Shadow Woman

12

Linda Thompson sat at the edge of her chair in the dark and watched the front door of Pete Hatcher’s apartment building. She liked looking through the night-vision binoculars, liked the way everything showed up green and glowing. She even liked the fact that Earl had spent nearly nine hundred dollars on them. His aching need for the best toys and gadgets gave her a lever to keep him a little bit off balance. Any time he felt the urge to say something about what she spent, she had been able to point to a gizmo that cost twice as much. She was careful not to let Earl notice how much she liked looking through the binoculars. They made her feel as though she had the senses of some sleek, beautiful animal lying in wait in the jungle, its eyes bright and yellow, able to see its dim-sighted, clumsy, hoofed enemy stumbling through the underbrush toward her.

Tonight she could feel her heart beating in her chest, the blood carrying more oxygen to her fingers and toes than it had since they had arrived in Denver. The air was clear and thin here, and she had hated that until her body had adjusted to the altitude.

Linda was feeding on Pete Hatcher’s fear and indecision. Five nights ago she had seen him walk down the street at about nine, and come back at nine thirty carrying a single big grocery bag back to his apartment. He had done the same thing three nights ago. Tonight, she knew he was thinking it was time to go get some more food. She was sure he wanted to get into his car and drive somewhere—to a giant supermarket in some other part of town, or to a good restaurant. He had not done it because he was afraid. He was afraid to go where there were bright lights and a lot of people, even though his craving for them was almost physical. Those moments in crowded public places must be precious to him because they felt like safety, but he seemed to know they were not good for him. People would see his face. His car represented the same kind of problem. He had probably bought it because it kept him from feeling helpless and trapped, but he sensed that he needed to keep away from it.

She saw him at the window of his apartment. He stood to the side in the darkened room and looked out, first at the little park, then up and down the street. She raised the magnification and studied his face. He was getting ready, and he was anxious. She saw him move away from the window. “I think he’s coming down,” she said.

She listened to Earl’s voice behind her ear, but kept the binoculars trained on the front entrance of the apartment building. “Everything’s ready,” he said. “Don’t worry.” He was talking to her like one of his dogs, low and soft. She liked it. “Just keep him in sight. That’s all you need to do.”

She saw Hatcher stop inside the lighted entry and pretend to check his pants for his wallet and keys, just buying time while he studied the street outside for signs of danger. He would do one last thing, and she waited for it, holding her breath. He reached behind him and put his hand under his coat to tuck in his shirt. She had known he would tell her. He was carrying the gun, the cute Ruger SP 101 he had bought a week ago. He had bought it because he was afraid, and now that he had it, he was afraid of the gun. “He’s got the gun in his belt in the small of his back, under his coat.”

“Fine,” said Earl.

“He’s out. He’s walking straight down the street toward the store.”

“Time to go,” said Earl.

Linda handed him the binoculars. While he was putting them in their case, he checked his watch. “It’s nine twelve. Give him until nine twenty-two to get there and get busy shopping. Be there at nine twenty-seven.”

“Right,” she said, and went out the door without letting herself look at his eyes. Let him wonder.

As she drove along the dark street, she teased herself gently. It would have been much easier to sit comfortably in the darkness of the hotel room and watch through the night-vision binoculars while Earl popped him with the fancy British sniper rifle through the window. The silencer on that thing would have made the whole episode sound like a bird bumped against the glass and broke its neck. But Earl could never feel satisfied unless he made Linda get a taste of it too.

Earl couldn’t just crudely cut him down with a rifle. Linda had to fool him first, make him into an accessory to his own death. He wasn’t going to be a leaking corpse lying on a kitchen floor. He was going to be one of those guys who walked off toward the grocery store and simply never came back. If the police got called in a week or two, they wouldn’t know whether to look for a corpse or a rent jumper.

David Keller walked out of the small grocery store trying to evaluate the odds. If he continued to walk to Danny’s to buy his food, he could just go on buying a little bit at a time and paying cash. If he went to a big supermarket and bought everything he would need for a couple of weeks, he would decrease the frequency of his trips. That would decrease his vulnerability. But he would have to take the car, and he would be seen by more people, and flash more cash, and that would increase his vulnerability.

He hurried to cross the little blacktop parking lot in front of the store where he was lit up by neon beer logos in the window and the yellow sodium light over the tall Danny’s Market sign. He moved quickly onto the sidewalk, where he could stay out of the light. Jane had not had time to explain everything to him, but she had told him he would do well enough if he just maintained the right attitude. He reached behind him to feel whether the revolver was riding up under his coat.

