Poison Flower

POISON FLOWER

A Jane Whitefield Novel

Thomas Perry

Also by Thomas Perry

The Butcher's Boy

Metzger's Dog

Big Fish

Island

Sleeping Dogs

Vanishing Act

Dance for the Dead

Shadow Woman

The Face-Changers

Blood Money

Death Benefits

Pursuit

Dead Aim

Nightlife

Silence

Fidelity

Runner

Strip

The Informant

Copyright c 2012 by Thomas Perry

All rights reserved.

To my family

1.

James Shelby sat in the white prison van looking out the tinted window. The tint was so dark it was hard to see out, and the grate on the inside that kept inmates from touching the glass made it worse. He was shackled to a ring welded to the side of the van, so he couldn't move around much.

Five prisoners were going to court this morning. Every-one in the California Institution for Men at Chino had already been tried and convicted, so they all knew the -routines -how they should stand, how their facial muscles should be set, where their eyes should be aimed. Three of the five men were going to be tried for crimes they had committed before they'd gone to jail-one man whose DNA had been taken at his prison intake physical and later matched to the sample swabbed from a rape victim, another man who had turned up on three bank security tapes committing robberies, and a liquor store bandit whose gun had been matched to a killing.

The fourth man was shackled a few feet from the others on the opposite side of the van with Shelby. His name was McCorkin and he was the former cellmate of an embezzler. McCorkin was going to testify that the embezzler had been bragging about using the money to buy drugs for resale. This was McCorkin's fourth trip to court to testify against cellmates, all of whom seemed to tell him things they hadn't told anyone else.

He and Shelby were shackled away from the others because they were both considered informers. Shelby had not concealed the name of the man who had stabbed him in the back two months ago. Being seated with McCorkin had its advantages. None of the others wanted to say anything in his presence that he could use to get more privileges or a shorter sentence. They didn't want him to be aware of them, because his mere notice brought with it a risk of future prosecutions.

Shelby looked out at the road, and not at his companions. From the start he hadn't let his eyes rest on any of them, because they were volatile. And today they were more dangerous to him than ever, because all any of them had to do was notice that something was odd about him and say so. If they even joked with him about being different today, the guards would hear it. He knew the malice and perversity that had tangled the prisoners' minds. If they knew he was planning to escape, they'd be resentful that he wasn't freeing them, too. They would be envious that he had a plan, because they didn't. And the ones who considered him an informer would find it simple justice to snitch on him.

On the way into Los Angeles there were mountains, then dry-looking pastureland and a succession of telephone poles, and then a big highway with cars driven by bored civilians who saw the marshal's logo on the side of the van and the reinforcement of the side and back windows, and tried to see through the tinted glass. They wanted to see a sideshow, a few ferocious beasts whose ugly faces would give them chills, and maybe even more, the poor, sad bastards who didn't look mean or crazy. Shelby was one of those. If they could have seen him through the glass, they would have said he looked just like their brother or nephew or cousin-a man in his late twenties with light hair and a reasonably handsome face. There was some unholy fake sympathy in people that made them think, "There, but for the grace of God . . ." and not mean it. The idea that they were the favored ones seemed to titillate them. They were not the ones inside the bars with the monsters and the freaks, and never would be.

The ride took another hour, and then the van pulled off the freeway at Grand Avenue, and went south to First Street and then up Broadway toward the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Courts Building. It was still early morning. Through the tinted glass Shelby could make out lots of people on the sidewalks of the court district. The lawyers all wore suits, mostly in shades between light gray and charcoal, with white shirts and neckties. The female city bureaucrats all wore pantsuits, and the males had dress pants and light-colored shirts and ties, and all of them wore plastic badges dangling on lanyards from their necks like jewelry. The jurors dressed more casually. Each of them had a red-and-white paper badge for jury duty stuck in a plastic holder with an alligator clip to hold it.

In the period of his life long before his troubles started, Shelby had lived for a year in Los Angeles. He'd served on a jury here, so he knew. They always started the day by herding a couple of hundred men and women into that small assembly room on the fifth floor. Then they waited, and at irregular intervals one of the clerks would come out of their office and read some juror numbers.

Benches lined the hallways of the court building, and they were always occupied by lawyers, their clients, witnesses, and the defendants' families. The first time he had seen the hallways, they had reminded him of the marketplaces in the Middle East, with people haggling and gossiping and scheming, their private conversations all out in the open, but unheard because there were too many people talking at once. Everyone had something pressing of his own to worry about at that moment-legal papers to look at and stories to repeat and get straight before going into the courtroom, or plea deals to evaluate before they were withdrawn.

The building was modern, with floors marked by rows of identical windows a person couldn't see into. The main entrance consisted of steps descending into a sunken patio. At the edge of the patio were glass doors leading into the building. The court building seemed worn. Everything had been walked on, rubbed, touched by human hands so many times that it was old while it was still new. Inside the tall glass doors was a security area that could have been transported from an airport. Long lines of people waited to put their belongings on conveyer belts that took them through X-ray machines, and then waited to walk through the arch of one of the three metal detectors.

Big, hard-eyed male cops and a few women cops operated the machines and funneled the mass of people into single-file lines and off into the rows of elevators on both sides of the lobby, first the ones for floors twelve through nineteen, and then the ones for floors two through eleven. During the past weeks Shelby had spent hours remembering every detail he could bring back.

Shelby prepared himself while the van pulled up behind the building and then into an underground garage. The van stopped. The guard yelled, "Listen up," and paused to hear the silence. "When you're unlocked, get out on the right side through the open door. Follow the man in front of you and line up in that order with your toes on the yellow line. Do not walk, do not move, until I tell you."

Shelby and the others got out and remained in line. They were all experts by now at hearing the order and following it without allowing it to linger in their minds to chafe. Following orders had become the only way forward in their lives.

The second guard got out with them and stood a few feet back, so they couldn't rush him without getting shot. The driver pulled the van ahead and around to an extra-long parking space reserved for the vehicles from the lockups. He came back and stood near his companion. "All right. We're going in through that door over there. When we're inside, you'll be given instructions and taken to a holding room. Walk."

The group of shackled prisoners walked ahead in single file to the door and then continued inside. The second guard handed a police officer a piece of paper, and he read it and handed it to another police officer at a desk, who used a pen to check something off against a list and wrote something down. All of the cops' faces were set in a wary distrust, making sure they were seeing the same things they'd seen ten thousand times before, and not something new.

The men were shackled to a railing that was attached to the wall in a holding room, in the same two groups. Shelby wondered where the black-haired woman was right now. He had listened closely to what she had told him during her visits to the California Institution for Men at Chino. She had told him where things were going to be and how he should reach them, but she'd never said where she was going to be or what she would do. Now he couldn't help wondering whether she hadn't told him because what she intended to do was insane, and she had been afraid he would lose his nerve. Maybe she had already set everything up before dawn, and had taken off, to be as far away as possible before things began to happen. She'd said only that she would give him a chance to free himself, and he had to be ready.

There was a television set on a metal stand high up in a corner, but it wasn't turned on. On the center of the wall was an electric clock. He and the others sat in silence for a long time watching it and waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. He began to worry again that he was not exuding the same air of bored emptiness that he had on other days, in prison. If he seemed nervous or unusually alert, one of the other inmates would know that he was hiding something. He half-closed his eyes and pretended to be dozing, but he tried to figure out where the guards were. About once an hour one of the sheriff's deputies in tan khaki shirts and green pants would come through the room as though he were taking a shortcut to somewhere else. Twice Shelby heard prisoners' names called over an intercom, but they must have been in other holding rooms.

At eleven thirty Shelby began to get nervous and agitated. The time was coming. Either it would happen soon, or it would not happen. There were a hundred reasons why it couldn't happen, and only one reason why it might-the woman's sheer mad certainty-but as long as that one reason wasn't dead, the tension in his chest kept growing. In a half hour he would be free or he'd be dead. Less than a half hour, now.

His eyes began to lose their ability to stay focused on one spot, because they weren't able to rest anywhere long enough. A cop came to the door and called out, "Shelby!"

"Yes, sir," Shelby said.

"There's an attorney waiting to speak with you. Stand up."

He stood and the cop unlocked his shackles from the rail on the wall and guided him out the door. Shelby took deep, even breaths. This was the start, and he was going to need to be sharp. The cop led him along the back hallway to the first open door, a room with a small window that started head-high with steel mesh over it. The cop ushered him in and closed the door behind them.

Seated at the table was the woman with black hair. Today she was dressed in a black suit, and she had draped a black raincoat over the table. The cop led Shelby to a chair across the table from her and began to shackle Shelby to the ring welded to the table.

The black-haired woman dropped something that sounded like a pen, and crouched to pick it up. For a moment Shelby and the guard lost sight of her under the table. The guard suddenly released Shelby's chain and stepped back. "Hey! What are you doing" He reached for something on his belt and took a first step to go around the table toward her. Before he could make the turn, his legs bent at the knees and he pitched forward. He fell to the floor, and rolled over to get his radio off his belt, but she batted it out of his grasp with her hand, and it clattered across the floor.

She held up her other hand to show him a hypodermic needle she had used on his leg. "It's a low dose of anesthetic. It won't hurt you, and the effect will be gone in a little while. I'm sorry."

The cop stared at her with wide eyes, but he didn't seem to be able to move. In a few seconds his eyes closed. She said, "He'll be out for a half hour." She knelt; unbuckled the cop's utility belt with his gun, mace, and handcuffs and set it across the room in a corner; reached into his breast pocket to get his cell phone; and took the battery and put it with his other equipment.

Shelby saw that the cop hadn't managed to close the hasp to lock his chain to the ring, so he pulled it through and freed himself.

She took the key from the cop's limp hand and removed the chains from around Shelby's waist and between his ankles. "Take off the jumpsuit."

Shelby unzipped it and stepped out of it, then stood in his underwear feeling cold and vulnerable. The woman looked out the screened window and took off her suit pants, which had been rolled at the waist to conceal their length, and cinched with a belt at her hips. She took off her black stretch turtleneck and handed it to him. This left her in a pair of tight black pants and a fitted vest over her white blouse. The suit coat she had left inside her raincoat when she'd taken it off, she now extricated and handed to Shelby. He put it on, and it fit reasonably well. She put on her raincoat.

She turned to him again, and he felt the blue eyes sweeping down from his face to his feet.

"How do I look" he asked.

"Not like a prisoner." She knelt again beside the cop, took off his black shoes, and handed them to Shelby so he could put them on. He kicked off his plastic sandals, stepped into the oversize shoes, and tied them as tightly as possible. The last thing she handed him was her briefcase. "Ready"

He nodded. She unlocked the door with one of the keys from the cop's belt, and went out to the narrow, empty corridor. There were doors all along the left side that led to rooms like the one they'd just left, and one windowless steel door at the end with a clipboard hanging on it. The sheet on the clipboard listed Kristen Alvarez, but she took out a pen and added the name Gregory Campbell to the list with the same entry time as Kristen Alvarez. She looked at her watch and signed them both out. They stepped out into the main hallway of the building. As they walked, she and Shelby looked straight ahead and never met the eyes of passersby. Shelby noticed that any eyes passed over him and lingered on her. She was beautiful, tall and erect, and took long, purposeful strides. They made a turn and stepped through the exit door into the staircase.

They hurried down four floors without meeting anyone on the stairs, and then she stopped at a small glass door with a fire extinguisher inside. She opened the door, reached behind the extinguisher, and produced a red-and-white juror badge in a plastic holder and clipped it to Shelby's breast pocket. She looked at her watch. "We're on the fifth floor. Just go out into the hall near the jury room and sit on one of the benches. In three minutes it will be noon."

"How can I ever thank you"

"You're not even out yet. Make sure you get one of the first elevators."

He nodded and went out into the fifth-floor hallway. In two and a half minutes the staff in the jury assembly room would let the two hundred or so bored prospective jurors go to lunch, and they'd all stream out to jam the hallway and the elevators and stairs. He walked toward the jury assembly room, but stopped outside the door and sat down on the bench by the wall closest to the elevator to wait.

JANE WHITEFIELD RAN DOWN THE stairwell the rest of the way toward the first floor, but just as she was reaching for the door handle to go out to the lobby, she heard a door a few floors up flung open, and she could hear the measured sound of leather-soled shoes on the metal stairs, and the murmur of voices-jurors. She almost smiled, but instead kept her face blank and serene as she stepped out into a narrow corridor to the back of the lobby near the elevators.

Then Jane saw the three men. Shelby's sister had given her photographs of them when she had come to Jane in Deganawida, New York, to ask for her help. "I took these during Jim's trial," she said. "These are the three who helped frame him. They bribed some witnesses to say that Jim had done violent things when he got mad at people, some to say they saw him sitting in the parking lot waiting for Susan to come home that night, and scared at least two other witnesses away so they couldn't be found in time for the trial."

The pictures had been taken from different angles: one photo of them taken as they were coming out of some public building together, one taken when they were getting into a car, and one taken through the open side window as they pulled away. The men were all about thirty to forty, with short, well-barbered hair, all wearing suits. They looked like lawyers or business clients arriving for a case.

Jane watched them. They had already passed through the metal detectors to get in, so they couldn't be carrying guns. But they were moving against the crowd of jurors and lawyers departing for lunch, standing in front of the bank of elevators, and as each door opened to let jurors out, the three men moved a little closer to get in. There were six elevators on each side of the lobby. There was still a good chance that when James Shelby's elevator arrived they would be entering another one, or at least not looking in his direction.

Jane moved closer to them. This was developing into a situation where she might have to pay a high price for James Shelby. She had prepared herself for this possibility a long time ago, something that was implicit in the promise she made to her clients. If she was going to save innocent people from the enemies who wanted them dead, there would be times when she must fight.

She was close to the three men now, almost to their backs. The door of the elevator to their left opened and she saw James Shelby. He was in the middle of the crowded elevator, and as the door opened he spilled out with a dozen jurors, all pushing forward, weaving to get past the surge of people wanting to get in. A hand shot out as one of the men in front of her grabbed Shelby's arm, and Jane pushed off with her back foot to throw her body into the arm, wrenching the hand off Shelby. The man grunted in pain and surprise and half-turned to get a look at her over his shoulder, but she pivoted, her back to him and his companions as she moved toward the main exit. Ahead of her she saw Shelby heading across the lobby with the torrent of people.

"That's him!" the man yelled.

"What are you talking about" That seemed to be one of his companions.

"It's Shelby! He's leaving!"

The voices were behind her as she caught up with Shelby and pushed him out with the crowd into the narrower space at the glass doors.

"Stop him!" the man said. "It's him!"

Jane got Shelby out onto the sunken patio outside the entrance where the steps went up onto Broadway. "Go!" she said to him. "Just as we planned."

He looked at her in panic, but his legs took him up onto Broadway, and he kept going.

Jane planted herself at the foot of the steps. She reached into a pocket of her purse, took out a black elastic band, gathered her hair in a ponytail and slid the elastic over it, then tucked it under so the hair was tight to her head. She stood straight and held on to her purse.

The man who had grabbed Shelby had wasted fifteen seconds keeping his companions out of the elevator and another fifteen getting them to plow through the crowd and across the lobby. The people in the crowd were unwilling to let anyone push them aside to get out of the building ahead of them, so getting out took time and the three men weren't much faster than anyone else.

Jane felt the seconds passing. Shelby should spot the parked car soon. Within another minute or two he should get in, find the keys, start the engine. Next he would head for the freeway entrance. Maybe the crowd would delay the men long enough.

But the three men burst out the double doors. They had been craning their necks to see what went on through the glass while they fought their way to the exit, so they all dashed toward the steps where Shelby had escaped to the street. Jane knew Shelby was still not completely recovered from the stabbing two months ago, so he would be slow. Not enough time had passed since she'd freed him from the man's grasp. They could still run him down if she didn't stop them.

Jane took two steps and turned on the bottom step to face them. She could see that they still hadn't grasped what she was. To them she was a lady lawyer, and they planned to push past her and endure her look of irritated disdain.

The first one was easy, probably because he was bigger and faster than the other two. He didn't seem to be aware that she could possibly be a lethal opponent. He charged ahead, barely seeing her as he dashed to the steps. All Jane had to do was sidestep, trip him, place one hand on his spine and the other on the back of his head to direct his face downward into the steps. Her push increased his momentum enough so he hit hard and lay still.

The second man was the one who had grasped -Shelby's arm in front of the elevator, so he was ready. He didn't try to get around her, but went straight for her with both his hands up, preparing to throw a punch. Jane knew she couldn't fight toe-to-toe against a male opponent who outweighed her by a hundred pounds, so she never did. She retreated up two more steps to place herself beyond the man's fallen companion. He took a wild swing at her with his right fist, and when he missed, he had to put one foot on his unconscious comrade to keep from falling over him.

Jane swung her purse into his face. He grabbed it, and she wrapped the strap around his wrist, tugged him toward her over his unconscious companion, and delivered a quick jab to the bridge of his nose. When both of his hands went to his face, she stomp-kicked his kneecap from the side. He went down, landed on his friend, and rolled down the last step clutching his knee while his nose bled down the front of his clothes.

Spectators were beginning to gather, jamming the crowd that was still trying to leave the building. In the corner of her eye Jane caught the third man moving up the steps toward her back, but he threw his arms around her from behind in a bear hug before she could evade him. In a single motion she threw her head back into his nose and upper teeth, heel-stomped his right instep, made a fist with her right hand, and swung it behind her into his groin. She felt a puff of his hot breath on the back of her neck as he released her and rocked back.

His momentary distress seemed to give bystanders courage. A dozen men swarmed in at once, getting between Jane and the three attackers, holding them back and pinioning their arms. It was surprisingly quiet, just a bit of grunting and "You don't want to hit a woman, pal." "Calm down." "Just don't struggle." "Fight's over."

Suddenly there was a loud, authoritative voice. "Stand aside. Police officers." Five big cops in black LAPD uniforms moved in, parting the crowd as they made their way toward the three men.

Jane turned instantly and walked off, away from the center of the crowd, adjusting her steps to put as many people as possible between her and the policemen. She hurried along the sidewalk in front of the building and into the other, separate crowd of curious people who had retreated half a block before stopping to watch. As she burrowed deeper into the group, she took off the black raincoat, pulled the elastic band off her hair, and shook her long hair out. She set her face in a slightly amused expression, an implication that whatever had been going on down there had nothing to do with her and was, in any event, incomprehensible.

She got past the spectators and moved on with the stream of people going to lunch. She walked downhill on Broadway to First Street, and turned right to head for the Metro station at Hill and First. She walked quickly, taking long strides that carried her past most of the other pedestrians. The sidewalks were full of people wearing juror badges clipped to them or security ID on lanyards for the city and county offices in the civic center. There were male lawyers with thick briefcases and female lawyers pulling cases on wheels with long handles like suitcases. She spotted the tall red sign with an "M" on it, glanced behind her to look for anyone running, and kept going.

