by Thomas Perry
Jane smiled. She picked it up, rotated the cylinder, swung it out, and looked into the barrel. “Not bad for thirty or forty years old.”
“They don’t rot,” he said.
“Let’s see what else you have.”
He pointed at the smallest gun in the tray. “A Cobra CA380. Tiny. You could hide it anywhere—in your purse, or whatever. They sell for about six hundred, but I can give you a deal.”
“They must have gone up. They used to sell for about two hundred new, and this one isn’t.” She smiled. “You wouldn’t be making fun of me, would you?”
The man smiled. “Well, look them over. Take your time.”
She examined each of the guns, then said, “Can I make you an offer?”
“I’m listening.”
“I’ll take this old Colt 1911 .45, the Cobra .380, and the Czech CZ 97 .45. I’ll give you six hundred.”
He stared at the guns. “The two .45s and the Cobra? That would be more like eight hundred.”
“Seven is more like eight.”
He smiled again. “Make it eight and I’ll throw in two boxes of .45 ACP ammo, and most of a box of .380—maybe fifteen rounds left—and the shotgun.”
“Done.”
“And done,” he said.
Jane reached into her pocket and pulled out hundred dollar bills one at a time while he went to his van and brought out a two-handled shopping bag with a big red Macy’s star on it and placed the pistols and the boxes of ammunition inside. She handed him the eight bills. He counted them and folded them into his pocket. “You got a nice deal.”
“Yes, I did,” she said. “Thanks. And you don’t need any paperwork, right?”
“No. Only licensed gun dealers need to do that in New Hampshire. The rest of us are free. Have a nice day.”
“You too.” Jane picked up the bag and the shotgun, returned to the car, locked her purchases in the trunk, and turned her head to look for Mattie. She stood by a table with sweaters and gloves pretending she hadn’t been watching Jane. She stepped over to the car.
Jane drove back toward Hanover. When they reached one of the big plazas in Lebanon, Jane said, “I’ve got to make a stop. This wouldn’t be a bad time to stock up on food. Can you get a start on the shopping and I’ll meet you in the supermarket?”
“Good idea.”
Jane pulled up to the market and let Mattie out, and then drove to a big discount sporting goods store she had spotted from the road. She bought three boxes of five double-aught shotgun shells, a can of Hoppe’s gun oil, a can of solvent, and a gun-cleaning kit, put them in the car trunk, and went to meet Mattie.
That night after dinner, Jane brought the guns into the apartment. She spread newspapers on the kitchen table, then took each firearm apart, cleaned, and oiled it. When she was nearly finished, Chelsea walked into the kitchen.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “What are you doing?”
Jane said, “Don’t worry. They’re just a precaution, like having a fire extinguisher or a lifeboat. A lot of really bad things would have to happen before we needed these.”
“I thought you just helped people run away. That’s what you said.”
“True,” Jane said.
“Then what’s changed?”
Jane spoke quietly. “When this started, we thought that we were just hiding Jimmy so he wouldn’t be arrested. I didn’t want any guns because we would never use one on a policeman. Now there are other people looking for us. The main thing we’re doing is still trying to avoid them, and staying out of sight.”
“So why do you have guns?”
Jane sighed. “Because what these people want is to kill us. Jimmy and you in particular.”
Chelsea stared at her for two breaths, and then turned away. She almost bumped into Jimmy and Mattie, who had come to the doorway when they’d heard the distress in her voice. She slipped past them, went to the bedroom she’d been sharing with Jane, and closed the door.
Jimmy followed her. After a few minutes, he reappeared. “She’ll be okay.”
Jane said, “Do you know how to use one of these?”
Jimmy said, “I’ve fired a semiauto sort of like those. I fired a Beretta M90 a few times when I was in the army.”
“Good. Mattie?”
“No.”
