Runner

2

Sky Woman was contented, living above the clouds with her husband, whom she loved with a fierce, steady passion. There was no time then, because there was no change, and so she was always the same slender young woman who lived in the firmament. She was the one who witnessed the first change ever to occur, because it happened to her. She wanted to get at the roots of a big tree and prepare them as food for her tall, strong husband. She asked him to push over the tree for her, but when he did, the roots came up and tore a hole at Sky Woman's feet, and she fell.

As she dropped from the sky she felt the wind streaming through her long black hair and heard the fluttering of the fringe on her deerskin skirt. She was falling toward the vast and ageless ocean of dark water far below. She knew that this must be dying, and that she would never again see or touch the husband she loved so much.

It took time for her to fall so far, and the animals, who had acute senses, could see her from below. The birds felt sorry for her, so they flew upward to meet her. They placed their soft, feathery bodies beneath her, and spread their wings to slow her fall into a long, gentle glide to the dark water.

JANE WHITEFIELD FOUGHT the darkness. She struggled to hold in her mind the possibility of waking, and then to make her way toward it. She felt the pain where her body was in contact with the hard, cold terrazzo floor. She opened her eyes to the sight of the overhead lights flickering and then steadying to a sickly yellow glow as the hospital's generators came on. She could hear the voices of confused people, some moaning and others calling to each other. "Marie! Are you all right?" "Lie still." "Mark? Where are you?"

She sat up, then placed one hand on the wall to steady herself. As she gained a sense of where the pains were coming from and how they hurt, she formed a working theory that they were all only bruises and minor sprains. She got her feet under her and stood. She could hear a clanging alarm and another that made an electronic tone, distant sirens, shouting people...

The hallway seemed at first to be full of white smoke. She could see human shapes, some on the floor and some moving half-blind through the haze. Jane sniffed and smelled no burning, only plaster dust. She covered her nose and mouth with the fabric above the hem of her gown and looked toward the door from the hall into the kitchen. The two men were gone. She moved to the cafeteria, dodging a stream of men and women in ruined evening clothes, some of them staggering, a few men carrying injured victims in their arms.

She stopped just inside the cafeteria. For a second she was amazed at the orderly, expert way the party guests were already taking care of the injured, but then she remembered that many of these people in tuxedos or satin dresses were doctors. Where was Carey? She craned her neck to look for him, and then she saw him across the cafeteria. His tall, thin body was so much a part of her world after ten years of marriage that it wasn't exactly the body of another person anymore, and when her eyes found his shape she felt as though she were touching him. He knelt for a second, then stood and lifted a woman in his arms.

Jane saw Carey's eyes find her, and then saw him grin. "You're all right?" She could barely hear him. Something had happened to her ears. They felt as though she were at a high altitude and they wouldn't pop.

"Yes. You, too?"

"Yes." He kept walking, glancing down at the inert woman now and then, and Jane walked with him. He said, "You saw it coming. Do you know what caused the explosion?"

"No, I was trying to get to the kitchen. There were two men guarding the door. I didn't get that far. Did you see it happen?"

He shook his head. "I didn't see the flash or anything, just felt the force of it. I think it was from the back of the cafeteria. We're moving people into emergency, and I'm pretty sure some of them are going to need surgery right away, so I don't know when I'll be out again. You'd better go home."

They had reached the door to the emergency room, and she watched him step through the automatic double doors with the woman he was carrying, and then he was gone.

Jane moved back up the hall to the cafeteria. Not an accidental explosion, then. A bomb. She fought for calm, to make herself think clearly. This was the only chance to try to see the people who had done it, but the two men she had seen before had vanished. As she passed the accordion room divider she noticed it had been blown off its track. Now that she was closer she could see places where it had been pierced and torn by flying metal. Jane ran to the kitchen and reached for the door, but at that moment the door burst open toward her and three waiters shouldered their way out past her. All three had their wrists bound with duct tape and more tape wrapped across their mouths and around the backs of their heads. They ran into the lobby, moving toward the front of the building. She could see that they had cut or partially pulled off the tape around their ankles. The people with the bomb must have tied them up.

