Free The Stalker by Bill Pronzini Page B

the day any time I want to.
    The thoughts became a firm resolution in her mind, and she stood and reached for her purse. Yes, a drive was just the thing, into San Rafael, she decided; there was one large shopping center which remained open on Sundays. She could browse leisurely there, have lunch, perhaps even go to a movie tonight. That was certainly better than just sitting here in this now-comfortable, now-livable little shack in the middle of nowhere that she knew she was a darned fool for coming to in the first place, in spite of all her nice rationalizations.
    Buttoning the wool jacket to her throat, Andrea went to the door and stepped outside.
    To escape momentarily from all the hundreds of little things that had begun to remind her of Steve from the moment she first set foot inside the shack, from all the memories that a thousand cleanings could never remove from its omniscient walls.

    Standing at the edge of a small, grassy slope in Golden Gate Park, his hands pressed deep into the pockets of his topcoat, Steve Kilduff looked out over the flat, shallow water of Lloyd Lake. What I’ve got to do, he told himself, is be practical; I’ve got to put yesterday out of my mind, blank it out—Andrea and Drexel and Granite City—blank it all out with cold clear calculation and think about what I’m going to do now, now that the money’s almost gone and I’m about to be faced with the prospect of starvation. So it looks like a job, eight-to-five or equivalent, because I sure as hell don’t qualify for welfare; digging ditches or pumping gas or clerking in an office, brown-nosing the boss’s ass for that Christmas bonus and that ten-dollar semi-annual raise—why not? The trouble before was I wanted too much, expected too much; once you’ve got money, you acquire a taste for luxury, for money, and you can’t reconcile yourself to menial labor for menial wages. That was the trouble, all right, that was exactly what the trouble was, so the thing to do is go down to one of the employment agencies tomorrow and tell them I’ll take anything so long as it’s honest, tell them . . . well, now, that was pretty funny, wasn’t it? Take anything so long as it’s honest. Oh, Lord, that was really pretty damned funny, old Public Enemy Number One, The Man Who Helped Pull Off One Of The Few Really Big Unsolved Crimes In The Country, why, yes sir, I’ll take anything you have open just so long as it’s honest . . .

    El Peyote was a combination cocktail lounge and Mexican restaurant on South First Street in San Jose—a low, stucco, Spanish-architected building with a center patio replete with fountain and heavy tables and strolling mariachis for outdoor summer dining. It catered to a varied clientele, from the surrounding suburban elite to the pachuco of San Jose’s large Mexican population. Five men had been knifed—two of them, fatally—in El Peyote’s dark interior lounge in the six years since Larry Drexel had opened it, and instead of harming business, it brought out the crowds.
    As far as Drexel was concerned, if people wanted to pay for the prospect of seeing some spic with his belly ripped away, holding in his entrails with one bloody hand, then that was all right with him. He had raised his prices ten percent after the last incident, three months previously; with a winking smile, he had told Juano—his three-hundred pound headwaiter-cum-bouncer—that the increase was a kind of entertainment tax, what the hell.
    At five o’clock Sunday afternoon, Drexel was sitting in his darkly furnished office upstairs above the lounge, drinking aquardiente, and staring broodingly at a large reproduction in oil of a portion of a mural by Diego Rivera, which covered the wall immediately behind his desk. He felt edgy and restless, had felt that way ever since learning of Beauchamp’s death, and spending the better part of the day in his office hadn’t helped matters any. And then there was the meeting last night—that had been