Poison Flower

by Thomas Perry

  Jane hurried past the house to the driveway, and saw the big blue Ford Crown Victoria speeding down the narrow drive with its lights off. She used both hands to steady her aim, and fired four times. She punched a hole in the trunk, then the back window shattered and the car wobbled from side to side, but it didn't stop. The car reached the end of the driveway, swung out onto the highway, and drove out of her sight.

  The gunfire out on the road had stopped. Some sets of robbers must have triumphed and left, and the losers were probably dead. Jane stepped to the kitchen door. She moved carefully down the short hallway to the living room, and found what she had expected. Maloney was lying by the door. The blood that had pumped out through his severed carotid artery had run all over the hardwood floor into a pool, then stopped when his heart did. Outside the front door she could see Gorman's body on the porch. Eckersly was sprawled on the floor where she had seen him fall. His suitcase of money was gone. And so was Wylie.

  12.

  Jane drove south out of Ithaca, heading for Route 17, the Southern Tier Expressway. Sarah sat beside her for a few minutes in silence, then said, "I can't believe we're alive." Jane said, "We did what we could do, and didn't make any mistakes, so here we are. I can only hope it lasts. We're going to have to be very careful, and find a place where you can stay put for a while."

  Sarah didn't seem to hear. "And now I know who murdered Susan."

  "Yes. The man Wylie and his men were working for, whoever that is. It was pretty obvious before, but Wylie admitted that much."

  "But I know the name. Right after they broke into the house and captured me, Wylie told Gorman to call the boss and tell him. When Gorman called, somebody else answered, and Gorman asked for Daniel Martel."

  "Are you sure about the name"

  "Yes. Absolutely. I could never get that wrong, and I'll never forget."

  "Now that you've told me, neither will I."

  Jane brought Sarah into Buffalo, and then to the Hyatt hotel. She parked a short distance up the street near the convention center, because there was a pay telephone on the outer wall. She got out and called the hotel room. After a few rings, Iris answered the telephone. "Hello."

  "Hi, honey. You know who this is."

  "Yes," said Iris. "We've been worried about you. What happened"

  "It took longer than I thought."

  "What time is it"

  "It's about three a.m. I've got Sarah with me. What I want you to do is wake Jim if he's asleep, and get the two of you packed up. Then I want you to wipe every smooth surface of the room for fingerprints. When you're satisfied, fill in the quick checkout card, put the key cards in it, and drop it in the box. Don't forget to wipe off the key cards and the checkout card. Then come out to the street."

  "Uh, okay. Jim Time to get up."

  "Good. Get going." Jane ended the call and looked at Sarah, and she was glad Sarah was standing by the car and she'd had the phone clamped to her ear so Sarah couldn't hear. At three a.m. Iris had been asleep so close to Jim that she'd only needed to speak a bit above a whisper, and probably touch him.

  Jane got back in the car and made a circuit of the block before she pulled to a stop a few yards up the street from the hotel where she could see the front entrance. She thought about her decision to leave Iris and Jim alone in a hotel tonight. In retrospect, it seemed obvious that she was leaving them in a position that was likely to lead to intimacy. She decided not to tell Sarah anything.

  In fifteen minutes, Jim and Iris appeared just inside the hotel entrance, and Jane started the car and began to move. As the two came out the glass doors, her car pulled up the driveway and stopped under the overhang. Jane popped the trunk lid, and Jim put the two suitcases in the trunk.

  The two got into the back seat, and Jane began to move. Jim said, "Sarah. I'm so glad to see you."

  "I'm glad to see you, too. It's the first time in years when I saw you wearing regular clothes."

  "This is Iris. Iris, this is my sister, Sarah."

  Sarah looked at Iris for a moment, made a decision to smile, and said, "Pleased to meet you."

  "Me too," said Iris. She decided to smile, too.

  Jane drove out the driveway and down the street, and headed south away from the center of the city of Buffalo.

