Runner (15 page)

"You must have done more than that. I saw you fight."

"Not exactly. You saw me not-fight. This is fighting." She pretended to deliver a series of punches and kicks that were so fast that Linda could barely follow the movements. "That's karate, of course. That's called a kata, and it's a set routine you can go into in a certain situation. You work on a kata until you can do it correctly. Then you practice it in exactly the same way a few thousand times. After two thousand you can usually perform the movements well enough. Another two thousand times and you have it ingrained deeply enough so you might think to use it if you were attacked. After you've done it many more times, you can do it very fast. It takes two-tenths of a second for the eye to receive and transmit an image to the brain and the brain to interpret it. If you can deliver a punch or a kick faster than two-tenths of a second, then you can hit an opponent before he sees the blow coming."

"That's what you did that night. Why do you call it not-fighting?"

"I broke his knee before a fight could start, and then I ran away."

"But you could fight."

"Only because he didn't think I could. He thought I couldn't hurt him, so he didn't pay enough attention to me, or protect himself. There was a huge difference between us. No matter how much work I do, or how much I learn, I'm never going to be as strong as even the average out-of-shape man. He has at least seventy or eighty
pounds on me, a lot of it muscle. I have to attack very fast, fight very dirty, and get back where he can't reach me. I can't stand around hitting him and letting him hit me. If he lands one good punch he'll break bones."

"But you beat him."

"No, I tricked him. That man saw the two of us, and what he was seeing was like a pair of little pussycats. You can go up to a hundred cats, one after the other, and they're all perfectly docile. Then you meet that one that looks the same, but suddenly it has its claws digging into your arm to hold on while it sinks its teeth all the way into your hand. That's me. I'm the one that bites."

"That's what I want to be," said Linda. "I want to be able to fight back."

"You don't want to fight," said Jane. "You want what I want, which is to get away."

"I guess that's true."

"I was planning on helping you with that. We'll start tomorrow after the appointment at the doctor's office."

The next day was cooler but bright and clear, with a breeze that seemed to Jane to be an early summer treat before the humidity set in. Jane drove Linda along East River Parkway to the edge of the University of Minnesota campus. When she reached Harvard Street she turned left and pointed at the big building that dominated the area. "That's it."

"That's what?"

"The hospital. The Fairview-University Medical Center."

"It's big. And impersonal."

"Two wonderful qualities that we really want right now."

"I was thinking of maybe a small, private kind of place where everybody knows me and stuff."

"I know this seems as though it ought to be about your preferences, but it isn't. When you're having a baby, you've got to prepare for the possibility that things are not going to go smoothly. If they don't, the place you want to be is a big urban hospital with lots of really good surgeons and pediatricians and specialists and fancy equipment and superbly trained staff. We'll go in and interview Dr. Molinari. If you don't love him, we'll keep looking."

Jane drove up Harvard Street until she came to the parking structure for the hospital. They parked and walked to the main building, then rode the elevator up with a pretty woman about thirty years old who looked about six months pregnant. The woman said to Linda, "When are you due?"

Linda shrugged. "Early fall. Late September, early October."

The woman said, "Are you with Dr. Kwan?"

"Molinari."

Jane stood with a fixed smile on her face. The woman craned her neck to look across her at Linda as though she were some obstacle like a piece of furniture. Even the way the woman held herself when she spoke, leaning close to Linda, made it clear she was speaking only to Linda. The elevator door opened, and Jane led the way down the hall to Dr. Molinari's office.

Inside the waiting room, Jane saw that there were five women in various stages of pregnancy waiting for Dr. Molinari or one of his partners. While Jane waited, she found herself studying them, wondering what made it so easy for them to conceive, when it didn't seem to be possible for her. Had she simply waited too long? That didn't seem to be it. Two of them were about Linda's age, but the other three looked older than Jane. As the nurse came to the doorway and called them, one by one, to go back to the examining rooms with her, Jane watched them and compared her body to theirs.
Maybe it was all the exercise she had done for the past twenty years, the running and martial arts. Maybe the stress on her body had stimulated some receptor, released some unnoticed chemical, that told the body not to reproduce. There were all of those teenaged gymnasts who never got their periods. Maybe—

"Linda Welles?"

