Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

15

Jane flew to Chicago as Karen Roth, then shopped for her next flight by walking along the concourse at O’Hare looking at the television monitors that listed scheduled departures. Hatcher had called her at around ten on Tuesday night, and she had not heard the message until seven the next evening, so he was already in Billings. She diverted her course to a pay telephone, called her answering machine, pressed 56, and listened. “Two messages,” said the mechanical voice. The first was Hatcher’s voice saying, “It’s just me again.” She clapped her hand over her free ear to block out the noise around her and waited, but there was a pause, then a click to signify that the call had ended. The second message was just the pause and then another click. Jane put the receiver back on the hook and went to buy her next ticket. Either Hatcher had not settled anywhere yet, or he had decided it was not safe to leave a number, or something had gone wrong with her machine to make it stop recording. Maybe it had failed to disconnect after the first call, and used up all the blank tape recording nothing. Maybe the clock battery had died, or the tape had tangled, or … she might as well stop kidding herself. Or when Pete Hatcher had made the first call, standing in a lighted phone booth at a rest stop on Route 25, he had hung up the phone, turned around, and had a .357 Magnum stuck in his face.

She flew to Missoula as Katherine Webster on a smaller plane and arrived at seven in the morning, then went shopping for a car as Wendy Wasserman. The car Wendy Wasserman selected was a two-year-old Nissan Maxima with low mileage and a finish that had been dulled by the first owner’s failure to protect it from the winter weather. The owner had left on it a parking sticker that said UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA. Jane drove it to the campus and left it in a covered parking structure surrounded by busy dormitories, then walked northwest up Broadway until she found a car-rental agency.

She called her answering machine three times during the day, and each time the machine said, “Two messages.” She drove the three hundred and forty miles eastward on Route 90 to Billings as the sun made its way toward the mountains behind her. The eastern side of the Rocky Mountains was high country and forested, but it was dry and hot, the very edge of the Great Plains. As she drove, the forests dwindled and were replaced by huge fields of wheat growing tall in the late summer sunset.

Jane arrived in Billings after dark. She drove the streets for two hours to get a sense of the city, then left her rented car in the parking lot at Deaconess Medical Center and began to walk. She bought a newspaper at a machine on a corner and studied it. There was no mention of a David Keller being found, no Pete Hatcher, and no John Does. If he wasn’t alive, the police didn’t know it yet.

She tried to imagine his steps. He would have come up on Route 25 until it merged with Route 90 and arrived in the middle of the night. He had probably checked into a hotel at noon. He would have been exhausted by then, and slept until dark. He would have gotten up, dressed, and then realized that he didn’t have a good enough reason to go out there in the strange city at night. He would have eaten in the hotel, then returned to his room. He would know that the only place she could hope to find him was in a hotel, so he would stay there. If there was a problem with her answering machine, then he would send her a note in the mail. He would stay put and hope that she could get to him before anybody else did.

If she wanted to get to him and take him out without attracting attention, she would have to look as though she belonged here. Jane went to a shopping mall and studied the women around her. In the twelve years since she had begun doing this, fading in had gotten easier. She had read somewhere that between 1970 and 1990 a mall had opened somewhere in the country every seven hours. One of the changes this had brought was that women in one part of the country dressed pretty much the way they did in all of the others. Her clothes would do for a few days in Billings, but she could still make some purchases to improve her chances.

She found a store that sold T-shirts and bought one with UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA printed on it. She bought a pair of hiking boots like ones she saw on some other women.

She knew a little bit about what Pete Hatcher was going through. At times he would be sure that he had completely, miraculously lost his pursuers. But every time he heard a maid push her cleaning cart down the hotel hallway, he would feel all the muscles in his body go tense. He would try to reassure himself, then realize that he had no external way to tell whether he was perfectly safe or in imminent danger. So he would sit for hours looking out the window of his room for some piece of evidence that had not come from inside his own skull.

As she searched for the store where she would make her last purchases, she reconsidered what she knew about Pete Hatcher. The first time she had heard his name had been in a telephone call from Paula Dennis. Paula was an intensive-care nurse from Kentucky, and it wasn’t until the call that Jane had learned she was also a gambler, and she needed help for a man she had met on a junket to Las Vegas. When Jane had asked her what she knew about the man’s habits, she had said, “Pete Hatcher is a ladies’ man.”

To Jane that had sounded like trouble. Men who had that reputation left behind rivals and angry husbands and women who knew too much about them and were bitter enough to tell strangers. But Paula had said, “By that I mean he is a man who could have been invented by and for ladies. He is a perfect gentleman: attentive, thoughtful, kind, considerate at all times and in every situation. You could take him to visit your aged grandma in Charleston. He’s also a very naughty fellow, if you know what I mean, but there are no hard feelings afterward. He’s at his sweetest when he takes you to the airport. There are no lies, no chances to make false assumptions with Pete Hatcher. You can be sitting in a restaurant with him, and he will not pretend he’s not looking at other women below the face. But the way he does it doesn’t make you mad. It makes you squirm in your evening gown. One night I saw him doing it and told him so, and we had quite a conversation about a woman two tables over. He made me understand what he saw when he looked at a woman, and honey, it made me like myself better.”

Jane had not been moved to enlist in Hatcher’s cause just yet, but her curiosity had been piqued. “What, exactly, did he say?”

“He misses nothing—and I mean nothing—and he likes all of it. This is a woman on the downhill side of fifty. I’m thinking, ‘A kind face. Nice clothes. Not impersonating a teenager, but not making up the seating list for her wake, either.’ He starts telling me about the smile lines at the corners of her eyes, and the calm glow of the cornea that shows wisdom and receptiveness—which from Pete’s side of the table seem to be the same thing—and the flecks and color variations. This is just eyes, remember. I’m leaving out the topographical features south of there, which he can talk about well into next week, if you’re mature enough to stand it without hyperventilating and falling into a swoon. But he’s never exactly wrong, because what he sees is verifiably there if you look for it. He sees what you wish they would all see. You’re just this person getting by on whatever you have. You don’t think about how you look most of the time. You think about what you’re doing, and that’s probably just as well, because it keeps us all out of trouble. Pete comes along and looks at you as though you were an object. No question about that, but the object is a flower or a bird or a tropical fish—something that has its own rules and purposes, its own course in life that doesn’t have anything to do with his. If you want to come closer, that’s okay with him. But if you don’t, that’s fine too, because he’s just glad to be there and see the pretty colors. This is not a deep thinker. But if this is a man who deserves to die, I want the others all killed off first.”