She reached the sign and turned into the walkway toward the escalators. A plain, dark blue Ford Crown Victoria sped up Hill Street toward her, veered to the curb, and stopped. Two men in suits got out quickly. One of them yelled, "Stop right there, miss. Police." He opened his coat and she could see a gold badge clipped to his belt. His companion stayed by the driver's door, but he had pulled out his gun and was steadying it on the roof of his car, not quite aiming at her, but showing it.

Jane's mind raced ahead. If she managed to get down the escalator without being shot by one police officer or wrestled to the pavement by the other, she might reach the platform and have to wait ten minutes for the next train. She couldn't outrun their car on these streets. She stood still and held her hands out from her sides. "What's the matter, officer"

"Just stay where you are, with your hands in sight." He ran up to her, grasped her right wrist and brought it behind her, snapped a handcuff on it, then took the left behind her and closed the other handcuff on that wrist. He clutched her arm and tugged her toward the car. "Now come with me. We're going to get into the back seat of the car. Keep your head down."

He opened the door and put his hand on her head to keep it from bumping as she slid onto the seat. He moved in after her, and the lock buttons clicked down. The driver put away his gun, put the car into gear, and drove.

The car went up Hill to Temple, turned left away from the court building, past the cathedral and the concert halls, and swung onto the Hollywood Freeway moving north. Obviously, they were taking her, not back to the courthouse, but to their precinct station. She decided to introduce doubt. "You've got the wrong person," she said. "I haven't done anything wrong."

"I didn't ask you," said the cop beside her. "There will be plenty of time to talk later." He had small, close-set eyes and the sort of thick, dark hair that went down too far on his forehead so it looked like a cap.

"I was just getting on the subway and you came along and arrested me, so you must think I did something." She had begun the urgent business of keeping them from holding her long enough to connect her with Shelby's escape.

"I didn't say that."

"But whoever you're looking for is back there somewhere laughing at us. She's getting away." She didn't have much hope of persuading them it was a case of mistaken identity, but she had to keep probing to see if she could derail the inexorable process of getting her into a jail cell, where she'd be when the escape was discovered.

The cop beside her sighed wearily. "You had a little scuffle on the courthouse steps, didn't you You hurt some people. Does that ring a bell"

She knew cops lost their sympathy when somebody lied to them, so she'd have to try something that didn't contradict what they'd seen. "I was in front of the building when these three men rushed out of the building and attacked me. There are at least a hundred witnesses who saw what happened."

"These men just attacked you for no reason."

"If they had a reason they didn't tell me what it was."

The cop shrugged. "Could it be because you had just helped James Shelby to escape"

"Escape All I was there for was to get excused from jury duty."

"Consider yourself excused," the driver said.

"Those three men were trying to hurt me."

The cop beside her said, "I'm not arguing with you. I believe that's what happened."

"So why are you arresting me"

The cop beside her said, "When you see three men who mean you harm, how do you know that there aren't more"

The driver laughed. "There could be a couple more waiting in a car nearby."

Jane turned to face the man on the seat beside her. "What are you" Her hands were cuffed behind her, but she used them to grasp the door handle.

"We're the guys who caught you pulling a jailbreak."

She kept her eyes focused on his, but she was watching the speed of the fixed objects passing the window behind him-trees, buildings. The freeway was crowded, but the car was still moving about forty miles an hour. Even if she managed to survive a fall to the pavement at that speed, she would be hit by at least the car behind, and probably the next two after it. She had to wait and hope there was a bottleneck somewhere ahead that would slow the traffic to the stop-and-go crawl that was typical of Los Angeles freeways.

She said, "Since you're not cops, this is kidnapping, false imprisonment, and about eight other things. If you drop me off at any police station and say you saw me get James Shelby out, they'll arrest me and you'll be heroes."

"Sorry. We've got orders, and that isn't what they are."

"Whoever told you this was a good idea isn't doing you any favors. Will he be with you while you're serving a life sentence in a federal prison"

"Nobody's going to prison," said the driver. "Just sit back and relax for a little while, and everything will be fine."

"There's nothing fine about this," she said.

She watched for her chance impatiently, but the car never slowed below forty. It was still only a few minutes after noon, so the traffic was moving smoothly. She watched for police or highway patrol or sheriff's cars, but the only one she saw was an LAPD car about a quarter mile ahead, taking an exit onto a surface street.

They drove outside the city and into the dry, brown hills to the northwest. Beyond them there were the same rugged gray mountains that loomed like a wall on the east all the way up the coast from the Mexican border to Oregon. The traffic sped up instead of jamming.

Jane waited and watched. If she had suspected that the men weren't police officers, she would have made her stand before she got into the car. The badges, the guns, and the make and model of the car had fooled her. If she hadn't been in the middle of the criminal court complex, expecting the police to be chasing her, the thought of impostors might have entered her mind, but it hadn't. She had allowed herself to be kidnapped in daylight on a city street without ever suspecting it was happening. She kept remembering what the experts said about kidnapping. Never get in the car. Once you're in the car, you're dead. If you're going to fight, you have to do it before then.

The car wasn't going to be stalled in traffic on the freeway, so she began to work out an alternative plan. Sometime they would have to pull off the freeway onto an exit ramp, and an exit ramp usually came to a stop at an intersection. If there was no traffic signal right away, there would be one soon afterward. As soon as the traffic stopped, she would unlatch the door with her handcuffed hands, lean out, and roll when she hit the pavement.

If she was lucky, the two men would panic and drive off. If, instead, the two tried to drag her back into the car, she would kick and scream that she was being abducted. She might be able to delay them long enough to attract help, or at least get someone standing nearby or in a passing car to call the police.

A few minutes later, at five after one, the car began to coast, then moved to the exit lane, and she saw the sign for Route 23 North toward Moorpark. She prepared herself. Their course seemed to be taking them from crowded places to empty ones, so this might be her only chance.

She felt the car losing momentum, heard the tires bump over the crack that separated the freeway from the ramp, felt the brakes slowing the car. As the car rolled to a near-stop, she pushed the door handle down, and the door swung open. As the car started to move forward again, she pushed off with both feet and propelled herself out. She hit the pavement hard, rolled with the momentum, went backward over her shoulder, and landed on her knees at the top of the ramp.

"Help! Help me!" she shouted. "They're kidnapping me!" A car with a frightened woman at the wheel nearly hit her as the woman swung past. "Call the police!" Jane yelled at her. "Help!"

The two men didn't drive on. They both flung open their doors and ran toward her. The man who had handcuffed her took out his gun. As Jane dived toward the bed of ice plants beside the exit ramp she heard the shot and felt the brutal impact of the bullet, and then the explosion of pain.

JANE'S RIGHT LEG FELT AS though it were crushed and on fire, throbbing with each heartbeat. She must have lost consciousness for a moment, because she didn't remember being dragged back into the car. She was strapped tight by the seat belt with her hands still cuffed behind her. The pain was like fire that seemed to grow hotter and hotter. The leg was weak, and if the bumping of the car moved it, the pain shot inward from her thigh to her spine. Jane could manage only shallow, quivery breaths that rasped in and out. She tried to keep the breaths quiet, to hide her weakness from her enemies, but she couldn't control them. She knew she had been shot only a few minutes ago, but she couldn't imagine living much longer with this pain. She fought the impulse to close her eyes again. She had to remain aware of what was around her.

Since she had come to, the man beside her in the back seat had been talking to her in a hiss of hatred, his face close to her right ear. What was he saying "You bitch. You stupid bitch. You did this to yourself. We would have found out what we wanted and then let you go-dumped you someplace so it would take you time to get to a phone. But you couldn't live with that. Now you're going to be crippled, or lose your leg."

To give herself strength, Jane gathered her pain and anger, like two hands scraping crumbs together and compressing them. "I doubt it."

"Oh You're a doctor, too"

"No, but I can see I'm bleeding out."

He looked down at her right thigh, and his eyes followed the dark wetness that was soaking her black pants, and where the blood dripped to the floor he could see a pool forming. He said to the driver, "She's bleeding a lot."

The driver said, "Then do something. We've got to keep her alive."

"Do something What"

"Stop the bleeding," the driver said. "Use a tourniquet."

The man unbuckled his belt and pulled it off, then wrapped it around Jane's thigh just above the wound and tightened it.

"Ahh!" Jane shouted.

He cinched the belt tighter and held it there. Jane could tell he was happy that he was inflicting even more pain.

Jane leaned back in the car seat but kept her eyes open, searching for signs-a street, a city, a direction. There was a shopping mall, but she couldn't see its name. They were passing the delivery entrance, and the sign was facing the other way on another street.

She wasn't sure she should have mentioned the blood. She might soon wish she had bled to death before these two started doing things to make her give up James Shelby.

Her husband Carey's image appeared in her mind, but she blinked and glared at the sights flashing by-chain-link fences around parking lots, low gray or beige buildings with trucks parked at loading docks. She couldn't let her own feelings distract her. She had to be alert to the next chance to save herself, and not think about losing the world full of things she loved.

She was held upright by the seat belt, and she kept her eyes open, scanning the lines of cars in each direction, looking for a police car. That would be all it would take-a police car. She could attract the cop's attention, and this would be over. She watched for what seemed to be twenty minutes, but she knew it couldn't have been that long.

The police car never seemed to appear, and the pain of the gunshot wound was worse and worse. She felt sweat at her temples, the back of her neck, her sides. She kept fighting waves of dizzy nausea, then faintness. She couldn't lose consciousness now, or she might miss her chance to stop the two men before they got her out of sight somewhere.

The car slowed a bit, sped up, slowed, and she realized the driver was looking for an address. As he did, other cars began to pass him on the right-a chance. The seat belt, the handcuffs, and the man's hand holding the tourniquet tight would prevent her from moving anything but her head now. She shrieked as loudly as she could, her voice tearing the air, and threw her head against the side window of the car. She shouted, "Help! Call the police!"

A man driving the car beside her looked shocked. He slowed, then stared at her. Her captor put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her inward. He held up his badge and gave an authoritative wave to tell the gawker to move on. The man pulled over and turned right. She screamed, "No! They're not cops!"

The man holding the tourniquet tugged on it and the pain shot up her leg. "You really are stupid," he said. "There's no need to kill yourself. Leave something to us, for Christ's sake."

The driver was staring intently in his mirrors. "That guy's gone, right"

The other man looked out the rear window. "Yeah. It's safe to go in."

The car turned left and went between two one-story gray buildings that looked like small factories or warehouses into a parking lot. There were three more low buildings ranged around the lot. The car stopped beside the door of the second one. "Let's get her inside."

Jane's world was becoming a place with dark patches that would join at the periphery of her vision and then spread like a stain. The man swung open the car door, but she mostly heard it, because almost instantly the pain in her leg was sharp and deep, like a blade thrust into the muscle. She felt as though the knife's serrations were scraping the bone, and then the men had her arms over their shoulders, half carrying, half dragging her to a door, and then inside.

The inner space was huge, like a small high-tech factory with brushed concrete floors and acoustic tile ceilings. "Let's put her on the couch." The voice had a slight echo as though the place were entirely empty, but it wasn't. There were rooms of some sort built along the side-offices, maybe.

The two men, now just shadows, dragged her to a couch and then lowered her onto it. The pain always grew, never diminished. Every movement seemed to set off a spasm, bending her body over like a hook. The two shadows stayed there, two blots in the middle of her burning red pain. One of the shadows said, "If you want to scream now, go ahead. That's why we brought you here. But while you're doing it, start thinking about something. You're going to talk. Everybody does."

2.

Jane woke up and saw that a new man was beside her, wearing a surgical mask, headgear, and gloves, using a pair of curved bandage scissors to cut along the outer seam of her pants. A doctor. He pulled back the flap of fabric and examined her wound for a few seconds, then began to talk to the man standing above her behind the couch. His mask muffled his voice.

"You had to shoot her" He was angry. "This is going to make everything harder for you than you can even imagine. She could die." He had a foreign accent, but with the mask she couldn't place it. His skin was light brown, and his eyes were dark.

"Then make sure she doesn't die."

"Easy to say after the bullet has been fired."

"There was no choice."

"She'll need daily care to control the bleeding, prevent infection, and get the wound to heal properly. She must have antibiotics, painkillers and sedatives, IV feeding."

"You'll be well paid for everything you do, and for once you won't have to testify in court that your patient got hurt in a car accident."

"Very funny. I'll need to bring my nurse to assist me."

"Is she worth all this trouble" The second man was standing somewhere beyond Jane's head, where she couldn't see him.

"What do you mean"

"Is she even going to live"

The doctor's voice became contemptuous. "The bullet passed through her leg and exited the other side, which is why there are two holes. She didn't die of shock, or of blood loss, and the femur wasn't broken, all of which I attribute to luck. The care she gets will determine whether she lives or not. You could take her to a hospital and her chances would be very good."

"I don't think so. I want to hold on to her."

"Then we'll have to do our best here. I'll clean and dress the wound now, and then set up the rest tomorrow morning. Let me give her a painkiller so we can move her to the table." He took a very small bottle of clear liquid from his bag, unwrapped a hypodermic needle, filled it, and swabbed Jane's leg with a cotton ball. She smelled the strong, almost nauseating odor of alcohol, and then felt the needle.

EVERY TIME JANE AWOKE SHE tried to sit up, but there was something tied across her under her arms that prevented her. She was aware, as in a dream, that if she could simply overcome her confusion and gather her thoughts, she would be capable of escaping the restraints. But each time, she exhausted herself and fell back to sleep.

In her dream it was a winter night somewhere in the north. She could feel the clear, freezing air and see the light dusting of snow on the ground, indented with many footprints. She was in a big enclosure of straight tree trunks with the bark still on them, sharpened at the top, and in the middle there was a single fire that gave no warmth but illuminated the space with a flickering light. There were other people-women and children mostly, with just a few men here and there. She knew they were all captives. They wore dark, dirty, torn clothes she couldn't even tie to one period or style, and they stayed in the shadows. Some of them limped or crouched or tried to bind up their wounds.

Jane walked, wandering among the people, listening to the things they said to each other. She tried to be unobtrusive, slouching and lowering her eyes to look at the ground as she passed. "Do you think they'll just keep us here until we die" There was no attempt to answer. "Who are they" "Strangers. Enemies."

She looked up, and she could see his eyes looking at her long before she could make her way through the crowd to reach him. He stood alone, even though there were people on all sides of him. He wore the same gray polyester sport coat with a faint greenish tinge. He had worn it when she had met him, and even though the elbows were faded on that day, probably from countless hours of leaning on poker tables, he wore the coat later when she was taking him into hiding. He must have had it on when he died. As always, he had on brown dress pants that were shiny in the seat and knees, and scuffed shoes.

Harry Kemple was her only mistake, a gambler who had heard murderers burst into his poker game while he was in the bathroom and kill all of the men at the table. He had opened the door a crack and seen them leaving. They had hunted him, so she had saved his life, taken him away, and given him a new name. Years later she had been fooled into leading one of the hunters to the forger who had made the documents for Harry's new identity, and in two days he was dead. Since then Harry sometimes visited her in dreams.

"I was coming to find you," he said.

She came closer. "Where are we"

"Just one of those places between life and death. It's a convenient place for people from both sides to meet."

"Sleep"

"You're not asleep. You're closer to death than sleep."

She looked down at her wounded leg, and at her feet there was blood in the snow.

"Your blood is leaking out of you. Those stitches the doctor put in your leg and the bandages are only slowing it down." He lifted his face to look upward and pointed at his throat, where the medical examiner had put some crude stitches to close the gaping wound where the knife blade had passed. "Nobody knows more about bleeding out than I do."

"I'm so sorry, Harry," she said. "I thought he was a runner who needed my help. It never occurred to me that he was using me to find his way to you."

Harry raised an eyebrow and stared at her for a couple of seconds. Then he said, "Every time we meet I have to listen to the same apology. Forget it. If he hadn't collected on the contract on me, there would have been a car crash or a microbe or a blood clot. When you're dead, the way death got you is just one thing that happened among thousands. You don't care more about that day than any of the others, just because it was the last day. You'll see."

"Are you telling me I'm dying"

He frowned. "At the moment you are. You're losing blood, and you're in the hands of enemies."

"Is there any way I can save myself"

Harry held up his hands and shrugged. "How do I know what you can do or can't do You're the only one who has any way to guess. These things aren't determined ahead of time. The grandsons of Sky Woman fight. That's all we know. The left-handed twin Hanegoategeh raises his arm to strike, but the right-handed twin Hawenneyu reaches up with his right, like the image in a mirror, to block it. Creator and Destroyer, life giver and killer, they struggle, and their constant fighting is what makes the world we pass through into a battlefield. Sooner or later, everyone is a casualty. Every-body sheds his blood, like me. And like you."

She followed his eyes downward, and looked at her leg. The big white bandage that was wrapped around the wound was bright scarlet, and the blood in the snow was pooling. She raised her eyes again. "I've lost blood before," she said. "I want to do better than to lie on that couch waiting to die so the pain will end. What can I do"

Harry sighed. "You know I love you, but you made your choice a long time ago-day over night, life over death. You think you're on the side of the good twin, the Creator twin. If he made you, then he must have made you what you are for his own purposes. We can't know the scheme, because he's trying to fool his brother, and the left-handed twin might read our minds."

"But that doesn't tell me what to do."

"If you're Hawenneyu's creature, be exactly what he made you, because you have a part to play in the fight. If he made you a fox, he must need a fox, so be the fox he made. Don't think you're smart enough to improve his strategy."

"And if I die"

"You will die. You know that."

"I meant-"

"I know. Gather your strength now. Your biggest trials are coming soon. Remember the Grandfathers, the ones who chose to stand and fight to block the trail while their friends escaped."

Jane awoke. She was in the big, dimly lit room on the couch, covered with a sheet. She was sweating, and she was very conscious of the tight bandage wrapped around her leg. Her white blouse and vest had been replaced by a man's shirt. She was terribly hot. She wondered if she had a fever and if it meant that the wound was infected.

Her eyes moved, following the weak, dim light to the source, a reading lamp on a small desk far off on the other end of the room. It seemed to flicker, and she realized there was also a laptop computer on the desk. A movie was playing on its screen. Jane hoped it was an online version, and not just a DVD playing. In less than a minute she could use a computer to e-mail her husband Carey or the local police. There were a pair of earphones on the desk, but nobody was visible.

Jane welcomed the extra light because it illuminated her surroundings, and gave her a chance to explore without moving. There were six windows in a row about fifteen feet from the floor, but they looked like immovable glass installed to let daylight into the building but not to open. They had been covered with blackout fabric taped to the glass so no light could pass in or out-had they simply been painted black They had no latches. The right side of the big room had a wall with four doors, but the wall seemed to extend only to the acoustic tile ceiling.

She heard a door open, and when it did, she heard water, like a toilet tank refilling. The door closed again and a woman in hospital scrubs and a pair of white sneakers walked to the computer. The woman had very dark, curly hair gathered into a bushy ponytail behind her head, and she wore glasses with rectangular lenses and black frames.