As he touched the lump he felt a small twinge of anxiety. She had implied that a gun was not a good idea. She had said, “You’re out of Las Vegas, trying to live a new life in, say, Chicago. You see the same car outside your apartment for three nights in a row. On the fourth night, at midnight, you see the car pull up again. Two men get out. After a minute you hear a knock at your door. What do you do?”

“Do I have a gun?”

“Yes.”

“I get it ready, hold it where they can’t see it, and open the door to see who they are.”

“Right hand or left?”

“Right.”

“They’re your new neighbors, young single guys who go out every night, a lot of fun. They noticed you watching them through the window, so they knew you were up and decided to ask you over for a drink. One of them holds out his right hand to shake. Or they’re cops. The good guys. They’re watching the neighborhood because somebody has been selling drugs. They came up to see who you are: maybe you’re a witness, but maybe the reason they haven’t caught the dealer is that there’s a lookout, and it’s you. At that hour they’re going to ask if they can come in to talk to you. Or maybe you were right, and they’re professional killers, come to get you. You have the gun in your right hand. You open the door with your left, so you’re ready. They know who you are, but you don’t know them. They won’t hesitate. You will.”

“What was the right answer?”

“What would you do if you didn’t have a gun?”

He had shrugged. “I guess I’d figure out who they were without answering the door. You said it was after midnight.”

“Good,” she said. “Now you know the main thing about guns.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“They make you act differently. And they’re no good unless you’re positive. You have to be so sure that you’re willing to kill the two men at the door right away—not look closer, or ask them anything, just pull the trigger.”

“If they come to my door, intending to kill me, shouldn’t I do that?”

“That’s up to you. What would you do after you killed them? There’s been a lot of noise, and now there are two bodies bleeding in your doorway. Five quarts of blood each.”

“Run, I suppose. Get away. I couldn’t very well hang around to talk to the police.”

“Good. What if you didn’t kill them, just ran instead? Do you get anything from killing them first?”

“More time?”

“It’s after midnight in an apartment building. You’ve fired at least two shots into a hallway. Your neighbors are up dialing 911. The response time on ‘shots fired’ calls in a big city averages around three minutes, and they usually redirect the helicopters at the same time.”

He had said, “I give up. Forget the gun.” Maybe he had known even as he said it that he had been lying. Now, while he walked down the dark, quiet street lined with big, dark houses that had been segmented into apartments, he felt a little better because of the gun.

He turned the corner and walked down the darker side street, carrying his grocery bag in his left arm. He saw the woman long before she saw him. She had the hood of her car open, and she was standing in front of it, leaning over and staring down into the engine with a little keychain flashlight.

Keller walked along the sidewalk until he was within twenty feet of the car. She reached out tentatively and touched something. It must have been hot, because she instantly drew back her hand, gave a little “Oooh!” and sucked her fingertips.

He could see her face in the dim glow of the little flashlight, and it looked so perfect that the air in front of him solidified and cut his speed by half. She had long, shiny blond hair that was pulled tight along the sides of her head and held back in an intricate braid, and skin that glowed. As she drew her fingers out of her mouth he saw long pointed nails that showed she had not spent much time staring into the engines of cars. She wore tight blue jeans and a jacket of some fabric that looked like canvas but couldn’t have been, and the engine she was staring into belonged to a pearl-cream Lexus LS 400 that cost about sixty thousand dollars. She walked around to the trunk and opened it as Keller came abreast of the car. When the light came on and he could see her eyes welling with tears, he stopped.

Whatever anyone thought of women like her, none of them were in the business of ratting on fugitives. As it happened, David Keller liked women like her very much. He missed them. Instead of approaching and spooking her, he called to her from the sidewalk.

“I see you’ve got trouble. Can I call the auto club for you or something?”

She swung her head around, startled. She didn’t seem to have remembered that she wasn’t marooned alone on the surface of the moon. She studied him for a second, seemed to be noting that he had clean pants and a respectable sport coat on. But the fact that he was carrying a grocery bag seemed to make the difference. Jane had been on the money once again. If people could see that you were out on your own business, it was better than a pile of testimonials.

She smiled, and he could see the lush, ripe lips part to show perfect white teeth. She shrugged and held her shoulders in an embarrassed cringe. “My membership lapsed. I called them, and they ran me on the computer, and then I noticed my card was expired.”