  Jim said, "Where are we going"

  Jane said, "I'd like each of you to think for a moment. Is there any good reason why any of you can't live in Pittsburgh"

  "What sort of reason" Sarah asked.

  "You didn't go to college there, or have a favorite aunt who lives there. You didn't once have a job there, or have a former fiance who lives there. Nobody who looks closely at your past will find any reference to Pittsburgh."

  "Not me. I don't know much about the place, really," said Jim. The others looked at each other, but said nothing.

  "Perfect," Jane said. "We'll go take a look. We'll be there in a few hours."

  "What are we going to do there" asked Iris.

  "We'll find a nice house, probably in the suburbs, and then we'll begin the next phase."

  "What's that"

  "Trying to create a new normal. Pittsburgh may not be the place you stay for the rest of your lives. But it's the real thing, a city where there are jobs and everything a person needs to live a good life. There are over three hundred thousand people in the city itself, and two and a half million in the general area around it. You've gotten used to using new names and being alert. We've changed your looks a little. Now you live. When you get good at it, and your permanent ID catches up with you, then you'll be ready for anything-finding jobs, making a few casual acquaintances. We'll take all of this slowly."

  "How long will it take" Sarah asked.

  "A few months. Six, probably, to get you settled. Of course, you always have to be ready to get out fast, if something makes you nervous. Then we'll replant you somewhere else and start over."

  "What makes you think we're ready for this" Shelby said.

  "You've all got the basic tricks, and you've practiced a bit. You don't break character, and you never forget you're in danger. The part that's important is to remember that you can never go back to being the people you used to be, even for a minute, and you can never drop your guard. The rest is refinements."

  "Like what"

  "Pay attention to appearances, always. If you must meet people, you smile. If people like you, they're not suspicious. You keep yourself in places where you're relatively safe. You go to plays and chamber music concerts, not sports events where there will be a thousand cops and fifty TV cameras. Every step is slow. You aren't in a hurry. Every day you're alive and unnoticed moves the odds over to your side a tiny bit. For the moment, let Iris be the one who deals with strangers, with Sarah as the backup. As time goes by and you get more settled, Jim can get out more."

  Jane, Iris, and Sarah checked into a big hotel in Pittsburgh, then went to search for apartments while Jim stayed in the hotel out of sight.

  After two days of searching, they drove to a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of town, where several sets of duplexes had been built. There were perfect, thick lawns that they could see had been laid in as sod like strips of carpet. There were two trees per lawn, roughly fifteen feet tall, planted with a backhoe that moved from building to building, all landscaping completed in an afternoon.

  They toured the model duplex, and Jane, Sarah, and Iris were intrigued. The hardwood floors were perfect blond wood, the crown moldings were eight or ten inches to give the ceilings a vaulted look. The counters were all granite, and the cooking island was exactly like the ones in the home magazines. The master bathroom had a deep tub with jets, and the shower was surrounded by glass and had multiple heads, as though a team were going to use it.

  Jane told the rental agent that she and Sarah and Iris would have to think about it. As they drove off, Sarah said, "Is that kind of place a real possibility"

  "It's leading the league right now," Jane said. "It's upscale, the sort of place that w
on't have lots of surprise police visits-or worse, surveillance. The place is so new you can smell the paint, so everyone will be a stranger, and nobody will be suspicious if you don't know your way around Pittsburgh."

  "Let's talk to Jim."

  They took the apartment. They paid the first and last months' rent with an electronic transfer from a Chicago bank account Jane held in the name Heather Gollensz.

  Jane helped Iris and Sarah shop and decorate the apartment. They registered a sale of the Honda in the name John Leland, and got Pennsylvania plates. Other electronic transfers gave the Lelands a bank account, and Iris another. On the fifth morning in the new apartment, when Sarah emerged from her room on her way to the kitchen, she saw that Jane was sitting in the living room, fully dressed, with her suitcase at her feet.

  "You're going"

  Jane nodded. "It's time."

  "I guess I felt it coming."