Jane moved back into the cafeteria and stepped toward a group of people who had pulled themselves or crawled to the far wall. Monica Kaminski appeared at her side. Now her shiny blond hair was tousled and powdered with a thin layer of plaster dust. Her milky complexion was red and raw as though she had been in the sun and wind, and the seam of her bright yellow dress had separated at the waist, so it looked like a camisole and skirt. "Are you hurt?"

"No," said Monica. "But I'm pissed off. It's got to be the abortion freaks. I guess shooting one doctor at a time is too slow for them."

"Have you seen any police yet?"

"Yes." Monica looked around. "No. I guess they're just the hospital guards. I want to do something. What can we do?"

"Let's try and get some of these people into the emergency wing," said Jane. "See if you can find a wheelchair, and I'll see who looks most urgent."

"There are always wheelchairs in the lobby."

Monica hurried away toward the hospital lobby, weaving through the people in the corridor. Jane stepped toward the people in the cafeteria. She saw an elderly woman lying alone on the floor near one of the tipped-over tables. She reached her and saw the woman was conscious. "I'm here to help," she said. "Is anything broken?"

"No. I just got the wind knocked out of me, I think."

Jane said, "Can you walk?"

The woman nodded. "I think I can." Jane put her hands under the woman's arms and pulled her to her feet, then took her arm on her shoulder and walked with her to the emergency room. Inside all was motion and voices. Doctors and nurses in dusty evening clothes attended patients in cubicles. There were already people on gurneys lining the walls. Jane helped the woman to a chair. "Just sit and rest for now, while I try to get someone to help." She waved at David Meyer, the chief of pediatrics, and he hurried over, nodded to Jane, and focused his intense gaze on the elderly woman. "Hello, ma'am," he said. "Are you having any trouble breathing?"

Jane turned and rushed out. As she reached the hallway, Monica came by pushing a wheelchair with a man in it who sat very still with his eyes closed. Jane hurried back toward the cafeteria, making her way among the gaggle of confused, frightened people in the hall, when suddenly a hand closed on her wrist.

She looked at the person who had stopped her. It was a patient. She appeared to be a teenager, a couple of inches shorter than Jane, with brown hair. She was wearing a white hospital bathrobe, and Jane could see at the neckline the tiny flowers of the awful pattern of the standard-issue gown. Her expression was anguished. Jane said, "Are you in pain?"

The young woman said, "No. I'm okay. Please. Do you know Jane Whitefield? A woman over there said you might. Do you?"

"Yes," said Jane. "I'm Jane. But look, I—" She was already turning toward the injured people in the cafeteria, but the girl held her arm.

"Sharon Curtis told me to come to this hospital, and ask for you."

Jane turned to look at the young woman more closely. There were very few things she could have said that would have kept Jane from shaking her off and going back for more victims. Sharon Curtis was a name that Jane knew well because ten years ago she had invented it. Jane's eyes didn't leave the young woman's face. "Why did Sharon send you here?"

"She sent me to a house in Deganawida. I waited for a whole night, most of it on the back steps, but nobody ever came. She had said to try the hospital as a last resort. She said it had been a long time, and you might have moved. But the hospital might know where you were."

Jane's mind was full of conflicting thoughts, and among them was a memory of the day she had left Sharon. She had said then, "If you need me again, you know where to come. If I'm not there, try the hospital where they sewed up your arm."

Jane said to the girl, "I understand, and we'll talk. But right now we're in the middle of a disaster here. Can you—"

"This was about me."

"About you?" Jane put her arm around the girl and pulled her to the side of the hallway so they were against the wall and out of the way. "Why?"

"I got the doctor to admit me because I'm pregnant and I told her I was having some bleeding. I had to stay off the street, where they could get me. I needed to rest, and I needed time to find you."

"They? Who are they?"

"There are six of them—four men and two women. They handle things for a man I used to work for. I ran away and now they've come for me."

"Why would they set off a bomb in the hospital? What does that have to do with you?"

"They wanted the hospital evacuated so they could drag me out and take me back to San Diego."

Jane was frustrated, impatient. "How do you know it's them?"

