Shadow Woman

18

Jane left the rented car at the agency in Missoula and picked up the one she had parked on the university campus. Pete Hatcher watched everything she did and listened to her explanations, then nodded his head. He had stopped asking questions, and that set off a tiny alarm in the back of Jane’s mind. It would not be out of the question for a man in his position to be contemplating suicide. It was also possible that he was only getting tired and passive. If that lasted long enough, it wasn’t much different from suicide.

She drove him northeast on Route 200 away from Missoula, and stopped at a motel in a small town called Potomac. They sat in the car for a moment. She waited for him to ask a question. Finally, she pulled a small leather wallet out of her purse and handed it to him.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“We need to sleep now. This is a motel. It isn’t part of a national chain, so that makes its records a lot harder to get. If we do everything the way everybody else does, we’re invisible. What everybody else does is that the man goes inside and registers. For the moment, we’re going to travel as Mr. and Mrs. Michael Phelan of Los Angeles. I have identification that matches. Now go do it.”

Too soon, he came out of the office and walked to the car. “They don’t have any suites or anything like that,” he said. “Should I rent two rooms?”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. He seemed to have lost his will to keep his mind working. “Pull yourself together and think. Mr. and Mrs. Phelan don’t sleep in separate rooms. Get it over with.”

He disappeared inside the office again and came out carrying a key. She watched him open the door, then started the car and pulled it into a parking space a distance from the room and went to join him inside. She surveyed the room. Her eyes rested on the king-size bed in the center of the floor. She forced them to move on. That was an extra problem with hiding a man. Dancing around in cramped quarters to keep the distances proper and the bodies covered became part of the job. She decided not to face that conversation yet. Anything she said now would not get a second bed in here, and would make him more passive and tentative.

She looked out the windows, checked the locks, examined the curtains, and continued her commentary. “When you check in, you take a mental picture of the world outside. The best way out of here is to the left, toward the car. I parked it in front of another door, away from the office. If somebody finds out we’re here, he doesn’t know which car is ours. If he finds the car, he doesn’t know which room is ours. It’s late now, so most of the other cars that will be in the lot are already here. Next time you look, what you’ll be looking for is newcomers. You lock everything that will lock.” She flipped the deadbolt and the safety latch. “If you do all the little things right, you’ll sleep better.”

She glanced at her watch. “I’m going out for a few minutes. When I come back I’ll knock four times, like this.” She rapped on the table.

“Where are you going?”

“To make a phone call from the booth at the gas station.”

“There’s a phone right here.”

“There would be a record of the call.”

She slipped out and walked toward the car in case the night clerk happened to be watching, then kept going past it and across the weedy margin of the property to the gas station, put a quarter into the telephone slot, and dialed zero, then the number of the house in Amherst. “I’d like to make a collect call. It’s Jane.”

She heard Carey pick up the telephone. “Operator.” The word came out before he had even said hello. “Will you accept a collect call from Jane?”

“Sure,” he said. The operator clicked off. “Jane?”

“Hi,” she answered.

“You okay?”

“Yes. I found him, and I picked him up, and now I’ve got him hundreds of miles away. I think we’re two hops ahead of them. Maybe only one hop, but it’s a good one.”

“Where are you?”

The question startled her. She had never talked to anybody at home while she was working—not really talked, because she had always lied. She felt a twinge almost like pain when she said, “I’m in a little town in the Wild West. At least I think I’m in town. There’s not much here, so I can’t be sure.”

“A hotel or something?”

“Sure. It’s not the Hilton, but I haven’t seen any cockroaches either.” She was saying words that were true, but she was lying. He wanted to know everything, and she was giving him breezy nonsense.

“You’re staying with … him? That can’t be safe.”

The lie came easily, like breathing, really. “Well, no, not exactly. One of the tricks of the trade. He’s in his motel room and I checked into another room across the parking lot. That way I can watch his door, and if anything suspicious happens, all I have to do is dial his room. He goes out the window on the side I can see is clear, and I pick him up on the highway.”