After they had met with Dr. Molinari, Linda Welles decided he was the one. She officially selected him as her doctor, and made her first set of appointments.

When they got to the car, Linda said, "Now we're done with doctors for today. Can you show me some self-defense moves?"

Jane nodded. "I'll show you something that will work for you." Jane drove them out of the city into the nearly flat, empty land to the north. When they had driven for about an hour, she slowed down, looking for a particular spot. Finally, she turned off the road and guided the car along a barely visible unpaved road consisting of a pair of tire tracks winding through a forest of second-growth trees. She stopped in a place that looked as though it had been used as a turnaround. "This ought to be the right sort of place."

"For what?"

Jane pulled the car around so it was facing out again, then turned off the engine. She picked up her purse, opened it, and took out a small snub-nosed revolver.

Linda gasped, "Oh, my God. A gun?"

Jane swung out the cylinder, showed Linda that it was empty, and closed it again.

"Where did it come from?"

"When we stopped at the house in Amherst, this is one of the things I picked up. When I go, I'll leave it with you. It's a tricky thing to have a gun in the house at the best of times. When you expect to
have a curious baby crawling around, it definitely has to be both locked up and well hidden. I have mixed feelings about doing this, but I don't see any other way for you to be safe."

"You don't? I thought you would teach me something from martial arts."

"You're pregnant. Even if you weren't, it takes years of practice to learn enough to do you any good at all. Ninety-nine percent of the time, all the practice does for a woman is to make her think she can stand her ground against some male attacker who takes her apart in a second. This works."

"But I've never even fired a gun. And I heard experts on TV say having one is more dangerous than not having one."

"The only experts whose opinions mean much are cops. Every cop in the country has one strapped to him right this minute."

Christine looked at the gun warily. "What do I do with it?"

"We'll buy you a purse that has a center compartment, and you'll keep it there, where you can reach it instantly, but you can also open the other parts of your purse without showing it."

"But how do I use it?"

"That's why we drove way out here. Come on." Jane got out of the car and set off into the woods. "This used to be a farm once. Now it's part of a huge piece of land that's been put together. The Manitou Paper Company owns all of it. Nobody lives around here anymore."

When they had walked far into the woods, they came to a clearing. It looked like a meadow, but the ground was too soft and swampy to walk on. "Stay here." Jane skirted the meadow, walking among the exposed roots of trees. She picked a tree twenty-five feet from Linda, took a white handkerchief from her purse, and hung it on a pair of thorny twigs. Then she made her way back.

Jane stood beside Linda, and opened the cylinder of the gun. "Notice how I open the cylinder. The barrel is away from us, pointed down at the dirt. I don't have a finger inside the trigger guard."

She took a box of bullets out of her purse. "Here. Hold this. It's .38 caliber ammunition. It's what police used to use in most towns until nine millimeter automatics became popular. This load is a little hotter than I would have chosen for you, but people send things to me with the idea that I'll be the one to use them. If you ever fire at anybody, you'll wish it were more powerful." Jane began to load the gun.

"If I lose it or something, will the police trace it to you?"

"No. This one was part of the inventory of a gun dealer who died. Before his death was reported, his suppliers were all paid in full, and a lot of guns and the records that came with them disappeared mysteriously. If somebody asks you, this one was in a trunk you bought at a garage sale in Oregon."

Jane closed the cylinder, stepped to the side, and aimed the gun with a two-hand stance. "This is probably the easiest for you. Shooting a pistol is like pointing a finger. Holding it with two hands doesn't change that. You point, line up the sights on the target. You don't close one eye. Then you squeeze the trigger so the barrel doesn't get dragged off target. This is a double action, so pulling the trigger cocks and fires." She handed Linda the gun. "Do what I did, but don't pull the trigger."

