by Thomas Perry
She paid out more para cord until the line went slack, then quickly went down the stairs and outside to the driveway. The ball was lying on the pavement with the cord hanging down to it from the roof. Jane pulled the cord slowly and patiently, dragging more and more of it out her upstairs window and over the roof. When it stopped, she climbed upstairs and found that one of the knots she had tied to make loops had snagged on the rain gutter. She searched the back yard until she found a rusty rake, went up to her room and used it to push the loop up over the gutter onto the roof, then pushed the next few up after it. Next she returned to the driveway and pulled the para cord tight again. She wound the para cord three times around the trunk of the tree beside the driveway, tied it securely, and hurried back to her room.
When she had the directional microphone and its electrical cord strapped to her back with a belt, she pulled on her gloves, gingerly put one leg out the window, and looked down to place her foot in the nearest loop of cord. She felt her lungs huff, as though a pair of hands had clapped together against her ribs to squeeze her breath away. She raised her eyes a little, grasped the cord, and swung out above the ground.
She climbed slowly, using each loop as a foothold, then reaching to grasp the next one to pull herself up until she was just below the gutter. Then she reached over it and felt for the next loop. When she found it, she pulled herself over the gutter onto the roof. She held on to the rope as she crawled up the steep incline to the chimney. She freed herself of the directional microphone, set it where the chimney would hide it from the street and the slope would hide it from Sid Freeman’s house, then aimed it at the spot where she had parked her car on the night when she had brought Dahlman here.
Jane began the slow descent from the peak of the house, paying out the electrical wire as she went. When she reached the place where the para cord bent and went over the gutter, she felt the worst of the fear. She clung to the para cord and let her legs go out while she lowered herself with her hands, then bent at the hip and felt with her toes for the next loop.
When she found it, she felt a relief so strong that her breath came from her throat in raspy whispers. It took a short time to climb down to the level of her window. When she reached it and pulled herself across the sill she lay on the floor, trembling for a moment. The arches of her feet hurt from unconsciously trying to bend them to cling to the loops of the cord like hands.
When she stood up, she felt energized. She had not fallen. Now she had to clean up. She ran downstairs to cut the cord free of the tree and pick up the baseball. She returned to the room and pulled the cord back over the house into her window. Then she went back to watching the path along the lake.
It was early the next morning before she adjusted all of her equipment for the last time. The microphone and one video camera were trained on the most likely spot for a car to park along the lake. That was the only place where the face-changers would say anything to their rabbits. After that, until the rabbit returned, he was on his own. The second video camera was aimed at the approach to Sid’s house. At this range the built-in microphone might even pick up a bit of what the lens saw. Then Jane lay on the bed and closed her eyes.
By watching all night and working all morning, she had reset her internal clock to become nocturnal. When she closed her eyes she had to endure three very clear and convincing versions of herself losing her footing on the high, steep roof, then sliding down the rough shingles, scrabbling with her fingers so the nails broke, then being launched over the edge, where she made one desperate grab for the gutter. Each time, that only got her turned around, so that she plummeted toward the ground headfirst like a diver, the wind blowing her hair and the ground coming toward her so fast it seemed to swell to fill her field of vision like an image in a zoom lens. Then her heart would stop for an instant, and she would be awake again. While she waited to see it for the fourth time, she fell into a deep sleep.
She awoke at sunset and went to check her equipment. She played each of the tapes on fast forward, but none of them had picked up anything but a woman walking a dog by the lake, at least a hundred cars passing on the road above it, and four little boys who had come to give bread to the ducks.
She had dinner and rewound all of her tapes. When it was dark she put the earphones on and listened to the microphone and watched the lake with her night-vision scope. Late in the morning she turned on her recorders and video cameras and went to sleep.
