by Thomas Perry
Jane stepped into her room. She stripped off the wet suit quickly in the bathroom and hung it in the shower. She glanced at her own naked body in the mirror and caught herself making the comparison that seemed inevitable at this strange instant in her life. It made her feel a little better: she was not the hag she was feeling like. She was pretty.
She stepped into a pair of jeans and pulled a sweatshirt over her head. At the door she stopped, stood absolutely still, and took a breath. Why am I doing this? Because if I sit in this room alone, I could wake up alone and wish I had kept him from getting himself killed.
She blew out the breath, closed the door behind her, and walked to the women’s room. The light was on, so she was sure it was the right one. She knocked. The door opened a crack, and she pushed it cautiously to come inside. The connecting door to the next room was open, and a dim light was on in there too. Carol, the copper-haired one, emerged from the next room still in her bathing suit, set two glasses of brown liquor and bubbles on the table, and headed into the bathroom. She stopped in front of the mirror and began to blow-dry her hair with a loud dryer. She yelled over it, “Where are you two from?”
Jane picked up the drink that was closest to her and walked to the doorway of the bathroom. “More important, where are Jim and Pam now?”
Carol clicked off the dryer and began brushing her hair, an amused little smile on her face. “Didn’t they come in there?” Then she stopped brushing. “Why, that little …”
Jane turned toward the open connecting door and Carol stepped to her side. “If you can’t see them, do you really want to go next door looking for them?”
“Probably not.” She took an experimental sip of her drink. It was warm and sweet, like bug repellent.
“Are you really his sister?”
“Sure.”
“You don’t look like him.”
“Different fathers. Our mother was a magnet for bums.” Jane wasn’t sure why she had chosen to make up this kind of story, but it fit her mood. It occurred to her that Pete could easily be telling a different story. “Jimmy might not tell you that, because it’s not nice. And I think men make up nice stories because they need a father they can admire. But we’re all grown-up women here. Are you and Pam related?”
“Just friends,” said Carol. She pulled down the top of her bathing suit and Jane looked away involuntarily to see if Pete was behind her seeing this. But the door to the next room was now closed. Carol slipped the tight suit down from her hips, and Jane looked at her objectively. She had been given to understand that men liked red hair, and hers was at least real.
Carol caught her eye and smiled. “We’re on vacation together from the car agency.” She cocked her head. “You wish we’d drop dead, don’t you?”
“No,” Jane lied. “Why would you think that?”
Carol found a small perfume bottle in the shoulder bag on the counter and dabbed a bit on her neck, then another on her belly, close to the patch of red hair. The little smile was conspiratorial. Jane’s stomach felt hollow. Carol leaned close to the mirror and began to make up her eyes. “I don’t know. That’s what I was wondering.”
“That’s not the way I feel,” said Jane. “But he’s my little brother, and maybe I’m protective.” She walked into the outer room and sat at the table.
In a few seconds Carol walked out to join her. Only then did she carelessly slip on a terrycloth robe and tie it. She sat on the bed and switched on the television with no sound. “I guess you should be protective,” she said. “He’s such a hunk. Of course, if you’re his sister, he probably doesn’t strike you that way.”
“I can see,” said Jane. She needed to add something malicious. “He seems to attract one after another.”
It didn’t seem to touch Carol. She shrugged. “Life is short. He might as well have some fun.”
Slowly, against all of Jane’s hopes, she began to hear faint noises coming from the next room. The walls were so thin that they muffled none of the sounds. There was a soft, female moan, and then the springs of the bed. She needed to talk. “You said you and Pam work together?”
Carol stared at the silent screen of the television set, but Jane could see she was listening to the sounds behind the door. “Uh-huh.”
“And this is your vacation. Have you been up in the mountains?”
Carol looked at her, the blue eyes focused on something behind Jane’s head. “A couple of hikes.” The voice in the next room was up an octave now, and louder, sounding almost distressed. “Oh,” it said. “Oh, oooh, yes. Please.”
Jane considered that this was one possible way that hell could be. It was torment, and it was designed to make her know, and to feel, that she was bad and weak. She could do nothing but talk to this idiot on the bed, and talking to her was like looking in a mirror and seeing a grotesque parody of herself. Carol was lying there and the robe barely covered her anymore, but she didn’t think to close it, and her face showed that she wasn’t just hearing, she was listening, and wishing more fervently each second that it were she instead of her friend. “Are there any good hikes that we shouldn’t miss?” asked Jane. “We’ve been sticking to the road a lot.”
“No,” said Carol absently. “I don’t really think it’s much fun.” She turned to glance at Jane, then said to the television set, “You get hot, and sweaty, and out of breath.” She lifted her glass to her lips, tasted it, and made a face.
“What’s wrong?” asked Jane. Talk, damn you.
“These taste awful without ice. We need ice.”
Jane almost sprang to her feet. “I’ll get some,” she said. “Do you know where the ice machine is?”
