Shadow Woman (51 page)

A young man’s voice came
on. “What city, please?”

“North Hollywood.”

“Go ahead.”

“Do you have a number for
Leonard Tilden, T-I-L-D-E-N?”

The young man was gone, and in
his place was the familiar female voice of the information computer.
“The… number… is – ” Jane hung up.

The man she was interested in
was the other one, the man who had carried the fancy sniper rifle.
The little packet that contained his license, three gold credit
cards, and one platinum card also contained fifty hundred-dollar
bills. She dialed the Information operator again and asked for the
number of Earl Bliss in Northridge. The computer came on and said,
“We re sorry. That number is unlisted.”

She slipped the two men’s
identification cards into one pocket and the money into the other.
Then she repacked the suitcases, making sure that everything the men
had left here was inside. As she was about to go and load all of the
luggage into their vehicle, she heard a sharp rapping on the door.
She dropped quietly to the floor, held her breath, and listened.

Calvin Seaver waited on the
doorstep and knocked again. He had stopped in Missoula to buy a down
jacket, but his feet were wet and cold after the short walk from his
room to Earl’s. He listened at the door but heard nothing. He
thought about the size and configuration of his own room, tried to
imagine not hearing a knock on the door, and found that he couldn’t.
He rapped on the door a third time, harder, but he had already
admitted to himself that his wait was not over yet. He had thought
that maybe the new vehicle he had noticed in the parking lot had
meant that Earl and Linda had returned, but apparently it hadn’t.
He stepped back along the snow-covered walk, placing his feet in his
own footprints, opened the door of his room, and went inside.

He stepped to the corner of his
room, where his suitcase sat on a folding stand, opened it, and took
out his other pair of shoes and a dry pair of socks. He looked at
them, then put them back. The snow had not gone away. He had heard
that once it began to fall in the Rockies, it often never went away
until spring. A dry pair of shoes wouldn’t stay that way long
enough to get him to his car. He was going to have to drive down the
street to one of those upscale sporting goods stores and buy himself
a pair of warm waterproof boots and some wool socks. If he got going
right away, there would probably be some places open.

He sat at the desk and tried to
anticipate the mistakes he might be making. After a moment of
thought, he quickly wrote a note on a sheet of paper from the phone
pad in front of him and looked at it. “Come see me in Room
3165.” He fretted for a long time about the signature. He had
been very careful so far. He had not left a message on Earl’s
answering machine or put anything in writing that could connect him
to Earl if anything went wrong. He had paid the up-front money in
cash that had come in across the tables in the casino. He had found
Earl here without speaking to outsiders.

He had been able to do it
because of a combination of luck and curiosity. When he had met with
Earl and Linda in Los Angeles, they had made the deal in the car and
had eaten lunch in a restaurant without saying anything that could be
overheard. When the waitress had brought the check, Seaver had pulled
out a credit card to pay it. But Earl had shaken his head and said
gruffly, “I’d better pay that.” Seaver had
hesitated, but Earl’s eyes had told him that he considered this
a part of their business relationship, so he had put away his wallet.
He had expected Earl to pay in cash so no record of the meeting would
be created, but Earl had used a credit card, added a big tip, and
signed with a flourish. It had caught Seaver’s attention that
the name he had signed seemed to be much longer than Earl Bliss. As
Earl and Linda had stood up to leave, Seaver had surreptitiously
opened the leather folder, glanced at the receipt, and seen that the
name was Donald R. Brookings. As soon as Seaver had arrived in
Kalispell he had called Pleasure, Inc. and asked that the credit
department add to today’s long list of names for credit checks
the name Donald R. Brookings. When he called again, he learned that
Donald R. Brookings had charged meals and rooms in Lake Havasu,
Denver, and various places in Montana. The last ones were for this
motel in Kalispell.

Now Seaver was in a delicate
situation. If Earl Bliss got a note that was not signed, he might
think just about anything. He might imagine it was a note from
Hatcher and the dark-haired woman, inviting him to talk about a
buyout of his contract. That could not be anything but an ambush.
Earl would know that, and he would respond by arranging to have
something ugly happen in this room suddenly and without warning.