"I saw one of them here. He was walking up and down the halls in the upper floors looking for me. He was carrying a little bouquet of flowers he had bought in the gift shop, but he was looking in every door. He saw me, our eyes met, and he turned away. When he was gone I slipped out and hid in the visitors' restroom on the next floor. Then a while later there was the explosion. I looked out, and I could see the nurses and orderlies starting to evacuate patients. I ran so I wouldn't be where the six wanted me to be."

"Come on," said Jane. She guided the girl down the hall away from the emergency wing, avoided the lobby, and turned toward the new neonatal center that had been bought with the proceeds of the past year's fund drive. It was scheduled to open in a month, and all evening Jane and the rest of the committee had been leading donors through, showing them the facilities.

When Jane pushed open the door, she was surprised to see that the place had already changed. It was all bright lights and motion. There were hospital staff here, and there were people in bloody evening clothes on gurneys being moved into the rooms. Jane saw that one of the linen closets was open, so she stepped in and took two packaged sets of light green hospital scrubs, then pulled the young woman out through the doors with her.

She stayed close to the young woman, and spoke under her breath as they walked. "Did you leave anything upstairs that you need?"

"No," she said. "I've got my wallet in my robe pocket."

"Good. We're going to have to leave the hospital while these people are watching for you, so we've got to move fast and change what we can." She hurried up the back hallway past the outpatient cancer-treatment rooms and into a bathroom. Jane took off her evening dress, draped it over the top of a stall, and put on a set of green scrubs.

The young woman said, "That's a beautiful dress."

Jane shrugged. "Glad you like it. You're going to wear it."

"I'm pregnant. I'll never fit in that."

"That's the idea. If they see you from a distance in an evening gown they'll look past you. Slip it over your head. We won't try to zip it. Leave the hospital socks on."

The young woman took off her bathrobe and Jane hurried out. A few minutes later, after the girl had the dress on, holding it up with her hands, Jane returned with a wheelchair. She set the second set of scrubs on the seat and said, "Get in the chair."

The young woman obeyed, and Jane arranged the dress so it looked as though the young woman fit into it. Jane pushed the wheelchair toward the big double doors at the end of the hall beyond the outpatient center. As she walked, she talked quietly to the young woman. "You're somebody who was at the benefit, and you've been treated, and now you're going home. You'll recognize the people who are after you, right?"

"Yes."

"I don't know what they look like, so if you see one of them tell me. You don't have to make a lot of noise or anything, but be sure I know."

"Okay."

The automatic doors gave a quiet huff and swung open and Jane pushed the wheelchair into the night air. There were more sirens that she had not heard before. She pushed the chair out into the service road that ran along the side of the hospital, and turned toward the parking lots. As she came within sight of the back of the building she saw that at least a dozen police cars had arrived. She moved into the lot, hoping the presence of cops would protect them, but realized that the cars were all empty. They had simply been left at haphazard angles, and the officers had run inside. There were big knots of people in the lot now, many of them evacuated patients and hospital staff, some of them curious onlookers and others victims who had rushed out of the building. She was pleased that there was plenty of activity to distract the watchers, if they were out here.

She saw that the row of doctors' parking spaces near the building was full. It had been half-empty when she had arrived here this morning with the rest of the committee to prepare for the benefit. She couldn't help noticing Carey's black BMW in its reserved space. She pushed the wheelchair across the lot toward her own white Volvo sedan, looking ahead but watching for movement in her peripheral vision.

She arrived at the car, stepped into the space to the right of it to open the door and let the young woman get in. Then she tossed the package of scrubs onto the woman's lap and closed the door. She heard something behind her—the scrape of a shoe on the pavement—and she half-turned as a man's hand pushed her hard toward the car beside her.

Jane pivoted with the push and set her back against the car. She saw that he wore a dark suit, and recognized him as one of the men she'd seen standing outside the hospital kitchen. He looked surprised that his push had not sent Jane far out of his way, and he seemed to sense, dimly, that this tall, dark-haired woman in the green scrubs wasn't doing what he had expected. He reached into his coat.

Jane's stomp-kick to the side of the man's leg at knee level replaced his suspicion with intense pain as his knee popped and he fell to the pavement clawing and grabbing at his ruined kneecap with his free hand. He struggled to free a gun from his coat and bring it around to aim it at Jane, but that idea had occurred to him too late. Her foot hit the side of his head and battered it against the door of her car, and her next kick propelled the gun out of his hand.

