Vanishing Act jw-1

by Thomas Perry

  Jane said, "It’s cash, isn’t it?"

  He shrugged. "Well, yeah. I didn’t think I’d be in a position to cash a check or something."

  "Put it in the trunk. It won’t be any safer two feet closer to you on the back seat."

  He opened the trunk and put the two bags inside, then started to close it, but hesitated. "I don’t want to keep guessing wrong. Is it all right to keep the gun up front with us?"

  She was at the rear of the rented car, opening the trunk. She said, "It’s fine with me. Keep the trunk open." When she slammed the trunk and came around to the new car, she was carrying a backpack and a short-barreled shotgun. She put them in beside the bags.

  "You still want me to drive?" he asked.

  "If you don’t mind. People always take a second look if the woman is driving. It looks like the man is drunk or something." She set the keys on the hood of the rented car and got in beside Felker.

  "Drive straight north again. When you come to the intersection with Ridge Road, take a right."

  He bumped the car slowly around Clifford’s building and glanced past it to gauge the speed and distance of the next set of headlights coming toward them. She saw that his eyes focused on her for a second before he stepped on the gas.

  "What’s wrong?" she said.

  "It’s typical Harry. He didn’t bother to tell me what you looked like."

  "Why? What do I look like?"

  He shrugged. "Well, you don’t look like a bodyguard."

  She regretted having asked that way, as though she wanted him to tell her she was pretty. She regretted saying anything at all. She should have ignored it. She hadn’t been given enough time to prepare for that too, the special strain of traveling with a man who wasn’t too old and wasn’t too young and had gotten used to the fact that most of the attention he had given women was welcome. She had to keep him thinking in another way, so she pretended to misunderstand, as though the whole idea had never entered her head. "That’s the way it’s done," she said. "You’ve got to get used to thinking one way and looking another way. Turn right at that light up there."

  He made the turn and accelerated onto the eastbound highway. Then he looked at her again. "It’s a beautiful disguise." He seemed to realize he had gone too far. "Very smart."

  "Yours has got to be better. It has to come from inside your head. When was the last time you were afraid for your life?"

  "That’s easy," he said. "When I was a cop."

  "Cops are dogs. Try to think in rabbit."

  "What?"

  She said it carefully, so he would understand. ’’This is like dogs chasing a rabbit. When the rabbit wins, he doesn’t get to kill the dogs and eat them. He doesn’t get to be a dog. He just gets to keep being a rabbit."

  He opened his shirt and held out the pistol. "You mean rabbits don’t need one of these."

  "It’s an asset if you think of it as a last resort. Just don’t imagine that a shoot-out with the people who are looking for us is going to help you. Once anybody has discharged a firearm, sooner or later everybody left standing has to talk to the police."

  "And we can’t talk to the police."

  "A few days in a jail cell won’t hurt me. I’ve done it before. But if these people are any of the things you think they are, then you can’t." She paused for a moment, then said, "Or any of the people you haven’t thought of yet."

  "What people?"

  "I don’t know."

  "Why aren’t you saying it straight out? What is it?"

  "Whoever it is wants you killed in jail before a trial. Doesn’t that have a familiar ring to it?"

  He answered too quickly: "No."

  "So you have thought of it."

  "I’ve thought of everything. I’ve heard those stories too, but not from anybody who would know. And not in St. Louis."

  "The contract on you is being circulated in prisons. Money doesn’t do a lifer much good. Other things do."

  "It’s not cops."

  "Nobody seems to be afraid that a prisoner who hears about it will take it to the authorities. It does make you wonder."

  He was irritated now. "I wasn’t a dirty cop who knew things about other dirty cops. I did my job until the day I quit, and when I left, as far as I know, everybody else did his job too." He simmered for a few minutes while she waited in silence. Then he said quietly, "I’m sorry. I just... my life just kind of blew up. It’s taken a few days to get used to the idea that the last five years, when I was an accountant, were a waste. I was probably just being set up. I’m ready to give up everything I ever was, but I’m not ready to decide that everything I’ve ever done was worthless. Does that make sense?"

