Runner

by Thomas Perry

  Jane kept going along the concourse, then came to another row of shops. The first was a newsstand, the next a place that sold nothing but baseball caps. The next store sold golf clothes and accessories. She bought a white sweater, a blue nylon windbreaker, a pair of khaki golf pants with a sharp crease in them, and a straw hat shaped like a man's panama hat. She moved on until she found the next ladies' room, changed her clothes, and stuffed the jeans and sweater she had been wearing into her shopping bag, and then spent a few minutes getting her long hair hidden under the hat. She looked as unlike herself as she could on short notice. From a distance, outside in the dim light, she hoped she might even look ambiguous enough to be mistaken for a man.

  As she went toward the escalator that would take her down to street level, she put together the little she knew. Ketter had said he wanted to walk her out through the baggage claim, so he had probably told his people to wait there. Being there would be of no use without having a car waiting at the curb to take her away. Jane went down the escalator, turned to her left away from the baggage claim, and walked to the lobby, where there were ticket counters. She could see the traffic outside in the circular drive was moving from left to right across the windows, so she kept going to the left. If any watcher saw her, they couldn't back the car two hundred yards to push her into it. She went out the last door of the terminal and walked to the next one before she got on the shuttle for the rental car lots. She sat on the bench seat on the right side of the shuttle near the driver, so her back would be to the terminal. When the shuttle made its first stop, Jane stepped down and went into the rental agency without caring which one it was.

  She rented a car and drove from Long Island to New Jersey, crossed into Pennsylvania and took the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Harrisburg before she turned north into New York State and made her way north toward Rochester. Along a rural road she spotted a thicket of sumac bushes, so she stopped, broke off a few twigs, and took them with her. Late in the morning she stopped at a tobacco store on a plaza on West Henrietta Road and went inside to look around. There were lots of cigars behind the glass wall along the back, a supply of the usual kinds of cigarettes and pipe tobaccos, and a glass case that held lighters, pipes, cigar cutters, and cigarette cases, but Jane knew what she was looking for. She went to the rack where packs of exotic cigarettes were sold, and picked out two packs. The brand name was Seneca. The cigarettes were made by Grand River Enterprises, a company based on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, of tobacco that was grown, cut, and hung to dry in sheds on the Cattaraugus Reservation in New York. She brought the cigarettes to the cash register, and the tall, bald man who owned the store took her money and put the cigarettes into a small brown bag. She wondered if he remembered her from other times, but she preserved their impersonal relationship by not asking.

  In the drugstore across the small plaza she bought a set of fingernail clippers and a newspaper. When she returned to her rental car she spread the front section of the newspaper on her lap, trimmed her fingernails, and poured the clippings along the crease in the paper into her bag with the cigarettes. Then she drove on up Henrietta.

  It was nearly noon when Jane drove into the middle of the city and turned off onto a quiet, narrow street called Maplewood Avenue. At this time of day the sun was high enough so the spreading canopies of the tall trees on both sides threw the pavement into shadow. She left the rental car at the curb and walked down the street past the two rows of big old houses, all of them three stories, with steep peaked roofs. They were all edged right up to the sidewalk, built in the days when lawns were not of much interest. In those days people liked to have a carriage pull right up to the front of the house so a lady would not get mud on her thin shoes or the hem of her dress.

  The houses had been built big to hold lots of children and a few servants, but as the world changed, many of them had been partitioned into apartment buildings, with extra kitchens and bathrooms where the original builders never intended them to be.

  Jane walked to the end of the street to the long, narrow, quiet park that began at the white Romanesque Christian Science church and ran beside the street for a few hundred feet. Along the far edge of the park was a steel railing to keep people from falling off the cliff into the Genesee River below. The Genesee River was like an artery that ran down the center of Nundawaonoga, and if she stopped walking she could hear it running just beyond the edge of the park, past the railing.

  This was one of the places where Jane sometimes stopped after she had been on the road. Until the 1770s there had been a big Seneca village here. There were dozens of Seneca village sites in the land between Sodus Bay on Lake Ontario and the Niagara River, but this was one of her favorites because it was so quiet and empty during the day, even though it was in the center of a busy city. There was only Jane walking toward the edge of the park beneath the tall shade trees, listening to the wind moving through their leaves. She reached it, looked back over her shoulder to be sure she was alone, and climbed over the railing.

  The bank was high, at least thirty feet above the Genesee River, but she had been here a number of times, and she could see that the way she had found to get down to the river was still passable. It didn't deserve the name of path. It was just a slight protuberance, a stony shelf in the gray shale along the side of the cliff set at a gradual angle to lead her down. She had to use a series of thin saplings that grew out of the cliffside as handholds, but in a minute she was at the bottom of the gorge walking on the dry pebbly ground along the river. The water was deep enough at midstream to move in lazy silence to the north where it would flow into Lake Ontario, so she could hear small birds chirping in the trees far above.

