Runner

9

Linda Welles moved into one of the two front apartments on the second floor of a nearly new building that had eight units. Christine was now getting used to calling herself Linda Welles, because she'd had to use the name so many times. Jane had needed to take her to a bank to open an account before she could write a check for the security deposit and two months' rent. Jane presented herself as Linda's sister, who was helping her get settled. The bank gave Linda a debit card and a pile of brochures about mortgages, car loans, and other services.

They bought a few pieces of furniture and a television set and arranged to have them delivered on the first of the month. Jane was very patient as Linda chose pictures, rugs, sheets and blankets, and other furnishings because she knew that those things would help make the apartment feel good to her. Jane had done all of this many times before, and she allocated days for each of the tasks they had to complete.

There was one day to find a car for Linda. Jane picked out a four-year-old Volkswagen Passat station wagon. "This is just about right. You don't want a new car. The people who are looking for you will expect a rental, and they're all new. This has the look of something you've been driving a while, which is good. We'll take it to a glass shop and have the side windows tinted a bit so you're hard to see from outside."

There was another day to shop at the Mall of America for clothes and incidentals for Linda and the baby. That was harder for Jane, but she was careful to keep it from Linda. Jane made sure that the pregnancy clothes would be big enough for the final months. She also made sure that Linda picked out fashionable clothes that would fit after the baby was born. If Linda could keep herself optimistic and cheerful, she would have a better chance.

They spent another morning finding baby furniture and accessories, and an afternoon assembling the crib and the changing table in the spare bedroom of the new apartment. In the evening Jane came out of the spare room with a bag.

"What's in the bag?"

"Women's magazines."

"That's nice."

"It's another chore. I want you to look at the pictures of models in these. You want a hairstyle that's different from the one you have now. Pick one out. When you've found one, we're going to take the magazines with us to a good stylist, and get your hair done."

"Do you really think that's necessary?"

"Any change is helpful. I know they got photographs of you from Richard Beale. We don't want them to be able to show the pictures to people, say, 'Have you seen this girl?' and find you. Anything you can do that will make you different from the girl you were could save you. Normally, I would want you to dye your hair, too, but I'm not sure the chemicals are a good idea for a pregnant woman. Pick a style you like, or you won't be able to stand it for long."

"Okay." Linda took the magazines and began to look through them. After a few minutes of browsing, she said, "This is actually sort of fun. What will Linda Welles look like? A hippo, of course, but maybe a stunning hippo."

"Not stunning, please. Elegant, stylish, cute, or fetching. The hippo thing only lasts a couple of months, and then it's back to gazelle. And one more thing. Do you have perfect vision?"

"It's my one perfect feature."

"Then while we're out tomorrow, we'll get you some nice glasses. You'll want a pair of sunglasses that are big and dark to change the shape of your face when you're out. We'll need a second pair with a lighter shade, probably brownish. You'll also want some that are clear, so you can wear them in places like movie theaters and grocery stores."

"Ugh."

"I'm giving you the means to be safe. When I'm gone, you'll decide which ones you can tolerate in which situations."

"Are you getting sick of me?"

"Not yet," said Jane. "You're actually growing on me."

"Very funny."

"That's another thing. We've got to start shopping for an obgyn for you. We need one who works out of a hospital in this part of town."

"I could call the office of my doctor in San Diego and ask him for a referral."

Jane looked at her, shocked. She was so young. "Bad idea. Before we do this, we'd better do some preparing. First we have to get you some new health insurance as Linda Welles. You're young enough so we can probably say you haven't had a job with health benefits yet, and that this is your first policy. Then we'll go for your first checkup."

"Why can't I call my doctor in San Diego? I'd just ask for a name."

"Any time you get in touch with anybody from your past life, you give the hunters another way to find you. You can't ask for doctors in Minneapolis without someone making a note on your file that you moved to Minneapolis. Nothing that happens in a doctor's office is supposed to be public information, but there are a million ways to get it. No place where there are physical files or computer records is safe from people who are willing to break in."

