Shadow Woman (11 page)

“No sense thinking about
what we don’t have. What we do have has got to be enough to get
us there.” He consulted his notes. “He used a pro to get
out of here. She had him drive out in a car instead of getting on a
plane in Las Vegas. It wasn’t a rented car, because then he’d
turn it in wherever he ends up. So she bought it for him. If she’s
any good at all, she wouldn’t let him stay in Nevada, right?
It’s too small.”

“Right.”

“So he’s out of
state, with the car. He’s got to do something with it. If he
sells it, keeps it, or abandons it, then it gets new plates and the
old plates get returned to the Nevada D.M.V. There are only a
million, two hundred thousand people in the whole state. How many
cars? About half that many. How many of them are going to have their
plates turned in this month?”

“I have no idea, do you?”

“No, but not many.”

“What if it’s in her
name?”

“If it was, it won’t
be. He has to insure it in the new state, be able to get pulled over
and ticketed without getting hauled in.”

“He’ll need a
license to do any of that.”

“If she didn’t get
him anything else, she got him a new license and birth certificate
and Social Security card. Those I can’t start with. But the new
car registration I can probably get at the end of the month.”

“Suppose he just drove it
to an airport outside of Las Vegas? That’s what I’d do.”

“Yeah,” said Earl.
“We’ll have to cover that possibility too. It’s not
going to be simple. This woman is a problem. She didn’t let him
make a lot of mistakes. There’s nothing easy left: no personal
letters, no pictures, not even any old credit card bills. Oh, that
reminds me. Where’s the bank statement we got? He just might
have written a check to his new name.”

“In my purse.”

He snatched her purse off the
doorknob where she had hung it, pulled out the statement, and opened
it. He quickly shuffled through the checks, then sighed. “Jesus
Christ,” he muttered, then slapped the checks down on the
table.

“What’s wrong?”

“He had a balance of
sixty-two thousand bucks. He wrote a check for sixty to ‘Cash.’
You want to know who took it and gave him the sixty in cash?”

“No bank I ever heard of
would…. Oh, don’t tell me.”

“Yep. Pleasure Island
Casino. The stupid bastards had him under surveillance, and they let
him walk up to a cashier and write a check for his fuck-you money.”

“That’s got to be
his idea,” said Linda. “I’m sure he’s seen
them do it for gamblers. But he wrote it for less than his balance,
so he doesn’t have the bank and the police looking for him too.
That’s her.”

Earl shrugged. “Her again.
Yeah.” He stared into space for a few seconds. Slowly, his jaw
began to work, the knotted muscles grinding his teeth together.
“Let’s think about her. She sees, probably before he
does, that his time is coming. They’ve watched him enough so if
they were just going to fire him, he’d be gone already. She
knows they’re not going to take their eyes off him while he’s
alive unless she makes them. She tells him how to do a quick
housecleaning. She gets him a car, and some papers. She arranges to
meet him in the one place in Las Vegas where there aren’t a
million lights. She gets him out” Earl’s face assumed a
look of puzzlement. “But then she doesn’t go too, she
hangs in to buy him time.”

Linda sighed. “This isn’t
getting me anywhere. So she bought him time.”

Earl’s irritated look
froze her. “You’re not thinking. You know any pros who
are going to hang around to get in a fight in an elevator if the
client’s already driving out with a big head start?”

“No women, anyway.”

“No men either. The pay
doesn’t go up any for bruises. She must have thought he needed
the extra minutes, and that means he wasn’t safe until a
particular time.”

“It can’t be
anything but an airport,” said Linda. “He wasn’t
going to be invisible until the plane was in the air.”

“How much time did she
need to buy him?” Earl leafed through the piles of tourist
literature the maids had left on the coffee table. He found a number
and dialed. “Yes. I’m interested in the midnight show,
but I want to see another show, too. Is it one of those things where
you have a bunch of warm-up acts? What time does the Miraculous
Miranda actually get on stage?” He wrote something down. “Then
when does the show end?” His pencil scribbled another note.
“That’s too bad. I may have to catch her act on another
trip. Thanks.” He hung up and studied his notes. “Okay.
Miranda comes on right at twelve, first thing. She’s on the
stage for two hours.”

