Thomas Perry - Runner

When the Jesuit missionaries came to the Senecas, they were promptly sent to their heaven. But the people who once inhabited this part of California coast weren't like the people of the eastern forests. They hadn't been fighting for a thousand years like the Iroquois. It took only a few Spanish soldiers on horseback to round them up and make them live in captivity. They died in such numbers that the cemetery filled up and the bodies had to be dug up and re-buried elsewhere over and over to make room for the new deaths. Jane couldn't help walking out through the side door of the church into the cemetery. There were old stone markers here, with names and dates worn away. And there were green plants and flowers growing with the vigor of Santa Barbara's perpetual May. There was a melancholy silence here, interrupted about once every two minutes by the whispery sound of a car passing beyond the wall.

"So you're back."

Jane shut her eyes tightly, but she knew she had to turn around, so she did. She opened her eyes, knowing. There he was, the way he always was in her dreams. "Hello, Harry," she said. He was wearing the moss green sport coat that had always seemed slightly too big for him. It made her wonder if he'd bought it that way to hide cards in poker games, or if he had begun to age and get smaller before she had even met him. Harry was leaning on the high stone cemetery wall, his sad brown eyes fixed on her. She added, "I was thinking of you when I flew into the Santa Barbara airport today. I can't come here without thinking of you."

"I'm hard to forget even after all this time."

"You are. I'm so sorry, Harry." She could feel the tears beginning to well in her eyes.

"I know, I know. It doesn't matter to me anymore. Dying was one nasty surprise on one night of my life, the big hand in my hair jerking my head back, and then the knife going right across my throat, as quick as that. The experience was really all over before I even figured out what had happened. The result was determined, I mean. He let go of me, and I was already dead, while I was stand ing up." Harry tilted his head back, and she could see the mortician's crude stitching across his throat. "Looks like a baseball, doesn't it?"

"A little."

"It doesn't matter. By now I could be dead from a bad piece of meat. Don't waste time blaming yourself. This was just the twins, the grandsons of Sky Woman. Hawenneyu the right-handed twin creates, and Hanegoategeh the left-handed twin destroys. We're all just part of the battle they've always fought with each other, and we don't even know what part we're playing. Hawenneyu creates a bright little boy who grows up to be an anesthesiologist, but Hanegoategeh has already given him a blind spot in his peripheral vision so he won't notice that the dial on the meter is too high and so he'll kill a patient. But maybe Hawenneyu has made sure the patient is the one who would have grown up to kill whole countries. Each move has a countermove, and only the twins know which is which."

"That example is pretty far-fetched."

"Is it?" he said.

"Why are you here?"

Harry looked around at the old cemetery with exaggerated interest. "Somebody belongs here more than me? Somebody deader than I am?"

"You know what I mean. Why tonight?"

"I'm here to warn you, Janie," he said. "You've been living a quiet life for a long time. You don't get to know why you were allowed to do that. Hawenneyu raises his right hand to strike, but Hanegoategeh raises his left to grasp his wrist, just like a mirror image. Maybe he blocked the blow, but maybe Hawenneyu was just keeping him from moving."

"Meaning what?"

"It's over. They're moving. You're out again."

"I know that."

"But do you know which twin is doing it—day or night? Creator or Destroyer? The good twin or the bad one?"

"You just reminded me that I don't get to know."

"There are always results. Somebody lives. Or dies. Think about the woman."

"What about her? She's just a kid."

"Woman. There are a lot of questions you never asked. You accepted her because she said Sharon sent her, but you never talked to Sharon."

"There were men with guns waiting in the parking lot. They persuaded me."

"What were they going to do with the guns—kill her? Kill you?"

"It doesn't much matter. I couldn't let them do either. I couldn't let them take her. I couldn't ignore the fact that they set off a bomb to get to her."

"You couldn't. You couldn't. Somebody put you in a position where you couldn't make any choices. Or maybe they were just making the right choices unthinkable. Who was it?"

"I don't know."

"Make sure you're doing what you think you're doing."

"I think I'm doing what I'm supposed to. I'm keeping my word."

Harry shrugged. "I can't hang around here all night. You hid the woman. Now you're going to see her only living connection, the only person who seems to give a shit if she lives or dies. The boyfriend must know about him, right? Would you send somebody else there?" He gave her a compassionate look, then reached out and touched her cheek.

The hand was cold, with a texture like wax. She shuddered and jerked her head back involuntarily, and awoke. She lay in the bed staring up at the cottage-cheese ceiling above her. There seemed to be light behind the curtain, so she sat up. The clock said it was five A.M., but she didn't want to go back to sleep. She was afraid that she would see Harry in her dreams again. She showered and dressed, then packed, checked out of the hotel, and drove to Lompoc for an early breakfast.

JANE HATED JAILS. Twice she had gone in because that was the only way to get to a woman and talk to her privately before she was released into danger again. Two other times she had allowed herself to be arrested because the alternative would have been to injure a police officer. Every surface in a jail seemed to her to have its own special cruelty—the bars, which were mostly symbolic in women's jails, but also the beds, the toilets, the showers, all of them rough, cheap, nasty versions of things that existed on the outside, as though someone wanted every instant of life to be a reminder that the prisoner was in a different world where everything was bad.

She drove around the perimeter of the parking lot as though she were undecided about where she was supposed to park, and looked at the cars, trying to detect a watcher. The cars all appeared to be empty. As she parked the car and began to walk toward the main building of the complex, she felt an instinctive urge to run, but she steadied herself and walked on.

About half the prisoners at Lompoc were assigned to the federal prison, the United States Penitentiary, a high-security section that had all the usual architectural reminders that the government had no intention of letting any of these men decide to leave—fences, towers, bars. The other half were in the Federal Correction Institution, the low-security section. She had checked in advance on her computer, and learned that Robert Monahan was one of these inmates.

She went to the front lobby and saw that things were less ugly than she had expected. The place reminded her of a military base. But she knew what she was seeing was a gloved fist. It might seem smooth and not terribly threatening, but inside was still a fist. Jane told the first person in a uniform, a young man, that she had an appointment, and he told her to show her ID to a woman called the Front Entrance Officer, who checked her off the visitor list.

The man held a metal detector and moved it up and down her body, and the woman patted her down. Jane had brought only the plastic see-through change purse to hold her driver's license and sunglasses and money, but the male officer opened it and searched it anyway. Then she was directed to a waiting room consisting of bare painted walls and rows of chairs, where another officer handed her a copy of the rules that she had already read. One rule was that a violation of the rules could result in a sentence of twenty years for the visitor.