The Shadow Hunter

door, opening in the other room. He was home.
    With a last effort she wedged the screen in place.
    Footsteps inside the apartment. He was coming into the bedroom, probably to put away the duffel bag.
    She ducked low. No time to crawl away. She hugged the wall.
    The blind swung and rattled in the bedroom window. Hickle would surely notice. He did. She heard the complaint of the floorboards as he approached to investigate. She unclasped her purse and curled her finger over the Smith’s trigger.
    The blind opened, brightening the fire escape. She pressed close to the brick wall under the windowsill. Across the iron railing loomed Hickle’s shadow, large and misshapen. His head tilted at a funny angle. He was peering out, surveying the night.
    If he glanced down, he would see her. She waited, not breathing. She thought again of what a shotgun shell would do to her at this distance. Like a grenade going off in her chest.
    He might have spotted her already. Even now he might be removing the shotgun from his duffel, preparing to fire, while she huddled like a child playing hide-and-seek. It took all her willpower to remain motionless.
    His shadow shifted. She saw a movement of his arm as if lifting the shotgun—
    Then there was a metallic clatter and a fall of darkness, and she realized he had merely reached up to pull the cord that closed the blind.
    The tramp of his footsteps retreated. He had not seen her. He must have concluded that a gust of wind had set the blind swaying.
    Close one, Abby thought. Kind of thing that really gets the blood circulating.
    She slipped inside her apartment, then spent the next few minutes reacquainting herself with the experience of being alive and intact and ambulatory. Her throat was dry, and the back of her neck was stiff with tension.
    When she checked the current programming on the closed-circuit TV monitor, she saw Hickle pacing his living room. He was agitated. He was angry.
    She dialed up the volume, trying to catch the words he muttered under his breath. “Can’t trust anybody,” he was saying. “Can’t trust him…or her. Can’t trust either one.”
    Abby didn’t like the sound of that.

21
    Travis stepped out of the shower, throwing on his robe, and heard the chime of his doorbell.
    Seven thirty in the morning seemed early for visitors. He rarely had company anyway. He lived on a twisting dead-end street in the Hollywood Hills, in a ranch-style house cantilevered over a canyon—a good house for entertaining, but he preferred to pass his time alone.
    He wedged moccasins onto his feet and padded down the hall, pausing in an alcove before a video monitor that displayed a view of the front steps. Abby stood there in a rumpled blouse and jeans. His first thought was that she looked different. There was something about her expression, something hard to define. Then he realized it was the first time he had ever seen her looking scared.
    He shut off his alarm system and opened the door. “Hey,” he said.
    “Hey.”
    She entered without another word. She hardly seemed to see him at all. “Everything okay?” Travis asked, knowing it wasn’t.
    “Not exactly.” Abby sidestepped into the living room and tossed her purse on the sofa but didn’t sit. “Hickle may have an accomplice.”
    “Accomplice?”
    “Or an informant. I don’t know for sure. Actually I don’t know anything for sure.” She paced, her Nikes squeaking on the hardwood floor. Sunbeams slanting through the deck’s glass doors lit her trim, nervous figure.
    She had been to the house many times over the years, though rarely without calling first. Travis was always struck by how well she fit in here. His decor was sleek and functional in a starkly modernistic style, and Abby suited it—Abby with her slender legs and narrow waist and supple, elongated neck.
    “I think you should sit down,” Travis said quietly. “You seem a little stressed.”
    She ignored him. “I should be stressed. I was up half the night. Couldn’t go to sleep until Hickle did. I watched him on the monitor till finally he nodded off after three a.m.”
    “Okay, slow down and take it from the beginning.”
    She let out a rush of breath and made an effort to speak calmly. “Hickle got a phone call last night around eight thirty. He left his apartment, taking his shotgun, and drove off. I lost him. I don’t know where he went or who he might have made contact with. When he returned, he was obviously upset. The surveillance mikes