Thomas Perry - Runner

"Talk to him. But I want all four of you individually to know that I'm not a happy client. This should have been done the first night, when she was in Buffalo, which is—what?—three weeks ago?"

"I'll give you to Steve."

He heard Steve Demming's voice, and he could detect the irritation in it. "Yes?"

"It's me. I'm calling to find out what's the matter. I expected to see her back here three weeks ago."

"Richard. You know we're on this, and we're doing the best job possible. This isn't a time to start losing faith and insulting each other."

"There were six of you to one of her. I gave you her phone's Global Positioning locator so you knew exactly where she was at every second."

"It's not six to one. You know this. She met up with a pro the very first night we were on this. They managed to slip her phone into the back of a truck on the New York State Thruway. We caught up with the truck when it was almost to New Jersey. If you want her phone back, I can give it to you. I just don't have the girl yet."

"Tell me about this pro. Who is she?"

"We don't know a lot about her yet. She's probably a private detective working as a bodyguard. A lot of women don't want a man protecting them. They want somebody who can go into the ladies' room with them. We think that Christine flew all the way to New York just to hook up with her. She took over that night at the hospital, and we haven't been able to catch up with them yet. We will."

"Come on. I don't believe this. How could Christine know anybody like that?"

"You wouldn't be the first one to think he's the only guy some chick knows, and be wrong. Somebody sent this woman to pick Christine up at the hospital. When we tried to keep her from driving her off in a car, she broke Ronnie Sebrot's knee. We had to drive him to a hospital seventy miles away in case the police knew somebody got hurt that way. He was in such pain he was screaming half the time."

"Jesus, that's awful."

"But we didn't give up. All the time we were still tracking her cell phone's signal. Late that night we blocked a road ahead of them, had two cars coming up behind them. What does this woman do? She clips Carl McGinnis with her car and takes off. We couldn't leave him lying out there by the road waiting for the state troopers to find him, could we?"

"I guess not. But did you have to shoot him?"

"That again? Yes. We had to shoot him."

"Why?"

"The woman ran him down. He was hurt bad. We couldn't leave him there to suffer, and we couldn't take him in. He was in and out of consciousness and might have said just about anything on painkillers."

"It's unbelievable."

"We're not animals, Richard. The girls held his hand and talked to him, and never let on that we were even thinking about doing it. Claudia just waited until he lost consciousness for a second and shot him in the head. He never knew."

"I still can't believe this," said Richard. "It's awful." He was breathing hard through his open mouth. There didn't seem to be enough air. He felt as though he were falling—dizzy and faint.

"You're the one who wanted us to do this. Sometimes this is what it takes."

Richard lowered his voice to a raspy whisper, so he wouldn't be overheard. "But you killed somebody. It doesn't matter if it was your friend or not. If they connect us with this, we'll all go to jail for the rest of our lives."

"Richard. You hired us to kidnap a pregnant girl and bring her back to you, remember? What do you think the penalty is for that? Or for setting off a bomb in a hospital so she'd be evacuated and left in the open? Whatever we've done since then is just extra stuff they add on beyond your life sentence to make themselves look like hard-asses for the next election. The point is to not let them catch you and give you any sentence."

Richard Beale didn't answer. He was light-headed, but his stomach felt as though it contained a rock that was somehow expanding. He looked out across the parking lot at the boats bobbing beside their docks in the marina, but they only made him feel that the ground under him was moving, so he stared far past them at the line of the horizon.

"Are you still there?"

"I'm here."

"You have any other questions?"

"Not a question," Richard said. "I called you because this is getting critical. I need to have Christine back. She needs to be alive and not too beat up. Do you hear that?"

"Yes. Alive. That's what we've been doing. If we hadn't been trying to take her alive, we wouldn't have lost Ronnie and Carl. We're doing it."

"It matters a hell of a lot more than I thought. I need that baby. Christine has to be alive and healthy long enough to deliver that baby. You don't know the kind of pressure I'm under. It's got to happen as soon as possible."

"We're doing our best, but if I've got to be on the phone all day, well, what can I say?"

"Nothing. Go do it." Richard Beale slipped the phone into his pocket and took his eyes off the ocean, but it didn't help. His fate had been settled on his father's boat. Staring and heavy breathing had only made him dizzy. He walked with purposeful determination to a trash barrel at the side of the parking lot, grasped its rim where the plastic bag was fitted over it, bent at the waist, and succumbed.

11

Jane drove from Minneapolis to O'Hare International Airport to return the rental car. There was little chance the four hunters could know that the car existed, let alone trace it from the Buffalo airport to O'Hare. If they managed to trace it, they would only conclude that she and Christine had driven to Chicago and gotten on a plane.

She was at the airport before dawn, took the car rental agency shuttle to the terminal, and arrived at five-thirty A.M. when the crowds were thin for her flight to Austin, Texas. She had not been to Austin in several years, but she remembered it as the right kind of place for a few months from now, the time when Christine had the baby and stopped being Linda Welles. Austin was warm most of the time, and it had a lively atmosphere. Austin was the state capital and the home of the University of Texas. Big universities created whole communities around them like ripples spreading outward from a splash. There were large groups of unattached, interesting people, lots of nightlife, music. There was no better place for providing cover for a woman of college age, particularly one who would arrive in the early fall, like thousands of others.

The airport required caution. O'Hare held dangers for Jane that had nothing to do with Christine Monahan. It was one of the biggest airline hubs in the country, placed right in the center, and so it had always attracted lots of hunters—cops and bounty hunters watching for fugitives, criminals watching for victims, an array of professional searchers trying to spot particular travelers. There might be men in the terminal who would remember her face if they saw it. As Jane moved through the lines waiting to get through security, she kept scanning the places where people could stand and watch the passengers. When Jane was through the security checks, she walked past her gate, sat in the waiting area two gates farther down the concourse with her back to the big window overlooking the flight line so the morning glare would be behind her, and studied the faces that came near enough to see. She saw nobody who struck her as a threat, so when her flight began boarding she walked slowly to her gate and stepped through the door into the short tunnel to the plane.

When the plane landed in Austin, she rented a car, checked into a hotel near the airport, and went out apartment hunting. This was a good time for doing it, when much of the campus population had left for the summer, and not all of the apartments had been rented for the fall. Jane's story was that she was planning to enter a graduate program at the university in the fall, but would be in Europe for most of the summer. She wanted to rent an apartment right away for herself and a roommate with a baby. She was willing to pay the rent for the rest of June, July, August, and September in advance so she could store her books and furniture until university classes began. The simplest arrangement, she said, was to put the apartment only in the name Cecilia Randazzo—her name—and she would sign the lease and be responsible for the cost.