Jane watched the path this way, night after night. She ate simple meals that didn’t require her to be away from the window. She performed extended versions of the Tai Chi movements to keep her muscles loose and her joints flexible. She left the house only during daylight, when visitors were least likely to come along the path, and when she returned she checked the tapes her recorders had made. She resisted the growing temptation to turn her attention toward Sid Freeman’s house, because she knew there was no more to be learned there. All she could do was make Sid’s protégés think his house was her target and kill her.
She kept her suitcase open, and the only clothes that were out of it were the ones she was wearing at the moment. She had a second, larger suitcase that she would use to carry the cameras and recorders and earphones. The directional microphone could stay on the roof if it didn’t come down the first time she tugged the power cord. One thing she knew for certain was that she was not going up on that roof after it.
Each evening after dinner she cleaned the apartment completely before she sat down to watch the path. If she had to leave quickly, there would be two or three door knobs to wipe off, and the place would yield no prints. She even composed a note and typed it on a typewriter on display at an office equipment store. It said, “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Stewart, I’m afraid I’ve been called away urgently. My mother back in Florida has had a stroke, and I need to be there to care for her immediately. Thank you so much for your kindness. I’m enclosing next month’s rent to cover the inconvenience while you find a new tenant. Regretfully, Tamara Davis.” She had put the paper into the typewriter and taken it out with a tissue in her hand, then slid it into an envelope the same way so it would carry no prints.
With that, she decided she was ready. In the Old Time, a lone Seneca might have come to this very place to watch the lake. In the wars of the forests, all attacks were surprise attacks, and the best strategy was to become indistinguishable from the forest, to wait and listen and watch. Enemies needed to be studied until their strengths and vulnerabilities were known and the time was perfect. Relations with distant tribes of the west were fluid and shifting, so they were studied for signs of impending trouble.
Each night she sat at her window gazing at the familiar picture she could see through her night-vision scope. By now the bright green image had become flat like a painting—an unchanging arrangement of shapes that her mind simply verified each time she leaned to the eyepiece.
But the green painting had small living elements. Owls nested high in the canopy of leaves at the top of the stand of old maples across the lake to her left, where there were no houses. Every few nights she would see one glide out of the high place, suddenly swoop into the brush, and rise clutching a small shape that must have been a mouse, then flap its wings to return to the confusion of dark leaves. The ducks that swam on the surface of the lake in daylight were gone by the time she took her post each night, but she had studied the tapes to see them return to their nesting places in the reeds to the right of the owl trees. To the far right, near the road that ringed the lake, she had found squirrels. To amuse herself she had switched on the infrared scope to pick up their body heat as they slept in their ramshackle piles of dead leaves in the high overarching limbs of the sycamores.
The only human shapes that moved across the green painting regularly were two people she called Woman with Dog and the Sad Man. Woman with Dog seemed to work late five nights a week. Jane saw her car appear on the hill at around midnight and pull into the driveway of a big house up one of the side streets across the lake
. The light would go on only in an upper window, so Jane was sure the woman lived in a converted upstairs apartment like hers. Then the woman would reappear in a sweat suit with a retriever on a leash, and go for a long walk in the park. The Sad Man usually appeared some time later. He seemed to come from a distance. He walked steadily, but not quickly. He slouched forward and looked down at the ground, as though he were wondering whether this was the night to burrow into it.
The other visitors were ephemeral. One night, after Jane had watched a middle-aged man selling crystal methamphetamine to a college-age boy, a man and a woman pulled to the curb near the spot where Jane’s directional microphone was trained. Jane’s spine straightened, she turned on her cameras, and recorded the sounds her microphone picked up. The scene began as she expected. The man was alert and watchful, looking around him for other people, then moved the car with its lights out so that it was precisely in the ideal parking spot, shielded by bushes, barely visible from any side but Jane’s.