She knew it sounded plausible. She had been lying for so long that it was almost a reflex. She had heard the trouble building in his voice, and she had flinched to evade it. She pushed the question and the answer into a corner of her mind and labeled the corner a special exception. She had been trying to save him some anxiety, and the anxiety would have been pointless, because he would have been worrying about a dangerous situation that she had no way to evade. Or maybe, in the back of his mind, he had been worried about … something else. That was something she simply was not going to do, so worrying about it would serve no purpose. She loved Carey McKinnon.

Carey was already talking. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I missed that.”

“I said, Do you know where you’re going next, or when you’ll be home?”

His kind, patient voice opened a wound in her, and she tried to make up for the small lie. “I’ll tell you what I know at the moment,” she said. “The attempt these people made was a little worse than I thought. He would be dead now if a cop hadn’t happened along in time to take the bullet for him. So he’s a mess—I mean psychologically. Guilty, scared, and, consequently, stupid. The hunters are a lot better at it than I had hoped, so I have to be cautious. At the moment the plan is to take him someplace where he’ll be almost impossible to find, teach him everything he could possibly need to know, and split. That’s what I should have done in the first place, but I couldn’t.”

Carey’s voice was a monotone, as though there was hurt and anger that he was making an effort to keep out of it. “It’s starting to sound like it will take a lot of time.”

“It shouldn’t,” she said. Why was she talking to him as though there were lawyers present? “There is nothing in the whole world that I want more than to be with you. Right now. Tonight. But I think this could take a couple of weeks. I’ve got to be sure I’ve lost the hunters, and then get him settled. When that’s done, I’ll rush home and have a lot of fun being Mrs. McKinnon again. Forever. Maybe I’ll lock you in the house for a month and see for myself if the bad reputation you have is justified. I’m pretty sure it is, but I’d like to double-check.”

She heard him give a small, unvoiced chuckle. “I miss you,” he said. She heard a sigh. “Well, I guess there’s nothing much I can do except wait and hold you to your word. Do what you have to do, and get home.”

She loved him. The lies were a pain in her chest. “I miss you so much I could cry.” She wanted to tell him things. A big truck rushed past on the highway and a hot, dusty wind blew off the pavement into her face. “Stupid trucks,” she said. “I’m going to try to jump around to a few of these little towns for a couple of days to see if anybody’s looking for us, then leave some trails in the wrong direction. After that I’ll put him in a place where he can stay for twenty years. But first, the little towns.”

“Pick one, and I’ll call you there tomorrow.”

She felt a chill. “I can’t do that,” she said quickly. “I’ll be using different names, and I don’t know which one or where I’ll be yet. If I did, I couldn’t say it on the phone. I’ll call you.”

There was silence on the other end. Had he figured out that the name would be Mr. and Mrs. something?

“Carey?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll call you as soon as I can. I know this is hard. I love you.” She had never known that “I love you” was what a person said when she had run out of words and couldn’t say anything else. It was like reaching out a hand in desperation.

“I love you too. Just be careful, and come home in one piece.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve become a very cautious married lady.” She took a deep breath. “That reminds me. I guess I ought to get going now.”

“I could talk to you all night.”

“When we’re together,” she said. “Then I’ll talk until you want to smother me with a pillow. But I’d better go. Some people are born to disappear. This one takes a lot of hand-holding.” She drew in her breath, leaned her forehead against the phone booth, and shut her eyes. It was the middle of the night. If Hatcher was waiting for her to come back, the story that they were in different rooms didn’t make sense. She said quickly, “I love you,” and hung up. She turned and walked to the motel feeling sad and empty.

Jane approached the motel by circling it to study the cars in the lot, the traffic patterns on the two roads that intersected beside it, and the businesses nearby. The town was tiny and clean and presented an unassuming business face. But she could not induce a feeling of safety here. It was not big enough to provide a crowd to hide in, and not remote enough to be hard to find. As soon as Pete seemed rested and presentable, she would get him back on the road.

