by Thomas Perry
She tried to close her eyes and cover her face, but it didn’t change anything. She could still see him clearly, the red shirt getting tinier and tinier as he fell, turning slowly until his face stayed down and he had to watch the surface of the water rushing up at him. There was a little white splash, but the current moved so fast here that before it disappeared it was downstream.
She clung to the girder, closed her eyes, and sobbed in anguish. Then she heard the soft, kind voice. “You have to get up, Janie.”
She looked along the arch, and she could see her mother standing on the narrow steel a few feet from her face. She was wearing a blue silk dress Jane remembered, which her husband had picked out to match her eyes. “I loved him,” Jane said. “I love you both so much.”
“We’ve lost him. He’s not coming back.” Her mother waited expectantly. Jane bent her knees, held her arms out from her sides like a tightrope walker, and stood. The wind seemed perverse now. It came in gusts, so she had to lean into it to stay upright, and then it would stop and she would almost fall.
Her mother’s blue dress was flapping in the wind, but she turned around in a slow circle, looking off at the horizon.
“What am I doing up here?” asked Jane. “Was there something I could have done?”
Her mother looked at her, puzzled. “You mean so he wouldn’t have gone up? Not ask for a new pair of shoes, or eat less food?”
“I don’t know …”
“Everything that happens matters, but we don’t know how.” Her mother stared down the river toward the falls. “You can’t break ground within a hundred miles of here without hitting bone.” She looked at Jane with deep sadness. “Every single one of them loved somebody so much that when they closed their eyes at night they would think of something they forgot to do for them today, or something funny they wanted to tell them tomorrow.”
“Don’t.”
“Men, women, children,” she persisted. “In the Old Time when a baby died, the mother would bury him next to a trail. She thought maybe when some other woman came up the path to work the cornfields, his soul would go into her body so he would get another chance—not so she would have him for herself, but maybe some other woman would get him, who wouldn’t make whatever mistake she had made.”
Jane was frustrated, miserable. She wanted her mother to stop, but she was trying to tell her something. “That’s it, isn’t it—I made a mistake? What is it?”
Suddenly the shadow passed over her mother, then over Jane. She looked up. The crane was swinging the girder out over the water again. There was another man standing on it. She looked at her mother again.
She could see that her mother was anxious, almost afraid to answer her. “It’s the brothers doing this. The world they beat out between them is a battlefield, and the fight doesn’t stop. You don’t get to fuss around for months, watching and poking around while your enemies are busy.”
Jane watched the steel I-beam rise into the sky. The man waved his arm, but this time he was waving at her. She felt her heart stop. It was Carey. “No!” she screamed.
“If you want him, you have to go up there yourself.”
She froze. “That’s the price?”
Her mother spoke quietly. “That’s always the price. That’s how the brothers play. They won’t stop until somebody loses everything.”
She stared at her mother. “But I don’t know enough yet. I know a name—Brian Vaughn. I don’t know what he’s running from, or who is hunting him.”
“You know something just as good.”
“What?”
“You know people who will hunt anybody.” She stopped and watched Jane. “People who are hunting you.”
Jane stood on the arch of the bridge as Carey rose higher and higher. The crane operator made some move that was a little faster than he had intended, and the girder began to swing away. It reached the end of its swing, then began to come back. It moved closer, closer, and Jane knew she would have just one chance. As it stopped, ready to swing away again forever, she jumped for it. She felt herself falling faster and faster, the wind tugging at her hair, the water rushing up at her, and then she woke, lying on the bed in the dark room.
35
When Alvin Jardine saw her he happened to have his head back to drink the last sweet, muddy residue of sugary coffee at the bottom of his cup. He took in a breath and nearly choked. She was coming off a flight from San Francisco and her eyes scanned the way their eyes always did, then snapped straight ahead. Jardine shut his briefcase and stood to turn away while she passed, then decided that the briefcase might be a problem. He pushed it into a rental locker, dropped the quarters into the slot, and took the key. He didn’t need a Wanted poster or printed circular to remember that face. There was nothing in print on her anyway, and he knew he didn’t want to get close to her encumbered by baggage. He quickly walked to the big open portal toward the concourse.
This was just another piece of evidence to prove that life presented prizes that were better than anything anybody could wish for. Here he was, waiting for any one of two dozen small-time bail jumpers and parole violators to step off a plane and into his custody, when in walks a trophy as rare as the last damned whooping crane. And here is Al Jardine, one of probably twenty bounty hunters in the whole world who would have known what he was looking at or had the slightest idea what to do with it.
He watched her from two hundred feet back as he followed her down the crowded concourse. She still had that long black hair, and the rest of her was exactly the way he remembered—legs that looked as though they went on and on. They reminded him of the tricky nature of the task ahead. She was not entirely defenseless. He remembered that very clearly from the one time when he had happened to see her work.
Jardine had been waiting at the Los Angeles County lockup on Vignes Street, watching the door that opened once each day to emit a few prisoners. A man named Hayward was due to be released any day, and Jardine had a fairly strong opinion that he had been jailed and served ninety days under a name that was not his own. It was Jardine’s theory that Hayward had spent most of his life as Bobby McKay.
