Shadow Woman

15

Jane flew to Chicago as Karen Roth, then shopped for her next flight by walking along the concourse at O’Hare looking at the television monitors that listed scheduled departures. Hatcher had called her at around ten on Tuesday night, and she had not heard the message until seven the next evening, so he was already in Billings. She diverted her course to a pay telephone, called her answering machine, pressed 56, and listened. “Two messages,” said the mechanical voice. The first was Hatcher’s voice saying, “It’s just me again.” She clapped her hand over her free ear to block out the noise around her and waited, but there was a pause, then a click to signify that the call had ended. The second message was just the pause and then another click. Jane put the receiver back on the hook and went to buy her next ticket. Either Hatcher had not settled anywhere yet, or he had decided it was not safe to leave a number, or something had gone wrong with her machine to make it stop recording. Maybe it had failed to disconnect after the first call, and used up all the blank tape recording nothing. Maybe the clock battery had died, or the tape had tangled, or … she might as well stop kidding herself. Or when Pete Hatcher had made the first call, standing in a lighted phone booth at a rest stop on Route 25, he had hung up the phone, turned around, and had a .357 Magnum stuck in his face.

She flew to Missoula as Katherine Webster on a smaller plane and arrived at seven in the morning, then went shopping for a car as Wendy Wasserman. The car Wendy Wasserman selected was a two-year-old Nissan Maxima with low mileage and a finish that had been dulled by the first owner’s failure to protect it from the winter weather. The owner had left on it a parking sticker that said UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA. Jane drove it to the campus and left it in a covered parking structure surrounded by busy dormitories, then walked northwest up Broadway until she found a car-rental agency.

She called her answering machine three times during the day, and each time the machine said, “Two messages.” She drove the three hundred and forty miles eastward on Route 90 to Billings as the sun made its way toward the mountains behind her. The eastern side of the Rocky Mountains was high country and forested, but it was dry and hot, the very edge of the Great Plains. As she drove, the forests dwindled and were replaced by huge fields of wheat growing tall in the late summer sunset.

Jane arrived in Billings after dark. She drove the streets for two hours to get a sense of the city, then left her rented car in the parking lot at Deaconess Medical Center and began to walk. She bought a newspaper at a machine on a corner and studied it. There was no mention of a David Keller being found, no Pete Hatcher, and no John Does. If he wasn’t alive, the police didn’t know it yet.

She tried to imagine his steps. He would have come up on Route 25 until it merged with Route 90 and arrived in the middle of the night. He had probably checked into a hotel at noon. He would have been exhausted by then, and slept until dark. He would have gotten up, dressed, and then realized that he didn’t have a good enough reason to go out there in the strange city at night. He would have eaten in the hotel, then returned to his room. He would know that the only place she could hope to find him was in a hotel, so he would stay there. If there was a problem with her answering machine, then he would send her a note in the mail. He would stay put and hope that she could get to him before anybody else did.

If she wanted to get to him and take him out without attracting attention, she would have to look as though she belonged here. Jane went to a shopping mall and studied the women around her. In the twelve years since she had begun doing this, fading in had gotten easier. She had read somewhere that between 1970 and 1990 a mall had opened somewhere in the country every seven hours. One of the changes this had brought was that women in one part of the country dressed pretty much the way they did in all of the others. Her clothes would do for a few days in Billings, but she could still make some purchases to improve her chances.

She found a store that sold T-shirts and bought one with UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA printed on it. She bought a pair of hiking boots like ones she saw on some other women.

She knew a little bit about what Pete Hatcher was going through. At times he would be sure that he had completely, miraculously lost his pursuers. But every time he heard a maid push her cleaning cart down the hotel hallway, he would feel all the muscles in his body go tense. He would try to reassure himself, then realize that he had no external way to tell whether he was perfectly safe or in imminent danger. So he would sit for hours looking out the window of his room for some piece of evidence that had not come from inside his own skull.

As she searched for the store where she would make her last purchases, she reconsidered what she knew about Pete Hatcher. The first time she had heard his name had been in a telephone call from Paula Dennis. Paula was an intensive-care nurse from Kentucky, and it wasn’t until the call that Jane had learned she was also a gambler, and she needed help for a man she had met on a junket to Las Vegas. When Jane had asked her what she knew about the man’s habits, she had said, “Pete Hatcher is a ladies’ man.”