She thought about her conversation with Carey as she walked. She had been vague and evasive, but she had heard herself say something that she now realized was accurate. She had almost no idea where the chasers were, or what they were thinking. It was possible that Pete, in his novice’s panic and ignorance, had managed to leave them behind in Denver. They would certainly trace his car to Billings, but by the time they did, it would be in an impound lot and Pete could be anywhere.

Only if they were spectacularly good or phenomenally lucky—had an unseen person follow his car all the way to Billings—could they know he had gotten even that far. After that she had taken him out in a rented car, changed to still another car, and driven nearly eight hours. It was very unlikely that they could have followed without her seeing them.

If she kept Pete out of airports and big, well-lighted cities for a time, she would at least avoid squandering the lead she had on them. One way to do that was to keep him in suspended animation in the tiny resort towns up here, looking like one of the thousands of summer tourists.

She knew a little bit about the way the shooters must have found him the first time. They had looked at computerized public records and found out that the same man in Denver had registered a car and bought a gun at the same time. Probably they had run a credit check and found that he had also just arrived in town, and then they had flown in to take a look at him.

Now Jane would keep him from doing anything that got him on any lists for a time. Then she could control where and when he did anything else that created public records. She had already bought him a car under the name Wendy Wasserman. She would get him settled in his next apartment, find him a job, and help him fit in with the locals. He had already given in to the urge to buy a gun, and he still had it, so he probably wouldn’t make that mistake again.

She allowed herself a small feeling of optimism. Eight hours was not a huge lead, but it was growing. When she knocked on the door of their motel room, she heard him go to the window, saw him move the curtain aside to look out, then heard him step to the door and open it.

She slipped inside, closed the door, and glanced at him. He was in a pair of blue boxer shorts, and he turned away and hastily slipped his pistol into a pile of clothing on a chair. She couldn’t help being surprised by the sight of his body, but she fought to keep him from noticing. She had plucked the poor man away from Billings without his suitcase. She had not expected him to sleep fully dressed. She had not expected anything at all, and she reminded herself that she was going to have to anticipate his needs or she was going to wear them both out. She tried to formulate some words that would get them past this moment.

“It looks clear out there.” The attempt disappointed her. After all, what he was wearing wasn’t different from what men wore on the beach. She was a grown-up married woman. What difference did it make what he wore? Then it occurred to her that she was going to need to wear something to bed too. What she wore did seem to her to make a difference.

She pushed the thought aside and let the space fill itself with a trivial observation that had been prickling the back of her mind. “You did okay a minute ago, but all I’ve got to do right now is give you lessons, so here’s another one. You heard the right knock, so you thought it was me. You looked around the curtain to see if I was alone. Good. But I heard you, and saw you, and that was not so good. If I had been the wrong person giving the right knock, you’d be dead.”

“What was I supposed to do?”

“You were right to want to look before you opened the door. The very best time for them would be those few seconds while you and I were standing together with the door open. They could see us both in the light, and if they missed one of us the first time, they wouldn’t need to break anything down to get the survivor. But you want to look without letting anybody know you’re doing it. Do what the cops do on surveillance: don’t move the curtain, just look over the top of the track it’s on.”

“You can’t see anything but the wall,” he said. “The track is above the glass.”

She moved a chair to the far side of the window, and said, “Trust me.”

Pete stepped on the chair and looked down over the top of the metal track. In the two-inch space he could clearly see the step in front of the door, the wall on either side of the door, and some of the sidewalk. “I can see more from here than I could when I opened the curtain.”

“Right. It’s a view that shows you the likely hiding places around the door. It’s above them, which is good, because people seldom look up unless they know what they’re looking for. They look to both sides, look behind, look down.”

“I never noticed that. Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the way the skull is connected to the neck. Maybe it’s some prehistoric instinct that serious trouble hardly ever comes at an animal our size from above the treetops. Notice anything else while you were up there?”

“It’s an odd angle.”