“I’m sorry,” said Keller. He stepped a little closer to her car—not to her, but to the open hood. He would let her do the approaching. “I used to have one of these. They’re usually pretty dependable …” The sentence died in his throat. He could not believe he had let that slip out. It wasn’t like looking at a ten-year-old car and saying, “I used to have one.” This one was new.

But he could see that the effect he had wanted to convey was the only one that she had caught. She was coming around the car to join him. She had snatched a clean red towel from the trunk, and she was wiping her hands with it. He said, “At this time of night, I’m afraid all the mechanics might be home teaching their sons to overcharge.” He stared at the engine, pretending he knew what he was looking for. “How is it acting? Does it turn over?” He set his bag in front of the bumper.

She was right beside him now. He could smell the scent of her hair. Things must be going much better than he had imagined. She was much closer to him than was normal. They were almost touching. She leaned over the engine and pointed to a box bolted to the firewall that had colored wires plugged into it. “When I opened it, I could smell something burning over here.”

He leaned in too, trying to see if the insulation on one of the wires was melted. He felt a light touch on the small of his back, and the hard, heavy weight of his pistol was gone.

Almost instantly, his head was pushed to the side. The pain was horrible, and it was coming from a heavy metal object pressed to his temple. He could feel the red cotton towel covering it, but he had no time to think.

She was speaking low, almost in a whisper. “Police officer. Come around to the back of the car.” He hesitated, but she tugged his coat hard, and he tried to straighten so fast that he banged his head on the hood. When he reached the back he noticed that the light in the trunk had gone out.

“Get in,” she ordered.

“Look,” he said. “I can explain the gun. I was just trying to help you.”

“You have the right to remain silent.” She lifted the rag off her hand and he could see the gun now. It was big and square and ugly, with a muzzle that looked cavernous. “Get in the trunk, please. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

Keller was dazed. His mouth was dry and he couldn’t swallow. He was getting arrested by a Denver cop, a woman decoy. On an illegal weapons charge. They would find out who he was. There had to be a way out of this.

“You have a right to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, the court will appoint one for you. Have you heard and understood these rights?” Her thumb with the beautifully polished, tapered nail came up and cocked the hammer.

David Keller climbed into the trunk. Why did she have to put him in the trunk? Didn’t they have a second car with regular cops who hauled you away when they caught you? Of course. She wasn’t a decoy at all. She was off duty. She had just seen the gun at his back, plucked it away, and stuck hers in his face. The trunk slammed down on him and the world went black.

Linda stood behind the trunk of the car, squeezed her eyes closed, and smiled, smelling the thin, delicious night air. She had found the mark, taken his gun away from him, and locked him up, all by herself.

Part of the pleasure of it was that she was not alone. She had done it from start to finish with Earl watching her. He had seen her pretending to burn herself and sucking her fingers and crying just a little bit, just enough to seem soft and feminine and vulnerable. And he had seen her stand on her tiptoes to bend over the engine in these tight jeans, just arching her back a tiny bit, enough to make the mark ashamed of himself for thinking that way, and enough to give Earl something to think about too. For Earl, part of the experience was that it made him want to hurt the guy, to break bones and teeth for Linda.

Linda didn’t really think much about the mark once she had him. He was necessary, but he wasn’t really a player in the event. She was just using him to act out for Earl’s eyes how desirable she was. The mark was a mirror for both of them. He let Linda see how beautiful she was through his eyes, because she never could quite look at herself the way men did, and so watching them look was the only way. And Earl could look at the way she affected this mark, and it made Earl feel more that way about her—as though he were seeing her for the first time too, and because he was feeling desire, he knew exactly what the other man was feeling, and that made him wild. The night was filled with invisible sparks of energy shooting back and forth around her. It was magic.

This was the part of their lives that she craved. She loved it when they were out in the night hunting together, thinking hard together about the mark and his habits and what he would do, and deciding what they would do to bag him like this. And now the hunt was right at its climax, with Earl out there in the dark concentrating all of his attention on her. In a minute he would emerge from the shadows to obliterate the mark and reclaim her. They would drive him up into the mountains and bury the body before dawn. She felt as though somebody had taken one of those electric-shock machines they had in hospitals and pressed the paddles to her chest to jump-start her heart.

