Free The Stalker by Bill Pronzini Page A

subconscious.
    He went into the kitchen and drank a glass of ice water from the refrigerator; his throat was raw and parched. In the bedroom he undressed and slid between the clean, cool sheets of the bed and closed his eyes. And when fatigue brought sleep flooding over him finally—
    Andrea came to him in the darkness of the tiny cottage bedroom ...

6
     
    The limping man left the Graceling Hotel at eleven o’clock Sunday morning. He walked through heavy damp fog—one hand firmly grasping the handle of the American Tourister briefcase, and suspended over his right shoulder by a thin carrying strap, a cracked vinyl case containing an inexpensive pair of Japanese-manufactured binoculars—to the parking garage on Geary, where he had left the rented Mustang the previous afternoon.
    He presented his claim check to the attendant on duty, and when the car was brought down from one of the upper floors, he locked the briefcase and the binoculars inside the trunk. Moments later, he drove up to the street.
    It was still early, of course, he knew that—there really was nothing he could do until after dark—but leaving now assured him of plenty of time to select a place of concealment from which he could observe Yellow’s movements. Besides, Yellow’s moment was close at hand now—very close, perhaps as close as that very night—and the limping man was possessed with a certain nervous excitement, the same excitement he had experienced prior to Red and Gray and Blue. He could not simply remain in his hotel room for the entire day.
    With his right hand he manipulated the dials on the automobile radio until he found a station which played old standards. He turned up the volume, thinking of Yellow as he drove with cautious rapidity through the chill, mist-shrouded San Francisco morning.

    In the shack in Duckblind Slough, Andrea Kilduff sat bundled in her wool jacket at the wooden half-table, drinking a cup of hot black coffee. She had not slept well at all—had lain shivering beneath the heavy blankets on the Army cot, listening to that damned wind howl across the morass and across the expanse of the slough like the collective wail of souls in purgatory—and she felt chilled and cross and very much alone on this Sunday morning.
    She had cleaned the shack from top to bottom the previous day, going over everything with mop and broom and dustcloth and soapy water at least twice, putting herself into the chore with an almost mechanized fervency, making it last until day had receded into night. As a result, the two-room interior was spotlessly fastidious—almost, she thought, surveying now her labor in the light of morning, comfortably livable. Almost.
    Andrea finished her coffee and carried the cup to the tin sink and washed it out carefully, turning it upside down on the wood drainboard. She looked briefly out of the window above the sink, at the wind-swept grasses covering the inland area within her vision, at the leaden sky with its promise soon of rain, and then she turned away and sat down again at the table. She lifted the ostentatiously dust-jacketed novel she had brought with her (four hundred pages, very erotic—makes you ever so terribly horny, dear, a friend of hers had told her), but she put it down almost immediately. She didn’t feel like reading—not that she felt like sitting either, because she didn’t. Well, she was a fine one; she’d been out on her own for less than one day and already her own company bored her to tears. But there was nothing to do, nothing to keep her mind occupied the way the house-cleaning had done yesterday; at home, she had been able to call one of her friends on the telephone or go out shopping or driving or visiting if she became bored; but here, there was just nothing to do. . .
    Well, I’m certainly not chained here, am I? she asked herself. I can leave, can’t I? Well, of course I can; I’m not a prisoner in this shack, after all. There’s nothing that says I can’t leave for