“Okay. Let me teach you. Any of these three handguns works about the same. You pull back the slide to let the first round up out of the magazine into the chamber, and release it. You push the safety off, and you can pull the trigger until the magazine is empty. These .45s hold seven rounds. If you want to reload, you press the magazine release right here, drop the magazine out, and push the bullets into it from the top. Then you push the magazine back in like this until it clicks. You cycle in the first round again. The man I got them from didn’t have extra magazines, but I’ll try to get some.” She turned the gun around and handed it to Mattie. “It’s empty.”
Mattie picked it up gingerly and examined it.
Jane said, “Hold it in both hands and aim it. Get comfortable. Line things up with the sights.”
Mattie and Jimmy both followed the instructions, getting as familiar as they could with the two pistols while Jane finished cleaning the compact .380.
That night after the others went to bed, Jane began her watch. She knew that if the killers found them, they would come at night.
Over the next three days Jane altered her routines. She took a nap after dinner that lasted from around eight until midnight or one. When Chelsea came in to go to bed, Jane got up. She would sit in the darkened apartment waiting and watching. Each night she took out the computer and checked the sites of the Western New York newspapers and television stations to see if anything had changed. In the tablet’s dim blue light she sat and read the news. She kept the window open, listening through the screen for any sound that was out of the ordinary. Sometimes she heard owls calling to one another as they hunted above the deserted streets, or a dog bark in the distance, but otherwise the night was quiet. It wasn’t until the fourth night that she found the article on the Buffalo News site.
COUNTY INMATE FOUND DEAD IN CELL. She scanned the text until she came to the name Walter Slawicky.
“The Erie County Sheriff’s Department issued a statement today concerning the death of a Caledonia man in Erie County jail on Thursday night. Walter Slawicky, age 46, had been held in custody on suspicion of giving false evidence in a murder case, pending a bail hearing scheduled for Monday. He was found dead in his cell by guards on Friday morning.
“Slawicky had told police he had sold a rifle like the one that had killed Nicholas Bauermeister of Avon, to James Sanders of Basom, New York, shortly before the murder. Three days ago, police found the weapon buried in Mr. Slawicky’s yard. Ballistic tests matched the weapon and the ammunition found with it to the bullet that killed Bauermeister. The Sheriff’s Department spokesman would not speculate at this time whether the cause of Slawicky’s death was suicide or homicide.”
Jane found herself standing. She had to stifle the impulse to wake the others. They would want to get into the cars right away and drive toward home, but she needed time to think about the implications of Slawicky’s death.
Slawicky was gone, and his claims about Jimmy discredited. That meant that the main reason the police had thought Jimmy was involved had disappeared. But he was still the one who had been in a fight with Nick Bauermeister, and he was still the one who hadn’t shown up in court for the assault and battery hearing. There was almost certainly a warrant out for his arrest. If he was caught, he would probably be locked up in that same jail, if only temporarily. There was no sign yet that the men in jail waiting for him had gone anywhere. And there was no reason to believe that Daniel Crane, or the men protecting Daniel Crane, had stopped looking fo
r him. And they were certainly still looking for Chelsea.
Jane read every version of the story on the laptop, and then clicked on every link to articles that might give her more details.
Hours later, when the others were all awake, Jane said, “I have news.” She explained Slawicky’s death to them, and set the computer on the table where they could read the story.
“Can we go home?” asked Mattie.
“Read the articles, and when I wake up again we can talk. There are still people looking for you. They just aren’t people who want to bring anyone back home for a trial.” She walked into the bedroom and closed the door.
28
Late the following night, Jane heard the sounds she had been listening for through the open window. A car passed at 3:00 am moving slowly along the residential street. It was unusual to hear the hiss of tires at this hour on a weeknight in quiet Hanover. The Dartmouth undergraduates wouldn’t be back until mid-September, and the local grown-ups weren’t much for carousing. The road to the hospital was three blocks away, and the car was moving too slowly to be heading for the emergency room at 3:00. Maybe it was a police patrol she had not noticed on other nights.
