Shadow Woman jw-3

by Thomas Perry

  “If you want to be,” she said.

  “Why you said no.”

  She sighed. “Marriages are fragile. When you boil off all the nonsense, what they amount to is a promise.”

  She could tell he had no trouble understanding her. If she could break that promise to her own husband, then strangers like Pete Hatcher wouldn’t stand a chance. “Okay. I won’t grill you anymore.”

  “Keep asking questions. It’s what we’re doing together,” said Jane. “I want you to learn everything you can. I want you to get as good at this as I am, because in one more day I’m going to take you somewhere, get you settled, and go home. You’re my last trip.”

  He stared at her. “In a way, I’m glad,” he said. “I’m a little scared. One more day isn’t much time. But I’m glad for you. This is a crazy way to live.”

  “It took me a long time to reach that conclusion. I guess I had to find another way to live before I could admit it. But I’m taken care of. Let’s get rid of what’s still bothering you.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I seem to be having trouble imagining a future. That makes it hard to ask questions about it.”

  “I know some of it,” Jane said. “You’ll live in a place that’s pleasant, but maybe has a few security features most people wouldn’t pay extra for. This morning I was thinking that one of those small, gated developments might suit you. The identity I’m going to give you is terrific, so you could survive the checks they do on new residents. The rent-a-cops wouldn’t present much of an obstacle to the people who are after you, but the entry gates make it difficult for them to drive through and browse. They’re pros, so their main concern is getting out afterward.”

  “It sounds logical.”

  “We’ll find you a job. You were a manager in Las Vegas, so we’ll get you something at about the same level in the new town. It will have to be something where you have less contact with outsiders, so we’ll pick a company that limits it, somehow—maybe one that sells equipment only to doctors, or physicists, or—”

  “How?”

  “How what?”

  “How do I get a job at that level in a business I’ve never been in?”

  She smiled. “That’s something I’ll help you with. I’m a representative from an executive head-hunting agency. I’ve got a promising prospect. I sell you to them. I’ve already checked all your references, et cetera, so the company doesn’t have to.”

  “You can pull that off?”

  “Sure. I do it by not cheating too much. Your résumé won’t list your real college, but it will have equivalent courses from another one. Your references won’t come from Pleasure, Inc., but they’ll come from a company that has a similar corporate structure, and I won’t lie about your place in the hierarchy. And I’ll be very clear about my fee.”

  “You actually collect a fee?”

  “Of course. It will be the same fee other companies like mine charge. Otherwise your employers would know I’m a fraud.”

  “So now I have a condo and a job. Good start.”

  “A condo in the center of the development, that can’t be watched from outside the gate. A job you like and are qualified to do, that keeps you busy. All you have to do is keep from making mistakes.”

  “Mistakes—you mean the ball games and movies and all that.”

  “I said that I train you to be the new person, to the extent that I can. What I can’t do is give you an identity that doesn’t fit.” She paused. “That’s why I’m glad last night happened.”

  “You’re working up to writing me off.”

  Jane smiled, but her brows knitted. “I thought we were past that game. You pretend to be shocked at your own behavior and deeply humiliated that I know about it. This forces me to choose between two roles—the scandalized schoolmistress who talks to you with pinch-faced distaste, or the conspiratorial madam who tells you it’s cute. Either way, we evade the real issue.”

  “What is the real issue? My sex life?”

  “Your life, period. Suppose I tell you that having sex with strangers is dangerous. Is that news? Does it change anything?”

  He looked down, silent.

  “How about that it’s even more dangerous for you, because the people who are chasing you know that you do it?”

  He watched her, but still said nothing.

  “You could improve your chances a lot just by being slightly more selective. Women who go to church social groups are less likely to be decoys than ones who step out of dark doorways after midnight wearing two ounces of nylon. And church groups are notorious for being exactly what you need. Join a group for singles. Every woman there is looking for a man, and they outnumber the men two to one. Someone like you would be very welcome.”

  “Are you trying to help me, or get back at me for embarrassing you last night?”

  “I’m being realistic. Even if I were trying to embarrass you, who cares? Will anything I think about your personal life matter when you’re on your own? No, and it shouldn’t.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  “When I sent you to Denver I hadn’t had time to get to know you. I expected you to live like a monk. Maybe you did too. This time, let’s get it right. Those security-minded condo places are that way because they’re full of young, career-minded women. You’ll find them hanging around the pools and the exercise rooms. Some of the owners’ associations even have parties where the eligible women will push themselves in front of your nose. Take them. Enjoy yourself. But stick to your story. Never reveal anything that doesn’t fit.”

  Hatcher looked at her sadly. “I thought you were just being the pinch-faced schoolmarm. It’s way past that, isn’t it? You sound like a scientist talking about rats.”

  She reached out and touched his hand, then regretted it and pulled back. “I’m sorry. I’m just being professional. If you’re happy, you’ll be able to stay in one quiet, safe place for a long time. If you’re not, you’ll take risks to get happy. So I need to make you happy for as long as I can.”

  “But you don’t feel anything.”

