Thomas Perry - Runner

She waited, looked, and listened while the sun went down and the house gradually sunk into darkness. When it was eleven o'clock, she stood and put on her backpack, then looked out the windows again before she left the master bedroom. She went down the stairs at the center of the building and then walked from room to room in the dark, testing her memory of the distances and spaces. Then she went out to the garage and made her way across the broad brick pavement to the garden planted beside the front gate to hide the machinery that opened it. She sat down behind a tree near the gate.

At eleven-thirty the front gate began to glide to the left on its track. A black Cadillac Escalade drove in and stopped on the brick pavement in front of the garage where it was closest to the front door of the house. It was where Jane had expected the vehicle to park, shielded from the line of fire on three sides—the house, the garage, and the front hedge. Jane watched from her hiding place by the gate as car doors opened, lights went on, and people emerged. The driver was a man whom she had seen in New York. He had to be Demming. He was tall, had light hair, and an athletic body that had thickened a bit in middle age. He wore a short-sleeved polo shirt with a sport coat over it, presumably to hide a gun. He went to the front door, unlocked and opened it, and stood guard there while the second man joined him.

The second man was also tall. His hair was dark, and he had a handsome face, smooth and a bit boyish. He had to be Richard Beale. She could imagine Christine being attracted to him. He stood on the porch just in the doorway while Demming went inside, presumably to make sure Jane wasn't in there waiting. Beale looked increasingly uneasy as he waited for Demming to return. When he did, Beale stepped in.

Jane remained motionless and looked hard, waiting for the next two, who were sitting in the back seat. The left rear door opened and there was the one with black hair she had seen outside Lompoc prison. The woman got out, held the door, and waited for the other woman to get out, then grasped her arm and hurried her into the house.

For the few moments while the second woman was visible, Jane strained to see her clearly. Her height seemed to match Christine's. She looked about thirty pounds heavier than Christine had been when Jane had seen her, and that would be about right. The hair seemed to be the same style as Christine's. Was that exactly what it would look like four months later? The dress was one that Jane and Christine had picked out at the Mall of America in Minnesota. There wasn't enough time. In the few steps between the car and the house Jane couldn't tell if was Christine or it wasn't.

Jane waited until she saw a light go on in the big central room, then stepped to the front gate across the driveway, took out the padlock and chain she had brought, wrapped it around the gate and its post, and locked it shut. Then she kept going to the pedestrian gate nearby and locked that one, too. She moved around the garage toward the back yard, where she could see through the big glass wall into the lighted room.

The four people looked lost in the emptiness of the big room. They drifted around in it, like fish swimming the perimeter of a bare aquarium. Jane could see no weapons on any of them, but she assumed they were armed. She moved into position in the garden a dozen yards from the back of the house, turned on the baby monitor she had kept, and watched the people in the house react. They must have heard the click.

"What's that?"

"Do you hear that, too?"

"It sounds like static."

"Where's it coming from—the ceiling?"

Jane said, "It's me. I'm here. We're going to do this quickly. Christine?"

A man's voice jumped in right away to preempt anything the woman would say. "What do you want us to do?" Jane guessed that they had rehearsed this in advance, trying to make sure that Jane didn't hear the impostor's voice.

"Let Christine walk out the glass door at the back of the house and onto the lawn. The rest of you, stand in the center of the room and keep your hands above your heads."

She recognized Beale's voice from her telephone call. "What do we do?"

There was a whisper. "She can hear."

The woman who was supposed to be Christine walked to the sliding door.

"Wait." It was Demming's voice.

The woman didn't stop. She opened the sliding door and stepped into the darkness. She began to walk out into the yard away from the house. She stepped past the rock garden where Jane crouched and onto the lawn.

Jane switched the monitor off and the woman turned around and took a step toward her. "Stop there."

The woman moved her head from side to side, and Jane could tell the woman was trying to see her better. Jane crouched in the shadows a few yards from her. The light from the glass wall of the house was behind Jane and illuminated the woman's features.

Jane said, "You're Claudia Marshall, aren't you?"

"No. It's me—Christine. Don't you even recognize me?"

It was awful to hear her mimic Christine's voice. Jane could tell that the woman had heard Christine talk recently, probably a number of times. Jane said, "I want you to tell me what happened. Is Christine alive?"

"Sure I am." The woman stepped closer again, but she was drifting to Jane's left. Jane could see she was attempting to step out of the light and make Jane easier to see.

Jane said, "Stop."

Then everything around Jane seemed to be in motion. The woman wearing Christine's clothes lifted the dress and pulled out a pistol. She managed to raise it toward Jane before Jane shot her. The woman fell backward onto the grass, a red spot in the center of her chest.

Jane dived to her left away from the glass wall just as shots from inside shattered the pane behind her. Jane rolled once, turning her body to face the house, and fired six shots through the glass at the figures in the big, empty room. She saw Demming go down, but she wasn't sure whether he had been hit or simply dropped to deny her a target. Sybil Landreau swatted the switch by the front door to turn off the lights, and disappeared in the blackness.

Jane had spent the afternoon making decisions about what she was going to do, and she executed the moves that she had planned. She crawled a few feet toward the side of the house, picked up the fishing line, and jerked it so the power to the house was cut. Then she ran along the house to the first of the windows she had left unlatched. She turned on the battery-operated receiver for the baby monitor again.

The voices were stage whispers. "Don't worry. We'll find her, and then get you to the hospital."

"I'm shot through the thigh, Sybil. If I lie here, I'm going to bleed to death."

"Come on, Steve. Tie it off with your belt while we take care of this."

"At least help me move out of the center of the floor, so if she comes back I'll have a chance."

"You're not thinking clearly. You're right where you want to be. She'll think you're dead, and you'll shoot her."

"Listen, Sybil. I really need to go."

"Quiet. Both of you." This time it was Richard Beale's voice. Jane could hear him walking, each step like a hammer blow on the hardwood. There was a click, then another, and the click-click-click as he tried to turn on the outdoor floodlights. "Shit! She cut the power."

Jane switched off the monitor and left it beside the house while she pushed the window open. She used both hands to raise herself to the windowsill, then slithered inside onto the floor and closed the window. She could tell from the dimensions of the room that this was a bedroom. She remained where she was with her gun aimed at the door and waited. When she hadn't heard anything for a few minutes, she rose and stepped to the door. She crouched low and looked down the hallway toward the central room. She could make out the shape of Steve Demming on the floor. She saw no movement, but that meant nothing, because lying still was not only the strategy Sybil Landreau had urged him to follow, but it was also probably the best way to slow the bleeding from his thigh.