Poison Flower (11 page)

"But-"

"This is no time to be coy. We have minutes." She put the money in Jane's hand and added a set of car keys. "Take the black car that's at the curb. Get as far away from here as you can. When you're safe, leave it somewhere sensible, and mail me the keys and a note saying where it is."

"You can't do this," said Jane. "You'll get in terrible trouble."

Sarah Werth said, "He found her, broke in, and tried to kidnap her. When I intervened, he tried to attack me, so I shot him. I have a damaged door, five eyewitnesses, a registered pistol, and a lifetime of good behavior. I can take the heat without any effort. You can't. Now I need time to fire my own gun so there will be powder residue on my hands and a bullet missing. So go. You saved Iris's life tonight. Go save your own."

Jane leaned close and kissed Sarah's cheek. "You're like an angel."

"So are you. Good for us. If we're mistaken, I'll be proud to spend some time with you in hell. Now get out of here." She pushed Jane toward the front door.

Jane slipped out into the night. She put the gun into the waistband of her black exercise pants, limped to the small black Honda at the curb, got in, and started it.

She turned her head to look back at the safe house, but as she did, she saw Iris. She was running down the front lawn toward Jane, a look of terror on her face. She was carrying the backpack she'd brought with her. Jane could only imagine that somehow the man had gotten loose. She opened her car door and started up the lawn, but Iris reached her, clutched her arms, and said, "Please, Melanie. Take me with you."

Jane said, "Iris, honey. I can't do that. Where I'm going, it will be more dangerous than it is here."

"You have to. He's hardly hurt at all. He'll never stop looking for me. When he finds me this time, he'll kill me."

There was the muffled sound of a shot from inside the house. It had to be Sarah firing her pistol. It wasn't loud, but Jane could see that a couple of lights had gone on in upper windows of houses along the street. Jane heard, far off, the sound of sirens. She knew before looking at Iris's face that she was telling the truth about the ex-husband. He would never stop, and there was no chance the women in the safe house could stop him. She looked back at the house just as the young assistant stepped out on the porch. She waved at Jane frantically, urging her away. "Get in."

She drove toward the bright lights of the Las Vegas Strip and Interstate 15. The Strip was so big and bright that it threw its impossible smear of color into the sky-blue, green, gold, red-and tore a gash in the night. Her car rose onto the overpass above Route 15 and, for a moment, was part of the light.

Iris crouched in the passenger seat as Jane went over the bridge down the ramp and onto Route 15. She drove up the wide interstate out of town and into the darkness, keeping at the speed limit every second, never letting up at all. She was heading north, as the signs reminded her after every entrance ramp, and she drove with the sensation that every mile she put behind her was making her and Iris safer. It was another few minutes before she thought to take the pistol out of her waistband and hide it under her seat.

Jane said, "I'm going to Salt Lake City." She looked at Iris beside her, but there was no visible reaction. "Since you're with me, that means that's where you're going too. Is Salt Lake City all right with you"

"I guess so," Iris said "I've never been there, and nobody there knows my name."

"What is your name" said Jane.

"Iris May Salter," she said. "It used to be Hampton, but I had my maiden name restored in the divorce."

"Iris Salter is your real name"

"Real Of course. It never occurred to me to change it again, but maybe that's a good idea."

"You might want to consider it. I find it never hurts to make things a little harder for people who want to hurt you."

"Steve-that's my ex-husband's name-seemed to think he had a right to hurt me."

"People who like to hurt you can always tell you why it's your fault."

Jane drove along Interstate 15, trying to put as much road as possible behind them. It was nerve-racking to be on such a major highway, the most obvious way out of Las Vegas. If the police listened to Iris's ex-husband and thought they needed to hunt for the woman who had really fired the shot, they would be on Interstate 15, too. They already were on Interstate 15, all day every day, all night every night, because Interstate 15 wasn't just a river of money coming into town. It was the route of an invading army of troublemakers and screwups. Jane couldn't afford to be pulled over by a cop for some minor infraction tonight. The authorities in Los Angeles had already had three days to take frame grabs from the security cameras in the courthouse and distribute them to cops along the obvious escape routes, and Las Vegas was the most obvious escape route of all.