  "Of course it does," she said. She had gone as far as she could for the moment. Some of the rabbits took to it instantly because they had been hiding and ducking all of their lives. Some took longer.

  As they drove along Ridge Road, the dense thickets of bright electric lights along the river faded and threw no illumination in front of them. Ridge Road had been laid out on the northern branch of the Waagwenneyu, the great central trail of the Iroquois that ran from the Hudson to the Niagara. The north branch had been placed just below Lake Ontario on the long, flat escarpment that was the prehistoric edge of the lake.

  As she looked out into the darkness past the little pool of light that the headlamps threw, she could feel the Waagwenneyu under them, just below the pavement. In the dark, the road sliced through the middle of the property of some rich guy who thought of himself as a country gentleman. Her view was blocked by a dense second-growth of trees that the owner’s farmer ancestor must have left there to protect his crops from the wind. The thick trunks presented themselves one after the other and swept by, and the overarching branches fifty feet above nearly touched each other in the middle, and looking up at them put Jane a few inches lower, below the pavement on the Waagwenneyu. The path was mostly straight, winding here and there to avoid a thick tree or a muddy depression. It was narrow, only eighteen inches wide, but deep—sometimes worn a foot below the surface by hundreds of years of moccasins. This was the branch of the trail that took the Seneca from the Genesee valley and the Finger Lakes northwest into Canada. The other branch was now Main Street in Buffalo, and it ran to the shore of Lake Erie and continued along it into Ohio and beyond. Those were the paths to war.

  In the direction they were traveling now, it was the trail home, to the soft, rolling country where the Seneca felt most safe. The world then was all tall forests that had never been cut, oak and maple and elm and hickory and hemlock and pine, alternating in stands and mixed together. Sometimes runners would move along this trail eastward to tell something urgent—alarms or councils. They ran day and night, naked except for a breech-cloth and belt, their war clubs stuck in the belt at the back and their bows strung across their chests. They always ran in pairs, one behind the other, silent, never speaking. They could cover a hundred miles a day, so the trip from Neahga, the mouth of the Niagara, to Albany, in the country of the Mohawk, took three days. In all that distance there was no point where the trail emerged from the forest. It was marked at intervals by hatchet gouges on the biggest trees, but the runners didn’t need to look. Sometimes they would glance up and to the left to navigate by the constellation of the loon, but most of the time they could feel the trail with the balls of their feet.

  When the trees had thinned out again, Jane replaced them with ghost trees beyond the range of the headlights, so that what was beyond eyesight could be the great forest again, deep and thick and shadowy. The secret was that the forest was still here, the descendants standing tall in parks and groves and windbreaks. The Seneca were still here too, driving this road to jobs in Lockport or Niagara Falls, dreaming Seneca dreams.

  There was a disturbance coming from outside her, a light that rushed up from behind and pushed the forest back on both sides, where she couldn’t feel it around her anymore. She sat up. "How long has that car been behind us?" she asked.

  "I don’
t know," said Felker. "He just switched his brights on."

  "Think for a second," she said. "Was it there when we made the turn?" She knew the answer. It wouldn’t have been so dark if the other car had been behind them. It must be all right. They hadn’t been followed.

  "I don’t think so," he said.

  The car came closer and closer, catching up quickly, but the driver didn’t dim his lights. Felker reached up and moved the rearview mirror to cut the glare of the rectangle of light that it threw across his eyes.

  "There’s a long, straight stretch in a minute," said Jane. "When we get there, let him pass."

  "I’d be delighted." He reached the section where the road straightened. On both sides were low, crooked fieldstone walls and houses built far back from the road, as houses had been when these were still farms. Felker slowed to forty, then thirty, but the car slowed too and stayed behind. Finally, he coasted off onto the shoulder and the car came up behind. When he had nearly stopped, the other car pulled to the left, its glaring headlights merging now with his to illuminate the slight decline ahead and then halfway up the compensating slope. The car slowly slid past and gained speed.