Carol shook her head. “I’ll get it. It’s around a couple of corners.” She stood and walked to the door. Jane noticed that she put no shoes on her feet. She paused and studied the two room keys on the table, then seemed unable to remember which one fit this room and slipped both into the pocket of her robe.
For the first few seconds, Jane was relieved to be out of Carol’s company. But as minutes passed, the sounds from the next room seemed to grow louder and more frequent. Jane tried not to hear them, then knew that there was no way not to hear them and let them induce clear, detailed visual images in the mind. She was ashamed, and she resented having to feel that way. Her mouth was dry and she detested the drink in her hand, and she needed to clear her throat, but if she did, then Pete and the blonde would hear her, and it would show them that it was impossible for her to be in this room without eavesdropping. She could not even deny to herself that she was listening now, feeling each minute that this was some low ebb in her life and that it was sinking lower, and she with it.
Then Jane heard a new sound. For a few seconds, she wondered why it had surprised her. It was the voice of Carol, coming to her through the connecting door like the other one. “Oh, Jim,” it said. “Oh, Jim.” Jane carried her drink to the bathroom sink and poured it out. Then she walked out of the room. When she reached her own room, she remembered that Pete still had the key in his pocket.
She was not going back. She picked a credit card out of her wallet without looking at it, curved it a little so it would fit between the door and the jamb to depress the plunger, then slipped inside and stood alone in the darkness.
She was amazed. She had left her husband and rushed all the way out here, maybe to walk in front of a gun muzzle, because that man had called for help. Then she had carefully piled up day after day of invisible, anonymous travel to let his trail get cold. Now he was busy burning up all of her efforts, making himself as memorable as any human being could be to two women who probably couldn’t wait to meet the next strange man in the next hotel. She hated Pete Hatcher. He had done this to punish her for rejecting him—wanted to make her imagine, know what she had thrown away, and learn to want it. No, that was too simpleminded. It had been for both of them, to prove that he was still attractive, still manly, still Pete. He had done that better than she would ever let him know. The word ever struck
her ear as accurate, so she said it aloud: “Ever.”
23
She heard him before he put the key in the lock. She let him sneak in without acknowledging his presence, or the bright sunlight that shone in the door when he opened it. She had gone out twice during the night to walk the perimeter of the hotel grounds, studying the cars in the parking lot and the windows of rooms that were on the court, but had seen nothing that worried her, and then she had slept.
She waited until ten to get out of bed. While she was in the shower he got up too, and she found him packing his suitcase. “Good morning,” she said, carefully modulating her voice to sound as cheerful and unconcerned as she could.
“Good morning,” he answered. He stepped past her into the bathroom without meeting her eyes, and then she heard the shower for a long time.
She finished packing, latched her suitcase, and spent a few minutes selecting identities for the day. Today they would be Tony and Marie Spellagio, who had not yet made an appearance in Montana. She laid their credit cards and driver’s licenses on the bed in a row, so that Pete could examine hers too.
Then she made her preliminary inspection of the grounds through the windows. It was another perfect late-summer day in the Rockies, with the sun glaring from what seemed to be just over their heads, and no sign that anyone was near enough to be watching.
Pete came out fully dressed and with hair wet from the shower, picked up his cards and both suitcases, and followed the usual routines. He set the suitcases down beside the car, dropped something so he could look beneath it, peered under the hood, and then loaded the trunk while Jane checked out. She came back and said, “You want to eat breakfast before we move on?”
“No,” he said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get down the road a bit before we stop.”
Jane nodded and got into the passenger seat. She was not sure whether he was feeling queasy from the syrupy drinks or wanted to be gone before his little playmates woke up. As he drove off the lot onto the highway, he answered her question. “I don’t want to run into Pam and Carol.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“Because they want to travel with us for a few days. It came up last night. I can’t think of a good way to refuse without hurting their feelings. Everything I tried last night had an answer. This way I’m a jerk, and that will burn off the attraction. Because I left them both, neither one will take it personally. In a day or two they won’t mention me, even to each other.”
Jane did not speak, because he was probably right. His famous understanding of women seemed to have come back to him. It shouldn’t have been a surprise: he had given himself a giant dose of femininity in the past twelve hours. She studied her road map.
They stopped outside a big restaurant in Swan Lake. There was no evidence on the signs on nearby businesses that the name referred to anything but a lake that had once had swans in it. They walked inside and the head waitress noticed them. “Would you like to sit inside, or outside on the terrace?”
Pete glanced at Jane, who said, “Inside” and moved into the interior of the restaurant. “Is that booth over there taken?”
“No,” said the waitress, “but I could seat you by the window if you like.”
“No, thanks,” said Jane.
When the woman had left the menus and returned to her post by the door, Pete said, “What’s wrong? Are you hungover?”
Jane leaned forward, her forearms on the table, so she could talk quietly. “It’s a beautiful spot, so most people want to sit where they can see it. This time you don’t want what everybody else wants.”
“I don’t?”
“Sitting here is a precaution that costs you nothing, loses you nothing. It makes you invisible to anybody but the people to the side of this booth.”
His eyes moved to the side. “There aren’t any people to the side of this booth.”