Jane stepped to the wall beside the window to watch the car receding. In the moonlight she could see it was a silver SUV, not a police car. The brake lights went on. The driver didn’t signal, but went into a right turn. A second person, a man, was visible in the passenger seat.
Jane picked up the laptop and looked up the state’s closing hours for bars. Last call had been changed about a year ago from 1:00 to 2:00 am. Maybe it had taken somebody a long time to drive home from a bar somewhere. Cops often spotted drunk drivers because they drove more slowly than sober ones.
Jane put the laptop in her backpack and exchanged it for the CZ 97 pistol, then moved her seat back from the window, where she could listen for more sounds from the street but remain far enough back to be invisible in the darkened room.
Five minutes later she again heard the hiss of tires on the pavement coming toward the apartment. It was the silver SUV again. The vehicle was going more slowly than five miles an hour this time, and the man beside the driver stared steadily at the apartment building. The driver nearly stopped as he leaned forward to see past his friend’s head. Then he looked ahead again and sped up to the corner.
Jane stood, closed and locked the window, and went into the room she shared with Chelsea and shook her. “Get up and get dressed and ready to move. No lights. We’re going to have visitors. Bring the shotgun.”
She stepped to Mattie’s room and shook her awake, and then went to the alcove where Jimmy slept on cushions from the couch. In about thirty seconds they had gathered in the dark kitchen. Jimmy whispered, “Are we going to fight?”
“No,” said Jane as she slung her backpack over her shoulder. “We’re going to run. Head for the house behind us, and make your way to my car.”
She quietly opened the kitchen door and beckoned. The others slipped out past her and down the steps while Jane locked the kitchen door. Jane caught up with them and moved ahead. They filed along the side of the backyard and into the kitchen garden of the next yard. She directed the others past her and along the side of the next house toward the street.
Jane stopped and crouched to watch the building they’d just left. First one, then another, and then another silhouette, each of them bent over to keep from letting his head rise to the level of the windows, ascended to the back porch.
Jane pivoted and moved quickly after her companions. When she emerged from the yard she looked for the silver SUV she’d seen coming past the apartment, but it wasn’t there. She had been hoping to find and sabotage it, but there must be a driver who was still cruising the neighborhood waiting for a pickup call. She couldn’t afford to watch any longer.
She ran to the spot where she’d parked the Volkswagen Passat, and started it while the others got in. As soon as they were inside she pulled ahead, made a left turn onto Wheelock Street, and headed toward Route 120 out of town. As she passed the corner of Chambers Street where their apartment was, she saw the three men trotting out the front door of the apartment toward the waiting SUV. They must have come in quickly, seen that everyone was gone, and called for their getaway car.
“That’s bad news,” she muttered. She sped up and turned onto Route 120.
Jimmy said, “Where are we going?”
“I’m trying to get to Interstate 89. The main thing is to get out of sight before they pull themselves together.”
“Who are they?” asked Chelsea.
Mattie said, “Could they have been the police?”
“No,” Jane said. “When the police come for someone they think might resist, there are a whole bunch of them and they identify themselves.”
Chelsea said, “This is my fault. They’re after me.”
Jane said, “That train of thought doesn’t do anything for you right now. They were after all of us.”
“This time it has to be about me. And—oh my God. I forgot the shotgun. You told me to bring it, and I was half-asleep, and I saw it, leaning in the corner near your side of the bed, and I just forgot.”
Jane said, “It’s okay. We don’t need a shotgun right now. And it doesn’t matter which of us they want most. They have to get all of us or they risk getting caught. Now calm down, but stay alert.”
Mattie said, “There’s a set of headlights way back there.”
“Let’s see if it’s them,” said Jane. She pushed down on the accelerator and added speed steadily. She kept glancing in the mirror to judge the effect on the vehicle behind them.
“They’re speeding up too,” said Jimmy.