Jane tried to evaluate her features. Did she look cruel or dishonest Jane saw no sign of either. She might be foreign and might not speak English well enough to know that Jane had been kidnapped. But then, what could she imagine had happened If she was a nurse, she knew Jane's wound was from a gunshot, and she certainly knew this industrial space wasn't a hospital.

Jane decided the woman in scrubs couldn't be much help. Then it occurred to her that the nurse and the doctor might help her unintentionally. At some point, the men who had brought her here were going to try to force her to tell them where Jim Shelby had been heading when he'd left the courthouse. Maybe having the medical people here would restrain them a little.

And the doctor and nurse had medicines and drugs. The doctor had injected Jane with a couple of things-an antibiotic and a very strong painkiller that had put her to sleep. She wondered if it was the same kind she had stolen from Carey's office and used on the guard in the courthouse. She had filled the syringe she'd gotten from a diabetes kit, then broken the bottle and left the pieces inside the cardboard box, as though it had been dropped in shipping. A mixture of Midazolam and Fentanyl, it was an anesthetic used for minor surgeries, or as a pre-op sedation before a general anesthetic. She had read on the Internet that it was safer than most of the drugs used for that purpose, and a full dose wore off in about two hours.

Jane kept looking out into the room, taking in the small bits of information that her eyes brought her, and then turning them around in her head to examine them from different perspectives. But she was careful not to move. The sooner the woman she thought of as a nurse knew she was conscious, the sooner she would notify the men who had kidnapped her and the really horrible stuff would begin. Every minute Jane could lie on the couch pretending to be asleep, Jim Shelby got farther from Los Angeles, and farther from the people who were looking for him.

And perhaps every moment, the police were coming closer to finding her. She had been taken in a busy place. Many of those big public buildings had multiple security cameras going all the time. There were also the subway entrance and the major intersections around the court buildings and government offices. One of these cameras must have caught her fake arrest on tape.

Jane lay there counting each minute as a point for her side. Whenever she partially opened her eyes, she would see that the woman still had the earphones on and was still staring at the computer screen. After a long time, Jane dozed off again.

When the doctor came in, he switched on bright overhead lights and talked loudly. "You can assemble the bed over here, in the center of this room."

As the pieces were brought in from the truck and assembled, the bed took form. It was the size of a twin bed with a steel frame. After less than thirty seconds they were going back out for the mattress. They set it on the steel-mesh spring.

The nurse took off her earphones and said something to the doctor in a language that didn't sound familiar to Jane, and he answered her in the same language. The nurse went to the truck; came back with a set of sheets, a pillow, and a wool blanket; and made the bed quickly. As soon as she was finished, the doctor said to his employers, "You two are going to have to help us move her onto the bed."

"How do we-"

"I'm about to tell you," he snapped. "It's important that you do exactly as I say. We're going to put the blanket under her partway." He and the nurse unfurled the blanket and tucked it under her, then slid her onto it. "Now lift the blanket." Then the four lifted her again onto the new bed, and the nurse arranged her pillows.

The doctor said to his nurse, "I need to have another look at the wound. Bring the dressing kit."

The nurse laid out various implements and dressings, and prepared a hypodermic needle. Jane said, "What's in the needle"

"It's a painkiller."

"I don't need a painkiller," she said.

"Yes you do. I haven't begun yet." He injected the painkiller into her arm, and in a short time, she felt limp and sleepy, and then there was darkness.

When she awoke the doctor was gone, her mouth was dry, and her leg hurt a bit more than she remembered it hurting, as though the doctor had disturbed it somehow.

"So where is Jimmy Shelby" The voice sounded friendly. It seemed to her the voice was a little bit like the voice of a country singer. She opened her eyes and looked at the man who had spoken. He was ten feet away. He had the reddish skin that some pale-complexioned people had when they'd spent too many years in the sun. The sunburn never seemed to go away. He was tall and lanky, wearing a pair of boots, with the legs of his blue jeans down over them, and a black sport coat. His short blond hair was spiked on top, and it struck Jane as grotesque, because his face looked a generation too old for the style.

"I don't know," she said.

He looked at her with an expression of mild surprise, which seemed to blossom into sincere curiosity. "Now why would you say that"

"Because I don't."

"You broke him out of the courthouse, left a car for him to drive, and then used delaying tactics to keep anyone from getting to him while there was still time. Are you denying that"

"No."

"So you have to be a pro, somebody who has done this kind of thing before, and who knows the way things work. You knew there was a big risk, and you might be caught. You must know where he went."

"I didn't want to. It wouldn't make either of us any safer. If I don't know, I can't tell."

"I sure hope you're not telling the truth about that," he said. "If you don't know, you have nothing to trade. All you'll be is a woman who freed a man we put in jail, and hurt three friends of mine doing it."

"That's all I am," Jane said.

"Are you trying to get me to kill you"

"I'm just answering your questions truthfully right now at the start, to avoid a lot of fruitless conversation later. You'll make your own decisions."

He looked at her closely, his brows knitted. Then he called out to his men, "I think she needs to focus her mind. Ask her again." He turned and walked across the big room and out the door. When it opened she saw that night had come. She heard the sound of a car engine, and then silence.

The man who had shot her and the driver came in from one of the doors along the side of the room. Each was carrying a bamboo stick about three feet long, and about the thickness of a cane. Without any preliminary -threatening, the man who had shot her simply raised his cane and brought it down across her shin. She squinted, and the other began to beat her too, hitting her across the stomach. She was strapped to the bed with only a man's shirt and a sheet over her, so the blows fell on her head, stomach, arms, feet, knees, and shins without padding to soften them. The men avoided hitting her right thigh, where the bullet wound was, but otherwise, they seemed bent on hurting her everywhere. She lost count of the sharp, stinging blows, but she could tell the two men had not. She suspected they must have orders to hit her a certain number of times. She turned her head to avert her face, but that was all she could do in her weakness. As though at a silent signal, the blows stopped.

"Where is he" It was the man who had shot her.

"I don't know."

"You have to know his first stop," the driver said.

"Why do I have to"

"He's hurt, has no money, no clothes, no shelter. You must have help waiting for him somewhere. Tell us where."

"I offered to get him out of jail. He said yes, so I did. Since then he's been on his own."

The driver hit her again, a sharp, sudden blow that was aimed at her knee, but which hit an inch higher. "Which direction did he go East"

"I don't know."

The other man's bamboo stick slashed across her ribs, and she glared at him, but refused to cry out.

The questions came, and after each one, a blow. After a while, they stopped waiting for her to say, "I don't know," and just hit her after each question.

As the blows fell, Jane withdrew her mind from the room where the men were beating her and concentrated on the past, on the wars of the forests her ancestors had fought. Often, when members of a war party were returning from a raid in a distant territory, they would be running to escape, and a much larger force would be pursuing them. Sometimes, if it became clear that they were going to be overtaken, a lone warrior would stop at a narrow, strategic spot on the trail and turn back to delay the pursuers. Most of the time he would fight until he died. But the enemies always wanted to take him alive. They would surround him and try to wound and exhaust him if they could. When all of his arrows were gone and he had swung his war club many times, they would rush him from all sides at once, drag him down, and subdue him.

The Seneca warrior would be brought back to the enemy village bound and wounded. He would be the only representative of the war party that had struck and probably killed a few of the enemy, and he had probably killed more in his fight to buy time for his friends to get away. He would know that the only thing in his future was pain.

But a captured warrior was still a warrior. It was his job now to be indifferent to physical torment. Before he died, he wanted to demonstrate his superiority so convincingly that his captors would be terrified of the next Seneca they saw.

She imagined that the first stages of his torment would be like what she was suffering now. As he was dragged in, the villagers would beat him with sticks, poke and pound him, teasing him with the taste of the pain that was to come.

He would give them no satisfaction. He would pretend that their blows were not frightening to him, and that his death meant nothing. The last, best thing he could do for all the Senecas who came after him was to plant in their enemies a secret, lingering fear that would make them timid and hesitant, so they could be struck down.

Jane felt the blows, and she knew the other torments that would be coming, probably better than these men knew. They were simply doing what they guessed might force her to talk, but she had already thought through all of the tortures that were likely to occur to them as they tried again and again to break her. Each attempt would be worse. Every form of cruelty seemed ready-made, tried long ago, but also reinvented in every human brain because when a person was afraid it took effort not to think of all the things he didn't want done to him.

What the men were doing was just like the entry into the enemy village-a prisoner with a debilitating wound, a beating to announce to her that they were willing to cause her more injury and pain. Probably only a day or two would pass before the novice torturers began to introduce refinements that would make a person shudder and feel ashamed of the species. Then Jane would have to be brave the way the old warriors were, always alert for a way to kill one of them or force them to kill her.

The beating ended. She lay on the bed on her back and silently allowed each of the places where she'd been struck to report the damage. There would be welts on much of her body, and big bruises where they had hit particularly hard. There seemed to be no broken bones in her forearms or wrists, no broken fingers or toes yet. She looked down at her thigh. Blood had soaked through the bandage and the sheet, but it wasn't the sort of bleeding that would kill her.

3.

Jane awoke again because she heard a woman's voice. She knew from the way her wounds felt-dry and angry-that a few hours had passed, but there was no day or night, no light or dark. The woman had come back again and was standing a few feet from her, talking on a cell phone. "You should see her. I'm telling you, this is crazy. It looks like they hit her with clubs or something. All nearly identical contusions. Arms, legs, abdomen, chest. . . . Not the head, that I can see. And not the wound on the right thigh. If this is going to be a murder, I'm out. All right, I'll see you later."

Jane had heard, in that short conversation, more than the woman would ever have told her. The woman came closer and looked down at Jane. Today she was wearing burgundy scrubs and a different pair of bright white sneakers. "You're awake. If I help you, do you think you can get to the bathroom"

"Yes." Jane looked at her calmly, watching her undo the restraints and support her back as she sat up. "You're a real nurse." Jane slowly swung her legs off the bed; tried twice to stand in spite of the pain; then used the headpiece of the bed to support herself, stood, and walked with the nurse. The nurse protected the IV needle stuck in Jane's wrist, kept the tube from tangling, and moved the aluminum stand with the IV fluid bag hanging on it.

"Yes," she said. "I work for the doctor who saw you the other day."

It was the first confirmation that at least two days had passed since Jane had been here. The doctor must have seen her the first day, right after she had been shot; cleaned and closed the wound; and given her antibiotics and painkillers. "Were you here when they beat me"

"No. The doctor said I shouldn't come in until tonight, after my shift. He didn't know what they were going to do, and neither did I. I swear."

"He's your boyfriend, isn't he"

"I don't know if I'd say that. There's nothing official." She was smiling, almost blushing, as though she were in high school, talking to a friend.

Jane thought, A doctor would never get you involved in something like this if he didn't think he could control you for a long time. If you ever reported him for what's already happened, he'd lose his license and go to federal prison. "Is he smart"

"Of course. He's a doctor."

Jane couldn't help thinking about her husband, Carey. He was brilliant. "I know some doctors who are very smart, and some who don't have that advantage. All they can do is follow the rules they've learned and the methods they've practiced, and hope they do everything right. That's the way most people are, and I think it's not so bad."

"Well, this doctor is smart."

"Good," Jane said. "That's good news for you and me." She had planted a tiny germ of worry in the woman's brain. She wasn't hopeless. She might be in love with the arrogant little doctor, but she was clearheaded enough to have seen the welts and bruises on Jane-maybe, because of what she'd seen, she had checked for other signs of abuse while Jane was asleep-and called her doctor boyfriend to complain. She wasn't hopeless. She helped Jane get to the toilet, and waited in the doorway.

The nurse said, "He probably saved your life."

"I might be able to save his," Jane said. "And yours."

"You can't use my cell phone."

"I'll make it clear that you helped me, and that you had no idea what was happening until you saw they were hurting me."

"I still don't know what this is about." She looked frightened, anxious. She helped Jane up, flushed the toilet, and helped her walk to the bed. Then she hurried to the sink, brought a cold, wet cloth, and pressed it against Jane's bruises. "We need ice to make the swelling go down."

"Those men are criminals," Jane said. "Somebody-probably one of them-killed a woman about three years ago, and they framed her husband, a man named Jim Shelby, for it. He went to prison. I got him out, and they want to make me tell where he is."

"Won't he just go back to prison if you tell"

"No. They don't have any way of getting him back to prison without the authorities asking questions they can't answer-what they were doing in Los Angeles, why they would look for Shelby, and how they found him when the police couldn't. And of course, they can't let me go. Kidnapping and torture would mean life sentences for them."

"Oh, my God." The girl walked a few paces and sat down on the chair at the desk. "All this is such heavy stuff, out of nowhere. They just told the doctor there was a private patient who had an injury and wanted to pay for special care."

"That's the way trouble always comes-out of nowhere, with no warning. When it does you have to decide quickly." She waited, watching the girl sitting at the desk, staring at the wall. "Will you please let me use your cell phone"

"You just said it was a kidnapping and torture thing. Everybody would go to prison."

"Not you. You'll be the hero."

She looked sideways at Jane. "How do I know you'll twist it that way, and not the other way"

"Someone who helps me will be my friend. They're just getting started on me." She waited, but the girl didn't seem to be able to make up her mind. She looked paralyzed. "Are you worried about your boyfriend"

"I told you, he's not officially my boyfriend." She was irritated. She started to walk away, and it seemed to make her remember why she was there. She hurried back to the bathroom and returned with cold, damp hand towels she put on Jane's bruises.

Jane watched her. It doesn't matter if he hasn't declared himself to be your boyfriend. You've had a big fat crush on him for a long time, and one slow day in the office, he came on to you in an examining room. Or he came to the office one day with flowers and asked you to dinner. Whatever it was, you're committed to him, and you have an intimate relationship now. I can hear it in your voice.

The nurse went to the medical supplies and returned with Neosporin, which she gently applied to the scrapes left by the bamboo sticks.

Jane said, "I'm perfectly happy to include the doctor in the hero category too. I'll say that the next time he comes in is the first time I was conscious when he visited, and as soon as he knew what was up, he helped you save me. I know he has nothing to do with these men or framing Jim Shelby. But you've got to help me. The longer this goes on, the harder it will be to make up a story that keeps him innocent."

"I've got to have time to think. I should talk to him, too." She looked at Jane again. "Are you married"

Jane wasn't wearing the ring, but there was still a pale line on her ring finger, and the young nurse must have seen it. "Yes." After a second she added, "I wouldn't ordinarily tell anyone that."

"I knew already, because there's an indentation on your ring finger. I'm glad you didn't lie."

"Sometimes a person in my position has to lie. I've got to lie to those men. I don't want to lie to you, though. Will you please help me"

"I need time to think."

"We don't have much time. The next stage of this is going to come pretty quickly."

"The next stage What's the next stage"

"They'll think of things to do to me that hurt, that will make me so afraid I'll talk. The next stage will be heat-hot irons, or fire. You may be used to seeing things others haven't, but you don't want to see this."

"Why can't you just tell them, and we can all go home"

"These men are implicated in a murder. No matter what I tell them, nobody's going home but them. They can't let any of us go."

"You're scaring me."

"We have to save ourselves. Either let me use your phone right now, or you use it as soon as you're a mile or two from here and positive you haven't been followed."

The woman took a deep breath, and let it out. "All right. Here."

She came to Jane's bed and held her cell phone out to Jane. They both heard the door at the end of the building swing open. Jane shook her head and the girl pulled back her cell phone and retreated to the desk and the computer. She pretended to be composing an e-mail.

Jane looked up at the men coming in the door. First came the tall man with the western accent who seemed to be in charge, and the others trooped in after him. He eyed the nurse as he passed her, then stopped at Jane's bed. "I see you're awake again. That's convenient."

"Why"

"I didn't want to wake you up." He turned to the nurse and said, "Okay, honey. Why don't you go take a break We'll call you if we need you."

"Yes, sir," the girl said. She stood up, walked to the door, and went outside. Jane saw that the parking lot was dark.

Jane watched the tall man. He took his time appraising the progress of her decline. He stared at her bruised and swollen arms and hands above the sheet. "Do you have anything to tell me yet"

She moved her head from side to side slowly, not taking her eyes from him.

"The thing is, we're in a bit of a bind here. You've taken something of mine. Not to mention hurting several friends of mine in a public place, where they couldn't really give you an idea of the consequences."

"You're persuading yourself that whatever you do to me, I deserve it, and that you'll just be paying me back. That's not true. Nothing you or your friends have done was legal or justified."

His eyes narrowed. "I don't think you're going to help your cause any by pissing me off. Fair warning."

"I don't have a cause."

He looked angry. "Not much of one. So, before things get a hell of a lot worse, I'd advise you to listen to me for a minute. The doctor tells me you're too weak to run away, even if you could get out of your bed by yourself. What you've managed to do by getting shot is to delay things by three days. Your boy Jim Shelby has had seventy-two hours. He could be anywhere in the country by now. Isn't that true"

"If he drove most of the time and didn't stop long, sure."

"What that means isn't what you seem to think. His arriving where he was going doesn't take the responsibility to talk off you. It makes you even more important. You're going to have to tell us where he is."

"I still don't know."

"Tonight, I expect to find out if that's true. Each time you don't answer is going to cost you. Maybe it will be a finger. Maybe the next thing will be an ear, a toe, or an eye. I can tell you that it's best to give in early."

"I don't have anything I can tell you," she said, "so it will be a very unpleasant waste of time."

"Well, in a little while the others will get here with the tools, and we can get started. So sit tight." He walked off.

Jane tightened the muscles in her uninjured left leg. That was still strong, and so were her hands and arms. But her right leg would barely hold her, and she was too weak to put up much resistance.

The air where the tall man had stood still held his smell. A smoker. He had probably just gone out for a cigarette. He certainly would before he began to torture her. That was the way the habit seemed to work-a cigarette before anything and one after.

She wondered where her purse was now. She had sacrificed it when she had fought on the courthouse steps to buy time for Jim Shelby to get away. Inside it was a bottle of a particularly strong batch of water hemlock she had harvested and processed last summer.

Some people in upstate New York called the plant cowbane, because now and then a cow would eat a bit and die. The Latin name for the plant was Cicuta maculata, and it was related to the carrot, but the water hemlock was the most deadly plant on the continent. The traditional Seneca method of suicide was to take two bites of the root. About once a year Jane went to swampy places to look for the tall plant with tiny white flowers arranged in a flat circular group. She cut the roots from the stems and mashed them to get the clear yellowish liquid that held the strongest cicutoxin. Then she repeatedly strained the liquid until the particles were gone, and distilled it to remove most of the water. One swallow from the cut-glass perfume bottle she carried in her purse would have killed her in minutes.

Without the water hemlock, Jane would have to wait and see what tools her captors planned to use on her. If they were the right kinds, maybe she could use one to accomplish her death. If her hands were free she could tear out the stitches in her leg and get the blood flowing again. Maybe the men were novices who would accidentally cut an artery and she'd bleed to death quickly.

