Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

When he saw her turn her head to look at the display window of a boutique, Earl gave a sullen nod and followed her inside. Linda bought a silk summer dress that made her feel light and pretty, a little bit like a butterfly.

Pete Hatcher was crouching on his knees, shaking. He could tell that he must have lost some of his sight and hearing. He had seen the trunk begin to open. He had just found the safety latch inside the lid by touch and gotten the courage to release it when he had heard the keys in the lock and seen the crack of light appear.

He had been terrified that the cops would see his hand near the lock, so he had reflexively recoiled, scuttled back into the corner of the trunk behind the loose spare tire and curled up. He had seen the pistol appear in the opening, but he had never expected the gun to go off. The blast, the flash, and the shower of sparks made him bring his knees to his chest, clap his hands over his ears, and close his eyes.

She had fired again and again at the spot where he had first lay down when she locked him in—first where his head had been, then his belly, then halfway back up, to his chest, then his head again.

He heard nothing now, but his ears were still ringing, so he wasn’t sure that there were no sounds. The woman had every right to think he was dead, so now she would drive the car somewhere. He waited for the sound of the engine, but it didn’t come. He tried to figure out what he should do, but first he had to know why she had shot at him. No, that was wrong. Somebody was going to open the trunk again soon, expecting him to be dead. When they discovered that he wasn’t, they would certainly correct the oversight. He could die that way, or he could try to run.

He pulled the safety latch behind the lock and cautiously pushed the trunk open a crack. He heard the sound of a police radio, then saw the police car. He closed his eyes and felt sweet relief. She couldn’t kill him if the other cops had already arrived. That was probably why she had done such a hasty job of it—to finish it before they got here. He popped the lid up, then swung his leg over the rear bumper, misjudged the height of the trunk, and toppled over onto the street. He began to sit up, then lay back down again and stared along the underside of the car.

He could see the body of a policeman lying on the street at the front, almost under the radiator. There was a big hole in his forehead as though the skull had been punched outward, and blood draining down over his left eye into a pool. Hatcher’s brain tried to take all that it knew and make sense of it. Did she imagine Hatcher had killed the policeman earlier, and then think she was executing him for it? What was he thinking? It was impossible. She had killed the policeman. She was no cop.

His breathing stopped. He had no idea how long he had been hearing the sirens. He was alone with the body of a murdered policeman. He had just bought two guns, and this woman had probably used one of them on a policeman. It might be lying around here someplace, and if it wasn’t, the police certainly had a way to know he had owned two and had only one left.

Hatcher stood and backed away from the car, his head swiveling around, first to see if the madwoman was still nearby waiting to fire, then to see if any of the people in the houses had come out, then just to see where he was going. He walked to the front of the car and picked up his grocery bag. He turned, and then his feet were pounding on the sidewalk, carrying him away, the momentum building and building, his mouth open in a grimace so the air hissed in and out through his clenched teeth.

His mind burned through the mass of impressions into a bare, heightened clarity as he ran. There was no moment of indecision, no wavering among choices, because he had no choices. He knew the police would come toward this spot from three directions at once, because there were only three ways for a car to come. They would flood each end of the block and come up the alley. He took the fourth way, entering the lobby of an apartment building that looked a lot like his own, walking through it, down the first-floor hallway and out the back door, then beside the next one and across the street, where he entered the lobby of the next one, so he emerged on his own street a block from his apartment.

He walked into his entryway and climbed the stairs for the last time. He knew that the madwoman almost certainly believed he was dead. Even if she had any doubts and knew where he lived, she would have had a difficult time getting here before he had. He opened the apartment door, slipped inside, and locked it behind him.

He had no difficulty working out the order of tasks. He made the telephone call first. She wasn’t home, but he left a message. Then he collected the cash from its hiding places in the apartment, packed his clothes quickly, and wiped his fingerprints off all the surfaces he usually touched. He took all of the food jars and bottles out of the refrigerator, put them into the sink, and ran water over them until he was sure they carried no fingerprints, then put them all into a big plastic trash bag with his groceries.

He went out, locked the door, wiped the doorknob, walked quietly down the hall, and carried his suitcase and his trash down the back staircase. He put his trash in the Dumpster. Then he walked around the corner to where his car was parked, set his suitcase in the trunk, and began to drive.

Earl and Linda sat in a cowboy bar in Golden, a half hour into the mountains west of Denver, and watched the eleven o’clock news on the television set on the wall above them. The newswoman was reporting “the senseless, execution-style killing of a young police officer.”

Earl knitted his eyebrows. “Now, that’s typical, isn’t it? They haven’t found out why it happened, so they say it was senseless. They read the words on the prompter, but they don’t seem to know what they’re saying.”

Linda could see the newswoman standing about twenty yards away from the Lexus, and behind her the police crew was dusting it for prints. The car trunk was open. “The police are urging anyone who has information about the incident to contact them. They have no solid leads as to why anyone would have shot the officer. One theory I’ve heard is that even though the new Lexus sedan had not yet been reported missing, the officer might have seen something suspicious and pulled it over.”

Linda held her breath, waiting for Earl to notice what had not been said. Finally she knew that he already had. He swallowed the last of the beer in his glass, set it on the table, and said, “Well, we’d better go see if we can figure out where he’s gotten to now.”

“I’m sorry, Earl,” she said. She wanted to waste some time in the bar, where there were people, before she blithely stepped into the dark with Earl. He was perfectly capable of hiding his anger until they were somewhere along a deserted road. “I’m really sorry. I don’t know how I could have—”

“I did it,” he said. “I stopped you before you could do him right.” He added, “1 keep thinking, ‘So she might have put a round into the gas tank. If we’d been back a few yards it wouldn’t have been so bad.’ ” He pulled her up by the arm. “Better than this, anyway. This is a joke.”

When they reached the neighborhood where Hatcher had been living as David Keller, they drove past the place where he had parked the used Saturn that evening. For an instant Linda felt the thrill of surprise and anticipation: the space was not empty. But when Earl drove closer she could see that the car in the space was a Thunderbird.

Earl left their car a block from the rear of Hatcher’s building and they climbed the back stairs. Earl opened the lock effortlessly and they stepped inside, put on their gloves, and began the search. As soon as Linda opened the refrigerator, she knew what the rest of the small apartment would be like.