  Jane said, "I left the things you'll need on the counter in the kitchen-a lot of cash, another gun, and some ammunition I brought with us from Ithaca. As soon as the permanent IDs and things show up in my post office box, a man will call me, and I'll pick them up and send them to you. Remember, the best way to keep from making a mistake is to stay scared."

  There was a short, tentative honk of a car horn.

  Jane stood up and moved the curtain aside, then let it drop. "That's my cab. I was going to say good-bye to Jim and Iris, too, but you'll have to do it." She hugged Sarah. "I'll see you before too long." She took her suitcase and went out the door. Sarah watched her get into the cab and then saw the cab moving off down the street toward the highway.

  13.

  Dr. Carey McKinnon had performed his first surgery of the day at seven in the morning. It had been a relatively routine removal of a gallbladder with no complications, and as of his evening rounds, Mr. Gryzkowski and all of his other patients had been recovering well. He had completed four surgeries today, five yesterday. If he kept up this pace, he would probably catch the attention of the Medicare people who looked for false billings.

  For the two weeks since Jane had left, he had been fully scheduling his mornings with surgeries, then spending the afternoons seeing patients in his office. He ate his meals in the hospital cafeteria and went through his rounds in the evening. Then he left to drive to Amherst and put his car in the old converted carriage house next to Jane's car, and then walk up the driveway to enter his dark, empty house. Each night he did exercises for an hour, showered, and watched the news on television before he collapsed into bed.

  Staying busy was the best thing he could think of to do. There was no question that the tall, dark-haired woman on the television news who had freed a convicted killer from the Los Angeles courthouse was Jane. It hurt Carey to know that she would do something crazy and audacious now. It meant that she not only was willing to risk her life but had been willing to risk his, too-or at least his chance for happiness.

  What she did was illegal-buying or making false identities; obtaining and carrying unlicensed guns; operating imaginary companies to commit mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering. But what kept him in a constant state of anxiety was the danger. The service she offered was to put herself between killers and their victims. He could understand some of this as part of her family history and traditions-the glorification of the warrior, the horror of incarceration and confinement, the contempt for fear, the peculiar Native American notion of changing names to fit new circumstances, the well-founded distrust of government. He understood all of these things and their origins. But comprehending the logic of a situation was not the same as accepting it. He hated this.

  The idea that his beautiful wife had for years before their marriage harbored and transported fugitives had always made him sweat with retroactive fear for her. The fact that she was doing it again made him frantic. She helped fugitives out of a kind of idiosyncratic public-spiritedness. To her, saving people from danger was just something a person did, if she happened to have the skills.

  The difference between public duty and personal responsibility was utterly lost on her. The idea that only duly sworn peace officers were supposed to save people from criminals struck her as absurd. She had said, "Fine. I'll do it only when they can't, or won't." The only difference she could see between herself and the authorities was mere legality, and she had no regard whatever for legality. When she heard someone talking about "obeying the law," it was as though he had announced he lived his life according to the rules of mah-jongg or gin rummy.

  He loved her. He was never going to end the marriage, and everything else was empty chatter. He had not even asked her to quit. She had simply promised. It was just before their wedding, maybe two weeks. She had been on the road, and come home safely. She said to him, "Well, that's over. I'm through being a guide. If I'm going to marry you, I can't do that anymore."

  She had stopped. She had turned her attention to the sorts of things that surgeons' wives did. She helped raise money for the hospital. First she took her turn serving on committees where her job was to fold letters and type envelopes, and slowly moved up to chairing committees and putting on benefits. She became active on the Tonawanda reservation and taught an after-school class in the Seneca language for middle-school students. Jane had become the ideal middle-class married woman of two generations ago. He had tried to talk to her about her decision, but she didn't seem to be sensitive about it. She said, "I took a lot of people out of the world and made new people turn up in other places. I'm glad I did. Now the last person I have to make disappear is me. There is no Jane Whitefield. I'm Mrs. Carey McKinnon."

