A String of Beads

by Thomas Perry

  Jimmy was stuffing his new clothes into his backpack. Jane stepped past him into her room, rolled her clothes and placed them in her backpack, then went into the bathroom and swept the cosmetics and soaps into a plastic bag. After she put the bag into her backpack she took a hand towel and began wiping every surface. She stepped to the door, saw Jimmy wiping doorknobs and counters with a napkin from the coffee service, and tossed him a hand towel. “Use this. While you’re at it, check the window for watchers or suspicious cars, but don’t get spotted.”

  Jimmy stepped to the window and looked out the lower right corner for a few seconds. “I don’t see anybody out there. There’s nobody near our car.”

  “Good. Keep wiping. Anything either of us may have touched.” She put all of the dishes from the cupboards into the dishwasher, added soap, and started it. She picked up the magazines from the coffee table and put them in a trash bag, then swept everything from the refrigerator into the bag after them.

  Jimmy had completed his circuit of the suite, so Jane said, “All right. Go down the stairs.”

  Jimmy went while Jane stayed a few seconds to wipe off the door and its inner and outer handles, and let it swing shut. She slipped into the stairwell just as she heard the ele­vator bell ring.

  At the bottom of the stairwell, Jane edged past Jimmy, slipped out the door, and moved to the small enclosure where the garbage dumpsters were hidden from view. She emptied the bag of trash into a dumpster, then crumpled the bag, tossed it in too, and walked with Jimmy to the Chevrolet Malibu. She set her backpack on the backseat, and got into the driver’s seat. Jimmy sat beside her.

  She started the car and backed out of the space, then headed toward the exit from the parking lot. “If they’re going to take us, it will be in the next few seconds, before we hit the street.” She drove at a moderate, unhurried speed to the exit, signaled, looked both ways, and pulled out into the traffic on the highway. She matched her speed to the other cars, and eased the Malibu into the stream of cars in the left lane. For a few seconds, she kept glancing at the side mirrors for any sign that they were being followed. Then she turned to Jimmy. “How’s your mom?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Somebody traced the call?”

  “I’m not absolutely positive what happened,” she said. “I would have liked a chance to get a better look at what the men I saw in the lobby were doing, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to stick around. They looked like plainclothes police officers of some kind. I saw the guns but not the badges, so I can’t swear to that. They were with the desk clerk looking at the guest list on his computer. What I’m hoping is that they’ll go through it all, not figure out that you were staying in a room registered in a woman’s name, and move on to the next hotel. When you called your mother you were in the hotel?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Jane, I’m really sorry. I thought that if I was using a throwaway phone, nobody could trace it to me.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “But if they were monitoring your mother’s calls, they would know she got a call from a number that was pinging off a particular tower outside Cleveland. That’s what they wait for.”

  “I can’t believe I was too stupid to think of that,” said Jimmy. “I’m ashamed of myself for putting you in danger along with me.”

  “I don’t want to go on and on about this,” Jane said. “But you’ve got to listen to whatever I tell you and take it seriously. I’m willing to take some of the blame for this, because I didn’t explain why we can’t call home, just told you not to. And if we’re in trouble, then the person who will suffer most for it isn’t me.”

  “I’m so sorry. I just thought—”

  She interrupted. “It was a mistake. But this is a special situation, where we can’t make mistakes. None. I know my way, and you don’t, so pay attention—all the time.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Jane drove on in silence, checking the side mirrors frequently in case she’d missed something earlier. There were still no cars staying too long back there, but she knew she had to take more precautions to be sure. “Take the battery out of your phone and toss it out the window. Then the phone.”

  Jimmy took the battery out, dropped it on the road, and then the cell phone.

  When she reached a small plaza she pulled over and said, “You drive for a while.” When they had changed places, she said, “Go up there to the right and get on the eastbound ramp for the interstate.”

  Jimmy put the car in gear and drove. As Jimmy pulled onto the interstate ramp, Jane leaned back in her seat and let her muscles relax.

  Jimmy had been watching her. “What’s the plan?”

  She said, “If anybody was tracking your phone’s GPS, they’ll go where the last pings were going.”

  “Is that why we’re going east?”

  “Partly.”

  “What are the other reasons?”

  “One is that we’ve already come west, so if someone is following at a distance, or has just decided to, he’ll assume we’re still going in the same direction, because that’s what people do. I’ve also found over the years that people who run away tend to favor places to the south and west, where it’s warm, a little bit exotic, and living isn’t hard work. Hardly anybody wants to go where it’s cold in the winter. Right now I’m taking every choice that makes finding us less likely, even if it’s only a tiny bit less likely. Advantages add up.”

  “That sounds smart.”

  Jane sat in silence. She decided that her inability to get through to him must have been caused by the lifelong relationship between them. When they were children they had been equals. Or maybe the advantage had been a bit on Jimmy’s side. They had been comfortable playing together, partly because she was a girl who didn’t like sitting still. She was physical and energetic, and that helped Jimmy accept her. She liked to run and climb and explore. Jimmy was handsome, strong, and athletic, and Jane—if she remembered it right—had been tall and bony and unattractive. The first time anyone had said she was beautiful was in college, and she’d thought they were being sarcastic.