  “I don’t feel what you feel. You see any woman on the youngish side with round breasts and the right ratio of hips to waist, and you want her. I can know that, but knowing is all I can do. It’s all any of us can do. And what you did last night wasn’t shocking or particularly newsworthy. It was just something I needed to be reminded of.”

  “You’re taking one incident and weaving it into a rope to tie around my neck.”

  “No,” she said. “This is hard for me to talk about, so let me get it all out of the way. Last night I watched a young woman strip off a wet bathing suit to put on makeup at two A.M. so she could lure you away from her best friend. Ignoring the power, the need that makes people do that would be stupid. Will you personally take the chance of getting killed for sex? Sure. Scratch the topsoil anywhere on the planet and you’ll find the bones of people who maybe didn’t all know it, but who died over the instinct to mate. It’s not an opinion, it’s a fact. What I think about it, or feel about it, or what the implications are for romantic love or babies or families or anything else is irrelevant. All I can do is get out of the way. In this case it means putting you in the right location, so you’ll survive.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” He had surprised her again.

  “Yes. You don’t think much of me today. When I ask you why you save people’s lives, you say it’s because you’re a woman who saves people’s lives. I want to know if you care about me. I know I have no right to ask you to care. I just want to know if you do.”

  Jane patted his hand and gave him a smile that was achingly false. “Of course I do. You’re the best brother I ever had.”

  She turned her attention to the plate of food in front of her. He had been eating while she had been talking, and her scrambled eggs had turned cold and rubbery. She put some into her mouth. She could feel tears beginning to gather behind her eyes. Something was very wrong this morning, and she cou
ld not find a way to fix it. Maybe she had placed too much weight on her young, tender marriage. She had somehow gotten the impression that it was going to be a shield that protected her, kept her at a distance from certain kinds of hurt, certain ugly facts of other people’s lives. If nothing else, it should have made her immune to feelings about men like Pete Hatcher.

  Jane swallowed her eggs and turned her attention to the people filling up the dining room for lunch. There were the usual number of older people with gray hair, the women in shoes like nurses wore and the men in socks that matched their shirts, and lots of stuff in their pockets. There were two families with children who had sat in cars all morning and now fidgeted and thought of excuses to get up and wander in the dining room. She let herself wonder if some day she and Carey would be like this, threatening their kids in low voices to make them behave, or later, growing old together and wandering around like the couple in the next booth.

  Then she saw two people who intrigued her. The woman was tall and thin with long black hair, dark almond eyes, and high cheekbones. Around here the blood was probably Blackfoot or Kootenai or Flathead. The man was big, blond, and broad-shouldered—not muscular, but fit in the way that tennis players were.

  The head waitress moved them from an inner table and seated them at a table beside the window. They watched her set their plates in front of them and talked quietly. Jane wished she had not seen them. The woman looked a little like her, and so she had wanted the man to resemble Carey. It was a childish and primitive impulse to make the world bend into congruence with what she wanted, to have the universe send her an omen that everything was all right. She did not want to notice at first, and then she did not want to acknowledge the truth. If the man looked like anybody, it was Pete.

  She looked away. But before her head had finished its turn, she sensed that she had seen something strange. Her eyes shot back to the couple, focused on the high hillside through the window beside them. She gazed at it for several seconds, but the sight did not come again. She had imagined a small, bright flash of sun on metal. She stared down at her plate, not aware that her brow was furrowed.

  Pete noticed her expression and said, “What’s—” just as Jane had put the pieces together. She stood up quickly and took a step toward the couple, and time ran out.

  She saw the windowpane shatter and the man by the window stop, his mouth open to receive the fork with a piece of pancake on it. His head seemed to bob toward Jane, his ear striking his shoulder, then bouncing back a little. Jane saw the splatter of blood, bone, and dark tissue that had to be brain in the air all mixed with glittering, sparkling fragments of glass.

  The dark woman’s eyes grew white-wide, her fingers curled like claws, and she shrieked as the rest of the people in the crowded dining room took in a single gasp and let it out in a shuddering moan. People began to scramble. Chairs fell, plates broke.

  Jane dashed over the shards of glass, yanked the woman out of her chair, and pushed her into the crowd that was backing toward the doorway just as the second shot shattered another pane of the window. She turned to search for Pete and he bumped into her, then held her to keep her from falling. The details flooded her mind now: there had been no report of the weapon, so it must have a silencer; no crack of a bullet breaking the sound barrier, so the ammunition must be subsonic. It probably didn’t have the velocity to pierce any walls. She said, “Hold on to me,” and set off, with Pete’s hands on her waist.

  They threaded their way into the crowd cowering in the restaurant foyer. The cashier was shouting into the telephone and the dark woman was off to the right screaming while two elderly women held her. Jane’s mind raced. If the shooter had finished firing and was already slipping away, then she should get Pete out of here before he discovered his mistake. But what if he wasn’t running away? His rifle scope had enough magnification to let him put a bullet through the wrong man’s temple from the mountainside. If he was using this time to creep down the mountain, then in a few minutes he would be close enough to see faces clearly.

  Jane knew she had to do something that was not going to make her proud, and she had to do it now. She began to push toward the door and yelled, “I’m not going to stay here and get killed!”