As Jane drove, she tried to decipher and untangle her predicament. She was hurt. She had promised Jim Shelby she would meet him at the hotel in Salt Lake City, and she was already three days late. Crouching in the seat beside her was a young woman whose will seemed to have been beaten out of her.

Jane said, "I think we should talk."

"Okay. What about"

"I wasn't planning to take you with me. When you came running out, I thought something else had happened, and then you were in the car and we had to leave. For a lot of reasons you don't know yet, that might not have been your best move."

"I had to get away."

"Getting away from a man like that is a good idea, but that's not the point. The point is that everything you'd seen about me was an indication that I had a few problems that existed before I met you, and might put you in worse danger."

"I know," said Iris. "I saw your back after your bath. And I saw the bandage on your leg. And the giant bruise around it."

"You saw that"

"I wanted to meet you, so I went into our room, and I saw you weren't there. I went toward the bathroom, and you had finished your bath and opened the door a crack to get rid of the steam. When you reached up to clean the steam off the mirror with your towel, I slipped aside so you wouldn't see me in the mirror and think I was spying on you. But I saw."

"Seeing the marks shouldn't have made you want to risk going with me. I couldn't even protect myself."

"I could see you were someone who understood what it's like. Your burns are from metal that was heated up. You can see that on my back, too. When Steve did that to me he used a bunch of big nails. He heated them in a frying pan and dumped them out on my back. And I could see where somebody hit you with a switch, too. In some ways that was the worst for me, even though it hurt less than the burns or the punches. It was humiliating, like a child being whipped for doing something bad. I'm sure you know."

Jane said, "I'm not much like the person I've been pretending to be. Let's try to figure out what you can do, and where I can take you."

"I'm not the way I seem, either. I'm a normal person. I never even knew people like Steve. I met him at a club in LA. He carried himself like a bad boy, and I thought that was dark and mysterious and sexy. He was very male, always in charge. And there was an edge to him, sort of a repressed anger that I took for toughness. I fell for him-or for the man I had invented. That's the right term-fell for him, like you fall for a hoax or a fraud. I married him. A few months after that, he started to work on me. I was young and naive, and to him that was the same as being stupid. I wasn't a poor kid, brought up in the backwoods somewhere, and I hadn't raised myself on the streets, so I was weak. I liked pretty clothes and things, so I was spoiled. After a while I was sad. It was hard to live with his contempt and be happy. I told him I didn't like being treated that way, so I was a nasty bitch. After a while he was watching everything I did, but without ever looking at me when he spoke to me. I was an enemy, and the minute he got up in the morning he started noticing things about me that weren't right. The day after the hitting started I left. I slipped out and went to my parents' house in Sherman Oaks. I filed for divorce from there. My father was a doctor, and we had a nice house with my old room and everything, but he told me the best thing for me was to go to another city until the divorce was final. I should get a job and meet nice people my age and do some thinking about the future I wanted."

"That sounds smart. That's exactly what I'm trying to get you to do now."

"I went to Boston. I only came home for the final decree, then went back. And then my father died. It was the last thing in the world I expected. He was always very fit and healthy, and he seemed so young that I always forgot his age. He had a massive heart attack and died, and then I realized I hadn't actually been seeing him. I'd been looking at him and seeing him as he'd been fifteen years younger. When he died, my mother was all alone."

"So you came home to be with her."

"Yes. She was alone, after being married for over forty years. He was the sort of person who just quietly took care of everything. She never seemed worried about anything, because he was this big, reassuring presence. Now she was lost. So I moved in. I don't know how he found out, but Steve knew immediately that I was living there. He showed up at the door a few days after the funeral and said he wanted me back."