“So what?”

Earl scowled. “So this
woman figures Hatcher is going to have two hours to drive before the
lights come on again and somebody sees he’s not sitting next to
her. He’s driving to an airport, and she’s planned on two
hours. His plane has to leave pretty soon after he gets there,
because she doesn’t want him sitting in an airport when
Seaver’s people start looking for him. She wants him to arrive
about the time the plane is boarding, so he can walk right in and
disappear.”

“Seaver said she bought
him an hour after that.”

“Right,” said Earl.
“She did it, but she couldn’t know in advance that she
could do it. How could this one woman think she could tie up those
guys that long? No, she was counting on two hours, and whatever she
got after that must have been insurance. Figure he drives sixty miles
an hour, so there’s no chance he’ll lose twenty minutes
getting a speeding ticket.”

Linda stood up and pulled the
map out of her suitcase. She measured 120 miles on a piece of dental
floss, tied it to Earl’s pencil, and ran it in a circle around
Las Vegas. “Kingman, Arizona, on Route 93; Bullhead City,
Arizona, on 95. Maybe Lake Havasu if he pushes it on Route 95 south.
Baker, California, on 15 south. There’s no airport for another
hundred and twenty miles, so scratch 15 south. Nothing at all on 93
or 95 north, so scratch them. That leaves 93 or 95 south into Arizona
or 15 north, into Utah. If it’s 93, it’s Kingman. If it’s
95, it’s Lake Havasu City. Both have airports.”

“What about Utah?”

“No airport until Cedar
City. About a hundred and eighty miles.”

“Okay, scratch that too.
We’re down to two possibilities, then,” said Earl. “He
flew out of Kingman or Havasu City. Now what we’ve got to do is
see what flights go out on a Tuesday night at those airports between
two in the morning and, say, three. There can’t be many.”

“What if they go to
Chicago and Dallas? Little airports usually just feed big ones.”

“We’ll just hope the
other things we’re doing give us a break, and tell us which
one.”

“What other things?”

He pawed through her purse and
saw the apartment rental bill. “First thing is, put on some
gloves and mail this in with some cash. I want to make sure his
landlord doesn’t evict him, in case we need to go back there.”

“Okay. But where would he
fly?”

“Put yourself in his
place. This woman must have asked him what places he could go. He
can’t go to Atlantic City or Reno or some other place where
they gamble. He’s going to pick a place he knows a little
about. A place he likes, right?”

“I would think so. The
better he likes it, the longer he’ll stay put, and the harder
he’ll be to find.”

Earl clasped his hands behind
his head and stared at the ceiling. “No close relatives, no
permanent girlfriend, lots of friends, too many to narrow down…”

“Vacations?” asked
Linda. “Business trips?”

“Maybe. If we can get a
hotel charge on a credit report, we’ll have a place to start.”

Linda lay perfectly still. “I
just thought of something. He knows he’s in danger. He knows
she got him out in the nick of time. He’s never done this
before, and he doesn’t know if we’re stuck in this motel
or already staring at the back of his head, right?”

“That sounds right,”
said Earl. “But – ”

“What’s the first
thing he’s going to buy?”

“If he dumped his car at
some airport, he’ll buy another one.”

“I’m not saying he
won’t do that,” said Linda. “But what else do they
always do? They buy a gun. If he flew out, he doesn’t have one.
If she set all this up in a couple of days, she probably wouldn’t
have time to get him one and leave it for him in the new town. Unless
it’s stolen, she’d still have the five-day waiting
period.”

Earl grinned and squeezed her so
hard her neck hurt. “Whatever else he does, he’ll do
that. And that puts him on a list. It’s a list we can get,
because it’s a public record. She’ll probably tell him
not to, but the minute he’s on his own in a strange place,
looking over his shoulder, he’ll do it.” He sat down and
wrote more notes. “First, we’ve got to find out what
airport he used, then what flight he took. Tomorrow I think we’ll
drive into Arizona and see if we can find a car with Nevada plates
that got left in one of those two airports at two in the morning on
Tuesday.”