McKay was worth fifty thousand dollars to an armored-car company. He was also reputed to be big, violent, and uncomfortable without the weight of a pistol somewhere on his person. The best way in the world to take a man like that was at the jailhouse door. He couldn’t be armed and had no chance to prepare. If he proved to be too much for Jardine, then the sight of Jardine getting pounded into the sidewalk would bring cops from inside.
The steel door opened and the gate was sliding out of the way. That day’s excretion of rehabilitated citizenry was already streaming out into the sunshine. The sparse group of friends and relatives were pushing forward to meet them when Jardine became aware that a car had pulled up behind him. He turned and saw the tall, thin woman with black hair come around the car and open the passenger door. He saw a small, frail-looking woman with stringy blond hair separate from the rest and step toward the car, and he felt better, because that assured him the car wasn’t there for Hayward.
There was a sound that set Jardine on edge. It wasn’t loud—just the sound of feet moving fast on the concrete—but anything sudden or unexpected was out of place here.
Jardine had turned his head just in time to see a tall man in a suit arrive at the car and lean forward to lunge past the woman with long black hair to make a grab for the little blond woman in the seat. But the woman with the long black hair had heard him coming. Her elbow caught his face, and Jardine could still bring back the sound of it. He wasn’t sure if it had been the crack of some facial bone breaking, or if the blow had just clapped the man’s jaws together so the teeth clicked. But his head jerked sideways and his body reeled in approximately the direction she had sent his head. She spun counterclockwise. Jardine’s eye had taken it as a quick pivot to begin a retreat around the front of the car to the driver’s seat before the man could collect himself. It was more. As she turned, she was leaning her
weight on the hood, swinging her right leg way too high. Her kick clothes-lined the man at about eye level, dropped him onto his back, and followed through. The momentum helped her roll over the hood of the car and land on her feet on the driver’s side. She was inside and accelerating away before Jardine fully appreciated what he had seen.
Jardine had instantly induced in himself an uncharacteristic concern for the welfare of the man in the suit. He had knelt and used his handkerchief to stanch the flow of blood from the man’s nose, muttering quiet bits of optimistic nonsense about his condition. He had helped him to his feet and driven him to the hospital emergency room.
It was at least an hour before he had managed to get any answers to his sympathetic inquiries about what had brought this poor man to Vignes Street and what had led this woman to drop him on the pavement like a sack of garbage. When Jardine had heard that the man was a bounty hunter from New York, he had begun to feel rather festive about the whole episode. Jardine had no love of outsiders who came into his city to hunt his game.
The blond woman, it seemed, had been doing exactly what Jardine had suspected Bobby McKay of doing. She had gone to jail on a disorderly conduct charge and spent thirty days picking up gum wrappers along the freeway while the people who had been chasing her wore themselves out.
Like many hunters, Jardine had always been a convivial companion and an avid listener to his colleagues’ stories of the chase. It was his main consolation in times when nothing seemed to work, and his best celebration of victory. But it also had a practical purpose, because the tales often carried information he could use. There had been times when he had heard things about a particular fugitive he had been chasing that had helped him make money, and other times he had heard things that had convinced him to turn his attention elsewhere. It was not a good idea to chase a fugitive who had once been convicted of something known to be the exclusive province of organized crime—large-scale gambling, or trafficking in stolen securities, for instance.
But along with the rest of the stories came rumors and tall tales. One of them he had heard several times was about a woman named Jane who made people disappear. He had not taken the Jane stories seriously, because they had always been about the one that got away. Some enormous payday had not come for some hunter, and here’s why it wasn’t his fault.
But on that day three years ago when the little blond woman had gotten away, he had begun to listen to the rumors, and to connect Jane with the names of fugitives who had not been captured. Maybe the stories weren’t all true. Any time there was a ready-made excuse for failure, most people would take it. But he was sure that enough of them were true to make this Jane woman worth some effort. If someone managed to put her in a cage, he’d have the aliases and addresses of all the people she had ever hidden.
Jardine was having a difficult time believing his good fortune tonight as he followed her down the concourse toward the escalators. His mind worked frantically. He had just seen her come off an airplane. She could not possibly be armed. If she even owned a gun, it could only be disassembled and the parts scattered around in some big piece of luggage she had checked in. If the baggage claim was where she was headed, then he would simply have to move in close before she had a chance to claim the suitcase and get it out of here into a private place.
Jardine’s gun was in his car, parked right across the street in the short-term lot, where he could get to it quickly. He would have no trouble with her if he kept the initiative and stayed a little bit ahead, so she wouldn’t figure what she should have done until that “should have” had been firmly built in. She had almost certainly never seen Jardine before except on that one day three years ago, when she’d had other things on her mind.
As he watched her he could see that she was working. She wanted to give an overeager pursuer a chance to move in too early and show himself. She stopped to stare into a store window. Then she went into another and came out the farther doorway. Alvin Jardine was not a novice. He didn’t want her in this crowded, brightly lit, heavily policed airport. He wanted to materialize in her path after she was alone out there in the dark.