And Earl had been in this
business for a long time. There might be any number of loose ends and
potential paybacks swimming around in that fevered brain of his that
Seaver didn’t know about. Earl might kill Seaver tonight in the
dark just because he was about the size of one of Earl’s loose
ends. What was already happening was risky enough. Seaver was showing
up and surprising Earl Bliss either just before or just after Earl
had killed somebody.

Seaver tried to look at the
issue of the signature from a positive point of view. Would leaving
an unsigned note in the room down the walk protect Seaver from
suspicion if the ones who found it were the police? No. It had his
room number on it. He wrote “Seaver” clearly at the
bottom of the page. Seaver looked at it for a moment, crumpled it up,
and threw it into the wastebasket. What had he been thinking of? This
was not the time to get impatient and do something foolish.

Seaver walked back past Earl’s
room and slogged off through the snow toward his car. When he got to
it, he had to clean the snow off the windshield and the rear window
with his bare hands. He started the engine and then sat in the car
holding his cold fingers over the defroster for a minute or two until
the numbness went away and he felt ready to drive. While he was at
it, he would buy some gloves, too, and a hat.

Jane crouched behind the door
and listened. When the knocking on the door had stopped, she had
watched the man walk off and disappear into Room 3165. She had waited
a few minutes, then returned to the work of packing up the men’s
belongings. She’d had a half-formed plan to take all of them
out the back window of the room and bring the Toyota around the
building and out of sight before she began loading.

But then she had been startled
by the heavy crunching sound of footsteps outside the door. She
crouched beside it and clutched the pistol she had taken off the
second man. She stayed where she was, barely breathing, until she
heard the footsteps again, this time getting fainter as the man moved
off across the lot.

She recovered a little of her
composure as she watched the man ineptly sweep the thick layer of
new-fallen snow off his windshield and rear window onto his own feet,
then drive off and have the pile of snow he had left on the roof
slide down to cover his rear window again. The snow meant that the
car had been here for hours, and the dress shoes and suit pants the
man was wearing meant that he had probably come here from somewhere
else and been caught unprepared by the early snowfall.

Jane’s eyes rested on the
elaborate carrying case for the fancy sniper rifle. She put on her
gloves, knelt on the floor beside it, opened it, and began to take
out the rifle parts that she had hidden in her pack and place them,
one by one, in the precisely shaped indentations of the travel case.
Magazine here, suppressor here, foregrip here, bolt here, buttstock
here. There was a peculiar satisfaction to the task. It was like
feeling the pieces of a puzzle slip perfectly into the spaces where
they belonged.

When she had finished, she
loaded all of the items she had found in the room into the Toyota.
Then she carefully walked down the snowy pavement, stepping in the
man’s footprints to Room 3165. She used a credit card to open
the door and looked around her: a single suitcase, a suit hanging in
the closet. She searched the suitcase, but there was nothing in it
but men’s clothing with brand names that could be bought
anywhere. She went to the closet and looked at the label sewn inside
the coat of the suit: Callicott Haberdashery, Las Vegas. It could
hardly be a coincidence that a man who bought his clothes in Las
Vegas had knocked on the door of the two shooters she had met in the
Montana mountains. He must be one of the team.

She went into the bathroom and
looked at the items he had left on the counter: razor, toothpaste,
comb, hairbrush, deodorant – just the usual stuff. She stepped
back into the other room and noticed the wastebasket. She reached
inside, unfolded the single piece of crumpled paper, and read it:
“Come see me in Room 3165. Seaver.”

She had heard that name. Seaver
was one of the names that Pete had mentioned when he was talking
about the casino. Seaver was the one who had been told somebody was a
problem just before Pete had read an obituary. But he hadn’t
been some hit man. He was the chief of security for the whole
company.

