She'd found his firing site.
"Abbyl" Travis, bursting into the room, the flashlight attached to his rifle like a bayonet, the beam stabbing the darkness as he pivoted from side to side.
He hadn't spotted her yet. She ducked low and kept running, thinking she could use the worktable for cover, buy herself a few more seconds.
The beam swept toward her, rippling across the broad sheets of glass.
She dropped to her knees and crawled under the worktable to hide.
The flashlight probing, licking the room's far corners, then drifting back to alight on the table and illuminate her small, huddled shape.
"You're dead, you bitch," Travis breathed, his voice eerie in the dark, and he was coming her way.
She scrambled out from beneath the table and collided with something shapeless and heavy on the floor.
Hickle's duffel bag. Not empty. Something was inside.
He had used the rifle in the stairwell. But the shotgun was his weapon of choice at close range. Why hadn't he used it? Because he'd left it here-left it in the bag.
Her shaking hands unzipped the flap, touched the sleekness of the shotgun's barrel.
Travis sprinting. Light expanding at her back.
She jerked the long gun free of the bag, braced the butt against her chest and spun in a crouch, pumping the action once. Her finger groped for the trigger, and the flashlight found her.
She couldn't see Travis, only the blinding glare. It was easier that way.
She fired at the light.
The recoil upset her precarious balance, blowing her backward onto her tailbone. The room spun in curlicues of yellow glare. She thought she was suffering some extreme onset of vertigo, then realized that what she saw was only the smeared beam of the flashlight as it spun with the rifle across the concrete floor.
The gun and the flashlight attached to it came to rest against a wall, by chance casting the beam at Travis, sprawled limp on the floor.
Abby knew he was dead even without taking a close look. She had fired at him from six feet away. The shotgun shell had cut him almost in half. She couldn't see his features and didn't want to. She imagined that the last look on his face had been one of surprise.
He had never thought he could lose to anyone and certainly not to her.
He was her mentor, after all, and she was only the gifted protegee.
She got to her feet, leaving the shotgun where it had fallen after she fired. She didn't need it any longer.
There were no more bad guys to kill.
Her first step was shaky, and she almost sank to her knees before steadying herself. On her way out of the room she stooped to pry the flashlight free of the rifle.
Its beam guided her to the stairwell. On the stairs below the ninth floor she found her purse with her cell phone inside.
She took out the phone and sat on the steps, taking a moment to compose herself before calling Wyatt at the Hollywood station.
"Hickle's dead," she said when he came on the line.
"And somebody else too. But I'm okay. I just wanted you to know."
"Abby, what the hell are you talking about? Where are you?"
"It doesn't matter where I am. I'll be calling nine-one-one after I'm through talking to you. Everything will be taken care of. But you have to stay out of it, all right? I mean completely out. Don't visit me, don't call me, at least for a while. I don't want your friend Detective Cahill putting things together-and he will, if anybody connects you with me."
"You still haven't told me what happened."
"Do you promise to keep your distance?"
"Yes, damn it, I promise. Now what's going on?"
She let her head fall back against the cold concrete wall.
"It's nothing. Vie, really." She sighed.
"Just another day at the office."
She ended the call before he could ask her anything more. ramedics delivered Abby to UCLA Medical Cener, where she was checked for injuries and released.
There were two detectives waiting for her outside the examination room.
They asked her to accompany them to the West LA station. She was relieved to learn that neither of them was named Cahill.
The first interview was brief. She was too tired to give more than a bare recitation of the facts, carefully edited. But she gave the detectives a present-the tape in her microcassette recorder. It was a fresh tape, which she had loaded immediately before Travis's arrival in Westwood; it contained his confession and nothing else.
The police allowed her to leave by 8 a.m. She had not seen her condo in daylight for a week. She slept until two in the afternoon, then fixed a meal. At three the guards in the lobby said two men from the LAPD were here to see her.
This time she gave the detectives the full story, staying close to the truth but not too close. Fatigue made lying easy; it was as if her body was too worn out to register any of the usual discomfort that a lie detector or a trained observer could catch.
"Travis hired me to move in next door to Hickle. I was there to track his movements, make note of when he came and went. We wanted to get a feel for his daily routine. That was what I was told, anyway. But in fact, I was being set up. Travis told Hickle I was spying on him, and it drove Hickle over the edge. He tried to kill Kris. After he failed, Travis gave him my home address in Westwood. I guess you know what happened after that." They asked what had led her inside the office building.
She said she had begun to suspect Travis. Suspecting an ambush, she'd checked out her neighborhood and found evidence of illegal entry to the office tower.
She'd thought Hickle might be inside.
"That's when you should have called the police," the older of the two detectives said in an almost fatherly tone.
"I wasn't sure Travis was guilty. I wanted proof. I wanted it on tape."
The younger detective, less sympathetic, pointed out that her words on tape and the condition of Howard Barwood's gun, recovered from Travis's body, served as evidence that she had broken into Barwood's Culver City bungalow and tampered with his property.
Abby admitted to this.
"If Mr. Barwood wants to press charges against me, he's entitled." She allowed herself a sweet smile, aimed mainly at the older cop.
"Think he will?"
"Considering that you've cleared him on multiple felony counts, ma'am, I think he'll give you the damn gun if you ask for it, and the bungalow too."
The younger detective wouldn't give up.
"On the tape Travis seems to hold you responsible for the death of Devin Corbal. What have you got to say about that?"
"Travis hired me to follow Sheila Rogers, Corbal's stalker, and report her movements. That particular, night, I lost her. I didn't know where she had gone, and so I wasn't able to give Travis's men a heads-up when she entered Lizard Maiden, the club where Corbal was hanging out. Travis never forgave me for it."
"But you weren't actually present at the scene of Corbal's death?" the younger detective asked.
"No."
"Suppose we were to round up some of the people who were in the club that night and show them your photo. What do you think they'd say?"
"Probably that the club was crowded and dark, and it's been four months since the incident, and under the circumstances their memories aren't likely to be reliable.
That's what a defense attorney would say, don't you think?"
The younger detective had no answer to that. He and his partner left shortly afterward. Before they left, Abby made them promise that her name would be kept out of the media.
They returned twice in the next two days, asking her to fill in details.
At first Abby thought they were leading her on, pretending to believe her version of events while preparing charges against her, either in the Travis shooting or in the Corbal affair. Eventually she realized that the truth was somewhat different. They didn't entirely believe her, but they had no clear idea of how badly she had misled them, and they didn't particularly care.