She smiled. “That’s why I picked this one instead of another. Almost all precautions are simple and effortless. After a time you’ll take them without thinking each one through. The important thing is that you look at each situation and modify it to make yourself comfortable. If there’s a choice between a tiny bit of vulnerability and none at all, you pick none.”
“I thought the best place to hide was in a crowd.”
“It can be. If a crowd is immobile and on display, then it can’t hide you. If what you want it for is to hold off shooters by surrounding yourself with witnesses, then twenty is better than a thousand, because they can’t shoot even twenty, and all of them will see. So you don’t stand in long lines to go to movies or plays or games. You do your waiting at home. When the movie has been out a month, you can walk right in.”
“What if it’s a game? You can’t wait a month for that.”
“Watch it on television. If it’s so important to you that you still want to go, then it’s important enough to pay for the safest seats in the stadium.”
“Which are those?”
“Down near the field. The only ones who can see your face in a stadium are the ones below you. A hunter scanning for you would look up toward the seats in the back—not only because the back seats feel like a hiding place to an amateur, but because they’re all the hunter can see. So you pick the front seats. Everything is a choice.” She smiled. “You’re getting a feel for this. All you have to do is keep trying it out in different situations until they’re all automatic.”
Another waitress arrived and took their orders, then bustled off to the kitchen window to clip it to a stainless-steel wheel for the cooks to read.
Pete stared at the table. “ ‘Different situations.’ You’re trying to be tactful about the mistakes I made last night, aren’t you?”
Jane looked away for a moment, then back to him. “What was wrong last night? You tell me.”
“We met two strangers. I let them get too close before I was sure they were okay.”
“Go on.”
“I went to their room. Somebody could have been waiting.”
She waited, but that was all he was willing to say. “Or been called in by one of them while the other one … kept you busy. Prostitutes have been robbing clients for thousands of years, so the routines are pretty slick by now. You couldn’t know all of them.”
“For starters, they weren’t prostitutes.”
“I’m teaching you how to live by your wits, not by luck. Neither of us knew anything about them when they showed up. What about my mistakes?”
“Yours?”
“Sure. You can learn from those too.”
He seemed shocked. After a moment, he said, “I guess you let them get too close.”
“Good. I never saw them coming until they were by the corner of the building. I should have kept scanning the entrances to the courtyard while I was swimming.”
“Like those Secret Service guys,” he said sadly. “What a way to live.”
“It would have been easier than that. All I had to do was keep my mind on the possibility, and looking would have been unavoidable. As it happened, it didn’t matter. As soon as I saw them, I was certain they weren’t dangerous.”
“How?”
“They showed up in the skimpiest suits imaginable.” She saw Pete wince, but she went on. “In certain situations that would be ominous. Maybe they had been sent to distract you, keep you from looking in another direction. But it also let us see that they couldn’t be armed. And their presence wouldn’t make it any easier for someone else to kill you: they might get hit in the dark, and they could hardly expect me to be stupefied by the sight of a girl in a bikini.”
“Stupefied?”
“I’m sorry,” said Jane. “Distracted.”
“I’m the one who’s sorry. Once again.”
Jane’s eyes flicked to his face and then around the dining room. He was miserable, and she wasn’t being fair. “I guess we have to clear the air some more, don’t we?”
Pete shrugged. His face was apologetic and appealing, like a little boy who w
anted to be forgiven.
Jane took a deep breath and saw the waitress striding toward them on rubber soles, carrying a tray. Jane waited until the waitress had served them, said, “Enjoy your meal,” and hurried away.
“Back to that air,” she said. “I’m a guide. I lead people who are about to be killed to places where nobody wants to kill them. I give them pieces of paper that say they’re somebody else. To the extent that I can, I train them to be the new person—how to look, act, think. If they’re being actively hunted, I give them a few tricks that can fool hunters.”
“And?”
“And then I turn them loose and go home.” Jane stared into his eyes and watched him to see if he understood everything she was saying. There was light behind his eyes, but it seemed only to be the life force, the glow of the eyes of a big, healthy animal.
“What is he like?”
Jane stiffened. “That wasn’t … I wasn’t talking about him.”
“No,” he said. “You know everything about other people, but they’re not supposed to know anything about you.”
It wasn’t a statement Jane could ignore. “It’s true, and it’s not an accident. It protects him, and it protects me, and it protects you. When I take on a person like you, we both have to be aware that some day I might very well be caught. Years from now I might be asked where you are and what name I gave you. There are things that could be done to make me want very much to tell. My promise to you is simply that I won’t tell. If there’s no other way, I’ll commit suicide to avoid it.”
“Really?”
“Really.” She let the knowledge settle on him for a moment. He seemed unable to take the next step. “If I tell you about my family and friends, are you willing to do the same before you’ll tell anyone?”
He thought about it for a long time. “I would want to. I don’t think I could.”
“And you don’t have to, because you don’t know about them. But I can’t help knowing about you, so I’m stuck. I gave my word.”
Pete nodded thoughtfully. “We’re back to last night, aren’t we?”