Thomas Perry - Runner

The visit was over. Whatever she had accomplished would have to do. When the day came for Robert Monahan's release, there would be no doubt whether or not she had said the right things. And there was no doubt that Monahan had understood the message. Jane glanced in the rearview mirror again to check on the cars behind her. She didn't like the fact that the visitors were all let in and out on the hour. The little road away from the prison seemed unnecessarily well traveled. Jane didn't have to accept that. She watched for a safe place to pull her car over to let the other cars pass. Some of them probably had a long way to go, and it was better to let them head for the interstate than to have them tailgate and make risky moves to pass her. Jane wasn't in a hurry. She had already accomplished everything she had come to do, and all that was left was to make it home safe and unnoticed.

She found a turnout, a wider stretch of shoulder where she could let the others pass. As each car went by her, she looked at the driver. Each of the first four cars was driven by someone she had seen in the visiting room. Two of them were young women driving alone, and both of them looked as though they were crying. The third car held a mother and three young children. The mother drove with stony-faced resolution. In the next car was an elderly couple who were the parents of an inmate. She had noticed them in the visiting room walking in slowly, in that stiff, careful way that indicated they were afraid of falling. They sat across from a handsome dark-haired man about thirty years old. The mother and the son had been talkers, sometimes interrupting each other or talking at the same time, as though they shared the gift of talking and listening simultaneously. The father had sat back a bit so his wife could be closer, and said nothing. He simply listened.

The next car to appear in Jane's rearview mirror was a full-sized dark blue model. It had pulled over, too, at least two hundred yards back. As she watched it for a few seconds and it showed no sign of pulling out again, small alarms began to sound in her mind. There was a white van coming, still far off. She returned to the road and accelerated to thirty-five, and then checked the mirror again. The blue car let the big white van pass, and then drove after it. She wasn't sure about the blue car yet, but if she had been trying to follow someone, she would have done the same thing—let the van pass so it would be between them.

Curious about the driver of the blue car, she let her car drift out a bit to the left edge of her lane, and tried to use her side mirror to see him. The car was too far back. She knew that no matter who was in the car, it would be best if she didn't let him spend too much time behind her, but she wanted to see him. Waiting outside the prison until someone came to see Robert Monahan and then following her was exactly what the four would do. Jane tried repeatedly but she couldn't quite see the driver. She sped up and watched the mirror. Nothing happened, so she put more distance between her car and the van.

As she accelerated, she tried to picture each stretch of road ahead, waiting for the place where she could make a sudden turn and force the follower to either drive past the turn and lose her, or commit himself to a pursuit. She couldn't let anyone follow her back to the Santa Barbara Airport and learn what flight she was taking. The farther she went with him behind her, the greater the possibility that he would learn something about her that she didn't want him to know.

There was only one traffic light on this route before the road took them into the city of Lompoc. She would drive fast around the bend, across the bridge to the traffic light. If it was red she would go through it, and if he was guilty he would, too. If it was green she would wait for it to turn red. If he was guilty he would wait with her.

Jane pressed harder on the gas pedal and increased her speed. She was going over sixty before she reached the end of Klein Boulevard. She slowed only enough to make the turn without spinning off into a field. Her tires squealed a little, but she kept the car in control, and accelerated again. This time she built her speed to sixty-five and held it as she drove on, checking her mirror. The other car peeked out from behind the van, then veered around it into the left lane to pass. The car kept accelerating, trying to keep Jane's Cadillac in sight.

The time was coming for Jane to make her move. She could see the start of the curve ahead, just a place where the road seemed to dissolve. She took the bend in the road and then knew what she wanted. Jane hit her brakes, pulled off onto the right shoulder, and stopped. The dark blue car had been accelerating to catch up with her, and as it came around the bend, it could barely hold the road. Jane saw the front dip down, then dip again as the driver applied the brakes, but it was moving far too fast to stop in time. The car slowed only to about thirty as it went past her, the driver fighting to slow it down.

The driver was a woman. She appeared to be in her thirties, with long hair that appeared slightly unnatural as though it had been straightened and dyed coal black. She glared at Jane, and the expression on her face was a mixture of anger and fear. It was clear that she knew she had failed to keep Jane from noticing her and by slamming on her brakes she had convicted herself of trying to follow her. The woman was no longer anonymous.

Jane could see that the woman had a Bluetooth mic on her ear, and was talking to somebody on the telephone as she skidded past.

Jane pulled out onto the road after her. The woman saw Jane's car in the mirror and began to accelerate. Jane accelerated, too, coming up behind the woman fast, as though she meant to come up on her left and force her off the road. The traffic signal at the intersection was visible now and turning yellow, then red. The woman added more speed as she approached the bridge. Her car bounced when the tires hit the metal seam between pavement and bridge, and Jane could see that she was going to run the light.

Jane stayed behind her, but before they reached the red light, Jane took her foot off the gas pedal and fell back. The woman was watching Jane, and she didn't see until the last moment that there was a truck coming into the intersection on the cross street from the left. She made a panicky attempt to avoid it by standing on her brakes, but the driver of the truck had seen her coming and begun to stop, too. They were entering the intersection at the same time.

The woman wrenched her wheel to the right and hit the gas pedal to swing into a right turn around the corner. The truck driver saw what she was doing and swerved to the left to avoid her, so both the woman's car and the truck moved off down the road side by side, the truck in the left lane and the car in the right.

Jane accelerated past them both and through the intersection. Even though the light was still red, there was no other vehicle coming. She kept going into the business district of the city of Lompoc, made a few quick turns to be sure the woman couldn't find her easily if she tried to catch her, and then drove on residential streets until she reached the next intersection with a busy street, turned and followed it to the entrance to Interstate 101. There was no question in Jane's mind that the woman would know she had come to Lompoc from somewhere nearby, almost certainly Santa Barbara, an hour to the south. Jane drove to the right onto the northbound entrance and drove hard toward San Francisco.

She reached San Francisco in the late afternoon, and stopped at the Bank of America branch on Market Street where she kept an account in the name of Valerie Collins. The teller seemed only mildly surprised when she withdrew four thousand dollars in cash. The teller in the Wells Fargo branch up the street behaved the same when Carol Stevens withdrew thirty-five hundred in cash from her account just before closing time. As long as the amount wasn't large enough so they had to fill out extra forms, everybody seemed to be unconcerned. It was clear now that Christine was going to have to keep a low profile and pay for everything in cash for a longer time than Jane had anticipated. She would have to visit a few more banks in the months before she returned to Minneapolis to pick her up.