To Jane that had sounded like trouble. Men who had that reputation left behind rivals and angry husbands and women who knew too much about them and were bitter enough to tell strangers. But Paula had said, “By that I mean he is a man who could have been invented by and for ladies. He is a perfect gentleman: attentive, thoughtful, kind, considerate at all times and in every situation. You could take him to visit your aged grandma in Charleston. He’s also a very naughty fellow, if you know what I mean, but there are no hard feelings afterward. He’s at his sweetest when he takes you to the airport. There are no lies, no chances to make false assumptions with Pete Hatcher. You can be sitting in a restaurant with him, and he will not pretend he’s not looking at other women below the face. But the way he does it doesn’t make you mad. It makes you squirm in your evening gown. One night I saw him doing it and told him so, and we had quite a conversation about a woman two tables over. He made me understand what he saw when he looked at a woman, and honey, it made me like myself better.”

Jane had not been moved to enlist in Hatcher’s cause just yet, but her curiosity had been piqued. “What, exactly, did he say?”

“He misses nothing—and I mean nothing—and he likes all of it. This is a woman on the downhill side of fifty. I’m thinking, ‘A kind face. Nice clothes. Not impersonating a teenager, but not making up the seating list for her wake, either.’ He starts telling me about the smile lines at the corners of her eyes, and the calm glow of the cornea that shows wisdom and receptiveness—which from Pete’s side of the table seem to be the same thing—and the flecks and color variations. This is just eyes, remember. I’m leaving out the topographical features south of there, which he can talk about well into next week, if you’re mature enough to stand it without hyperventilating and falling into a swoon. But he’s never exactly wrong, because what he sees is verifiably there if you look for it. He sees what you wish they would all see. You’re just this person getting by on whatever you have. You don’t think about how you look most of the time. You think about what you’re doing, and that’s probably just as well, because it keeps us all out of trouble. Pete comes along and looks at you as though you were an object. No question about that, but the object is a flower or a bird or a tropical fish—something that has its own rules and purposes, its own course in life that doesn’t have anything to do with his. If you want to come closer, that’s okay with him. But if you don’t, that’s fine too, because he’s just glad to be there and see the pretty colors. This is not a deep thinker. But if this is a man who deserves to die, I want the others all killed off first.”

Remembering Paula’s call made Jane irritable. It wasn’t Paula’s fault, and it wasn’t even Pete Hatcher’s. It was her own. She was already feeling a sick twinge in her stomach about Carey, and she was not yet prepared to set aside time to think clearly about it. She had no business leaving a husband of three months. She had no business breaking her promise, so something in some primitive lobe of her brain told her she was going to be punished. What Paula had said had nothing to do with Carey. It should not have made her feel this way.

When Jane had met Pete Hatcher she had understood what Paula had meant. He had been scared and psychologically worn, but while he was standing up politely to shake her hand, his eyes had taken the long route up to meet her eyes. What he was saying at the time was something good-natured and self-deprecating about needing her advice and help. It should have been incongruous and discomforting, but somehow it wasn’t.

Carey would never do anything that simpleminded. He was much more … what? Highly evolved. Pete Hatcher appealed to women because he was guileless and optimistic. He made it clear that he was having a lot of fun, and that was a form of flattery. His expression said, “You delight me,” and delight was contagious and reciprocal. It created a magnetic field around it stronger than gravity.

But women loved Carey because he knew all their secrets, including the ones that weren’t any fun—wear and aging and imperfections and scars—and he was always on their side. It wasn’t that they seemed glamorous for the moment, or something. His appeal was a quick and sensitive mind but, more than that, an air that conveyed a knowledge that didn’t exclude things found in books but was full of things that he knew because of who he was.

Jane felt weak and foolish for letting Carey enter her mind now. She knew it was because she was about to do something that Carey would have had a right to object to. The bathing suit she chose was relatively modest. It was one piece, black, and not cut as high at the hips as the others in her size. She could have worn it at home without feeling uncomfortable. But she was buying it to wear for Pete Hatcher.

She had to be where the hunters weren’t looking and Pete Hatcher was. They would be looking at lobbies and parking lots, and he would be looking at women. He would be hiding, he would be scared, but he had a lifelong addiction to studying every woman who passed in front of his eyes. He would look, because runners had a way of falling back into old comfortable habits to calm themselves. She bought a canvas purse and a wraparound skirt, a big pair of polarized sunglasses and a pair of slip-on rubber-soled shoes that she could run in if she needed to.