She knelt and looked at the pavement to see where the gun had gone, but she saw something else. There was a second man in a suit sprinting toward her from the direction of the emergency wing, passing the slow-moving people leaving the hospital. She rose and looked over the hood of the next car and saw that there was a third man running into the parking lot off to her right. As he skirted the knot of patients and nurses who had been evacuated, a few stepped aside and stared at him, but none of them seemed to interpret what he was doing. Jane whirled to see that there was a fourth standing on the other end of the lot. It was as though they were moving into firing positions.

Jane ran to the driver's side of her car, got in, and started the engine. She backed up quickly, saw the injured attacker trying to drag his tortured body toward a spot where he must have seen his gun. Jane swung the car around quickly and drove toward the end of the aisle.

She could see that one of the men was moving to the end of her aisle to wait for her. As she drove, he reached into the inside of his coat, as though he had his hand on a gun. Jane sped toward him, reached a spot where there were several empty parking spaces, swung abruptly through them to the next aisle, and cut away from the man.

In a moment she was out the exit and on the street. Jane made two rapid turns and then a third to take her along quiet residential streets to the entrance to the Youngmann Expressway. Then she was on the big highway, moving along at sixty-five, far from the hospital. She said, "Do you still have the scrubs?"

"Right here."

"Then take off the dress and put them on."

"Okay." The woman tore open the plastic package, pulled the dress off over her head, and quickly pulled on the scrub shirt, and then eased into the bottoms. She folded the dress and held it on her lap.

Jane's eyes flicked from one mirror to the other, then returned to the road. "Okay. I'm persuaded that you're not imagining that they're after you. Is this about your child?"

"It has to be. I didn't think anybody even knew I was pregnant when I left, but they must have found out."

"Who sent these people?"

"His name is Richard Beale."

"What does he do?"

"He runs a company—business rentals, some residential, some real estate sales, some loans. I was his personal assistant. I quit, and he didn't want me to."

"Why does he know the kind of people who would set off a bomb in a hospital to help them kidnap somebody?"

"Because he's that kind of person, too. I didn't know it when I met him. Now I do."

Jane exited the expressway and drove up a side street. "They must have had a car at the hospital. Have you seen it?"

"I only saw the man in the hallway, and then the other three outside. I never saw a car."

"I didn't either. If I planned to set off a bomb, I wouldn't park in the hospital lot. I'd park on a dark street a block away. Let's hope they couldn't get to it in time to follow us." Jane drove past the lighted front of a small grocery store that took up half of a strip mall. She made a U-turn, stopped behind the building, and said, "Sit tight. I'll just be a second."

She stepped to the pay phone on the wall and dialed 911. In a few seconds she heard the connection being made. She squinted at the tiny face of the white gold watch with the diamonds to time the call. "Hello," she said.

"Emergency. What's the nature of your emergency?"

"I was at the hospital a few minutes ago when the bomb went off. I saw the people who did it. There are four men and two women. The men were wearing dark suits to fit in with the benefit crowd. One of the men got hurt in the parking lot and seems to have a broken knee."

"Who are these four people? Do you know them?"

"Six people. Four men, two women."

"Tell me your name."

"Sorry. I have to go."

"Where are you now?"

Jane hung up, stepped to her car, and drove off. She could see that the girl was studying her.

"Just a quick phone call. I had to tell the police the little we knew."

"You shouldn't have done that."

"Why not?"

"Because I can't stay in Buffalo waiting for a trial, and I can't prove anybody did anything. The only person who would be stuck here is me, getting bigger and more pregnant every minute. If Richard knows where I am, he can hire sixty people instead of six."

"This isn't about trials. I'm hoping the cops will see them and pull them over. That creates a record of their names, and it might get them searched for weapons and even tested for explosives. It's hard to plant a bomb without having a residue of certain chemicals on your hands. The main thing it would do is delay them for a day. Nobody knows your name or my name, and the call was too short to trace. Now we're on our way."

"Where are we going?"