She saw Earl appear from the alley behind the little market, walking along briskly. He was primed. She stepped to the front of the car and slammed the hood. That let her see the police car.

Then it was pulling up beside the Lexus. The cop was young, and she could see his lips were straight across his face with no smile, but she knew it was waiting to come, because the eyebrows had that wanting-to-be-concerned look that cops sometimes got. He stopped the car, got out, and left the door open so he could hear his radio. He didn’t do the things they did when they were suspicious—put their nightsticks in their belts, say something into the radio. She could hear the nasal voice of a female dispatcher squawking out meaningless words and numbers, but he didn’t answer. Instead, he stepped closer to Linda and said, “Having car trouble?”

“No,” said Linda. When she smiled she could feel that she had actually induced a blush. Her cheeks were hot. “I thought I heard something in the engine, but it was just my imagination. Everything is fine.”

He glanced at the car, then back at Linda. “Why don’t you start it up, and I’ll listen?”

Linda sensed that it was a devious way of being sure the car wasn’t stolen without coming out and asking for her license and registration. She was glad he was so young and handsome, because the sight of him right after Hatcher would be sending hot flashes of jealousy up Earl’s spine mixed with the alarm and the wonder at how desirable the bait really was. She smiled as prettily as she could for both of them and said, “Well, if you wouldn’t mind …,” then obediently opened the driver’s door and sat behind the wheel.

The shot was so loud that her legs kicked out and pushed her back against the seat. Blood and brain from the cop had spattered the windshield. She scrambled out of the car as though it were on fire.

Earl’s strong hand clamped her arm. She danced at the end of his arm, tugging to get moving, but he tightened his grip. “He’s still alive, right?”

At first she thought he meant the cop. “How could—” she began, then remembered. Hatcher was still in the trunk. She held her panic in check as she hurried to the trunk, unlocked it, and lifted the lid three inches. She stuck her big Colt into the dark space, then pulled the trigger four times before Earl grabbed her and slammed the trunk.

In the sudden silence she could hear the sirens too. More police were coming. Earl dragged her toward the alley, his grip so tight that she could feel the blood beginning to collect below it, so her fingers throbbed. His voice was a raspy whisper. “Don’t ever fire blind into the trunk of a car when your ass is that close to it again, you dumb bitch. The gas tank is right under it.”

She had forgotten about the gas tank. Imagining the bright orange explosion she had flirted with gave her a giddy feeling of luck, but even better, she detected that the strain in Earl’s voice was genuine concern. He had just dusted a cop to reclaim her, and he really didn’t want to lose her. She let him pull her along the alley, then lead her up the dark space beside the market and over to the next street. In another minute and a half they were on the pedestrian mall along Sixteenth Street, far from the sirens and far from the cops cruising around looking for a getaway car.

When he saw her turn her head to look at the display window of a boutique, Earl gave a sullen nod and followed her inside. Linda bought a silk summer dress that made her feel light and pretty, a little bit like a butterfly.

Pete Hatcher was crouching on his knees, shaking. He could tell that he must have lost some of his sight and hearing. He had seen the trunk begin to open. He had just found the safety latch inside the lid by touch and gotten the courage to release it when he had heard the keys in the lock and seen the crack of light appear.

He had been terrified that the cops would see his hand near the lock, so he had reflexively recoiled, scuttled back into the corner of the trunk behind the loose spare tire and curled up. He had seen the pistol appear in the opening, but he had never expected the gun to go off. The blast, the flash, and the shower of sparks made him bring his knees to his chest, clap his hands over his ears, and close his eyes.

She had fired again and again at the spot where he had first lay down when she locked him in—first where his head had been, then his belly, then halfway back up, to his chest, then his head again.

He heard nothing now, but his ears were still ringing, so he wasn’t sure that there were no sounds. The woman had every right to think he was dead, so now she would drive the car somewhere. He waited for the sound of the engine, but it didn’t come. He tried to figure out what he should do, but first he had to know why she had shot at him. No, that was wrong. Somebody was going to open the trunk again soon, expecting him to be dead. When they discovered that he wasn’t, they would certainly correct the oversight. He could die that way, or he could try to run.

He pulled the safety latch behind the lock and cautiously pushed the trunk open a crack. He heard the sound of a police radio, then saw the police car. He closed his eyes and felt sweet relief. She couldn’t kill him if the other cops had already arrived. That was probably why she had done such a hasty job of it—to finish it before they got here. He popped the lid up, then swung his leg over the rear bumper, misjudged the height of the trunk, and toppled over onto the street. He began to sit up, then lay back down again and stared along the underside of the car.

