Thomas Perry - Runner

"You know."

"You're going with her?"

"I'll get her to a safe place and get her settled, and I'll come home. It should just take a few weeks."

"A few weeks?" he said. "Jane, you can't just disappear the way you used to. What am I supposed to tell people?"

"I'll have to trust you to think of something convincing. I got hurt, or I went to stay with a relative to get over the shock—any-thing. Whatever you make up, tell me later and I'll play along."

He sighed in frustration. "So this is the last call for a while, isn't it?"

"Yes. You know how it works."

"I remember."

"I hope you're not mad or hurt or something."

"I'm not happy about it, but what can I do?"

"Nothing."

"That's what I thought."

Jane saw the pavement ahead of her brightening again as the next car approached. It reminded her that while she was standing here with the car turned off she and Christine were vulnerable, and they would attract attention. "Carey, I've got to go. Please understand."

"Be safe."

"You, too." She looked back at the windshield of the car, and saw Christine staring at her. "I love you." She ended the call and put her phone into her jacket pocket, then hurried to the car and pulled out onto the road again. Christine seemed to sense that she wasn't in the mood to talk for the moment. Jane could see she was pretending to sleep, and she was grateful.

As she drove the long, dark highway, she thought about Carey. She kept falling into a circular series of thoughts. She felt guilty because she wasn't living up to her responsibility to him, but she would have felt much more guilty if she had refused to help Christine. She knew Carey's anger wasn't about his own convenience. It was that he genuinely loved her and didn't want her to risk her life. But what was her life if it consisted of little but being safe in the big old McKinnon house in Amherst, probably the safest of the suburbs on the eastern side of Buffalo?

When she had married Carey, she had been very conscious and deliberate about ending the period of her life when she was Jane Whitefield the guide before she assumed the next identity as Jane McKinnon, the pleasant, unremarkable local doctor's wife. She had assumed an identity that she believed would keep the old life away and keep Carey safe. She had kept up her old relationships with family, friends, and relatives, partly because being part of a community made an assumed identity more solid. She had taught the old language to Seneca children on the reservation, served in quiet ways in tribal life and government—the titles that brought unwelcome visibility were traditionally held by males—and had volunteered at the hospital.

One of the assumptions she'd had about marriage was that she would have babies. She had been careful not to let herself get pregnant for the first three years after her last client, until she was sure that some forgotten aspect of her past wasn't about to spill over into her new life, and Carey had understood. When the three years had passed, she had begun to feel that old dangers had become distant. She had told Carey she was ready, and they had stopped using birth control. The one thing she had never wasted much time worrying about was infertility. But after six months, nothing had happened. After a year had passed, Carey had arranged for them both to be examined and tested for physical problems, and they had both been declared problem-free. Still, nothing. After two years of trying, Jane's infertility was unexplained. What was unexplained couldn't be treated.

As soon as she had seen Christine tonight, a hundred contradictory thoughts and feelings had flooded her brain, and she was sure they had affected everything that happened in the past few hours—her concern for Christine, her reluctance to tire her out with pointed questions, certainly. But she felt a hurt, too. She had wanted a child more each month, and when the longing was beginning to be unbearable, who had turned up but a teenager with an accidental pregnancy? It was a cruel joke.

Jane looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was after one A.M. The windows along the road were all dark, and she was seeing fewer cars now. For miles between small towns there were only a few houses placed at long intervals, far back from the highway. She noticed how many of them had big toys beside them—recreational vehicles, motorcycles, boats on trailers.

After a time Christine spoke. "I'm not asleep."

"If you keep trying, maybe you'll doze off."

"No."

"Worrying isn't going to help. What helps is putting miles of road between us and them, and we're doing that."

"I know. I keep thinking about them."

"The six?"

"Yes. I don't know why there are six. When I first noticed them one or two were different people. They disappeared and new ones took their places. But it's always six."

Jane said, "To be honest with you, it's one of the reasons they worry me. It's the largest number who can ride in a car—just about any car. Or they can split into three separate teams and still work twenty-four hours a day—one on, one off. No doubt it gives them a chance to use a lot of different skills at once—a lot of ways to catch us."

"Now there are only five."

"Now there are five," Jane said. Her voice was not as hopeful as Christine's.

"What are you thinking?"

"We know who hired them—Richard Beale. We know their names. When you were in San Diego, why didn't you just talk this over with the police?"

"I couldn't," said Christine.

"What was stopping you?"

"I can't prove they work for Richard. When he did anything he didn't want known, he used to make up a corporation name, get a bank account, use it for a few months, and then close it. But the one who opened the account and had signature power wasn't him. When I worked for him, a lot of the time it was me."

"So if the police connect these people with a crime—the bombing—when they trace the money to the person who wrote the check or withdrew the cash to pay them, it will be you. Your name, your fingerprints on the checks."

"A lot of the time, I said. Not all of the time. But it will never be Richard."

Jane turned to study Christine's face. "Didn't this strike you as an odd way to run a business?"

"What did I know about business?"

"What did you know?"

"I knew what Richard chose to teach me. It was my first grownup job. I was sixteen when I started, and Richard told me what he wanted me to do. He didn't make a fuss over any of this. He didn't say something like 'This is illegal so don't tell anybody.' And I figured that the presidents of Microsoft or General Electric certainly didn't sign all the checks for their companies. They wouldn't be able to do all of them in a lifetime even if they did nothing else. So why should Richard? So I did what Richard said was my job, and I was secretly grateful that he was patient enough to explain how to do things. And also relieved that he didn't know I wasn't actually eighteen, which is what I had said."

"How long did you work at his company?"

"Three and a half years. Not all of it was working for him, though. The man who hired me ran the apartment rental business for Richard. I was actually looking in the newspaper ads for an apartment, and their ad for apartments had a little box in the corner that said the company was hiring. I came in and asked for an application, and he interviewed me while I was filling it out. His name was Dave. He was a big, heavy guy about fifty. You know how with some people when you look at them you know exactly what they looked like when they were babies?"

"Sure. He was one of them?"

"Yes. He had that look, as though one day he was in his crib, and the next he was in the office going over a rental agreement."

"What I'm wondering was why, at the age of sixteen, you needed a grown-up job and an apartment."