The nurse returned to the desk and sat in front of her computer. As the man walked by her, he said, "Take the rest of the night off, honey. We'll take care of her. And if the doc ever brings you back, don't bring the computer or a cell phone with you. Leave them at home. Understand"

"Yes, sir." She looked terrified. "I understand." She hurried to pack up her things. She started the shutdown process on her laptop.

"I hope so," he said. "Because I'm not going to tell you again."

"I'll be sure to remember." She moved quickly. She had seen the marks on Jane and was eager to get away from the people who had made them. She closed the laptop even though it had not fully shut down, slid it into her bag, and hurried out the door.

Jane stared after her. She could not quite guess what the girl would do next. Jane had carefully nudged the girl's mind, inch by inch, until she was cornered, unable to think of a reason not to let Jane call the police. She had been ready to give in. But this had been a terrible, frightening experience for her, and Jane had seen people react to danger in many different ways-some had a first impulse to be heroic that carried them only through the initial moments and got them killed. Some people ran not only from the danger but even from the memory of the danger.

It was possible that the girl would get out of here, think about getting her boyfriend and herself into legal trouble or about bringing on them the hatred of an unknown number of violent criminals-six and counting-and pretend that she had never seen Jane. She would tell herself that Jane would talk and be released, or if Jane didn't talk, the consequences would be her own fault. And the girl would stop thinking about her. In a month Jane would seem like a dream. In a year the experience would be so far back in her memory that she would never revisit it.

Jane lay on the bed and studied the man. She hadn't had as much time to observe him as the others, but had no desire to be around him a second longer than she was forced to be. Clearly he was in charge. He was taller than the others, and spoke louder. When he was gone, the others all waited for him to come back and tell them what to do. When he was here, they all watched him and unconsciously mirrored his movements and expressions. But there was something else, and listening to him talk to the nurse helped her identify it: people were instinctively wary of him. There was a volatile, vindictive quality to him that was so strong that people timidly observed his moods for signs of change, and humored him.

He came closer and sat beside her on the bed. Jane was acutely conscious of the restraints on her arms. "Now we're alone for a few minutes, and we can talk." His voice and expression were friendly, almost conspiratorial. "If you'll give me some help and say where Shelby is likely to be now, we can avoid bringing everybody in here to spend the night thinking of new ways to make you tell us. We can avoid wear and tear and loss of limb." Jane decided to play him for time. If the girl did call the police, it would do no good if they didn't have time to get here. She had to keep him talking.

"So what you're saying is that if I give you Shelby, then you will let me go. Is that right"

He nodded, his face earnest, but then began to modify his expression. "After a reasonable interval. I'd have to send someone after Shelby to be sure you told me the truth, of course. And we would have to be able to get some distance away before you were loose. Probably we'd get on an airplane and fly somewhere, and then make a call from there to let a person of your choice know exactly where to find you. Sound fair"

"It sounds like a plan that would give you unlimited chances to change your mind and kill me, or just leave me here to die."

"Of course you have to remember that you're my prisoner. I'm not your prisoner."

"That's hard to forget."

"But aside from my leaving myself some wiggle room, do we have a deal"

"No," she said. "I don't know where Shelby is."

"I'm sure you do."

"I got him a car and a change of clothes and some cash. If he doesn't make any mistakes and drives somewhere that's reasonably free of cops and people who hunt fugitives for a living, he can be invisible for months. He didn't tell me what his destination was, and I didn't suggest any."

"Did you get him credit cards"

Jane saw the trap. "No."

"How about false ID A driver's license"

"No."

"Why not"

"I didn't want to know what his new name would be," she said. "If people had his new name, they could eventually get his new address."

He looked at her closely. His blue eyes had probably looked innocent to many people over the years, and that was why he was trying to use them again on her. But to Jane his eyes looked cold and opaque, like flat metal disks. He manufactured a half smile. "I don't think I understand you yet. Is this about the money Is somebody paying you a bonus for each day Shelby stays hidden"

"No. Nobody's paying me anything."

Suddenly, she understood what he was doing. After the captured warrior had been brought into camp, he would sometimes be bathed and his wounds would be bandaged, and he would be allowed to rest. That evening he would be brought to an important man's dwelling, fed, and treated as an honored guest. Some enemy peoples would even formally adopt him, so he would become a relative. In doing these things the captors were trying to make his body stronger and his will weaker, to force him to live through the cruelest treatment, all the time feeling the terrible contrast between the feast and the torture. Almost the minute after the feast was over, the captured man would face the first of the major torments that would end only in his death.

The tall man looked at her with a friendly, concerned expression, as though he genuinely cared about her. "If you're not getting paid, then why would you put up with the kind of treatment you've been getting, and what's about to happen to you"

"As you've said, you've got me. I don't have you." His hand shot out suddenly and slapped her face. She had watched for it and decided in advance to take the blow. If she did anything to deflect it or counter it, she would reveal how strong she really was, and this was a secret that might be important to her later. Her face felt hot and sore, and she knew it was probably turning red.

His smile returned. "You just reminded me that I can do whatever I want."

Jane heard cars pulling up outside the building, and her heart began to beat harder. The young nurse must have gathered enough nerve to call the police and say she had been hired to care for a kidnapped woman. Jane lay there, her eyes on the tall man. She knew that when the police came through the door he would either try to use her as a shield, or kill her. She would have to roll off the bed and stay low. Maybe she could deliver a kick to distract him for the police. She bent her strong left leg so she would be ready to push herself off the edge of the bed.

She heard the door swing open, and after a second he called out, "It's about time you guys got here."

The man who had driven the car when she was caught walked in carrying three bags against his chest. He said, "It took us a while to find all this stuff."

The man who had shot her said, "You wanted to talk to her alone. Should we wait"

"She's buying time and bullshitting. We might as well get ready."

The men brought in a folding table, opened it, placed it about six feet from Jane's bed, and then began to take things out of the bags and lay them out on the surface. Jane considered not looking, because the fear would only weaken her, but she reminded herself that she needed to see what implements were going to be lying where she might be able to reach them later.

There were assorted knives, some of them serrated and some smooth, a package of steel skewers for barbecuing meat, a small handheld blowtorch. So this stage of her ordeal was going to be what she had expected-cutting and fire. There was a car battery, and a set of insulated wires with alligator clips. Just another kind of fire.

The tall man disconnected the IV needle from the back of her left hand and wrapped the tube around the steel stand. "Here. Roll her over on her stomach and use the restraints to secure her wrists to the bed."

The two men turned her over roughly, and tightened the Velcro restraints on the bed frame around her wrists. She heard a cigarette lighter, and then a hiss. She turned her head toward the sound and watched the tall man holding the lighted torch, adjusting the feed valve until the flame was a small blue point.

The tall man used the torch to heat up a set of four steel skewers while the driver held them with a pair of long-handled pliers. Jane pictured the warrior, tied to a stake by now, watching the embers being heated, the torturers' eyes glowing like cats' eyes in the reflected firelight. The proper response was complete indifference. The warrior would pretend to be unafraid, would show calm when the pain came, would pretend that he felt no despair.

Jane could see that the skewers were red and glowing. The driver pulled the oversize man's shirt she was wearing up to her shoulders, and the tall man simply laid the skewers, one by one, across her back. Her muscles tensed, and her vision narrowed, with a red halo at the edges. Her eyes were wet, the tears spontaneously running as the hot steel seared her back. She believed she smelled her own flesh cooking, but she pictured the warrior's eyes staring into hers, silently urging her to endure the pain and the horror, and remained still.

The tall man picked the skewers up with the pliers. "Hot enough, you think" She couldn't tell who he was talking to, and it no longer mattered. "You know, that was a shame. You really did have a beautiful back. I hated to ruin it with those burn lines. Well, guys What should we try next"

Another voice said, "We should have just killed her when we got her here."

"You shot her. You could have fired again or just aimed higher and said it was an accident." He was enjoying her ordeal, but it seemed to be making his friends uncomfortable. "She has a lot of determination, doesn't she"

The driver said, "Maybe she told us the truth. Maybe she doesn't know where he went."

"Then she's really stupid. You should always have -something-one precious thing-that you can use to keep this kind of shit from happening to you." He was heating the skewers again, and this time, he dropped all of them on her back at once. Jane's vision clouded red again, with only a small point of light in the center. The muscles in her arms and legs tightened in a spasm, but she held back the scream, kept the air moving in and out through her nostrils so it wouldn't pass her vocal cords and make a sound.

The burns on her back were now throbbing from the first attack, the air sweeping across them and making the pain flare again. She felt the bruises from the beating under her, and the burned flesh on her back, and together they seemed to overwhelm her nervous system until she was barely aware of the men and their movements.

"You know how to make this stop. All you have to do is give us back what's ours."

It was getting harder to keep silent. The bullet wound in her leg hurt again. Her body was a raw, throbbing, aching set of nerve endings, all sending hot, screaming alarms to her brain at once, and she couldn't soothe herself, couldn't turn away, couldn't even move. Inside her closed eyes she had a vision of her husband, Carey-not wishing he could save her, not wishing him into this horror at all, just feeling the loss of him.

What the tall man did next came with no warning, no sound that reached her ears, but brought an explosion of pain, and then the red cloud in front of her vision closed the point of light in the middle, and went black.

At first the darkness was like being in a pocket, but then she sensed that it was big, like a starless, infinite space. She wondered for a moment if she was dead. Moving was impossible, and she couldn't feel her body touching anything. And then, without warning, she felt all of it. The skin of her back was on fire. Her eyes opened like a camera shutter, and closed again at the glare of the lights.

She tried to look at the men again, and saw that they had gone. She couldn't see them or their shadows or hear their voices. She was cold, and she suddenly realized she was wet. She looked around at the table, and saw that someone had attached the two insulated wires to the car battery. That was it. They must have given her a shock, and she had passed out. She wondered how long she had been unconscious. She tried to run an inventory of pains, but she didn't detect any she hadn't felt before. They had let her alone after she passed out. They wanted her to feel every single sensation. There was no point in hurting a person who couldn't feel.

She had lost track of time. She had heard from people who had been broken in interrogations that losing track of time had weakened them. A person had to feel that there was a whole world outside his prison where time proceeded in an orderly, uniform way, where the sun rose and set as it always had. She realized that this was part of the distress she had felt when she had first been dragged in. The high windows that had been blacked out had scared her a little, and the single dim desk lamp had been worse. It was always gray twilight in the big room.

Jane took a deep breath, asked herself how long she could hold out against the pain, and realized that she was still willing to die. As long as she didn't reveal where Jim Shelby was, she could buy him time, and keep these men occupied with her instead of searching for him. Shelby and every one of her earlier runners would have another day of safety, another day for their identities to mature and be more solid, another day to make a friend who might help them. And another day would give Jane's captors a chance to get impatient and careless.

She thought about her runners. Over the years she had taken dozens and dozens of them away. Shelby was only the most recent. They had almost all come to her in the last days of wasted, ruined lives, sometimes just hours before their troubles would have changed from dangerous to fatal. She would obliterate the person's old identity and turn him into a runner, a fugitive she would guide to a place far away, where nobody knew him, and certainly nobody would ever think of killing him. She would give him a new identity and teach him how to be that new person for the rest of his life. By now there were people all over North America and Europe who bore names that she had made up.

She thought about her husband, Carey, the surgeon who spent every day of his life fixing and curing people. He had been her reward, the part of the world that she had taken for herself for no better reason than that she wanted him and he kept pestering her to take him. She loved him so much she could picture every centimeter of him with such clarity that she could feel him against her skin. She had lived a good life, but now she had to be ready to die to preserve the other people, the ones who had trusted her with their lives.

Jane let go of Carey's image and prepared herself for the next phase. The pain of torture was almost unbearable, but she had discovered it had other qualities, too. It set her apart from the rest of humanity. Each time the pain didn't destroy her was a failure for the enemy, a wall that had held against an attack. The cuts and burns were decorations of valor and at the same time proof of the torturers' unworthiness. The pain was the means of consecration, the welcome fire that proved the victim's nobility.

She would wait for the next torment, and if she got the chance she would use their implements as weapons. And when she couldn't do that anymore, she would use one of them on herself.

4.

Jane waited several hours lying facedown on the bed. The young nurse had not scraped up the courage to call the police. Jane had made a number of excuses for her during the past few hours. Maybe she had not known the way here. No, she had come along with the doctor once, and she had come alone and left alone last night. Maybe she had felt she needed to wait for her boyfriend the doctor to return home so she could explain to him in private what she had seen and why they had to call the authorities. She had said something last night about wanting to talk to him.

The girl had said he was smart. That didn't mean he was smart; it meant only that he had persuaded her of his intelligence, and that he wouldn't have much trouble talking her out of helping Jane. That was the smart choice, the one that would probably keep them both out of trouble, preserve his freedom and his license to practice medicine, and let them forget they had ever seen her.

The easiest thing for them to do was to separate themselves from this unpleasantness. He had treated her bullet wound, and what had happened to Jane after that was not his business. He would use the girl's belief in his authority and her faith in his wisdom to smother her conscience.

Jane heard an engine, and then footsteps, and she lifted her face off the bed, straining to see. Even though she knew better, she couldn't help holding her breath, hoping the police had arrived. But a key unlocked the door. The door swung open and she could see the blinding yellow-white light of the morning sun slice into the room and illuminate it for a second. When the door closed, the same three men were standing in the room.

Jane could see there had been a change. They seemed to know something she didn't, and it had lightened their mood, as though they'd been excused from a big, unpleasant job. She felt a sick fear for Shelby. The man who had driven her here said, "Hey, Wylie. You going to tell her now"

The tall man turned his head and glared at the driver. He said, "Yes, I am, Gorman."

"Sorry," the driver said. He looked at his feet.

Jane silently repeated the names to herself a dozen times. Wylie was the tall one, and Gorman was the fake cop who had served as the driver. She had an irrational fear that she would forget their names, even though she knew that this would be impossible. She would still remember them if she lived to be a hundred and the fresh burn scars on her back healed to invisibility. Wylie and Gorman.

Wylie stood over Jane with his arms folded on his chest. "Normally I'd kill Mr. Gorman for that, but it doesn't matter, because I've learned something I didn't know before. Want to know what it is"

"No," Jane said. She was still in restraints and lying facedown on the bed. She turned her face away from him.

"I'll bet you don't." He undid the Velcro strips that held her wrists, and grabbed her hair so she had to turn toward him onto her side. He grinned, and she noticed how his mouth was twisted to make a smile that was really a snarl. It was as though the meanness behind his eyes distorted his expressions. "I started to get curious about you the first time I heard about you. A lot of people go through the jails and courts every day, but the only ones who ever get away seem to be the ones where some clerk screws up the paperwork or something. Nobody breaks out. So I started asking around. And you'd be amazed at all the people who are interested in you."

Jane studied the blue eyes and saw spite in them, and greed. But what she saw that was most disturbing was joy. He was celebrating a victory.

"What have you done" she asked.

"In a way, it's good news for you. I'm arranging an auction for tomorrow. There are people who say they're willing to pay some really big money just for the privilege of meeting you in person for a leisurely chat."

Jane's stomach felt as though it had turned cold and heavy. She said, "Who"

"The bidders are coming here, so you'll see them. And they want to see you before they hand over the money. One is named Barraclough. He's the younger brother of someone you had an altercation with years ago, I understand. He owns a security company. There's a private detective named Killigan, who represents Robert Eckersly. You apparently took Eckersly's wife away from him. There's a gentleman named Grady Lee Beard, a bounty hunter, I think, who says you gave him a knife scar that runs from his collarbone to his navel. He says you got him arrested in an airport only a year or two ago."

Jane turned away.

"Don't you want to hear about all the bidders"

Jane thought, Now I understand why you don't care if I know your name.

"They all seem to have somebody they want to ask you about."

"I won't be telling anybody anything."

"No" He sighed. "What a shame. I don't think I'll want to watch. You know, when they were asking me questions to see if you were the same woman, every one of them mentioned those blue eyes. I was relieved that I hadn't popped them out. That was coming up soon."

"Why didn't you"

"You passed out. I'm glad I didn't do anything so they wouldn't recognize you. Now that I know how valuable you are, I realized I can't afford you. I have other ways to find Jimmy Shelby. He's got a sister, and he's a regular good old boy, who will probably make some dumb-ass mistakes and get caught. So tomorrow when the bidders get here, you go on the auction block." He turned to the others. "Maybe we ought to actually build an auction block. What do you think, Gorman Maloney"

The one who had shot her said, "Was that necessary"

"Sorry, Mr. Maloney. Just having a little fun."

Now she had all their names. Wylie. Gorman. Maloney.

Wylie laughed, turned away, and went to the door. "I've got some stuff to do. You two keep an eye on her. A couple of those bastards might be smart enough to come early and try to steal the merchandise." He went out the door and locked it.

Wylie was gone all morning, so Gorman went out to buy hamburgers and french fries and milk shakes for lunch. Jane had been fed intravenously, and it had been days since she had eaten solid food, so the lunch caused cramps, but then, hour by hour, she felt better and stronger. Wylie didn't return by dinnertime, and Gorman and Maloney grumbled. Maloney went out to buy the food this time. They let Jane sit in her bed and eat without restraints. Jane ate quickly. She knew now that this was going to be her last night before these men sold her. Once she was in the hands of any of the likely bidders, her chance of survival would end. She saw Gorman get up to throw away his trash, so she lay back in her bed. When Maloney went to the bathroom, she lay on her stomach and wrapped the Velcro restraint around her left wrist to tie it to the bed frame, then lay on her stomach. She put her right hand under the sheet so it couldn't be seen. She hoped that both men would glance in her direction and assume the other had made her secure. Then she arranged herself so she could open one eye a slit and see the rest of the big room.

After Maloney, Gorman, and Jane had eaten, the two men went to the steel door, looked outside, then locked it. She could hear them fiddling with something that clanked, but she closed her eyes. They were more worried about the bidders taking Jane than about her making an escape, and she had to keep them confident.

They came closer to her. Jane caught sight of Gorman's watch, so she knew it was ten in the evening when Gorman and Maloney made an agreement. Each of them would stay awake to keep watch for four hours. The first shift was to be Maloney's. He sat at the table near Jane's bed drawing pictures on the backs of some medical papers that the nurse had left. Jane could see the drawings were the sort that ten-year-old boys drew, fighter planes diving low toward a stronghold made of piled-up boxlike structures, strafing them with machine guns. A second wave came in higher, releasing large bombs from their bellies. After a while he obliterated the defenders with a couple of large, puffy explosions.

Next Maloney drew a few pictures of women, all with exaggerated breasts and bottoms, and impossibly thin waists. He wasn't very good at hands or feet, and when he got to the faces, he drew big, lipsticked mouths and cowlike eyes, but kept drawing bad noses and erasing them until they were gray smears. At last he tired of making art. He sat on the couch near Jane and stared at the closed door to the office where Gorman was sleeping, then at his watch. After a time his head tipped backward, his eyes closed, his mouth gaped, and Jane heard him snoring.