  Jane stared at the back window while it was still in the beam of the headlights. There were four heads in it. That usually meant it was kids, probably farm kids who had spent the day in the city. Her eyes moved downward. It had New York plates, and that was a relief. But there was a license-plate holder around it with the name of a dealer.

  "Does Star-Greendale mean anything to you?" she asked.

  "Where did you see that?"

  "People from around here buy their cars around here. I never heard of it."

  "St. Louis," he said, frowning. "Greendale is a town outside St. Louis. But it’s not Star, it’s Starleson Chevrolet."

  "Stop," she said. "Leave the lights on, but give me the keys. Somebody saw you get on the bus in St. Louis."

  She slipped out and closed the door, then ran to the trunk. She pulled everything out and tossed it into the back seat, then climbed over it. He watched her in the back seat as she opened the backpack. "What are you doing?"

  "The car has New York plates. They must have damaged them prying them off somebody else’s, so they left their holder on to cover it." She was busy pushing shells into the long tubular magazine of the shotgun. "They’re waiting for us up there somewhere. If we go back the way we came, we’re a half hour from anywhere crowded enough to lose them."

  He checked the load of his pistol and then snapped the cylinder back into place. "There’s a box of ammo in my suitcase," he said. "I’d like to have that where I can reach it before we go ahead."

  "We’re not going ahead. We’re not dogs, remember?"

  "What, then?"

  "Take the backpack. Put your money in it, or whatever else you think is worth saving. Don’t leave anything here that will tell who you are—I mean tell anybody, even the police. Wipe off everything you touched."

  "We’re going to walk?"

  She didn’t answer, so he quickly did what she had told him to. The money wouldn’t all fit in the knapsack, so he put some of it in his pockets. Jane put her leather bag over her shoulder and held her shotgun in her right hand. "Time to go," she said, and walked across the road. She swung her legs over the stone fence and into the empty cornfield beside it, then stood still as he hurried to catch up.

  "All right," she said. "Walk only on the trenches between the rows. That’s the way the farmers do it because the corn is planted in the raised places."

  "You care about their corn?"

  "No, I care about leaving footprints you can see with a flashlight."

  She started off across the cornfield, taking two rows at a step, and Felker followed. She could hear him coming along behind her, and it made her comfortable, because if he had stepped on the soft ridges of dirt, it would have been silent. Now and then he stopped to glance up the highway, and that put him behind, but she didn’t care. He was tall and strong, and he wouldn’t have any trouble keeping up.

  She angled away from the barnyard, where there would be animals to smell them and bring the farmer out. When they reached the windbreak of trees at the north end of the field, she stopped and touched Felker. He leaned down and she put her lips to his ear. "We’ll watch from here."

  She set down her bag and sat on it, leaning against a tree trunk, the shotgun butt on the ground and the barrel upward. Felker slipped the backpack off his shoulders and sat by the next tree. It took five minutes. The Chevrolet’s headlights came over the horizon, aimed first up into the sky and then dipping at the crest of the hill. The car was moving fast, at least seventy, judging from the way it gobbled up the space between the telephone poles.

  When the driver saw the car parked by the side of the road, he slowed down. There were no heads visible in the borrowed Ford, so the driver had a decision to make. The Chevrolet veered to the center of the road and passed the parked car at about the speed of a walking man. It proceeded a hundred yards farther, and then its lights went out before it stopped. The doors opened and three of the four men got out and started to walk back along the road.

  Jane didn’t see the dome light go on, and she didn’t hear any door slam. None of this was reassuring. The one in the car left the lights off and kept going down the road, then stopped and turned around. It was too far from the parked car for Jane and Felker to have heard it if they were hiding on the floor. The three men on foot spread out when they were still a hundred feet behind the parked car. Two of them went into the fields behind the stone fences on either side of the road, and all three slowly approached the car. When one was in front of it and one on each side, they stopped, pulled guns out of their coats, and aimed them at the Ford.

