The Shadow Hunter

kitten could have done more damage.
    Again she tried to raise the window. Still no luck. Weakness overtook her, and she lowered her head, coughing. God, she was tired. She wanted to sleep…
    Plenty of time for rest later. Eternal rest, if it worked out that way. At the moment she was still alive. She would not waste whatever time she had left. The explosion could come at any moment. She had to dilute the fumes with clean air, or she was dead. Open the damn window. Do it now.
    She put everything she had into a final effort, pushing upward with her last strength, and the window cracked open a few inches.
    Success.
    She rested her head on the sill and tried to draw a breath, but her throat had closed. There was air coming in, pure air, and she couldn’t breathe it. What the hell was wrong with her lungs?
    But it was simple, really. Her vision was graying out, and her ears hummed, and she was going to lose consciousness. She had driven herself to the point of collapse, and although she had forced the window ajar, it was not enough to save her.
    “Nice try, girlfriend,” Abby murmured, “but no lollipop.”
    The floor rushed up, and she fell away into the dark.

32
    “…vehicle is a VW Rabbit wanted for felony evading, license plate…”
    Wyatt heard the call on his radio as he cruised back to Hollywood Station after supervising a crime scene on Highland—drugstore hold-up, nobody injured. The suspect had taken a hundred bucks out of the cash register and three packages of Trojans. Apparently he had a big night planned.
    It was nothing major, and Wyatt had passed the time pondering what to do about Abby. He had decided on a confrontation tomorrow. Call her, arrange a lunch meeting, then demand to know what she’d gotten involved in. And once she told him? He didn’t know. His planning hadn’t made it that far.
    At 11:40 he had been relieved of responsibility for the crime scene by the arrival of a bored detective, accompanied by an equally bored forensic photographer. Now he was driving down Melrose, listening to the dispatcher report a CHP stop gone awry on the Santa Monica Freeway, miles away, twenty minutes ago. He wondered why the BOLO was going out over a Hollywood Division frequency. As he turned onto Wilcox, he got his answer.
    “…registered to a Hollywood resident…”
    That explained it. There was a fair chance the suspect would be stupid enough to return home. Patrol units in Hollywood were advised to watch for a VW Rabbit with the reported plate number, and to keep an eye on the suspect’s residence.
    “…address, 1554 Gainford…”
    Wyatt stiffened. The Gainford Arms.
    “…name, Hickle, Raymond, that’s Henry Ida Charles…”
    It was Hickle who had been speeding on the freeway, Hickle who had fled a traffic stop. Wyatt had no idea what this might mean, except that Hickle was out of control and dangerous and crazed.
    “Abby,” he breathed, a cold feeling in his gut.
    The time was 11:48 when Hickle abandoned his car in a small beach parking lot off Pacific Coast Highway. He’d made it. He was in Malibu, on Kris’s territory. The police had not intercepted him.
    The access path to the public beach was never closed. He lugged his duffel down the dirt trail, then headed into the woods that bordered Malibu Reserve, his flashlight probing the foliage.
    Midnight was close, the time frame tight, but he no longer feared failure. He was destined to succeed. He could feel it. Kris had messed with him, and she would pay, as Abby had paid.
    Thinking of Abby made him wonder if she was dead yet. Fifty minutes had passed since he’d released the gas. By now she must have been asphyxiated or blown to bits.
    Now it was Kris’s turn to die.
    Not far from the Reserve’s perimeter fence, he located the mouth of the drainage pipe. The pipe was two feet in diameter, jutting out of a mound of earth under a eucalyptus tree. There was a small brackish pond nearby, and evidently the pipe had been laid down as a flood control device, its purpose to channel overflow from the pond away from the path and into the ravine that ran through the fenced compound.
    On hands and knees Hickle bellied inside, dragging the duffel after him. The bag got stuck in the opening, and briefly he was afraid it wouldn’t fit—he’d never brought weapons on his previous outings, only the Polaroid camera—but when he turned the bag sideways it slipped through. He crawled over leaves, twigs, candy wrappers, and other detritus