The Stalker

15

He was the last one left.

Steve Kilduff, man alone.

He sat in the kitchen of the Twin Peaks apartment, and stared into the cup of black coffee. It was past dawn now, Thursday morning, and he could see, through the partially draped window-doors the length of the apartment, the gray sky with its dotting of gray-black clouds—tainted chunks of butter floating in tainted buttermilk.

And, as if superimposed on the bleak patina of the newborn day: Larry Drexel, lying on the cold wet grass—blackened and foully reeking and dead...

Himself, kneeling beside the charred body, now standing, now backing away...

The girl in the plastic raincoat, taking his place on the grass, burying her face in her hands...

Faces—featureless, oddly disembodied—watching the flames and staring at the dead man; pagan worshippers at the shrine of horror...

His car, ignition, brake, reverse, drive forward—going where?—going nowhere...

Police cars with flashing red dome-lights, and fire engines with high brightly yellow-white eyes...

Freeway lights, the same surrealistic montage of red and yellow, red and yellow, rushing forward, going nowhere as he was going nowhere, until fear sent him panicked onto an exit ramp to seek escape...

Interior shot: a cocktail lounge, locationless, nameless, dark, almost deserted, and the glass in his hand, trembling, full, and the glass in his hand, trembling, empty...

Dark, rain-swept, maze-like streets and roads and county highways, empty and strange, leading somewhere, yet leading nowhere, turn left, turn right, turn around...

Freeway again, an incalculable time later, the motion slower now, not so frightening, fewer yellows and fewer reds, and the rain had abated somewhat . . .

The dead, lonely streets of San Francisco under the first pale filtered light that signified the coming of dawn, daybreak of the morning after the final holocaust, and he was the lone survivor, the last man on earth, coming home...

He could see all of that vividly, but it was all in his mind, and in his mind, too, were the sounds, nightmare sounds of screaming and wailing sirens and driving rain and hurtling machines, and above it all were Larry Drexel’s brittle, dying, whispered words: “Helgerman . . . dead . . . long-time dead.”

He had been sitting there at the dinette for—how long? two hours? three?—sitting there and staring into the cold coffee, trying to keep from losing his grip on reality, from blowing his mind finally and irrevocably, feeling the awful pressure slowly but inexorably begin to lessen until, now, he knew a kind of unstable calm. He could look at the mental images, and hear the mental sounds, and there was no panic. He could be objective now, he could examine what had happened and determine its effect, he could be rational.

Helgerman is dead, he thought, it isn’t Helgerman; Drexel said it isn’t Helgerman and he was dying when he said it and there can be no disputation of the words of a dying man. So it isn’t Helgerman, Helgerman is dead, it isn’t Helgerman of the injured neck, Helgerman the wronged, Helgerman who had been struck down in the parking lot, Helgerman the only man it could be; it isn’t Helgerman. Then—who is it? Who pushed Jim Conradin off that cliff, and who set fire to Larry Drexel, and who murdered Cavalacci and Wykopf and Beauchamp? Who was waiting for him, Steve Kilduff, out there somewhere in the cold gray morning and in the dark black night? Who wanted him dead, as he had wanted and had made the others dead? What was the reason, the rationale, in a mind surely twisted?

Who?

And why?

But even more urgently important, what am I going to do now? Do I somehow seek out and somehow kill this now-nameless, now-faceless, non-existent but all-so-terribly-real madman—as Drexel would have done? Do I avenge the deaths of the others, and in so doing save my own life? Or do I go to the police, as I should have done in the very beginning? Or do I curl up in a tiny ball like a naked hedgehog and wait defenseless for whoever it is to come for me? Or do I run out of the state, out of the country, always looking over my shoulder, always trembling, always running?

What do I do?

The only thing I can do.

I’m not a killer, I never will be a killer, I could never find the man alone, and I would be as mad as he must be to believe I can. And I don’t want to die any more than any man wants to die; and the only place I could run—my eventual destination next week or next month or next year—would be off the deep end, right off the deep end. I have one alternative left, then. I go to the police. I go to Inspector Commac and Inspector Flagg and I tell them all about it, I tell them the whole story and I ask them to protect me and they will protect me and they will find the madman, whoever he is; I simply go to the police, and it’s over for me, it’s finished, no more fear, no more terror, it’s over.

But can I do it?

Can I go in there and pick up that telephone and dial that number and say the words that have to be said? Did what I saw and heard and smelled and was a part of last night—the horror of last night—somehow give me enough guts to do what I wasn’t able to do yesterday? Have I regained something of myself, a part of my manhood, that which enables a man to do what he must do?

Or is cowardice, once ingrained, not so easily dispelled?

Like a terminal malignancy, does it only spread until it consumes and destroys the being? And like that same malignancy, does it bring brief moments like these now—moments of painless calm, of commanding will, of hope—only to banish them, and return even more relentlessly destructive than before?

Kilduff got to his feet, pushing his chair back, and walked very slowly toward the hallway telephone. To find out if he was still a man.

It was just eight o’clock when Inspector Neal Commac stepped out of the elevator on the fourth floor of San Francisco’s Hall of Justice. He walked along the quiet hallway and through a doorway marked with the sign: GENERAL WORKS DETAIL. It was a huge room with pale plaster walls and a reception desk on his immediate right and several glass-fronted interrogation cubicles beyond an open archway. The detective bull pen contained several metal desks in no particular order, with typewriters on metal roll stands beside them.