  After three years, she had announced it was probably safe to have a baby. Nobody had found his way to the house in Deganawida, nobody had arrived from some faraway place asking for Jane Whitefield, and no word had come that one of her old runners had been found. She had chosen the room next to theirs in the big old stone house that would be the baby's room. They had painted it a pale yellow with bright woodwork and crown moldings, and bought furnishings, and even a few stuffed animals. She had gone to the attic in the Deganawida house and brought back an antique cradleboard. She had taken it from a box and unwrapped its paper wrappings and shown it to him before she'd hung it up. It was made of a frame of half loops of bent hickory like ribs, and had a few wooden hoops at the top like a canopy to protect the baby from sun and rain. The frame was covered by a skin of beadwork. The background was black, with a pattern of green stems and leaves topped by forest wildflowers in white, red, and yellow. Carey could see it was very old, too old to be anywhere but a museum, but he said nothing except that it was beautiful. She hung it on a wall with a picture hanger, a substitute for the way a -seventeenth-century ancestor had hung it in a longhouse while she was inside, and on a low tree limb while she worked in the fields or orchards.

  They had tried to have a baby for two years, but so far, it hadn't happened. After a year he'd had a colleague do workups on both of them, but they learned nothing. Their infertility was unexplained: everything was working perfectly but had not resulted in conception.

  A few months later, a pregnant twenty-year-old girl had shown up looking for Jane Whitefield. One of Jane's old runners had been the girl's teacher in a San Diego high school. The girl's much older former boyfriend, a small-time criminal, was trying to find her so he could take the baby. Jane had put the girl into her car and driven off. But months later, when Jane had come back from wherever she'd taken her, she had seemed different. After she'd been home two days, she took down the antique cradleboard, carefully rewrapped it, put it back in the attic, and then closed the baby's room.

  Since then, Jane had gone out with runners twice. One was an advertising man named Stephen Noton who had somehow gotten his hands on a document about drug smuggling, and was being hunted for it. The third runner Jane had taken on since she'd quit was James Shelby.

  Tonight Carey was tired. The loneliness, the obsessive brooding on where Jane must be at this moment, got much worse at night
, and he couldn't fight it by staying busy. He looked at his watch. It was after midnight. It was Friday, so it wasn't as bad as it could be. He could sleep until noon tomorrow if he wanted, and then go in for hospital rounds at two or three in the afternoon.

  He went to the kitchen without turning on the bright light, opened the cupboard, and took down the bottle of Macallan twelve-year-old single malt Scotch. He set a heavy crystal glass on the counter and poured, then held his glass under the faucet and gave it a small squirt of water.

  "Doc Holliday, I presume"

  He turned toward the kitchen door and there she was, standing in the dim light just inside the doorway. For an instant the word "hallucination" came to him, but her image didn't fade or waver. He said, "Calamity Jane," then lifted his glass to salute her.

  "I meant he ruined his health drinking and smoking."

  "You're leaving out the effects of tubercular bacilli, I think."

  "Then how about a drink"

  "Name your poison."

  "I'll have what you're having," she said.

  She set her purse on the counter beside her and watched him fill a second glass and add water. She took a step toward him and reached for the glass, and then saw his eyes widen.

  "My God, Jane. What happened Was it a car accident Have you been seen" He looked down at her leg, and up to her face, hair, eyes. She could see that his assessment of her appearance was not good.

  She took the glass and sipped from it. "A lot happened, not much of it good. And yes, a doctor saw me right away to clean the wound and sew me up. Since then I've taken care of myself."

  "You said `wound.' What sort of wound"

  "Oh, it's a lot to say at once. If you missed me, come give me a kiss."

  He stepped to her, set their drinks on the counter, and gently put his arms around her. He did kiss her, but she could tell he was impatient. And he was so gentle it made her impatient, too.

  "I won't break," she said. "I'm just a little tender in spots. A lot tender, actually. Fortunately for you, none of them are your favorite spots."