Linda Thompson pumped harder on
the stationary bike, slowly adding speed, watching the digital
readout on the little electronic podium in front of the handlebars.
Thirty miles an hour, thirty-five, forty. She moved her legs faster,
then pushed the thumb-lever forward to jump to a higher gear, and the
speedometer told her she was going fifty. She gradually worked the
gears back until the pedaling was almost effortless. She kept moving
her legs for a long time to avoid getting knots in her muscles, but
she had lost interest in the machine. Nobody went fifty on a bicycle.
The scale was designed to give suckers a warm, cozy feeling.

She dismounted and looked out
the glass wall of the exercise room. She was still alone. The gawkers
were probably at their sales meetings. She went to the weight area,
did a few more bench presses, a few more curls, then went to work on
her latissimus dorsi, always using light weights and many repetitions
to keep the muscles supple and avoid adding ugly body mass.

She had been eager to begin
hunting, and it was frustrating to be stalled for days right at the
start. Hatcher might have been dumb enough to ditch the car at me
Kingman airport or the Havasu airport, but the woman had not been
dumb enough to let him. Earl wasn’t saying it yet, but none of
the flights out of either airport fit the schedule. The woman
wouldn’t set it up so that Hatcher had to drive out of Las
Vegas at midnight and wait in an airport until seven for a flight.
That was the kind of thing they did later, when she and Earl were
getting close, and they were scared and desperate. At the beginning
they still had a choice, and the first moves were smooth and
efficient.

She walked into the tiny
changing area and came out the other door in her swimsuit, cap, and
goggles. She ran her toes along the surface of the water and verified
that it was cold. It was a pretty good trick to have a cold swimming
pool in a place where it was over a hundred degrees in the shade. She
slipped in and endured the shock, then began to swim slowly up and
down, warming her body and letting the long, slow strokes stretch the
muscles and clear her lungs. It was already nearly eleven, so she
decided she would do only a half mile and get out. Hotels started to
get busy around noon, even in places like Havasu, Arizona. She
resented having to do everything in the morning each day. Linda was a
night person.

When she had finished her swim,
she slipped back into the dressing room, and in a few minutes she was
walking back up the hallway of the hotel. She opened the door and
found Earl sitting at the table, tapping the keys of the laptop
computer. Then she saw that the bags were packed.

“What is it?” she
asked. “What are you looking at?”

“Airline schedules.”
Earl grinned that strange grin he had. At times like this his face
seemed more animal than human. “I think I figured out why none
of the flights he could have gotten out of Arizona fit.”

“Why not?” She set
down her gym bag and waited. She was relieved that he had not made
her bring that up. But he must have found something else. He actually
looked happy.

“Listen carefully,”
said Earl. “He takes the car from the parking lot in Las Vegas.
It’s about midnight. He drives two hours south toward Kingman
or Havasu, Arizona. What time is it?”

Linda shrugged. “Two
o’clock. Nothing takes off for four or five hours, and then
it’s just local stuff.”

“Right. Suppose he doesn’t
drive to Arizona. Suppose he drives north about a hundred and eighty
miles at sixty miles an hour. He’s at Cedar City, Utah. What
time is it?”

“Three o’clock.”

“Nope. Four o’clock.
He’s crossed from the Pacific time zone into Mountain.”

Linda sat on the bed. “But
Utah is in the same time zone as Arizona.”

“Yeah, but Arizona doesn’t
do daylight savings time. That’s why we didn’t have to
set the clocks forward when we got here.” He looked at her
intently. “Okay. He’s driven three hours to Cedar City.
It’s four o’clock. What time is it in Las Vegas?”

Linda lay back on the bed and
stared at the ceiling. “Three o’clock. She’s just
finishing up with Seaver’s men.”

Earl nodded. “We ruled out
Cedar City because it was too far to reach before Seaver’s men
started looking. I would have ruled out his flight, too, because it
left so late. She couldn’t have hoped to buy him enough time to
make it, so why would she bother to buy him any time at all? But it
wasn’t late. It was just the amount of time she was buying for
him. It’s Flight 493 to Denver, at four eighteen a.m.”

Earl looked at her expectantly,
but she opened her suitcase, took out a comb, and walked to the
mirror.

“Aren’t you
interested?”

“Interested?” asked
Linda. “Oh, sure.”