The Stalker

13

11:28.

Larry Drexel poured himself another glass of aquardiente, his third since he had arrived home, and resumed his restless pacing of the parlor’s Navajo rug. The pallid light from a lantern-style wall lamp made his face look grotesquely demoniac, like a sculpted burlesque of an entity from Dante’s Inferno.

Goddamn it! he thought, drinking from the glass, moving with long, fluid strides the width of the darkly somber room, turning at the fieldstone fireplace, retracing his steps, turning again. Where the hell was Kilduff? Sure, he’d told him eleven-thirty, but you’d think the bastard would—

Euphonious chimes echoed through the darkened house.

Reflexively, Drexel’s hand went to the .38-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver in the side pocket of his suit coat. He touched the grip, and the feel of the cold, rough metal seemed to relax him. He took a slow breath, thinking: Easy, now, it’s Kilduff and it’s about time. But he went slowly, silently, along the front hallway and drew back the tiny round cover which guarded the peephole in the arched wooden door —no use in taking chances even if it was Kilduff, especially now...

But it wasn’t Kilduff.

It was Fran Varner.

He pulled open the door, his nostrils flaring with sudden anger and splotches of crimson flecking his smooth cheeks. “What the hell are you doing here? I thought I told you I didn’t want to see you tonight.”

She took off her plastic rain hat and shook her brown hair. Her eyes probed his imperiously. “I have to tell you something, Larry,” she said softly. “And it simply can’t wait.”

“The hell it can’t! Go home, Fran...”

“No,” she said. She held the rain hat clutched tightly in both hands, twisting it between her long, slim fingers. “No, I won’t go home until I’ve talked to you.”

Drexel thought: You silly, clinging bitch. “Listen,” he said, “I can’t talk to you now. Don’t you understand that?”

“Why not, Larry?”

“I’m expecting someone.”

“Who?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“Another girl?”

“Oh, Jesus!”

“Is it, Larry?”

“No, it’s not another girl. It’s business!”

“At eleven-thirty at night?”

He wanted to hit her. He wanted to lash out with his balled fist and knock her flat on her soft round little ass, teach her not to come around here bugging him like this when he was caught up in something so damned big, what the hell was the matter with these chicks? But he didn’t hit her. He didn’t hit her because Kilduff was going to arrive here any minute now and he had to get rid of her before then and he couldn’t get rid of her if she was lying on her ass on the fieldstone walk.

He said in a cold, deliberate voice, “Fran, I’m telling you, if you know what’s good for you, go home. Get out of here and go home right now. I mean it, Fran.”

There was hurt and pain deep in her amber eyes now, as if she had just fully accepted a great, sad truth—not that he gave a crap what it was; all he cared about at that moment was getting rid of her. He thought she would obey his command, expected it with that hurt and pain in her eyes, but she caught him off guard. She said, “I’m coming inside, Larry,” and before he could react she was past him and walking down the hallway into the parlor.

Rage welled up inside Drexel until the blood pounding in his ears sounded like a distorted drum-roll. He slammed the door savagely and went in after her. She had turned and was standing in front of the scrolled desk, her plastic raincoat dripping crystalline beads of water onto the rug. She waited until he had taken two steps into the parlor from the hallway, his eyes blazing, and then she said in a loud, clear voice, without preamble, “I’m pregnant, Larry. I’m going to have your baby.”

It stopped him. It stopped him cold. His mouth opened, and then closed, and he stood there staring at her.

You bitch! he thought finally. I ought to kill you, you stupid little bitch!

11:28.

The street was half a block long, and ended abruptly in a white city barricade that stretched most of its width. To the left, facing in, was a densely grown area—a miniature wilderness—containing oak and eucalyptus and high grass and wild blackberry. To the right was a neatly trimmed green box hedge, jutting some ten feet thickly skyward, which fenced the property of some unseen and grandiose dwelling. Beyond the barricade was a short expanse of deciduous turf that formed a gradual down-slope leading to a narrow, meandering creek below.

The limping man parked the rented Mustang nose-up to the white barricade, shut off the lights and the engine, removed the key from the ignition, and stepped quickly out into the thinly falling drizzle. He went around to the rear and opened the trunk. He put on a pair of black pigskin gloves and worked swiftly there for something less than two minutes, darting occasional looks over his shoulder at the cross street, seeing nothing. Finally, he lifted from the trunk the double-strength shopping bag. He closed the deck lid and, carrying the shopping bag in the bend of his left arm, moved rapidly around the near end of the barricade.

He began to climb slowly, cautiously, down the slippery bank, with his free hand holding onto bushes that grew there, digging the heels of his canvas shoes into the spongy ground. After a time, he stood on the sharp stones at the edge of the creek bed. In its center, a narrow, shallow stream of rain water rushed past; the creek had been dry when he had last seen it, six weeks earlier.