Jane waited. Gorman had retired to one of the offices along the side of the building, and he had been snoring for an hour. She knew she would move quietly but could not make herself perfectly silent. She had to let Maloney reach the stage of sleep that Gorman had already reached. If he heard a small noise now, his mind would try to remain asleep by incorporating the noise into his dream.

Just as Jane was about to move, Maloney stirred. He sat up, took off his coat, and tossed it onto the arm of the couch, then slipped off his pants and draped them over the coat, then lay down full length. He pulled the spare blanket that had been left on the couch over him and immediately went back to sleep. Jane waited for what seemed to her like an hour.

After a time Jane raised her head. Maloney was deep asleep now. She was so eager as her time approached that her breaths were becoming shallow and her thoughts were scattered, tumbling over one another. So many things had to be done before Wylie got back, and he could be stepping up to the door right now. She was badly hurt. Would she even be able to do those things She clenched her teeth and thought. First she had to get out of the bed.

She slowly, carefully removed her single Velcro restraint, trying to muffle the skritch sound by pressing the pillow over it. Then she pushed herself up so she was on two hands and her left knee. She eased to her right, then lowered her tender right leg to the floor. It would have to hold her weight for a few seconds. If it collapsed, she would fall and wake Maloney. She shifted her weight to the right leg while her left was lowered to the floor beside it. The leg held. Then she was kneeling on the floor beside the bed.

Maloney had taken off his coat and pants to sleep. She touched the pants pockets for the gun, then searched the coat pockets. Where was his gun The gun must be here where he could reach it. She reached out and slowly, gently slid her hand into the small space beneath the cushion he was using as a pillow and the couch. It wasn't there.

Jane began to crawl. Crawling was quieter and easier right now than putting all her weight on her legs. She crawled to the table where Maloney had been drawing. She lifted his paper slightly, and caught sight of a black, chunky object. She reached under the paper, encountered the cool steel and then the knurled handgrips of the Beretta M9F, and felt her face forming itself into a smile.

She had Maloney's gun in her hand. The gun was a huge step. She had accomplished a wonder. At the worst, Jane wasn't going to have to lie in bed helpless until the time came to let the next set of captors torture her to death. She could take at least a couple of the tormenters with her, and then end her own life. Her heart was pounding with exhilaration.

Jane crawled toward the door of the office where Gorman slept. When she was nearly there, she came to a steel support pole rising from the floor and used it to pull herself up to a standing position. She took a step with her injured right leg and realized it was much stronger than she had expected. The twinge she felt was bearable; and, even better, the leg held her weight.

She stepped to the steel door of the room and tested the knob. It turned smoothly. She held it. There was a raised circular dead bolt at eye level, with a key slot. She stared at it as she prepared herself to open the door. In a moment she would have to spot Gorman in the darkened room. She might have to fire and kill him before he found his gun and aimed it. She stood slightly to the side, held the gun in her right hand at chest level, and turned the knob the rest of the way until it stopped. She pushed the door inward and saw Gorman.

He was across the room lying on his side on a couch. Near him was a big wooden desk. He was still asleep, his mouth open and his jaw slack, breathing deeply. It would be easy to shoot him from here, but she would have to be positive he was dead, and that meant three or four shots, and then trying to make it back on her bad leg to a spot where she could shoot Maloney before he was awake, up, and dangerous. She had his gun, but she didn't know if there was another one in this building.

Jane took another step into the room, and then turned a bit to close the door behind her, but she stopped, staring at the inner side of the door. Right in front of her was the inner side of the dead bolt. It was a four-inch circle of brass exactly like the outer side. The dead bolt was the kind that had keyholes on both sides, and this side had the key in it.

She quietly extracted the key from the lock, backed out, and closed the door. She stuck the key in the lock and turned it to lock the dead bolt. Gorman was locked in. When he woke up he wouldn't be able to get out. She put the key in her shirt pocket and turned her eyes toward Maloney. He was still sleeping.

It took her a long time to walk to the couch, taking each step with care to be sure that it was silent and that it didn't strain her injured right leg. The time seemed to be passing too quickly. She must not waste her last chance by taking too much time. Wylie could be pulling into the parking lot at any second.

When she came near the couch she could see the items laid out on the table near her bed. There was the blowtorch they had used to heat the skewers; there were the bamboo sticks they had used to beat her, the skewers, a big pair of bolt cutters with two-foot handles, and a pair of big steel rings with screws attached so they could be embedded in a support beam and made to hang heavy objects. She saw a coil of rope and knew that the heavy object was to have been her. They must have planned to hang her up for the next torture session. There was a roll of duct tape, with a pair of scissors. She supposed they would have taped her mouth when the screams got too loud to tolerate. There was a set of handcuffs and a key.

Jane picked the handcuffs up and stepped to the spot between the couch and the bed. She touched the muzzle of the gun to Maloney's head and gave it a hard push. He flinched, and his eyes opened and focused on Jane.

She whispered, "If you move or make a sound, I'll kill you. Do you believe me"

He nodded.

"Get on the bed and lie on your stomach." She kept the gun aimed at him as he moved from the couch to the bed. She closed one handcuff on his right wrist and the other on the steel bed frame. Then she used one of the Velcro restraints to fasten his left wrist to the other side.

She limped to the table, took the duct tape and scissors, then returned and wrapped the tape around his head and across his mouth three times before she cut it.

She went to the couch where he'd been asleep, and put on his pants. They were too wide and too long, but she cinched the belt as tightly as she could. Then she found her flat black shoes under the bed, and stepped into them. She bent close to Maloney's ear. "I'm not going to harm you or Gorman. I'm just going to leave. But don't ever let me see you again."

Her anxiety was shifting into hope. She had the two men locked up. She had the gun, and now she was taking steps toward the steel door at the end of the building. And then she saw the chain. There was a thick, heavy chain running through a bolt hole in a vertical I beam, then across the door, around the nearest support pole, and back. It was fastened there by a big padlock. She lifted the padlock and looked beneath it. There was no key. It was obviously intended to keep someone from forcing the door from outside, so there was no reason for the key to be gone. Where was it She looked everywhere nearby-any sort of small ledge created by the structure of the building, or by the floors. She went into the bathroom and looked there, too.

For the first time, Jane's eyes began to water. She was so badly hurt, so weak and tired after the past few days. She had dared to feel some faint hope, and now this. No. No weakness. She blinked her eyes clear, gripped her pistol, and walked back to the table that held the tools they'd used to torment her. She put the gun in her belt and snatched up the pair of bolt cutters with the long handles. She brought them to the chain on the door and closed them on the shaft of the padlock. She squeezed the handles as hard as she could, but they made no impression on the lock.

She knelt and examined every link of the chain, looking at the weld that closed each oval. At last she found a weld that looked a bit thinner than the link, so it formed a small indentation. She fitted one blade of the bolt cutters into it, then tried to bring the two handles together to cut it. She kept trying, but she wasn't strong enough. She stopped to catch her breath and let her muscles relax. Sweat had made her hair damp and streaked her forehead. The various pains in her body seemed worse. She set down the bolt cutters and examined the weld of the link she'd been attacking. It did show some signs of wear, a slight distortion.

Jane got up, went back to the table, picked up the blowtorch and the plastic cigarette lighter, and returned. She struck the lighter and then turned the knob on the blowtorch. It hissed for a second and then ignited. She adjusted the flame to make it smaller, a deep blue point that was hot and intense. She set the bottle-shaped torch down so the point of the flame was on the weld of the link.

She waited for a long time, watching the link get hotter and hotter, then red-orange, then cherry red. She decided it was time. She lodged one handle of her bolt cutters against the wall of the building, opened its jaws, and set one blade in the red-hot weld. She stepped out of her shoes so her bare left foot was set against the floor, and grasped the other handle near the end with both hands. She pushed, hard. She used her strong left leg and her back and shoulders and arms. She thought she felt movement, but it wasn't enough to cut through. She knew she had to use her injured right leg. Even if it could exert only a hundred pounds of pressure, it would help. And if she died later tonight, she would know that she had used everything.

She used both legs, she pushed harder, and the blade cut through and the handles came together. She pushed the red-hot link against the hinge of the steel door and used the leverage of the bolt cutters to bend it, so the opening widened. A length of chain slipped through and fell to the floor. Jane pulled the bolt cutters away, turned off the blowtorch, and stepped into her shoes.

She walked to the door and reached for the knob. She was relieved that the knob turned and the door opened. She held on to the bolt cutters as she stepped through the doorway into the night.

The air was cool and moving, and she loved the sweet taste of it. There were no cars on the asphalt outside. The lot was shielded from view on three sides by other buildings sharing the same parking lot, and on the fourth by the building where she had been held. She had a bad feeling about limping along the street that Wylie would use to enter the lot, so she slipped between two of the buildings and stopped to listen. There seemed to be streets on two sides, with the whispery sound of cars passing, and ahead of her was the glow of electric light. Jane picked the street away from the lot entrance and headed for it.

At the end of the passage between buildings, she looked out and saw that the street she'd chosen had no pedestrians and only an occasional car. She looked down at her bolt cutters. One end was a pair of steel shafts with rubberized handles and the other was two steel blades like a parrot's bill. She knew the men had brought the bolt cutters here in case they decided to cut off fingers or toes. Now that she was outside in the air and could see sights that had the dull normalcy of any other city street, the horror of the men's plans struck her in the stomach like a physical sensation. She felt an impulse to drop the bolt cutters. No, she told herself. It was too early to feel, too early to allow herself any weakness. She must think only about what she had to do. The throwaway cell phone she'd had in Los Angeles had gone with her purse in the fight, and so had the false identification she'd brought. She had a sudden thought. Maloney and Gorman must have had cell phones, but she hadn't taken them. How could she expect to live if she didn't think of things like that No, she thought. Taking them would have been foolish. If she'd called the police she'd go to jail forever. And she couldn't wait in Los Angeles for Carey to come and get her. She had to get moving away from this place.

The old warriors came back to her. If one of them ever managed, after the torture had begun, to see a second chance to fight, how precious that would have been to him. She must not waste this chance. She knelt and rolled up the bottoms of the oversize pants she had taken, pulled out her shirt to cover the gun in her belt, put her bolt cutters under her left arm, then stepped out onto the sidewalk.

Before her was a four-lane thoroughfare, with a traffic signal hanging on a wire in the center of the intersection, and a long row of industrial buildings and businesses. Across the street she could see a place that sold marble and granite to builders, a fence company, and farther down, a United Rent-all. None of the buildings had any lights on except a few overhead floods on their parking lots.

Jane kept to the shadows as she walked to the United Rent-all. She stepped to the side of the chain-link fence, where the light was dim, used her bolt cutters to cut five links in the fence, ducked, and entered the lot. There were a few cherry pickers for high work, a Caterpillar tractor, two plain white vans, two white pickups. The doors of the vehicles were all locked.

She looked at the front of the rental office, then approached and stared in the window. She saw a counter, a clock that said twelve thirty-five, and a door that led to a back room. She could also see an electric-eye alarm system at the doors and a set of metal alarm tapes in the windows. She moved farther back along the building and, in the dim light, saw that the back room was lined with shelves that held every kind of power carpentry tool she had ever seen, plumbers' equipment, and a few electronic boxes that could have been anything. Where was the dim light coming from Overhead. She put her face close to the window and looked up to see that there was a large skylight above the storeroom.

She kept moving back toward the rear of the building. At the back was a roofed-in area that held a decorative fountain for fancy parties, a collection of lawn chairs and tables, and finally, a row of ladders of all sizes.

She came closer to the ladders. They were all locked up for the night with a chain running from a rung in the wall, through each of the ladders, and then padlocked to the last one. She fitted her bolt cutters to the chain, set her hands at the very ends of the handles, and cut it. She pulled out an aluminum extension ladder and leaned it against the roof of the building. With her injured right leg, she wasn't sure if she could climb. She tested herself, using her left leg to go up, then pulling her right to join it on the same rung, then holding most of her weight with her arms as she lifted the left again. It worked once, so she did it again.

With great difficulty she climbed the ladder to the roof. Each time her right foot rose to the next rung and she tried to make her right leg hold her weight, the thigh gave a stabbing pain that made her weak for a few seconds. At the top of the ladder she crawled onto the roof and looked down at the skylight. There were no conductive tapes on the glass, so she decided the frame must be what was on the alarm circuit. If she opened the latch and lifted the glass, she would set off the alarm. But with no tape, the glass itself wasn't wired. She used the butt of the gun to break a pane of glass, but no alarm sounded. She crawled back to her extension ladder, pulled one of the two ladder pieces out of the other, then lowered it down through the skylight. She rested a moment, then slowly went down the ladder into the room.

All around her she saw equipment of all kinds. But mounted on the front wall she found what she had been searching for. It was a large metal box that was nearly flat. It was held closed by a small lock. Jane looked around her, found a crowbar, fitted it between the box and its cover by the lock, and popped it open.

Inside there were rows of hooks with keys hanging on them. Each set of keys had a plastic tag on it. She selected a few sets that seemed to have license numbers on them, and put them in her pants pocket. She tolerated the pain and weakness as she slowly, patiently climbed back up to the roof, then climbed down on the other half of the extension ladder to the ground. She propped the half ladder along the side with the other ladders and ran the chain through them again, so her burglary wouldn't be obvious from the street.

She went to a small pickup truck, looked at its license plate, then sorted through her keys and found the right one. She started the engine, drove the truck to the gap she had cut in the fence, rolled back some more chain-link, and drove out through the gap to the street.

According to the clock on the pickup's dashboard, it was nearly two a.m. She drove straight until she saw a sign for the 101 Freeway. She followed the arrow, got on the freeway a few minutes later, and headed east. At the junction with the 134 she switched freeways, because she knew that the 134 became the 210 and met Interstate 15 a few miles ahead on the far side of Los Angeles. Interstate 15 North ran across the desert to Las Vegas, and then kept going north all the way to Salt Lake City.

5.

Jane kept the pickup at ten miles an hour over the speed limit with a steady pressure on the pedal, trying not to slow down or apply the brake. She used her left foot because the right leg had been weakened by the bullet wound and hadn't been rested much tonight. When the sun came up just before six she was almost to Nevada on Route 15, and she had been successful in avoiding any traffic problems or slowdowns.

She had guessed correctly that the rental company would keep the gas tanks full so the staff could simply hand a customer the keys to any vehicle and tell him to bring it back with a full tank. When she left Los Angeles she had no purse, no money, no identification. She was wearing a man's shirt that had been put on her as a hospital gown, and a man's pants with the legs rolled at the ankles and the belt cinched tight. The only part of the outfit that was hers was the pair of flat black shoes she'd worn to the courthouse. Her only real assets were stolen: the truck, the loaded gun, and the bolt cutters.

She knew that the time was coming very soon when the police in California would receive the report of the stolen pickup truck. People who rented tools and construction equipment undoubtedly opened early. When she crossed into Nevada, she felt as though she had won an extra hour or two before a police car might appear behind her flashing its lights. It took time before auto thefts from other states got to the top of the list anywhere.

She drove into Las Vegas, took the Tropicana exit, drove east of the tall casinos on Las Vegas Boulevard, and pulled the pickup truck into the parking lot of a large chain drugstore. She put the gun and spare magazine into her pants pockets, tucked in the big shirt, and started to walk. She was in terrible condition, in pain and exhausted. At six thirty in the morning, the sun was low on the eastern side, but already strong. It always seemed to be either in her eyes or reflecting off every smooth, flat surface ahead of her. The pavement was already radiating heat that she could feel on her bare ankles.

The burns on her back and the bruises on her arms and shoulders and sides ached again, now that she wasn't sitting still in the truck. But the bullet wound was still her main worry. It was still angry and painful and made her limp slowly along the street.

The day was going to heat up rapidly, so she would need to get into some shade and air-conditioning. She had been in Las Vegas a few times before, staying in the big hotels on the Strip. She had noticed all the security cameras on the ceilings, and the mirrors placed in spots where they could only be for observation, and the many quiet, well-dressed men who appeared and disappeared, watching the changing crowds of people to be sure nothing disrupted the orderly flow of money from the customers to the casinos. She had found the security relaxing, because it took a bit of the pressure away from her. But she knew today was not a good day to try to enter any of the big hotels. A glimpse at her reflection in every window she passed showed her she looked like a madwoman. She wouldn't get more than a few steps inside the door before some calm, efficient functionary intercepted her and offered her help getting where she belonged.

She passed a tiny strip mall, where she could see two pay telephones on an outer wall. They struck her as almost impossible relics of the days before cell phones, but she could see that one of them had a telephone book that was intact. She went to the phone, opened the front section of the book, and, after some looking, found the address of a shelter for battered women.

A map in the front of the book indicated she had to walk east on Bonanza Road. She walked steadily, trying to get as far as she could from the pickup truck she'd abandoned, and hoping to be inside before too many people noticed her. The blocks were very long. She found that she could make better progress if she walked in the shadows of the big buildings and parking structures. After an hour she went into a gas station to use the ladies' room, wash her face, and then drink water from her cupped hands. She clawed her hair with her fingers to comb it. When she came out, an attendant was already standing in the shade near the pumps to satisfy himself that she was on her way.

By nine she was on the right street, and at nine forty-five she was at the front door. The shelter looked like a house, just another one-story bungalow among thousands. There was no big sign on the front, only a little wooden one that read "The Lifeboat" and an even smaller one beside the door that read "Please ring." She pressed a button on the intercom box and heard static. "Hi," Jane said. "I just got to town and I'm having a hard time. I wondered-" There was a buzz and a solenoid clicked a dead bolt open.

Jane stepped inside and saw that behind a counter to her left there was a young receptionist, with an older woman standing beside the receptionist looking down at some papers. The two looked up at Jane at once. The younger one smiled and said, "What can we-" but the older one interrupted. "Come in. Don't worry. You're in the right place. Come right in here with me."

The woman had white hair with a few remaining streaks of blond, so it looked a bit yellow, as though she had simply forgotten to make a decision about which color it should be. "This is the Lifeboat. We have everything you need right here. Come sit down in here." She led Jane into an office and let her sit on a soft leather couch. "Would you like some water"

"Sure," Jane said. "I'd love some."

She went to a small office refrigerator, pulled out a pitcher full of water, and poured Jane a glass. Then she refilled the pitcher at the tap in the bathroom and put it back in the refrigerator.

"I'm Sarah Werth." She picked up a clipboard with a form on it from a table, and sat down in front of Jane in a desk chair. "Now, honey. Let's get some quick essentials."

"All right."

"How did you get here Is there a car outside we need to move"

"No, I walked."

Sarah Werth looked at her for a second or two, then returned to her form. "Do you need medical attention right away"

"I need access to a first aid kit, but that's about all."