"To the place where Sharon sent you—my house."

The car swung north, away from the center of the city along the elevated, curving strip of the Scajaquada Expressway. Jane could always feel Nundawaono place-names in the muscles of her mouth—along the tongue and palate, and behind her teeth: Canandaigua, Conestoga, Schenectady. She reached the stretch of Interstate 190 that ran along the broad, night-black Niagara River—Nee-ah-gah, really, meaning the Neck. It was the long, straight conduit where all of the water of the Great Lakes narrowed to flow from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario and go eastward to the ocean. Jane kept going along the river past the town of Tonawanda—swift water, in English—and then coasted off the 190 at the Grand Island bridge and drove along River Road into Deganawida, the town where she was born. It was named after the wandering solitary prophet—what else could he be called?—who founded the Iroquois league.

When Jane drove the road on the bluff above the river it was more a physical act than mental—reflexes and long habit took the place of thought, and seeing took little attention because her mind was already so deeply imprinted with images of every house and tree and curve that it noticed only the changes. She turned off onto Two-Mile Creek Road, the first street, running between the dark groves of Veterans' Park, and then turned left onto the end of Fletcher, always watching her mirrors to see if anyone followed.

She went as far as Wheeler Street and turned, then continued for a mile or more away from the river, across the railroad tracks behind the long-closed fiberboard factory, and then made three left turns to come back the whole mile to be sure that there was no chance that she had been followed. Finally she turned again and went along the street past her own house, one of a dozen narrow two-story houses built eighty years ago on this block by men who worked in the factories and lumber mills that once existed in Deganawida.

She looked at the tall sycamore in the front yard beyond the privet hedge. Soon the days would be longer, and the sycamore's leaves would spend the summer growing as wide as two hands. She went around the final block and returned to the house, steered up the driveway, and pulled the car into the garage. Both women got out, and Jane closed the garage door so the car wouldn't be visible from the street. Then she went to open the back door of the house. She looked down at the back steps, then bent lower to see more clearly.

"Stay back," she whispered. "Let me check it out first to see if anyone's been here besides you. Be ready to run."

She opened the door and stepped into the dark interior space, smelling the stale air that had been trapped since she'd closed the door three days ago. She picked up the other smells. There was the lemony smell of the wax she'd used on the wooden floors and the chlorine cleanser in the sinks and the ammonia from the window cleaner. But it was a very old house, and she could even pick up the faint scent of the wax that her mother and her grandmother had rubbed into the floorboards and the woodwork for decades, the old paint her grandfather had brushed on for the first time eighty years ago. Maybe there was still, lurking somewhere beneath the paint, the particular scents of her family—her grandmother's corn soup, or the French pastries her mother had learned to make when she was a girl in New York.

As she moved through the house, her senses took in everything. She could feel that the air was as it should be, that the doors and windows had been shut for a long time, but she had to be sure that the house had been that way for the three days since she had been here. She examined all the locks and latches and scanned the panes of glass. Before she walked on the living room carpet she knelt at the edge to see if shoes had left an impression on it. She climbed the stairs to the second floor and looked in each of the bedrooms and bathrooms, but detected no evidence that anyone had been inside.

She stopped in her old bedroom and picked up the telephone to dial the message number. It said, "You have eight new messages." She heard the voice of Sharon Curtis. "This is Sharon, from a long time ago. I'm calling from a pay phone. I'm still well, still safe. I'm sending a girl to you. I hope you can give her the kind of help that you once gave me." The rest of the messages were all the voice of the young girl downstairs. The first began "You don't know me, but—" and the last said, "I'm going to try the place Sharon said to look for you. If you get this message, please call me. Once again, my number is—"

She went back downstairs and held the door while the young woman stepped into the kitchen, then closed and locked the dead bolt before she turned on the light. "It's safe for the moment. Nobody's been in here."

The young woman said, "It's nice here. Cozy. Do you live alone?"

"This is the house where I grew up. My grandfather built it. I don't live here anymore." She pulled out a chair from the kitchen table. "Have a seat. I won't be long."