The limping man rested there for a moment, and then started off to his left, walking slowly, cradling the shopping bag in close to his body. It was very dark. The sky was the color of soot, and the trees and bushes limned against it were little more than formless black shadows. He paused once, listening. There was no sound, save for the temperate fall of the rain and the sibilant rush of the creek water. The night was wet and black and silent around him—a huge enveloping blanket—and he was safely hidden within its folds. He moved forward again.

When he reached the half-upright log imbedded in the soil at the creek’s edge, he stopped and peered across to the opposite side. He could see the wall there, a solid black line atop the bank, and he nodded once and began to pick his way gingerly across the bed. It was littered with leaves and twigs and mud and various bits and pieces of garbage carried and deposited by the accelerated rain water. The footing was treacherous, but he reached the opposite bank without incident.

He began to work his way upward along its surface. The contours of the stone-and-mortar wall became evident to him, and then he was standing before it, with his left hand steadying his body on the cold, moist stone. He could not see over the top of the wall from that point. He went to a build-up of silt on a higher section of ground near the far end of the wall. From there he was able to peer cautiously over the top at what lay beyond it.

An elongation of pale light spilled out through a glass-enclosed archway in the house across the interior patio; it gave substance to the shapes within the patio. So Green was still up and about, the limping man thought. Well, all right. Better if he was asleep, but not really that important; he could come back later of course, but he was here now, and there was really no need in taking unnecessary chances.

Carefully, he placed the shopping bag on the flat top of the wall. He swung himself up by utilizing the power in his wrists and forearms, favoring his game leg; he was an agilely poised black shadow for an instant atop the wall, and then he dropped inside the patio, crouching on one of the macetas, listening. There was no discernible sound from within the house. He straightened momentarily to lift the shopping bag down, and after a few seconds he began to make his way slowly, silently, across the stone floor of the patio. He paused at the fountain in its center, by one of the stunted Joshua trees, unhurried now, moving with care, with precision.

He reached the wall beside the glassed archway and flattened himself against the damp stucco. His ears strained, and voices—faint, but comprehensible—filtered through the glass.

“...are you going to do, Larry?”

Woman’s voice. Green had company. Well, maybe she would leave, but he couldn’t wait very long. If she was still in there when the time came, then that was too bad for her. Damned whore anyway, what did it matter? He couldn’t afford to be humane, not now, not now.

“... expect me to do?” Green’s voice, harsh and cold.

“Marry me, Larry. That’s what I expect you to do.”

“Marry you?” Laughter, without humor. “Jesus! I told you to take the goddamned pill, didn’t I? Is it my fault you’re too stupid to do it?”

Silence. And then: “You . . . never loved me at all, did you? You only said the words, lied to me, to . . . to...”

“To get into your pants, sweetheart.” Viciously, with contempt. “The only thing I ever cared about, baby, was that hot little fanny of yours. So there it is, all out in the open at last. Now are you going to get out of here, or would you like me to tell you some more? Like what a really lousy lay you are. And how I was thinking about other girls the whole time, even when I was—”

“No! Oh God, Larry, stop it! Stop it!”

“Then get out!”

Vague weeping sounds. Footsteps, rapid, retreating. Door slamming. Silence.

Now.

The limping man squatted and placed the shopping bag on the wet stone at his feet. He lifted out the gallon jug which had once contained apple cider, but which now contained the high-octane gasoline he had purchased at a Chevron station in Belmont forty-five minutes earlier. He removed the protective section of cellophane food wrap from the top and felt the strips of cotton sheeting which were stuffed into the bottle’s neck. Dry. All right.

He got the windproof butane lighter from his overcoat pocket and straightened up, bringing the gallon jug with him, crooked in his left arm, and he held the lighter poised in his right. He flipped the cap down and his gloved thumb rasped the flint wheel. A thin, high jet of flame shot up. He held it to the sheet strips, watching them flare and begin to bum brightly, and then he stepped out to stand directly in front of the glassed archway, the jug held chest-high like a basketball about to be passed, and Green was there, with his back to him, ten feet away and moving, and almost casually then, the limping man thrust forward, releasing and stepping back, and the flaming container shattered the archway glass and shattered the stillness and shattered itself on the floor inside in a great, rushing, mushrooming sweep of heat and fire and destruction . . .

The sound of the archway glass breaking sends Larry Drexel whirling about, his eyes bulging wide in surprise and sudden fear, and there is in that moment an intense, bursting. undulating vortex of flame that sends him stumbling backward, trying to get his arm up to protect his eyes, but it is too late for that, too late, and the heat singes away his eyebrows and his eyelashes and blisters the skin of his face like a strip of paint under a blowtorch.

