by Thomas Perry
“Where are we going now?”
“First, we’ll drop out of sight completely for a few days, to let the trail get cold. Then we’ll start all over again, and do this right. I’ll hide you somewhere, but I’ll stick around this time until I’m sure we’ve lost them for good. I’ll give you a few lessons I should have given you the first time. I’ll help you get used to the next new name, new place, new life. Then I’ll leave for good.”
“You said the first thing is dropping out of sight. How do you do that?”
“The best way is to do nothing.” She smiled. “Missoula looks like a good place to start doing it. We’ll buy you a new suitcase, check into a motel, and see if you got lucky and lost them. In fact, that’s the good part about what I was saying, and I almost forgot to tell you. They’re pros, and from what I can tell, they’re near the upper end of the scale of people who could be called that. That means we avoid them or we’re dead: there isn’t any mystery about the outcome. But the nice thing about pros is that they’re in it for the money.”
“So?”
“They get paid in two ways. One is that they get all of it when they’ve killed you. The other is that the client gives them some money up front for expenses, and the rest when they’ve got you. Either way, your best friend is time. They’ve just wasted three months for nothing, and spent a lot of money traveling. People like that could have made a lot in three months. Hardly anybody is very difficult to kill. If the client is paying for all this, then by now he’s going to be wondering what he’s getting for his money.”
“I still don’t get it. How does this help me?”
“If you wait long enough, pros go away.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not. They don’t hate you. They’re in a business. At the moment when they calculate that the job is a waste of effort, they quit. If they’re getting paid for expenses, the time comes when the client makes the same calculation and stops paying.”
“Then I’ll be safe?”
She cocked her head and pursed her lips, then said reluctantly, “Not exactly. At least not yet.”
“Why not?”
“The client in your case can afford to replace them. But the replacement would have to start all over again at Las Vegas. Pros aren’t likely to turn over their information to competitors.” She shrugged. “I’m not saying you’re in the best position possible, but there are worse.”
“What’s worse than being chased by professional killers?”
She thought for a moment. “I guess the worst is if you’ve committed some really awful crime and people know it.”
“What would you do for a person like that?”
“Nothing,” she said.
16
Seaver drove along the desert highway, watching the long, empty gray road ahead wavering near the distant vanishing point as heat waves rose from the pavement. Now and then a dark reflective spot would appear on the road, the eyes would see it as water, but the brain would say “mirage,” and it would diminish to nothing as he approached it. He drove quickly, feeling the slight lift of the car’s springs as he reached the crest of each little rise, then feeling his body regain a few pounds more than its weight as the car came to the bottom and began the next climb.
Seaver was satisfied that he was going about this in the right way. The three partners had ultimately left the strategy up to him. Earl and Linda were probably getting close to payday by now, so whatever he did, he had to avoid getting in their way. He might have left a message on their answering machine, asking them to get in touch with him. But leaving a message like that on the answering machine of two professional killers required an absolute belief that they could not get caught, recognized, or traced on this job. The world didn’t always work that way. Anybody who had worked in Las Vegas for ten years had seen the ball stop on the double zero a few times.
He had considered tracing their movements and trying to catch up with them. But Earl would not look upon his sudden, uninvited appearance as a favor. It was, in the way these people looked at things, a terrible insult and a violation of their agreement.
Seaver suddenly showing up would mean that there were three people for bystanders to notice, instead of just two. And he would have traveled there by a separate route. That doubled the number of trails that later might be traced to Hatcher’s body. He was not at all sure that he wanted to place himself in some distant city with those two at the precise moment when he convinced them that he was so unprofessional and unreliable as to be an actual danger to them.
No, what he was doing made more sense. Earl and Linda were looking for Hatcher. He was looking for the woman. After he found her would be the time to think about meeting them. Then he would have something to bring to the party.
He had assigned five men just to talk to people who were in the chase-and-find business—skip tracers, retrievers who worked for bail-bond outfits, freelance bounty hunters—to see if any of them had ever come across a woman like this. A few of them had heard vague stories, but none of them knew anything that could lead to an actual living woman. It was then that he had realized that he was going about solving the problem backward.
The people most likely to know about her would be the ones in the run-and-hide business. He had called an old friend from the police department who had quit at about the same time he had and had gone to work in the California prison system. Seaver had not described his problem but had described the sort of prisoner he wanted to talk to. He needed one who had been in lots of jails in different parts of the country and who had drawn a long sentence the last time out. But most important, it had to be one who had a history of trading information for favors.
Seaver saw the low, drab buildings, the fence, and the watch-towers undulating in the heat waves across a barren field far back from the highway. He turned up the long, narrow drive that led to the small parking lot outside the gate and glanced at his watch. The drive out here had taken longer than he had expected, but he supposed it wouldn’t much matter. In order to miss this guy, Seaver would have to be about twenty years late.