He began to worry. She might be doing these things because she knew that someone else was following her that Jardine didn’t know about. Jardine stopped in front of a display of guilty-husband presents in a window: perfume, jewelry, stuff with flowers and hearts on it. He tried to keep Jane in sight while he let the crowd behind him go past. He picked out two men who were possibilities, then let them get ahead and watched.
One went into the rest room, and the other walked so fast that he caught up with her and passed her. Jardine was elated. He didn’t have to worry about having to fight over her. She passed the spot where the security people were herding passengers through the metal detectors, then stepped aside into the cafeteria. Jardine went past the doorway and loitered near the television sets where the schedules were posted so he could see which direction she would face when she sat down. She picked up a tray and got into the line of people sidestepping along in front of the food counter. About halfway through, she dropped something and squatted down to pick it up, and that gave her a chance to take a glance at the people behind her. Jardine had seen it coming, and looked away at the television screen.
He moved off while she paid for her food and went to sit in a booth at the wall so she could watch the doorway. Jardine waited on the other side of the wall, where he could see the doorway too. Watching her go through her precautions had made him feel eager. He had noticed before that sometimes people who were running seemed to have a vague premonition, to sense a change in the air that told them trouble was close, but not that the trouble was Jardine. Jane’s extreme caution validated his belief that she was worth having, and he knew that each feint or detour she completed was helping her silence her own intuition and prove to herself that she was safe.
Jardine slapped his back pocket to feel the two sets of plastic wrist restraints. He liked them so well that he had given up carrying handcuffs even on the occasions when he didn’t have to pass through a metal detector. They were quick and easy and gave a better fit, and getting out of them wasn’t a question of picking a lock: they had to be cut. He had to remember that this time he wasn’t going to be able to grab her and intone some meaningless words about warrants for her arrest. She would know that the words were meaningless as well as he did. He would be a fool if he didn’t use the second set of restraints on her ankles.
He saw her leave the cafeteria and move toward the escalator. He waited until she was descending and hurried to the elevator, then walked across the first floor to be outside before she was. He watched the long line of glass doors until she was out. His luck seemed to be getting better and better. She had not stopped in the baggage claim. She didn’t have a gun, and she wasn’t going to have one. She stepped to the island to join the half dozen people waiting for the shuttle bus to take them to the distant long-term lots.
Jardine knew not only where she was, but where she was going. He hurried across the street to the short-term parking structure, ran up the stairs, and got into his car. He pulled out of the space and quickly made the first circuit of the parking structure to the ground floor, then stopped to look at the island. The shuttle bus pulled up to the stop and the people began to get in.
Jardine idled his car and watched to be sure she actually climbed aboard. Then he pulled forward out of the shelter of the parking structure and up to the kiosk to pay. In a few seconds he was on the long circular drive, following the shuttle bus. It stopped several times in front of other terminals to pick up passengers, but she never got off. When the bus finally passed the last stop and left the airport, Jardine could feel his lungs expanding in his chest. He drove far behind the bus, giving it plenty of space.
When the bus pulled into its special entrance at Lot C, Jardine drove on to the public entrance, took his ticket from the machine, and waited for the arm to lift to let him in. He drove slowly on a straight course down the middle aisle of the h
uge lot, watching the shuttle bus going back and forth in front of him, stopping every two hundred feet to let passengers off.
Slowly the bus emptied; people put suitcases into the trunks of cars and drove toward the exit. Jardine’s luck seemed to be growing at every turn the bus made. She was going to be one of the last people out. That meant the others would be on their way home, and the empty bus would go back to its bus stop to wait for its next run to the airport. She would be virtually alone.
Finally the bus stopped and she got out. She walked along an aisle with few cars in it, staring around her as though she had remembered the row, but not the space where she had left hers. Jardine tugged the ends of the plastic restraints out of his pocket so he wouldn’t have to dig around for them when the time came. She had found the car. She reached into her purse as she walked up to it. He could see she was going to have the keys ready when she got there. He sped up, turned abruptly, and stopped a yard away from her. He was out of the car and moving when she turned to him.
Her arm came up to her waist, and her white teeth glowed blue from the overhead light as she smiled.
“Hello,” she said. She held a small black shape in her hand. He couldn’t see much in this light except that the muzzle seemed to be lined up with his chest.
He tried letting some of the surprise and outrage he felt escape his lips. “What is this?”
She was not susceptible to doubt. “Be quiet and listen,” she said. “I don’t have any desire to kill you, so you won’t need to do anything desperate.”
“What do you want?”
“Just a ride.”
“The key’s still in the ignition. Get in and take it.”
She moved around the back to the passenger side. He could see that she was giving him a few seconds to look around him. His inability to detect any other human beings in the vast parking lot was not comforting now. If he ran, he might get as far as the nearest parked car before she shot him, but he had nothing that would keep her from coming there after him, and reaching the first one wouldn’t get him to the shelter of the next one. If he did as she said, he might be able to get his gun out from under the dashboard. She didn’t seem to have any idea who he was.