Commac nodded a perfunctory good morning to the receptionist, turned to the right and then to the left to a doorway beyond, entering the bull pen. At the desk facing his, in the center of the room, Inspector Pat Flagg was just hanging up his telephone. Steam spiraled upward from a container of coffee at his elbow. He looked up as Commac took off his hat and sat down.

“Morning, Neal.”

“Pat.”

Flagg indicated a covered container identical to the one on his desk, resting on Commac’s blotter. “Brought you some coffee.”

“Thanks,” Commac said gratefully. “I could use some. It’s a bear out this morning.”

“We’re in for a hell of a winter.”

“Yeah.” Commac slipped the plastic cover off the container and tasted the coffee. He made a wry face and looked at Flagg over the rim of the container. “What’s on tap?”

“So far, just a talk with Mr. Brokaw on that attempted extortion in Sea Cliff.”

“Any special time?”

“After eleven.”

“Okay.”

“Oh, and the DMV report came back on that ’59 Personnel Roster we got from the Bellevue Air Force Station.”

“Anything?”

Flagg picked up a printed form from his blotter. “Six with registered automobiles in California,” he said. “Conradin and Kilduff; Thomas Baird, North Hollywood; Lawrence Drexel, Los Gatos; Dale Emmerick, Redding; Victor Jobelli, Yreka.”

“You run those last four through R&I?”

“What I was doing when you came in.”

Commac nodded. “I wonder if we’ll turn anything there.”

“Is that a question, or are you thinking out loud?”

“A little of both, I guess.”

Flagg said, “Probably draw the same blank we did on Kilduff and Conradin.”

“Is that a considered opinion, or are you just being cynical?”

Flagg grinned. “A little of both, I guess.”

The phone on Commac’s desk buzzed; it was an interdepartmental call. He depressed the button and lifted the receiver. He listened for a moment, said “Yes, sir,” and replaced the instrument. To Flagg he said, “Boccalou wants to see us, Pat.”

“What on?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Well,” Flagg said, getting to his feet, “here we go.”

They went across the bull pen and Commac knocked on a door marked: CHIEF OF DETECTIVES. A voice said to come in. They stepped inside and stood respectfully before the desk of Chief Nello Boccalou. Boccalou had inscrutable green eyes, a firm chin with a Kirk Douglas cleft, and longish silver hair that gave him a leonine and properly authoritative appearance. He smoked imported English tobacco in a long-grain briar pipe, and the office was filled with gray-blue clouds of aromatic smoke. He said, “Commac, Flagg.”

“Morning, Chief,” Commac said.

“Turn anything new on this Kilduff you questioned yesterday?”

“Not yet, sir,” Flagg told him.

Boccalou took the pipe out of his mouth and scowled at it and put it in an ashtray. “Well, I may have something for you. Squeal from the Los Gatos police.”

“Oh?”

“Seems they had a fire-bombing down there last night. Local man killed, assailant or assailants unknown. There were a couple of witnesses—neighbors, the dead man’s pregnant girlfriend, and an unidentified man who chased after the victim when he came running out of the burning house, clothes afire. This unidentified man managed to put the flames out, but it was too late; before the fire department and the Gatos officers arrived, he took off. The girlfriend was hysterical, but when they got her to a hospital and calmed down, she managed to give them a description of the unidentified and a partial on the license plate of his car. One of the neighbors supplied the rest of the plate, and Gatos ran it through DMV. Who do you suppose the car belongs to?”

“Steve Kilduff,” Commac said immediately.

“Uh-huh,” Boccalou said. “Description matches, too. Gatos has a want on him for questioning. They’re requesting we pick him up.”

“What’s the name of the guy who died?” Flagg asked. “The Gatos resident?”

Boccalou looked at a form on his desk. “Drexel,” he answered. “Lawrence Drexel.”

Commac and Flagg exchanged glances. “He’s on the Bellevue Personnel Roster,” Commac said. “He was stationed with Kilduff and Conradin.”

“It looks like a tie-in on the Smithfield unsolved, then.”

“Yeah, it sure does.”

“Go on over to this Kilduff’s apartment and bring him in on a hold for Gatos,” Boccalou said. “We’ll see what he has to say for himself.”

“Right.”

While they were waiting for the elevator to take them down into the vehicle garage in the basement of the Hall of Justice, Commac said, “How does this whole thing look to you, Pat?”

“Like there’s more to it than we might first credit,” Flagg answered.

“I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

“Any ideas?”

“Not really.”

“Do you think Kilduff had something to do with this Drexel’s death last night?”

“Boccalou said he was the one who tried to save him.”

“Yeah.”

Commac rubbed the back of his neck. “Kilduff was scared when we talked to him yesterday. Scared shitless. The way you’re scared if somebody’s got a gun to the back of your neck.”

“I had that feeling, too,” Flagg said. “But I can’t figure an angle either. Hell, it’s been eleven years since that Smithfield job. Why, all of a sudden; should the guys who pulled it off—if Kilduff and the others are the guys who pulled it off—begin dying mysteriously?”

“There’s the obvious answer.”

“One of their own, you mean?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It doesn’t add,” Flagg said. “The time factor is all wrong. The only logical motive would be the money, and eleven years makes that ludicrous.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“So what else can it be?”

“That I don’t know.”

“Maybe Kilduff does.”

“Well, if he doesn’t,” Commac said, “he’s got a pretty good idea.”

The elevator doors slid open and they stepped inside. They rode down to the basement in silence.