"They don't know the name of my doctor in San Diego. While I was there I never told anybody but Sharon I was pregnant."

"But Richard knows. Even if some doctor's bills haven't come to your house by now, Richard is your employer. I'm sure he can get the insurance company to list the payments they've made to doctors and figure out which ones are yours. It's likely that his people have already begun to check your medical records. They'll be waiting for you to go to another doctor somewhere. Let me handle this part. I'll get started on it today, with the insurance."

That afternoon Jane made a telephone call and arranged to add an employee named Linda Welles to a group health insurance contract for one of the imaginary companies she had incorporated years before. When she had first started giving runners new identities, she had found it useful to create corporations that could produce work histories and references for them. After that she had found more and more uses for the shadow companies. She could make purchases with a certain amount of anonymity just by reciting account numbers over a telephone. After the insurance was arranged, she began the search for a doctor to oversee Linda Welles's pregnancy and deliver the baby.

While Jane concentrated on getting Linda Welles settled, she instituted new routines. Every morning Jane got up early, put on a sweatshirt, shorts, and running shoes, and went for a run before the sun came up. She would begin by running the streets and parking lots of the apartment complex. During the first two mornings she memorized the cars that belonged to the tenants along the nearby streets, and each morning after that, as she ran, she watched for ones that didn't belong. When she had been through the complex she ran along the street beyond the entrance, and then returned to Linda Welles's apartment. She stood barefoot on the carpet in the spare room and went through the ordered poses of tai chi.

One morning Linda was up early enough to watch her. "That's tai chi, right? They're all animals, aren't they?"

"They're stances that each animal uses when it fights."

"Why do you do it?"

"It makes me feel good. It keeps me flexible, improves my balance and coordination." Jane smiled. "It makes me easier to get along with. I can start teaching you a little, if you want."

"Not today," Linda said. "Where did you learn to fight?"

"By fighting."

"Before that. You've had training."

"I learned tai chi in a class about twenty years ago. I've been running since I was a kid. I was on the track team. But I wanted something different that kept me flexible and strengthened my upper body. Later on, I took a man out of the world who happened to be a black belt in aikido. He was being hunted hard, so I had to stay with him for several months to make him safe and teach him how to be the person he was going to be. You're a young girl, so you don't have to account for much time. Most people you meet will just assume you've been in school from the time you were five until now. It's much harder for a middle-aged man. He has to account for twenty or thirty years of history beyond that—jobs, wives, hobbies, friends and relatives, education, experiences. That's tricky. He has to account for what he knows, but also pretend he doesn't know certain things, or people will figure out where he must have come from. We used to have long talks. I would ask him to tell me stories about his imaginary life, and I'd try to pick holes in them. When we got tired of that, he would teach me aikido for five or six hours a day."

"You must have done more than that. I saw you fight."

"Not exactly. You saw me not-fight. This is fighting." She pretended to deliver a series of punches and kicks that were so fast that Linda could barely follow the movements. "That's karate, of course. That's called a kata, and it's a set routine you can go into in a certain situation. You work on a kata until you can do it correctly. Then you practice it in exactly the same way a few thousand times. After two thousand you can usually perform the movements well enough. Another two thousand times and you have it ingrained deeply enough so you might think to use it if you were attacked. After you've done it many more times, you can do it very fast. It takes two-tenths of a second for the eye to receive and transmit an image to the brain and the brain to interpret it. If you can deliver a punch or a kick faster than two-tenths of a second, then you can hit an opponent before he sees the blow coming."

"That's what you did that night. Why do you call it not-fighting?"

"I broke his knee before a fight could start, and then I ran away."

"But you could fight."

"Only because he didn't think I could. He thought I couldn't hurt him, so he didn't pay enough attention to me, or protect himself. There was a huge difference between us. No matter how much work I do, or how much I learn, I'm never going to be as strong as even the average out-of-shape man. He has at least seventy or eighty pounds on me, a lot of it muscle. I have to attack very fast, fight very dirty, and get back where he can't reach me. I can't stand around hitting him and letting him hit me. If he lands one good punch he'll break bones."

