The Shadow Hunter

a flickering glow of red and blue—the domelight of a police car.
    Cops had pulled into the parking lot already. They’d found his car. Hickle reversed course, retreating up the path toward the beach again.
    The flashlight beams were nearer. The pursuers who’d followed him from the Reserve were closing in, following his shoe prints in the sand.
    His every escape route was cut off—except one.
    The lagoon.
    It lay on his left, a dark spread of mudflats and low shrubs bordering two shallow ponds fed by Malibu Creek. Forty acres of wetland, Malibu Lagoon State Park. A nature preserve, a nesting spot for migrant birds…and for him, a place to hide.
    Hickle left the path and started running again. He wondered if he would ever be able to stop.
    “He went into the lagoon.” Pfeiffer stood where the beach met the dirt path, staring down at a confusion of tracks. “He ran for theparking lot, must’ve been spooked by the cop car, came back, and took cover in there.”
    His flashlight beam picked out a zigzag line of shoe prints that vanished among the tall cattails and pickle-weed, their roots sunk in the muddy soil.
    Travis and Carruthers stood beside him, guns and flashlights drawn. “Might be hunkered down,” Carruthers said nervously, “drawing a bead on us right now.”
    “This guy is too rattled to draw a bead on anyone,” Travis answered. “He’s a scared rat on the run.” He looked at Pfeiffer, who had a good eye for a trail. “Can we track him?”
    “Don’t think so. Boss. He must’ve trampled the foliage, but it looks to me like it’s already springing back. And what with storm surges and careless hikers, there’s enough damage to cover whatever tracks might be left.”
    Travis surveyed the ranks of cattails, then pointed at the bridge over Malibu Creek. “He’s heading that way. He’ll go in the water, cross under the bridge, and get out on the opposite side.”
    Carruthers frowned. “How can you be sure?”
    “I know how these guys think. I was right about the car, wasn’t I?” Travis had suggested the possibility that Hickle left his car in the beach parking lot. Carruthers had passed on the alert over his radio, and a CHP unit in the vicinity had taken the call. The highway cops had found Hickle’s Volkswagen Rabbit a couple of minutes ago.
    “You were right,” the deputy conceded. “Well, if the bridge is where our boy is going, we better stop him.” He unclipped the radio from his belt and, via the dispatcher, relayed a message to the CHP officers in the parking lot, reporting that the armed suspect had entered Malibu Lagoon and might attempt to make egress under the Cross Creek bridge. He really did use the words
make egress
. “If those guys are done securing his vehicle,” he told the dispatcher, “we could use ’em on the bridge to keep an eye out.”
    “Good idea,” Travis said when the transmission was over.
    “Yeah, if you’re right about where he’s headed. If you’re wrong, then we’re watching the bridge while he circles back to the beach and hightails it out of here in any of three directions.”
    “So how do we proceed?” Travis asked. He had to defer to Carruthers, because the kid was the only law enforcement officer on the scene.
    “We split up, cover the whole lagoon. If he’s hiding in there, we flush him out.”
    Travis nodded. “It’s a plan.”
    “Who checks out the creek under the bridge?” Pfeiffer asked.
    “I do.” Travis shrugged. “My theory, so I get to prove it.”
    “Watch your back,” Carruthers said.
    Travis sketched him a wave and headed into the lagoon, holding his flashlight down at his side to conceal its beam.

37
    Hickle crawled through the ranks of high, waving cattails, dragging the duffel. His elbows and knees were slimed with mud. Gnats buzzed at his ears. Twice he had blundered close to nesting waterfowl, which had flapped their wings at him, squawking angrily. He didn’t know if his pursuers could pinpoint his position from the noise.
    The ground turned softer. He smelled brackish water. One of the ponds was just ahead. He scrambled forward, sloshing up thick clumps of ooze, and finally burst out of the cattail forest into the open space at the edge of the estuary.
    The pond joined the mouth of Malibu Creek, which flowed under the bridge that was part of the coast highway. Bridge traffic flashed past with a rattle and hum.
    On the far side of the highway no one would be looking for him.
    This thought impelled