As he turned off his car engine, he stopped to glance in the rearview mirror. Then he got out and put on his coat. He had chosen his clothes carefully. He wore a dark-gray summer-weight suit that cost more than his first new car. His white shirt was marine-pressed with the front and collar starched stiff, and the cuffs showed only a glimpse of his Rolex Oyster watch. A naive observer would have interpreted the bow tie as a whimsical touch, but Seaver didn’t expect to meet any naive observers. He was going into a maximum-security prison, where it was well known that nobody with a functioning brain wore anything tied around his neck with a slip-knot.
He walked to the gate, handed his driver’s license to the guard, watched him compare it to the list on his clipboard, then obeyed the invitation to step inside. He held up his arms and stood with his legs apart as the second guard ran a metal detector up and down his body, then ran a hand through several of his pockets. He submitted to the preliminaries patiently. Security was his business, and he knew that each stage of the process had two purposes. Scanning the human body for chunks of metal or contraband was the easy part. The hard part was studying the visitor to see if he had something hidden in his head. Each of these meaningless little steps was a test. A normal person would gradually get used to following the unfamiliar rules that applied in a place like this. The person hiding some rash and violent scheme would either feel his nerve draining out of him or get frustrated to the point of blind, undirected rage. Security was mainly a question of finding out whom you were letting breach your perimeter.
Seaver was directed into a small anteroom where he could be kept isolated until they were sure that he wasn’t carrying anything that would make him a match for more than one man and that the identification he had given them was real. After ten minutes he was admitted to a room with a desk, where he could be observed while he signed in and had time to check off his compliance with each of the r
egulations listed on a form and acquaint the guards with the purpose of his visit on another form. It was only after his forms had been completed, read, and determined to be satisfactory that the next door was opened and his escort beckoned to him.
When he walked through the doorway, he noted with approval that there were two guards, the first to lead the way and serve as turnkey and the second to follow a half step behind and to his right, either to protect Seaver’s weak side or take advantage of it, as events dictated.
They took him on a long trek down hallways broken at intervals by steel grates that had to be opened with a key and an electronic code. They walked under surveillance cameras recessed in wall niches that one prisoner standing on another’s shoulders could not reach and covered with plastic plates that would probably stop a bullet. He admired the premeditation of the system and felt a tiny twinge of envy at its blatancy. Here it was an advantage to be obvious—to convince inmates that escape was ludicrous, that movements inside the complex were monitored, and that disturbances could be isolated instantly. Seaver had to work under more difficult circumstances. The few devices and precautions he could use legally had to be subtle and decorative.
The two escorts led him into a windowless room with a bare wooden table and two chairs. He sat down in the chair facing the door and waited. He had sat for twenty minutes before the two guards reappeared with Stillman, Ray Q. He was a little above middle height, but he slouched the way violence-prone convicts often did, the hips forward and the back hunched in a question mark stance that invited an approaching stranger to take the first swing.
When Stillman turned to hold his wrists out for the guards to unlock his manacles, his back looked like the hood of a cobra, spreading wide as it rose from the thin waist, and then rounding inward at the top because of the slouch that kept the hands and knees forward and the gut pulled back.
The guard wordlessly declined to unlock the manacles. He simply glared at Stillman and left. Stillman’s predatory eyes focused on Seaver as he sat down, his thin lips coming up at the corners a little to convey his interpretation of the demonstration: I’m too dangerous for you.
Seaver reached into his shirt pocket and produced a pack of cigarettes, pulled the strip to remove the cellophane, tore off the foil, and thumped the pack to raise a cigarette. He lit one with a match, then held it out. Stillman reached across the table with both hands, stuck it in the corner of his mouth, rested his hands in his lap, and waited.
Seaver looked at him for a few seconds, then said, “I’m Seaver. I can’t get you out of here. I can’t get you a new trial. If you ever get a parole hearing, I won’t be there to tell them you cooperated in an investigation. I won’t be there at all.”
Stillman looked at him expectantly, and Seaver knew he had begun well. They were all experts in the ways that the system could be manipulated, and the ways that it couldn’t. After about two convictions they also knew that false hope worked on them like poison, and they hated anyone who tried to force it on them. “Here’s what I can do. Captain Michnik is an old friend of mine. If you have the answers to my questions, he will help you right now, starting today. You don’t have to wait six months for an official letter that’s never going to come.”
“What kind of help are you offering?”
“A little slack. You’ll get a better job, if what you want won’t be so obvious it’ll get you killed. If a guard is down on you, he’ll be rotated to another block. If you’ve done anything recently that you need to skate on, he’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”
“What does that cost me?”
“I heard something, and I want to know more about it.”
“What did you hear?”
“I heard there’s a woman who hides people.”
Stillman blew out a quick puff of smoke. “A lot of women hide people.”
Seaver slowly shook his head. “This one is a professional. If you’re in trouble, you hire her to get you out of it. She comes and whisks you away—makes you disappear. I guess she must get you a new name and new papers, maybe a job.”
“Which are you?”
“What?” snapped Seaver.
“You thinking of disappearing, or are you looking for somebody?” His head was cocked to the side, and his eyes squinted through the smoke.
Seaver gave a half smile and a snort. “Do I look like somebody who has that kind of problem?” He shot the cuffs of his immaculate white shirt so he could be sure Stillman saw his watch and the perfect fit of his tailored suit.