The next day she allotted two hours to each of the biggest hotels: the Rainbow, the Traveler’s Rest, the Mountaineer. It was easy for a woman to get into the part of a hotel where Jane wanted to go. She entered at the end of a residential wing and walked down the corridor of rooms. She left it near the center of the building, before she reached the lobby, and stepped out into the courtyard. She knew that Pete Hatcher would not be in a ground-floor room, because he would not feel safe in a room where an intruder could walk up to the windows. If he had his choice he would be on an upper floor in a room facing the courtyard, so he could not be shot from the street.

At each hotel she walked to the swimming pool, found a big lounge chair, greased herself with sunblock, and lay back to feel the sun. At some point, Pete Hatcher would look out his window, and he would see her. A lot of people would notice that there was somebody out by the pool. Pete Hatcher would not leave it at that. He would stare at her hard, just because she was a woman between eighteen and fifty-five—and he would recognize her.

By noon she was glad that she had found some sunblock that was practically opaque. The sun came down clear and sharp at this altitude. She lay on her stomach at the Mountaineer and stared along the surface of the water in the pool, watching the sunlight break into spots on the surface and ricochet up against the concrete wall of the building.

She saw Pete Hatcher the second he stepped into the bar overlooking the pool. She stood up, put on her shoes, then wrapped the skirt around her and hooked her bag over her left arm while she watched him through the sunglasses. He was talking to a waiter. She walked quickly toward him.

She could see the waiter going to a cappuccino machine behind the bar that looked like the reassembled parts of a steam locomotive. Too late. The waiter was pouring a pitcher of milk into the boiler and flipping levers. She thought about what Paula had said. Pete Hatcher was standing there with a pulse rate that was probably nearing two hundred. He had just seen the arrival of what amounted to his last chance to blow out the candles on his next birthday, and his response was to order coffee for two. She stepped in the door. No, it was iced cappuccino for two, somehow even more absurd and courtly, because it was the right thing to order for a woman who had been lying in the sun.

He carried the glasses to the table, but Jane took his arm and moved him on to another that was out of sight of the door. The waiter was busying himself at the bar, so she leaned close and gave Hatcher a peck on the cheek before she sat down. “Very thoughtful,” she said. In a whisper, she added, “Why didn’t you call again?”

He looked pained. “I did. Your message ran, but then there was no beep to start the recorder. I said where I was, but I couldn’t tell if it picked anything up. I guess it didn’t.” He leaned close and looked into her eyes, and she thought of Paula again. Those long eyelashes were part of it—he didn’t seem to know they belonged to him. “I made a couple of mistakes in Denver,” he confided. “I thought I was doing great, but I was absolutely clueless. That scared me. That’s why I called in the first place. If you didn’t get my messages, how did you find me?”

“Okay,” said Jane. “It doesn’t matter. You got through. Now, what have you got up in your room that you can’t leave there?”

“One suitcase. The one you had me pack the last time. It’s got my money in it.”

“Give me the key,” she said.

He handed her the key, and she looked at it before she slipped it into her purse. He said, “The number’s not on it, but it’s 605.”

“Here’s what we do,” she said. “You sit here, sip your drink. If it takes too long, drink mine. Stay here with the waiter. If he leaves, don’t go to the lobby or follow me to your room or something. If everything unexpectedly goes wrong, don’t go to your car.”

“How did you know I had a car?”

She smiled sadly. “If they haven’t found you yet, all this is practice. If they have, what they’ve found is the car.”

Jane stood up and walked across the deck outside, back into the corridor where she had entered. She followed it until she found a fire door that led up the stairs. At the sixth floor she stood for a moment with her ear to the door. She heard nothing, so she stepped out into the hallway, found 605, and opened it.

The suitcase was neatly stowed in the closet. She tipped it on its side and searched it. There was sixty thousand dollars in hundreds, fifteen little plastic folders full of traveler’s checks, seven passbooks for savings accounts in Denver banks. She loaded the money, passbooks, and checks into her canvas bag and looked deeper.

When she found the box at the bottom she stopped. It was gold with a black stripe. It said, “.38 Special. 20 pistol cartridges.” She felt almost relieved. He had gone out and bought himself a pistol and a car. There was nothing mysterious about the way they had found him. All they had done was watch lists that anybody could get, until one man’s name had turned up on two or three lists. She put the box of cartridges into her bag with the money, then examined the suitcase for anything else Hatcher had neglected to mention.