  Along the riverbed the river was wider and shallower and there were some flat stones big enough to sit on. She could hear a faint sound of the water moving over pebbles here. She opened her shoulder bag, took out the bag of cigarettes she had bought, opened the two packs, and sniffed the strong, fragrant aroma. She tore the paper on each cigarette and emptied the shreds of tobacco onto the rock, then took out her broken sumac twigs. She peeled them, crumbled the bark, dropped it into the tobacco and used a twig to mix it. Then she shook the fingernail clippings out of the paper bag onto the rock beside the tobacco.

  She said aloud, "Jo-Ge-Oh." That was the name of the little people. "Jo-Ge-Oh. Grandfathers." The little people were only a few inches tall, but they were a very ancient race. They had already lived in the gorge of the Genesee when the Nundawaono had come into being on the big hill at the foot of Canandaigua Lake near Naples, New York, so they were properly called grandfathers and grandmothers.

  Jane had always felt close to them, because they were compassionate and performed a particular service to human beings who came to them in trouble. The Jo-Ge-Oh would reveal themselves to people who were hunted, and spirit them away from the human world to live with them for a time. When they felt that the moment was right, they would return the person to the place where he had met them. To the fugitive it would seem that he had been with the Jo-Ge-Oh for only a few hours or a day, but when he walked home, he would find that so much time had passed that his enemies were dead.

  "Jo-Ge-Oh," she said. "Come on, little guys. I know you're around." The Jo-Ge-Oh were very shy, and they seldom appeared to people who weren't in danger. But they always lived in places like this, very near to the settlements where full-sized Nundawaono lived. If they had been here in the 1700s, they were still here. The intervening centuries would not strike them as an especially long time. They might even still be harboring refugees from wars before then, planning to return them here in due time.

  "Here you go, little guys. I've brought you the usual presents. Here's some of the only tobacco." She took half of the tobacco shreds and placed them on several other flat rocks. The Jo-Ge-Oh were known to be addicted to tobacco, and they liked it the traditional way, raised in this part of the continent and cut with a bit of sumac bark. It was commonly referred to in the Seneca language as "the only tobacc
o."

  She took her collection of fingernail clippings and scattered them over the rocks. "I brought you some of my fingernails. I hope they work for you." The tallest Jo-Ge-Oh were only a few inches high, and so the small scavengers and predators that lived along the Genesee could be a source of real annoyance to them. The scent of full-sized people on the clippings helped to keep the raccoons, skunks, and possums at a distance.

  She placed the rest of the tobacco into another pile on another flat stone. "I hope you enjoy your presents. Thank you for Christine's life and for my life." When Senecas spoke to the supernatural beings that inhabited their country they never asked for favors or future services of any kind. They only gave thanks.

  She folded the empty cigarette packs into the small paper bag and put it into her jeans pocket, then stood still for a few seconds, listening to the quiet murmur of water through the stones at the edge of the river. Then she made her way back to the long, narrow incline up the side of the gorge. When she reached the top, she climbed back over the rail, put the tobacco bag into the nearly empty trash can, and went back to the rental car. She drove to the Outer Loop and made her way onto Buffalo Road.

  The New York State Thruway felt too dangerous, so she drove the last seventy miles west along the straight rural highway. The closer Jane came to her home, the more careful she became. She had not forgotten that the only time the hunters had seen Jane she had been in western and central New York.

  When she arrived in Deganawida, she passed her house three times before she was satisfied that she had not been followed and that there was nobody waiting at the house for her. She turned into the driveway and closed the garage, then opened the back door of the house. At each stage she kept all of her senses alert, searching for signs that someone had been here. She checked the telephone upstairs, but there were no messages. Then she went down to the cellar. She moved the ladder and climbed up to the old heating duct, then removed the steel box and opened it. She put the remaining stack of hundred-dollar bills into the box, then restored the driver's licenses and credit cards in different names she had been carrying. The only identity she kept out was Rebecca Silverman. She hid the box and went upstairs.

  In the kitchen she took the Rebecca Silverman license and credit cards, and cut them up with a pair of scissors. As she took the tiny shreds, put them into an envelope, and returned them to her purse, she felt regret at losing such a solid identity. But she knew that there was no salvaging Rebecca Silverman after an incident in an airport. Even being a victim of a crime made the name too dangerous to use again.

  When she was ready to leave, she checked the windows and the locks again, adjusted the timers on the lamps to be sure the house looked occupied, and then drove out of the garage and up the street. She took the direct route to Amherst on surface streets, driving down Delaware Avenue toward Buffalo, then turning left onto Brighton Road and following the long, straight highway until it became Maple Road and passed the University at Buffalo campus. All the way she watched for cars that might be following her. She stopped at the Boulevard Mall for a few minutes and used the opportunity to disperse the bits of Rebecca Silverman in two trash cans. Twice she turned off on small residential streets to see if anyone made the same turn, then returned to the main road and went on.

  Jane turned into the driveway of the McKinnon house at four-thirty, and kept going all the way up the drive around the house so the car would not be visible from the street. She studied the doors and windows of the house from outside to be sure the glass was intact and that there were no suspicious marks on the windowsills, no gouges in any doors near the locks. When she was satisfied that nobody had broken into the house, she unlocked it and went inside.

