by Thomas Perry
After a few months Lenny had become convinced that it was virtually impossible to work the pools; keep replacing customers who moved away, got pissed off, or never paid at all; buy the chemicals; keep the books; and still live a decent life. If he drank too much one night, he couldn’t call in sick. He still had to spend the next morning squinting against the glare of the sun that flashed off the shimmering surface of some swimming pool.
He was just at the point of admitting to himself that the business was not as practical as it had looked, when Earl had begun to toss him tidbits to keep him solvent. Earl did it with the same manner that he used when he tossed a chunk of meat to his dogs: “I got something for you, if you want it.” At first it had just been watching the house and feeding the dogs while Earl and Linda were away.
For a long time he had not even known what business they were in. He could tell they made money at it, but sometimes it seemed to Lenny that everybody in the world was making money except him. It was like a joke that they had all heard and he hadn’t. Linda had been the one to tell him they were detectives.
Earl had asked him to watch some guy’s apartment. He had sat for three days listening to people on the radio bitching about the government, told Earl when the guy came home, and collected a thousand in cash. Another time, Earl had asked him to go pick up a package in Chicago. Lenny had received another thousand for taking a plane ride. The ease of it had suggested to him the plan of transforming himself from pool man to detective. The only way to get a license was to serve an apprenticeship consisting of two thousand hours of work for a detective agency, but he was, in a manner of speaking, already working for one.
It was only after Earl had agreed to put him on a time sheet but just pay him when he needed him that he began to see that the detective business was not what it seemed any more than the pool business was. He had logged barely a thousand hours on Earl’s fabricated time sheets before the day came when he called Earl to say he had found a suspect, and then watched Earl walk to the window, poke a shotgun through the screen, and blow the guy’s head off. That had been five years ago.
All of his history up to then—as soldier, businessman, entrepreneur—and all of the experiences he had endured since then that he didn’t especially want to enumerate at the moment had led him to this. He was loaded up and slogging through snowy mountains like a damned Sherpa, and he was becoming more and more suspicious that he might be lost. The world around him seemed inconceivably enormous—much bigger than it seemed in the city—and yet he felt hemmed in by it, because moving across it was a matter of inches and heartbeats. Going in any direction in this snowstorm was like making a colossal bet. If he was wrong, there would be no recovery. But already, when he picked out his spot on the map, he could not be positive that he was pointing to where he was, or where he wished he were.
He devoted the next mile to hating Earl. It was Earl who had done this to him, left him here laboring through the snow, probably toward his death. Earl’s method had not been much different from the alternation of fear and gratification that he used on his dogs. It was mortifying. For a second he hoped that Earl was lost somewhere out in the deepest wilderness, freezing to death.
Without warning, Lenny experienced a moment of clarity. That was what Lenny’s personal story was about: Earl was going to get killed—maybe not on this job, but some time—and Lenny was going to inherit Linda. He would also take possession of all of Earl’s stuff, as a matter of course. There was money, the house, the detective agency, and so on. None of that was important in itself. Its only purpose was to allow the man who had Linda to keep her comfortably.
As soon as he had discerned his destiny, Lenny began to feel better. He marched along with a dreamy certainty, thinking ahead in time rather than space. As long as he kept his face pointed toward the north, he would survive. He began to develop a notion. It was too new, too vague and unformed to call a plan. He would meet Earl somewhere on this trail. He would learn that Earl had caught up with the man and woman he was chasing and bagged them. Earl would start off along the trail toward home. Maybe Lenny would let him get five or even ten miles before he pulled the P 239 out of his pocket and fired it into the back of his head. Lenny would hurry back to California and console Linda.
When he reached a hundred-yard straight stretch between parallel rows of trees, he set off more quickly. He must have been on the trail all along. With the unbroken snow ahead, the path looked like a sidewalk. He had taken ten steps before the woman separated herself from the trees. She stood absolutely still and erect, and at first he wondered whether he had imagined her.
He kept walking, and he was sure. She was gazing at him, but her eyes never moved. For a few seconds he squinted at her, and his mind insistently offered him interpretations so frightening that he forgot to stop walking. Maybe she was dead, frozen to death leaning against a tree. Maybe Earl had killed her, and this was her ghost, lingering on the spot. Maybe she had always been something not quite human, and she had lured Earl away from the trail to get lost and die and was waiting to do the same to Lenny.
For the next few seconds he calmed himself. She was not a spook. She was a woman. He could see the long black hair streaming down from a navy watch cap, and there was a strap across the front of her chest that had to be her pack. Spooks didn’t need to wear packs. She must have circled back and come out on the trail behind Earl, and now Lenny had her.
She must have seen him by now, but still she didn’t turn to run. Maybe she didn’t know Lenny had seen her. He had seen rabbits behave the same way in the first snowfall of the year when he was a kid in Michigan. They seemed to think the snow had made them invisible, so you could walk right up and knock them on the head. He kept his eyes fixed on her and kept walking, narrowing the space between them.
