Thomas Perry - Runner

As Jane was walking across the living room toward the sliding door, she heard a sound. She whirled and aimed her gun at the man on the floor. "You're alive."

"Help me," said Steve Demming. His voice was strained and weak, but she could hear him.

"Toss your gun so you can't reach it."

He flipped his wrist and the gun slid a dozen feet on the bare floor. "Help me."

"You need to help me first."

"Get an ambulance. There are no phones in the house."

She understood. He had brought no phone because if he had made or received a call, it would prove where he was while Jane was being killed. "Tell me about Christine."

"I can tell you where she is."

"Her body?"

"No. That day, when she tried to get away, this house was already set up like a damned hospital. The Beales had brought a doctor from Mexico to deliver the baby, and a nurse to take care of it. They were still here a week later. And Ruby Beale is a nurse, too—retired. After Sybil shot Christine, they were all over her in five seconds. She's alive."

35

It was already nearly ten in the morning. The sun was bright and hot enough to burn off the protective haze from the ocean. The drive to the Mexican border seemed longer than Jane had imagined it. To her, San Diego had always seemed to be right on the border. But the wealthy parts where she had been spending much of her time had their faces turned to the north. Mexico was present only in the Indian faces of the people who worked in the restaurants and stood at the bus stops. Now, as she drove south on Interstate 5 and then through National City, Chula Vista, and Palm City, she began to see signs advertising attractions in Mexico and brokers who sold Mexican auto insurance to tourists. She pulled off at Palm Avenue and bought a policy. She knew she would never file a claim, but if she was in an accident she didn't want to be detained while the Mexican police sorted things out. A few minutes after that she reached San Ysidro.

Jane took her place in one of the seven lanes of cars waiting to cross the border. She read all of the signs and watched the movement of the cars on both sides of her, trying to be patient and calm because patience and calm were the things that customs agents on every border looked for. Jane had no experience at the southern border, but like most people in western New York, she had crossed the Canadian border frequently. This morning she was dressed in clothes that would make her identical to the hordes of female American tourists crowding the border. She wore a pair of expensive blue jeans, a long-sleeved white blouse, running shoes that showed she was expecting to be doing some walking, big sunglasses, and a baseball cap. She had her Alexandra Crowell identification in a worn wallet at the top of her purse, ready to show the customs officers.

The cars ahead didn't seem to be moving at all, but one at a time the ones at the row of customs kiosks changed. The people inching forward to the kiosks didn't seem worried, but they probably weren't carrying guns and ammunition and ten different sets of bogus identification. When she was given the wave to pull forward she took her turn with the Mexican officers. One of them came to her window.

Jane kept her face relaxed and blank, but looked at him attentively. He glanced at her for less than a second before he waved her into Tijuana and turned his eyes toward the next car.

Jane moved ahead. It had taken over two hours to get through the jam and into Mexico. She wanted to get out of the vicinity of the border, where the traffic was thick, but the traffic came with her and stayed with her—mostly in front of her—down Avenida Revolución. Mexico was crowded. The sidewalks were moving streams of people. There were hundreds of small stores and stalls and people selling everything—trinkets, textiles, leather, food. People who were obviously Americans elbowed one another to get closer to displays of brightly painted wooden objects. There were nightclubs, bars, and hotels, and in front of many of them, stalls that seemed to represent all of the great profusion of objects that existed and could be sold by one person to another.

As she made it onto Boulevard Agua Caliente the traffic thinned, and she dared to lift her eyes from the road to look around her more often. But as the sense of crowding eased, she was shocked by the sight of the endless hills on both sides, covered with the small cottages and shacks of poor people, most of them probably squatters, since it was hard to imagine pieces of land being cut into such small parcels. They went as far as she could see, and beyond.

By the time she was away from the border, many of the cars had pulled away onto Route 10 along the ocean toward Rosarito and Ensenada, and she felt a bit less hemmed in. But being on this side of the border worried Jane. Everything was unfamiliar and took extra seconds to interpret. She had seen not only policemen in the area close to the border, but also small contingents of armed soldiers at various corners, watching the passing cars. She wasn't sure what to expect of them. The crowds of people everywhere—half of them Americans—made her feel a bit less worried about standing out. Her long black hair might make an eye passing over a crowd include her with the Mexicans, but she didn't speak Spanish, so the impression was only of value if she kept moving and didn't talk.

She knew she was going to have a difficult time finding the building she was searching for, a hard time getting in, and a hard time getting out. As she moved along Boulevard Agua Caliente, she began to see some of the things Steve Demming had told her to look for. There were whole blocks of pharmacies. People who were obviously Americans, most of them elderly, came in and out carrying large shopping bags. There was even a charter bus parked on a side street with its motor running.

Now she moved into the part of the district that she had been watching for. There were medical and dental offices in every space of each block. There were signs offering lap band surgery, tummy tucks, breast and buttock implants, collagen treatments, botox injections, face-lifts, liposuction. The larger buildings were all called clinicas. Most signs were in a sort of English that had an otherworldly quality, with words that were cognates, not translations. There were buildings devoted to medical care that were called "spas." And beside a business offering a jumble of unrelated but major kinds of surgery would be an office offering "painless dentistry" and teeth whitening.

Jane found the address in the center of this wilderness of medical and cosmetic marketplaces. The four-story stucco structure looked like an apartment building jammed between a pharmacy and another medical center, but it had balconies that opened onto a view of another stucco wall two feet away.

She drove past and then around the area for a few minutes before she found a parking space in a lot beside a large market. She went inside and used American dollars to buy a few snacks and some cans of Coca-Cola. She put them into her SUV and began to walk.

She thought about her conversation with Steve Demming. The address he had given her seemed to match his description of the building and the district. But she still wasn't positive that he had given up hope of killing her.

She had knelt beside him in the dark house. "Why should I believe you?"

He said, "Because I don't have anything to gain by lying now. I want to live."

She heard the siren in the distance. "The ambulance. One last thing."

"I know. If you find out I lied, or that I warned anyone that you were coming, you'll kill me."

"I hope you believe that."

"I do."

Jane walked along the street behind Agua Caliente listening and looking, trying to get a sense of everything that was happening around her. She went past dental offices, other places specializing in "salud familiar." Every place advertised that its doctor was board certified and everything cost less than half the U.S. price.