She stared at the gap where the two top buttons of Jane's shirt were open. "I can see somebody has been hitting you," she said. "Would you like to report a crime"

Jane could tell she had seen one of the bruises. She drew the shirt closed and buttoned it. "No, I can't do that," Jane said. "I know what I need, so can I just ask"

"If you want to do it that way, you can," said Sarah. "But I'll need to ask you the rest of the questions afterward."

"Fair enough," Jane said. "I would like another glass of water in a minute. I'd like a bath and then something to eat, and then a place to sleep for about eight hours."

Sarah waited for a couple of seconds, but nothing more came. "Those are easy." As she took Jane's glass and refilled it, she said, "We have about seventy women and children with us right now, most of them in secret, secure locations."

"What kind of locations"

"They're mostly houses, single-family houses that are owned by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. We keep them occupied and kept up. If someone comes to us looking for a particular woman, we ask her if she wants to see him. If she does, she meets with him here. If she doesn't, we never heard of her."

"Sounds smart."

"Is someone looking for you that you'd like to avoid"

"Yes. Anyone who comes looking for me is someone I'd like to avoid. But I don't think people can find me here, or I wouldn't have come."

"All right. Take this clipboard and fill in all the blanks that you can."

Jane took the clipboard and worked her way down the form. Her name was Melanie Kraft. She had no current address, but had last lived in Salt Lake City, and wanted to go back. She had been driven to Las Vegas a few days ago by a man she had known in Salt Lake City. But he had beaten her up and burned her, so she had stolen some clothes from him and run away.

She filled in all the spaces, but left out the wound in her thigh. In some places there was a law that people like social workers and nurses had to report all gunshot wounds to the police.

When Jane handed back the clipboard, Sarah said, "I can see why you're afraid. I'm a nurse. Would you mind if I looked at the burns"

Jane turned away and raised her shirt.

"Oh, my God," the woman muttered. "Hold on right there. I'd like to take a picture of that."

Jane let go of the shirt. "No pictures. I'm sorry."

"You have to think ahead. Someday, a man like that is probably going to kill you. Even if you aren't up to charging him right now, you're going to wish you had evidence of what he did to you."

Jane said, "What happened is over if I can keep it over."

"If you won't do it for yourself, think about the rest of us. Now that he's out of your life, he's looking for somebody else right now. He'll do the same to her, or worse, unless you stop him. This thing we're doing here really works only if we all help. I can hide people from creeps. But the only one who can take him off the street is you."

Jane said, "I agree strongly with every single thing you've said. I can only tell you that this time it's a one-of-a-kind situation. I have no personal relationship with this man. I escaped the first second I could. Calling the police would only endanger me."

"Are you a sex worker You didn't check it on your form."

"No. Please. Just listen. You can see I have injuries. I escaped with no money, no identification, not even my own clothes. I want to move on. As soon as I can get a job and earn enough to leave, I'll go. Sometime later, I'll send you a contribution that will more than repay what you invest in me, I promise. But please. I can't leave photographs of myself, or have any conversations with the police."

Sarah Werth stared at her for a few seconds. "I assume you've given me a false name."

"Of course."

Sarah Werth set the clipboard on her desk and stood. "Come on, and we'll get you bathed and fed and assigned to a bed."

In the bath Jane kept her bullet wound dry, but washed it in hydrogen peroxide from the first aid kit and rewrapped it with gauze and tape. There were no signs of infection, and the stitches had held. The rest of her body was a pattern of welts, bruises, and scars. Everything hurt, every surface was sensitive, but in the end she didn't feel as though any of the injuries but the bullet wound was deep enough to need much attention. She thought about Carey. He would know what to do about the injuries. But even if she'd had a phone, she couldn't call him from here. The number would be on the bill, and a phone number was as good as an address.

When she was finished, she was given a pair of black exercise pants and a T-shirt. She put them on and went into the bedroom she was to share with a woman named Iris. Iris was not in the room yet, so Jane got into the bed she was assigned and slept.

The escape from Wylie, Gorman, and Maloney; the burglary; the five-hour drive to Las Vegas; and the long, painful, limping walk to the shelter had left a deep exhaustion and a flood of impressions and images that gave her quick, bright, unsettling dreams. One was about walking through a city that had huge buildings without doors. Then it got dark and she could see that there was a man walking to overtake her. As he came closer and walked into a bit of light aimed downward from one of the buildings, she recognized him.

"Hello, Harry." As always he was wearing the gray-green coat, and this time he had a hat, a man's snap-brim like the one she had seen him wear the night when she had first taken him away from his troubles.

"Hi, Janie."

"I thought you'd be around soon."

"Do dreams come to you, or do you come to us"

"That's too idle a question for right now. I'm in terrible trouble, Harry. I was captured and they tortured me. They lamed me so I can hardly walk."

"I know. I know the things you know because I exist only in your mind. The hurt was a revelation, wasn't it Maybe it was supposed to change you."

"It made me weak and slow and afraid to be hurt again."

"Maybe Hawenneyu the right-handed twin needed you to be in one place and not another at a particular time, and the price of having you there was the wound. Maybe it made Hanegoategeh the left-handed twin think he had won and turn his head away for a moment. Or maybe what happened was meant to remind you that some people have been amazingly tough."

"The Grandfathers"

He shrugged. "Every one of them was a relative of yours. When they were fighting far from home, and one of them decided to stay back and die, it terrified their enemies."

"My enemies aren't terrified. They can't wait to find me."

"You could just as easily have killed the last two in that building."

"If I had killed them, what would make me different from them"

"Are you different from them"

"I would never take anyone's life unless I had no choice."

"You're alone, hurt, and hiding. You may not have choices from now on. Everyone is a warrior, and every last one of us falls in the fighting. For now, one of the brothers has kept you alive. He must have had some purpose in mind. Be ready." He looked to the left, nodded to her, and then crossed the street. He hurried up the sidewalk, but when he stepped into a shadow, he never stepped out of it again.

Jane slept in dark, unremembered dreams for hours, then woke before dawn to find a woman standing in the doorway. The woman saw that Jane was awake. "Good morning," she said.

"Good morning."

She went to the other bed and gently touched the sleeping woman in it. "Iris, get up, honey."

The sleeping woman jumped, uttered a little cry, and held her forearms up in a gesture that Jane recognized as an attempt to protect her face from blows.

Jane said, "It's all right, Iris. You're in the shelter. You're safe."

Iris took in two deep breaths that were like sobs, then sat up and rubbed her eyes. "I'm sorry. I was having a bad dream." Jane got a chance to study her. She was about twenty-five, with very white skin and the kind of thin blond hair that looked like cornsilk. It had been cut short, but it looked uneven and jagged, as though she had cut it herself.

The woman who had awakened them said, "The dreams will go away, too. Don't worry. I'm here to take you two to another house. It's just across town, but I'd like to get going right away, because there's less chance of being seen before dawn."

Jane and Iris got up and put on the rest of the clothes Sarah had left on the dressers in the room-for each, jeans, a fresh T-shirt, a long-sleeved shirt to keep off the night chill. They didn't stay for breakfast or to put on makeup. They just gathered their few belongings and went through the office to the lobby that had once been a living room. Through the window Jane could see a small SUV with tinted windows waiting in the driveway. A middle-aged woman got down from the driver's seat and opened the side doors, but no light went on.

The SUV took them across the city to a quiet street in Henderson, and up the street to a small yellow-tan stucco house with a red tile roof that made it look as though it had been built in Tuscany. The van pulled into the open garage and Jane and Iris got out. Jane said, "Thank you."

"Stay safe," the woman said, and waited in the driveway to watch them walk to the back door of the house.

Jane knocked on the kitchen door, and in a few seconds a woman about forty years old, taller than Jane, came and opened it. She was wearing black capri pants and a T-shirt, as though she were up for the day and knew it would be hot. "Come in."

As they did, Jane said, "My name is Melanie. This is Iris."

"Hello," the woman said. "I'm Sandy. There are three other women here already-Beth, Michelle, and Diane. They're asleep, but they've got jobs that start around nine, so they'll be up before too long. I volunteered to let you in."

"Thank you," Jane said.

"I'll show you your room. Do you mind sharing"

"No," Iris said. "It helps."

They followed Sandy into a back bedroom, where there were two narrow beds. Jane stepped close to the window and eased the curtain aside a half inch. The light was strong enough already so she could read the sign at the end of the street and the numbers on the houses. There were lights on in the kitchens of many of the houses, but very soon they wouldn't be needed. She said, "Come on, Iris. Maybe we can make ourselves useful in the kitchen. Before long it will be time for breakfast."

"Great idea. Let's get started." Iris hurried out of the room. She seemed to react instantly to fulfill any suggestion from anyone, as though on her own she had no idea what to do, or even what to want.

Sandy said quietly, "Do you know her story"

"No. But it can't have been good. I figured keeping occupied might help her."

Sandy nodded. "It helps us all." They headed into the kitchen. As soon as Iris got there she began to work. As each new person came in for breakfast, she would nod and smile, but say nothing. Jane would introduce her and ask what each person wanted to eat, and Iris would duck her head away and go to work like a short-order cook, making the food as quickly as possible. There was a strange subservience about her, and Jane recognized that this was a person who had spent a long period buying safety with compliance. When the others left to get dressed for work, Jane cleaned the kitchen and did the dishes. She made Iris sit at the table and drink coffee "to keep me company." She praised Iris's cooking, and talked about what they could do to their new room when they'd found jobs and had time to earn a little money.

During the afternoon Iris kept to herself, going around the house dusting and vacuuming and polishing things that looked to Jane to be polished already. After dinner Iris took her turn in the shower and then lay on her bed with a transistor radio next to her head, turned on so low that a person five feet away couldn't hear.

Jane tried to get to know the other housemates. Not one could talk about who she was without referring to a husband or boyfriend who had at some point begun to hurt her, first by belittling, then by cursing, and finally by hitting. In the midst of the stories there were varying digressions about drugs, alcohol, other women, children. Jane didn't reciprocate. She said little, until a woman named Kyesha finally said, "And what about you What are you doing here" Jane stood, lifted the back of her shirt to show the angry burns and the deepening purple marks of the beatings, and then sat down again. "I don't think I'm ready to talk about it yet." Then she changed the subject to what jobs the women had found and where she might look for work, and the others seemed relieved.

Jane was trying to recover by getting as much rest and sleep as possible, so she excused herself at nine and went into the bedroom. Iris had fallen asleep with the radio on, so she turned it off. Within minutes she was asleep, too.

She slept deeply, until she awoke sitting up. She looked at the clock beside the bed. It was just after two a.m. She lay back in bed and closed her eyes again, listening to the night silence of the house. Had there been a noise that woke her Yes. She heard it again-the scraping of metal on metal. She lay still, listening and evaluating the sounds, then decided that letting this kind of sound go uninvestigated would be the wrong thing to do.

She stood with some difficulty and put most of her weight on her strong left leg. When she stepped with her right there was pain, but she quietly moved toward the source of the sound. The sound was coming from the kitchen door, and it was so low that she could hear it only because the air conditioner had cooled the house enough to quit and leave absolute silence. Jane looked out a crack between the kitchen window curtains and saw the shadow of a man bent over, fiddling with the part of the door near the doorknob. He must be jimmying the lock.

There was a quiet creak, a cracking sound as the wood beside the lock was compressed by a tool, and the door moved inward a little. Jane turned and bent low, moving as quickly as she could on her bad leg toward the bedroom. She made it through the doorway, found her bed, and flopped onto it. She listened, and after a few seconds she heard the floor in the hallway creak.

A shadow filled the doorway, and a man's voice said, "I know you're awake." The level was conversational, not a whisper. "You can't hide in bed."

Jane sat up to face him, and turned on the lamp beside her bed so the room was awash in bright light.

"Iris!" the man said loudly.

Iris's legs jerked under the covers as though she were trying to run. She lifted her head, seemed to wake, and saw him. Her face appeared to collapse, her mouth hung open, and Jane heard a low moan that grew steadily higher, like a sob.

The man was tall, dressed in a pair of tight blue jeans and western boots. His black shirt hung loose like a Hawaiian shirt, and Jane suspected it was to cover some kind of weapon. She said, "Who are you"

The man stepped toward Iris's bed without looking at Jane. "None of your business."

Jane flung her blanket aside and called, "Hold it."

The man's eyes involuntarily turned toward her voice, and saw that her hand held a gun that was aimed at his chest. He stopped in mid-stride.

Jane spoke quietly. "If you take a step toward her, you'll never take another one."

He turned his head the rest of the way toward Jane, and his shoulders squared. "I came to take her home." He glared at Iris for a moment, and his voice seemed to harden. "She asked me to come because she wants to go home." He turned to Iris. "Don't you"

Jane swung her good leg to the floor, stood up beside her bed, and aimed the gun at him with both hands. "I know you can probably scare her into saying something that she doesn't want to. Now I want you to take a long, careful look at me. If you think I haven't fired a gun into a man before, or that I have even a slight reluctance to do it again right now, then go ahead. Try to get to me."

He studied her angrily, and seemed to see something he didn't like. His arms and shoulders lost their rigidity, and his knees straightened. He crossed his arms on his chest. "Why don't you let her decide"

"She decided to go to a shelter instead of being with you. And after you found out where she was, you decided that the only way you'd ever get past the door was if you forced the lock. Is that about right"

"You can say it like that, and I can't deny it, but it's not really like that. We had a little argument, like married people have, and she did something foolish. Now she's been waiting for me because she can't get home without me." He turned to Iris, and once again his voice became harsh, imperative. "Tell her."

Iris's voice was tremulous. "Please. Please." It was impossible to tell who she was talking to.

"There you go," he said. "See"

"Please," Iris said again. "Don't let him take me."

"There you go." Jane stepped toward the end of the bed, where she had a clearer view of him. He wouldn't be able to take cover behind any furniture. "Take yourself back out the door where you came in."

"I'm not leaving without her."

"Of course you are," Jane said. "Just turn slowly and walk to the door." She advanced a step to adjust her angle so that when he stepped through the doorway, she wouldn't lose sight of him for even a second. "I'm going easy on you because I don't want to spend a lot of time going to your trial. Just leave, and that will be the end of it."

He took two steps, his head down and his body slouching, but the steps were too small. She saw him take a deep breath, then another. Then he leaped toward her, reaching out to grab for the gun. Iris screamed.

Jane stepped back, his leap fell short, and he snatched empty air as Jane fired. He sprawled on the floor, his right arm still extended. Jane stepped close to him, the gun in her hand. She said to Iris, "He's going to need an ambulance. Can you go to the phone and dial nine-one-one, please"

"What are you going to do"

"I'm afraid I've got to leave before they get here."

"No. Don't leave me alone with him, Melanie."

Jane looked up and saw the other three women venture cautiously into the room. Jane said, "There. See The others are here. They'll take care of you and help you get through this. You'll get sent somewhere else where you'll be safe."

"I'll never be safe." Iris turned to the other women. "I divorced him, but he took me and made me stay with him for months, and he hurt me every day, until I got away and came to the shelter. He came here, too, but Melanie stopped him. She tried to make him leave, but he came after her."

"We've got to call Sarah," said Sandy, the woman who had met Jane and Iris when they'd arrived. "Don't do anything until I come back." She hurried into the living room.

The four women stood in the bedroom, as far from the wounded man as possible. None of them appeared to want to do anything to stop his bleeding.

He said to Jane, "Police will be here soon. You really messed me up with that gun. You're going to jail, honey."

"No, honey. I'm not," said Jane. "And if you do anything but lie there, you're not, either."

Sandy came back, still holding the phone. "She's on the way. She'll be here in a few minutes. She said don't do anything, don't say anything, just make sure he doesn't hurt anybody or get away."

A few minutes later, Sarah Werth and the young assistant pulled up in front of the house in two cars, and came inside. The young assistant knelt over the man. "Give me your arm." She snapped handcuffs on his wrists. Then she stood.

Sarah Werth beckoned to Jane. "Come out here with me, Melanie." Jane stepped into her shoes and followed her into the kitchen.

Sarah looked at the door. "Is this where he came in"

"Yes. He jimmied the lock with something. We'd better see what, because it's still on him. He came in to get Iris."

"And you shot him after he jumped to get your gun away. Is that right"

"That's the short version."

"We don't have much time." She reached into her purse and produced a folded wad of money with a paper clip on it. "Take this."

"But-"

"This is no time to be coy. We have minutes." She put the money in Jane's hand and added a set of car keys. "Take the black car that's at the curb. Get as far away from here as you can. When you're safe, leave it somewhere sensible, and mail me the keys and a note saying where it is."

"You can't do this," said Jane. "You'll get in terrible trouble."

Sarah Werth said, "He found her, broke in, and tried to kidnap her. When I intervened, he tried to attack me, so I shot him. I have a damaged door, five eyewitnesses, a registered pistol, and a lifetime of good behavior. I can take the heat without any effort. You can't. Now I need time to fire my own gun so there will be powder residue on my hands and a bullet missing. So go. You saved Iris's life tonight. Go save your own."

Jane leaned close and kissed Sarah's cheek. "You're like an angel."

"So are you. Good for us. If we're mistaken, I'll be proud to spend some time with you in hell. Now get out of here." She pushed Jane toward the front door.

Jane slipped out into the night. She put the gun into the waistband of her black exercise pants, limped to the small black Honda at the curb, got in, and started it.

She turned her head to look back at the safe house, but as she did, she saw Iris. She was running down the front lawn toward Jane, a look of terror on her face. She was carrying the backpack she'd brought with her. Jane could only imagine that somehow the man had gotten loose. She opened her car door and started up the lawn, but Iris reached her, clutched her arms, and said, "Please, Melanie. Take me with you."

Jane said, "Iris, honey. I can't do that. Where I'm going, it will be more dangerous than it is here."

"You have to. He's hardly hurt at all. He'll never stop looking for me. When he finds me this time, he'll kill me."

There was the muffled sound of a shot from inside the house. It had to be Sarah firing her pistol. It wasn't loud, but Jane could see that a couple of lights had gone on in upper windows of houses along the street. Jane heard, far off, the sound of sirens. She knew before looking at Iris's face that she was telling the truth about the ex-husband. He would never stop, and there was no chance the women in the safe house could stop him. She looked back at the house just as the young assistant stepped out on the porch. She waved at Jane frantically, urging her away. "Get in."

She drove toward the bright lights of the Las Vegas Strip and Interstate 15. The Strip was so big and bright that it threw its impossible smear of color into the sky-blue, green, gold, red-and tore a gash in the night. Her car rose onto the overpass above Route 15 and, for a moment, was part of the light.

Iris crouched in the passenger seat as Jane went over the bridge down the ramp and onto Route 15. She drove up the wide interstate out of town and into the darkness, keeping at the speed limit every second, never letting up at all. She was heading north, as the signs reminded her after every entrance ramp, and she drove with the sensation that every mile she put behind her was making her and Iris safer. It was another few minutes before she thought to take the pistol out of her waistband and hide it under her seat.

Jane said, "I'm going to Salt Lake City." She looked at Iris beside her, but there was no visible reaction. "Since you're with me, that means that's where you're going too. Is Salt Lake City all right with you"

"I guess so," Iris said "I've never been there, and nobody there knows my name."