  Now, over twenty years later, Jimmy was about the same, but Jane was different. He seemed to be having trouble accepting the fact that she knew so much that he didn’t. If he wasn’t going to take what she said seriously, they were both in trouble.

  If he had been a stranger, a person who needed her help and came to her to ask for it, she would have spoken harshly when he’d ignored her orders. She might even have picked up her backpack, said, “This is as far as I go. You’re on your own,” and left. She would never be able to do that to Jimmy, but that wasn’t the problem. Maybe the problem was that he knew it. She looked at Jimmy. “Just keep driving east. When you get tired, wake me up and I’ll take over.” She leaned back, closed her eyes, and waited for the gentle rocking and the quiet hiss of the tires on the road to put her to sleep.

  Jane woke when the car lurched hard to the side and skidded, throwing her forward against the restraint of her seat belt. She clutched the armrest but the car fishtailed as Jimmy struggled to keep the wheels headed forward, then hit the brakes. She saw a set of taillights to the left, and then a series of them flashing past to the right. Jimmy shouted, “That guy tried to hit me!”

  “Pull to the right, away from him.” She punched the emergency blinker switch on the dashboard so it began to tick and flash, lowered her window, and stretched her arm out to signal to the cars coming up, half leaning out to look into their headlights. “Go now!”

  Jimmy moved over one lane and kept going. Jane kept her arm out the window as she watched for an opening, then said, “Now!” Jimmy made it to the right lane. “Take the next exit, and get there as fast as you can.”

  As he reached the exit a few seconds later and guided the car to the ramp, Jane held on to the back of her seat and stared out
the rear window of the car. “He doesn’t seem to have made it over to the exit, but he’ll take the next one.”

  “He was actually trying to hit me,” Jimmy said. “It was as though he wanted to slam us into the rail.” He stopped at the bottom of the ramp and then pulled cautiously into the traffic moving to his right on the road.

  “Pull into that lot up there—the hotel—and around the building to the back.”

  Jimmy pulled off the road and into the large parking lot that surrounded a twenty-story hotel. He drove up an aisle filled with cars and around the building, then pulled into one of the empty spaces at the rear of the building where their car could not be seen from the street.

  “Leave the motor running. This will only take a minute.” Jane got out and walked around the car, and then knelt beside the driver’s side door. After a few seconds she swung the door open and Jimmy got out.

  “You didn’t find anything, right?” Jimmy said. “The SUV didn’t actually hit us, but he would have if I hadn’t seen him in time.”

  “The driver wasn’t trying to smash into us.” Jane pointed at the bottom of the door just above the rocker panel. There was a small round hole punched in the sheet metal of the door. “That’s a bullet hole. There’s another one here. The shooter in the passenger seat must not have been prepared for you to drop back so suddenly. When you stomped on the brake he had to take his shot after he was ahead of you with his arm trailing out the window.”

  “Why would cops shoot at me?”

  “They weren’t the police. Cops give you a chance to let them take you the easy way. They don’t just open up on a car going seventy in traffic. I also think the shots weren’t loud enough, so the gun must have had a suppressor. The police don’t use them.”

  “I don’t get this.”

  “I don’t either. But from the look of the holes, I’d guess he could have been aiming for your left front tire to get us to pull over. He could also have been aiming at you.” She sat in the driver’s seat. “Get in. They’ll be taking the next exit about now. We’d better be gone before they get back here.”

  Jimmy got in, and Jane backed out of the space and drove around the big building. “We’ll change course and stay off the interstate. While you’re watching for the black SUV, also watch for a sign that says Route Eleven. It’ll be one of those white state highway signs.”

  “Okay.”

  Jane drove aggressively, not breaking any laws except the speed limit, but changing lanes frequently to avoid being trapped behind slow cars and trucks.

  Jimmy said, “What kind of person would be coming after me with a gun with a silencer? Who even has a silencer?”

  “Last time I looked it up there were thirty-nine states where it was legal to own one, and Ohio was one of them. You pay a two hundred dollar transfer tax to the ATF, and wait for them to process your application. If you’re somebody who can legally own a handgun, eventually you’ll get your silencer.” She kept her eyes on the road, trying to use each moment to get as far as she could from the highway exit they’d taken.

  She looked into the rearview mirror and said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t be thinking about hardware. I’d be trying to bring back anything I could about Nick Bauermeister, or his lawyers, his friends, family, or anything else that would tell us why somebody in another state would be looking for you.”

  “I don’t know. I told you I didn’t kill him. I don’t know anything about him except that he was a drunk taking a swing at me in a bar. Maybe he had a relative or friend who’s a badass and doesn’t trust the police to get me.”

  “This isn’t one man,” Jane said. “I saw two men at the hotel, and just now there were a driver and a shooter. The only way anybody could have found us in Ohio was by looking at your mother’s phone record. That narrows things down.”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t the police.”

