Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

Earl always left most of the packing to Linda, because she was the woman. She supposed that meant she was too fastidious to put dirty clothes in by mistake.

She heard his heavy feet on the walk outside, then heard them clomping into the hallway. She called, “You want to take these Colts, right?”

He came in and looked at the pistols she had taken out of the gun cabinet and set on her dresser. They were Colt Model 1911A1s, the most common handgun in the United States, and probably the world. Colt had made them since 1925, over a million of them during World War II alone, and other manufacturers at least that many. The government had kept issuing them for forty years after that, and every army and police force in the Western world had carried some copy with minor variations. The sheer age meant the cops had lost track of most of them long ago, and ballistics identification was a fantasy. Seven .45 rounds were plenty if you didn’t plan to have anybody shooting back, and the bulk of the gun was only a problem on the way. You could drop it after it was fired.

Earl said, “These will do fine.”

She could tell by the look on Earl’s face that it was time for the ritual to begin, so she started. “I’m worried.” She had to be the one who said the first words, because he liked it that way.

“There’s a lot to worry about,” he said. “This is a big job, and it won’t be easy.”

“I could tell as soon as Seaver started talking,” she fretted. “He didn’t want to look in my eyes. You spent the afternoon on the computer. Didn’t you find anything?”

He pursed his lips and shook his head. “Seaver didn’t miss much. No criminal record. No marriages, no out-of-town property. The only car he owned is the one that’s still there. I found court records for probate when his old man died. He inherited a few bucks, and there were no other close relatives mentioned in the will.”

Linda frowned. “Not much for us there. It will be hard.”

“But this is one we’ve got to win,” he said. “The money is good. If we do this one, it will get better on the next one.”

“If we blow it, Seaver’s bosses will send somebody to look for us.” She knitted her brows. “He as good as said that, didn’t he?”

“It’s a Las Vegas hotel. It’s got to be Mafia.”

“Got to be,” she agreed. “We do it right and we get lots of jobs and lots of money. We fail—don’t find him, or try, and botch it—and they’re not going to leave us alone.”

“It’s an important job. More important than anything we’ve ever done. Life or death.”

It was working, and Linda could feel it. Already her breaths were quick and shallow, and her stomach had little quivers in it. The adrenaline was pumping into her veins. She could see Earl’s eyes were beginning to get that narrow long-distance gaze. She searched for a way to turn up the pitch, and found it. “We’re starting out dead, really. Because they already have us—know who we are, where we live. They’ll kill us unless we get him.”

That seemed to work for Earl. “He’s got our life. We’re dead until we get him. We have to find him to take it back.”

Earl’s anger transported Linda. Her energy was beginning to crackle out in little bolts of rage. “And who the hell is he to do that? He knew he was going to die—deserved to die—but he decided it wasn’t going to be him. It was going to be somebody else.”

“He knew what he was doing,” said Earl. “He knew there would be somebody who had to come along and clean up the mess he left. Somebody like us would be put in his place, in a deep hole, and have to dig their way out of it.” His throat was choked with anger.

“Oh, he’s not worried about us,” she muttered. “He’s someplace laughing at us. Both of them are. That woman who got him out of Vegas. They think they’re smarter than anybody who would need the money bad enough to come for them.”

Earl stood up and began to pace. “Not just smarter. Better than us. Like even if we did luck onto him it wouldn’t matter, because he’d beat us.”

Linda’s pulse was fast, hard, and strong now. She was transfixed with hatred and fear. Her jaw was clenched and her long fingernails were jabbing into the palms of her hands, leaving little red crescents. She could see the veins standing out in Earl’s neck. He was moving again, too full of energy to keep still. He was picking things up and tossing them into his suitcase. He seemed to see what a mess he was making of it, so he went and gathered the two Colts from the dresser and headed for the door. He stopped in the doorway and said, “Just be sure you’re ready by six.”

6

Jane sat on the couch and stared around her at the baseboards in the living room. There were nicks that her father had patched with the best synthetic wood mixtures they had sold at the time, then painted over, but she knew where they were twenty years later. The one by the kitchen door was from the new refrigerator he had bought as a surprise for her mother, which was still on the other side of the door running right now. Jane remembered seeing the man pushing the two-wheel hand truck it was strapped to miscalculate and nick the doorway. The man who was supposed to be guiding him saw it, spit on his finger, and rubbed the spot, trying to believe it was just a dirt mark but feeling the groove.

The imperfections in the surfaces were events. Her great-grandfather had built most of the house himself, and her grandfather and father had painted and varnished it, and her grandmother and her mother had rubbed every square inch of it clean a thousand times, so if she put her hand here, or here, she was touching their hands.

She said aloud, “I got married yesterday,” as a test, and it failed. The words didn’t sound convincing, because they didn’t have behind them the resonance of wonder. All of the people who would have come rushing in from the kitchen and the dining room, making noise and smiling—or maybe looking worried—were just memories now. Birth, marriage, death. That was all they put on tombstones, and that seemed to be about all anyone wanted to know unless you were pretty remarkable. Jane Whitefield had spent the past twelve years straining every nerve to keep from being remarkable, because attracting attention was dangerous. It seemed she had succeeded, and now she would have to succeed some more, because she had Carey.

Jane turned her attention to the pile of mail that Jake had left for her, setting the bills beside her and the advertisements on the floor for the wastebasket. She came to a stiff white envelope with no return address. Probably it was another wedding card. It would have the usual flowered bower with bells, and beneath it would be the archetypal stiff little people, one in white and the other in black. There was no way anybody could be expected to obtain one that was remotely evocative of a marriage between actual human beings. For some reason there was no market for such a thing. But this mail was old. It had come while she was in Las Vegas, and she had forgotten about it in the rush and excitement of getting married. This couldn’t be a wedding card.

She tore it open and saw that it was a plain white folded sheet. Printed in ballpoint pen was “You told me I would be thinking of you just about now. So here’s a present. Chris.” Inside was a cashier’s check with the purchaser listed as Christine McRea. The stub attached to it said “Repayment of Principal.” Jane glanced at the machine printing on the check: one hundred thousand and 00/100 dollars.

Christine McRea had come a long way since the night when she had knocked on the door of this house. Her name had been Rebecca Solomon then, and she had made the mistake of assuming that when a judge said the names of people serving on a jury were confidential, that meant an enterprising reporter wouldn’t be able to find hers and print it later. When Jane had met her, she had already used all the money she had saved on her secretary’s salary just to get as far as Cleveland, and had hitched a ride the rest of the way with a pair of itinerant heavy-equipment operators who had begun to hint at things she could do to repay their kindness.