"But you beat him."

"No, I tricked him. That man saw the two of us, and what he was seeing was like a pair of little pussycats. You can go up to a hundred cats, one after the other, and they're all perfectly docile. Then you meet that one that looks the same, but suddenly it has its claws digging into your arm to hold on while it sinks its teeth all the way into your hand. That's me. I'm the one that bites."

"That's what I want to be," said Linda. "I want to be able to fight back."

"You don't want to fight," said Jane. "You want what I want, which is to get away."

"I guess that's true."

"I was planning on helping you with that. We'll start tomorrow after the appointment at the doctor's office."

The next day was cooler but bright and clear, with a breeze that seemed to Jane to be an early summer treat before the humidity set in. Jane drove Linda along East River Parkway to the edge of the University of Minnesota campus. When she reached Harvard Street she turned left and pointed at the big building that dominated the area. "That's it."

"That's what?"

"The hospital. The Fairview-University Medical Center."

"It's big. And impersonal."

"Two wonderful qualities that we really want right now."

"I was thinking of maybe a small, private kind of place where everybody knows me and stuff."

"I know this seems as though it ought to be about your preferences, but it isn't. When you're having a baby, you've got to prepare for the possibility that things are not going to go smoothly. If they don't, the place you want to be is a big urban hospital with lots of really good surgeons and pediatricians and specialists and fancy equipment and superbly trained staff. We'll go in and interview Dr. Molinari. If you don't love him, we'll keep looking."

Jane drove up Harvard Street until she came to the parking structure for the hospital. They parked and walked to the main building, then rode the elevator up with a pretty woman about thirty years old who looked about six months pregnant. The woman said to Linda, "When are you due?"

Linda shrugged. "Early fall. Late September, early October."

The woman said, "Are you with Dr. Kwan?"

"Molinari."

Jane stood with a fixed smile on her face. The woman craned her neck to look across her at Linda as though she were some obstacle like a piece of furniture. Even the way the woman held herself when she spoke, leaning close to Linda, made it clear she was speaking only to Linda. The elevator door opened, and Jane led the way down the hall to Dr. Molinari's office.

Inside the waiting room, Jane saw that there were five women in various stages of pregnancy waiting for Dr. Molinari or one of his partners. While Jane waited, she found herself studying them, wondering what made it so easy for them to conceive, when it didn't seem to be possible for her. Had she simply waited too long? That didn't seem to be it. Two of them were about Linda's age, but the other three looked older than Jane. As the nurse came to the doorway and called them, one by one, to go back to the examining rooms with her, Jane watched them and compared her body to theirs. Maybe it was all the exercise she had done for the past twenty years, the running and martial arts. Maybe the stress on her body had stimulated some receptor, released some unnoticed chemical, that told the body not to reproduce. There were all of those teenaged gymnasts who never got their periods. Maybe—

"Linda Welles?"

After they had met with Dr. Molinari, Linda Welles decided he was the one. She officially selected him as her doctor, and made her first set of appointments.

When they got to the car, Linda said, "Now we're done with doctors for today. Can you show me some self-defense moves?"

Jane nodded. "I'll show you something that will work for you." Jane drove them out of the city into the nearly flat, empty land to the north. When they had driven for about an hour, she slowed down, looking for a particular spot. Finally, she turned off the road and guided the car along a barely visible unpaved road consisting of a pair of tire tracks winding through a forest of second-growth trees. She stopped in a place that looked as though it had been used as a turnaround. "This ought to be the right sort of place."

"For what?"

Jane pulled the car around so it was facing out again, then turned off the engine. She picked up her purse, opened it, and took out a small snub-nosed revolver.

Linda gasped, "Oh, my God. A gun?"

Jane swung out the cylinder, showed Linda that it was empty, and closed it again.

"Where did it come from?"

"When we stopped at the house in Amherst, this is one of the things I picked up. When I go, I'll leave it with you. It's a tricky thing to have a gun in the house at the best of times. When you expect to have a curious baby crawling around, it definitely has to be both locked up and well hidden. I have mixed feelings about doing this, but I don't see any other way for you to be safe."