Linda assumed a stance, and Jane adjusted her limbs to make it right. "Your arms should be out ahead a bit more, and your knees flexed, not locked. If you're aiming that at somebody, he's going to want to be moving, so you may have to move, too. Open your other eye, Linda."

"Sorry."

"You're fighting for your life. You can't afford to lose depth perception or peripheral vision. You're not going to be firing at something a hundred feet away. You'll be fifteen at the outside."

"It feels weird to me."

"It won't if you get used to doing it right. Now, some preparation. It's going to be much louder than you expect. There will be a bit of a kick that will make the gun jump back a little, and the natural tendency is for the barrel to jerk upward. Be ready for it by keeping a good, firm grip on it so you don't drop it. Instead, you want to bring it back down to aim again. Can you remember all that?"

"I think so."

"Then hand me the gun, but keep it aimed downrange." Jane took the gun. Then she handed Linda a set of earplugs. "I picked these up for us at the drugstore. The best would have been to get real ear protectors that look like earphones, but these will do." She put hers into her ears and waited for Linda. "Now I'm going to fire one round, so you can see what I mean."

She aimed and there was a sharp bang, and the handkerchief jumped.

"You were right. That was loud."

"It's worse in an enclosed space. Your turn."

Linda took the gun and assumed the stance. Jane stood beside her and watched to be sure she was doing it right. "Any time you're ready."

Linda fired. The gun jumped up and she winced, then leveled it.

"Again."

She fired once more.

"Again."

This time the handkerchief puffed backward as another hole appeared in the thin white linen. She aimed again.

"How many rounds are left?" Jane asked.

"Two."

"Good. Fire again."

The handkerchief jumped and fluttered downward toward the foot of the tree, but caught on a small branch jutting from the trunk. "There's one left."

"Then fire it."

Linda fired. She was controlling the recoil better, not flinching at the sound, and she appeared to be holding the gun with more comfort and confidence. She lowered the gun and held it out to Jane, the barrel pointed away from them.

"Want some more practice?"

"Yes."

"Then you load it this time."

Jane held the box while Linda opened the cylinder, poured out the brass casings, pushed in another six rounds, and closed it. Jane said, "Hold your fire. I'm going to walk to the tree and put my poor handkerchief up again."

"Okay."

While she went to the tree and returned, Jane watched the way Linda handled the gun. She was careful, she was alert, and she was getting more comfortable. Jane said, "All right. Fire when you're ready."

Linda fired the next six rounds, hitting the handkerchief each time.

Jane said, "You seem to be getting the idea. Do you think you can do that if you have to?"

"I can fire the gun. I don't know about shooting a person."

"That means we're done, I think. I don't have another handkerchief." She scooped up the empty casings at their feet, counted them,
and then retrieved the shredded handkerchief. "This wasn't much of an introduction. I just wanted you to be able to load and fire in an emergency. People practice for a lifetime and still keep learning things. What I want you to do when we get back is go through your apartment with the lights on and again with the lights off, figuring out exactly what you would do in an emergency—where you would take a firing position, what you would be able to see from there, what you wouldn't be able to see. Where you would retreat from there. Everything you know and don't have to spend time deciding will help."

As they walked back to the car, Jane suddenly bent down in a clearing, and began picking leaves from a vine with red berries on it that ran along the ground.

"What are you doing?"

"This is partridgeberry. I didn't know it grew this far west. But of course it would."

"But what are you going to do with it?"

"The berries are full of seeds, and they don't taste like much. But you boil the leaves in a little water and make a tea out of it. It's a cure for morning sickness. The old people say it even helps make childbirth easier later on."

"Are you sure it's safe?"

"If you're worried, I'll drink it first. You can watch me for a day and then try it." Jane picked a pound or more of the leaves, then put them in the trunk of the car. "You'll thank me for this."