Jane put on the earphones, and the man said, “This isn’t a good idea. I don’t want to do this. Please.” That didn’t sound right. The woman’s voice said, “What are you afraid of?” Then she suggested, “The police?” and the man said, “Well, that’s not unreasonable, is it?” Jane increased the magnification of the zoom lens of the video camera aimed at the car, turned up the volume of the microphone, and began to prepare. She had her suitcase closed, her keys and purse on the bed, and was on her way to the window with the big empty suitcase to begin collecting her electronic equipment, when the sounds began to change. She stopped and listened. They were having sex.
Jane had started to turn off her electronic equipment, then stopped. It wasn’t out of the question for one of them to be a face-changer and have that kind of relationship with a runner. This wasn’t the time for it, but since it wasn’t beyond the realm of human behavior, she couldn’t dismiss these two people just yet. She waited, keys in hand.
Finally, the man said, “Next Friday?” and the woman answered, “I’m sorry, but it’s my anniversary, and it’s very important to me. How about Saturday?”
Jane thought about that a few times afterward, but never was confident that she understood. Each of the false alarms during those few weeks made her faster and more efficient, but each one made her more impatient. She seemed to have done to herself what she had done to Carey. She had left him in a kind of paralysis, where he could do nothing but stay where he was and allow every tiny movement he made to be watched. Now she was trapped too, sitting in a room watching a static landscape, waiting to detect some minuscule change.
One night another man and woman arrived and stopped in the same parking place. They behaved so much like the other couple that she was almost sure it was just more sex. The woman said, “Are you sure no one will see?” and the man was the one who said, “Don’t worry.” But then he said, “Just walk straight ahead along that ridge. Then go up to the big brown house, stand on the porch, and knock. By the time you get there they’ll be waiting.”
24
Jane watched the woman walk along the dark path toward Sid Freeman’s house. She was about twenty-five years old with a good figure and a face that might be pretty under white light. But in the dim green glow through the eyepiece of the nightscope, the skin looked ghostly and the hollows of the eyes were deep gashes of darkness. Her hair seemed to be dark, cut above the shoulder, then curled and puffed to stand out a little. She wore a dark sweater and a pair of jeans, but Jane did not consider drawing any conclusion about her from the way she dressed tonight.
She carried a big shoulder bag, and Jane watched the way she handled it. At first it hung on her left shoulder with her hand resting on it. Jane watched her head moving in little jerks from side to side, looking for human shapes and listening for footsteps, and wondered if the woman was carrying a gun in the purse. Then the woman stopped, frozen for a moment, and listened. After a few seconds, she recognized that the sound she had heard was a car going by on the street, and she went on, looking anxious. She slipped the strap over her head and across her chest and clutched the bag with her left hand, but never touched the metal latch. She didn’t have a gun in there. She had money for Sid Freeman, and she was protecting it as though all she had to worry about were purse snatchers.
Jane turned the nightscope away from her and watched the man. She wrote down the license number of his car, then reached to turn up the volume on her directional microphone, but found she already had it all the way up.
He was in the shadow created by the roof of the car, and there were no streetlights nearby, so he was a shadow in a shadow. Jane picked up a small ticking sound, then recognized it as the sound car engines sometimes made when they were hot. The man’s hand came up to his mouth, then went down again. The other hand came up and there was a bright flash, then a blinding glare. Jane blinked, then instantly understood he was lighting a cigarette, but the nightscope made it look as though a flare had exploded in his face. She turned to the eyepiece of the video camera in time to see the next two seconds. The automatic light meter on the video camera let in more light than a human eye would, so she saw his face clearly until the cigarette caught and he closed the lighter. He was the man she had seen outside the hospital in Buffalo—the blond one who had turned into the wind to light a cigarette.