At seventy yards, with less snow falling between them, he could see her more clearly. She was definitely staring straight into his eyes. Then he recognized the strap across her chest. The dark line above her shoulder that his eyes had interpreted as a branch of a tree was the barrel of Earl’s new rifle.
Lenny shrugged off his heavy pack and heard it hit the ground. He pulled his pistol out of his jacket and charged her. He paid no attention to what was under his feet, just dashed toward her. He fired at her as he ran, a loud, echoing blast. He saw the snow kick up five feet from her. He fired again as she stepped to the side, and a small gash of white opened on the pine tree behind her. She stopped a pace away, beyond the snow-plastered trunk of a dead tree.
He saw her swing the rifle sling over her head and grasp the big sniper rifle in her left hand. He saw her put the fingers of her right hand between her teeth and pull the glove off to bare her trigger finger. She raised the rifle to her shoulder, brought up the bolt, slid it back, forward, down. He had to keep her pinned behind that tree, afraid to stick her head out.
Lenny fired twice more, quickly. He was so close now that he saw her push off the safety. He heard her yell, “Stop! I want to talk!” and then, “Stop or I’ll shoot!” She was staring at him through the scope, but her small, female voice reminded him that he could do this. If he could make her flinch, duck for better cover—anything—he would be on her before she could recycle the bolt and take aim again.
Lenny raised his pistol again and tried to hold it on her as he ran. He fired again and again, his shots going wide, high, low, hitting bark and snow and rocks. She stood as still as the trees. He saw her finger start to tighten, and then he stopped seeing.
When Jane reached the trailhead at Logan Pass, it was night and the snow was a foot deep. The visitor center was dark, and the windows had been boarded over for the winter. She found the car that she and Pete Hatcher had left, and she could see that the keys were still in the ignition. She decided that it was best not to leave it here, where the search for lost campers it prompted might lead to shallow graves, so she drove to the next trail at Siyeh Bend, drove it into a snowbank, and walked back to Logan Pass.
She used the key
she had taken off the body of the second man to open the rented four-wheel-drive Toyota and start the engine. She sat for a minute enjoying the sensation of being out of the cold wind, then drove out onto Going-to-the-Sun Road. At two in the morning, she reached the row of yellow steel stanchions set into the pavement to block the road for the winter. She had hoped the barrier would be fragile enough to crash through, but this one had been made with people like her in mind. She found her way out by backing up a quarter mile, driving through a small wooded grove and an open field, then coming out on the highway beyond the gate.
Jane drove ten miles from the park before she found a level, paved turnout on an exposed plateau, where the wind had swept away enough of the powdery snow to bare some of the blacktop. She stopped and left the motor running while she completed a cursory search of the vehicle. Under the seat was a key to a room at the Rocky Mountain Lodge in Kalispell, and in the glove compartment was a rental receipt for the Toyota.
She arrived in Kalispell before dawn, carried everything that had been left in the vehicle into the motel room, and began to study it. The men had left nothing in the room, but Jane had not expected them to. People in professions like theirs—or hers—didn’t leave things where other people were likely to find them. She opened the two men’s suitcases and sliced the linings enough so she could fit her hand inside to feel for hidden papers. She slashed the insoles of the shoes to see if they had been opened and glued back. She took apart their flashlights, the carrying case for the sniper rifle, then held up each piece of clothing and shone a flashlight through it to be sure nothing had been sewn into it.
When she had finished, she walked back out to the Toyota. She knew that there had to be a hiding place. After ten minutes of studying the engine compartment, removing door panels and carpets, taking out the spare tire and the gas-tank cover, she realized that she had looked at it and missed it. These killers wouldn’t simply have hidden their secrets: they would have wanted them guarded.
Jane hurried inside and began to dismantle the dogs’ travel cages. By the time she had pried out the false floor of the second one, she had confirmed her assumption that the licenses and credit cards the men had been carrying were counterfeit. The ones she found in the dogs’ cages were older and bore scrapes and dull finishes from being carried in men’s wallets.
She read the name on the cards in the first packet: Leonard Tilden. Leonard Tilden’s California driver’s license said he lived at an address in North Hollywood with an apartment number tacked onto it. He had only one credit card, and it carried the name of a bank that Jane recognized. The bank advertised credit cards for people with bad credit ratings who deposited enough to pay the limit. Tilden’s picture on his license identified him as the man who had been following along behind to carry the gear. He wasn’t a serious professional killer, he was a caddy. It was possible that she could use him to find out if the cards were real.
She stepped to the nightstand by the bed, picked up the telephone book, found the area code for the northern part of Los Angeles, and dialed Information.
A young man’s voice came on. “What city, please?”
“North Hollywood.”
“Go ahead.”
“Do you have a number for Leonard Tilden, T-I-L-D-E-N?”
The young man was gone, and in his place was the familiar female voice of the information computer. “The … number … is—” Jane hung up.
The man she was interested in was the other one, the man who had carried the fancy sniper rifle. The little packet that contained his license, three gold credit cards, and one platinum card also contained fifty hundred-dollar bills. She dialed the Information operator again and asked for the number of Earl Bliss in Northridge. The computer came on and said, “We’re sorry. That number is unlisted.”
