by Thomas Perry
Tomorrow morning, after he had caught up on his sleep, he would drive up to Kalispell. It looked like the only town up there that was big enough to hide a stranger comfortably. He would check into a hotel there and spend some time trying to pick up signs of Earl and Linda.
27
Jane led Pete along the trail in the waning light. She kept them at a double-time pace, along the long high cliff the map called the Garden Wall and on to Haystack Butte. When she judged that they had traveled two miles, she slowed to a walk. She waited for her wind to come back and then listened while Hatcher’s deep, labored breathing slowly became quiet. She said, “How do you feel?”
“Lousy.”
“Does your head ache?”
“Yes.”
“Dizzy?”
“Yes.”
“Green spots on your hands?”
“Yes.”
“Liar.”
“Yes.” He walked along at her shoulder, taking deep breaths and blowing them out. She listened to them attentively without speaking. There were no whistles, no bubbly liquid sounds that would mean he was in trouble. There were people who simply could not tolerate high altitudes. Unless they were brought down, their lungs filled up with fluid until they drowned. Starting Pete off with a two-mile jog probably had not been the safest way to find out that he wasn’t one of them, but she had needed to know before they had gone too far to turn back.
She had not lied to him about needing to use the last precious hour or two of light efficiently, to put distance between them and the road. It was already getting too dark to run. A twisted ankle would make the next thirty miles a nightmare.
As she walked, she subtly increased the pace again. She tried to keep her steps regular enough on the uneven, winding path to hold her speed. The end of the long summer had come, so the trail was as beaten down by other boots as it would ever be, and it had been laid out at about seven thousand feet, along the ridges just below the treeline, where soil was thin and poor and the constant winds stunted the fir trees.
After another mile they had passed Haystack Butte, and in the dusky light she saw the change she was looking for in the slopes to her left. There was a low, lush dark carpet of bushes and evergreens—lodgepole pine, spruce, fir—all young and thick. Among them loomed tall, ghostly gray trunks like the masts of sunken ships.
“Look at that,” said Pete. “I wonder why it looks like that.”
“A fire,” said Jane. “In 1967 this patch burned.”
He craned his neck to look at her with ironic amusement. “You from around here?”
She shook her head and smiled. “Of course not. I spent half the day in the car looking at maps. This is one of the places I picked out to get my bearings. If we get lost up here we’re not going to enjoy the experience.”
“What do we look for next?”
“After another mile or two, we should be able to look up on our right and see glaciers. First a little one. That’s Gem Glacier. Then a really big one, called Grinnell Glacier. Then Swiftcurrent Glacier, all in a stretch of a couple of miles.”
“And after that?”
“If we get that far before it’s too dark to travel, I’ll be very surprised.”
He walked along for a time, then said, “I guess I should be delighted at the news that I don’t have to keep trudging along all night. To tell you the truth, though, the farther we get from that guy with the rifle, the better I feel. And there’s even something about it getting dark that’s comforting. I’ve been having a prickly feeling in the back of my neck, like he’s back there looking down the barrel at me.”
Jane turned and looked up at him with an enigmatic smile. “He wouldn’t be looking down the barrel. Nobody puts a round through somebody’s temple from that far out without a scope.”
“You’re a very strange woman. You know that?”
“Of course I do.” She smiled. “It’s something I’ve cultivated over the years. But I’ll bet you want to keep going even more than you did a minute ago, don’t you?”
He seemed to be consulting an inner voice as he walked. “You’re right. It worked. I feel bad enough to walk for hours.”
“Bad isn’t exactly the feeling I was looking for, but that’s the price. As long as you never let your brain stop working, thinking about what’s behind you, you’ll be very hard to kill.”
“So the prickly feeling in the back of the neck doesn’t go away.”
“That’s right. I have it right now.”
Pete half-turned his head to look as he walked. There was nothing behind them but the empty trail as far as the last bend. “You think they’re back there?”
“If I did, I’d be running for my life,” she said. “I think they’re good. They’ll find out the car was left in that lot in about three days, when it’s towed out of the park. By then the only road here will be closed to visitors, the nearby car crossings into Canada will be closed too, and the long detours that go up there don’t go to where we’ll be. What I think they’ll do next is give up.”
The sky was darkening quickly now, and she saw the glow of his teeth that had to be a smile. “Really?”
“They’ve been following you for about a hundred days. They’ve committed two murders they won’t get paid for. They’ve exhausted the computer searches, because from here on we aren’t going to use credit cards or even names, if we can help it. That means the hunting is going to get much harder. Following you into a foreign country adds a level of extra risk. I think for a professional, the point of diminishing returns has come. They’re in it for the money, and if this goes on much longer, the money’s not good enough. They could have made more of it more easily doing bitter divorce cases and premature life-insurance payouts.”
“Won’t Pleasure, Inc., hire somebody else?”
“There are several possibilities. One is that these killers will tell Pleasure, Inc., where they lost you. Pleasure, Inc., will decide that if you’re in Canada, then you’re not planning on talking to American police. A second possibility is that the people who are after us now will keep Pleasure, Inc., on the hook—tell them to be patient, they’re on your trail—but not waste any time actually hunting. Once a month they’ll use the computer to see if your aliases turned up again.”
