Shadow Woman (28 page)

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.