  The people who had been standing paralyzed, waiting for some voice to suggest a remedy for their terror, shifted in a single wave. The double door ahead of them opened, then began to wag back and forth as each person nudged it aside to get out.

  Jane tugged Pete out in the middle of the throng. As she had expected, once they were out in the sunlight and fresh air, sanity seemed to descend upon the crowd. They saw how open and unprotected they were in the parking lot, so they began to spin like dancers, looking in every direction to see where the danger was coming from as they retreated toward the overhanging roof and brick wall of the restaurant.

  Jane sprinted to the car and crouched until Pete had joined her. As she had expected, her run—a definite, unhesitating move—seemed to some in the crowd to be shrewdly based on information they did not have. They ran to their cars, started them, and wheeled out of the lot to the highway.

  “Drive,” said Jane.

  Pete ducked into the driver’s seat and they joined the line of cars streaming out onto the road. Pete gripped the steering wheel hard, holding it steady with effort as though its natural inclination were to veer off into the woods. “I saw it,” he said. “I couldn’t think fast enough.”

  “Saw what?” said Jane.

  “I was thinking they looked a little bit like us. Like you and me.”

  “Drive,” said Jane. “Don’t worry about the speed. Out here what they do when they want somebody is put up a roadblock. When they do, we’d better be on the other side of it.”

  24

  Jane studied the road map while Pete drove. She traced the red and blue lines meandering through the mountains, searching for turnouts and alternative routes. It was the wrong part of the country to evade someone in a car. The Rocky Mountains didn’t offer many vulnerabilities to road builders.

  “Where do I go?” asked Pete.

  “No choice but to keep going up 83 for a while,” she said. “There’s no place to switch until Bigfork.”

  “What then?”

  “I’ll tell you when I know. Right now, if you do that much, we’re not dead. When there’s a straight stretch, try to look behind you and make a list of all the cars you can see. Get to know them.”

  “How do I know if he’s in one of them?”

  “You don’t. Most of them will drop out at Bigfork to look for a police station or a telephone. The one we need to worry about won’t.”

  He drove for fifteen minutes, and Jane noticed no cars coming toward them in the left lane. Finally, three police cars flashed past, driving hard toward Swan Lake. She turned to look after them, then switched on the car radio. After some static and blurts of music she found, “The police have asked us to report that Route 83 is closed south at Bigfork and north at Salmon Prairie. It will remain closed until further notice.” She switched it off and muttered, “Of course.”

  “What?” said Pete.

  “I hadn’t thought of that. They think they’ve got a sniper back there still taking shots across a highway at a restaurant. They don’t want to block the road out until they get people evacuated. What they’re blocking is the way in, so nobody gets shot.”

  She went back to her road map. “All right. At Bigfork, turn right onto 35, to Creston, and keep heading north when it changes to 206.”

  She set the map aside and stared out the back window. Maybe the shooter had not made it to his car in time to follow. He had been up above on the hillside, at least three hundred yards away. As soon as she had thought of it, she knew she was being foolish. It wasn’t likely that a pro would strand himself that far from his car and open fire. His car had been up there too, probably parked beside one of the firebreaks or timber roads cut into the forested hillside.

  The reflection had not come from his eq
uipment. All he had needed was a rifle and a scope, and the good ones were designed with that problem in mind. It was cars that were covered with chrome and mirrors. He was probably right behind them now, if not among the first few cars, then in the next pack.

  “We have to talk,” she said.

  “You start.”

  “We have a problem here. I don’t have any idea how they knew where we were.”

  “Obviously I don’t either.” He turned to her, eyes wide. “You don’t suppose Pam and Carol—”

  “No,” she said. “If they had put two girls in your path to get you alone, that was when they would have killed you. And we left this morning before those two were up. They couldn’t have told anybody where we were going, because they didn’t know.”

  “Then what could we have done to tell that guy where we were?”

  “Maybe they have some spectacular new way of instantly picking out charges on the credit cards we’ve been using. Maybe they somehow found out about this car the day I bought it, and hid a transmitter in it. Whatever they’re using to trace us, it might as well be magic.”

  “You’re making me more nervous than I am already, and I can hardly hold the wheel steady as it is.”

  They passed a sign that said BIGFORK 5. She said, “We have five miles to make a choice. What I’m saying is that they shouldn’t be here. When I play this game, if my side wins a round, we get to play another round. If the other side wins one, the game is over.”

  “A nice, sporting way of saying I’m dead.”

  “We’ll both be dead. I’m trying to tell you we haven’t won any rounds. They had you in Denver, until the policeman got in the way. They had us twenty minutes ago, and that poor man took the bullet. They haven’t got you, but they haven’t exactly missed yet, either. It’s important to remember that. In a few minutes we’ll be in Bigfork. There are cops on the road there now, and more on the way. We could stop, tell them our story, and they would take over.”

  “You mean give myself up?”

  “You haven’t committed any crimes. They would protect you, beginning in four minutes. In a day or less, you could be a thousand miles away, telling the Justice Department what you know about Pleasure, Inc. They would keep you safe, at least until you testified in court.”