Jane put the crumpled paper back
into the wastebasket. Seaver was the customer, the one who had hired
the killers. He was the one who had been sitting in Las Vegas all
this time, comfortable and immune, while they had gone out to hunt
Pete Hatcher for him. They had murdered a young policeman in Denver
and some unsuspecting tourist in Swan Lake, but nothing they had done
could ever reflect on Seaver. He had kept his distance until now.
What was he doing up here? Was he checking up on his employees? No.
What could he say that would have made them try harder, and what
sanctions could he apply if they failed? Probably he had considered
it safer to hand them their final payment as soon as they came out of
the mountains so they wouldn’t knock on his door in Las Vegas.
It didn’t matter. He was here.

Jane hurried out to the Toyota,
took one piece of luggage out of the cargo bay, went back into
Seaver’s room, and knelt to slide it under the bed.

Jane drove to a supermarket in
Whitefish, unloaded the rest of the men’s belongings into the
big Dumpster behind the building, then drove back to Kalispell. It
was the middle of the night when she parked the Toyota outside the
gate of the rental agency. She threw the key over the fence so it hit
the door of the office and dropped to the top step, where they
couldn’t help finding it. Then she walked to the small airport
at the edge of town and paid in hundred-dollar bills for a seat on
the first flight to Los Angeles.

It was not until she was sure
the weather had cleared enough and her flight was boarding that she
went to a pay telephone and made her call to the police. She said
quickly, “There’s a man in Room 3165 at the Rocky
Mountain Lodge. He told me last night he killed that guy over in Swan
Lake.” The woman on the other end was talking over her
insistently, saying, “Your name, please. Give me your name.”
But Jane said, “He showed me the gun,” and hung up.
Probably the woman had not picked up everything she was saying, but
it didn’t matter. They recorded all the calls, and in a minute
she would be playing it back for some superior.

Seaver
was in a daze. None of this felt real to him. The cell was like
something out of the movies: old, with things written on the walls
that had come from a succession of madmen stretching back at least a
generation, thoughts that no functioning brain could contain scrawled
in letters like shrieks, with every fifth word misspelled, and
anatomical pictures that made him queasy.

Seaver couldn’t be here,
not in his waking life. When the door had burst inward onto the floor
he had been lying in bed, so maybe he had been asleep and what he saw
now just proved that his subconscious was getting better at
constructing nightmares. The guns had all been pointed at him as the
intruders sidestepped to spread out around the bed. Some of the men
had looked at him with cold contempt, but the faces of others were
empty, just concentrating on lining up the sights with his chest, his
head, his belly, waiting to fire.

He had known enough to lie
motionless on his back, both arms stretched out from his sides as
though he were being crucified. He had known that speaking was a bad
strategy, not only because he might say something that would come
back to haunt him but also because it was in his best interest to
keep the ones with the empty faces calm. They would do the job they
had been sent to do, and then they would realize they had the wrong
man and leave.

Then one of them had dropped to
his belly, slithered under the bed, and dragged out a long, narrow
case, opened it, and nodded to the leader before he closed it. “He’s
got it,” he said.

Rough hands had rolled Seaver
onto his belly, applied the handcuffs, dragged him to a car, and
driven him to the local police station.

While he had been fingerprinted
and photographed and searched and pushed into the cell, he had been
thinking frantically, trying to catch up with time. They had to be
after Earl. Somehow Earl had done this to him – read the note,
slipped the gun under the bed, and left. Then Linda had called the
police on the way out of town. He wanted to shout, “But why?”
loudly enough so they could hear it. Was it just because he had
violated the unspoken terms of their agreement and come to Montana?
Or could Earl have thought that Seaver had grown so impatient that he
had come here to get his advance money back?

Seaver kept reminding himself
that it didn’t matter. He was in trouble, and he had to
concentrate on what was going on now. The police had found his false
driver’s license and credit cards. They had performed a trace
metal detection test on his hands by swabbing them with
hydroxyquinoline and holding them under ultraviolet light. He was
fairly sure he was in the clear on that one, because the glowing
purplish specks that indicated steel and brass were small enough to
be ambiguous.