He goes to his knees with a scream erupting from his throat, high and shrill and containing every decibel of mortal terror. The flames spread with insane rapidity, licking at the walls, the furniture, the rug and the floor, consuming the scrolled desk, consuming the religious mural and the blue velvet nude, crackling, thundering, brilliant red-orange billowing smoke, searing heat. Drexel tries to stand, and the flames reach out for him, catch him, hold him, set his sleek black hair ablaze, and his shirt and jacket and trousers ablaze, and in the pain thing that is his brain:

Oh God the heat the heat the heat I’m on fire I’m on fire help me Jesus Christ help me I’m on fire

He screams again, and again, and again, he can’t stop screaming, and then he is on his feet and running, running toward the hallway and into it, running for the door, getting it open somehow, trailing fire, running outside, running blind, seeing nothing, feeling nothing but the heat and the pain, a human torch, screaming, dying . . .

The first thing Steve Kilduff saw was the orange glow flickering through the windows of the house.

He hand just turned onto the Five-Hundred block of San Amaron Drive, and when he perceived the glow at two hundred yards he knew that the house was on fire. Intuitively, he sensed that it was Drexel’s house, that it was Number 547, even though he was still too far away to read the number and to determine accurately the make and color of the sports car parked in the drive. His foot came off the accelerator and touched the brake, and the long conical beams of his headlights picked up the outline of a car parked in front of the house and picked up, too, the figure of a girl in a plastic raincoat standing immobile on the sidewalk, looking back.

And that was when the front door burst open and the man on fire came hurtling out.

Kilduff. thought: My God, my God, my God! He knew that it was Drexel, knew with that same intuitive certainty that it was Drexel and that Helgerman had been responsible, had gotten to Number Five. He saw the burning man, Drexel, veer to the left, stumbling over the land scaped front yard, through bottle brush and barrel cactus and Joshua trees, across the drive at the rear of the sports car—and his foot came crashing down hard on the brake. The machine slewed violently sideways, the rear end coming around on the rain-slick macadam street, the front wheels skipping up over the low curb. Kilduff was out of the car before it had rocked to a full stop, out and running after Drexel, no indecision, no weighing and considering, he wasn’t thinking at all; he was reacting, reflex, instinct, military training, pulling off his overcoat as he ran along the sidewalk, past the girl in the plastic raincoat. She was screaming, hysterical; and fifty yards away, bulling through a low thin hedge, Drexel was screaming with a different kind of hysteria. The night was alive with vibrating nightmare sounds.

Kilduff had the overcoat off now, and he closed the gap between himself and Drexel to twenty yards ... fifteen ... ten. They were on a wide expanse of neighboring lawn, on a cushiony surface dotted with rain ponds that glistened dancing silver highlights in the scintillation from the fanning, clinging flames. Kilduff overtook Drexel and threw the overcoat around him, the screams piercing his skin like long sharp needles, and pulled him down onto the wet grass. He held the overcoat around him, trying to smother the flames, his hands locked together at Drexel’s belt, feeling the heat scorch his body through the heavy cloth. And then they were rolling over and over through the cold, wet grass and Kilduff was able to gain his knees beside Drexel, smelling the stench of burned hair and burned flesh, and vomit came up into his throat and gagged him. He pulled the overcoat back, and the flames had given way to rising puffs of blackly acrid smoke; but Kilduff kept rolling him back and forth on the puddled grass for a long, long time.

When he finally stopped, he could hear screaming again, from close behind him, and he knew it was the girl in the raincoat. He shut his eyes and opened them again and looked down at the charred, smoking body, looked down at it long enough to confirm what he already knew —that the man was Larry Drexel—and then he turned away and let the vomit come boiling out of his throat.

Light flooded over him as he rose to wipe his mouth, and a frightened woman’s voice said, “I’ve called the police and the fire department—is that Mr. Drexel, is he dead?—oh dear Lord, I saw him running on fire...”

“Shut off that light,” Kilduff said. “Shut it the hell off.”

The light went off, and there was the sound of a door slamming. Kilduff got his arm under Drexel’s head and lifted it up; with his other hand he found one of the wrists, still hot, and probed for a pulsebeat. He couldn’t find one, and he thought that Drexel was dead; but then he realized the two terrible black-white things which had once been eyes were staring at him and somehow seeing him, somehow recognizing him, and the black gashed thing which had once been a mouth was working around a protruding tongue. Dry, brittle sounds came out, the sounds of twigs snapping in the darkness of a forest, and after that there were words, unrecognizable at first, but Kilduff put his ear very close to Drexel’s mouth and he could understand some of them.

“Helgerman . . . listen . . . Helgerman . . . ”

Kilduff wanted to vomit again. He wanted the girl behind him to stop screaming. He wanted to turn and run, get away from there, far, far away. But he said, “Don’t try to talk, Larry,” in a voice that was strangely gentle, strangely calm. “Don’t try to talk.”

But Drexel’s mouth continued to work, and the brittle sounds that became words reached Kilduff’s ears again. “Helgerman . . . dead . . . long-time dead.”

And the brittle sounds ceased, and there was a single, barely audible, undeniably final exhalation of breath, and the blackened lump of flesh which had been Larry Drexel died shuddering in Kilduff’s arms.