The Stalker by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online Page A

cattails and milkweed and tall brown rushes grew densely to the water’s edge; across the slough, perhaps seventy-five yards wide at that point, thick clumps of anise and sage dotted the flat marshland. In the distance, beyond the Petaluma River itself, the rising black oakcovered foothills of the Sonoma Mountains lay brown and desolate against both summer and winter skies.
    You got to Duckblind Slough by way of a narrow dirt road leading off Highway 101 north of Novato, in Marin County. The road wound inland for a mile or so, through aromatic eucalyptus and bay and pepper trees, past a club for trap shooters and the Mira Monte Marina and Boat Launch—a small cluster of buildings which catered to outboard boats and fishermen and water skiers during the summer months. At that point, a sign announced that the road would now pass through private property, and that trespassers would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Three miles further along, a second private road branched off to the east, crossing a raised bank of railroad spur line tracks; a wooden gate capped with barbed wire and fastened closed with a chain-and-padlock blocked the road there. Duckblind Slough was another half-mile beyond the gate.
    The road ended in a small clearing just large enough for four cars if they were parked carefully side by side. Three separate paths led from there to the shacks. The two inland ones were owned by Sonoma County businessmen, who used them sparingly for bass fishing and duck hunting in season, and who seldom if ever used them at any other time. The one on the point belonged to Steve and Andrea Kilduff.
    It was almost four when Andrea brought her little Volkswagen into the deserted clearing. She shut off the motor and sat staring at the wind-bent grass and thinking that she was probably crazy for having come all the way up to this desolate spot instead of simply calling her sister, Mona, who lived in suburban comfort in El Cerrito across the Bay. But the idea of having to answer all the questions Mona and her husband, Dave, would ask, and of having to put up with their three pre-school children whom she normally adored but who would undoubtedly send her clawing at the walls in this situation, had not appealed to Andrea at all. She had wanted to be alone—that was a very necessary part of things—and there was no better place for that than Duckblind Slough, where you were almost literally up a depository tributary without due means of locomotion, as a friend of theirs had laughingly suggested when Andrea told him about the shack’s location. Besides, Steve would never think of looking for her there; Andrea had never really been one for the spartan life. Oh, she had accompanied him up here a couple of times (anything to get away from the impossible rush of the city), but sitting in a rowboat with a five-horsepower motor and putt-putting in and out of sloughs looking for elusive bass and catfish was not exactly her conception of the ideal vacation. Still, the bleakness, the almost atavistic quality of Duckblind Slough in November, had a certain allure for her now. It was the first place she had thought of—the head shrinkers could make something out of that, all right.
    She buttoned her cardigan sweater at her throat and stepped out of the Volkswagen. The wind blowing across the marshlands was gelid, making a low, mournful soul song as it played amongst the tules and cattails, bringing the vague smell of salt and an almost tangible smell of things long dead, as if she had suddenly been thrust backward in time to some primeval era.
    Andrea shivered, and then smiled faintly. Next thing you know, she chided herself, you’ll be seeing a dinosaur or a tyrannosaur or something come lumbering up to the water to drink, perhaps even to drain the slough dry in its thirst. She shivered again; the thought of all the water being drained from the tributary, of the potential horrors, real or imagined, which lay half-hidden in the