Jane went upstairs again and dialed Carey's cell phone. She waited through the message: "You have reached Dr. McKinnon. If this is a medical emergency, please call the following number: 5559852. If you would like to leave a message, you may begin at the tone." Jane heard the tone, and said, "Carey, I'm afraid I have to leave tonight without seeing you. The bomb was planted by a crew of professionals. There are six of them—four men and two women—who have been trying to kidnap a pregnant girl who had checked in for observation yesterday. I'm with her now. One of the men got a dislocated knee tonight, so if you have a way to check with other hospitals, you might find something out and tell the police." She paused. "I love you, and I'm sorry." Jane went down the hall and descended the creaking stairs.

When she reached the first floor Jane stopped for a second to look through the lighted doorway at the girl sitting in the kitchen. She looked exhausted, as if only the fear was keeping her from collapsing. Her light green eyes looked faded, almost gray, and her face was pale. Jane moved on. She opened the door to the cellar staircase and descended into the cool underground. The old walls were made of big stones held together with mortar, but she'd had them reinforced with rebar and concrete a few years ago.

Jane opened the stepladder and climbed it to reach the hiding place in the rafters, the old heating duct from the coal furnace that her father had removed when she was a child. She reached in, pulled out the steel box she kept there, balanced it on the top step of the ladder, and rifled through the items she had hidden there. She set aside a large stack of hundred-dollar bills, and selected four different driver's licenses with her picture on them and sets of credit cards in the same names. She took one quick look at the special sets she kept in leather folders, then returned them to their corner of the box. These were the identities she hoped never to use. One set she kept in case something went wrong. It was for a married couple and had pictures of her and of Carey. The other set was placed there in case everything went wrong. It held papers for each of them with different surnames.

She put the money and her four false-identity packets into her purse, then hid the box, put away the ladder, climbed back upstairs, and entered the kitchen. She could hear nothing but the ticking of the clock on the wall as the girl turned to stare at her. "What do we do now?"

"First we get ourselves something to wear from the closets upstairs. We can't go any place in scrubs. I don't keep that many clothes here anymore, but I have a couple of pairs of black drawstring yoga pants that are mid-calf length, and I think they'll fit you, and lots of running shoes. If they're too big we'll use thick socks to make them fit. And we'll take a couple of hooded jackets and sweaters. Come on."

They climbed to the second floor and went into one of the bedrooms, where Jane began pulling things from the closet and the dresser drawers. "See if any of these looks as though it might fit you." While the girl picked up some of the clothes, Jane said, "You know, you haven't told me your name."

"Christine Monahan."

"Where did you come from?"

Christine looked surprised at the question. "San Diego. That's how I know Sharon."

"This man—the father of your child—do you think that what he wants is to kill you?"

"Richard Beale. I think he wants to hurt me. I don't know how bad."

"Why does he?"

"I think because I left him. He doesn't like it if somebody doesn't do what he wants. He likes to control everybody around him."

Jane was silent for a few seconds while the two changed their clothes. Christine was holding things back, but she didn't seem to be lying about her predicament. Jane could wait to hear the rest until they were away from here and in motion, but there was something else she had to get out of the way now. "There are some things that you should know before we go any further. This isn't as simple as it was ten years ago when Sharon came to me. It's not as safe. I made a lot of people disappear before I met her, and a lot after her. For every runner there are chasers, and some of them have seen my face. There are people looking for me—people who would do anything to get me in a small room someplace where they can ask me questions. It's possible that the most dangerous thing you've ever done is come here to see me." She paused. "That's one of the reasons why I stopped doing this."

"You're ... retired?"

"It was never a job, never a business. I simply stopped doing it about five years ago. The last person I took out of the world was me."

Christine said, "Are you saying that you're not going to be able to help me?"

"No. I just need you to know what comes with my help. It isn't all good."

"If I hadn't found you, they would have caught me tonight. I wouldn't be here at all." Her eyes were beginning to fill with tears, but she wiped them away. "I appreciate the warning, but it doesn't change anything. If you're still willing to help me, then I want you to. I'll try to be as easy as I can."

"Don't worry," said Jane. "I'm willing."

"Thank you," she said. She looked at her reflection in the mirror in her borrowed clothes, shrugged, and turned to Jane. "Then what's next?"

"Now we run."