"What is your name" said Jane.

"Iris May Salter," she said. "It used to be Hampton, but I had my maiden name restored in the divorce."

"Iris Salter is your real name"

"Real Of course. It never occurred to me to change it again, but maybe that's a good idea."

"You might want to consider it. I find it never hurts to make things a little harder for people who want to hurt you."

"Steve-that's my ex-husband's name-seemed to think he had a right to hurt me."

"People who like to hurt you can always tell you why it's your fault."

Jane drove along Interstate 15, trying to put as much road as possible behind them. It was nerve-racking to be on such a major highway, the most obvious way out of Las Vegas. If the police listened to Iris's ex-husband and thought they needed to hunt for the woman who had really fired the shot, they would be on Interstate 15, too. They already were on Interstate 15, all day every day, all night every night, because Interstate 15 wasn't just a river of money coming into town. It was the route of an invading army of troublemakers and screwups. Jane couldn't afford to be pulled over by a cop for some minor infraction tonight. The authorities in Los Angeles had already had three days to take frame grabs from the security cameras in the courthouse and distribute them to cops along the obvious escape routes, and Las Vegas was the most obvious escape route of all.

As Jane drove, she tried to decipher and untangle her predicament. She was hurt. She had promised Jim Shelby she would meet him at the hotel in Salt Lake City, and she was already three days late. Crouching in the seat beside her was a young woman whose will seemed to have been beaten out of her.

Jane said, "I think we should talk."

"Okay. What about"

"I wasn't planning to take you with me. When you came running out, I thought something else had happened, and then you were in the car and we had to leave. For a lot of reasons you don't know yet, that might not have been your best move."

"I had to get away."

"Getting away from a man like that is a good idea, but that's not the point. The point is that everything you'd seen about me was an indication that I had a few problems that existed before I met you, and might put you in worse danger."

"I know," said Iris. "I saw your back after your bath. And I saw the bandage on your leg. And the giant bruise around it."

"You saw that"

"I wanted to meet you, so I went into our room, and I saw you weren't there. I went toward the bathroom, and you had finished your bath and opened the door a crack to get rid of the steam. When you reached up to clean the steam off the mirror with your towel, I slipped aside so you wouldn't see me in the mirror and think I was spying on you. But I saw."

"Seeing the marks shouldn't have made you want to risk going with me. I couldn't even protect myself."

"I could see you were someone who understood what it's like. Your burns are from metal that was heated up. You can see that on my back, too. When Steve did that to me he used a bunch of big nails. He heated them in a frying pan and dumped them out on my back. And I could see where somebody hit you with a switch, too. In some ways that was the worst for me, even though it hurt less than the burns or the punches. It was humiliating, like a child being whipped for doing something bad. I'm sure you know."

Jane said, "I'm not much like the person I've been pretending to be. Let's try to figure out what you can do, and where I can take you."

"I'm not the way I seem, either. I'm a normal person. I never even knew people like Steve. I met him at a club in LA. He carried himself like a bad boy, and I thought that was dark and mysterious and sexy. He was very male, always in charge. And there was an edge to him, sort of a repressed anger that I took for toughness. I fell for him-or for the man I had invented. That's the right term-fell for him, like you fall for a hoax or a fraud. I married him. A few months after that, he started to work on me. I was young and naive, and to him that was the same as being stupid. I wasn't a poor kid, brought up in the backwoods somewhere, and I hadn't raised myself on the streets, so I was weak. I liked pretty clothes and things, so I was spoiled. After a while I was sad. It was hard to live with his contempt and be happy. I told him I didn't like being treated that way, so I was a nasty bitch. After a while he was watching everything I did, but without ever looking at me when he spoke to me. I was an enemy, and the minute he got up in the morning he started noticing things about me that weren't right. The day after the hitting started I left. I slipped out and went to my parents' house in Sherman Oaks. I filed for divorce from there. My father was a doctor, and we had a nice house with my old room and everything, but he told me the best thing for me was to go to another city until the divorce was final. I should get a job and meet nice people my age and do some thinking about the future I wanted."

"That sounds smart. That's exactly what I'm trying to get you to do now."

"I went to Boston. I only came home for the final decree, then went back. And then my father died. It was the last thing in the world I expected. He was always very fit and healthy, and he seemed so young that I always forgot his age. He had a massive heart attack and died, and then I realized I hadn't actually been seeing him. I'd been looking at him and seeing him as he'd been fifteen years younger. When he died, my mother was all alone."

"So you came home to be with her."

"Yes. She was alone, after being married for over forty years. He was the sort of person who just quietly took care of everything. She never seemed worried about anything, because he was this big, reassuring presence. Now she was lost. So I moved in. I don't know how he found out, but Steve knew immediately that I was living there. He showed up at the door a few days after the funeral and said he wanted me back."

"Did you fall for it"

"No. I told him there was nothing at all left between us, and that he should go away and never come within a mile of me again. He, of course, wanted to stay and argue about it."

"But you didn't give in"

"Not then, and not the next fifty times. He called at all hours, showed up when I went to work and stood in front of my car, sent presents I didn't want and apologies. He said he hadn't ever wanted to be mean to me, but I had forced him. Surely I understood that."

"Iris, honey. I've heard this story before. I don't blame you for any of it. But you need to think about tomorrow and the next day. We need to make a plan for how you're going to spend the next month or two."

"Please," Iris said. "I've got to tell you, so you'll understand."

"All right."

"I got a restraining order. He violated it about three times before the cops or the judge or someone persuaded him he couldn't prevent me from going to work or wake me up in the middle of the night. A few months after my father died, my mother got sick. It was a heart problem, too. And then she died. I heard afterward from a lot of people that this kind of thing happens quite often with couples who have been close. The one who was left didn't take long to follow the one who died."

"What did you do then"

"I was alone, and I saw the world a little more clearly. The house that had been the symbol for me of safety and security since I was a baby had changed. Without my parents, it was just an empty, sad building. There was no help or advice or companionship, or even safety there anymore. There was a sadistic, crazy man out there somewhere, and the house suddenly seemed so fragile and insubstantial that he could walk in through the walls to get me. I mean, it was a one-story, sprawling ranch-style house with big glass windows everywhere. All he'd need was a rock. I went to a realtor and told him to estimate what the house was worth, price it twenty thousand cheaper, and sell it fast. The house sold, I deposited the check, packed up, and moved out in a hurry. I put my parents' furniture in storage, rented a one-bedroom apartment in a duplex, and moved in. Steve waited until one day when the people in the other half of the duplex had gone to work, and came and got me."

"Just like that"

"Pretty much. He kidnapped me-put tape over my mouth and wrists, then dragged me out to the back door into a van, taped my ankles, shut the doors, and drove off. He's big and strong; I was small and weak. That's all it takes. He drove to a place he had leased in Nevada. And then it began. Being his ex-wife was about being punished for being a failure as his wife, and for leaving him and divorcing him, and for not coming back when he told me to. There were no illusions about a romantic relationship. It was him getting even and teaching me a lesson. I was a person who had done him grave injury, and now I'd pay for it. He had me for five months before I got away."

"How did you accomplish that"

"He went grocery shopping. A couple of times when I'd gone with him I'd tried to get people to call the police, but they never had. Still, he kept his hand on my wrist after that. This time, he couldn't take me with him, because my face didn't look too good. So I waited until he was gone, and slipped out of the chain he had on my wrist. I had been preparing by not eating for a few days. He put the lock on the same link as always, but it was too big this time. I didn't really know where I was, but I knew it was Nevada and the sign on the highway said, `Las Vegas, 146 miles.' I hitchhiked to Las Vegas, but if I hadn't been picked up, I would have walked. I stopped when I found the shelter where I met you. I know I should have kept going, but I needed food and rest. But now I'm out, and I'll have a big head start on him, thanks to you."

"You're welcome," Jane said. "I'm glad you're okay. But I have something urgent I need to do when we get to Salt Lake City. I'll leave you as much money as I can, and get you checked into a safe hotel. But then I have to go. If you'd rather I leave you somewhere else, I'll try to do that."

"With you," Iris said. "I want to go with you."

"I can try to come back for you."

"Why can't I help you do whatever you're doing"

Jane took a deep breath, and then let it out slowly. "I know how this is going to sound, but I guess I have to say it and hope your gratitude or your ability to recognize me as a friend will keep you from ever repeating it. I'm running. I'm being hunted by some men who will kill me if they catch me, and they plan to take a long time letting me die. The reason I couldn't hang around to wait for the police in Henderson is because the cops are searching the country for me, too. And I'm in no shape to protect you. That bandage you saw around my leg is covering a gunshot wound. Just about the most dangerous place in the country you could be right now is with me."

"Please," said Iris.

"Are you even listening"

"Sure. I can repeat it all if you want."

Jane could see sincere fear in Iris's eyes, and the profound sadness of abandonment. Jane drove on, trying to make as much distance as she could. The next three times that she looked, Iris's eyes were still on her, unchanged. The fourth time, the eyes were closed. Iris was asleep.

Jane sped out of the lower slice of Nevada and kept going across Arizona. She knew she was driving through some of the most dramatic places in the country, but the deserts consisted of the two cone-shaped beams of headlight illuminating a road that seemed straight and infinite beyond her sight, and the mountains were a steep, winding ribbon of pavement that sometimes made her feel as though she were flying up, down, left, right like a plane in a dogfight. She could see the North Star in the clear black of the sky in the unlighted places she drove through.

She passed towns-Saint George, Cedar City, Beaver, Elsinore, Scipio, Nephi. The sun began to rise on her right, in time for Spanish Fork and Provo. When she came off the interstate at Salt Lake City she was glad she had told Jim Shelby to meet her here. By her reckoning she had driven 430 miles in about six hours. She was far enough from the West Coast so the escape a few days ago from the courthouse in Los Angeles would be little remembered here.

The Residence Inn where she had told Shelby to wait for her was four blocks east of the interstate, across the street from Pioneer Park. It was already eight thirty in the morning, and the traffic was steady, full of people going to work. As she approached the address, she recognized the big, low, brick building that looked like a huge house in a green space with a sidewalk jutting from the building to the street, and broad parking lots on both sides.

She scanned the lots for the new Camry she had left for Shelby in the barn near Riverside, California. But she had chosen the car well. There were probably thirty cars she could see that looked enough like it so she would have to go around on foot, examining each one closely.

Iris woke and sat up. "Is this where we're going"

"Yes. I'm going in alone. That will give me a chance to be sure everything's okay. I'll be back out in a while."

She pulled into the nearest lot, then drove to the part that was at the rear of the building and got out. She walked the length of the parking lot before she found the car she had left for Shelby. When she had scanned the rest of the lot to be sure nobody was watching the car, she approached it and looked inside to see if she could detect any damage or any signs that it had been opened by force. It seemed all right. She walked to a back entrance, went down a long hallway lined with rooms, and went to a small table in the lobby with a white phone on it. She picked up the receiver and heard a ringing signal. A female voice said, "How may I direct your call"

"Can you please ring John Leland's room"

After two rings, Jim Shelby's voice said, "Yes"

"Hi," she said. "It's me. What's your suite number"

"Two-sixteen."

"I'll be right up."

She went to the elevator just off the lobby and rode it to the second floor. As she stood there she felt distaste, then realized she was remembering the last elevator, the one that had brought Wylie, Gorman, and Maloney into her life.

The doors opened, the hallway was empty, and she walked out into the corridor. The door marked 216 opened, and Jim Shelby stood in the doorway. She slipped in and he shut the door, locked it, and bolted it. "I heard the elevator arrive," he said. He turned and stared at her. "What happened to you Why are you limping"

"I got shot," she said.

"Jesus. Who shot you One of the men at the courthouse"

"Not the ones we both saw. These came along later-one named Gorman and one named Maloney. They pretended to be cops, so I went with them. When I realized they were just more thugs, I tried to get away, and Maloney shot me. The one in charge is named Wylie. But that's all over. I'm here, and so are you. Tell me how it's gone so far."

"The way you said it would. No surprises."

"You were careful to be sure nobody followed you here"

"I'm positive. It was a long drive through open country. If there had been anybody following, I'd have seen him."

"You made stops and turnarounds to be sure"

"Yes. About four times before I got out of California, and then once every hour after that. I even got off the interstate and drove in the opposite direction to the last exit twice."

"Good," she said. She looked around her. "This is a nice place. I wish we could stay for a month and try to get over some of the things that have happened to us."

"We can't"

"No. What I'm worried about is your sister. When the hunters are looking hard for a fugitive and the trail goes cold, they go find the nearest relative. The day before I broke you out of the courthouse, I called your sister and told her to close up her house and get out of Austin. If we didn't make it, she could come back in a couple of weeks. If we succeeded and got you out, she would be the next way to get to you, so she had to stay away. She said she'd do it."

"Where did she go"

"I don't know yet. I told her to call the person who acted as go-between to get her in touch with me. I'll call the woman now and see what she knows. Have you seen a pay phone around here"

"There's one downstairs in the lobby."

"Good. I don't have a cell phone. Or any identification, or much of anything. Do you have any change"

Shelby emptied his pockets, then went to the dresser in his room and returned with a handful of coins. "I'll show you where it is."

"No. Show yourself as seldom as possible. I'll find it." Jane took the change and set off. She held herself with a stiff determination, ignoring the pain. When she reached the phone she dialed the number, put in the amount the recording demanded, and waited.

The voice that answered was a receptionist. "Legal office."

"I'd like to speak with Allison, please. This is Jane."

"Please hold." The receptionist's line was silent for a few seconds, but when she came back she said, "I'll put you right through."

The next voice was Allison's. "Jane. You're a celebrity in certain circles. Best jailbreak in memory."

"I've been in those circles. They can keep their award."

"And Kristen Alvarez sends her congratulations, too."

"Thank her again for letting me destroy her reputation."

"Not only does Kristen Alvarez have a reputation that's too good to ruin, but she's honored to have you borrow her name for a jailbreak when you do such a good job. I'm delighted that you let me in on it, too. Some of the things I've done for you are legally the worst things I ever did, but they're the ones I feel proudest of. When I fall asleep at night, what I think about isn't the nine-hundredth plea bargain. It's that I had the guts to-well, we both know, so there's no need to repeat things."

"Right. Did our mutual friend Sarah call yet with an address"

"Yes. It's 3592 Dryden Road, Ithaca, New York."

"Ithaca" Jane said. "You're joking."

"I'm not. I suggested it. You know Ithaca-it's pretty remote, but with lots of new people coming and going for the university."

"True. If she calls again for any reason, tell her I'm on my way."

"You're going there I could take a couple of days off and fly there. We could have a nostalgic lunch at Cornell or something." She laughed. "Coffee in Willard Straight Hall."

"The people who framed Sarah's brother will be trying to get to her now. She's all they've got, so this trip could be kind of tense."

"God, Jane. I wouldn't have your life for anything." She paused. "I'm sorry. That didn't sound the way I meant it."

"Yes, it did. And for the moment, at least, you're right. But I'm hoping things will look up shortly. Thanks again. See you."

"Good luck."

Jane hung up and walked back toward Shelby's suite. Allison was a woman she'd met when they were students at Cornell. After they'd graduated, Allison became a lawyer. A few years after that, she had unexpectedly come to see Jane at her house in Deganawida, New York. She explained that she had an innocent client who was about to be convicted, and she was positive that once the verdict was read, he would never get out of prison alive. She had spent the past two days meditating on her responsibilities as an officer of the court, a defense attorney, and a human being. She was aware that years before, when they were in school, Jane had made a friend and classmate disappear. Could she do it one more time

On the day of sentencing, Allison was in court, but the client was not. Since he wasn't violent, she got the judge to grant him an alternative court date, but he didn't turn up on that date, either. An all points bulletin was issued, a warrant for his arrest was circulated, and his picture and description were added to the displays on various police department bulletin boards. The particulars were still in the NCIC system, although nearly twenty years had passed and the fugitive student was pushing forty. Jane had met Kristen Alvarez years later, and had done a favor or two for clients of hers.

Jane went to the front desk in the hotel lobby, and waited for the young man in a sport coat to acknowledge her presence. He looked at her and raised his eyebrows.

"Hi," she said. "My name is Carol Rosen. I reserved the room for Mr. Leland, two-sixteen. I wondered if you have a second room available for me for the next week."

"For seven days" He went to the computer, and from the way he looked at the screen and typed, she could tell he knew he had one. "Yes," he said. He typed in some other mysterious information. "And how would you like to take care of that"

"You can put them both on the same American Express card," Jane said. "It's the one that ends in 65951, right Carol Rosen"

"Uh . . . yes. Do you happen to have it with you"

"I'm sorry, but I left it with my purse upstairs. Can I just stop in later and you can take another impression" She gestured toward her leg. "I've got a bad sprain, and I . . ."

"Well, sure," he said. She could tell that he didn't feel comfortable and wasn't supposed to do it, but was determined to be nice to her. She was obviously a good customer. He produced a card with the number of the room and the usual address and phone number information. "Just initial here and here, then sign here."

Jane did, and he said, "It's vacant right now, so you can have early check-in. How many keys will you be needing"

"Two."

He produced two key cards, stuffed them into a folder, wrote Room 392 on it, and handed it to her.

"Thanks," Jane said.

"You're welcome, Mrs. Rosen."

Jane limped off to the parking lot. She got into the black car and shut the door. Iris sat up. "Sorry to keep you waiting."

"That's okay," said Iris. "I guess you need me to get out of the car, right"

"Not in the way you mean it. Here," she said. "I brought you a key card for your room. It's on the third floor, 392." She handed the little folder to Iris, and kept one of the two key cards. "It's vacant, so you might as well go right in."

"Oh, Melanie. How am I going to pay for it"

"You're not. It's charged to the American Express card of a woman named Mrs. Carol Rosen."

"Is that you"

"Sometimes it is. Tomorrow you can be Carol Rosen, except with the desk clerk on duty this morning. Get a look at him. You can sign for meals and charge them to the room. Also laundry. And I haven't explored the hotel, but I think there's a shop or two in there, so feel free to charge some clothes, too. Signing for things won't help anybody find you. There's no trail. Everything is in Carol Rosen's name, and I always pay the bill when it comes. I have a ride, so I'm leaving you the car. If something changes so you don't need it anymore, leave it somewhere safe, like an airport lot, call Sarah at the Lifeboat, and she'll send somebody to pick it up."

Iris leaned over and hugged Jane. "Thank you for everything. Are you leaving right now"

"No. I need to get some sleep first. Don't worry. I'll be back for you in a week or so. In case I'm late, here's the cash that Sarah gave me before we left."

"But then-"

"I'll have what I need." Jane put the money in her hand. "If for some reason you can't be here when I get back, call Sarah at the Lifeboat and let her know where I can find you. All right"

"All right."