Stillman shrugged. “You look like somebody who might develop some problems if you got sent to a place like this—or even if somebody in here got out. If you know the captain, maybe you put some of them in.”
“Could be,” said Seaver.
Stillman nodded with amusement. “That’s it, isn’t it? Somebody you don’t want to turn your back on dropped out of sight?”
“No,” Seaver said. “I’m interested in this woman because she made somebody scarce that I want, but the last person he wants to see is me. I’d like to ask her about him.”
Stillman shifted in his chair and lifted both hands to pluck the cigarette from his lips. He stepped on it with deliberation. When he raised his face again his blue eyes were opaque, but Seaver could tell he was taking the offer seriously.
“I don’t know her.” Stillman grinned and held up his chained wrists. “I bet you could have guessed that.”
Seaver nodded. “But you’ve heard of her.”
Stillman nodded too. “If you’re in here long enough, you probably hear every way that words can be pulled together. I’d like to get a few favors. But there’s another side to this. If you can get me goodies, you can also get my ass kicked or worse. What I know is just rumors: thirdhand stuff. I send you off, you’re probably going to come back and tell the captain I shined you on. I don’t know you, but I know him.”
Seaver studied him. Something else was on his mind, and the only way to hear it was to get through the easy ones. “Okay, I’ve been warned. You tell me what you heard, and I won’t hold a grudge, as long as you don’t add anything of your own.” Then he added, as a precaution, “Anyway, I know plenty about her already, so I can figure out which parts you heard wrong.” He handed Stillman another cigarette and struck a match, then held it out so Stillman could lean into it and puff until the tip ignited.
Stillman leaned back and said, “Say there really is a woman like this? There would be people in the joint who know about her. Maybe they got helped by her once, then fucked up again and couldn’t get to her in time. Maybe they didn’t get to her even the first time, but they hope some day they’ll make it.” He smiled and shook his head. “Even though a germ couldn’t get out of here, about one in five of these guys thinks he can.”
Seaver’s smile mirrored Stillman’s. “A lot of sheets get tied together, but you don’t see many of them hanging outside the walls of these places.” He shrugged. “Anyway, this isn’t that kind of situation. I’m not interested in charging her with anything, or even putting her out of business. I want this guy, and I’ll pay her for him. She’s nothing to me.” He caught a hint of skepticism in Stillman’s stare, so he said quickly, “Of course, if she draws down on me, I’ll have to kill her. But even then, nobody would know you told me about her.”
Stillman put his tongue to his lips and spat out a flake of loose tobacco. “Okay, then I know some things.”
“Go on.”
“It’s probably none of it true. People talk about things like that. There’s a pair of Siamese twins in Vacaville they have to let out every other week, because one of them didn’t get convicted. There’s a four-fingered lawyer in San Diego who knows one thing they forget to do in almost every trial, so he can get anybody off who will send him a finger. One of the contractors who built this place was getting kickbacks on the materials, so just in case they caught him, he put a secret tunnel under the infirmary. There’s a woman who takes people out of the world and gives them new
lives.”
“A little bit past her prime with blond hair, right?”
“Not in the version I heard. It was black. She had long black hair, and she was nice looking. I don’t vouch for that, because in stories the girl is always that way. It wasn’t like you said before, either. I heard the way it works is, you have to come to her. And you have to clean yourself before you do. If you want to bring something you left behind—maybe what you stole, maybe a girlfriend—she’ll tell you you’re not ready for her. If what you want is another chance to kill the one who set you up, she’ll tell you to go do it and not come back. She’s in the running business, not the fighting business. You don’t just give up your name, you have to give up everything you ever were, ever saw or did. You’re a new person, who doesn’t know any of that.”
“I heard that,” Seaver lied. It occurred to him that maybe Hatcher wasn’t planning to resurface after all—that maybe this was all a waste of time. But it was way too late for that kind of thinking. It just weakened him, distracted him. The partners had made their decision, and they were waiting. “Where do you go?”
“You mean where does she take you?”
Seaver spoke patiently, almost respectfully. “No. You’re on the run. You collect a pile of money for her fee. Where do you take it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who did you hear all this from?”
“I heard it a few times, and I can’t sort out which part I heard which time. The first one was seven or eight years ago, in Alameda County Jail. It was an old guy, and he was telling a kid. See, the kid was in for the first time. They had a running tab on him. It started out as some kid thing—vandalism or something. He tried to run: resisting arrest. He hot-wired a car to get away: grand theft auto. He drove it fast until a police car crashed into him to run him off the road, so it was attempted vehicular manslaughter. He struggled, so it was assaulting a police officer. On and on. He tried to hang himself, but the old man cut him down with a shank he carried. He said to the kid, ‘You got to get yourself in shape so the guards don’t know about this. On the day of your arraignment, you’re going to get out on bail for a month or so while they dream up more charges. That’s your chance. But if they know you did this, they can keep you here and watch you.’ He helped the kid get rid of the homemade rope and cover the welts, and then told him about the woman.”