“So I should feel good, right? I’m not being stupid.”
“No. Because in a week or so they’ll probably be off stalking somebody else, and if they’re replaced, the new ones will be starting at zero. This morning you were talking about a different feeling you had—that you were glad to be alive. It’s not gone, is it?”
“No.”
“The quiver in the back of your neck doesn’t go away, but the good feeling doesn’t either. Now that you’ve had it, every day is going to feel as though you won it in a world championship.”
He laughed. “It already does.”
“You’ll notice other things later.”
“What things?”
“Good things. The kind of ambition that’s stupid, the kind that makes you want a fancy car and a big house and flashy clothes, goes away.”
“Why?”
“Because having them makes you feel as though people are looking at you, and that’s uncomfortable. Being average, normal, makes you feel comfortable, and it isn’t very different unless you read labels very closely. That was always true, of course, but now you’ll be able to feel it, because you know that being a regular guy is a million miles from being dead.”
The trail led them up between thickets of berry bushes, across meadows of wildflowers now dry and well past blooming. As the light died for the night, Jane could see the higher peaks on her right, but the blue-white glacial ice was lost in the black silhouettes of the mountains. They walked on, sticking to the center of the path in the dark. Jane took her flashlight out of her pack and let it play on the ground in front of her. Finally, as the trail led them up into a stand of stunted pine trees, she stopped, knelt on the ground, and studied the map.
“Are we lost yet?” aske
d Pete. She felt his shoulder beside hers as he knelt down to look at the little circle of light.
She put her finger on the map. “We’re here.” It was a spot where twisting dotted lines seemed to radiate in all directions, like the strands of an unraveling rope. “The trail on the left goes back to the road, then up Flattop Creek. The one on the right goes through Swiftcurrent Pass and connects with this whole network of trails up here. This one in the middle is the one we want.” She aimed her flashlight up the path, and in the glow around it, Pete caught a glimpse of a wooden sign.
“So what’s the problem?”
She frowned. “Never give up a chance to deceive. This chance is a beauty. I’m just trying to figure out how to use it.”
He said, “Switch the sign?”
“They wouldn’t be looking for one trail or another. They’d be looking for us, probably our footprints. We’ve already put about seven miles of them on the path, and if they were following, by now they wouldn’t have much trouble recognizing them.”
Pete sat and waited while Jane stared at the map, then stood up, opened his pack, and handed him his flashlight. “This is probably a waste of time,” she said. “But if they do follow us, it isn’t. You go down the left path as far as you can until it gets so narrow you can’t step off it. A quarter mile would be great, but at least a couple of hundred yards. When you get to that point step off, and come back parallel with the trail, never stepping back onto it. Meet me here.”
Jane walked down the trail to the right alone. She stopped once to listen for Pete’s footsteps, and when she heard them they sounded as though he was doing what she had asked. One of the qualities that made Pete Hatcher worth saving was that he never resisted. He wanted to live, so if she was willing to help him, he would do what she asked. Simple.
As she walked, she imagined herself taking Carey out of the world. Everything he said would be a question too, but the questions he asked would come from a more complicated intelligence, one that would be sifting and evaluating and testing alternative logical paths. The problem with classically intelligent people was that they seemed to be able to discern too many alternatives to pick any of them during the brief periods when what they did still mattered. She wondered what she had meant by that, and was back to the night ten months ago when Carey had asked her to marry him. She had said she would not marry him right then. She would tell him about her last trip—about who she really was—and then give him a year to think before he asked again.
He had not listened and then said instantly, “I don’t care about any of this. Marry me now.” He had listened judiciously and then let the waiting period begin. When he had thought about it for a month, instead of sticking to the terms and letting her spend the year cutting her ties, he had realized that he didn’t want to wait—not shouldn’t, but didn’t want to. He had been unfair. He had focused his intellect on convincing her to marry him while she still had no business marrying anyone.
Her mind abruptly collided with something and jumped to another track. That story was fictitious. Jane Whitefield walked through the world with her eyes wide open. She could not pretend she had not known what might happen, or what she would do if it did. She had always felt contempt for women who accepted the theorem that if they were unhappy it could only be because their husbands had not made them happy. This must be how it started: constructing convoluted proofs that their mistakes were not actually their mistakes but their husbands’ failure to prevent them or cure them. Not me, she thought. I did this, because I wanted his love more than I wanted to be careful. Now I’m going to get through it and go home to my husband, who is impatient because he adores me.
She watched the path narrowing, the rock slope on her right rising into a wall, and the little margin of weeds on her left thinning into a ledge that bordered a steep chasm. She put the flashlight into her back pocket, leaned both hands on the wall, placed her toes on the weeds, and began to sidestep back the way she had come. She had inched along for fifty feet before she was able to stand upright again. Then she carefully took a diagonal course down a gentler slope and headed for the crossroads.
When she approached the rocky knoll, she saw Pete Hatcher waiting patiently for her. She switched on her flashlight so he would see her coming and not be startled. “Been waiting long?”