She went into the bathroom, picked up his bag of toiletries, wiped the faucets and fixtures with a washcloth, then came out and wiped the desk, the television set, the table, the doorknobs. Then she checked all the wastebaskets for receipts or papers that would hold a print. When she was satisfied, she closed the suitcase, put the sign that said MAID SERVICE on the doorknob, and slipped back into the stairwell.

She climbed to the top floor, then onto the roof of the building. She left the suitcase behind a big air-conditioning condenser and went back down the stairs. They would find it in a month or two and have no idea how it had gotten there.

Downstairs she found Pete Hatcher drinking his cold coffee and looking happy. “Time to go,” she said.

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

She led him the way she had come, down the long corridor and out the door at the end of the east wing to avoid the lobby and the front entrance. When they were in her rented car on the next street she started the engine and waited. “Tell me where your car is.”

“It’s parked down the street near another hotel,” he said. “About three, four blocks down.”

She was beginning to feel a little more confident. It wasn’t a particularly cunning way to hide a car, but at least it showed he wasn’t totally unconscious. He was thinking. She turned the corner and drove in the opposite direction. “I hope you’re not too attached to it.”

“No,” he said. “Does that mean we’re just leaving it?”

She sighed. “If things were different I think I would be tempted not to. I would find a very good spot so we could watch the car around the clock. Eventually, the people who want you might come along, and I could see who they were. I’m not that curious this time.”

“I don’t want to imply that I am, but why aren’t you?”

“Several reasons. One is the way they found you.”

“You know how they found me? Even I don’t know.”

“I’m not positive, but you did two things that I know of that a person does who’s scared and running. You bought a gun and a car. That gave them two things to put together, two lists with the same name on them. So they might already be watching the car.”

“How did you know about the gun?”

“Hardly anybody carries ammunition in his suitcase who doesn’t have one,” she said. “Tell me exactly what happened in Denver.” She drove along the same street in the opposite direction and saw no other car turn to follow.

“There was a woman on the street when I was coming home from the grocery store. She looked like she had car trouble, and I walked over and took a look under the hood. She lifted the pistol out of my belt, stuck a big automatic in my face, and said she was a cop. She made me get in the trunk. A real cop came along right after that, and she killed him.”

“How did you see that from the trunk?”

“I didn’t, but when I got out, there he was.”

“How did you get out of the trunk?”

“She opened it, fired four shots at me, and slammed it again. I’m lying there and after a minute, I realize I’m not dead. She actually missed. On most cars there’s a latch inside the trunk. You pull it, and the trunk opens. I was alone except for the dead cop. I don’t know anything else.”

“That’s about all we need to know,” said Jane. “They managed to find you. I assume you walked to the same store by the same route regularly?”

He nodded.

“They knew that, and they knew you weren’t the sort of man who could walk past a woman with car trouble. Not everybody would stop. They knew you were carrying a pistol, because otherwise she wouldn’t have grabbed it before she showed you hers. The fact that she didn’t pull the trigger means they must have been planning to drive you out of town where they could shoot you without having anybody hear and bury you without having anybody find you.”

“Why do you keep saying ‘they’?”

“Did this woman look as though she could carry your body by herself?”

“No.”

“Then there was someone else who could. There’s also the dead policeman. Denver has serious criminals, and a serious police department. Any cop who stops his car is going to be sure he’s able to control whoever he sees. So probably he was shot by somebody he didn’t see. Not for sure, but probably.”

Pete Hatcher looked out the window and watched the display windows of businesses slipping past as the car moved west toward the interstate. “Then the one I didn’t see could have shot me the way he shot the cop—while I was alone on the street. Why didn’t he?”

“That’s one of those bits of good news that’s not quite as good if you take a second look at it,” Jane said. “Your former friends from Pleasure, Inc., aren’t hunting you themselves; they’ve hired professionals. The problems that raises should be getting obvious by now. Professionals know how to hunt. They know which ways to kill you are smart, and which ways are stupid. Taking you to a quiet, private place where nothing will be seen or heard is smart; blasting away in the middle of a city is not.”