"You don't? I thought you would teach me something from martial arts."

"You're pregnant. Even if you weren't, it takes years of practice to learn enough to do you any good at all. Ninety-nine percent of the time, all the practice does for a woman is to make her think she can stand her ground against some male attacker who takes her apart in a second. This works."

"But I've never even fired a gun. And I heard experts on TV say having one is more dangerous than not having one."

"The only experts whose opinions mean much are cops. Every cop in the country has one strapped to him right this minute."

Christine looked at the gun warily. "What do I do with it?"

"We'll buy you a purse that has a center compartment, and you'll keep it there, where you can reach it instantly, but you can also open the other parts of your purse without showing it."

"But how do I use it?"

"That's why we drove way out here. Come on." Jane got out of the car and set off into the woods. "This used to be a farm once. Now it's part of a huge piece of land that's been put together. The Manitou Paper Company owns all of it. Nobody lives around here anymore."

When they had walked far into the woods, they came to a clearing. It looked like a meadow, but the ground was too soft and swampy to walk on. "Stay here." Jane skirted the meadow, walking among the exposed roots of trees. She picked a tree twenty-five feet from Linda, took a white handkerchief from her purse, and hung it on a pair of thorny twigs. Then she made her way back.

Jane stood beside Linda, and opened the cylinder of the gun. "Notice how I open the cylinder. The barrel is away from us, pointed down at the dirt. I don't have a finger inside the trigger guard."

She took a box of bullets out of her purse. "Here. Hold this. It's .38 caliber ammunition. It's what police used to use in most towns until nine millimeter automatics became popular. This load is a little hotter than I would have chosen for you, but people send things to me with the idea that I'll be the one to use them. If you ever fire at anybody, you'll wish it were more powerful." Jane began to load the gun.

"If I lose it or something, will the police trace it to you?"

"No. This one was part of the inventory of a gun dealer who died. Before his death was reported, his suppliers were all paid in full, and a lot of guns and the records that came with them disappeared mysteriously. If somebody asks you, this one was in a trunk you bought at a garage sale in Oregon."

Jane closed the cylinder, stepped to the side, and aimed the gun with a two-hand stance. "This is probably the easiest for you. Shooting a pistol is like pointing a finger. Holding it with two hands doesn't change that. You point, line up the sights on the target. You don't close one eye. Then you squeeze the trigger so the barrel doesn't get dragged off target. This is a double action, so pulling the trigger cocks and fires." She handed Linda the gun. "Do what I did, but don't pull the trigger."

Linda assumed a stance, and Jane adjusted her limbs to make it right. "Your arms should be out ahead a bit more, and your knees flexed, not locked. If you're aiming that at somebody, he's going to want to be moving, so you may have to move, too. Open your other eye, Linda."

"Sorry."

"You're fighting for your life. You can't afford to lose depth perception or peripheral vision. You're not going to be firing at something a hundred feet away. You'll be fifteen at the outside."

"It feels weird to me."

"It won't if you get used to doing it right. Now, some preparation. It's going to be much louder than you expect. There will be a bit of a kick that will make the gun jump back a little, and the natural tendency is for the barrel to jerk upward. Be ready for it by keeping a good, firm grip on it so you don't drop it. Instead, you want to bring it back down to aim again. Can you remember all that?"

"I think so."

"Then hand me the gun, but keep it aimed downrange." Jane took the gun. Then she handed Linda a set of earplugs. "I picked these up for us at the drugstore. The best would have been to get real ear protectors that look like earphones, but these will do." She put hers into her ears and waited for Linda. "Now I'm going to fire one round, so you can see what I mean."

She aimed and there was a sharp bang, and the handkerchief jumped.

"You were right. That was loud."

"It's worse in an enclosed space. Your turn."

Linda took the gun and assumed the stance. Jane stood beside her and watched to be sure she was doing it right. "Any time you're ready."