Jane looked in the rearview mirror. “I see them. We’ll make it to I-Eighty-nine, but we can’t lose them on a six-lane highway. The road Mattie and I took on Saturday—Route Four—is the kind of road we need. That SUV has a higher center of gravity than we have, and it’s far less maneuverable than this car. We’ve been on that road, and they probably haven’t.”
Jane slowed to seventy, took the ramp to the interstate, and seemed to fly onto the highway, taking a gradual swing and using the whole road to straighten out. She switched off the headlights and Chelsea gave a little shriek. Jane drove by moonlight, trying only to keep the car on the broad highway.
She saw that there was a sign ahead, so she turned the lights on again and made the exit onto Route 4. She could see there were no other cars coming so she accelerated into the left turn to the eastbound side and kept forcing the speed upward as much as she dared.
They were now at the outer edge of Lebanon, flying through intersections with red lights. Almost immediately they were past the big plazas and the darkened fast-food restaurants, and into the country. They passed big fields, then farmhouses, and in minutes they were driving through wooded areas. Through the trees to their right they could see moonlight on water, and then just trees again. The road began to rise and fall as they lost sight of the water.
Jane accelerated on curves and coasted into the straight sections, always hugging the insides of the curves and moving to the center on straight stretches to straighten the car’s trajectory. She was counting on the likelihood that if a vehicle approached from the west she would see the glow of its headlights in time.
After a period, Jimmy said, “I see headlights behind us coming to that last turn, moving really fast.”
Jane said, “All right. I’m going to try hard to stay ahead of them and turn off somewhere. But I think we need to prepare in case that doesn’t work. Jimmy, the pistols you saw last night are in my backpack. Chelsea, hand him my pack.”
Chelsea lifted the pack up from the floor to the top of her seat and Jimmy pulled it over and set it between him and his mother.
“What’s next?” he said.
“Ta
ke out the .45 Colt. I’ve already loaded the magazine. Find it and click it into place.”
“Done.”
“Okay. Keep your finger along the side of the trigger guard until you’re about to fire. Don’t cycle the slide yet. There’s a box of extra ammunition. Put it in your jacket. Mattie?”
“Yes?”
“There’s also a box of .380 rounds. Take out the box and the smaller pistol, the Cobra. Do you remember how to load it?”
“Yes.”
“Then now is the time. It also holds seven rounds.”
“Okay.”
After a couple of minutes, Mattie said, “Ready.”
Jane said, “Okay. Mattie, hand me the Cobra.” She held her hand over her shoulder, took the gun, and handed it, handgrips first, to Chelsea. “Hold this.”
Chelsea took the pistol. Jane leaned forward and took out the CZ 97 pistol she’d been carrying and held it over her shoulder. “Mattie, take this one.”
Mattie took it. “What do I do with it?”
“Here’s the strategy,” said Jane. “You and Jimmy are each sitting by a window in the backseat, and you each have a .45 caliber semiauto pistol. You do nothing unless the people behind us fire a gun. If they do, you charge your weapon, roll down your window, lean out just enough to aim, and fire. Try to hit the driver’s side of the windshield. If you hit the car anywhere, they’ll probably drop back or stop. If you hit a person, they’ll turn around and head for a hospital.”
“I can do that,” said Jimmy.
Mattie said, “I guess I can too, if I have to.”
“Let’s hope you don’t,” said Jane. “If you do have to fire, you’ll notice two problems. A .45 round is very loud—deafening in an enclosed space. It also kicks, so hold the pistol tightly, and if you can, use both hands. If you drop the gun on the road, we won’t get it back.”
“Okay,” said Jimmy.
Jane drove on. She reached a town going eighty-five. Her headlights illuminated the sign that said CANAAN and it flashed past the window, then the restaurant on the right where she and Mattie had parked the car on Saturday, and the little town park where people had sold their food and crafts. In a few seconds they were past the town and in a few more they had passed the outlying businesses and were in woods again. Jane concentrated on holding the car on the curving, hilly road and not hitting anything.