The Stalker by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online Page B

sucking mud at its bottom, made a chill twice as cold as the wind’s walk along her spine.
    Quickly, then, she opened the trunk compartment of the Volkswagen and removed her two pieces of luggage and a cardboard box of food and supplies she had purchased before leaving San Francisco. She left the remainder of her belongings in the car. She carried the suitcases along the vegetation-choked path to the point, set them on the shack’s narrow, gap-boarded porch, and returned for the cardboard box, hurrying now. When she had completed the second trip, she fitted the old brass key into the lock and swung the door open.
    Two distinct odors greeted her: dry rot and the lingering acridity of fish. Both seemed to flow outward in an unseen wave, as if waiting for escape into the free air, and Andrea recoiled slightly, holding the door open, her nostrils flaring with distaste. After a moment, she carried the suitcases and the box of foodstuffs inside. Shutting the door—her desire for warmth was stronger than her aversion to the shack’s smellshe stood surveying the interior. The walls were tar-papered inside as well, and the studs were exposed. In one corner there was an iron potbellied stove which Steve had bought from a junk dealer in San Francisco for fifty dollars three years ago; beside it, stacked neatly against the wall, were a dozen or so circular redwood blocks and some kindling and a pile of yellowed newspapers. A kerosene stove, of the two-burner variety, reposed next to a homemade tin sink in a wood frame. A row of makeshift cabinets hung on the wall above the sink, on both sides of the narrow curtained window there. There was nothing else in the room save for a half-table and two chairs, an ancient wicker chair with a plastic cushion on it, and a folding TV tray sitting off to one side. Through an open doorway leading into the other room —little more than an alcove, really—Andrea could see the wide Army cot that had served as their bed and a scarred, unpainted dresser with three drawers.
    Home, she thought ruefully, looking with disrelish at the accumulation of dust and grit which covered the wooden floor. She rubbed her hands together briskly, passing through the doorway into the bedroom alcove. There were two closed doors side by side in the right-hand wall; the nearest, the door to the bathroom (bathroom, now that was really very funny, she thought, a john with a high wooden tank and a long pull-chain, for God’s sake, not to mention a cracked enamel sink and an exposed shower that sprayed water almost as muddy as that from the slough, even though the piping was supposed to connect with a county supply line). The other door was padlocked through a hasp: the storage closet.
    Andrea unlocked it with another key. From the shelves inside she removed several wool blankets, an old Coleman pressure lantern and a tin of kerosene. She put the blankets on the cot and carried the lantern and kerosene into the other room. Then she found the box of kitchen matches she had bought and took them to the stove and began to build a fire inside, remembering how Steve had done it with bits of kindling from the pile and some of the newspapers. Before long, she had one of the redwood blocks burning; she closed the iron door and stood with her back to the stove, trying to warm herself.
    This week alone here was going to be very good for her in a lot of ways, she reflected; she was going to be on her own for a long, long time, having to fend for herself, and there was nothing like disciplining right from the beginning.
    When the fire began to crackle hotly inside the potbelly, Andrea found a broom and a mop in the storage closet and began systematically to clean the interior of the shack.

    In the bedroom of her small three-room apartment in Santa Clara, Fran Vamer sat moodily sorting her week’s laundry and thinking of Larry Drexel.
    He could be so strange at times, she thought, putting an orange bath towel into one of the two wicker