The Hunter Inside (8 page)

It was past time to go.
Bill started the engine of the Ford on the second attempt and pulled out of the
drive. He drove for about ten minutes, a feeling of depression gnawing at his
insides and pulling at his flagging spirits. He pulled into a florist’s shop
near the cemetery, feeling close to tears. Thinking about his father and that
crazy day ten years ago when he had been told of his death was enough to make
tears stand in the corners of his eyes, and he tried to brush them aside,
before entering the florist’s shop and buying a bunch of lilies. Somebody had
once said that lilies were associated with death, and for one reason, he continually
placed lilies on his father’s grave. The reason was his continued reluctance to
let go of his father, despite the passing of so many years, until he understood
what had happened to him and why.

He drove the few remaining
kilometers to the cemetery that was situated on the outskirts of Glen Rock. He
pulled into the small parking lot provided for visitors to the cemetery, and
sat still for a few moments. He saw nothing that should make him worry, but the
chill that went through his body at that precise moment would leave his skin
tingling for more than a couple of minutes.

The sunshine provided no
more than a backdrop for Bill as he stepped out of the car and into the cool
June afternoon. Leaning back inside the car, he pulled a sweater out of the carryall,
before straightening up, pulling the sweater over his head, and leaning back
into the car a final time to retrieve the flowers from the passenger seat.

It took Bill two minutes to
walk the distance from the car to his father’s grave. When he saw how overgrown
it had become he felt a twinge of guilt.

‘Hell, I’m sorry Dad,’ Bill
said. Over the years he had visited less and less. After his mother had left,
he had gone as often as he could to the grave. That was mainly to see if his
mother had visited and left any flowers that might contain a message for both
of them, but as the months had gone by and no flowers appeared except his own,
he had become disillusioned, and eventually had begun to drive the big rigs,
which made it impossible to visit most of the time. His visits had dwindled
until it had gotten to the stage where he only visited once a year, on this
day.

Now, as he leant down and
began to tear out the weeds from the foot of his father’s grave, he began to
speak to his absent father once more. ‘Hell, Dad. I wish you were here. I’m in
a right mess.’ He continued to tug out weeds as he spoke, moving from the foot
of the grave towards the black marble headstone.

‘What am I going to do,
Dad?’

Bill Arnold was already
drained, and he still had a difficult journey to undertake. He started thinking
about his father’s death. This was something that was inevitable for him every
time he visited the grave. How had he died? Bill was not one hundred percent
sure, and his mother refused to talk on the subject. He’d always felt that she
knew more than she told him. All she would ever say was that he was murdered,
but nobody was ever arrested for the crime, and the police had quickly
forgotten the case when they had no leads; their budget would not support an extended
investigation.

He reached the head of the
grave and tore out weeds from around the overgrown headstone that spoke of his
father so richly; ‘William Arnold, Loving Husband and Father, Taken Into The
Arms Of Our Lord.’ The fact that what Bill actually looked at was his own name
did nothing for the nerves that continued to chew up his stomach. With a
resounding explosion inside the head of Bill Arnold the link was finally forced
that only his subconscious fear had allowed him to avoid.

He couldn’t believe that
he’d never considered this before. Could whoever was stalking him be the same
man who had killed his father ten years ago?

Shit, the time
.

He tried to put the thought
to the back of his mind, and instead concentrate on his journey. He had to travel
right through New York, negotiating the lunchtime rush, and therefore a drive
that should take one and a half hours would now probably take double that
amount of time.

‘Well, I’ll see you soon
hopefully, Dad,’ he said, and grimaced at the dual nature of the statement he
had made. He stopped a moment longer to remove some of the weeds that were
growing around the back of the headstone.

Bending down behind the
headstone, he was surprised to see a piece of sticky tape holding a piece of
paper to its rear. He tore the paper from the marble and unfolded it, before
looking at it with his mouth wide open, incredulous.

I am watching you
.

The shock of this sudden
revelation provided the final straw for Bill Arnold. He reeled backwards,
stumbling over another headstone and falling flat on his back, coating the seat
of his pants in grimy soil as he struggled to breathe. It felt as though an
anaconda had wrapped itself around his body and was quickly squeezing the life
out through his skin. His eyes moved rapidly around the cemetery, too rapidly
for him to register what he was looking at, but nobody attacked him and after a
minute of feeling that he was about to pass out, his breathing began to calm as
his heart came to terms with the shock and adrenalin that surged through his
body.

As the world began to
regain its colors, he was able to look around more slowly, though his technique
of surveillance did not feel as safe as when he had been protected by windows
and walls, and the fact that he was in a cemetery made him doubly scared. Had
it been night and darkness, then maybe it would have been the dead that Bill
Arnold was most afraid of, but he certainly didn’t intend to stay around long
enough to find out which carried most threat. Like most of his visits, he would
be glad to leave the cemetery with its narrow rows of headstones, something
which made it look like a war cemetery with its dead buried in unmarked graves,
searched for over many decades by families who couldn’t bear to have somebody
else mourn their loved ones.

These graves were not
anonymous though, and Bill Arnold looked at a headstone with his name on it and
thought about his desire not to become a victim to irony. He had to leave.

He was surprised his bowels
had not given way when he’d seen the note, for the shock of the realizations it
awakened in Bill Arnold would have reduced most men, even ‘hard’ men, into a
mass of feces and urine. He got to his feet and ran back to the small parking
lot where he had deposited his car under a huge Cherry Blossom tree that shed
its pink leaves all around like confetti.

