The Shadow Hunter

shotgun’s muzzle. Absurdly it made her want to sneeze. “Could you put that thing down? I think I’m allergic to it.
    He took a step away from the bed, shifting his grip to hold the gun by the barrel, not the stock.
    “Okay,” she said. “It looks like you found me out.”
    “Looks like.”
    “You’re smart, Raymond. I underestimated you.”
    “Yes.”
    “Now that I know how smart you are, things will be different. I can be straight with you.”
    “Go ahead, tell me what’s going on.”
    “I will. I’ll tell you everything.” She was starting to get matters under control. She’d had a bad moment there, but it had passed, and now she had options, possibilities.
    She sat up, choosing her next words with care, and Hickle slammed down the shotgun on the back of her skull.

29
    Abby fell off the bed and collapsed on the floor. She shuddered once, then did not move again.
    “No more lies, whore,” Hickle whispered.
    He stood over her, wary of a trick. She could be playing possum, though he doubted it. The shotgun’s buttstock had clipped her pretty good. Even so, he kept a tight grip on the gun as he crouched beside her and peeled back one eyelid. Her eye was rolled up in the socket. She was out cold. Breathing, though. Still alive. Well, not for long.
    She’d been right about firing the shotgun in a crowded apartment building. Had he been thinking more clearly, he would have recognized the danger himself. But there were other ways to kill her. Cut her throat with a kitchen knife. Yes, that would do it. He was halfway out of the bedroom before he remembered that all her eating utensils were plastic.
    Break her neck, then. He knelt and gripped her by the throat, tensing for a lethal twist of his wrists, but something in him recoiled from the hands-on intimacy of the act. There had to be another way.
    Suffocation. He could smother her.
    He turned toward the bed, reaching for a pillow, then stopped.
    Beyond the bed was the closet, the door standing open, a cache of electronic gear inside. In the frenzy of his attack and its aftermath, he hadn’t even noticed the stuff.
    It seemed odd to have audiovisual equipment set up in a closet, and what was odder still was that the image on the TV screen was his own living room.
    How could his living room be on TV?
    Then he understood that he was looking at a closed circuit broadcast. The TV must be receiving a signal from a camera Abby had planted.
    But that meant she had been inside his apartment. She had broken in, bugged the place. Then she had sat and watched him when he thought he was alone.
    “Watched me,” he breathed. It seemed horrible, obscene.
    Stiffly he approached the closet. Beneath the TV was a VCR, recording the live video feed. Next to it, an audio console, tape reels turning. When he’d talked to himself as he often did, she must have recorded his voice. She knew his every thought. She hadn’t simply invaded his life in the obvious ways. She had intruded on his most private moments, his solitude. She had watched and listened and recorded it all.
    A new thought struck him. An awful thought. When exactly had she been in his apartment? Before or after he’d sneaked into the laundry room? Because if it was after…
    Then she would have seen the thing he stole out of the washing machine. The white high-cut panties that had once been worn on her body. Her panties.
    She would have seen them, would have known he’d taken them, would have guessed what he wanted them for.
    Or maybe…maybe she didn’t need to guess. Maybe she had set up a camera in his bedroom as well.
    Maybe it had an infrared lens, so she could watch him in the dark.
    Had she watched him late last night, when he had taken those panties into his bed, when he had used them the way other men used pornographic pictures? Had she seen that? Had she gotten it on tape?
    Rage seized him.
    He pawed at the VCR’s Eject button, cracked open the cassette, pulled ribbons of tape off the spool in tangled handfuls.
    Maybe she had recorded the sound effects too—the creaking of his mattress springs, the low shudders of his breath.
    He wrenched loose the audiotape reels, unwinding them, spewing tape everywhere until the reels dropped from his shaking hands.
    Useless. He’d accomplished nothing. Somebody could wind the tape back onto the spools and view the video, hear the sound.
    Objectively he knew it didn’t matter what anybody saw or heard. There was a good chance he would die in his assault