The Shadow Hunter

fucking
cunt
.”
    He hung up. He had raised his voice at the end. A woman with a small child was staring at him from across the parking lot. He spat at her as he walked back to his car. She hurried away, and her little boy began to cry.

8
    Hickle arrived home shortly after five o’clock. He parked in his assigned space under a carport and went inside.
    The Gainford Arms, one of the oldest buildings in the neighborhood, was a relic of the era before garden apartments became fashionable—a rectangular brick pile, five stories high, with rows of small windows looking out on the dismal street in front and the parking lot in the rear. Iron fire escapes climbed the back of the building. Hickle sometimes sat on the fire escape outside his bedroom window and watched the sunset fade over the towers of more expensive real estate to the west.
    In the lobby he checked his mail. There was a bunch of junk, a gas bill, and a reply from a TV station in Cincinnati. The station regretted to inform him that it had no photos of its former weekend anchorwoman available for public dissemination. It thanked Hickle for his interest.
    He threw away the junk mail and the station’s reply. A couple of months ago he had written to every TV station where Kris had worked, requesting her photo from the archives. So far the responses had all been negative. He supposed it didn’t matter anymore.
    He rode the rattletrap elevator to the fourth floor.
    The elevator was slow. He passed the time reading graffiti on the walls.
    His apartment, number 420, was halfway down the hall. He was fumbling for his keys when he noticed that the door to the apartment next door was open. A large, battered suitcase stood at the threshold. As he watched, a slender, dark-haired woman in a T-shirt and jeans stepped out of the doorway and picked up the suitcase.
    She glanced at him and smiled. “Howdy, neighbor.”
    Hickle nodded.
    She carried the suitcase into her apartment and shut the door. Must be moving in. He wondered who she was.
    Once inside his apartment, he forgot her. This was his private place, his refuge from the world. Appraised objectively, it was a narrow, depressing hole. Cracks veined the plaster walls. There were no curtains anywhere; the windows were covered by sagging blinds, raised and lowered by pull-cords with paper clips at the ends. The carpet was a nauseous shade of gray-green, like mold, and its short-nap fibers had been stamped flat in the heavy-traffic areas.
    Heat was supplied by an upright gas furnace against one wall, with a vent feeding into the bedroom. Nearly all furnishings were provided by the management. In the living room were a battered sofa and armchair, chipped and mismatched end tables, undersized lamps with spotted shades. The landlord had supplied the thirteen-inch TV with rabbit ears—no cable here—but Hickle had purchased the VCR that rested underneath. He had wanted to buy a computer but couldn’t justify the expense, so he used the public terminals at the Goldwyn Hollywood Library on Ivar Avenue a mile away.
    The kitchen area was a tiny alcove, equipped with a gas oven that had not been cleaned since he moved in, and a refrigerator that leaked on the linoleum floor. Two stained potholders hungforlornly from hooks under the cupboard. Empty soda cans and glass jars were assembled on the counter; he redeemed them for nickels at the local Safeway.
    Sharing a wall with the kitchen was the windowless bathroom, smaller than a closet. A ribbon of rust ran down the wall from the medicine cabinet to the sink.
    Finally there was the bedroom. The bed sagged. Some of the mattress springs were broken. One spring had punctured the mattress itself, its jagged end poking up like a weapon. When Hickle had informed the landlord of this problem, he had been told to flip the mattress.
Isn’t it time to get a new bed?
he’d asked quietly. The landlord had answered,
Maybe it’s time for you to get a new apartment. What do you think this is, the Ritz fucking Carlton?
    He had no air-conditioning; when the hot Santa Ana winds blew in from the desert, he sweltered like a beast in a cage. At night he was kept awake by the radios from cars moving in and out of the parking lot, where drug deals had been known to go down. A few months ago a dealer had been fatally shot by a rival.
    The Gainford Arms was a crummy place, yet it offered him privacy. With the blinds pulled and the door locked and chained, he was as free as he could be from