  Felker leaned close to Jane’s ear and whispered, "If we’re going, shouldn’t we get started?"

  She shook her head. "I want to see one more thing."

  The Chevrolet began to move slowly up the road toward the parked car, its lights still off. When it was almost bumper to bumper with the Ford, it suddenly shot forward and rammed the back bumper to knock whoever was inside out of their crouch. The man on the road flung the back door open and aimed his gun. After a second he slammed the door in frustration, and the light went out before he turned his head.

  "Now," Jane said. She turned and crawled a few feet deeper into the windbreak and then stood up.

  9

  She went off at a slow jog, going due north, first among the trees and then across a second field. This one was unplowed and full of short weeds that whipped against the stiff denim of her jeans. When they reached the far side of the second field, she stopped and looked back. The headlights came on suddenly and bathed the Ford in a pool of whiteness.

  Then she was running through the night across the fields, the bag over her left shoulder and the shotgun balanced in her right hand. She could hear Felker’s breathing behind her, and she judged that he had the stamina to keep running.

  It was going to be possible if she could keep her vision clear. Everything about modem life made people think of the world as a network of roads. But in country like this, the roads were just the narrow borders of broad expanses of rolling, fertile farmland. The four men weren’t about to abandon their car in the dark and take off on foot across the fields after them. If they were like most people, they wouldn’t even think of it. They would already be searching a map for the place where Jane and Felker would come out on a road. The obvious thing to do was to take a loop, come out behind the men on Ridge Road, and hope to make it eastward into Lockport, where there would be lights and police. But what if she and Felker didn’t double back? If she remembered, if her vision was clear, there were no more big east-west roads between here and Route 18, just on the outskirts of Olcott.

  Felker moved abreast of her and said between deep breaths, "Where are we running to?"

  She said, "Olcott."

  "What’s Olcott?"

  "About seven or eight miles."

  "What’s
in Olcott?"

  "Save your strength," she said, then regulated her breathing again to bring in oxygen to keep her head clear. "Don’t talk."

  They ran in silence then, and she lengthened her strides to match his, so the sounds of their feet struck her ear at the same time, a strong, rhythmic cadence, not a ragged pitter-patter pitter-patter that drained strength and wore out the runner. She kept her head up and tried to relax her shoulder muscles, but it was difficult carrying the shotgun and the leather bag that bounced against her hip at each stride.

  She pulled the strap of the bag over her head so it went across her chest between her breasts and the bag was on her back. Then she slipped off her belt as she ran, and threaded it through the swivel on the end of the shotgun magazine, then through the trigger guard, and slung it tightly over her back so it was held against the leather bag. When she had done that, the running went faster.

  It was a clear, cool April night, so the sweat formed and dried almost instantly, and the air came into her lungs like a cold intoxicant and came out in steamy huffs. She thought about Felker and listened to his breathing. He was disturbing. Jane had never taken a fugitive out of the world who had had this much trouble this early. Yet he seemed to be accepting it. She could hear him breathing deep, steady breaths, not short irregular gasps. He didn’t seem to be afraid. He had more to be afraid of than some of the people she had protected, less than others, but they had all been afraid. They had come to her because they had already tried all of the forms of shelter that people believed in: laws, blood relations, friends, even society’s capacity for simple outrage and disgust that a lone, powerless person had been laid open to evil. He had come that way too, but he wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t afraid.

  They ran through the fields and pastures, thickets of small bushes and groves of old trees, once coming so near to a house that they had to duck a clothesline before they slipped along beside the white clapboards. There was a dark window in the back where she could see the ghostly blue glow from a television set on the ceiling, but no people. The night was empty now. They were all penned inside houses and cars, separated from the night by plates of glass and the electricity they immersed themselves in, thick blankets of sound and light and warmth.