Jane listened to the recorder as she hurriedly prepared. She wiped off the door knobs, tore the sheets off the bed and threw them into the suitcase with her clothes, then began to dismantle her equipment. The cameras, recorder, and scopes went into the second suitcase. She turned off the light in the room before she took her empty air conditioner out of the window and reinstalled the original. She carried her first suitcase and the empty air conditioner down to the car, then returned. Finally, with a little trepidation, she yanked the wire at the side window and coiled it as the directional microphone slid down the roof. It stopped at the gutter and she tugged it over, then barely kept it from swinging against the side of the house as it fell. She pulled it in the window, put it in the big suitcase with the rest of her equipment, and took a last look around before she locked the door. On her way to the car she left her good-bye letter in the landlords’ mailbox.
Jane drove out onto the side street, away from the road by the lake, then made her way along the streets on the hillside, keeping herself far above the waiting man. Whenever her route took her out of sight of the car for more than a block, she began to feel anxious. Each time she came to a turn or a stop sign, she would crane her neck to be sure the car had not moved. But when she had nearly completed a half circle to come out beyond it on the road, she saw that it was gone. The woman must have just come to pick up something Sid already had prepared for her.
Jane’s breath caught in her throat. She turned right and let the car gain speed as it coasted down the long straight street toward the lake. She had considered it essential to get out of Minneapolis without again coming into the sight of Sid Freeman’s juvenile delinquents, but now she had no choice. She had to hope they would just see her car passing and classify it with all the others that happened to move along the lake shore each night. She was aware that there were a few problems that weighed against her. It was now after two in the morning, so there were few cars on any of the streets of this residential area, and none on the lake drive except hers. Another was that Sid’s kids had very good optical equipment and nothing to do but look. If Sid thought she was breaking the rules, he would regretfully tell them to kill her.
She speeded up. When the road veered away from the lake she felt as though a weight had lifted from her chest. Jane had come to the house from a dozen different directions over the years, so she was familiar with all of the ways a car could go, but tonight she had no choice but to pick the most likely. The man would follow the surface streets until he came to Interstate 94, take it down toward the central part of the city, then branch off onto one of its tributaries—394, 494, 694. There was no telling which one he would take, and they went in all
directions. He would disappear.
She pushed the car harder, going as fast on the empty streets as she dared, and finally she saw the green car pass under a streetlight ahead of her. She lifted her foot off the accelerator and let her car coast down to the speed limit. She would have to be cautious now. The fact that there was so little traffic had allowed her to find the car, but it would also make her headlights stand out in its rearview mirror.
After two more blocks, the car swung up a ramp and onto the interstate. Jane gave them a few hundred yards, then followed. She let a big truck flash past her as she came into the right lane, then pulled up to hide behind it. Jane forced herself to be patient. All she needed to do was stay far enough back from the dark green car and keep other vehicles between them, and she would be invisible. After a few minutes she tagged along with a passing Mercedes, and stayed behind it until the green car took the airport exit.
Jane followed long enough to see it turn into the airport drive and stop at the curb in front of the terminal, let the woman off, and pull away. Jane took a few seconds to study the woman in the bright lights as she walked from the curb to the terminal; then Jane continued on to the long-term lot, parked, and ran for the shuttle bus back to the terminal.
She stalked the departure level, scanning each waiting area until she found the woman sitting a few yards from a United Airlines gate. Jane looked at the television monitor above her on the concourse and learned that a flight to Los Angeles was leaving in twenty-five minutes.
Jane walked up and sat beside the woman, but didn’t look at her. She said quietly, “I’m sorry, but we’ve had to change your itinerary. We think you might have been followed to the airport.”
The woman looked at her, and Jane watched her work her way through a sequence of emotions, trying to find the one that fit. First she was startled that a stranger was talking to her, and felt afraid. Then there was a second when the words she had heard acquired meaning and she felt relieved: this woman beside her wasn’t trouble. She was here to get her out of trouble. But that brought a new, undirected fear. Now the trouble had no face—it was everywhere. When Jane judged the woman had reached the right level of receptivity, she said, “Here’s what we do. You’re going to get up and go into the shop over there. The first one. When you come out, just go in the other direction, down toward the baggage area. Go outside and get on the shuttle bus for long-term parking.”