  When she stepped into the kitchen, she was reminded that Carey was, in some ways, a disturbing sort of husband. He had been a bachelor through medical school and internship and residency, so he knew perfectly well how to cook for himself. His life as a surgeon had given him little tolerance for microbes, so the sink and counters were as clean as they ever were when she cleaned them. She opened the dishwasher and saw that it had already been emptied and the dishes put away. There was a kind of military precision to everything he did when she was away.

  She went to the telephone mounted on the wall and called Carey's office. After one ring the receptionist answered, "Dr. Mc-Kinnon's office."

  "Hi, Julie. It's Jane. Is he in?"

  "Hi, Jane. He just got off a call, and he's getting ready to go back to the hospital for rounds. I'm sure I can catch him, if you'll hold."

  "Sure."

  A few seconds later there was a click. "Jane? Are you home?"

  "Yes. I just got home a minute ago."

  "Was there any trouble?"

  "No trouble," she said. "None at all."

  12

  Jane lay in the bed in the darkened room and listened to the regular, deep breaths that indicated her husband had fallen asleep. She looked beside her at his big, familiar shape. When Carey slept, his face acquired a lineless, peaceful emptiness that made him look like a teenager. She liked to see him, but the moon had moved so it was no longer shining in the bedroom window. She looked at the glowing display of the alarm clock on Carey's nightstand. It was two-thirty A.M. already. She felt happy, but she wasn't ready to sleep yet. She got out of bed, put on her bathrobe, and walked out of the bedroom. She walked along the hallway a few yards to the spare room that faced the front of the house. This was the room she had begun two years ago to prepare as a nursery. She stood at the edge of the curtains to look out the window without being seen.

  She looked out at the long, open road, now lined by large houses that had been built in the past forty years since Amherst had gone from farm country to suburb. There was nobody out there, not even a car parked where she could see it. During the winter a car left on the road was liable to be hit by a snowplow, and even now that summer had come, people stuck to the habit of putting cars away in their garages. There was nobody out there. Her house, her husband, her identity were all safe.

  Brent Ketter was on her mind. Even in the old days, she had known there was no question that if she kept being a guide, then one day she was going to walk down the wrong street in some distant city, or go into the wrong building. A face would be waiting for her, and it would acquire a sudden look of recognition, and then hatred. He would be someone she hadn't been thinking about, maybe hadn't thought about in years, but he would have no trouble remembering her. He would open fire before she could move. It had almost happened last night. If Ketter had seen her anywhere but in an airport, she would be dead.

  She had taken many people out of terrible lives, and for each of them there was at least one person like this—a professional killer who had not collected, an abuser robbed of his victim, a rival who had been cheated out of his little victory. Each time Jane had gone out with a runner, she had made another chaser aware that she had beaten him. She had gotten through last night, but someday, one of them might be more alert, faster, luckier.

  But she was home now. She had made a very brief, necessary return to the old life. Now Jane had returned to the life she had half-chosen and half-invented, the life with Carey. As she stared out the window at the familiar configuration of trees and rooftops arranged on the broad, flat country where she had always lived, everything looked the same as it had been before Christine. But nothing was the same as it had been. The world had a tension to it, an expectation like an indrawn breath.

  Carey had told his colleagues that Jane had been referred to the ear clinic at UCLA for treatment of minor hearing damage she had sustained in the bombing. She supposed that Carey was a better judge than she was about what would satisfy the curiosity of other doctors. She also supposed the nature of the imaginary injury would help. The problem had to be something that a doctor would shrug off as dull, and that didn't require Jane to look or behave differently. Carey had been at work every day since the bombing, telling the necessary lies. It made her feel peculiar—sad, gr
ateful, regretful, guilty—that she had forced her husband, the man she had admired since she'd met him in college, to become a liar.

  But the lies were over, at least for now. She would be home with Carey for the summer. She had put the pursuers far behind, and she was almost sure she had left them no way of tracing Christine. At first Jane had maintained a small hope that at least one of the six would be arrested, but after a couple of weeks passed with no news of arrests, she had given that up. People who made a living doing armed kidnappings seldom used their original names. Earlier tonight Carey had said, "I'm really sorry they weren't caught."

  Jane said, "That's okay. They're not important anymore."

  "They're not?"

  "No. I would have loved it if they were caught, or if something bad had happened to them to make them give up. But time will do the same thing. I'm not trying to get revenge on these people for the bombing, or bring justice for the ones who got hurt, or make sure someone gets punished. I don't really know how to accomplish any of those things. All I took on was a pregnant girl who came to me for help. I did what I could, and if she does what I taught her, she'll be safe."

  "Was that what it was—the fact that she was pregnant?"

  Jane studied him. "You mean is that why I helped her?"

  "Well, yes. It wouldn't be so strange. For years now you've thought about having a baby. And one night, here's a young woman who's pregnant. After five years of staying out of sight, she's the one you decide to risk your life to help. I wondered if that had anything to do with your decision. Just now you said, 'All I took on was a pregnant girl—' "

  "'...who came to me for help.' That's what I said."

  "Right," said Carey. "But the pregnancy was the only quality you mentioned."

  "I helped her because she's the first person to find her way to me needing my help. The pregnancy made it harder for her to run and harder for her to hide. It was only one of the reasons why she needed help."