“No,” he said. “Just got here. I went as far as a streambed, where it started to get wet. I came back through the woods.”
“Very good,” she said. She sat beside him. “Now we change our socks.” He watched her untying her boots for a second, then did as she said. When they had their boots on again, she said, “Now put the old socks on over your boots.”
“It’s a tight fit,” he said as he tugged and stretched.
“It’s okay,” said Jane. “Now stuff some of these dry weeds under the soles of your boots, inside the sock, for padding. Don’t use leaves, because they’ll squish and get juicy. No pine needles, because they’re slippery.”
When they had finished, she led him off beside the center trail. They did not step onto the trail again for fifteen minutes, at the start of a stretch of bare rock that extended beyond the flashlight’s beam. Pete stopped and shone his flashlight back the way they had come. “No trail at all,” he said. “You’re amazing.”
“It cost us a half hour, but it always makes you feel better to do what you can. And if we are being followed, it will do more than make us feel better. You have to remember this isn’t the F.B.I. that’s after us. It’s probably just some guy who discovered early on that it was easier to pull a trigger than learn algebra.”
As Jane set off across the rocky plateau, she discovered that what she had told Pete was a lie. Stopping to disguise their trail had not made her feel safer. She tried to measure the prickly sensation in the back of her neck, and her body gave a convulsive shiver. She pivoted suddenly in her tracks and stared back into the forest. The sight gave her no comfort: the individual silhouettes of the trees had merged together into a shadowy mass of twisted limbs ready to assume any shape her imagination gave them.
“What’s wrong?” said Pete.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just checking to see if you were keeping up.” She turned and began to walk quickly, and as she walked she searched for a way to exorcise her uneasiness.
She caught herself wishing she could have spotted the shooter on the mountainside this morning—if only a running human form, a solid shape in the windshield of a speeding car. As it was, the restaurant window had suddenly imploded in a shower of glass, and a bloody hole had appeared in a man’s head. There was nothing mysterious about the way that had been accomplished, but to some part of her subconscious mind, knowing the mechanical workings of rifles and silencers was information too meager to lay to rest the sensations she had felt.
Since she had left home it had not felt to her as though professional killers had been logically tracing Pete Hatcher’s movements. It felt as though they had given up physical form entirely, and rode the wind, waiting to materialize wherever it suited them.
Earl readjusted Lenny’s load. When he cinched the straps to make everything secure, he nearly tugged Lenny off his feet. “Think you can keep your balance?”
Lenny slipped the tumpline over his forehead and took a few steps. “Sure,” he said. “In the army we used to pack ninety pounds of gear and add the extra ammo on top of it. This can’t be much worse.”
Earl’s jaw worked impatiently. Whenever Lenny was feeling resentful, he would just happen to mention that he had once been declared worthy to sign up to get his head shaved and hang around Fort Leonard Wood in case they needed extra cannon fodder. Earl was never quite sure whether Lenny was implying that cleaning latrines had made him Earl’s moral superior, or excusing his inadequacy by saying that those wasted years had set him too far back to ever recover. It didn’t much matter. Whatever they had done for him in the army, it hadn’t given him big enough balls to challenge Earl directly, so Earl tolerated the talk.
; He said, “Just use your map and compass, like they taught you, and don’t lose your own ass out here.” He turned to T-Bone and Rusty. “Raus!”
The two dogs galloped down the trail to the first bend, then waited and stared back at him. Earl adjusted his own pack as he set off. Lenny’s military career had brought Earl one benefit, anyway. It had made him think of moving through these mountains the way armies did. He had loaded Lenny’s strong back with all the camping gear and supplies, so Earl could carry little and forge ahead with the dogs. If he wanted anything Lenny was carrying, he could meet him on the main trail.
Earl walked along the path after T-Bone and Rusty for a few hundred yards to let his pupils open to the dark and his muscles get warm. Then he stopped and did a few stretching exercises against a tall cedar. When he was ready, he began to run.
As he ran, Earl considered his circumstances, and he found them to his liking. Jane Whitefield and Pete Hatcher had graciously gone to a great deal of exertion and inconvenience to put themselves into a place where he was strong and they were weak. Hatcher had been saved twice by the simple fact that it was hard to kill a man in a public place without committing suicide. Now it was only one day before the whole national park closed, and there would be no more tourists setting out into the high country to get in the way.
Earl moved through the woods with a hunter’s practiced lope. He had always been a sportsman who loved to take the long, difficult shot, so he had spent many cold mornings running patiently through rough country, trailing wounded deer until they began to choke and cough too much blood to go on. Tonight he used his dogs to find his way and keep him on the path. He could hear the difference when their panting came from higher or lower, left or right, and the thuds of their big paws told him the nature of the surface they were running on. Turning on a flashlight in these woods would have given his presence away to anyone looking back from the ridges above, and the glare would have made his pupils contract, leaving him half-blind for several minutes.
Earl habitually held his head a little to the side as he ran, because the best night vision was at the edges of the eyes, and none of the wind from his running distorted the sounds. He knew his long legs carried him farther at each stride than his prey could step, and his stamina would keep him going longer than any man who had spent his days lounging around in Las Vegas.