The Shadow Hunter

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 lowpass 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