The Stalker Read Free Page A

his hands on the cold metal of the welded iron railing.
    The fog was coming in. It sat off to the west in great folding gray billows, like tainted cotton candy at a carnival. Kilduff watched it for a long moment—moving closer, inexorably closer, an advancing army with ephemeral wisps drifting ahead of it like the spirits of long-dead and long-forgotten generals. He moved his eyes slowly to look at what lay spread out before him: the gray close-set buildings of a big city, some hillside-clinging, some extending in long identical rows as if they had spewn forth from a gigantic duplicating machine, some jutting skyward with long, thin, beseeching spires; straight ahead to the Golden Gate Bridge, heavy with weekend traffic, the crests of its red spans already consumed by the approaching fog; across to Marin County and the brown and white and pastel cottages clinging to the side of the hill above Sausalito, where the would-be artists and the would-be writers and the hippies and the rebels and the fruiters lived; dipping lower, coming back to the ugly dead gray rock of Alcatraz, a toad’s wart in the leaden surface of the bay; to the right and the cantilever span of the Bay Bridge and along it, halfway to Oakland and the East Bay, where it touches Yerba Buena Island; down and over to the naval base on the long finger, obscene finger, of Treasure Island. A sweeping panorama, Kilduff thought, beautiful San Francisco, enchanting San Francisco, but only when the sun shines, baby, because when you saw it like this, on an overcast Saturday morning in early November with the vague promise of rain and the chill of winter and the smell of acrid brine in the air, when you saw it like this it was lonely and remote and hoary-old and not very beautiful or enchanting at all.
    He turned from the railing, then, and went back inside the apartment, relocking the window-doors and drawing the drapes closed again. He sank wearily onto the pliant cushions of one of the chairs and fumbled a cigarette from the pocket of his shirt. He was a big man, tall, muscular; at thirty-two, his belly was still washboard-taut and he still moved with the easy, natural grace of his youth. But his thick black hair had begun to gray prematurely at the temples, and his green and brown hawk’s eyes had an almost imperceptible dullness to them, as if the fires which had once burned there were now little more than rapidly cooling embers; his cheeks were sunken hollowly, giving him an anomalous, slightly satanic look. It was a strange face that stared back at him from the mirror in the bathroom every morning, a face he no longer felt at ease with after eight years of almost-but-not-quite, eight years of failure compounded upon failure, eight years of knowing that the money would run out some day and trying to look ahead to that time, trying to prepare for it in advance, and never accomplishing that objective—or any other.
    Like these past two days, he thought. Like what had happened with this Roy Bannerman, whom he had met at an incredibly sluggish party some friends of Andrea’s had given on Russian Hill. Bannerman was an executive with a large independent cannery in Monterey, and there was a managerial position opening up there shortly that paid twelve thousand per annum. Come on down, he had told Kilduff, I’ll have the brass over for dinner, give them a chance to look you over; hell, a few drinks and some thick steaks under their belts, and you’re in, Steve, I can practically guarantee it. So he had gone down there and met the brass, putting the charm on, smiling at the right time, laughing at the right time, speaking at the right time, lying at the right time, oh Jesus yes, he had impressed the crap out of them, they were calling him Steve and he was calling them Ned and Charley and Forry, and when the evening was over they had said to come around to the cannery in the morning and take a tour of the plant, see what you’ll be handling, eh, Steve, and he had