“Right. When you were at ground level peeking between the curtains, they could have seen you and shot you through the glass from the left, from the right, or from the parking lot. When you were beside the window and above it, the right side of the window and the parking lot were out. Anybody there couldn’t see you. The only danger left was that the person at the door would look up and to his left, pull out a weapon before you saw him do it, and make a world-class shot that hit the thin slice of your body that wasn’t protected behind the wall or the woodwork—all of that before you moved. Or, since you had a gun in your hand, before you opened fire on his completely exposed body.”

“How did you learn all these tricks?”

Jane sat down on the bed and smiled sadly. “No matter how much you learn, the people who chase fugitives are still better at it. You watch how they work, you pick up what you can, and you keep going.”

“Why do you? What made you get into a line of work like this in the first place? Is the money that good?”

She shook her head and let out a little chuckle. “I did it once, I did it again. It never occurred to me to accept pay. Somebody pressed the point, and I said, ‘So send me a present.’ The jobs got more dangerous, and the presents got bigger.”

“But why the first time?”

“Anybody who knows how to swim will jump in and pull out the one who’s drowning. I knew how to swim.”

“But—”

“Enough,” she said. “Things were going to happen, and I made decisions about which ones I could live with, just as anybody does. The choices aren’t always limitless. In case you haven’t noticed, I was feeling sorry for myself tonight without this conversation.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “If you want to be alone for a few hours, I could manage that much.”

“Of course not,” said Jane. “I didn’t mean it that way.” She felt ashamed. He was scared to death, and he was volunteering to go out and cower somewhere while she had a fit of the vapors or something. “You’re a good guy, Pete. We’re going to have to spend a lot of time together for a while. I’ll let you know now that I enjoy your company, so you don’t have to wonder or apologize for being here. We’re going to pull you through this little bumpy stretch and get you started on a new life. Then I’ll float off like the good fairy and go to work getting my own life straightened out. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Pete. His smile was almost a laugh. He looked strong and comfortable. The muscles in his shoulders and legs elongated as he slouched in his chair. He had that unself-conscious, almost comical look that she had seen on fathers taking little children to the park. “I guess knowing how to shoot people doesn’t do much for your social life.”

She was surprised at her sudden need to keep him from thinking she wasn’t desirable. She drew in a breath to respond, then looked down at her watch. “It’s late, and I’d like to get an early start tomorrow morning.”

He looked at the bed. “I can sleep on the floor.”

“Sorry, that’s mine,” she said. She took a pillow and the bedspread off the bed. “What I’m worried about is not you, by the way. Tonight I’m going to keep my eyes open for visitors.” She busied herself with the bedspread while he got into the bed and turned off the lamp beside it. Then she went into the bathroom, brushed her teeth, and came back out. He was lying in the dim light with his eyes closed. She turned out the other light and lay on the folded quilt in the dark.

“Jane?”

“What?”

“Thanks again.”

“Think nothing of it.”

She lay in the darkness, staring up at the ceiling and testing the sensation of not being able to detect the difference between having her eyes open or closed. She closed them and thought about Carey. She knew that at this hour he was fast asleep in the big bed at home. She tried to reach out with her thought and place a blessing on him while he slept, but the mere knowledge that he was sleeping cut her off from him. He was dreaming, not thinking about her, like a receiver tuned to a different station. She opened her eyes again and she was back in the motel room in Montana.

As she lay there feeling the floor pressing harder on her spine, she contemplated the absurdity of pretending to stay alert for intruders so she could lie here on the floor when there was plenty of room on a perfectly good bed a few feet away. She knew that she would have the thought again and again, each time she awoke in the darkness waiting for the night to end. It was her penance for lying to Carey about the sleeping arrangements. She couldn’t take back the lie, but she could suffer a little discomfort to make the lie almost true.

She dozed off for a few seconds and began to slip into a dream. The vague image of a man appeared and began to resolve and clarify—bare legs, arms, then the features of the face began to establish themselves. She was startled and her body jerked and woke her, pulling her out of it in time to keep the man from being recognizable. But it was too late to keep her from knowing that the sight her mind had been preparing for her had not been Carey.