  “Now I’m sure it isn’t. But there could be somebody who works for some police agency who’s doing a favor, or somebody in the phone company. There are also data brokers you can reach online who might get a list of calls made to your mother’s phone. Nick Bauermeister’s angry cousin isn’t likely to have done these things. Angry amateurs lose control and try to strangle you in court. They don’t hire pairs of killers to hunt you down two states away.”

  “There’s the sign for Route Eleven up ahead.”

  “I see it. Hold on.” Jane sped to the intersection and turned right without signaling, then accelerated away from the intersection down Route 11 to the south. She glanced in the rearview mirrors frequently as she drove.

  Jimmy said, “Do you think the guys in that SUV could have caught up with us this quickly?”

  “No, but I’m sure they could dial a cell phone this quickly to tell their friends where we’re likely to be. If you don’t mind, take a look behind us and memorize the cars. We’ll be away from the city lights in a few minutes, so study the way their headlights look, too. If anybody stays with us too long, or adjusts his speed just to keep us in sight, tell me.”

  “Headlights? Just two lights.”

  “They’re all different. Brightness, height from the ground, and so on. Look especially at SUVs, since that’s what just tried to force us off the road.”

  Jimmy turned around in his seat and stared for a few minutes. “We’ve got a few candidates, but nothing conclusive. Two SUVs. One black, like the one on the interstate, and the other light gray. There’s a white pickup. Looks like a Ford 250 with big tires, a yellow VW, a little red Fiat, and a—nope, that one dropped out at the Walmart.”

  “Good. That’s what I see, too. The VW and the Fiat are almost certainly harmless.”

  “Agreed.”

  “The white pickup we should keep an eye on, but usually what we have to fear from those guys is that they’ll drive so aggressively that they’ll kill us by accident. By the way, it’s a good idea to look for women.”

  “You mean woman drivers?”

  “Anywhere in the vehicle. There are a lot of bad things to be said about women, but they don’t get into this kind of work much. If you see a woman in any of the cars, we can pretty safely take it off the list.”

  “That leaves the two SUVs.”

  “Watch them for signs that we have a problem.”

  “I’m watching. What am I looking for?”

  “Signs that they’re trying to deceive us. Sometimes two cars will follow you by taking turns. One drops so far behind that you forget it exists, while the other keeps you in sight. Then they switch, so you don’t start wondering about the one you can see. When you see the first one again, you think it’s new. Sometimes a follower will get ahead of you for a while so you think you’re following them. Nobody who tries to fool you has a nice reason for it.”

  Jimmy looked at her for a moment, then out the back window. “Did you know these things by instinct when you started, or have they all happened to you?”

  “I’ve spent a lot of years helping people who are running away. All of them have someone chasing them. The important thing is to learn to trust yourself. If you look at anything—a car, a house, a person—and it seems a little off, avoid it. Simple.”

  Jimmy stared out the rear window. “I brought this on by making that call home to my mother. I’m regretting it every minute. But I’m not sure I’ll see the next mistake before I make it.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” Jane said. “The trick is to be alert. Always look for a way to improve the odds in your favor.”

  “Those two SUVs are still back there.”

  “I know,” she said. “I don’t like it either.”

  Jane drove on. Route 11 became less heavily traveled as the hour grew late. The road moved away from the city into a rural landscape, and then narrowed to two lanes. When they went through a tow
n it was always small, with darkened business signs and traffic signals that blinked yellow over deserted intersections. As they passed one that looked no different from the others, things changed abruptly.

  A pair of black SUVs similar to the one that had attacked them on the interstate pulled into the road a few hundred yards ahead. One came from a driveway to Jane’s right that ran like a bridge over a small stream in a ditch beside the road. The other emerged from the lot in front of a gas station on the left. They met like doors closing across the road.

  “Trouble,” she said. She hit her high beam headlights, bathing the two cars in light, and steered her car toward the spot just behind the car that had come over the ditch.

  “There’s a ditch on that side,” Jimmy said. When nothing changed he said, “Jane. A ditch.”

  “I see it.”

  She held the wheel in both hands, still steering straight at the rear of the car blocking the right lane. “Make sure your seat belt is tight, but keep your head low. Remember the other one shot at us.”

  Jimmy slumped lower, so he could barely see over the dashboard.

  Jane sped up slightly, aiming her car at the SUV on the right. She could see a head in the front side window turned toward her. The man in the driver’s seat had the best view, and he was getting frightened. His eyes were open wide and he gripped the steering wheel tightly. Jane altered her aim slightly, just enough so her car would look to him like a projectile streaking straight for him.

  Finally, he panicked. He threw his transmission into reverse and backed up quickly. He seemed to have forgotten how narrow the driveway was. His left set of tires found their way onto the driveway, but the right set slipped off into the ditch, and the vehicle tipped onto its side.

  Jane swerved, but not toward the space that had opened between the two SUVs. She aimed at the remaining vehicle and sped up again. She adjusted her aim to be sure that if she hit anything, it would be the passenger door.