies. But as she made fine adjustments, the murmur came through a bit more sharply, and she identified it as a voice.
Was Hickle muttering to himself under his breath?
She didn't think so. Maybe he was listening to the radio, but she didn't recall seeing a radio in his bedroom.
Then she heard new noises. She paused, kneeling on the floor alongside the console, her ear close to the speakers.