He could see the body of a policeman lying on the street at the front, almost under the radiator. There was a big hole in his forehead as though the skull had been punched outward, and blood draining down over his left eye into a pool. Hatcher’s brain tried to take all that it knew and make sense of it. Did she imagine Hatcher had killed the policeman earlier, and then think she was executing him for it? What was he thinking? It was impossible. She had killed the policeman. She was no cop.

His breathing stopped. He had no idea how long he had been hearing the sirens. He was alone with the body of a murdered policeman. He had just bought two guns, and this woman had probably used one of them on a policeman. It might be lying around here someplace, and if it wasn’t, the police certainly had a way to know he had owned two and had only one left.

Hatcher stood and backed away from the car, his head swiveling around, first to see if the madwoman was still nearby waiting to fire, then to see if any of the people in the houses had come out, then just to see where he was going. He walked to the front of the car and picked up his grocery bag. He turned, and then his feet were pounding on the sidewalk, carrying him away, the momentum building and building, his mouth open in a grimace so the air hissed in and out through his clenched teeth.

His mind burned through the mass of impressions into a bare, heightened clarity as he ran. There was no moment of indecision, no wavering among choices, because he had no choices. He knew the police would come toward this spot from three directions at once, because there were only three ways for a car to come. They would flood each end of the block and come up the alley. He took the fourth way, entering the lobby of an apartment building that looked a lot like his own, walking through it, down the first-floor hallway and out the back door, then beside the next one and across the street, where he entered the lobby of the next one, so he emerged on his own street a block from his apartment.

He walked into his entryway and climbed the stairs for the last time. He knew that the madwoman almost certainly believed he was dead. Even if she had any doubts and knew where he lived, she would have had a difficult time getting here before he had. He opened the apartment door, slipped inside, and locked it behind him.

He had no difficulty working out the order of tasks. He made the telephone call first. She wasn’t home, but he left a message. Then he collected the cash from its hiding places in the apartment, packed his clothes quickly, and wiped his fingerprints off all the surfaces he usually touched. He took all of the food jars and bottles out of the refrigerator, put them into the sink, and ran water over them until he was sure they carried no fingerprints, then put them all into a big plastic trash bag with his groceries.

He went out, locked the door, wiped the doorknob, walked quietly down the hall, and carried his suitcase and his trash down the back staircase. He put his trash in the Dumpster. Then he walked around the corner to where his car was parked, set his suitcase in the trunk, and began to drive.

Earl and Linda sat in a cowboy bar in Golden, a half hour into the mountains west of Denver, and watched the eleven o’clock news on the television set on the wall above them. The newswoman was reporting “the senseless, execution-style killing of a young police officer.”

Earl knitted his eyebrows. “Now, that’s typical, isn’t it? They haven’t found out why it happened, so they say it was senseless. They read the words on the prompter, but they don’t seem to know what they’re saying.”

Linda could see the newswoman standing about twenty yards away from the Lexus, and behind her the police crew was dusting it for prints. The car trunk was open. “The police are urging anyone who has information about the incident to contact them. They have no solid leads as to why anyone would have shot the officer. One theory I’ve heard is that even though the new Lexus sedan had not yet been reported missing, the officer might have seen something suspicious and pulled it over.”

Linda held her breath, waiting for Earl to notice what had not been said. Finally she knew that he already had. He swallowed the last of the beer in his glass, set it on the table, and said, “Well, we’d better go see if we can figure out where he’s gotten to now.”

“I’m sorry, Earl,” she said. She wanted to waste some time in the bar, where there were people, before she blithely stepped into the dark with Earl. He was perfectly capable of hiding his anger until they were somewhere along a deserted road. “I’m really sorry. I don’t know how I could have—”

“I did it,” he said. “I stopped you before you could do him right.” He added, “1 keep thinking, ‘So she might have put a round into the gas tank. If we’d been back a few yards it wouldn’t have been so bad.’ ” He pulled her up by the arm. “Better than this, anyway. This is a joke.”

When they reached the neighborhood where Hatcher had been living as David Keller, they drove past the place where he had parked the used Saturn that evening. For an instant Linda felt the thrill of surprise and anticipation: the space was not empty. But when Earl drove closer she could see that the car in the space was a Thunderbird.