She slipped the two men’s identification cards into one pocket and the money into the other. Then she repacked the suitcases, making sure that everything the men had left here was inside. As she was about to go and load all of the luggage into their vehicle, she heard a sharp rapping on the door. She dropped quietly to the floor, held her breath, and listened.
Calvin Seaver waited on the doorstep and knocked again. He had stopped in Missoula to buy a down jacket, but his feet were wet and cold after the short walk from his room to Earl’s. He listened at the door but heard nothing. He thought about the size and configuration of his own room, tried to imagine not hearing a knock on the door, and found that he couldn’t. He rapped on the door a third time, harder, but he had already admitted to himself that his wait was not over yet. He had thought that maybe the new vehicle he had noticed in the parking lot had meant that Earl and Linda had returned, but apparently it hadn’t. He stepped back along the snow-covered walk, placing his feet in his own footprints, opened the door of his room, and went inside.
He stepped to the corner of his room, where his suitcase sat on a folding stand, opened it, and took out his other pair of shoes and a dry pair of socks. He looked at them, then put them back. The snow had not gone away. He had heard that once it began to fall in the Rockies, it often never went away until spring. A dry pair of shoes wouldn’t stay that way long enough to get him to his car. He was going to have to drive down the street to one of those upscale sporting goods stores and buy himself a pair of warm waterproof boots and some wool socks. If he got going right away, there would probably be some places open.
He sat at the desk and tried to anticipate the mistakes he might be making. After a moment of thought, he quickly wrote a note on a sheet of paper from the phone pad in front of him and looked at it. “Come see me in Room 3165.” He fretted for a long time about the signature. He had been very careful so far. He had not left a message on Earl’s answering machine or put anything in writing that could connect him to Earl if anything went wrong. He had paid the up-front money in cash that had come in across the tables in the casino. He had found Earl here without speaking to outsiders.
He had been able to do it because of a combination of luck and curiosity. When he had met with Earl and Linda in Los Angeles, they had made the deal in the car and had eaten lunch in a restaurant without saying anything that could be overheard. When the waitress had brought the check, Seaver had pulled out a credit card to pay it. But Earl had shaken his head and said gruffly, “I’d better pay that.” Seaver had hesitated, but Earl’s eyes had told him that he considered this a part of their business relationship, so he had put away his wallet. He had expected Earl to pay in cash so no record of the meeting would be created, but Earl had used a credit card, added a big tip, and signed with a flourish. It had caught Seaver’s attention that the name he had signed seemed to be much longer than Earl Bliss. As Earl and Linda had stood up to leave, Seaver had surreptitiously opened the leather folder, glanced at the receipt, and seen that the name was Donald R. Brookings. As soon as Seaver had arrived in Kalispell he had called Pleasure, Inc., and asked that the credit department add to today’s long list of names for credit checks the name Donald R. Brookings. When he called again, he learned that Donald R. Brookings had charged meals and rooms in Lake Havasu, Denver, and various places in Montana. The last ones were for this motel in Kalispell.
Now Seaver was in a delicate situation. If Earl Bliss got a note that was not signed, he might think just about anything. He might imagine it was a note from Hatcher and the dark-haired woman, inviting him to talk about a buyout of his contract. That could not be anything but an ambush. Earl would know that, and he would respond by arranging to have something ugly happen in this room suddenly and without warning. And Earl had been in this business for a long time. There might be any number of loose ends and potential paybacks swimming around in that fevered brain of his that Seaver didn’t know about. Earl might kill Seaver tonight in the dark just because he was about the size of one of Earl’s loose ends. What was already happening was risky enough. Seaver was showing up and surprising Earl Bliss either just before or just after Earl had killed somebody.
Seaver
tried to look at the issue of the signature from a positive point of view. Would leaving an unsigned note in the room down the walk protect Seaver from suspicion if the ones who found it were the police? No. It had his room number on it. He wrote “Seaver” clearly at the bottom of the page. Seaver looked at it for a moment, crumpled it up, and threw it into the wastebasket. What had he been thinking of? This was not the time to get impatient and do something foolish.
Seaver walked back past Earl’s room and slogged off through the snow toward his car. When he got to it, he had to clean the snow off the windshield and the rear window with his bare hands. He started the engine and then sat in the car holding his cold fingers over the defroster for a minute or two until the numbness went away and he felt ready to drive. While he was at it, he would buy some gloves, too, and a hat.
Jane crouched behind the door and listened. When the knocking on the door had stopped, she had watched the man walk off and disappear into Room 3165. She had waited a few minutes, then returned to the work of packing up the men’s belongings. She’d had a half-formed plan to take all of them out the back window of the room and bring the Toyota around the building and out of sight before she began loading.
But then she had been startled by the heavy crunching sound of footsteps outside the door. She crouched beside it and clutched the pistol she had taken off the second man. She stayed where she was, barely breathing, until she heard the footsteps again, this time getting fainter as the man moved off across the lot.