Thomas Perry - Runner

Jane heard a new sound. It was the throaty, burbling sound of a motorcycle engine starting. She had underestimated the hunters. She couldn't outrun a motorcycle, but her bicycle still gave her advantages. It was silent. She could pull off and hide while the motorcycle went past, or find a path that was off the road and try to avoid roads entirely. In a couple of seconds the engine sound rose to a whine, and then a roar as the motorcycle came after her.

She could hear it gaining easily on her and saw the pavement ahead of her begin to glow from its distant headlight. Jane saw a street sign ahead, and she pedaled harder for it, then veered to the right and took the turn around the corner as fast as she dared and drifted almost to the left side of the road. She came upon a grove of stunted oaks, so she steered off the road into it, avoiding the trunks and raised roots until she could coast while she swung her leg over the seat and began to run with the bicycle. When she stopped her momentum fifty feet from the road, she dropped her bicycle in some high weeds and lay beside it.

She heard the motorcycle roar into the intersection, and looked in that direction, not raising her head, but staring through the weeds. There was the bright single headlight, the yellow motorcycle. Its helmeted rider was hunched forward over the handlebars, his legs bent so he held the motorcycle in a knock-kneed crouch. He had lost her, or maybe never caught sight of her, and just come this way because he knew she would be going in the direction of the freeway and the coast, not inland.

His single headlight turned in Jane's direction, and she ducked her head deep in the weeds, but he surged forward toward her hiding place only about thirty feet before he swung around, heading back into the intersection. He turned his motorcycle to the right so his light shone on the stretch of road he had been on before he'd turned, then rode a few feet up to the left, but didn't seem to see anything that way either. He came back along the road toward Jane. This time he seemed to have decided she couldn't have gone down either of the other stretches of road. He came along slowly, and as he approached, Jane saw the trees above her hiding place begin to glow brighter with his headlight.

The engine throttled back, so it was almost at idle again. Suddenly it grew much louder, and the motorcycle came off the road, over the shoulder, and into the grove, heading directly for Jane. She crawled behind a tree and stood, taking off her jacket. She pressed her body to the trunk of the tree, listening to the engine of the motorcycle and watching the beam of the headlight bouncing up and down on the leaves and upper branches of the oak trees around her.

She listened closely and watched the trees brighten more and more, and then stepped away from the trunk to face him. The man on the motorcycle was thirty feet away, moving toward her. As soon as he saw her he sped up, as though he intended to run her down. As he came toward her, Jane took two steps in one direction and then the other, as though she were transfixed, unable to decide what to do.

The motorcycle roared toward her, but she stepped aside at the last second and flung her jacket over his head and across his face. The motorcycle seemed to jerk as he tried to brake, then tried to turn it and lay it down. The motorcycle went ten feet past Jane into the trunk of an oak tree. The man was thrown over it, half-turned in the air, and hit the tree beyond it.

The motorcycle was still running, lying on the ground in front of the tree with its light on and the rear wheel still spinning and the engine roaring. Jane knelt there for a second and turned it off, then approached the injured man cautiously.

He was conscious, and Jane saw him try to move his right arm toward his jacket pocket, realize from the pain and immobility that it was broken, then try to reach across his body with his left. She saw the gun before he could get a grip on it, kicked his ribs, and snatched it out of his pocket. She held it to his head.

"You have one chance, and it's right now. What's your name?"

"Pete Tilton."

That was one of the names Christine had told her, so she accepted it. "Is Christine in that house?"

"No."

"Is she all right?"

"I'm not. I'm really hurt bad. Just call an ambulance and go. Nobody will come after you for this if you'll help." He tried to raise his head as though he wanted to sit up but couldn't.

"Is Christine dead?"

He moved convulsively, trying to catch Jane's legs in a side-kick and bring her down where he might be able to wrest the gun away with his left hand. Jane stepped backward and fired.

"WHAT WAS THAT?" asked Ruby Beale.

"Probably nothing. A backfire," Andy Beale said.

"I haven't heard a backfire in twenty years."

On the couch in the great room, Andy Beale had his arm around Ruby. He said, "Sometimes, when people are under a lot of stress, it gets into their dreams. They can wake up enough to walk around, and still be dreaming."

Ruby took two deep breaths and blew them out through her nose. "It wasn't a dream, Andy. I saw her. And if you had just looked right away when I pointed, you would have seen her for yourself."

He spoke very gently. "You saw me order Pete and Steve and the girls to go out there to look around, and so far nobody has found any sign of her. They're all still at it, but as the time goes by, the chance gets slimmer. You know, sometimes—I'm not saying this is one of those times—we see things with our heads instead of our eyes."

She turned her whole body to face him. "Just what are you getting at?"

"There's no such thing as a ghost, Ruby."

"So. You did see her."

"No, I didn't."

"What do you think is crazier—to see something and admit it, or see it and tell yourself you couldn't have, so you didn't?"

Andy Beale thought for a moment, then shrugged. "When you're at that level, who cares? Take your pick."

She stood up and went to the elevator. "Sometimes you're a real jackass, you know?" She punched the button and the doors closed.

Andy Beale heard it going up to the third level, where the master suite was. He knew that it was probably his job to follow her up there and make a convincing apology for being insensitive. That was just another way of saying he was a jackass, and it only applied after the fact when she wasn't mad anymore. He knew what was required of him, but tonight he couldn't bring himself to do it just yet.

31

Jane was back in Sharon's house taking a shower by one-thirty A.M. She knew it was a good idea to wash thoroughly after discharging a firearm into a person, but that was all she allowed herself to think for the moment. It was not until she had finished the shower and was soaking in Sharon's tub that she allowed herself to turn her attention to what she had done to the man on the motorcycle.

The first conclusion she reached was that she didn't especially regret killing him. She had needed to do the same thing to other people several times in the past. Right after college, when she had started making the hunted disappear, it had not occurred to her that she would ever kill anyone. She was only going to help people who were in danger run away. It had been a simple, logical proposition for her. Saving a life could never be wrong.

But after she had helped a number of victims begin new lives, she began to realize that some time, one of the enemies would find his way to her. On the day it happened, she had not made a slow, reasoned decision to kill. Instead she had acted instinctively in a second, and then recognized that this, too, had been part of her original decision. The moment she invented the profession of preventing murderers from getting to their victims, she had already made it inevitable that one of them would try to kill her. Her only choice would be to die or kill him. The first time, and every time after that, she had chosen to kill.