The two women got out of the car, and walked toward the hotel. "See you," Jane said. She walked to the end of the building, then turned the corner and stopped to look back. She watched Iris hesitate for a few seconds, standing outside the building and looking aimlessly in one direction, then another. She was afraid to go in and pretend to be someone else, afraid to drive away, and afraid she was attracting attention by standing where she was for too long. Finally, she lowered her head and stepped in through the double doors.

Jane watched the doors close. Good. One foot in front of the other. You'll make it.

6.

That morning it was hot in Austin, Texas. Gorman drove the rental car with the air-conditioner fan blowing hard while Wylie sat in the passenger seat beside him looking for the right address. Maloney announced the house numbers from the back seat. "Eighty-nine seventeen. We're close. Eighty-nine twenty-one. There it is. Eighty-nine twenty-nine. The white one up there."

"I see it," Gorman said. "Want me to go around the block to park"

"Hell no," Wylie said. "Just park."

Gorman made the Lincoln Town Car swoop to the curb behind a parked SUV.

"I'll go get started with one of the neighbors," said Wylie. "You two stay here, but watch the front door."

He got out of the car and went to the house to the left of 8929. He rang the bell, but nobody appeared. He knocked, but there was still no answer. He walked down the sidewalk and went to 8929. He rang the bell, knocked, looked in the front window. The place appeared to be deserted. He looked back at Gorman and Maloney in the car, and moved his index finger slightly to point to the house on the right, then walked to it. This time, when he rang the bell a woman opened the door a few inches. He could see that she was thin, about fifty years old, with long auburn hair, and that she was wearing blue jeans and flip-flops.

She looked at him suspiciously, as though she were planning to slam the door if he moved toward her.

He didn't move. He smiled and said, "Hello, miss. My name is Bobby Simms. I'm an old friend of Sarah Shelby. Actually, I'm more than that, because I'm a distant cousin, too. I just drove here all the way from New Orleans. I called her a few times on the way, but I haven't been able to reach her. I'm a little worried. Have you seen her in the past few days"

The woman behind the door frowned. "Are you a reporter"

"A reporter Me Lord, no," Wylie said, and then gave a surprised laugh. "I've never been accused of that before. Why would you ask that"

The woman's brows knitted, as though she had forgotten her suspicion and was concerned about him. "You know about her brother, right"

"I haven't kept up. I haven't seen either of them in a few years. What's wrong with Jimmy Is he sick or something"

"I'm sorry," she said. "I can't really go into their personal business. Sarah left town about a week ago, and I'm not sure when she's coming home. If you'd like to leave a message for her, I can give it to her when she's back."

"Well, then, what about Jimmy Do you have a number or address for him"

"No, I'm afraid I don't." She looked distinctly uncomfortable. "I'm sorry, but I've got some things to do." She began to push the door shut.

"Wait," he said, and she left the door open about half an inch. "Is there anyone else in town who might be able to give me a number or address"

She pulled the door open a few more inches to answer. "I honestly can't think of anyone. She left without telling me anything, but I'm sure there isn't anything wrong. She just said she was going on vacation for a while, and to keep an eye on her house."

The woman had a tell, a small mannerism that revealed when she was lying. It was a habit of looking in the upper right corner of her field of vision whenever she was forming the answer to a question, instead of looking into his eyes. He had been watching her do this since he'd first spoken to her. He sighed and turned to look in the direction of his car, as though he were straining to think. He suddenly hurled his body against the front door.

The heavy wooden door flew inward, struck the woman, and knocked her onto the living room carpet on her back. She was so stunned that she lay still, trying to fathom what had happened. Finally, she took in a deep breath.

Wylie closed the heavy door and took two swift strides, dropped to his knees beside her, and grabbed her throat, choking off the scream. "You're lying to me," he said. "Lying to me is about the craziest thing you could do."

The front door opened again to admit Gorman and Maloney. Wylie looked up to acknowledge them. "This lady has decided to lie to me instead of answering my questions."

"That would really be stupid, ma'am," Gorman said. He pulled his jacket aside to show her the badge he had used in Los Angeles, and made sure the woman could also see the gun he had in a shoulder holster. "Obstructing police officers in a murder investigation is about as serious as it gets."

Wylie kept his left hand on the woman's throat as he used his right hand to drag her to a sitting position. "I always heard that Texas cops didn't put up with this kind of crap, so you should know better. We came all the way from the city of Los Angeles hunting a dangerous escaped killer, and sure as hell won't go home just because somebody tells us lies. Now tell us where Sarah Shelby is right now."

The woman was beyond terror now. "Are you really police officers" She didn't see Wylie's hand move before the slap on her left cheek spun her head to the side. She cringed and tried to look away, but the open hand slapped her again. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean anything."

She was shocked, but not hurt. She made the assumption that Wylie had finished. She seemed to relax for an instant, but then Wylie slapped her face several times, harder each time, then stopped and moved his face close to hers. She was trembling and a low moan escaped from her throat.

"I'm helping you get used to your new world. As of now you aren't somebody who can keep the bad things out just by shutting your door. You just gave that up. Sarah Shelby is off aiding and abetting the escape of a murderer. A wife killer. You know that already, because you're obviously a friend of the family. But you don't seem to realize that anybody who helps a murderer get away is going to share his fate."

"I didn't do anything, and she didn't tell me anything. She just went away."

He didn't hit her, just clutched her arm. "Here's all the education you'll need, all in one afternoon. If you lie to the police when we come around trying to find a murderer, you're as much a criminal as he is."

"Are you going to arrest me"

"What happens to you is up to you. It's a kind of race. If you talk before Jim Shelby kills another innocent person, and before somebody else tells an officer what we need to know and he's captured, you'll do okay. If you don't, things will go hard." His head was behind the woman's, so she didn't see him nod to Gorman.

Gorman said, "Jesus, chief. She makes me sick. Why don't we just take her out and shoot her now You gave her a chance. Now the offer is expired."

"Not just yet," Wylie said. He took her head in his hands and turned it so she had to look at him. He studied her for a few seconds, then released her. "Okay. Put the cuffs on her."

Gorman stepped forward and grabbed the woman's wrists.

"Wait!"

It was her voice, drastically different from before. "She did leave an address and phone number, just in case something happened here."

"What is it"

"It's written down. I folded the paper and put it inside one of the books in the bookcase. The one over there that says Cats of the World."

Maloney stepped to the bookcase, pulled out the book, flipped the pages, and found the folded sheet. He opened it and read it. "3592 Dryden Road, Ithaca, New York. And there's a phone number. Seven one six-"

"Save it," Wylie said. He picked up a pillow from the couch, unzipped the cover, and pulled the pillow out. He put the pillow cover over the woman's head, zipped it tight to her neck, wrapped the pillow around his pistol, and held it up to the woman's head.

"Please, please," she said. "I helped you."

He fired one shot. The sound was muffled, but the woman's head jerked to the side. There was a splatter of bright red liquid soaking the pillow cover, and the woman's body followed the head, tilting to the right and falling to the floor.

"Not bad, eh" he said. "No blood spatter all over, and only one shot in case one of the neighbors came home. They hear one shot and they stop what they're doing for a second, listening. If they don't hear another one, they figure it was nothing-a firecracker, a backfire, a door slam. A squirrel fell on their roof."

"Yeah, and when he hit the shingles, his gun went off," Gorman said.

Wylie looked out the front window, craned his neck to see up and down the street. "Let's go. We'd better get started." He opened the door, and the three men walked across the street to their car. "We've got a long drive ahead of us."

7.

Shelby was waiting for Jane when she returned to the hotel room. She stepped inside and closed, locked, bolted, and chained the door. She smiled. "There's some good news." "What"

"Your sister listened to what I told her. She left her house in Texas, and drove to Ithaca, New York, to wait this out."

"Thank God." His legs seemed to give out and deposit him on the bed. "Is she going to meet us here"

"I'm afraid not," she said. "If she gets on an airplane, the people who are after you might be able to trace her, and the police certainly will. We'll have to drive up there and get her."

"When do we leave"

"I drove here from Las Vegas for most of the night. When I wake up, we'll talk some more."

She took the spare pillow from the closet shelf, lay on the couch, and slept. When Jim Shelby saw the process, he was intrigued. She seemed to move from a state of hyper-awareness to deep sleep in less than a minute. He had found the couch reasonably comfortable, but she had no blanket, and she didn't undress or make any other preparations. This was something he had noticed about her from the beginning. She had control over herself. Her movements were always economical, never aimless or nervous. When she looked at anything-a person, a building-she seemed to pick out instantly the part that was important. When she had looked at the crowd at the courthouse, she had instantly separated the bystanders from the enemies, and both from the police, and had begun to act before anyone else. Her mind was always focused-looking, thinking, noticing.

He intuited that part of the reason she allowed herself to sleep at the moment was that he was here to watch over her. He knew that she had no illusion that while he was still recovering from a knife in the back he could protect her from an intruder, but he could delay one, and he would fight hard enough to make a lot of noise. He understood what she was feeling, and he knew that what she wanted was for him to find something to do that wasn't noisy, look out the window occasionally to check for the men who had caught her in Los Angeles, and stay with her.

He lay on the bed reading the magazines the hotel had left on the coffee table. They were almost entirely ads for women's clothes and jewelry, and for the restaurants where women could wear them. He still couldn't quite imagine ever again having money to spend on a woman, but for now being out of prison was enough. Every surface in the prison was designed to be harder and rougher than a man's bones and skin. It was as though the authorities wanted prisoners to see how small and weak they really were. It was as ugly as they could make it without letting on that they were trying-light green paint over uneven, chipped surfaces of walls and barred windows. Ugly brushed concrete floors.

He dozed at some point. He didn't remember a last impression. The magazine was at his side, his fingers still on it. The woman was across the room, sitting in one of the chairs from the small, round table and staring out the window. He sat up. "How long have you been awake"

"A half hour or so."

"I'm sorry to make you wait. I didn't expect to fall asleep."

"It's fine. Now that I've rested a little, I've been able to think."

"There's something I've been wondering about," he said. "When you came to the prison, and even at the courthouse, you were Kristen Alvarez. I assume that isn't who you are."

"No, I'm not Kristen Alvarez. I just borrowed the name of a real lawyer."

"Now that we're out of the courthouse, do you mind telling me your name"

"That depends," she said. "Whenever I take on a runner, I've got to know certain things that are dangerous to you-your new name, your address. But I will die before I reveal them. If I tell you my secrets, will you do the same for me Will you die before you'll tell anyone else what I tell you"

He looked at her for a moment. She was leaning back on two legs of the chair, both feet resting on the sill.

He said, "The knife I got in my back was just the first attempt. I would be dead by now if you hadn't taken me out. I owe you a life already."

She met his eyes and nodded. "Jane Whitefield."

"Pleased to meet you."

"I'm glad you're pleased, because we'll be spending some time together."

"We will"

"There are tricks to changing who you are and living as a new person. I've got to start getting you ready to live a nice, quiet life somewhere as John Robert Leland. It takes preparation to do it well, but we didn't have time for that."

"Are you warning me that I'll get caught if I try to do this myself"

She looked at him thoughtfully. "Not getting caught is partly luck, partly attitude, and partly premeditation. But it depends mostly on who's looking and how hard. There are something like twelve million illegal aliens in this country right now. Nobody finds them because nobody's looking. Men convicted of murders are on the other end of the spectrum. Lots of people are searching, and they tend to be the last people you'd want after you-experienced homicide detectives, federal and state agencies, and all the miscellaneous invisible security companies that protect credit cards, give people ratings, make sure nobody runs out on debts."

"What do I do-stay in this room"

"We'll try to stay invisible as long as we can, but not here. Most people called escapees have walked away from work-release programs. The ones who actually break out are usually caught within hours a few miles from the prison. You've already lasted longer than most. But if you stay in a hotel too long, the staff people get curious about you because you're not behaving like an ordinary customer. You have to either give them an explanation that satisfies them and doesn't raise other questions, or go. We need to pick up your sister, so we'll leave as soon as we're ready to travel."

"What do we do"

"First we work on our appearance."

"You mean change"

"There are lots of things that help. The clothes I left in the car for you at the courthouse were all expensive and neat-tailored pants, dress shirts, sport coats, a couple of good ties in subdued patterns. When people picture an escaped convict, they think of a guy with a three-day growth of beard, dirty, torn clothes, and a haunted expression. So we play against that expectation. You have short hair, and we can't lengthen it, but we can dye it. Your hair is blond, and most of the men in the country have brown hair. You can't shave it, because a shaved head practically screams prison. We want the observer's mind to see you and automatically think, `Respectable, prosperous.'"

"What if somebody has seen my picture"

"People are far more likely to see someone who looks a bit like you, but isn't, and turn him in. Whenever there's a famous fugitive, the police get thousands of calls. What we want to do is make sure none of them is about you. We make people's expectations censor their vision."

"That works"

"More often than not. The first part of the game is adding one layer after another of changes, all designed to make you less like you and less like a convict. The second is making a plan for the day when something goes wrong."

"If the police find me, then they'll come for me in a way that won't let me just talk my way out of it."

Jane said, "If the police who find you know you've been convicted of murder and you've escaped from a courthouse, give up and go quietly. If you're just stopped by a cop, don't assume he knows anything. Lie. Show him the John Leland identification I left in the car for you. Try to fool him to the end. Don't worry. We'll work on all of it. Where are the keys to your car"

He got up, took them out of a sport coat he had hung in the closet, and handed them to her. "Are you going somewhere"

"Shopping. I'll get us some dinner and a few things we'll need for the next phase. Anything in particular you'd like"

"I've been in prison for three years. I'm not too picky. Should I come with you I'm good at carrying heavy bags."

"Thanks, but not yet," she said. "For now, I'll be the one to show my face. I'll be back in less than two hours. When I knock, look in the peephole before you open the door. Don't open it and look. Oh, and I seem to be out of money. Can you give me a few hundred from the money I left in the car for you" He pulled a wad of money out of his pocket and handed it to her. She walked to the door, and then she was gone.

Jane went to his car, got in, drove the perimeter of the hotel grounds, and then made a circuit of the neighborhood. There were no vehicles parked in sight of the hotel with people waiting in them, no loiterers across the street in Pioneer Park.

She drove to a large plaza dominated by a supermarket. She parked near the back of the lot, and selected a cart that someone had left far from the rack. She found that she could use it like a walker to take the weight off her healing right leg. She bought a cooked chicken, salad, and vege-tables for dinner, and then bought food they would need on the road-bottled water, cookies, nuts, fruit. She loaded it all into the car, and then went to the Target store beside the supermarket. She bought hair dyes, an electric razor, a pair of scissors, and a hand mirror. She found makeup that lightened her complexion a bit, and some tanning lotion. She bought sunglasses, hats, polo shirts for Shelby, sweaters, pullovers, and pants that would cover her bruises and burns. The last item was a small suitcase.

When she had finished her shopping, she drove along the boulevard until she saw a gas station that had a pair of pay telephones on the wall outside. She stopped and filled up the tank, then went to the telephones, put in five quarters, and dialed the number of the old stone house in Amherst, New York.

"Hello"

"Carey. It's me."

She heard the huff of air leaving his lungs, then heard the breath of air he took and she could picture him, standing in the kitchen. "Are you all right"

"I'm okay. It's been a little hairy, so I couldn't call before now. I just wanted to let you know that the hard part seems to be over, so you shouldn't worry about me too much from here on."

"I'll try to worry exactly the right amount. How much is that"

"I'm sorry," she said. "It was stupid to put it that way. Don't worry at all."

"I assume you can't say where you are or who you're with. Can you say when you'll be home"

"Not yet. I would guess it will be at least a few more days. There's a lot to do this time. I wish it were now, but it can't be. I miss you so much I could cry. In fact I guess I am."

"And I miss you."

"What have you told people about me"

He sounded weary. "I told them you've gone back into the consulting business because you missed the excitement, and you're helping a company change its supply and distribution systems to survive the hard times. They think you must have gone back to work because we've lost our savings in the market, so they just look at me with sympathy."

"That's very well done."

"Thanks. I've become an amazing liar-an undiscovered talent."

"I'm sorry," she said. "Look, I've got to go. I'm not sure when I can call again, so don't think anything has happened if I don't. I love you."

"I love you. If everything is okay, why are you crying"

"The usual reason. Because I want to be with you and I'm not." She sniffed. "I'm sorry, Carey. But I've got to go. Bye."

She hung up the telephone, went to the car, and drove off. She hated these telephone calls. They were always from pay phones, always rushed. "I'm sorry" and "I love you" and lies to him to make him think that what she was doing this time was safe and easy. None of it ever fooled him. He had learned over the years to pretend he believed, because that made it possible for both of them to get through the conversation. During their first year together, they had fought a couple of times during these calls. Since then they had learned to pretend.

Everything was a half-truth or an evasion. She couldn't say anything that was true or real; she could never say where she was or whom she was with, just in case someone somewhere in the miles between them was listening. At times she had sensed that he wondered what purpose it served for her to call at all. But when she hadn't called, they'd both felt awful.

On her last trip she had been taking an advertising executive named Stephen Noton out of Massachusetts and trying to relocate him in a safe place in the West. He had been an innocent bystander, but that hadn't protected him. There had been a would-be whistle-blower in a giant soft drink company who had documentary evidence that some divisions in the company were smuggling narcotics in certain large shipments of sugar and tea and tropical fruit. The company's security men had already intercepted his first attempt to get a copy out, had cut off his access to his computer, and were searching the building for him. He had noticed a large envelope in someone's office that was about to be sent by messenger to the advertising company-specifically, to Stephen Noton. He slipped his document into the packet and got back to his office just in time to be dragged away. Before long Stephen Noton had the document, but the company knew it. Once he'd read it, the company was determined to kill him. By the time he had made his way to Jane, Noton had survived two attempts on his life, including a nighttime raid of his home. When Jane had told Carey she was going to help Stephen Noton, Carey had said, "This is an innocent man. Surely the police can take care of somebody like him without your help." She had stopped calling until Noton was settled.

Jane reached the hotel and repeated her drive around the block to see if there were any signs of change in the parking lots surrounding the building or Pioneer Park. When she was satisfied, she parked near the side door so she didn't have far to walk.

She took her two bags of groceries and supplies and walked into the hotel. When she reached the door, she knocked and then stood in front of the peephole. She saw it darken, and the door opened.

Shelby took the bags and she relocked the door.

He stared at her. "Have you been crying"

"Me No," she said. "I guess my eyes are still watering from the dry air in the West. They'll be better when we go east."

"When is that"

"It's almost six now. We can probably be ready by midnight. First we have some work to do. Bring a chair into the bathroom in front of the sink."

Two minutes later, Jane joined him in the bathroom, opened the box of hair dye, and laid out the materials. When she had finished, she said, "Have you ever had your hair dyed before"

"No."

"You'll be amazed at how much it helps." She pulled his head back above the sink and applied the noxious-smelling chemical to his hair. "Now sit still and relax for fifteen minutes, and then I'll do a few highlights. Nobody's hair is all one uniform shade."