"Did you fall for it"

"No. I told him there was nothing at all left between us, and that he should go away and never come within a mile of me again. He, of course, wanted to stay and argue about it."

"But you didn't give in"

"Not then, and not the next fifty times. He called at all hours, showed up when I went to work and stood in front of my car, sent presents I didn't want and apologies. He said he hadn't ever wanted to be mean to me, but I had forced him. Surely I understood that."

"Iris, honey. I've heard this story before. I don't blame you for any of it. But you need to think about tomorrow and the next day. We need to make a plan for how you're going to spend the next month or two."

"Please," Iris said. "I've got to tell you, so you'll understand."

"All right."

"I got a restraining order. He violated it about three times before the cops or the judge or someone persuaded him he couldn't prevent me from going to work or wake me up in the middle of the night. A few months after my father died, my mother got sick. It was a heart problem, too. And then she died. I heard afterward from a lot of people that this kind of thing happens quite often with couples who have been close. The one who was left didn't take long to follow the one who died."

"What did you do then"

"I was alone, and I saw the world a little more clearly. The house that had been the symbol for me of safety and security since I was a baby had changed. Without my parents, it was just an empty, sad building. There was no help or advice or companionship, or even safety there anymore. There was a sadistic, crazy man out there somewhere, and the house suddenly seemed so fragile and insubstantial that he could walk in through the walls to get me. I mean, it was a one-story, sprawling ranch-style house with big glass windows everywhere. All he'd need was a rock. I went to a realtor and told him to estimate what the house was worth, price it twenty thousand cheaper, and sell it fast. The house sold, I deposited the check, packed up, and moved out in a hurry. I put my parents' furniture in storage, rented a one-bedroom apartment in a duplex, and moved in. Steve waited until one day when the people in the other half of the duplex had gone to work, and came and got me."

"Just like that"

"Pretty much. He kidnapped me-put tape over my mouth and wrists, then dragged me out to the back door into a van, taped my ankles, shut the doors, and drove off. He's big and strong; I was small and weak. That's all it takes. He drove to a place he had leased in Nevada. And then it began. Being his ex-wife was about being punished for being a failure as his wife, and for leaving him and divorcing him, and for not coming back when he told me to. There were no illusions about a romantic relationship. It was him getting even and teaching me a lesson. I was a person who had done him grave injury, and now I'd pay for it. He had me for five months before I got away."

"How did you accomplish that"

"He went grocery shopping. A couple of times when I'd gone with him I'd tried to get people to call the police, but they never had. Still, he kept his hand on my wrist after that. This time, he couldn't take me with him, because my face didn't look too good. So I waited until he was gone, and slipped out of the chain he had on my wrist. I had been preparing by not eating for a few days. He put the lock on the same link as always, but it was too big this time. I didn't really know where I was, but I knew it was Nevada and the sign on the highway said, `Las Vegas, 146 miles.' I hitchhiked to Las Vegas, but if I hadn't been picked up, I would have walked. I stopped when I found the shelter where I met you. I know I should have kept going, but I needed food and rest. But now I'm out, and I'll have a big head start on him, thanks to you."

"You're welcome," Jane said. "I'm glad you're okay. But I have something urgent I need to do when we get to Salt Lake City. I'll leave you as much money as I can, and get you checked into a safe hotel. But then I have to go. If you'd rather I leave you somewhere else, I'll try to do that."

"With you," Iris said. "I want to go with you."

"I can try to come back for you."

"Why can't I help you do whatever you're doing"

Jane took a deep breath, and then let it out slowly. "I know how this is going to sound, but I guess I have to say it and hope your gratitude or your ability to recognize me as a friend will keep you from ever repeating it. I'm running. I'm being hunted by some men who will kill me if they catch me, and they plan to take a long time letting me die. The reason I couldn't hang around to wait for the police in Henderson is because the cops are searching the country for me, too. And I'm in no shape to protect you. That bandage you saw around my leg is covering a gunshot wound. Just about the most dangerous place in the country you could be right now is with me."