As he approached the car it
looked more and more like a distant prize. Even a short run through the
cemetery took the wind out of Bill Arnold, and as the pink blossom fell around
his vehicle the fading gleam of the sunlight caught it occasionally, making it
look like glitter.

He reached the car very out
of breath, with stabbing pains in his shins and thighs, and fumbled for several
seconds trying to get the key into the small lock that he had to stoop to
reach. Finally, he was able to wrench the door open and dive inside the car,
locking the door behind him.

‘How does he know?’ Bill
said out loud as he gasped for air. ‘How does he know?’ Seconds passed as Bill
processed all of the information and its implications in his mind. As he did he
became more and more frightened.

The first thing he thought
about was this person’s ability to go undetected. He had not seen anything
during his surveillance operation of the perimeter of his house, but this
person must have been watching him all of the time to be able to follow him to
the cemetery. He was going to be looking over his shoulder with every step and
at every turn for danger. Whoever was stalking him was waiting to pick their
moment, and he could never be sure when that might be.

His aching head and his
aching mind were trying to tell him something else. But it was not until his
thought train had reached the end of the line. Then he understood. It was the
second thing that Bill Arnold realized as he sat looking all around, trying to
spot his stalker. He realized that whoever wanted him dead knew his next move,
and finally he made his ultimate connection. The note had been waiting for him
at his father’s grave. It was the same man. It had to be. His being stalked was
the continuation of his father being stalked and killed. This was the same man
that killed his father.

How long has he been
watching?

He must move, right away.
If he was being watched then he could be followed from the cemetery. Then his
journey would be a waste of time. He would have nowhere else to run, and he
didn’t think he would have the energy to run more than once.

Bill Arnold jammed the key
into the ignition and stubbornly held on, despite the struggling sound that
came as the car appealed to him to leave it be. He won the battle as it
shuddered into life, and was relieved that he had not managed to flood the
car’s engine. With a squeal of tires that he thought might have woken the dead
in the cramped confines of the space behind him, he roared away from the
cemetery, exiting the huge gates that stood at the front of the parking lot.
The roads around Glen Rock would be quiet, despite it being rush hour, and this
meant he could put his foot down in an attempt to shake off anybody that was following,
and make the first part of his journey in the least possible amount of time.
Another bonus was the fact that if anybody
were
following him then they
would be obvious from their excess speed. He just hoped he didn’t come across
any cops.

Bill pushed his foot
against the accelerator and the Ford began to pick up speed. Not as much or as
quickly as he would have liked, but he would not have been able to turn down an
RAF Tornado fighter jet if he had been offered one.

As he headed down the long
streets towards the freeway, he looked constantly in his rear-view mirror,
trying to see if anybody was following, and hoping that it stayed clear as he
maneuvered through the sparse traffic on the roads. He received a few
disgruntled honks from people who were not impressed with his desire for
control of the road, but at that moment other motorists were the last people he
was worried about.

He was normally a
conscientious driver. Driving the rigs meant that he had to be, but now he
didn’t, and he damn sure as hell wasn’t going to be when his life was under
threat. If he had the time to stop and explain his situation to the people who
honked, then he was pretty sure they would understand his traveling at nearly
one hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. But, that luxury denied him, he
ploughed onwards until he got to the freeway and was forced to slow
considerably by the swelling of traffic that came inevitably with the lunchtime
rush.

His pace decreased as he
entered the freeway, leveling off at a steady hundred kilometers per hour. This
seemed like a snail’s pace to Bill, and he weaved in and out of traffic for the
first few minutes, trying to pick up speed. This was impossible for him to
achieve, however, and he was forced to remain at a steady hundred.

The freeway brought its own
heightened sense of danger and made him more nervous. While he had not seen
anybody following his departure from the cemetery towards the freeway, he still
was not convinced that he wasn’t being followed, and on the freeway it would be
impossible for him to tell.

The thing for him to do now
was hope. And he had to have hope, right? Without hope what did he have? There
had to be a light at the end of the tunnel or else he might just as well give
up the ghost and accept his fate right now. The hope came from the fact that he
didn’t see it possible that to be murdered could have anything to do with fate.
It was an unnatural thing.

The freeway rolled out in
front of Bill Arnold, a never-ending merry-go-round that never closed. Through
winter, spring, summer and fall and back to winter, things on the freeway
stayed the same. Except for the moments when life was lost as accidents
occurred, and when vehicles were turned into weapons by drunks who did not have
enough sense to take a cab. But it rolled on, sometimes at eighty, sometimes at
ninety, sometimes at a hundred.

Today it was a hundred, and
this meant that Bill Arnold’s journey took around one hour and forty minutes.
As usual, it seemed as if some parts of the freeway had become giant parking
lots, but thankfully these were few and he was not held up for long. At the
times when he was stationary he found that his heartbeat increased at an
alarming rate. Every time he was forced to slow to a halt, he found himself
looking around anxiously to see if there was anybody staring at him from the
other cars that surrounded him, only to see quizzical looks from confused
motorists who wondered how they had managed to offend him. That, or looks from
people who thought he might be a madman like the one he feared seeing.

By the time he arrived in
Atlantic Beach, his eyes were exhausted from constantly trying to look in eight
directions, his mind was exhausted from endlessly spinning speculation, and he
was just about ready to find a motel and surrender himself to the sleep that he
so desired. His patience wasn’t helped as he traveled around the streets,
attempting to find the refuge that he hoped would be able to protect him from
what he recognized as a possibly life threatening storm. His thought that he would
have no trouble finding a motel in a place next to the ocean gave way to
frustration after ten minutes of seeing only residential properties. Then he
came across a police station.