Linda fired. The gun jumped up and she winced, then leveled it.

"Again."

She fired once more.

"Again."

This time the handkerchief puffed backward as another hole appeared in the thin white linen. She aimed again.

"How many rounds are left?" Jane asked.

"Two."

"Good. Fire again."

The handkerchief jumped and fluttered downward toward the foot of the tree, but caught on a small branch jutting from the trunk. "There's one left."

"Then fire it."

Linda fired. She was controlling the recoil better, not flinching at the sound, and she appeared to be holding the gun with more comfort and confidence. She lowered the gun and held it out to Jane, the barrel pointed away from them.

"Want some more practice?"

"Yes."

"Then you load it this time."

Jane held the box while Linda opened the cylinder, poured out the brass casings, pushed in another six rounds, and closed it. Jane said, "Hold your fire. I'm going to walk to the tree and put my poor handkerchief up again."

"Okay."

While she went to the tree and returned, Jane watched the way Linda handled the gun. She was careful, she was alert, and she was getting more comfortable. Jane said, "All right. Fire when you're ready."

Linda fired the next six rounds, hitting the handkerchief each time.

Jane said, "You seem to be getting the idea. Do you think you can do that if you have to?"

"I can fire the gun. I don't know about shooting a person."

"That means we're done, I think. I don't have another handkerchief." She scooped up the empty casings at their feet, counted them, and then retrieved the shredded handkerchief. "This wasn't much of an introduction. I just wanted you to be able to load and fire in an emergency. People practice for a lifetime and still keep learning things. What I want you to do when we get back is go through your apartment with the lights on and again with the lights off, figuring out exactly what you would do in an emergency—where you would take a firing position, what you would be able to see from there, what you wouldn't be able to see. Where you would retreat from there. Everything you know and don't have to spend time deciding will help."

As they walked back to the car, Jane suddenly bent down in a clearing, and began picking leaves from a vine with red berries on it that ran along the ground.

"What are you doing?"

"This is partridgeberry. I didn't know it grew this far west. But of course it would."

"But what are you going to do with it?"

"The berries are full of seeds, and they don't taste like much. But you boil the leaves in a little water and make a tea out of it. It's a cure for morning sickness. The old people say it even helps make childbirth easier later on."

"Are you sure it's safe?"

"If you're worried, I'll drink it first. You can watch me for a day and then try it." Jane picked a pound or more of the leaves, then put them in the trunk of the car. "You'll thank me for this."

They drove back to the city. On the way they stopped at a grocery store and replenished the supply of staples and picked up lots of extra food that Linda particularly liked. Jane used a plastic bag from the store to hold the partridgeberry leaves, then loaded the car trunk with groceries. While they were driving back toward the apartment, Linda said, "You're getting ready to leave, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"When everything I can do here is done."

The next morning Linda had her first dose of partridgeberry tea, and her last day of morning sickness. Over the next few days they filled the cupboards with canned and preserved food. They went to bookstores and bought pregnancy and child-care books, magazines and novels. The health insurance card in the name Linda Welles arrived, and they went to the doctor for Linda's next checkup.

One morning, when Linda woke, Jane was sitting in the living room with her suitcase packed. "It's today?"

"I think it's time," Jane said. "You're Linda Welles now. Your identity has held up, and you've been out of sight for a couple of weeks. You're in a safe place with just about everything you'll need, and you've got a car with Minnesota plates. Your neighbors are used to you already. It's up to you now."

"I'm scared to do this without you."

"Don't be. All you have to do is live quietly, take care of yourself, and let the time go by. Do exactly what your doctor says. And don't worry. I'll be back near the end of the summer to help you get everything ready for the baby."

Linda looked relieved. She put her arms around Jane and hugged her, holding on for a few seconds before she let go. She wiped her tears with the back of her hand. "Thank you, Jane. I'll see you then."

Jane went out, and looked carefully at everything she could see, trying to sense anything that might be out of order. She got into the rental car, then drove around the apartment complex once before she went up the long drive to the main street and turned right to find the entrance to the long highway.