Earl left their car a block from the rear of Hatcher’s building and they climbed the back stairs. Earl opened the lock effortlessly and they stepped inside, put on their gloves, and began the search. As soon as Linda opened the refrigerator, she knew what the rest of the small apartment would be like.

After fifteen minutes, Earl sat down on the couch. “He’s getting better at this.”

“He doesn’t have as much stuff to worry about,” said Linda. “She made him travel light.”

“Let’s see,” muttered Earl. “He’s in the trunk of the car. You put four shots in there. You would think with four rounds rattling around in there and bouncing off things, one of them would have clipped him, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes. I did. But it didn’t happen. There’s no blood anyplace.”

“He knows he’s a lucky man, but he’s scared to death. He hears us leave, he pops out and runs like hell—probably through back yards, or the police would have picked him up. He’s too stupid to do the wrong thing and run across town. He comes right back here. What does he do?”

“It looks like he spent some time cleaning up.”

“Right. He couldn’t have done that for us. We know who he is already. He must think the cops are going to come here looking for him. What else did he do?”

“He took his car.”

“That’s last. What’s first?”

“He packed his stuff. Probably some money, the other gun he bought.”

Earl nodded. “He did that. Put yourself in his mind. You’re scared. You’re so scared you just ran home as fast as you could. You clean up, throw everything in a suitcase. You’re about to go out the door and drive until you run out of gas. Where are you going to go?”

Linda’s eyes narrowed, and she bit her lower lip, then released it to reveal a little smile. She looked across Earl at the telephone on the table. “Does it have a redial button?”

Earl opened his briefcase and found the little microcassette recorder. “Testing,” he said. “You’d better work.” He clicked two buttons. “Testing. You’d better work,” it said. Earl pressed two more buttons, then looked at Linda. He lifted the receiver, clamped the tape recorder to the earpiece with one hand, pressed the redial button with the other, and recorded the series of quick musical tones.

Linda counted the tones. “Eleven numbers. Long distance. An area code and a number.”

Earl hung up before the phone on the other end could ring. Then he played back the recording of eleven tones and handed the recorder to Linda. “Get the numbers.” He stood up, took a penlight, and began to shine it on the surfaces of the furniture.

Linda lifted the receiver and said into the recorder, “One,” then pressed the one button and recorded the tone. She said, “Two,” pressed the two button, and recorded the tone. When she reached six, she hung up to avoid completing a call, then got the last four numbers on tape.

It took Linda another ten minutes to decipher the recorded tones of the woman’s telephone number. “I think I have it. Should I test it?”

Earl said, “Give it a try.”

Linda said aloud, “One. Area code seven one six,” then dialed the rest of it. After four rings she heard a woman’s voice. “Leave a message when you hear a beep.” Linda hung up. “It’s the woman. She has her answering machine on.”

Earl took his penlight and opened David Keller’s telephone book. “Seven one six.… That’s New York … Buffalo, New York.” He closed the book and looked at Linda. “Maybe this time we got lucky, not him, and not her. She’s got her answering machine on. He called her no more than an hour or two ago. Maybe it’s on because she’s already talked to him and gone off to meet him. But it just could be that he got her machine too, and left a message.”

Linda looked at the phone as though she could see down the wire to the other end. “Most machines will play back a message if you’re away. Ours will do it if you push a two-digit code. Some use codes with three or four, but it might be worth a try.”

“There are only a hundred possible combinations. And we aren’t paying the phone bill.”

It was two o’clock when Linda heard a change. “Leave a message when—” and the recording stopped. There was a click, and she could hear the answering machine rewinding, then another click. Linda held Earl’s tape recorder beside the earpiece of the telephone.

“Jane? Jane? It’s me. I’m in trouble. Somehow they found me. A woman tried to kill me tonight. I’ve got to get out. I’m going to head north, to Cheyenne. No, too close. Billings. I’ll try to make it to Billings, Montana. I’ll call again when I get there.”

She was laughing with delight when she played the recording for Earl, but he was staring at the wall, and he wasn’t smiling.

When it ended, he sat in silence for a moment, then glanced at his watch. “We’d better get going. I’ve got to put you on a plane, and then head up north.”

“Put me on a plane?”

He spoke so gently that she was afraid of him. “He saw your face, honey. Having you around isn’t going to do me any good in Billings.”

“You’re sending me home?”

“Home?” His grin came like a sudden snarl. “No. You’ve got to go do something about her.”