“But that’s just what they did. They shot the policeman, and then—”

“They didn’t plan to, and that’s another side to it. When something unexpectedly goes wrong, professionals don’t get emotional. Killing you is just a job, and anybody else who happens along is nothing but a little extra work. They know in advance that they might have to get rid of witnesses, so they’re primed for it. They react quickly, and don’t spend time asking themselves philosophical questions first.”

She glanced at Pete Hatcher to see if he was listening. When she saw his face, her breath caught in her throat. His eyes were watering. Could he be crying? She pretended to pay attention to the road behind her for a few seconds. She glanced at him again. His big brown eyes were welling with tears. When he sensed that she was looking, he turned away and wiped his eyes on his sleeve. She waited.

“That policeman,” he said. “He lost his life, and I got mine. It was a bad trade. You should have seen him. His head was half gone. I couldn’t even tell what he looked like. The world lost him just to get a little more of me.”

Jane blew out a breath slowly. “I don’t think that’s a train of thought you want to follow too far.” She stared ahead at the entrance to the interstate, slipped her car into the center of the tight stream of traffic, and found herself silently talking to Paula. You didn’t have a way to say it, did you? In all the talk about his pleasant disposition and nice manners you never told me why you called me.

In all her years of snatching rabbits out of the fangs of the wolves, she had almost never heard a rabbit so much as wonder out loud what had happened to the other rabbits. They weren’t selfish. It always seemed to her to be physical, the body overpowering the mind to save itself. They never thought of looking back until they had run far enough. That was why a sensible nurse who had seen a lot of men would intercede for this one. The fact that he didn’t have a fine and complicated intellect was about the same as saying he didn’t have a twelve-cylinder Italian sportscar. He was a decent human being who was just trying to drive what he had.

When she looked at him again, she had an urge to give him something. “Okay,” she said, “let’s think practically. What do we do with what we know? You got a good look at the woman, right?”

“Right.”

“And she got a good look at you. Wherever we go, keep looking for her in the distance. She won’t be up close again, but she may be in a crowd, or in a window, or in a car that goes by. If you see her again, you go. No hesitation, no wondering if she saw you or not, no decisions. You go that minute. If you’re in the middle of a date in a restaurant a year from now, you go to the men’s room and never come back.” She watched him to see if he understood, and he seemed to. “Only this time, you’re going to know in advance where you’re going and how to get there.”

“Where are we going now?”

“First, we’ll drop out of sight completely for a few days, to let the trail get cold. Then we’ll start all over again, and do this right. I’ll hide you somewhere, but I’ll stick around this time until I’m sure we’ve lost them for good. I’ll give you a few lessons I should have given you the first time. I’ll help you get used to the next new name, new place, new life. Then I’ll leave for good.”

“You said the first thing is dropping out of sight. How do you do that?”

“The best way is to do nothing.” She smiled. “Missoula looks like a good place to start doing it. We’ll buy you a new suitcase, check into a motel, and see if you got lucky and lost them. In fact, that’s the good part about what I was saying, and I almost forgot to tell you. They’re pros, and from what I can tell, they’re near the upper end of the scale of people who could be called that. That means we avoid them or we’re dead: there isn’t any mystery about the outcome. But the nice thing about pros is that they’re in it for the money.”

“So?”

“They get paid in two ways. One is that they get all of it when they’ve killed you. The other is that the client gives them some money up front for expenses, and the rest when they’ve got you. Either way, your best friend is time. They’ve just wasted three months for nothing, and spent a lot of money traveling. People like that could have made a lot in three months. Hardly anybody is very difficult to kill. If the client is paying for all this, then by now he’s going to be wondering what he’s getting for his money.”

“I still don’t get it. How does this help me?”

“If you wait long enough, pros go away.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not. They don’t hate you. They’re in a business. At the moment when they calculate that the job is a waste of effort, they quit. If they’re getting paid for expenses, the time comes when the client makes the same calculation and stops paying.”

“Then I’ll be safe?”

She cocked her head and pursed her lips, then said reluctantly, “Not exactly. At least not yet.”

“Why not?”

“The client in your case can afford to replace them. But the replacement would have to start all over again at Las Vegas. Pros aren’t likely to turn over their information to competitors.” She shrugged. “I’m not saying you’re in the best position possible, but there are worse.”

“What’s worse than being chased by professional killers?”

She thought for a moment. “I guess the worst is if you’ve committed some really awful crime and people know it.”

“What would you do for a person like that?”

“Nothing,” she said.